I remember taking the final in college. It was traumatizing, not because of the subject matter (which might well have been traumatizing had I been inclined to be traumatized), but because I forgot that I was registered in the class and never went to a lecture or read the books. It wasn’t until I received notification of when the final was to be held that I realized my error. It was too late to drop the course, so I had no other option than to show up for the final and do my best to pull it off.

I should have gone to Sheffield University.

Professors already give “trigger warnings” when using images from video games, war photographs and depictions about the crucifixion of Jesus Christ or when organising discussions about underage sex, homelessness and religion. Continue reading →

There’s a weird thing that goes through the heads of some defendants, where they start to believe their own malarkey. Like they’re innocent, when they’re guilty as sin, caught on video doing the dirty. It makes for some very weird discussions about the handling of their case. But regardless of outcome, the last thing you want to hear about is how innocent they were, and how they deserved the outcome as opposed to some damn fine lawyering that saved their very guilty butt.

Meek Mill has parlayed his profile as rapper into innocent spokesperson for the downtrodden in the system. While on probation in Philly, he came to New York City and pulled a wheelie on a dirt bike, which was put up on Instagram, because that’s what cool people do. He got pinched for reckless endangerment. His lawyer, Joe Tacopina, got him an adjournment in contemplation of dismissal, which means that if he stays clean for six months, the case is dismissed. He was also sentenced to 30 hours of community service.

An ACD is a good disposition, and the subsequent dismissal of charges, essentially a second chance built into the law, let’s a person walk away from their offense. But it’s not innocence. It is specifically not a “disposition in favor of the accused,” so as to distinguish an ACD from innocence. It’s just a Mulligan, and Joe Tac did a good job getting an ACD for Mill. Mind you, Joe doesn’t come cheap. Continue reading →

Some might have been put off by the fact that this steaming pile of crap appeared in no less a newspaper that was supposed to keep a critical eye on the doings of junk forensic science than the New York Times. After all, had the failings not been made abundantly clear?

Once seen as crime scene detritus, bullets and ejected shell casings — which have unique sets of scratches, grooves and dents — are recognized these days as vital pieces of evidence. More officers are now taking the time to collect shell casings from petty crimes and nonviolent shootings, like when joy riders use stop signs for target practice, because they may eventually help solve more dangerous acts of violence.

As the feds dearly love to do, they gave their database a cool name, National Integrated Ballistic Information Network, and fed a story of their glory to a willing “journalist,” who duly reported it. Continue reading →

Last week the house was full of young people, my son’s roommates who graduated college with him and remained to get advanced degrees. They talked, we talked, they talked some more. They were very smart kids, but very much kids.

One of the things discussed stemmed from another young person who was killed doing something foolish. It wasn’t so much about the activity itself, but about how he did it, failing to take the usual precautions students took to be safe. From there, the discussion digressed to their foremost concern for safety.

As a parent, I was torn. No parent wants to see harm come to his child. But at the same time, I didn’t want to bubble wrap my kids, for they needed to take chances and tempt the possibility that they might be harmed. But there was a force preventing them from tempting fate. There were rules, there to protect they were led to believe, and rules must be obeyed. Continue reading →

Not that stereotypes should be considered truth, even though stereotypes aren’t created out of thin air, but that only applies to those stereotypes that we prefer not apply. Apparently, the awful stereotype of black men doesn’t prevent a black woman from burning them for their failure to do as she would expect.

White female voters in Georgia showed little interest in helping black women fulfill their dream of electing Stacey Abrams as governor, which would have made her the first African American woman to head a state in the nation’s history.

As everyone, except white women, knows, they’re awful. After all, isn’t politics all about helping a black woman fulfill her dreams, rather than, say, electing a person to office because that’s the person they choose to vote for? Continue reading →

When something slips though the cracks of government, taken for granted until we learn that it wasn’t, there are calls to regulate it. We must fix it. Something must be done. And so things get regulated, whether it’s some requirement to take thousands of hours of classes to get a license to braid hair, or refusal to give a job to someone who risked their lives bravely fighting California wildfires because they were in prison at the time.

