An interesting post from Jonathan Turley :

There is an interesting lawsuit against an academic institution in Colorado. Spanish-speaking custodial workers at the Auraria Higher Education Center in Colorado are suing over the failure of the Center to give them instructions in Spanish — alleging that they have faced unsafe conditions over the use of English rather than Spanish. The case suggests that the use of Spanish can not only be legally required but that the use of English can constitute a type of unsafe workplace.

Blaine Nickeson, an AHEC vice president, said that the AHEC does offer some translations, but that it cannot be required to use native languages for all of its employees.

I cannot see how using English as the primary form of communication in the United States can be the basis for discrimination or an unsafe work environment. If schools are legally required to speak the language of custodians and other employees, can they refuse to hire non-English speaking employees or would that be a form of discrimination based on national origin?

“Too many things have happened to me there that I don’t even know how to explain it,” said Auraria custodian Bertha Ribota.

Ribota said she was injured at work because she couldn’t read a warning sign that was in English.

“If I could speak English I wouldn’t have the problems that exist,” said Ribota.

The same, of course, could be said of people who come to the United States to work, that it would be in their interest to learn English.  Of course, that’s easier said than done, and even if they do, they have to eat until they’ve achieved a sufficient level of mastery that they can read the sign that says “don’t stick your head inside machine while blades are turning.”

While Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 requires employers to provide “reasonable accommodations” in the cases of religion and disability, it does not require an employer to communicate with every employee in his or her native language.  The question isn’t whether it’s a good idea to do so, but whether the law requires an employer to do so.

Like Turley, I don’t see how it could work or be enforceable. If an employer has a staff that speaks 5 languages other than English (or make that 20, or 50), would the employer be required to have supervisors who speak those languages as well, signs for every language, perhaps translators working full time?

The alternative is that the law would have to allow employers to discriminate based on language, which implicates national origin, so that he could have staff speaking only one or two foreign languages, and then it would be relatively manageable to have supervisors or translators to manage the Babel.

But these are inherently burdensome on an employer and pretty ineffective means of dealing with the problem. What if your one Mandarin speaking custodian quit and was replaced by a Ukrainian?  The problems are endless.

The obvious “solution” is for foreign language speaking employees to learn English (or for everyone to agree to speak Spanish) so that there is only one language in the workplace, but that’s a fantasy solution, impractical as well. And yet who can blame employees for not wanting to get hurt?

It started at .10%. Then it was .08%. Now, the National Transportation Safety Board wants to  reduce it to .05% blood alcohol content to create a per se crime of drunk driving.  And it comes with a plethora of ideas, including steering wheels that can tell from perspiration whether the driver has been drinking, or interlock devices that won’t allow a car to start until the driver has done some heavy breathing,

The  New York Times says it’s a good thing.

It is surprising how few drinks can impair a driver’s judgment. A report from the National Transportation Safety Board estimates that alcohol-impaired driving contributes to thousands of deaths and tens of thousands of serious injuries each year. It is right to urge states to reduce that toll by lowering the allowable blood-alcohol concentration for drivers from 0.08 percent to 0.05 percent.

The first sign of a problem is the wiggly word used to make the connection between alcohol and thousands of deaths.  See how they snuck it in there, “contribute”?  Not “cause,” because there is no evidence that alcohol was the cause, and indeed there is a ton of evidence to the contrary. The statistics are played by including in the numbers any death where anyone anywhere near a car had any alcohol in them, including the victim, without regard to whether alcohol had anything to do with it.

The second sign is that Mothers Against Drunk Driving, the force behind the reduction from .10% to .08% and the public service announcements, the school groups like SADD, and pretty much every initiative relating to drunk driving, doesn’t support this change.

This is shocking. No, worse than shocking.  But MADD isn’t just the mothers who have endured a tragedy anymore, but a sophisticated machine. In their zeal to wipe drunk driving from the face of the earth, they realize that this move goes too far.  They have thrived on the support of middle America, using the “do it for the children” argument better than anyone else.  But this move goes beyond the tipping point of acceptability, and that would spell the death of their power and their effort.

