The New York Times raises an oft-forgotten stepchild of the legal system, parole, in an editorial calling for change in the system. The reason it rarely comes onto the radar is simple, these are convicts. They are beyond the question of guilt or innocence, rarely have the capacity to retain counsel and are almost entirely unseen by anyone outside prison. Only their families know the disgrace of the parole system.

For those unfamiliar with New York’s sentencing scheme, many sentences are imposed with an indeterminate span, say 15 years to life in prison. That means a prisoner is eligible for parole after 15 years, having served the minimum of the sentence.

From the perspective of all the players at the time of sentence, it is anticipated that in the absence of any post-sentence aggravating factors, Continue reading →

When police harm someone with a disability that isn’t very easy to see or grasp, the comparison is often made to those who are blind or deaf.  After all, it really doesn’t take a genius to appreciate that a blind person cannot see or a deaf person cannot hear, right?  Sadly, no, as Jonathan Meister learned.  Via Courthouse News:

Clueless Hawthorne police beat and Tasered a deaf man as he signaled to them that he was deaf and his friend had loaned him the snowboard he was carrying, the man claims in court.

When the police approached Meister, he attempted to alert them to the fact that he was deaf by using hand gestures.  Cops hate hand gestures. They’re threatening.  Of course, since Meister was deaf, it’s not as if he had a choice in the matter. Continue reading →

Soon after I wrote about Mary Anne Franks’ efforts to distort free speech to gain advantage in promoting her revenge porn law, and catapult her from a decidedly undistinguished, untenured, career as an academic toward Kim Kardashian recognition, I received an email from a very well-regarded law professor who told me that she was a disgrace to the Academy.

“Why don’t you do something about it,” I asked?

“Because Franks will call me a misogynist or racist, and I don’t need that.”

He asked me to keep this to myself, and I agreed not to disclose it. He didn’t need to become embroiled in this sort of garbage, which has been the modus operandi for those challenging the religion of a small group of law profs who try to make their name by championing radical views. This wasn’t his fight.  That was understandable. Continue reading →

At Techdirt, Tim Cushing writes about the egregious case of Justin Carter, the Texas teen indicted for making terroristic threats because of some monumentally stupid and infantile trash-talk on Facebook.  The result was beyond belief:

So, the grand jury indicted Carter and the prosecutor asked for $500,000 bail. Carter was jailed in February of 2013 (the first month of which he spent unindicted while officials sorted out jurisdictional issues), where he was beaten, raped, put in solitary for his own protection and placed on suicide watch. He wasn’t released until July when an anonymous donor paid the bail.

Tim also refers back to Gideon’s post at A Public Defender decrying the Mecklenburg County, Continue reading →

While we were busily applauding the approval of laws in Colorado and Washington State to allow the recreational use of marijuana, not to mention the many states that have followed California’s lead in permitting the use of medical marijuana, there was a huge, essentially insurmountable obstacle, hiding in the background that few failed to consider.

The production and sale of this now-lawful product requires that nasty little detail involving finance. There is a need for money to flow into the lease of space and purchase of equipment. There is a need for the money received from the sale to go, well, somewhere. The exchange of money by plastic, currency, bitcoins, whatever, has to happen.

Except the banking system of the United States, Continue reading →

Adam Steinbaugh broke the news late yesterday that a third revenge porn “king” was arrested.

Meyering is the second revenge porn site owner to face extortion charges in California.   Kevin Bollaert, who operated YouGotPosted, was arrested on thirty-one felony counts in December and is awaiting trial.  Revenge porn kingpin Hunter Moore was arrested on federal ‘hacking’ charges in January. Nobody, including Meyering, has been charged under California’s new revenge porn law, at least in part because the Communications Decency Act prohibits many state-level criminal charges against website owners.

Despite the rhetoric of how it’s critical to make sacrifices to “soft” constitutional rights like free speech in order to rid society of a blight like revenge porn, it turns out to be false.  As with most outrageous conduct with a financial incentive, strip it of its motivation and you can eliminate the manifestations. Continue reading →

Via Eugene Volokh at WaPo/VC, a post whose title demands repeating:

Your mother, officer, was a hamster, and your bicycle smells of elderberries

Come on, you have to love the Monty Python reference. It’s perfect here.  Eugene’s reference is to an Arizona law prohibiting, inter alia, the taunting of specific “vulnerable” parties.

A. A person commits harassment [a misdemeanor] if, with intent to harass or with knowledge that the person is harassing another person, the person: …

7. TAUNTS OR MALICIOUSLY THROWS AN OBJECT AT OR IN THE DIRECTION OF A VULNERABLE USER OF A PUBLIC WAY AS DEFINED IN SECTION 28‑913…. Continue reading →

In addition to a proposal to allow law students to take the bar a semester early if they promise to do pro bono their final semester, New York Court of Appeals Judge Jonathan Lippman raised another, tangentially related, issue that has long been on the agenda of the criminal defense bar: Expungement.

The bad news. His answer to expungement is “no.”  The not-quite-as-bad news:

“The stigma of a criminal record continues long after a sentence has been served,” Judge Lippman said. “Under this new policy,” he added, “individuals who have led a law-abiding lifestyle will not permanently be burdened by a single misdemeanor conviction, giving them a second chance.” Continue reading →

Few things cause fear and loathing in academia more than the words, “sexual assault.” The definition of rape and sexual assault has undergone a monster shift in the past generation, with the explanation of “rape culture” to justify its near-total divorce from anything remotely resembling doctrinal adherence.  Rape happens whenever a woman says it happens, and if you disagree, you are a misogynist and a rape apologist.

James Taranto challenged the feminist orthodoxy in his Wall Street Journal column, and was immediately attacked for doing so.  No doubt he expected as much.  After offering the requisite anecdotes, Taranto taps a New York Times article by Michael Winerip which ultimately makes the point the genre of rape and sexual assault stemming from a drunk boy and drunk girl could be avoided if others intervened before things went too far.

It’s a “sensible” point, given the fluctuating definition of rape which includes post hoc regret. Continue reading →

When I was a young man, a friend who assured me he was a Talmudic scholar started dating a shiksa (שיקסע, a non-Jewish girl in Yiddish).  This was curious, so I asked him to explain why a person who professed to be as religious as he, would go out with a shiksa.  He explained that the Talmud says “shiksas are for practice.”

Jonathan Lippman, Chief Judge of the New York Court of Appeals, has been at the forefront of trying imaginative ideas to address two vexing problems.  On the one side is the “access to justice” (A2J) problem, that there is a huge under- and unserved community in need of legal assistance but unable to afford it. On the other, there are law students coming out of school with huge debt and little hope of finding employment.

One idea that has made its way into practice is the 50 hour pro bono rule, that anyone seeking admission to the New York bar will be required to have fulfilled this requirement. Its novelty was that it took unadmitted, inexperienced lawyers who needed jobs, money and experience, and gave them a bit of experience without a job or money. Continue reading →