Oh, the promise of law in the eyes of the layman can be so charming, so alluring. After all, there are some little tidbits in there that would, in a sane world, make all the difference between a system where people stand half a chance and none at all.  One such promise was the Hyde Amendment.

Illinois Congressman Henry Hyde tacked an amendment onto an appropriations bill back in 1997 that allowed for attorneys fee for a claimant in an in rem forfeiture action.  You know, the ones where they seize property without a criminal conviction (or even a charge), claim some inherent evil and force the owner of the property to prove its innocence?  Among the many problems with this scheme to “take the profit out of crime” is that it can cost more to fight for the return of property than the property is worth.

As government set-ups go, forfeiture is about as sweet as it gets. They only need to claim probable cause to validate the seizure, which requires them to come up with a half-baked story about how only drug dealers carry cash or drive Toyota Camries, whereupon a judge wakes up from his nap long enough to nod before passing out again. Then they split the loot among the police departments involved and have a party. Yeah, a great set-up indeed.

Then along came Henry Hyde to screw up the deal. Except it didn’t quite do its voodoo, despite the bitching and moaning of the government. Continue reading →

DeRay McKesson is one of the leading voices in the Black Lives Matter movement, which is really quite a remarkable accomplishment.  And he came upon his activism organically, making it even more remarkable as there appears to be nothing in his background to suggest that he would rise up to take the lead. Via his wiki page:

Prior to becoming a full-time activist Mckesson worked as a school administrator in Minnesota. On March 4, 2015 he announced via Twitter that he had quit his job and had moved to St. Louis. He graduated from Bowdoin College in 2007.

In June 2015, Mckesson was the focus of a Twitter campaign while he was in Charleston, South Carolina to protest the Charleston church shooting. The campaign featured the hashtag “#GoHomeDeray”, which was accompanied by statements demanding that Mckesson leave the city. Mckesson responded to the hashtag, stating that he was there as a sign of solidarity for the nine deaths and that the hashtag was proof that “Racism is alive and well in places like South Carolina, and in towns across America.”

Where he will ultimately go from here isn’t clear, but if the wiki is right, he might end up being the first person to make his bones on twitter ending up with this own office in New Haven. Continue reading →

Bennie would be shocked and amazed, and more than a bit furious. He had to dodge and weave the cops to run numbers, knowing that eventually he would get pinched.  And today, you can’t watch a football game without competing commercials for a minor variation on a theme. FanDuel or DraftKings?

How is this possible?  And how did a fun water cooler pastime turn into a multibillion dollar industry overnight?  It’s the same lie that allows a stock market to exist. Fantasy football isn’t a game of chance, but a game of skill. You buy that, right?

The key to the industry’s growth is a loophole. Considered a game of “skill” versus “chance,” daily fantasy sports is exempt from the 2006 Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, which prohibited payments to online gambling sites. As a result, the industry is essentially unregulated, left to monitor itself.

Continue reading →

Whether you think Democratic presidential candidate, Senator Bernie Sanders, is a commie or the greatest progressive since, well, whenever, you have to admire this.

Remember the time Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) met with Sandra Bland’s mother and shamelessly used it for political capital?

Neither do we, because — though the Democratic presidential candidate apparently did meet Geneva Reed-Veal — he didn’t tell anyone about it. He did, however, promise to #SayHerName, which he did Tuesday during the first Democratic presidential debate.

A two-fer. Not only did he keep his promise, but he refused to shamelessly capitalize on his meeting for purpose of self-aggrandizement. Love or hate his politics, you have to admire the fact that he did something he could have used to promote himself but didn’t. Nobody does that anymore. Bernie did. Continue reading →

There is a critical mass of proponents to do away with state bar admission for lawyers and even the requirement that one be trained and validated in law at all. They come at it from two different directions. One side does so to open greater opportunity for young and solo practitioners to get clients from any source possible, anywhere possible.

The other because of the A2J problem, access to justice as it’s called, in order to fulfill the needs of people who either can’t afford a lawyer, or are too cheap to pay for a lawyer because they would rather spend their money to buy the newest iToy.

The former group is also a strong proponent of lawyers marketing themselves on the internet, puffing their mad skillz and experience even if they’ve only been admitted for 12 minutes.  The ethical proscriptions against deception are just old lawyers’ way of keeping them down.