The use of a percentage of blood alcohol content as the definition of a crime is a strict liability offense. You don’t have to drive dangerously. In fact, you can driver perfectly, but you’re still a criminal.  You may not put your own interests ahead of society, but just be a pretty normal, law-abiding, happy person, and still you’re a criminal.  You may support the death penalty, make cookies for the DAR bake sale, own an AK, but still you’re a criminal.

If the BAC is reduced to .05%, it’s going to change a lot of lives, and the people whose lives it changes aren’t bad people and aren’t going to like it.

The point has been made that if we want to eradicate drunk driving, then it can be done quite easily by making the legal BAC .00%. No drinking, period. Easy. But people aren’t going to like that at all. The argument offered to make the .05% BAC more palatable is that it allows some drinking:

The new standard would not bar all alcohol, but would mean giving up a drink or two. A 180-pound man who might be able to drink four beers or glasses of wine in 90 minutes without reaching the 0.08 limit might have to cut back to three to meet the lower standard. A 130-pound woman who could have three drinks in 90 minutes and stay below the current standard might have two drinks instead.

The advocates want to make this change seem as innocuous as possible, rather than controlling the behaviors of others. Not being much of a drinker, it would likely have no impact on me. But for those who enjoy a bottle of wine with dinner, or live out in no-man’s-land and whose only entertainment is a dozen beers at the highway honky-tonk, they will become criminals.

And that’s the issue. This isn’t about advocating for the right to drive drunk, but about the criminalization of things that are done today by the law-abiding.  This isn’t about people making a decision to engage in criminal conduct, but about people not knowing whether they’re going to be a criminal or not.

There are many consequences of this change, together with the other ideas to prevent people from driving drunk, that aren’t being discussed. What happens when the technology of the magic steering wheel fails and cars won’t start? What about the person who shares a car with a convicted drunk driver but is constrained to use the interlock device? What about the person with an emergency who needs to get to the hospital but can’t get the car to start?  The list goes on for a long time. Use your imagination.

The Bubble Boy agenda, the Utopia where no one is ever harmed, won’t happen because of this change. There will still be crashes, because people can’t drive worth a damn, and there will still be children who die in crashes. There will be diseases that take the lives of people who don’t deserve to die, even though the television informs us that they’ve cured restless leg syndrome. There will never be that perfect world where no mother has to bury her child.

Still, anyone who has had too much to drink should not get behind the wheel. You are selfish and foolish, and you have no right to put me or my children at risk because you wanted to have a good time.  But you can do this because you’re a human being, not because it’s the new crime du jour. And police can, and should, arrest you if you drive recklessly, whether it’s because you’re drunk or you just drive like crap.

It’s hard to argue against something that has become so socially unacceptable as drunk driving. Only a pariah, or a criminal defense lawyer, would be crazy bold enough to speak out against something that saves the lives of children.  But when half of America finds itself branded as a convicted criminal, crying in a lawyer’s office that they meant no harm, and caused no harm, it will make more sense.

The story isn’t a particularly complicated one, when an  armed intruder broke into an apartment of Hofstra University co-eds in search of money and, not finding enough to satisfy him, sent one to an ATM to get more. Even for someone stupid enough to invade a home, this was idiotic. If you want money, you don’t pick an apartment of college women.

Instead of going to the ATM, Jessica Rebello called the Nassau County Police. Her twin sister, Andrea Rebello, remained inside with the intruder. The story turns particularly banal at this point. Cops swarm, gunfight ensues and two dead bodies are found. Two?

According the Huffington Post :

Andrea Rebello, 21, of New York, was shot dead by a masked gunman while her twin sister was in the house, cops told the New York Post. The gunman was also killed in a firefight with police.

The intruder broke into the home at about 2:20 a.m., where the sisters, one of their boyfriends and another woman were staying. The suspect held them hostage for a short time, but let the unidentified woman go to get cash from an ATM. She called police, NBC News reports.

Rebello and the gunman were killed during a firefight that erupted when police arrived. Police told the Post that the suspect killed Rebello, and cops killed him.

This didn’t seem right. Not that it was impossible that the gunman shot and killed this lovely young Hofstra student, but why, in the midst of a gunfight with police would he kill her? To what end? The  Daily News told a different story.

