Mimi Schwartz sat on a Harris County grand jury and lived to tell about it.

Last year, Harris County led the state in the number of police shootings of civilians. Of the more than 200 officer-involved shootings brought before grand juries here between 2012 and 2016, only one was indicted — and that was just for official oppression. No case involving a possible indictment of an officer came before us.

Instead, we were treated to some cool field trips: a demonstration of a canine unit, a simulated shoot/don’t shoot course to test our reflexes, and a tour of the county jail. I was so fascinated that I didn’t at first think of it as an exercise in indoctrination.

Grand jurors don’t decide guilt, but merely cause. These are shortcuts to better understand the 99% of witnesses who will come before them. If you ask a cop, he may well be offended by calling it indoctrination. One person’s indoctrination is another’s foundation. How was she to understand what they were talking about when she never experienced it? Continue reading →

Douglas Koziol makes his pitch for allowing bakeries to refuse to make cakes for gay weddings. He works in a independent bookstore in Boston, and likely would never see his post as being an argument for, as he calls them, “straight-only bakeries,” but he does nonetheless.

He opens with his disdain for J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, which he finds despicable. But more problematic is that the independent bookstore sells it. A lot.

I don’t intend to review Elegy here. More capable pieces have already been written about the book’s “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” message, its condemnation of a supposed culture of poverty, its dismissal of the working class’s material reality as a determining factor in their lives, and its callous claim that the welfare state only reinforces a cycle of dependency. If any of this sounds familiar, it’s because these are the same rightwing talking points that have been leveled at the working class and poor for decades. As if that weren’t enough, the book also boasts glowing blurbs from the likes of Rod Dreher, whose oeuvre consists of transphobic screeds for The American Conservative; literal tech vampire Peter Thiel; and the National Review, which, under the guidance of William F. Buckley, promoted segregation and derided the Civil Rights Movement, among countless other odious stances, and which now primarily serves as a trust fund for a gaggle of #NeverTrump Republicans who hold the President’s views but gussy them up with a bowtie. And yet the customers where I work—largely liberal, well-educated and well-meaning people—have bought the book in droves.

Evil people like the book, which proves how horrible it is. And he knows who’s to blame. Continue reading →

Josh Barro gertrudes his way through the number at Business Insider, which would be cringeworthy in its simplisticness under other circumstances.

I’ve been haunted by a claim my KCRW colleague Rich Lowry made on our radio show a few weeks ago: Democrats keep coming up short in elections because they won’t give any ground on “cultural issues” to win back the working-class voters they’ve alienated over the past decades.

Most of the discussion of this trend has focused on non-college-educated white voters, who have swung heavily toward Republicans; but Democrats should also be worried about their disconnect with non-college-educated nonwhite voters, whose turnout declined precipitously in 2016.

On the other hand, when you look at the polling on specific “cultural issues,” Democrats usually have the edge.

There are two glaring, massive failures in this: first, polls get answers based on how questions are posed. “Are you in favor of discrimination?” No normal person could possibly answer yes, and yet, if people are asked, “should colleges prohibit students from saying ‘America is the land of opportunity,'” the opposite response results.  Continue reading →

A twit by Adam Serwer, senior editor at The Atlantic, formerly of Mother Jones, piqued my interest for all the wrong reasons.

The number of knee-jerk defenders of police who reversed themselves over the MN shooting because the cop is black and Muslim is remarkable.

He’s referring, obviously, to the killing of Justine Damond by Officer Mohammed Noor. His point, which was similarly voiced by Jake here, was that people who failed to see a problem when the bold-faced names of the recently deceased were black, are suddenly seeing a problem. It’s not the right problem, as they blame it on Noor’s being Muslim and brown, but at least it’s a problem.

Seize the moment to bring the “knee-jerk defenders of police” into the fold?  Try to create consensus that there is a problem, and that neither white women nor black men (nor any other combination of whatever identities touch a nerve with you) should die needlessly because some easily scared cop feels entitled to kill? Nope. Continue reading →

Letters to a Young Scientist was written by Edmond O. Wilson, the Pulitzer Prize winning biologist and the foremost expert in the world on ants. If you get nothing else from this post, buy and read that book.

I thought I might try my hand at writing something roughly similar, albeit far less beautiful and far harsher. If you are a young practicing lawyer, I hope that this post will curl your toes, but resonate with you too. Consider please the following advice from an old, straight, white man who was once a practicing lawyer.

Dear Young Practicing Lawyer,

You are young and immature. You instinctively know that you cannot comprehend what your youth and immaturity mean. So, I am going to mentor you from the vantage of 70-plus years. Don’t be mad or sad. Just read and reject or accept as you think best. After all, you are alone in this immense universe. In the end, the choice is yours and yours alone. Continue reading →

You know what’s exclusive? Harvard. It’s about as exclusive as it gets. Yet, that obvious fact doesn’t alter the fantasy of re-engineering one of the most exclusive places on earth to create the impression that it’s inclusive.

