Two things can be true at the same time. The screws at Rikers can be a cruel, sometimes criminal, lot toward their treatment of jailed pre-trial and sentenced detainees. Some of these detainees are violent and uncontrollable. The ugly reality, and it is extremely ugly, is that jails are dangerous, awful places that do almost nothing well aside from segregating people from  outside society.

What they cannot do is isolate the bad dudes, whether they’re the corrections officers or the inmates, from others within the jail but for solitary confinement. The very progressive New York City Council wants to end the practice. Continue reading →

My pal Carl, better known on the twitters as @HistoryBoomer, was kind enough to stop by Casa de SJ for dinner last night. Among our varied conversations, not the least of which was his eating peccadilloes, we talked about the kids. As a prof, Carl has a closer view of what young people are thinking and saying than an old lawyer like me, and his sense was that the unduly passionate are mostly on the fringes, with the majority of students reasonable, kind and open-minded. It was truly good to hear.

But then, what to make of this Harvard/Harris poll? Continue reading →

In the fevered minds of “leftists” (for lack of another “acceptable” word, I’ll use the word chosen by Kathryn Joyce and Jeff Sharlet in their In These Times post and adopted by Michelle Goldberg in the New York Times), their once-fellow travelers are turning away from the truth and beauty and joining the right.

Joyce and Sharlet’s broadside largely obsesses over bold-faced name converts, from Matt Taibbi  and Naomi Wolf to Russell Brand and Dave Chappelle. Goldberg tries to take it a step further, because who among us doesn’t form our view of the world based on Russell Brand? Continue reading →

Hey everyone! Your humble humorist is still plugging away at the big bastard of a post I write every year—the SJ Year in Review. Don’t worry, that’s coming next week. I thought while we waited, I’d regale you with a retooling of a bit I came up with two years ago.

It’s the holiday season, after all, and this time of year we’re getting Christmas cards and those long-winded, rambling Christmas letters people send updating you on the lives of everyone in their families. Consider this my Christmas letter to you all this year. Except mine’s got better jokes than your Aunt Tammy’s and mine’s set to festive music.

Mr. Tom Lehrer, will you kindly get us started? Continue reading →

Maybe it’s like the “reply all” error, where a private note intended for one person ends up in the hands of the very people you didn’t want to see it. Or maybe it was that Boston Mayor Michelle Wu’s city council relations director, Denise DosSantos, didn’t appreciate the virtues of segregation. Either way, the email went out, and so too did the cat from the bag.

A Wu administration official, on behalf of the mayor, mistakenly sent all Boston city councilors an email Tuesday inviting them to a holiday party that was meant exclusively for “electeds of color,” prompting an apology and mixed reactions.

Continue reading →

Over the past decade, public defenders’ offices, at least in New York, have become increasingly dedicated to social justice. While the lawyers who took on the representation of the indigent always trended to the left, the offices became increasingly progressive rather than liberal,  and increasingly intolerant of anyone who wasn’t dedicated to the farthest left fashions.

More than a few of the long-time public defenders have told me that if they applied for a job today, they wouldn’t get it because they were insufficiently woke. They say it as if it’s a joke, but it’s no joke. They live in fear of the younger lawyers, who will attack them at the slightest hint of heresy. Continue reading →

Ed. Note: Chris Halkides has been kind enough to try to make us lawyers smarter by dumbing down science enough that we have a small chance of understanding how it’s being used to wrongfully convict and, in some cases, execute defendants. Chris graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a Ph.D. in biochemistry, and teaches biochemistry, organic chemistry, and forensic chemistry at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington.

In 1989, Han Tak Lee and his daughter were staying in a 1000 square foot cabin in Pennsylvania when a fire destroyed it, claiming his daughter’s life. In 1990, Mr. Lee was convicted of first degree murder and arson, and sentenced to life without parole. The evidence against him included identifying one ignition point of the fire by the presence of crazed glass, thin, irregular fractures. The collapsed furniture and bed springs, spill patterns (pour patterns?), and deep charring and alligatoring of wood were also taken as evidence of a very hot fire; therefore a deliberately set fire. Crazed glass is created by cold water hitting hot windowpanes. Nor are collapsed furniture springs, pour patterns, alligator patterns or depth of charring of wood accepted any longer as evidence of arson. Continue reading →

Much of the time, a little legal research will produce a ruling that can guide the court and litigants as to how an issue has been addressed in the past. Sometimes, it’s precedential, for what that’s worth these days. Other times, its value is merely persuasive, leaving the decision to stand or fall on its merits. Rarely is there absolutely nothing out there, no court decision addressing an issue at all. But when it comes to Trump, novelty is the new normal.

Special prosecutor Jack Smith has employed a rarely used writ of certiorari before judgment to bring two issues before the Supreme Court in advance of trying Trump for his role in the January 6th insurrection. The question presented was carefully framed. Continue reading →

Kate Cox was the perfect patient to suit the Texas exception for the health of the mother. The circumstances could not have aligned better to test the merits of the law that, it was argued, didn’t ban all abortion, but allowed for medical intervention when the mother’s life or health was at risk. And despite her desire to have a child, her non-viable pregnancy was doomed, removing any cries of murder.

But her doctor had a point. This was Cox’s medical reality, but Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, no stranger to indictment himself, was of the view that he, and not those damn doctors, got to decide whether aborting Cox’s pregnancy was a crime. Even a judge ruling in her favor wasn’t enough to stay Paxton from control, and so he appealed and obtained an injunction from the Texas Supreme Court, which was apparently unaware that it lacked the jurisdiction to prevent medical harm from coming to Kate Cox while letting time go by. Continue reading →

While a candidate for the Virginia state house, Susanna Gibson’s online past came back to haunt her. Even so, she came within 1000 votes of winning the race, as the Democrats took the house. She’s now raising the question of whether her consent to putting her sex acts online for money in what she would argue was a private forum was consent to the Washington Post to write about it and others to repost video of her having sex and offering to pee for profit for all to see.

I think this is going to continue to happen as millennials age into running for office. There was a 2014 study conducted by McAfee that said or showed that 90 percent of millennial women have taken nude photos at some point. This is something that is very common, especially in the younger generations. Continue reading →