Zachary Randolph loves him some cops. And he’s allowed.

Randolph said he was working a normal shift at his job at the Katy Mills Mall when a police officer who worked at the mall placed an order for a $2.75 cheesecake brownie.

The teenager said he wanted to show his appreciation for the official protecting and serving his community.

A good deed? Well, everyone knows what comes of good deeds.

A Texas teenager was suspended from his cookie store job after a customer became upset when he paid for a police officer’s order.

Zachary Randolph, 18, was suspended from his job at a Great American Cookies mall after he bought a police officer a brownie out of his own wages on Sunday.

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He calls himself “Ol’ Clark,” and at 84 years of age, it’s an apt description. But then, an old fool is worse than a young fool, and Bill Clark is old enough to have no excuse.

The Columbia Daily Tribune has suspended columnist Bill Clark indefinitely after a public dispute arose over a column he wrote claiming his life was threatened when two sheriff’s deputies stopped his car in June.

Clark wanted desperately to “understand” what it was like to be a minority, a victim of police harassment, and so he manufactured a fantasy after he was stopped by two deputies.

I’m lucky I didn’t get shot. Sirens wailed and when I stopped, two officers were out of the sheriff’s vehicle. When I reached over to turn off the radio and then take my wallet out of my pocket to produce the driver’s license and insurance card, I realized my hands were not at the top of my steering wheel. Danger lurked and official arrogance was to follow.

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Reading the comments to David’s post yesterday, something struck me. Some, well-known here from their prior comments, had something to say, whether serious or fun. Others, unknown, did what so often annoys: took orthogonal flight from the point of the post toward whatever popped into their head.

Whether it’s what you think, believe or feel, what makes you feel compelled to express your value system? Why, oh why, do you suppose anyone, anywhere, cares?

This is the perpetual mystery of the internetz, that random people believe they get a vote, that their feelings matter. Some include tidbits of information, of dubious factual basis and even more dubious relative merit, as if this will overcome the core of their comment, that X matters to them more than Y.

If you’re someone whose views should be taken seriously by others, then say so. Perhaps your sensibilities matter. Perhaps not. Without knowing, however, you’re just making random noise online. Your views may be very important to you, but why are they important to anyone else? And when others fail to give you the “respect” you believe due, you get angry. Sometimes, you’re butthurt. Rarely are you satisfied. Continue reading →

Scott’s out of town today – a concert of some kind, old-people music, a trip to Cambridge – and he asked me to look after you guys. Entertain you, maybe.

This is not going to end well.

My usual MO would be to rant about the lack of civil liberties in Europe. And maybe that’s still going to happen. But I couldn’t help but notice you people celebrated Brexit 1.0 a couple days ago, so I thought it’d be a good opportunity for an outsider’s perspective on the United States in the midst of all the doom and gloom on social media.

As Scott puts it, you guys are mourning over the corpse of a great nation. It’s incessant. Either you flagellate yourselves because the United States, despite its egalitarian surface appeal, is racist, sexist and took ninety years to free the slaves, or you flagellate yourselves because the United States, despite its egalitarian surface appeal, is corrupt and elitist, a place where government/immigrants/the media (circle all that apply) have spent the last ninety years selling off the nation’s birthright. Continue reading →

Joel Cohen asked two judges a question. One judge, Jed Rakoff of the Southern District of New York, ended up in a position he likely didn’t anticipate when he agreed to the gig: playing straight man for the other, Seventh Circuit Judge Richard Posner. Then again, Posner is either a master troll, a brilliant pedagogue or completely senile. Of course, these options aren’t mutually exclusive.

The primary question was fairly straightforward, one that is subject to regular discussion with good reason.

Under the Constitution, federal judges, having life tenure, can be removed only by impeachment and only for “high crimes and misdemeanors.” But should it be that way? While we know there are federal judges in their 80s and even 90s who perform admirably, shouldn’t there be mandatory retirement at a certain age?

The problem of old judges, sitting beyond their expiration date, isn’t new, and is always worthy of consideration, both from the functional perspective as well as political. The general answer for federal judges comes with a knock on chambers door from the chief. As Judge Rakoff replied: Continue reading →

How hard can a test question be at Howard Law? Hard enough that it took 504 days to answer it, and they still got it wrong. From the FIRE.

On May 4, law professor Reginald Robinson was deemed responsible for sexual harassment after two students complained about a test question involving a Brazilian wax and an upset client.

