In criminal appeals, one aspect of strategy is to humanize the defendant in order to create as much empathy, if not doubt that the defendant is guilty, as possible when the court considers the legal arguments to overturn a conviction. The reason is simple, that a less hated defendant is more likely to receive sympathetic consideration. It’s human nature.

But the reality is that some defendants are just bad dudes, and committed heinous crimes. There isn’t much good to say about them. Yet, courts will, on occasion, reverse on the law anyway, cutting a bad dude a break. It’s really quite remarkable when this happens, given human nature, and yet it does. That’s the nature of law, in general, and crim law, in particular, that it’s molded around people who aren’t sympathetic and did things that were, well, heinous. Continue reading →

During oral argument before the Supreme Court in the vax mandate cases, Justice Sonia Sotomayor raised a “fact” that wasn’t.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor claimed that over 100,000 children are in “serious condition” with covid-19. Many, including The Post’s Glenn Kessler, pointed out that while omicron does seem to affect children more than other variants of the coronavirus, Sotomayor’s figure was wrong by a factor of about 20.

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Many of my First Amendment “fellow travelers” try desperately to show why every defamation suit is bad, wrong, and baseless. It’s understandable why they approach such actions with a strong bias against such suits, as they serve to censor, or at least, chill free speech upon fear of being held liable. As a general precept, it’s fair to approach defamation actions with skepticism.

But that doesn’t mean that defamation doesn’t happen and that some suits aren’t extremely well grounded. Take the case of Ruby Freeman, an election worker who had the grave misfortune of being named by Gateway Pundit as having committed “voter fraud on a MASSIVE scale.” She did nothing wrong, but nonetheless became the target of hate and ruin by a right-wing mob of flaming nutjobs. Not that Gateway Pundit cared. Continue reading →

It would seem at first blush that an employer would have certain prerogatives as to directing the attire worn by employees on the job. But Jennifer Abruzzo, general counsel of the NLRB, disagreed when it came to Whole Foods employees wearing Black Lives Matter masks.

In a Dec. 17 filing with the National Labor Relations Board, Whole Foods denied the agency general counsel’s allegations that the company violated federal labor law by banning employees from wearing “Black Lives Matter” insignia and punishing staff around the country who did. The filing is a response to the labor board’s accusation that by prohibiting Black Lives Matter messages at work, the company interfered with employees’ rights under the National Labor Relations Act to engage “in concerted activities for their mutual aid and protection.”

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There is a long and sordid history of jury nullification based on race, where a white jury would acquit a white person for killing a black person despite the law and evidence. It was an outrageous disgrace, and yet this flagrant racism happened. After the murder trial of Dayonte Resiles, the fear has been raised that it’s back, only in reverse.

Police said Resiles broke into the home to commit a burglary, and when he found Su inside, he tied her up and stabbed her to death. His DNA was found on a knife and inside the home.

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While it’s unclear how exactly the memo from Manhattan’s new district attorney, Alvin Bragg, will play out in the courtroom, there was no doubt that it was going to be received poorly by the cops. The new police commissioner, Keechan Sewell, immediately invoked the First Rule of Policing.

Commissioner Sewell, who, like Mr. Bragg, was just a week into her job, said in her email to about 36,000 members of the department that she had studied the policies and come away “very concerned about the implications to your safety as police officers, the safety of the public and justice for the victims.”

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On the one hand, dead is dead. When a human being dies of other than natural causes at the end of a long life, we generally feel a sense of tragedy about it, as well we should. And yet it feels very different if the cause is something we believe to be beyond our control, such as cancer, as opposed to something we believe can and should be controlled, such as crime. That makes the comparison between deaths caused by Covid versus deaths caused by homicide seem deeply flawed. But is it?

More than twice as many people died from COVID just *last week* than the increase in murders he describes as “way up.” https://t.co/UfDWCloOPi

— David Menschel (@davidminpdx) January 10, 2022

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I started SJ in 2007, a very different time than now. There was much to say to a public woefully unaware of either criminal law or policing, the pendulum firmly planted deep into the “tough on law” side of the spectrum and people blissfully unaware of the bad things that happened in their name and were hidden from view.

Over the past few years, the pendulum damn near took off my head when it swung with vicious force in the other direction, the public (or at least a certain very loud cohort of it) adopting the view that cops were constantly slaughtering black people in the street with abandon and without consequences, that bad laws could be easily fixed with one cool trick and that simplistic slogans chanted by clueless but passionate people with too much time and education on their extremely soft hands could give us Utopia. Continue reading →

She may have been United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan from 2010 to 2017, filling prisons with the righteousness of a champion for justice, but she caught a new gig after being dismissed in the regime change as MSNBC commentator. Barbara McQuade managed to adapt to her new persona by finding new hated people to condemn in place of the ones she spent her career convicting.

Some people steal money with guns. Other people steal money with lies. In a court of law, they’re all crooks. But not all crooks are treated the same by the justice system, a fact Elizabeth Holmes may be counting on when it comes to her sentencing.

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Musings of such a juror have been floated for many year, mostly from those who believe in jury nullification. They would pretend to be normies, perfectly ordinary folks who could, and would, be fair to all, to get on a jury. And then, boom, blow up deliberations with their activist belief in whatever purpose they served. Anti-cop? Anti-racism? Anti-government? And who could stop them? There they would be, having snuck past the gatekeeper by feigning fairness during voir dire and occupying the jury room.

What a glorious revolution it would be! After all, who can challenge the decision of a jury to acquit the guilty in defiance of bad laws, dishonest cops, an oppressive system? And of course it would never be used wrongly, as an affirmative bludgeon to assure the conviction of people hated, or crime reviled, lest someone despised walk free? Continue reading →