Perhaps the most basic reason for police not to engage in a car chase is the potential for harm to innocent bystanders. And for a 28-year-old guy, that harm came to pass when he swerved to avoid a collision.

City officials said Wednesday morning they have “serious concerns” about how police handled the pursuit that began sometime around 11 p.m. in the Greenville section of the city and ended about six miles away with an innocent man fighting for his life.

Leo Pinkston, 48, has been charged with aggravated assault and eluding in the crash. Police fired multiple shots at Pinkston about a mile down the road before the crash.

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District of Nebraska Senior Judge Richard G. Kopf, who presumably knows a secret or two, came out clearly against the current torrent of leaks from within the Executive Branch of government.

First, there is no excuse, none whatever, for leaks. And I say that with Nixon and “Deep Throat” (Mark Felt[1]) fully in mind. The ends do not justify the means. On this subject, there can be no equivocation.

It’s obvious that no organization, government included, can function effectively with its personnel betraying the confidences of their superiors, including disclosure of classified materials. On the other hand, as discussed in the particularly thoughtful comments, there is a well-founded concern that when government engages in impropriety, it would never be known but for the willingness of a leaker to do the dirty.

The conundrum is clear. Both sides have strong points, and it ultimately provides an unsatisfying middle ground that lacks sufficient definition to distinguish the righteous leaker from the rat. In the absence of a clear line, Judge Kopf offered his considerations on where the equities fall: Continue reading →

You do not need to be a Trump supporter to decry the tsunami of leaks coming from government higher-ups or those merely working for the government. It seems that virtually everyone who lives in Washington, D.C. is or wants to be a leaker.

I have two thoughts regarding leaks. Briefly, here they are. Continue reading →

June is Gay Pride Month in remembrance of the Stonewall Rebellion. There were riots in response to a police raid of a gay bar in Greenwich Village that, ironically, was owned by the mob, The Stonewall Inn. That was 1969, and it’s credited with giving rise to the Gay Rights Movement, so that gay, lesbian and trans people could be open about their sexual orientation without fear of arrest.

Arrest. Prosecution. Imprisonment. While the protesters needed support for the cause on the streets, when they found themselves in the bowels of 100 Centre Street, they needed something else. They need lawyers.

It’s fitting that the New York City Legal Aid Society’s LGBTQ Caucus recognize Pride Month. Yet, instead of honoring the spirit of the Stonewall Riots, not to mention the reason the Legal Aid Society exists, they have a very different concern: “resistance” to their delicate feelings.

Subject: LGBTQ Caucus Statement on Pride Month at The Legal Aid Society Continue reading →

I was backpacking through Europe, having just been handed a college diploma, facing a haircut and future of misery in law school.  Lawprof Steve Vladeck had yet to be born. Justice Harry Blackmun wrote an opinion that, even then, was edgy and controversial, Smith v. Maryland.

Technology allowed the government to wiretap our telephones, to listen in to our private conversations, and it was troubling. Back then, there was a very firm, very clear appreciation of privacy, and the idea that law enforcement could listen in bordered on shocking. Statutes were enacted to strictly limit the use of eavesdropping. Not only was a warrant required, but the ancillary requirements were strict, and the government was expressly required to strictly adhere to them. There was no fudging around the edges of a Title III warrant.

Another technology also came into play. Originally called a “trap and trace device,” it later became known as a pen register. Its capacity was limited to capturing the telephone number called or calling in.  Continue reading →

The cost of warehousing prisoners in California is high. By high, I mean incredibly expensive.

The cost of imprisoning each of California’s 130,000 inmates is expected to reach a record $75,560 in the next year. That’s enough to cover the annual cost of attending Harvard University and still have plenty left over for pizza and beer.

This is totally true, provided you drink domestic beer and aren’t too demanding about toppings on your pizza. It’s also the sort of comparison that shallow people conflate with actual alternatives rather than a shocking metric.

At $75,560, housing a prisoner in California now costs more than a year at Harvard https://t.co/g06HJsDZyC

— deray mckesson (@deray) June 5, 2017

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Liz Spayd was the sixth Public Editor at the New York Times since the inception of the position in 2003. It was birthed in the aftermath of the Jayson Blair plagiarism scandal as a palliative to readers who had lost faith in journalism’s ability to apply skepticism to its own. The first public editor, Daniel Okrent, proved unwilling to be the expected apologist.

From the beginning, though, the Times’ first public editor, Daniel Okrent, showed that the job could be much more substantive than that of email reader–in–chief. His January 2004 column “Is the New York Times a Liberal Newspaper?” remains a classic. It’s a flawed classic, in my view, because Okrent mistakenly viewed gay marriage opposition as a legitimate political position worthy of sympathy and positive coverage.

But a classic, nonetheless, because it sliced to the core of the sort of important, existential question that the Times ought to be publicly asking itself on a regular basis. He also challenged the paper to introspect more honestly about the incentives that shaped its disastrous coverage of Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction. And he took a thoughtful look at the Times’ reliance on anonymous sources—as urgent a topic today as it was then.

This quotes been taken from Slate’s Will Oremus, because it reflects so much of the irony of what’s needed, and missing, in journalism. He’s all for someone calling bullshit on journalism, as long as it reflects his truth. Continue reading →

While Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s stilted yet pedantic opinion, writing for a unanimous court (without Justice Gorsuch), bogged down in the dreaded textualism of 21 U.S.C. § 853, Honeycutt v. United States provided a break from two notions that the government has long taken for granted.  The first is that they love them some forfeiture. The second is screw co-conspirators and individualized liability.

Maybe there is hope?

The case involved two brothers, one of whom owned a hardware store in Tennessee where the other worked. They sold a perfectly lawful product, an iodine-based water-purification product known as Polar Pure, which could be used to manufacture meth, in quantities far exceeding any legitimate use. After learning this, they continued to sell it anyway, so the DEA dropped the hammer on them. Continue reading →

It was included in my first post about Bret Weinstein, the video of outraged students being outrageous. And while the students in the video, filled with self-righteousness, believed themselves to be on the side of truth and social justice, fighting the evil racist who didn’t think whites should be banned from their college campus, it was met with less than universal adoration.

By the chaos theory that only makes sense to the truest of believers in social justice, the students in the video became the victims of their own words and deeds. And those who criticized them were bullies. In stepped the Youtube gods to save them.

Whoa – key video Evergreen students confronting @BretWeinstein taken down @YouTube for violating “bullying” policies https://t.co/WlNlRxj0yQ pic.twitter.com/IfVjZFT8q7

— Legal Insurrection (@LegInsurrection) June 4, 2017

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There is a huge gap between intelligence, even brilliance, and stupidity. Ten students admitted to Harvard got caught in it, and their admission was revoked.

Harvard College rescinded admissions offers to at least ten prospective members of the Class of 2021 after the students traded sexually explicit memes and messages that sometimes targeted minority groups in a private Facebook group chat.

A handful of admitted students formed the messaging group—titled, at one point, “Harvard memes for horny bourgeois teens”—on Facebook in late December, according to two incoming freshmen.

In the group, students sent each other memes and other images mocking sexual assault, the Holocaust, and the deaths of children, according to screenshots of the chat obtained by The Crimson. Some of the messages joked that abusing children was sexually arousing, while others had punchlines directed at specific ethnic or racial groups. One called the hypothetical hanging of a Mexican child “piñata time.”

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