In all the years I’ve practiced criminal law, no one has ever called me because they want to be on a jury. Sure, I’ve gotten tons of calls from people who got called for jury service and want out, to which I give my talk about the importance of jury duty and how it might be an unpleasant use of time, but it’s critical that good people be willing to serve. They suddenly have something better to do with their time than talk to me on the phone. Go figure.

California has proposed a new law to eliminate the prohibition of people with felony convictions from serving on a jury, as if they don’t already have enough problems.

The legislation will restore the right to serve on a jury for people convicted of felonies who are not serving time in prison, on parole or under supervision beginning Jan. 1. But it excludes people who register as a sex offender because of a felony conviction.

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Sure, I get my say, but only because this is my blog. And now is your chance to get yours. This is essentially an open thread, so knock yourself out, get it off your chest, beat me up, whatever is in there that’s been yearning to breathe free.

And let’s not get all smarmy or mushy, please. Yeah, yeah, happy new year everyone. There, it’s said. Move on. Continue reading →

The end of a year, and a decade, tends to be a time for reflection. There’s no logical reason for it. It’s just another day, the same as any other day, but there is a sentimental division in time that makes us feel that it’s ripe for reflection. I admit to succumbing to the sentiment, just this one time.

Unlike Judge Kopf, I won’t do a reverse listicle (not that there’s anything wrong with that). They’re not my thing. Nor will I tell you my personal feelings about things that made me laugh, happy, crazy or sad. We all have our own lives, experiences, and mine are no more interesting or valuable than yours.

But a point that Judge Kopf has made many times is to ask ourselves the question, as we get older, whether we’ve reached the point of irrelevance. Have younger voices taken over? Have we lost touch with what’s happening in the world, dwelling on the past while the new world is swirling around us? Does anybody care what we think, what we have to say, anymore? Continue reading →

The New York Post laments the actions of the new Queens District Attorney, Melinda Katz.

Incoming Queens DA Melinda Katz is vowing to clean house when she takes office in January, dismissing holdovers from Richard Brown’s near-30-year tenure. Take it as an ominous sign.

The “elections have consequences” slogan cuts both ways, and for Katz, who barely edged out queer Latina public defender Tiffany Cabán because her extremely progressive credentials didn’t have the identity brand behind it, there were doubts that she would be as good as progressives wanted or as bad as conservatives expected. Continue reading →

Pamela Coloff did the heavy lifting in a New York Times Magazine story. Now Jesse Wegman reminds us of it, as James Dailey’s stay of execution is about to run out, and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has tired of hearing about it, so scheduling Dailey’s execution seems inevitable.

What Florida officials have so far refused to acknowledge . . . is that Mr. Dailey, 73, is almost certainly innocent.

Jesse gives two reasons for this conclusion. The first is that Dailey’s housemate, Jack Pearcy, was both convicted of the brutal 1985 murder of a teenager named Shelly Boggio, and asserted, twice, under oath, that he, and he alone, committed the murder. The second is that the only evidence against Dailey was the word of Paul Skalnik. Skalnik was the jailhouse snitch. Continue reading →

On “Abolish Today,” police.

We don’t consider the abolition of police a viable position to take because we believe they’re the only thing standing between upstanding citizens and the violence of the deranged. We’re afraid of being attacked on the street, of having our homes shot at, and being left without access to equally violent retribution. But does this mean we want police, or safety and security? Safety and security are ideas, ones that may never be fully achieved, and the police are an institution that have proved themselves capable of only providing the illusion of safety and security to a select few.

Mychal Denzel Smith argues in The Nation that the primary function of cops is to kill black men and protect the monied interest of white people. Indeed, after there was a shooting in his building, he tells of the police keeping a car outside. The “presence of the police scares me more than the kids selling drugs or the gunshots ever did.” If he was shot, he might feel differently, but he wasn’t. Continue reading →

The names should sound familiar. Catharine MacKinnon is a law prof at University of Michigan, and she was, in a very real sense, the godmother of the current Title IX sex policing on campus, deliberate in its construction to sacrifice male students to secure the feelings of female students at any cost.

The co-author is Kimberlé Crenshaw, who coined the term “intersectionality,” constructing the victim hierarchy based on identity. Gay trumps straight. Gay black trumps gay. Gay black unidexter trumps . . . well, you get it.

[I]ntersectionality functions as kind of caste system, in which people are judged according to how much their particular caste has suffered throughout history. Victimhood, in the intersectional way of seeing the world, is akin to sainthood; power and privilege are profane.

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I like to watch car shows on Velocity channel. Dr. SJ, not so much. It’s okay with me. It’s okay with her. To each his own, and if she (I confirmed her pronouns in advance of writing this post) isn’t interested in chasing classic cars, who am I to make her watch?

So why must guys want to watch a chick flick?

While the box office numbers following its release on Wednesday suggest the movie has found a decent audience — it placed third, behind the new “Star Wars” and the latest “Jumanji,” on opening day — that unconscious bias has seemed to trickle down to the casual male viewer as well, if Twitter is any indication. The New York Times critic Janet Maslin recently tweeted her surprise at the “active hostility about ‘Little Women’ from men I know, love and respect.” Continue reading →

As the year draws to the end, I have been thinking about 2019. I give you, the readers of Simple Justice, the discerning bunch that you are, my take on the top ten things that made me laugh, made me happy, made me crazy or made me sad during 2019. It is up to you to determine which category applies. Without further ado, here is my top ten.

Ten: The Senate Majority Leader pushed through a lot of smart new judges, albeit slaves to the Federalist Society’s schizophrenic program of promoting judicial restraint and judicial activism at the same time. Thus proving, I suppose, that one ought to buy stock in whatever big pharma manufacturers long-lasting Haldol. Continue reading →

Sentence inflation is the sort of thing one notices. When I started defending people accused of crimes, a first-time gun possession would get probation. As fear rose during the crack epidemic, the sentence required a mandatory minimum of a year. Under New York law, it now has a mandatory minimum of 3½ years. So no time to serious time all in my lifetime.

The theory was based on a belief that made complete sense to the public, and was easily played by lawmakers who capitalized on public fears: the longer the sentence, the less likely someone would commit the crime. The problem with the theory was twofold: first, people don’t really consider sentence when deciding to commit crimes. They don’t know what the sentences are, even though people believe that people inclined to commit crimes are somehow knowledgeable about such things. They’re not. In fact, they’re often not the brightest folks around. Continue reading →