Police brass acknowledged that officers opened fire in the house, but couldn’t confirm who fired the bullets that killed the popular college student and the unidentified attacker.

There’s the rub. Bullets have no mind, no conscience. They don’t know who they strike, and they don’t care.  At this time, it’s unclear whether the masked intruder ever fired his weapon.

Asked if the suspect fired his weapon, [Chief of Detectives Rick] Capece said authorities wouldn’t comment “until we get more info.”

Why is it always after the bodies are dead that the concern about getting more info strikes?

It may be that the police arrived and were fired upon by the robber, returning fire in turn. It may be that the robber, inexplicably, turned his gun on Andrea Rebello in the midst of a gun fight with police and killed her. There is no requirement that stupid or crazy people act in a rational way or do things that make sense under any line of reason.

But it may also be that the Nassau County Police, a force that doesn’t get many shootouts, failed to exercise tactical judgment, knowing that there was a young woman in the house with an armed gunman.  Was there a need for dozens of police cruisers to descend on the house in shock and awe fashion?  Did anyone think it through, make an active decision that this was the best thing to do under the circumstances?

It’s not a matter of sympathy for the masked gunman, but cold, hard analysis, that the primary goal at the outset was that Andrea Rebello, as well as the others inside the house, make it out alive.  There would be time later to deal with the robber, and capturing or killing him didn’t need to come first.  First, make sure the innocents inside stayed alive.

That didn’t happen. That is what makes this a disaster.

The smell of this scenario is all too usual, massive police presence descends on house. The sound of a gun shot and every cop there opens fire. Maybe it was the robber. Maybe it was a cop. Maybe it was an accident. Maybe it never happened, and one cop thought he heard something and it was his first shot that made the rest discharge their weapons.

But did anybody stop to think there were people in this house? Did anybody stop to think that firing into this house meant that bullets would strike whoever was in their path, without regard to whether it’s a masked gunman or a young woman?

I hope it turns out that the gunman shot at police first. I hope the gunman shot this 21-year-old college student. Not because it makes this pointless, terrible death any better, but because it’s better than the alternative that the police mindlessly fired into this home and killed her.  As a father, that would be more than I could take.

But the smell of this tragedy is bad, and regardless of who killed whom, the goal of the police should have been to assure that the people inside emerged alive. That didn’t happen, and there is nothing about the way in which the police dealt with this situation that gave it much of a chance. Their knee-jerk reaction prevailed when they responded to the call.

And when questioned about how Andrea Rebello died, the knee-jerk reaction was to blame the gunman, even though it may well prove to be the cops. Regardless of whose bullet struck her, this was not a good day for the Nassau County Police.  This was a horrible day for the Rebello family.  This was a bad day for everyone.

Update:  The good news is that an answer as to who shot Andrea Rebello now exists, and Nassau Police Commissioner Thomas Dale released it as soon as possible. The bad news is that it’s as suspected.

Andrea Rebello was shot once in the head Friday morning by an officer who opened fire after the masked intruder pointed a gun at the officer while holding the 21-year-old Hofstra University student in a headlock, Nassau County homicide squad Lt. John Azzata said.

In a tense confrontation with the officer, gunman Dalton Smith “menaces our police officer, points his gun at the police officer,” Azzata said. The officer opened fire, killing Smith and his hostage.

They then lapse into the usual rationalizations:

Azzata said the Nassau County police officer fired eight shots at Smith, who police described as having an “extensive” criminal background. Smith was hit seven times and died. Rebello was shot once in the head.

“He kept saying, ‘I’m going to kill her,’ and then he pointed the gun at the police officer,” Azzata said.

It appears that the story has changed markedly, now with two officers appearing in response to the call, and immediately entering the house, prompting the gunman to hold Andrea Rebello in a head lock. It appears that the gunman never fired a shot.

Condolences to the Rebello family.

Because everybody loves a listicle:

10. Reading a law review article.
9. Twitting.
8. Waiting for your client to be brought down to the visiting room at a correctional center.
7. Asking your mother-in-law “how are you.”
6. Driving on the Long Island Expressway.
5. Waiting for your case to be called for a quick adjournment.
4. Trying to find a new, worthwhile blawg.
3. Asking a parent “how are your children.”
2. Discussing the law of contracts with a fellow named Rajesh in Bangalore.
1. On hold waiting for someone at Dell Customer Care to anwer the phone.

