The other day on the twitters, somebody announced that New York was “going to” reform its archaic criminal discovery statute, CPL § 240.20. Gov. Cuomo says it’s going to happen. The state Senate and Assembly are finally both in the hand of Democrats, rather than the normal split of the Senate being held by Upstate Republicans.

So I quoted the “going to” language of the twit, and the fellow asked whether I thought it would happen. “No,” was my reply. Not that it shouldn’t happen. Not that it isn’t desparately needed. Not that the current discovery statute isn’t astoundingly bad and restrictive, designed to deny the defense of basic information necessary to make rational decisions and prepare a defense.

Supreme Court Justice Jim Yates provides an explanation of what was intended when this discovery statute was written.  He should know.  He wrote it way back when.

Judge Yates was disgusted by the way his discovery statute had been undermined.  It had been the intent to encourage and expect meaningful disclosure, but with prosecutors using disclosure as a weapon, and judges unwilling to buck powerful district attorneys, it became a unwieldy limit on the defense.

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It should come as no surprise that colleges occasionally turn to consultants to keep them abreast of the latest way to game Title IX campus sex policing, so as to avoid liability and bad public relations. Brett Socolow’s NCHERM is part of the cottage industry living off the largesse of ever-increasing tuition to pay the freight.

One of NCHERM’s services, apparently, is a tip of the week, and this one’s a winner.

Multiple appeals courts at both the state and federal level have explained the importance and necessity of cross-examination in campus sexual-misconduct proceedings.

They often invoke a quote by the famed American jurist Henry Wigmore, cited in a 1972 Supreme Court ruling, that cross-examination is “beyond any doubt the greatest legal engine ever invented for the discovery of truth.”

A high-profile Title IX consulting firm doesn’t agree, at least when cross-examination is used in its field.

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What if they couldn’t even afford the pizza that came in the box that told them about their job? Few, myself included, will cry a tear for the employees of the Transportation Safety Administration, the blue-shirted bit-players in the longest running show at the airport. But as much as they produce nothing beyond annoyance, the TSA agents are employees, working for a living, for the United States government.

Since T.S.A. agents, who are among the most visible of the affected workers, make do on a starting wage of about $23,000 a year (with the possibility of going up to about $43,000), these can be hair-raising calculations: Skip the children’s dentist appointments and pay the electric company? Or try to get an extension on the utility bill and go without getting the car fixed?

With no end to the government shutdown in sight, and neither side wise enough to give the other a backdoor, these employees aren’t as easily dismissed as GS 10s, who should have seen it coming and prepared. At the bottom of the wage scale, they were already below the poverty level for a family of four. Sure, there are benefits to working for the government, such as job security, as well as the occasional detriment like a shutdown, but as despicable as some TSA agents may be, it’s still a job. A job they’re being told to do without a paycheck, if only for now. Continue reading →

The “Little Flower,” Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, was faced with a newspaper delivery strike that lasted 17 days. He didn’t call the national guard, but took to the radio.

On July 1, La Guardia was scheduled for his regular Sunday broadcast of Talk to the People, a weekly radio show he held on WNYC. At one point in the show, he encouraged his listeners to gather their children around the radio, and commenced to reading that day’s “Dick Tracy” comic from the Sunday Daily News. With obvious relish, the mayor described the action in the panels, impersonated the voices of various characters, and reminded listeners of the plot that had led up to that moment. At the end of each strip, he would explicate the moral of that week’s adventure to his young listeners.

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When my kids hit a bump in the road, I would do my fatherly duty of giving them a pep talk. They would respond that I had no future as an inspirational speaker, which was their way of telling me that they got the message and had moved on to the joke-telling stage. The “trauma” was past, at least for the moment. What I never did was give them a dollar and a dream. Apparently, I handled it all wrong.

During the last month of school, when I was at my wit’s end, the principal called me in to discuss my kids’ excessive tardiness, and I knew something had to change. Fortunately, she was understanding, and I left the meeting with the beginning of an idea. By the first day of school this year, I had completely transformed our lives — the mornings and the evenings.

I accomplished this by paying my kids to perform basic life tasks. In behavioral psychology, this is called positive reinforcement. And it works.

