Ed. Note: Portland criminal defense lawyer David Menschel noted on the twitters that there are now more people on sex offender registries than incarcerated. While mass incarceration is a well-recognized travesty, recognition of the burdens of SORA remains a mystery to many, who have no appreciation of the devastation it imposes for jobs, residence, disclosure, reporting and the normal accouterments of life. Not to mention violent retaliation by the unduly fearful and hateful.

While it’s an easy sell to explain why a kid urinating against a wall, or a teen sexting a pic of herself, isn’t really a “sex offender,” it’s far harder to understand why people convicted of the more repulsive offenses shouldn’t be pariahs. Below is a repost of Guy Hamilton-Smith’s Medium post to give you some insight into who these evil people may be. Bear in mind, the question isn’t whether they did wrong, but whether the punishment for the offense should be the walking death penalty of a life condemned to misery.

Ryan is the hardest part of my story to explain.

We have never met, nor will we, and yet he radically changed the course of my life. Continue reading →

It may be that Michael Gottlieb figures he’ll cover all the bases, because why not? It’s not his job to worry about other people’s privacy, about sticking his nose into the wholly unrelated private business of people he neither knows nor gives a damn about. And as a fairly new lawyer at Boies Schiller, trying to make his bones in crisis management, leaving a little scorched earth behind is the least of his worries.

But for Pogo, not to mention Popehat, this is a step too far.

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Another wrinkle that was totally foreseeable has come to crush the dreams of the “video will fix everything” crowd of simplistic crim law activists. In the early days, when people started using their cellphones to create videos of things that never, ever happened before, like cops beating people for no particular reason, it revealed what we had been arguing all along. It was, to some, a panacea.

To others, it was a window to a world that had been denied forever, until it was right there, in your face, on video. Then came dash cam, and body cam, and Axon making a bundle off it after it changed its name from Taser. But still, there was video, which birthed the “but for video” series of posts here over the years.

But we also understood that there would be problems, some that we could easily foresee and others that would be far trickier, far less visible. One problem, however, has now come to pass that should surprise no one. Hackers gonna hack, right? Continue reading →

It can be hard to appreciate the homogenizing effects of various strong influences around us. Social justice, for example, aspires to mediocrity, as excellence is relative and allows some to succeed and, invariably, some fail. Better we should all be mediocre, or equitable as it’s benignly described, than hard work and talent be rewarded. If we’re all beautiful, then no one can be more beautiful. And the unbeautiful will be just as entitled to prominence as the gorgeous, even though we all know they’re butt ugly.

But our reliance on technology similarly pushes homogenization, as Carolyn Elefant describes in a very interesting post, dystopianly entitled “Alexa, Please Hire Me A Lawyer: How AI Will Change EVERYTHING We’ve Been Taught About Marketing Legal Services.” Before getting to the meat, it’s worth noting the word “please” in the request to an AI service. There’s nothing wrong with being polite by default, as most of us are, but there is a belief that when talking at (not “to,” but “at”) HAL, you ought to be nice. So as not to hurt HAL’s feelings.

Yes, I realize that asking an AI-assistant to find a lawyer sounds far-fetched — like something out of a bad sci-fi movie. But  Marketing in the Age of Alexa , a thoughtful, must-read  article by Niraj Dawar in this month’s issue of the Harvard Business Review will persuade you otherwise. Dewar describes how consumers will come to rely on AI-assistants not just to carry out instructions like purchasing laundry detergent or scheduling a dog-walker, but also to anticipate their needs.

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The Supreme Court punted in its Masterpiece Cakeshop decision, a 7-2 ruling that reversed the Colorado Civil Rights Commission on the narrowest of grounds, so fact-bound as to make it generally inapplicable to any other scenario. By doing so, the Court failed to answer the two questions posed: can a person be compelled to engage in speech against his will to avoid discrimination, and does discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation take precedence over discrimination on the basis of religion.

We’re no clearer on either issue today than we were before the ruling.

As many have noted, the path the court took toward ruling for the baker clearly reflected a compromise among justices with very different views. The court dealt with the profound issues of free expression and freedom of religion that the case seemed to present (whether it really presented them is a separate question) by avoiding them; as Prof. Michael Dorf of Cornell Law School wrote of the opinion, “At best, it is a masterpiece of ducking the hard questions.”