One of the things that people, including lawyers, have a hard time with is that laws and rights aren’t always in sync, and occasionally create a direct and irreconcilable conflict. Ultimately, a side has to be picked, and some will disagree with the choice.  This video of the police responding to a domestic dispute in Cotati, California, via Turley, presents a good view of the problem:



Way back when, domestic disputes were treated by law enforcement as a family matter, something that they had no business being involved with and below the threshold of “real crime.”  Not that it had anything to do with the old joke, “what do you call the husbands of 156,000 abused women? Officer.”  No, the problem is that what they perceived as benign neglect ended up with the occasional dead spouse.

While this isn’t a gender thing in the abstract, it is in real life. There are men who abuse women and do them grave harm. Yes, it happens the other way around too, but the frequency and level of abuse isn’t often the same. No carping on who gets beaten more or worse permitted.

A seismic shift in policy happen, and police in most departments across the country were not only required to fully investigate claims of domestic abuse, but to not take no for an answer.  No community or police department wanted a dead spouse after the police left a home.  This isn’t a bad goal.

As for what happened in the video, consider the pragmatics of the situation. The couple refused to come out, as is their right, and refused to let the cops in, as is also their right. If the cops walked away and the wife ended up dead, there would be hell to pay, but if they forcibly entered and found a beaten wife, there would be no downside. The remedy for an unlawful entry is suppression of evidence, and the only evidence would be the victim. You can’t suppress a victim.

On the other side, if they break in without a warrant and there is no evidence of a crime, the couple can try to find a lawyer to handle their civil rights claim for a broken door. Not too likely, and chances are fair that they would never make it past summary judgment, even though they should. That’s the nature of §1983, whether you like it or not.

But does that make the entry lawful? Not by a long shot. The domestic dispute call might give rise to a reasonable suspicion, but not probable cause. The cops had authority to investigation, but what they found at the home was a couple who asserted their constitutional rights. The issue, of course, is that abused women frequently deny abuse to the police, for fear of retribution afterward, so the wife’s (and we’re assuming that the police here figured it was the wife who would be getting the worst of the dispute) assertion that she was fine may have been completely accurate. Or not.

But the absence of any evidence, response or observation that supports the allegation that someone was being harmed doesn’t create an exigency that permits the police to enter a home without a warrant. Lack of knowledge is neither cause nor exigency, even though one can argue that lack of knowledge doesn’t prove that everything is fine.

So the solution was for the police to remain at the window and continue to observe while calling in for a search warrant issued by a neutral magistrate. If they saw someone being beaten in the interim, then they break down the door and enter to help. Otherwise, they cool their jets. And if the judge refused a warrant based on their allegations, then they turn around and walk away.

Might this put someone at risk of harm, even death? Yes, it might, but the Constitution isn’t an inconvenience to ignore when hypothetical concerns present themselves. Absent a warrant or exigent circumstances, the police cannot lawfully enter a home. That there is no meaningful remedy for their doing so is a fault in the way we address constitutional violations, not a free pass to ignore the Fourth Amendment.

As for the tasing upon entry, well, there was absolutely no explanation or justification for that use of force, and the woman’s screams reminds us that Tasers aren’t the easy fix to any situation, but painful and potentially deadly weapons only to be used then force is needed and permitted.

For those still unhappy about how the concerns for abused women interact with constitutional rights, consider that the only pain inflicted her upon the woman came at the hands of the police. How does that fly with your belief system?

Jacob Gershman at the  WSJ Law Blog opens his post with a question:

When it comes to regulating the legal profession, why is it that only lawyers call the shots?

“The legal profession is ponderous, backward looking, and self-preserving,” Mr. Moliterno writes. “I recommend a more forward-looking approach that welcomes the views, and even control, of nonlawyers and innovators in business and other enterprises.”

To steer a better course, he suggests giving non-lawyers a turn at the wheel. This means, he says, letting them serve in leadership and policy positions at the American Bar Association, which sets the standards and codes of the profession. He thinks state bar associations should also open their doors.

