Having worn out so many adjectives, the latest and greatest word in the lexicon of social justice is “condescending.” The dictionary definition is both clear and vague:

con·de·scend·ing
kändəˈsendiNG/
adjective

having or showing a feeling of patronizing superiority.

What constitutes “patronizing superiority” is a matter of feeling, making it easy to level and hard to refute. If the definition is based on what someone feels about what someone else says, then who can question whether they feel that way? That’s the problem with feelz, they’re personal and each of us is allowed to feel whatever we want. Our feelz are ours. You can’t touch them.

When Steve Silberman leveled the charge of condescension at the New York Times, together with a couple other vagaries, it piqued my curiosity. What would make him feel this way?

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After the revelation that “Jackie” was a liar and the horrific tale of rape at a fraternity party at the University of Virginia published in Rolling Stone was false, a great many anti-rape advocates argued that it didn’t matter. Truth and fiction wasn’t relevant, as the issue mattered, and even a lie that promoted public awareness of the issue had value. Times have changed.

Two young men were arrested for the rape of a 14-year-old girl, and Tucker Carlson grabbed it and ran.

Tucker Carlson doesn’t run a courtroom. He runs an opinion program on Fox News, a place where the fundamentals of American justice sometimes fall prey to ideological froth. And he doesn’t appreciate getting asked about it.

“He did not seem to presume that my client was innocent,” said defense attorney David Moyse in an interview with the Erik Wemple Blog.

Not to be unduly picky, but Erik Wemple doesn’t run a courtroom either. Media reports and commentary are replete with writing that makes people stupider about law because it furthers an agenda or the writers just don’t have a clue what they’re writing about. Or both. Continue reading →

Cobb County, Georgia, Police Officer T.T. Carroll isn’t just a special cop. He’s an expert. It’s not just him saying so, but he’s got a piece of paper from the International Association of Police Chiefs that says so.

Pretty darn cool, right? And 160 hours is a lot of hours. Maybe not 10,000 hours, but still. What that course means, teaches, does, isn’t at all clear, but if you happen to be a cop on the road, and you say someone is on drugs, then you must know what you’re talking about, because you’re an expert. Continue reading →

War broke out at Duke Divinity School. Rod Dreher wrote of a Catholic professor, Paul Griffiths, who took umbrage at being informed that he was required to take “racial sensitivity training,” for which he claimed that he was being illiberally and anti-intellectually attacked and punished.

Griffiths wrote an excoriating reply, saying something to the effect that the program was intellectually vapid and beneath the level of discourse an elite theological school should be having.

Dreher, noting in his initial post that he had only one side of the story, called this a travesty if true. In a followup, he posts a missive from another professor at DDS, Valerie Cooper, who proudly wears the title SJW: Continue reading →

Brothers Henry McCollum and Leon Brown did 30 years for a crime they didn’t commit. They never stood a chance.

McCollum and Brown’s limitations have been central to their story since their arrest in 1983 for the brutal rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl.

Agents for the State Bureau of Investigation and officers from the Town of Red Springs elicited detailed confessions from the brothers after hours of interrogation. They were teenagers at the time, living in a small town in Robeson County.

In 2014, a judge freed McCollum and Brown after DNA evidence led investigators to the real killer, a man police had originally considered a suspect in 1984.

It wasn’t just that the crime was horrific, or that they were black. They lacked the capacity to put up a fight. Continue reading →

Philosophy professor Rebecca Tuvel was all social justice-y, through and through, but she still wasn’t pious enough to survive being devoured by her own.

She talks about “biological sex” and uses phrases like “male genitalia.”

What was she thinking? After the townsfolk, armed with their torches and pitchforks, marched on feminist philosophy journal Hypatia, which collapsed like a cheap pantsuit, a bold voice come forward in Tuvel’s defense. Suzanna Danuta Walters, editor of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, took to the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Explain this:

We are in the midst of the Trumpian apocalypse. Actual bigoted provocateurs like Charles Murray and Ann Coulter throw flames in the academy. Hate crimes against trans people and people of color and Muslims are on the rise; women’s reproductive rights are on the line, as are just about every other aspect of bodily autonomy and gender justice. So what’s making scholars hyperventilate in outrage? A feminist academic whose body of work is clearly on the side of progressive social justice.

