During most of the encounter, Round Rock Officer Ben Johnson was calm and under control.  There were no overt signs of anger or frustration, and he was, indeed, the very model of a police officer doing his job. Which is why it’s all the more incomprehensible that he suddenly threw 27-year-old Viviana Keith down on the pavement.

The video is bad enough from the side, but the dash cam video reveals . . . nothing. A bit of mouthing and maybe a little pulling of the arms, which were already behind her back, but nothing remotely suggesting force or threat. So down he takes her. Continue reading →

At Volokh Conspiracy, David Bernstein asked a good question:

Where and when did this “makes me feel unsafe” thing start?

Sorry for being so loud about it, but like asking for clear definitions of misused words, it’s a question that needs asking.

But it’s such a common complaint that one hears it from across the political spectrum these days, in a loud chorus of whining victimhood, from gay students who object to proponents of traditional marriage, and from Christian students who object to nondiscrimination rules meant to protect gays; from Muslim students objecting to pro-Israel speakers, and from Jewish students objecting to anti-Israel posters. Just today I learned (via Hans Bader) that Oberlin, supposedly one of the great liberal arts colleges in the world, has been in a tizzy because of a speech by the rather mainstream conservative feminist Christina Hoff Summers, which supposedly made students feel “unsafe” well in advance. And so on.

In no examples that I have seen has there been any actual threat or prospect of violence against the students complaining that they feel “unsafe.”

Continue reading →

There was fury, outrage and anger. It proved every nutjob’s conspiracy theory true, and the emptiness of the American legal system.  Sharpen your pitchforks and light your torches, as this was the final straw.  But then Ken White, hero of the great unwashed, sucked the air out of the room:

[T]hey are very upset about a Supreme Court of Connecticut decision overturning a rape conviction. The case is Fourtin v. Connecticut. Fourtin was convicted of sexually assaulting a profoundly mentally and physically handicapped woman, a woman who clearly had no capacity to consent. If you read and relied upon “progressive” sources — like the Huffington Post or Think Progress or BoingBoing — you’d conclude that the Supreme Court of Connecticut held that Fourtin wasn’t guilty of rape because the evidence suggested that the victim could have resisted but didn’t.

The problem is that Think Progress, Huffington Post, and BoingBoing are full of shit.

Continue reading →

The jury found Barry Bonds’ non-responsive answer to a question put to him in the grand jury to be obstructionist, and convicted him under 18 U.S.C. § 1503 for Obstruction of Justice.  In a brief per curiam opinion, the Ninth Circuit, en banc, reversed.

During a grand jury proceeding, defendant gave a rambling, non-responsive answer to a simple question. Because there is insufficient evidence that Statement C was material, defendant’s conviction for obstruction of justice in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1503 is not supported by the record. Whatever section 1503’s scope may be in other circumstances, defendant’s conviction here must be reversed.

Boringo.*  But wait! Judge Alex Kozinski to the rescue in his concurrence.  And as usual, Judge Kozinski hits it out of the park.** Continue reading →

It was the first time a cop had been prosecuted for a homicide in Chicago in 15 years, according to Think Progress, and that was bad enough.  But what happened, a trial order of acquittal, went over the top.

Late Monday, a Cook County judge acquitted Chicago police officer Dante Servin of several homicide-related charges for the fatal shooting of an unarmed woman standing outside with some friends near his home. It was the first time in 15 years that a police officer had been charged in Chicago for a fatal shooting. And the courtroom attendees exploded in outrage as Judge Dennis Porter announced Servin was not guilty on all charges for killing 22-year-old Rekia Boyd.

But Porter’s ruling was particularly confounding because of bizarre reasoning that some legal experts are calling “incredible.”

Servin’s acquittal of involuntary manslaughter was stunning, but raised intricate issues of the mens rea distinguishing murder from manslaughter. Continue reading →

Q: How is it possible he ended up dead with a severed spine?

Cop 1: I dunno.

Cop 2: Beats me.

Cop 3: I never touched the guy.

Cop 4: He looked fine to me.

Cop 5: How should I know?

Cop 6: Why do you always think I did something? Continue reading →

In the continuing symposium on lawprof ennui at PrawfsBlawg, Dave Hoffman adds to the academic angst with a list:

Why, I wondered, has the energy left the building?

1. Because there are fewer fans.  This is most of it.  Prawfs started in the seven years of hiring plenty, and we’re now deep in the middle of the seven years of drought.  There are many fewer young law professors than there were in 2005, and those few that remain are well-advised to keep their heads down and do what’s necessary to survive increasingly difficult internal climbs to tenure. Prawfs’ and like blogs’ rise  had many parents, but a hiring glut has to take place of pride.
   Continue reading →

You never heard about this case. You should have, but you didn’t, and there is only one reason why: there’s no video.  Oh, video exists, and according to the lawyer for the dead guy, Christopher Slusser, it “leaves nothing to the imagination.” But it hasn’t been disclosed.

Without the video, the killing of 59-year-old David Kassick by Hummelstown Police Officer Lisa Mearkle, who put two bullets in his back, fades to obscurity.

Police said Mearkle attempted to stop Kassick’s vehicle for expired inspection and emissions stickers on Feb. 2, after which he drove away, reaching high speeds. When he did stop he got out and ran, and Mearkle was able to catch up to him.

She shocked him four times with a stun gun, equipped with a video camera, before shooting him twice in the back, four seconds apart, as he lay face down, police said. Perry argues she acted in self-defense, concerned he was reaching into his waist while she demanded he show his hands.

Continue reading →

Of course, as with every defense win in Fourth Amendment law, some will criticize the opinion for not going far enough. 

— Orin Kerr, Volokh Conspiracy, April 21, 2015

It’s a sad day when a law professor grows so cynical that he anticipates complaints with a Supreme Court win for the Constitution, and yet Rodriguez v. United States is, without a doubt, a “defense win.”  The problem, because there always is a problem, is that the Court’s answer to one question reveals the difference between law in theory and law on the street.

The Court held that the “core mission” of a traffic stop is pretty much what one would expect it to be:

Typically such inquiries involve checking the driver’s license, determining whether there are outstanding warrants against the driver, and inspecting the automobile’s registration and proof of insurance. See Delaware v. Prouse, 440 U. S. 648, 658–660 (1979). See also 4 W. LaFave, Search and Seizure §9.3(c), pp. 507–517 (5th ed. 2012). These checks serve the same objective as enforcement of the traffic code: ensuring that vehicles on the road are operated safely and responsibly. 

Continue reading →

In the New York Times, Eric Lander, founding director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, provides a ringing condemnation of the use of forensic science in the courtroom.

As miscarriages of justice piled up, it became essential to understand precisely how the criminal justice system made such mistakes and how to prevent them. Troublingly, about a quarter of the cases examined by the Innocence Project (on whose board I now serve) involved forensic scientists who had erroneously claimed to identify defendants with near-certainty by matching hair samples, fibers, shoe prints or bite marks.

There were clearly fundamental problems with forensic science. A 2009 report by the National Research Council, an arm of the National Academies, found that apart from DNA testing, no forensic method had been rigorously shown to consistently and reliably demonstrate a connection between evidence and a specific person.

Or to put it more bluntly, we’ve rested our faith in crap, scientifically unproven and unjustifiable, because people dressed in expert suits took the witness stand, offered jargonized mumbo-jumbo in official sounding tones, and promised that they were right, because science. Continue reading →