The test question was rather lengthy (it can be found in the link in the quote), and involves a procedure about which I know little more than it sounds painful at best. But apparently, one of Robinson’s students was more familiar with the procedure than Robinson (or me).

During a September 2015 class, a female student challenged a test question’s premise that a person could sleep through a Brazilian wax. After a complaint to administrators by two students and a 16-month investigation, Robinson was informed that one of the students allegedly believed the question’s premise somehow required her to reveal to the class whether she’d had a Brazilian wax.

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The education begins early these days.

Some of the lessons in “A Is for Anarchist,”* a popular alphabet book, exemplify the indoctrination.

‘F’ is for feminist, For fairness in our pay.

‘J’ is for Justice! Justicia for all.

L-G-B-T-Q! Love who [sic] you choose.

Don’t laugh. “A Is for Activist” has sold 125,000 print units since its release in 2013.

It’s always been part of parents’ responsibility to teach values to their children. I, for one, read my kids Pat The Bunny. Whether indoctrination works this way is another question, but it’s better than teaching children to hate blacks or gays.

And yet, hate manifests itself on both ends of the spectrum in the effort to indoctrinate people to one’s twisted beliefs. Duke philosophy prof Alex Rosenberg is a hater and wants to make your child hate too. Continue reading →

Tonya Jameson bought a car from a woman in Knoxville, Tennessee. That’s nice, right? Or at least it should have been for all involved, and would have been except that the son-in-law of the woman from whom she bought the car. Matthew Janish, was a Knoxville cop. He lived across the street from his mother-in-law, but apparently wasn’t kept in the loop and didn’t know she sold the car.

When Jameson arrived with new license plates to put on her new car, Janish, off-duty but ever-vigilant, saw something that he was unaware was a good thing. It’s a curious combination, vigilance and ignorance. Ideas fill the gap where knowledge might otherwise be and become real enough to act upon, even though they are entirely baseless. And since Janish was a cop, and this was his mother-in-law’s car, he made a choice from a wide variety of options. He chose poorly.

On May 3, I was confronted at gunpoint by Officer Janish while I was putting a license plate on an SUV that I purchased from his mother-in-law the previous week. The incident occurred in her driveway, which is across the street from Officer Janish’s home. Janish, who was off-duty, thought I was stealing the truck.

Here are the facts that Janish appeared to focus on – the unmarked cab, a black person, the duffel bag and the license plate.

Then here are other facts that he ignored – he knew his mother-in-law was selling the car, it was broad daylight, and I knew her first name, but not her last name. I offered to show him the keys, registration and bill of sale signed by his mother-in-law.

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In a variation of an old theme, Jesse Ball suggests that we add a new duty to citizenship:

I propose that all citizens of the United States of America should serve a brief sentence of incarceration in our maximum-security penitentiaries. This service, which would occur for each person once in a decade, would help ensure that the quality of life within our prisons is sufficient for the keeping of human beings.

While this has been urged upon prosecutors and judges so they get an appreciation of what it means to cage a person for a period of time, Ball’s suggestion goes to a different purpose.

Just think, if everyone in the United States were to become, within a 10-year period, familiar with what it is like to be incarcerated, is there any question that the quality of our prisons would improve? It also follows that the skill and understanding of our juries might grow apace, as they would now know to what they were condemning those they condemn.

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Even when you, the offender, help the government by providing really important substantial assistance in the investigation or prosecution of another person, if the prosecutors and the case agents are pissed off at you because you played games with them, it is very hard to get a sentence-reduction motion. See, e.g., United States v. Scarpa, No. 16-303 (2^d Cir. June 22, 2017) (while it was undisputed that Scarpa, a “made member” of the Colombo crime family, had provided substantial assistance in locating Terry Nichols’[i] long-hidden cache of explosive components, because the defendant was otherwise a lying sleaze ball[ii], the district court lacked authority to compel the government to file a substantial-assistance motion and reduce the defendant’s sentence by 10 years; a district court “may not override the government’s refusal to make a [sentence-reduction] motion on the basis of the court’s own balancing of the costs and benefits of making such a motion.”)

Nonetheless, as I have learned over the last 25-plus years, sometimes a federal district judge must get down and dirty with intransigent prosecutors. The judge must slap the government upside the head.

Attribution (as requested): WorldArtsMe

This post is about Mary Ann Rounsavall. It is also a post about my long wrestling match with a line prosecutor over his refusal to file a motion to allow me to go below the statutory minimum because of Rounsavall’s substantial assistance in the prosecution of her brother. Continue reading →