Once we regulate, we must enforce the regulations, for unenforced regulations are worthless. And to enforce our regulations, there must be punishment for a violation of them. There must be, and since our regulations are critical to the maintenance of society, the punishment must “send a message.” And if we try hard enough to achieve a well-regulated society, we could end up like Greece.

An initial court ruling two years ago handed the woman a 15-year prison term for defrauding the public; the sentence was reduced this month, and she has been in Thiva prison in central Greece ever since. Continue reading →

There is nothing to suggest that Miyekko Durden-Bosley is going to win any citizenship awards for her actions that night.

Durden-Bosley, then 23, was intoxicated and verbally abusive during the incident outside the home of a Seattle man whose mother had called the police. Shepherd, the first of three officers to arrive at the scene, ultimately told her and the man he was losing his patience with their contradictory explanations.

As the video shows, dealing with Durden-Bosley wasn’t a pleasant task. Continue reading →

Among the reforms Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner has instituted is a list of cops whom he won’t put on the stand because of their history of misconduct.

Philadelphia’s Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 5 is suing because District Attorney Larry Krasner has a list of cops with bad records, and his office uses this list to determine whether those cops can be called to the stand to testify in cases.

The reason for the database’s existence is eminently logical—if prosecutors use testimony from police officers with a documented history of misconduct, the defense can then bring that up and use it to cast doubt on an officer’s integrity and testimony and seed doubt in the jurors’ minds. In short: Part of the purpose of the list is to keep cops off the stand that could potentially wreck the prosecution’s case and also to alert prosecutors in advance about these potential problems.

Continue reading →

At Volokh Conspiracy, Orin Kerr provides a copy of the report of the Ad Hoc Committee  To Review The Criminal Justice Act, of which he was a member. The crux of the problem is the same one that’s plagued the federal indigent criminal defense function forever, money. But the committee’s focus was on the mechanism for dealing with money, now vested in the hands of individual judges.

Here’s the basic idea. Our committee found that there is a pressing need to reorganize federal criminal defense. We concluded that judges have too much of a role in overseeing appointed defense lawyers. Federal judges are deeply involved in indigent criminal defense. They appoint lawyers under the CJA, appoint federal defenders, review voucher requests, approve experts, and the like. Someone needs to play that oversight role, of course. But as our report explains, we think the system would be better served if there were an independent agency serving that role rather than individual judges who are also presiding over the same cases. There’s just too much of a conflict when judges are playing both roles. And some judges aren’t the best at overseeing defense functions that they may not have the experience to evaluate.

There’s little reason to recite the concrete problems, voucher cutting, refusal to pay for investigators and experts, waiting for payment and, of course, that the money for CJA funding come through the judiciary’s budget,than the judges are more concerned that they get the right tone of marble in their courtrooms than whether the panel lawyers. Continue reading →

Like so many things in life, if used well, lawfully, it made perfect sense. But if used malevolently, it was an easily abused bludgeon. It only depended on two variables, the integrity of the lender and the integrity of the borrower. It’s called a “confession of judgment.”

The lenders’ weapon of choice is an arcane legal document called a confession of judgment. Before borrowers get a loan, they have to sign a statement giving up their right to defend themselves if the lender takes them to court. It’s like an arbitration agreement, except the borrower always loses.

There are high risk borrowers, people who either may not be entirely inclined to repay loans or, for legitimate reasons, just can’t pay. They need money to run their business, pay for medical care or college, buy a car to get to work, but their credit is poor and no bank will give them a shake. What to do?

Then an opportunity with some lender offering loans to anyone, to you, comes along. The interest rates are high, usually usurious depending on how they spin it, but it’s money. You’re not going to get money from anywhere else, and you need it, so there’s no other game in town. You agree, sign the docs and, boom, there’s money in the back. One of those docs is captioned “confession of judgment.”

Armed with a confession, a lender can, without proof, accuse borrowers of not paying and legally seize their assets before they know what’s happened. Not surprisingly, some lenders have abused this power. In dozens of interviews and court pleadings, borrowers describe lenders who’ve forged documents, lied about how much they were owed, or fabricated defaults out of thin air.

