If you’re reading this post, you probably love words. If you’re reading this and involved in the legal profession in any fashion, you probably love swear words. Lawyers, particularly criminal defense and family lawyers, use swear words more often than they would likely admit.

That’s why the book “Nine Nasty Words: English in The Gutter, Then, Now and Forever” by John McWhorter is such an interesting read. If we’re going to use these words, it would do us well to learn something about them. And who better to teach us than a guy like McWhorter, a linguist and English professor at Columbia University. Continue reading →

At the Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan opens her fairly nuanced op-ed with a curious point.

All this happened after America watched the cellphone video of the extinguishing of the life of George Floyd one year ago, by an officer, Derek Chauvin, who posed through much of the tape with his hand on his thigh, the picture of brute nonchalance.

An incident so horrifying can and will stop America in its tracks, causing nationwide convulsion—protests, riots, burning of businesses. Continue reading →

Before the video was revealed, the story was simple and benign. Ronald Greene died in a car crash following his flight from police. Nothing to see here. Then there was video.

To be clear, fleeing from police is neither a good nor acceptable thing to do, even if some would argue that it’s understandable given the perception that the police will treat a black motorist disrespectfully at best or violently at worst. Nobody wants to be pulled over and killed, and regardless of the unlikelihood of that outcome, that is the prevailing perception in the current climate. Continue reading →

Christopher Rufo, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, has become quite a lightning rod since he’s undertaken to fight what he contends is the neo-racism of critical race theory. Some see him as a racial bomb thrower, while others see him as doing the “dirty work” of saying what few would say given the backlash. That’s not to say that he’s not a serious person presenting serious thought. Indeed, he appeared with Mark Lamont Hill as well as Tucker Carlson.

“What do you like about being White?” I asked this question to anti- Critical Race Theory advocate Christopher Rufo. He stated that Whiteness was always only painted as negative, so I asked him to offer something different. Peep his response: pic.twitter.com/H5IkAyv2Co

— Marc Lamont Hill (@marclamonthill) May 26, 2021

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The Washington Post broke the story, but since WaPo lives behind its paywall, it gets no link love. New York District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. has impaneled a special grand jury, as distinguished from the ordinary grand jury panels which deal with ordinary cases, directed specifically on something to do with Trump.

What that may be remains unclear, but the fact that Cy chose to announce that he was impaneling a grand jury, as opposed to announcing that a grand jury returned an indictment against, well, some entity, is a curious play. It comes on top of NY’s intrepid press-conference holder, Letitia James’ announcement that her office will be working with Cy’s office. Continue reading →

There is a real and significant difference between the harm done by criminals and the harm done by police. The former are called “criminals” because they commit crimes, engage in wrongful conduct and do harm. The latter are theoretically our protectors, authorized by law, armed by our choice, to prevent criminals from doing harm. Our expectations, our demands, are different and they should be. There is no comparison.

But that doesn’t meant that the harm done by criminals is neither harm nor devastating.

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Not that I haven’t fallen into this trap before. Like others, I blindly jumped on the bandwagon when the UVA rape case went public in Rolling Stone and I bit. It was a lie and I fell for it because I chose to fall for it. Not my proudest moment. Confirmation bias is a powerful drug, particularly when the risk of questioning, even taking a “wait and see” approach, is tantamount to being an apologist for the other team.

But the story out of Boise State was just the sort of thing that people believed would happen when academic ideologues pushed critical race theory, and so when the story broke, it proved their point and they grabbed it. Continue reading →

My tolerance for twitter arguments is very limited, as they tend to swiftly devolve into either ad hominem, idiocy or dive down rabbit holes. That latter is what happened in a thread I read recently involving Wesley Lowery, Ben Smith and David Menschel, which I would link in all its glory but much of it seems to have vanished. By much of it, I mean Lowery’s twits, which were the more interesting ones.

Lowery remains of the view that objectivity in reporting is a myth, and that there is no such thing as an objective report. On that, he may be generally right, as we all carry biases and they are reflected in everything from our choice of what to write about to our choice of adjectives. But the next leg of his argument is where he goes astray. Because no one is objective, journalists should reject the notion of objective reporting, admit to their biases and indulge them. Or to put it in clearer context, if a reporter can’t be perfectly objective, then why even try to be objective at all? Continue reading →

There’s a catchphrase, “criminalizing poverty,” which can mean many things. When fines and costs are imposed on defendants who walk into court destitute, the end result is a foregone conclusion. You can’t get blood from a rock, and they are rocks. When they fail to pay, not necessarily because they laugh at the law but because they’re broke, they get rounded up and put in jail as punishment for not paying. That’s criminalizing poverty.

Then there’s the other kind.

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The “Reasonably Scared Cop Rule” has inexplicably morphed from a defense in §1983 cases into a justification defense in prosecutions of cops for engaging in conduct that would be criminal if committed by anyone other than a cop. There are arguments to be made, that we place a different expectation, if not legal duty, on cops to act in the face of violence when non-cops would run away, but that’s not really much of an answer. They have no duty to shoot and they’re no more entitled to commit crimes than anyone else.

The kicker to the rule is its twisted use of the word “reasonable,” as it’s not what you, I or a jury deems reasonable, but what a trained police officer under the particular circumstances would deem reasonable. Since we’re not cops, we aren’t qualified to answer that question, and instead rely on experts in police training and tactics to tell us whether it’s reasonable. Experts like Bill Lewinski, who never met a use of force that was excessive. Experts like cop turned prawf, Seth Stoughten, who testified against Derek Chauvin. Continue reading →