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The intransigent problem of racism, as proved by disparate impact, needs to be fixed. And we came upon just such a fix that couldn’t possibly fail because it overcame all the problems that surely gave rise to this insidious reality. There could be no favoritism. No legacy special treatment. No good ol’ boy’s club. No excuses.

There was an answer, and we went all-in to seize upon it: neutral objective tests that would eradicate all the outside influences that maintained a legacy of racism. This was the solution, except it didn’t work.

In the face of growing pressure to tackle New York City’s widespread school segregation, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced on Saturday a proposal that would change how students are admitted to eight of the city’s specialized high schools, a group of highly sought-after institutions where students gain entry based on a single test. Continue reading →

Lawyers call it “demeanor,” the appearance one gives in conveying a message. An aspect of an advocate’s persuasiveness, or distraction, is how one comes off while engaged in the effort. Sometimes it will be a serious look. Sometimes a pleasant look. Some looks work for one person but not another. Finding the right look for you, and for the circumstances, is critical to being the most persuasive advocate possible. And what better time to learn this than in law school during moot court?

But after the “resting bitch face” fiasco, moot court judges need to be circumspect in how they convey this message, lest the students take offense. Then again, if avoiding offense is more important than teaching students about the value of demeanor, has a judge done their best to help a student?

I put in hundreds of hours preparing for the competition, which involved a criminal case based on a restriction of an individual’s freedom of expression—serious stuff. It centred on photoshopping intimate images of people without their consent, the intent to incite civil unrest, and threats to national security and public order. Continue reading →

Prostitution is one of those crimes that hinge largely on your belief system. If you believe that all prostitutes are forced into it against their will, whether by drugs or pimps, then prostitutes are victims. If you believe it’s possible that it’s just a transaction between consenting adults, then it shouldn’t be a crime at all. If you’re just a prude determined to tell other people how to conduct their sex lives in accordance with your sniffling sensibilities, then it doesn’t matter.

There can be some of each of these, and other, views about prostitution. Like most things in life, it’s not so simple that it neatly fits into one pigeonhole. As advocates like Maggie McNeil have made clear, there are women who choose prostitution as their occupation without shame or excuse. This is what they choose to do, and they don’t give a damn about your Victorian mores. You don’t have to like it, but you have no authority to tell them what they can do with their bodies.

There’s a reason why prostitution is called the oldest profession. The demand exists and always has, and despite your sniffling, it’s not going away. But is the answer to force prostitutes, and their customers, to risk the choice between contracting a loathsome, if not deadly, disease or enhance their time in jail? That’s what Allegheny County is trying to do, as if they’ve finally figured out a way to end the blight. Continue reading →

He was swiftly fired after the video of his running down Timmy Patmon went viral. Don’t cry for Taylor Saulters. He was a probie and could be fired at will.

A rookie police officer in Georgia was swiftly fired over the weekend after body camera video showed him striking a man with his patrol car during a pursuit.

An internal investigation by the Athens-Clarke County Police Department determined that the officer, Taylor Saulters, used excessive force when he struck the man, Timmy Patmon, with his vehicle on Friday. Chief Scott Freeman fired Officer Saulters on Saturday after initially placing him on administrative leave, said Eppi Rodriguez, a police spokesman.

If all this seemed to happen at extraordinary speed, it’s just because such decisions are usually made extraordinarily slowly. When there’s a video of a cop doing something incredibly wrong, like shooting a guy in the back after a traffic stop, it’s not because it actually requires weeks or months of “investigation.” They know, just like anyone else, whether it was right or wrong in ten minutes. The rest of the time is spent dealing with the ancillary questions, from what to do about the union to how to sell to the media that this wasn’t just some vicious killer in blue harbored by your brave little police department. Continue reading →

Things were different back then. There was no Victoria’s Secret catalog for young boys to sneak up to their room. If they were lucky enough to get their hands on an old Playboy, they were too afraid of mom finding it and dad whipping off his belt, proclaiming “this is going to hurt me more than it hurts you.” It was a lie. And every year, we watched the Miss America Pageant.

Winning the pageant was a big deal, and many winners went on to careers in entertainment and news media. It was a stepping stone to stardom. But we watched it because the women were supposed to be beautiful. It always struck me as a kid that they looked plastic, with hair that didn’t move and faces that would melt in the sun. I stopped watching it as it didn’t interest me, but then, the times they were a changin’. Sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. Plastic Barbies weren’t my thing. Continue reading →