Louisiana is notable for its gumbo, tossing bead necklaces at women with exposed breasts and outrageous failure to adequately fund its defense of the indigent accused. The gumbo is delicious. Its compliance with Gideon is awful, demanding an extreme response. Orleans Public Defender Derwyn Bunton was compelled to refuse to take on more cases.

There is nothing worse than the “nuclear option,” and Derwyn only dropped the bomb when he believed he had no other choice. So it worked?

The bill, which is currently awaiting debate in the Louisiana House, would increase the amount of money allocated to the state’s public defender offices by the Louisiana Public Defender Board, their umbrella organization. The board would be required to set aside 70 percent of its budget for local offices, up from 65 percent. The change would mean a $1.7 million increase in funding for public defenders.

Don’t unfurl the “mission accomplished” banner just yet. Continue reading →

“If only he did as the cops commanded” is a ready retort to the guy shot to death when he inadvertantly flinched, or completely ignored, police orders. Sometimes there is a good reason for it, conflicting commands, multiple cops screaming simultaneously, so that it’s impossible to know what to do, how to stay alive.

But the underlying premise is that if only they followed orders, they wouldn’t be dead. The critical piece of this scenario is that their death at the hands of cops is their own fault. They should have complied. They should have listened. They’re dead because they didn’t.

Elijah James Smith complied. He was ordered to raise his hands. He raised his hands. He was shot to death for it. Continue reading →

I’m friends with Frank Bynum, who’s the Democratic candidate for Harris County Criminal Court 8 judge. I contributed to his campaign because I think he’ll make a great judge. He knows the law and he has a deep concern for the rights of the accused. What more could you want from a judge?

HOUSTON — There was no question on primary night in Texas last month that Franklin Bynum would win the Democratic nomination to become a criminal court judge in Houston. The 34-year-old defense attorney had no challengers.

Frank will be on the ballot as a Democrat, but his affiliation is the Democratic Socialists of America. Continue reading →

Out of the blue, Trump pardoned Scooter Libby, which could only be explained as his way to send a message to his cohorts that they should keep their mouths shut and they too will be the beneficiaries of his largesse. Whether Libby deserved a pardon is irrelevant. It was clearly a message.

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has a plan to thwart any Trump effort to use the pardon power to keep his minions silent.

Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman of New York is moving to change New York state law so that he and other local prosecutors would have the power to bring criminal charges against aides to President Trump who have been pardoned, according to a letter Mr. Schneiderman sent to the governor and state lawmakers on Wednesday.

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Mark Bennett, the Texas Tornado, took another law down for violating the First Amendment. This time, it was Texas Penal Code 21.16(b), the so-called “revenge porn” law. In Ex parte Jones, the 12th District Court of Appeals reversed the court below and held that the statute was facially unconstitutional.

As has been argued from the day Mary Anne Franks began her efforts to create a criminal revenge porn statute, it clearly implicated the First Amendment’s prohibition against laws infringing on free expression, to which she merely screamed her denials and did her best to deflect by creating a fantasy interpretation of the First Amendment. The court made swift work of it.

In the instant case, Section 21.16(b) proscribes the disclosure of certain visual material, including any film, photograph, or videotape in various formats. Because the photographs and visual recordings are inherently expressive and the First Amendment applies to the distribution of such expressive media in the same way it applies to their creation, we conclude that the right to freedom of speech is implicated in this case.

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The notion of mandatory reporters seemed to make an enormous amount of sense at the fringes. After all, if a teacher saw her elementary school student with cigarette burns, how could she not report the child for protection? A child abused needed protection, obviously.

But then came the other end of the spectrum, where it was hardly clear that the child was being abused and yet the law required a mandatory report. And a child would be taken from her parents, put into foster care, a home, while an investigation was conducted. If it turned out that the broken arm just happened, because kids fall and get hurt because they’re kids, the solution proved far more harmful than the putative disease. But hey, it made an enormous amount of sense at the fringes.

When it was a matter of objective physical harm to a defenseless child, it was one thing. In the hands of SJWs, however, it goes off the rails.  Continue reading →

The village square is empty. There you are, soapbox in hand, ready to climb atop and harangue the throngs with your opinions, your call to action. And there’s nobody there. They no longer have to be, as they’re busy on Facebook, or the twitters, or checking their Instagram and Snapchats.

Does that mean the First Amendment demands you be given equal access to the web? After all, if you’re not on it, you can’t be heard. Your voice may not be silent, but your words fall on empty space if there’s no one to hear them. The ACLU has taken the position that equal access to the internet is a right, and the government must provide it.

In a report issued last month titled “The Public Internet Option: How Local Governments Can Provide Network Neutrality, Privacy, and Access for All,” the ACLU calls on cities to build and operate their own broadband networks.

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Granted, there seems to be no end to the peculiar, no, bizarre, twists stemming from Cooley Law’s most famous graduate, Michael Cohen. But even in the scheme of oddities gone wild, the hearing before Southern District of New York Judge Kimba Wood took a turn that only a made-for-TV hack writer could have devised.

Cohen, whose bona fides as a lawyer have come under scrutiny as a product of his challenging the execution of a search warrant for his records, claimed he was a legit lawyer and had three clients. One, of course, is Donald Trump. The second was Republican fund-raiser Elliott Broidy. The third?

It should be noted, at this point, that it’s entirely possible, and legitimate, for a lawyer to represent only one client. It’s not just Tom Hagen who did so. In-house counsel does so. Other lawyers representing wealthy (and litigious) people do so. There is no rule that says your law practice requires three, or ten, or 1000, clients to be a “real” practice. It’s real if it’s the practice of law. Continue reading →

Trump has let up on it, promising to take away Jeff Session’s video of Reefer Madness. Former Speaker of the House John Boehner, has “pivoted,” now that he’s out of office and powerless to do anything other than profit from it, calling for its “de-scheduling.” And upstate amateur lesbian gubernatorial candidate and former Sex in the City lawyer Cynthia Nixon is running on a platform of legalizing it.

Marijuana. So what if Nixon doesn’t grasp the difference between jail and prison, or that among the many sound reasons to legalize weed, racial disparities in arrests isn’t one of them.* Continue reading →

It’s not that they wanted to be the wedge in the battle for affirmative action, but there is a dirty secret desire to end the discrimination against them, without becoming the target of the ire of others also fighting for their hegemony. Asians are in a very awkward position.

A group that is suing Harvard University is demanding that it publicly release admissions data on hundreds of thousands of applicants, saying the records show a pattern of discrimination against Asian-Americans going back decades.

The group was able to view the documents through its lawsuit, which was filed in 2014 and challenges Harvard’s admissions policies. The plaintiffs said in a letter to the court last week that the documents were so compelling that there was no need for a trial, and that they would ask the judge to rule summarily in their favor based on the documents alone.

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