What these different groups have in common is that they claim there is no serious downside to their proposals.  Who has ever been harmed, they demand to know?  What could possibly go wrong? Continue reading →

Honor among thieves?  Well, murderers, really, but you get the point.

For a man who has spent most of his life in prison, Frederick Cobia has a vaunted opinion about himself.

And, defense attorneys say, it’s with good reason.

Cobia says he’s “real sharp with the law,” and apparently he is, one way or another.  According to Cobia, he’s got such mad jailhouse lawyer skillz that others spill their guts to him, confessing their crimes in the hope that he can save them.

Using his skills as a jailhouse lawyer, Cobia says he engages fellow inmates in conversation. Inevitably, he says, they confess. Then, he turns the information over to law enforcement. Continue reading →

As is so often said, there are no consequences for cops who commit perjury.  And then comes a prosecution and conviction, which would appear to put the lie to the assertion.

A judge has found an NYPD officer guilty of a felony for lying about the arrest of New York Times photographer Robert Stolarik, who was briefly jailed in August of 2012 after photographing a stop and frisk in the Concourse neighborhood of the Bronx.

Earlier today in Bronx Supreme Court, Judge Michael Gross convicted NYPD Officer Michael Ackermann of a single count of offering a false instrument for filing in the first degree, a Class E felony. Judge Gross found Ackermann not guilty of other misdemeanor charges related to tampering with public records and falsifying business records.

Is this a paradigm shift? Certainly, Ackermann hoped that a non-jury trial before Judge Gross would achieve a level of “understanding” that was not likely from a Bronx jury.  Guess he didn’t get the nod and wink he was expecting. Or maybe Ackermann realized that a judge trial was his only hope, since no Bronx juror ever would buy his defense. Continue reading →

It’s been quite a while since a child’s knowledge of sex was left to a parent’s explanation. This was no doubt a good development, since many parents did such a poor job of it. Indeed, the fact that they had a child at all was often proof of their lack of expertise on the subject.

But sex ed has gone from the controversial information of means of preventing pregnancy, AIDS and venereal disease to indoctrination into the current flavor of sexual politics.  This isn’t just because some teachers prefer the flavor, but because the law requires it.

Teaching birth control was shocking enough to parents who felt it compromised their message of abstinence. Whether or not one agrees, one has to respect a parent’s right to teach their children well. Morality, contrary to those who see it as an absolute, is left to each of us to decide, and having the government override our parental views is a problem.

Birth control, however, is at least a factual matter. We may not like it, but at least we can be assured that it’s accurate. Teaching children the vagaries of social interaction is an entirely different matter. Continue reading →

One of the key aspects to getting older is that you remember stuff. You were there before it happened, when it happened, and since. For a criminal defense lawyer, one such memory is how Supreme Court’s decisions affect what happens in the trenches.

My usual example is the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, when the Mistretta decision made them mandatory after every other court held them unconstitutional. That was 1989. Then the Supremes announced they were only kidding in Booker.  That was 2005. A whole lot of defendants got sentenced in between. Funny joke, right?

Not that the Supremes have failed us because they’re a bunch of slackers. It’s just that they’re modest.  They turn away cases that are clearly erroneous, not because the decisions are dead wrong, but because it’s not their job to correct every mistake made by lower courts. These are very important people deciding very important issues. They have no time to worry about such minor details. Continue reading →

Shaun King was born in 1979, the year I graduated from college. Thirty-six years later, he wrote his first column for the New York Daily News, having gone legit from punditry at the Kos Daily to the News Daily.  When news broke that he would get this new soapbox from which to speak, I offered only one piece of advice: get the law right.

His first column appeared today, entitled How First Grade Teachers Are Helping To Set Prison Sentences All Over America.  He didn’t listen to me.

If you’re unfamiliar with King, he’s an activist, currently activisting in the Black Lives Matter movement.  Given my support for saving black lives from needless death at the hands of police, it might seem as if we were on the same team, or at least sympatico. But King’s brand of activisim involves simplistic platitudes supported by few facts, and usually a mind-numbingly wrong grasp of law.

When preaching to the choir, this isn’t a problem. First, they’re at least as clueless as to facts and law, and second, they only care if the outcome confirms their bias. How you got there, the validity of your assertions, the accuracy of your substance, means nothing. Continue reading →