Harvard students could soon be banned from joining any private social organization or club.

If the recommendations contained in a just-released, 22-page report are enacted, Harvard would extend previously-proposed sanctions against students joining single-gender clubs, to all “fraternities, sororities, and similar organizations,” regardless of their co-ed status. And instead of instituting a blacklist — leaving non-compliant students unable to captain Harvard-recognized sports teams, or be nominated for prestigious scholarships, for example — violators would be subject to formal “disciplinary action.”

This began with Final Clubs, segregated by gender (at least if one considers male/female to be gender), which gave rise to cries of sexism. But once the ball started rolling, it became hard to stop. And it quickly rolled over fraternities and sororities, because they too are segregated by gender.

And then, as reflected in a student letter attached as an exhibit to the committee report, some students’ feelings could be hurt if they weren’t “punched,” asked to join one of these exclusive segregated clubs, and that’s just not right. Much as one student may swell with pride at being invited to join such an exclusive group, another will cry himself to sleep at night knowing that he was rejected, unwanted, undesired. What of his feelings? Continue reading →

On the twitters this morning, a twit by Baltimore Sun crime reporter, Justin Fenton, caught my eye. In one sense, it was a fairly pedestrian video, three cops planting drugs. But what made it curious was that they didn’t realize that the Axon body cam they were using to “prove” how they located the stash retains thirty second of soundless recording prior to its being turned on.

So the three geniuses, despite the federal report and consent decree by the Department of Justice that fixes all that horrible stuff cops do when they think no one is looking, tried to game the body cam, only to get nailed by their own video. Fenton put it on the twitters.

Footage shows officer placing drugs in trash; goes out to street, turns on camera, returns. Cams save 30 sec prior to activation, w/o sound pic.twitter.com/5ZW128lWFM

— Justin Fenton (@justin_fenton) July 19, 2017

Continue reading →

The argument is straightforward: for people who are not going to hire a lawyer but want to fight a parking ticket, a chatbot that provides them with kinda obvious, albeit simplistic, guidance is better than nothing. So DoNotPay was born, and was a success.

So someone thought to create an app that walks you through the elements, the common defenses and how to document them so as to beat the ticket. That’s great! Silly as these things may seem to a lawyer, normal people don’t think in terms of elements, defenses and evidence. The worst that can happen is you don’t beat the ticket, and the best is that you learn what to do to fight it. What’s wrong with that?

Is it a substitute for a lawyer when your life is at stake? Hardly, but this is a parking ticket, not a capital prosecution. This fills a gap in the law that needed filling, and apparently provides a sufficiently sound how-to list to be pretty successful.

But extrapolating one success to another doesn’t always work the same way. It requires a deeper understanding of why one idea is good, or at least not incredibly bad, and why it doesn’t necessarily translate into another.  Continue reading →

Justice Clarence Thomas made headlines again by taking a shot at qualified immunity. His opinion highlights that the doctrine is a mess and rests on shaky historical foundations. When merely answering the door can get you shot three times by police officers, without any legal redress, you can question to what strange shores have you been brought by the tides of qualified immunity.

There’s a lot that can be said about the history of sovereign immunity, the Reconstruction Amendments and civil rights acts, and the policy justifications for qualified immunity. And it’s all very interesting legal and historical stuff. Really, it is.

But at the end of the day, a legal case is foremost about solving the dispute at hand and secondarily about reducing uncertainty about legal rights in future matters. At the risk of sounding like a realist, pragmatist like Judge Posner (shudder), all this precedence and historical evidence doesn’t really help the dead guy’s family or the next poor soul who dares open a door with a firearm in hand.

Many criminal procedure and constitutional torts (civil rights claims) are agency problems in disguise. Taking a step back, if I am operating a delivery service with my truck, and I negligently run someone over, I am responsible for the damage. Continue reading →

People are killed. Some by accident. Some by criminals. Some by police. Some by police who are criminals. Some are female. Some are white. Some are in their nightclothes, having called 911, unarmed and talking to an officer driving a cruiser by a cop named Mohammed Noor, with neither body nor squad cameras turned on, by shooting through the driver side door.

Just before 11:30 p.m. Saturday, Damond, 40, called 911 to report a possible assault occurring in an alley near her home between Washburn and Xerxes avenues S., in the Fulton neighborhood.

Damond, in her pajamas, went to the driver’s side door of the responding squad and was talking to the officer, according to three sources with direct knowledge of the case.

Moments later, Noor shot across his partner from the passenger’s seat, killing Damond.

No explanation for the killing has been offered yet, whether because the investigating agency, the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, isn’t talking or Noor and his partner have invoked their union contract to conceal information about a killing that would have been sweated out of them had they been anyone but cops. Continue reading →