It’s not that Moliterno argues that non-lawyers should be involved in the process. To hear what people outside the legal profession think and experience would be enormously useful to lawyers. Any information that adds to our base of knowledge and understanding is useful. But that’s not what he’s saying. Not by a long shot.

Writes Mr. Moliterno:

Turning to creative nonlawyers presents the most advantageous way for the legal profession to grow and change on its own terms. Creative nonlawyers can predict and manage change that is likely to result from competitive forces. In the United States, changes made by the profession itself are highly likely to dampen pressure for change dictated by government. In the absence of self-reform, change will be effected either by government or the forces of competition.

“Lawyers still function on the state-by-state licensure system. A lawyer cannot walk across the line from Ohio to Pennsylvania and engage in law practice,” Mr. Moliterno tells Law Blog, as an example. “We would either move to a national law license or a very relaxed form of admission-on-motion system, allowing lawyers to much more freely cross borders.”

“If there were some nonlawyer ownership of law firms, or more generally legal services delivery, the owners would find it in their business interests for the lawyers to have insurance and follow the ethics rules,” said Mr. Moliterno, who just wrote a book on a similar theme.

The professor also predicts that non-lawyers would encourage the growth of legal services geared toward middle and low income people. “Entities like LegalZoom and Rocket Lawyer would flourish rather than be sued for unauthorized practice of law. Much more creative systems of service delivery would be pioneered without the resistance of the legal profession,” he said.

When  Tempe criminal defense lawyer Matt Brown decided to go on a walking tour of America for a few months, he probably wasn’t sure what would greet him when he came home. He found out.

For one thing, Matt learned that he had now achieved a perfect 10 on Avvo.  This comes as no surprise, given the strength of the latest award he deservedly won, though his relationship with Avvo hadn’t always gone smoothly.  But now that he looked as fine as Bo Derek, he returned to an office bustling with people who needed him.

At some point after climbing onto the Colorado Plateau, however, the volume of voice messages increased. Not a lot, but a noticeable amount. Many callers’ messages demanded prompt calls back, ignoring my voice mail greetings entirely. When I called, most of them tried to negotiate my non-negotiable initial consultation fee. They became angry when I suggested I might not be the right lawyer for them if they felt $100.00 was an unreasonable amount for an hour of my time. One guy fumed about how rude I was to not hike my ass back to the office and meet with him for free right away. Another guy sent [Matt’s partner] Adrian an email saying I should be fired. Adrian says the complaint is still under review by the firm’s human resources department.

By the time I was done with my vacation, I had scheduled six initial consultations for last week, my first week back. One was with someone who’d called during the first four weeks, but the remaining five were with callers I’d spoken with after more calls started coming in.

What could have caused this sudden surge in popularity?  Matt made six appointments for these “leads” and “prospects” to meet with perfection.

Last week, five people failed to show up for their appointments without so much as a call. When I called them afterwards, I got to hear the full gamut of reasons why people can’t be reached. “The Cricket customer you are calling is not accepting calls at this time.” “The number you are calling is no longer in service.” You name it, I heard it. The one no-show I did reach said he’d hired a “TV lawyer.” He didn’t think I might want to know that he wasn’t going to make the consultation we’d set. The one very pleasant gentleman who made his appointment and retained me was the first consultation I had scheduled. He was a referral from a former client.

That’s one out of six. One who showed. One who retained him. A week ago, I spoke with a fellow who called me after finding me on Avvo.  He had a real case. He had a case that interested me. I explained to him that I do not give free consultations, and he had no problem with it. I made an appointment to see him two days hence. 

At the appointed time, I sat there awaiting this potential new client.  Fifteen minutes later, playing spider solitaire unsuccessfully on my computer, I called to find out if there was a delay.  It took him a moment to remember who I was, and then he apologized.  He told me he retained another lawyer the day before.  I told that was fine, but asked him why he didn’t call me to tell me he would not make our appointment.  His voice turned sheepish, and he responded that he thought that was just the way things worked for lawyers.  Our call was over.

