There’s a curious character defect that allows the overly empathetic progressive prosecutor types to shamelessly switch from rationalizing the humanity of murderers, at least some murderers, while simultaneously pushing the most disingenuous sophistry when it comes to sex crimes. And whatever that character defect might be, former state and federal prosecutor, and most recently progressive candidate for Manhattan district attorney, Tali Farhadian Weinstein, has it in spades.

On March 8, at an unusual hearing, Juror No. 50 testified that he regretted making “an honest mistake” when rushing through his questionnaire. He was asked to describe repeated instances of abuse at the hands of a former stepbrother and his friend when the juror was 9 and 10 years old and the aftermath for him and his family. But, he told the court, the abuse “doesn’t define” him, and he does not think of himself as a crime victim. Continue reading →

The American Association of Law School’s, AALS, isn’t an organization that lawyers think much about. We take for granted that law schools are going to do their job, more or less, in turning out students who will someday join the guild and demonstrate at least minimal competence, if not excessive self-esteem in their early years until they finally figure out how little they know, how poorly they perform and how hard the job is. But I digress.

The mission of AALS is lofty and important, not to mention vague and facile. Continue reading →

Now that Elizabeth Holmes has gone from the genius waif of Theranos fame to convicted scammer, it was time for the government to take down Theranos’ COO and her ex-boyfriend, Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani. Holmes argued that it was Balwani, not her, who caused investors to be defrauded. She was the face but he was the brains.

Holmes claimed Sunny was “physically, emotionally and sexually abusive,” which sought to play into juror bias. The jury didn’t buy it.

Now it’s Balwani’s turn for trial. Then came the dump. Continue reading →

A while back, I engaged in a couple of twits with Nicholas Grossman of Arc Digital as he was expressing his views about Trump committing treason. My purpose was to explain that “treason” wasn’t something he felt it was, but a crime, and as a crime, had elements that had to be met or it wasn’t treason. Nick, who isn’t a lawyer, responded that he didn’t mean treason in the legal sense, but in the “colloquial” sense, the one without any elements or mens rea. The one that just feels kind of treason-ish.

There’s a “colloquial” sense of “treason”? Apparently so. Continue reading →

As Rush might have called it, even if you choose not to pay, you still have made a choice. Geraldine Tyler was 93 years old, which is pretty old, even for olds. Maybe she was no longer capable of handling her own affairs. Maybe she had no one to help her, no family or friends, and so maybe she lacked the capacity to understand or act upon what was happening around here. But that’s not the beef.

The 93-year-old left her Minneapolis condominium in 2010 after a nearby shooting and a disturbing encounter left her uneasy. But she was unable to finance both her new apartment and the property tax on her erstwhile condo, accruing $2,300 in debt. Continue reading →

A decade ago, progressive environmentalists fought to protect the ground from excess sewage, the schools from overly large class sizes and the habitat of the endangered spotted salamander. Open space, trees, water recharge areas and fewer cars choking the air with noxious fumes were the height of environmentalism. Save the planet!

If you paid attention to Ezra Klein, you would think this happened a hundred years ago in “another era,” and is now the bastion of right-wing  extremists trying to destroy the lives of the homeless and marginalized potential UC Berkeley students. It’s not that these aren’t concerns. They were always concerns. It’s that younger pundits are reinventing the narrative as their priorities shift. So who’s the NIMBY? Continue reading →

Combine the concerns of a Harvard Law grad with the tech savvy of MIT and what do you get?

Legal documents, such as contracts or deeds, are notoriously difficult for nonlawyers to understand. A new study from MIT cognitive scientists has determined just why these documents are often so impenetrable.

After analyzing thousands of legal contracts and comparing them to other types of texts, the researchers found that lawyers have a habit of frequently inserting long definitions in the middle of sentences. Linguists have previously demonstrated that this type of structure, known as “center-embedding,” makes text much more difficult to understand.

Continue reading →

Judge Naita Semaj was not kind to the officers who arrested “drill rapper” Camrin “C Blu” Williams.

“There was absolutely zero reason for any of those officers to approach this individual,” Semaj said on Tuesday in Bronx Supreme Court. “They approached him. They detained him. They searched him, and no officer even bothered to come up with a halfway legitimate reason for any of that.”

Continue reading →

Friends, today is an exciting day. We’re going to take a dive into the life of the Patron Saint of Scoundrels.

One could come up with any number of superlatives to describe our subject: the Prince of Hustlers, the Grandest of Grifters, the Sultan of Swindle. The name most knew him by, however, was “Titanic” Thompson. Continue reading →

An ordinary sentencing takes about 15 minutes, maybe half an hour. But the sentencing of Jussie Smollett lasted five hours, which was par for the course in a case that put together so much of what’s so very wrong about the current climate of criminal law.

At the end of a hearing that lasted about five hours, Judge James B. Linn excoriated Mr. Smollett from the bench, saying that he had concluded that the actor had premeditated the hoax and that despite his and his family’s admirable past work in social justice, he had an arrogant, selfish side and had planned the stunt because he “craved the attention.” Continue reading →