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When former Harris County, Texas, district attorney Devon Anderson jailed a rape victim as a material witness, screams of outrage were heard. It wasn’t that the witness, the alleged victim, wasn’t needed to prosecute the defendant, but the callousness of treating the victim as a criminal. It reflected a failure to grasp her relative role in the system, that Anderson’s desire to convict overrode any sensitivity to the needs of the person who suffered the harm of the crime.

But this outrageous handling of a victim gets taken a step too far when the victim assumes that it’s now her system, to do as she wills it, to accomplish her goals. Crimes are prosecuted in the name of the people, not the victim. The victim is not the client, the complainant, the boss. She’s a witness to a crime. She should be treated respectfully in the process, but not because it’s all about her, but because prosecutors shouldn’t be monsters. And most aren’t.

Deborah Cotton was the victim of a crime, shot in the stomach at a New Orleans parade. She has since died of her injuries, but left behind an essay explaining why she refused to cooperate. Continue reading →

I wouldn’t swear that it’s an affliction that only affects criminal defense lawyers, but it seems that we suffer from it far more than most.* When we see something that we think is wrong, we say so. We say so in clear language. We call it what it is, and make no bones about it. To other lawyers, this may come off as overwrought, as they prefer more moderated words, less clarity. That’s not our way.

There was a twit yesterday by an academic, who retwitted a twit by a former Obama administration adviser that was total malarkey, suggesting that border patrol agents had been great guys, honoring the law, until now. It was a basic anti-Trump twit which promoted the lie that CBE wasn’t just as bad before. I responded by calling it out. This wasn’t meant as a commentary on the life and times of this particular academic, but as a commentary on the one twit as an example of a recurring theme among profs.

This is an example of the myopia of academics, as if it never happened before b/c you were too busy looking elsewhere, and only now notice.

This is where I’m going dark on certain details, and it’s not offered to besmirch anyone for their feelz, but to make a different point. One twitterer for whom I have a great deal of respect responded that my twit was “uncharitable,” questioning whether I was aware of the academic’s full body of work. Do I have to be? Am I precluded from criticizing one twit because the person hadn’t been a miscreant in every public assertion? Continue reading →

Typos happen. There’s no shame in making a mistake when typing in letters or numbers, but there’s no pride in it either. You screwed up. When the mistake is made by a cop, they screwed up too. Not that it matters to the New York Court of Appeals*, which decided unanimously that a miss is as good as a hit.

Nothing in the record before us suggests there was anything unreasonable about the police officer’s actions or that the officer had any illegal motives. He ran the license plate and accessed the DMV database in the performance of his official duties. Therefore, the check was lawful, and the information from the database provided him with a valid reason to stop defendant’s car.

Holy Heien, Batman. The cop had no reason to run the plates. He observed no violation. But he decided for no particular reason to punch the plate in anyway, and boom, he got a hit, a suspended registration for failure to pay parking tickets because the database said so. Lucky?

And while we are mindful of the concerns about license plate checks, Continue reading →

Within the guild, disagreeing with judicial decisions is a staple of our existence. We dispute them in motions, briefs, memoranda and, occasionally, on a blawg. Rarely, however, is a judge attacked for being disingenuous in the motivations leading to the decision. Sure, there is pro-police bias. Sure, there is anti-minority bias, explicit or implicit. But rarely the rank politicization of the judiciary.

Until now. Mark DeGirolami has written an op-ed for the Weekly Standard claiming that the blight of “fake news” has now reached the bench, coining a new usage: Fake Law.

Something ugly is happening to the First Amendment. It is being contorted to enable judges to protest Donald Trump’s presidency. The perennial impulse of judges to manipulate the law to achieve morally and politically desirable ends has only been exacerbated by the felt necessity to “resist” Trump. The result: Legal tests concerning the freedoms of speech and religion that in some cases were already highly dubious are being further deformed and twisted.

Welcome to the rise of fake law.

DeGirolami extends the fake news phenomenon from the spin fed us by self-righteous journalists to make sure that our news sources lead inexorably to the “right” conclusions to the motivations of judges. Continue reading →