By my calculus, it takes 1000 calls from people who find you on the internet to get one person whose case I would take. The marketeers don’t see this as a problem, and their promise isn’t to get you clients, but “leads” and “prospects.”  What you do with them afterward is up to you, not them. 

But the same people who use the internet to find a lawyer are the ones who are taught by companies like Avvo that lawyers’ time has no value. They teach that lawyers answer questions for free. They teach that a person in need of a lawyer for his public urination case should contact 10, 20, 30 lawyers to find the right one for them. And while they include the caveat buried somewhere off to the side, below the grinning image of the lawyer who is paying to have his advertisement show up on your Avvo page, that the ratings shouldn’t be the sole basis for hiring a lawyer.

But then, who wouldn’t prefer to hire a lawyer with a perfect rating.  Like Matt Brown. Like me.

By my calculations, I will now have to turn away another 999 “leads’ before I hear from a client whose case interests me.  But I can’t afford to waste another hour of my practice on an appointment where the “prospect” doesn’t show.  I have work to do for clients who retain me based on referrals from other clients or lawyers, and the time lost to those who find me on the internet is stolen from me and never recovered.

If I feel like killing an hour of my time, maybe I’ll use it to walk America like Matt.  And when I come home, I’ll listen to my messages and ponder how best to use my time.

If anyone else had hogtied, beaten, dropped on the ground, beaten again until dead, a man named David Sal Silva, there would be a swift response, resulting in the release of video evidence to the media, a perp walk and a press conference about how brave the officers were to take down the perpetrators.  Anyone but their own deputies responding to an call about an intoxicated man.

The beating was horrible.

A half-dozen Kern County sheriff’s deputies were across the street beating a man with clubs and kicking him, she said. So she whipped out her mobile phone and began to video the episode, announcing to the officers what she was doing.

For about eight minutes, Ms. Melendez said, the man screamed and cried for help. Then he went silent, she said, making only choking sounds.

Finally, having hogtied him, a number of witnesses said, two officers picked up the man and dropped him, twice. One deputy nudged the man with his foot. When he did not respond, they began CPR.

 Two people reported to 911 what happened, and that they had recorded the beating. The cellphones containing the videos were seized by detectives before they had warrants. Then one of the videos disappeared.  In the meantime, the officers present at the murder were returned to full duty.

After the horror of this murder and the “disappearance” of the video became the subject of national scrutiny, gears shifted and Kern County sheriff changed his story.

Sheriff Donny Youngblood also announced Tuesday that he asked the FBI to analyze two cellphones taken from witnesses who say they recorded the incident.

“I took the unprecedented step of asking the FBI to conduct a parallel investigation,” Youngblood told The Times. “Our credibility is at stake here.”

Youngblood said he has also placed the officers on paid administrative leave, a decision made in the last 48 hours, based on information they had received. He said he wanted to ensure the safety of the officers on the street.

The officers involved are Deputies Ryan Greer, Tanner Miller, Jeffrey Kelly, Luis Almanza, Brian Brock, David Stephens and Sgt. Douglas Sword.

Since, a  surveillance video has emerged, but like most surveillance videos, it’s not particularly satisfying. The woman who had the video asked that her identity be kept a secret for fear of the reprisal.  The video on the seized cellphone that remains has not been released, but one might suspect that it’s not nearly as damning as the video that has disappeared.  And Sheriff Youngblood says “our credibility is at stake here.”

The isn’t a post about the horrific beating, murder, of David Sal Silva.  This isn’t about the warrantless seizure of cellphones with videos of the murder. This isn’t about how the deputies were returned to duty rather than arrested, or how they are now on paid vacation while the investigation spins in circles.  This is a post about salvaging credibility.

It appears that Sheriff Donny Youngblood, by calling in the FBI to figure out what happened with the disappeared video, thinks this is going to salvage credibility.  After all, doesn’t it show that he isn’t concealing the evidence of his deputies having murdered a man?  Hasn’t he opened his doors to another law enforcement agency, a credible agency, and by doing do shown that he is not engaged in a coverup?

What invariably comes from discrete incidents of outrage such as the murder of David Sal Silver, the taking of the videos, the disappearance of the videos, the restoration of the cops to the street and the reaction when the cops finally come to grips with the fact that the nation is watching, is a crisis management strategy that seeks to test how badly people want to not confront the terrible things that can happen. 