A confession of judgment is nothing new, having been in use from the English common law forward. There are reasons for it, good reasons. It avoids the expense of a collection suit, which would increase the cost to the lender and make it less beneficial to give a high-risk loan. It avoids the problem of borrowers in the wind, the ones who take the money and disappear, such that they can’t be served with suit because no one knows where they are. Hard as it is to imagine, some borrowers aren’t particularly honest about their intention to repay a loan, and others, even with good intentions, tend to prefer not to face the consequences of their circumstances.

The mechanism is easy: file the confession of judgment along with an affidavit of default and you get a judgment against the borrowers, which can then be used to attach and seize assets. While the attach and seize part remains a problem, as many borrowers have nothing to attach or seize, and you can’t get blood from a rock, at least there will be a judgment on file in case they ever manage to accumulate assets.

But the mechanism is also too easily abused.

The man identified himself as a debt counselor. He described a bizarre legal proceeding that he said was targeting Duncan without her knowledge. A lender called ABC had filed a court judgment against her in the state of New York and was planning to seize her possessions. “I’m not sure if they already froze your bank accounts, but they are RIGHT NOW moving to do just that,” he’d written in an email earlier that day. He described the lender as “EXTREMLY AGGRESSIVE.” Her only hope, the man said, was to pull all her money out of the bank immediately.

His story sounded fishy to the Duncans. They had borrowed $36,762 from a company called ABC Merchant Solutions LLC, but as far as they knew they were paying the money back on schedule. Doug dialed his contact there and was assured all was well. They checked with a lawyer; he was skeptical, too. What kind of legal system would allow all that to happen 1,000 miles away without notice or a hearing? They shrugged off the warning as a scam.

It wasn’t a scam, and they were actually fortunate to have even this bit of belated and odd notice.

The following Monday, Doug logged in at the office to discover he no longer had access to his bank accounts. A few days on, $52,886.93 disappeared from one of them. The loss set off a chain of events that culminated a month later in financial ruin.

Before you shed a tear, consider how and why the Duncans found themselves in this situation.

The Duncans’ ordeal began in November 2017 with an unsolicited fax from a broker promising term loans of as much as $1 million at a cheap rate. The couple had owned their agency, a Re/Max franchise, for three years and now had 50 employees, but they still weren’t turning a profit. A planned entry into the mortgage business was proving more expensive than expected. Doing some quick math, Doug figured he could borrow $800,000 to fund the expansion, pay off some debt, and come out with a lower monthly payment. The spam fax felt like a gift from God.

We all get spam faxes offering loans, and most of us wonder who would be so foolish as to respond to them. That would be the Duncans. Why didn’t they go to a bank? Why were they in a position where they needed a large cash infusion, particularly since their business wasn’t profitable? There’s nothing wrong with having a real estate agency, or even trying to expand into the (ironically) mortgage business, but there’s a point where it’s improvident to throw good money after bad. That point is when you get your loan from spam faxes.

The lender here was bad in every respect, usurious rates and filing the confession of judgment despite the Duncans not being in default. By filing a false affidavit of default, they were committing a crime, as they were by collecting interest above that legally permitted.

Assuming one isn’t bothered by engaging in crime, it’s an easy trick to pull off and, given the impoverished state of the victim, hard for the borrower to address without the ability to retain counsel. Sure, they could go to the District Attorney about the false filing in court, but many don’t think to do it and it doesn’t put the stolen money back in their bank account.

On the one hand, without a confession of judgment, there would be few legitimate lenders willing to make high-risk loans to people who can’t qualify for bank loans, so there may be no possibility for a risky business to get the money it needs to survive. On the other hand, confessions of judgment are like handing the key to your front door to a burglar, if the lender is dishonest and inclined to abuse the law.

To complain that the fault is the confession of judgment is easy, provided the story you hear is the Duncan’s and not the business that stole from them. Then again, the alternative would have been Jim Duncan getting no “gift from God” at all. And as a general rule, if a lender’s business model is to spam fax you their offer, maybe there’s a reason.