In fairness, the writer and her children had issues. Continue reading →

Years ago, I called my parents for my weekly check-in, but they were out and I got their answering machine instead. Not their voicemail. Their answering machine. The recorded message was from my father, who explained in his official voice that they weren’t home and would “return your call at my earliest convenience.”

When he called me back, I made a point of noting his message. “That’s rude, pop,” I explained. “At your convenience is like telling callers you’ll return their call if and when you have absolutely nothing better in the world to do and will, finally, deign to respond.” He didn’t mean it, and hadn’t thought about it. When I pointed it out to him, he realized it was the wrong message and changed it to “as soon as possible.” It was still in his official voice, but at least it wasn’t rude.

KJ Dell’Antonia writes about “parenthood,” which is one of those curious topics to write about since pretty much anybody can be a parent, and there’s no objective basis to heed one parent’s ideas of good parenting from another’s. Continue reading →

It’s hardly controversial for a woman to respond to a man’s disagreement with an assertion that he’s mansplaining, sexist or literally Hitler. But in the victim hierarchy, the social justice rules by which someone is allowed to “punch up” but not down, it’s hard to know where the oppressed win over the marginalized. Just when you think you’re entitled to express your opinion on a highly controversial subject, you get spanked for not being of the correct identity.

Cathy Young found this out the hard way when she wrote about that great humanitarian, Angela Davis. Maybe you love Davis. Maybe not. You’re allowed either way, because this is America and everyone is entitled to be wrong. But the problem wasn’t that Cathy Young was wrong about Davis, that she wasn’t pals with murderous communist dictators and a faming anti-semite, but that Cathy Young was, well, here’s the reaction she received.

Yes @CathyYoung63 is a white woman and yes she wrote this! pic.twitter.com/fsFiZ1IKOz

— Black Intifada (@IntifadaBlack) January 10, 2019

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Yesterday, KC Johnson twitted of the 128th loss in federal court by a college sued for its handling of campus sex policing in Doe v. Coastal Carolina University. That’s a lot of losses, not that there haven’t been some wins, but the trend has been clear: courts are acknowledging that these proceedings are not only deeply flawed procedurally, but that they reflect anti-male bias.

Therein lies the nasty detail behind an accused prevailing in a subsequent suit under Title IX against the college. That the adjudication was a sham, procedurally deficient, has become less of a stumbling block, as courts have recognized that the stakes are huge and the denial of minimal due process is flagrant. But that’s not enough to make it past a motion to dismiss.

A plaintiff claiming erroneous outcome must allege: (1) “particular facts sufficient to cast some articulable doubt on the accuracy of the outcome of the disciplinary proceeding” and (2) “a particularized . . . causal connection between the flawed outcome and gender bias.”

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When the Department of Education issued its “Dear Colleague” letters during the Obama administration, there was no push for comments in support of the constitutional rights of the accused. That’s because nobody asked. In the hands of Russlynn Ali and Catherine Lhamon, the rules were whatever they decided they were.

Your comments didn’t matter. They were going to do whatever they wanted to do, and what they wanted to do was create a system that assured that any woman who complained would prevail and any man who was accused would lose. “Survivors” became the twisted characterization, so we would all feel their pain and suffering.

Now that the Department of Education has chosen to employ the Administrative Procedures Act, or what lawyers refer to as law, the window for comments before the regulations are final has given rise to a last-ditch effort. And the push is on before the window slams shut. Continue reading →

Scandal-plagued and bankrupt is no way to go through life, but it’s apparently not enough to compel a sober view of why the American Bar Association has become irrelevant to the legal profession. So naturally, the ABA doubled down on its Model Rule 8.4(g) bet in a remarkably tone-deaf post by its “ethics counsel,” Dennis Rendleman.

The Crusade against Model Rule 8.4(g)

That it would begin by calling it a “crusade” sets the tone. Apparently, the oppressed ABA has been victimized by crusaders. Lawyers and judges, the big machers of the bar, have been mislead, deceived, snookered, by these crusaders who have made it their zealous duty to undermine the ABA’s good works for social justice.  Continue reading →