When Youngblood seeks to salvage credibility, he’s not being forthright.  What he’s really saying is he wants to see what it will take bring the public back to his side, to calm down, close their eyes and believe once again that the police are their friends.  It’s not trust, but stopping the loss of credibility before trust is gone forever.

There is nothing the FBI can do now, even if we assume they can restore a deleted video, that will change the underlying culture of this Sheriff’s department that made seven deputies think they were entitled to kill a man, made someone else think they could make the evidence disappear, and made a sheriff think he could put them back on the street and no one could stop him.  Even now, with the witness statements and the surveillance video, the best Youngblood can come up with is trying to salvage his credibility by asking the FBI to conduct a parallel investigation.

It’s not that David Sal Silva was the first man to end up needlessly dead on the street at the hands of law enforcement, or the first time officers roughly handled the citizens who had evidence of a crime, or the first time evidence of a murder by police mysteriously disappeared, or the first time the perpetrators of a crime were given their guns and shields back to protect and serve, or the first time they were later given paid vacations.

It’s also not the first time people read, saw, heard of all these things and let their minds play whatever games it needed to play to find a way not to confront the inescapable reality of the situation, that they were seeing the end result of a malignancy that existed and spread deep within the Kern County Sheriff’s Department. 

Will the media or the public recognize that there was no credibility to be salvaged, but just another test of whether they are too fearful, too disconnected, too willing to pretend it isn’t what it is so they won’t have to confront how law enforcement got this out of control, this violent, this evil?  If they fail the test, it won’t be the first time.

Update: The Kern County Sheriff has released the one video that didn’t get disappeared. It shows the second video being taken, the one that ceased to exist once the video came into his officer’s hands.  See them at ExCop-LawStudent.


Update 2:  Sheriff Youngblood announced the good news :

Kern County Sheriff Donny Youngblood said Thursday that a man at the center of a videotaped altercation with deputies died from heart disease — not baton blows.

The county coroner’s office labeled David Sal Silva’s death accidental, adding that the primary cause of death was hypertensive heart disease.

Forget those blows. Forget the beating. Forget that he died in the midst of the beating according to what the video (that has yet to appear) showed.  That was just background to his dying of heart disease, coincidentally while deputies were beating him.

And because that’s not sufficiently incredible and ridiculous, add this detail to the mix:

The deputy warned Silva he would release a police dog on him if he did not cooperate. When Silva continued to resist, the deputy remotely released the dog from his cruiser. The dog bit Silva several times and bit the handler deputy as well, Youngblood said. Silva grabbed the dog by the throat.

So as the dog was biting Silva, he “grabbed the dog by the throat,” which most people would say he held the dog back from further biting him. Most, but not Sheriff Youngblood.

Youngblood said Silva resisted deputies and tried to attack the dog.

That’s the dog version of “he attacked my fists with his face.”  It seems that the effort to salvage credibility isn’t going well.  Not well at all.

While heads are turned toward the other scandals du jour, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division and the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights has been hard at work trying to ram its Utopian vision of speech down the throats of colleges and universities. If students didn’t read Orwell in high school, they get to live it in college.

Via FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education,

In  a letter sent yesterday [May 9, 2013] to the University of Montana   that explicitly states that it is intended as “a blueprint for colleges and universities throughout the country,” the Departments of Justice and Education have mandated a breathtakingly broad definition of sexual harassment that makes virtually every student in the United States a harasser while ignoring the First Amendment. The mandate applies to every college receiving federal funding—virtually every American institution of higher education nationwide, public or private. 

The letter states that “sexual harassment should be more broadly defined as ‘any unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature'” including “verbal conduct” (that is, speech). It then explicitly states that allegedly harassing expression need not even be offensive to an “objectively reasonable person of the same gender in the same situation”—if the listener takes offense to sexually related speech for any reason, no matter how irrationally or unreasonably, the speaker may be punished. 

Ever the evil genius, Ann Bartow of Feminist Law Profs, who I’m sure comes to this symposium with an open mind, makes a pre-emptive attack in her opening post:

Many participatory sectors of the Internet are dominated by aggressive bullies, nasty haters and monetizing opportunists. It’s hard to tell whether they constitute a numeric majority, but the geography of the Internet allows a small number of people to scorch vast swaths of earth with surprisingly little effort. There is no currently such thing as the “safe spaces on the web where those with unpopular views can exchange ideas without fear of retribution” that Frank Pasquale calls for. Not even here. The folks running this symposium decided not to facilitate comments on CCR related posts here at Concurring Opinions, but they have no control over the conversations that take place other places, which may be intractably linked to this blog via hyperlinks and search engine results. I’m doubtful that the architecture of the Internet can be changed to provide the benefits of connectivity without simultaneously facilitating engagement or intervention by bad actors.

By the mere act of linking to the CCR posts, others (myself included) are “aggressive bullies, nasty haters and monetizing opportunists.”  Bartow’s never been one to tolerate any opinions other than hers, and she is well rehearsed in the art of simultaneously painting herself the victim even as she lashes out.

The appeal of the rhetoric is self-evident. After all, who wants to be an aggressive bully or a nasty hater?  Or for that matter, who wants to be a sexual harasser on a college campus because he asked a girl on a date and was not only rejected, but criminalized.  The possibilities are endless.

As insane as the CCR movement seemed at the time, particularly in light of its frontal assault on otherwise well-established rights such as free speech, the imposition of campus speech codes is not only insidious in itself, but the precursor to clearing up the neo-feminist angst online. 

After all, if they teach the males while in college that they are sexual harassers based upon the feelings of any potential hearer or seer of their male nastiness, chances are pretty good that they will conform their conduct to avoid being labeled an outcast or criminal, and carry that conduct over to their use of the internet.  It may take time for the newspeak mindset to filter through male society, but the hope is it will happen.

And similarly, with the DOJ and DOE on board with the evisceration of free speech in the name of delicate feelings, it becomes a baby step to push this view of sensitivity into other areas of life.  The workplace is already a lost cause.  The internet is just down the road apiece.

Even though these campus speech codes may not seem to affect many of us directly, though it could very well affect our children, the failure to recognize where this is heading and how it may impact general perceptions of “propriety” when it comes to free speech now may well prove disastrous later.  Ten years from now, merely writing this post could spell a ten year mandatory minimum for me, though I suspect it will be digitally burned before any delicate eyes might see it and suffer unpleasant feelings.



 

Many of us have wondered whether the person with the handicapped parking permit is really handicapped or just enjoying the perks of using one of the usually empty spaces close to the door. This same thought seems to occur fairly regularly to police when they come across a person in a wheelchair. After all, it’s so much cooler to roll around than walk.

In Rochester, New York, two cops were doing their important law enforcement duty of “clearing a corner,” when they came across a less than compliant 52-year-old Benny Warr. Good name, right? Warr was in a wheelchair, which naturally raise suspicions immediately.  According to the Democrat and Chronicle :

The incident occurred the evening of May 1 near Jefferson Avenue and Bartlett Street and involved 52-year-old Benny Warr. The video — taken by a bystander whose identity has not been confirmed — begins with Warr being physically taken to the ground from his motorized wheelchair but does not show what preceded the incident.

Police say the officers were clearing a corner, and that Warr was arrested for disorderly conduct and resisting arrest.

The word out of Rochester is that Warr was waiting for a bus when the officers ordered him to get lost. Warr was disinclined to do so, and let the officers know in appropriately unpleasant language. They did not react well.



Naturally, which is defined as there being a video so the Rochester Police Department can’t deny this happened or explain that Warr made a furtive gesture compelling the police to engage in a dynamic response for officer safety, an internal investigation is being pursued, according to Sgt. Justin Collins, and the cops hope that Warr will be a willing and compliant witness. Because, well, his experience with the Rochester police has gone so well up to now.

But one thing is clear. Warr needed the wheelchair. And as for any thoughts about whether those people parking taking the really cool handicapped spots are fakers, remember that not all disabilities are visible, and even if they are trying to beat the system, it won’t kill you to walk the extra 20 feet anyway. Don’t be a hater.

H/T Don Thompson