Some people just have a way with words, and Andrew Fleischman expressed the problem with notable aplomb:

In my experience, an officer will claim to have experienced a lot of things when two hundred grand is on the line. If he had to claim to know the exact taste of uncooked pig rectum to seize the assets, you’d better believe his training would cover it.

This tasteful explanation comes in response to the commonplace justification for a seizure of $201,000 from a safe found in James Leonard’s car during a search conducted with the putative consent of his passenger.

Police pulled James Leonard over at 3 in the morning for speeding and following too closely. For some reason, this led to a discussion of how much money he was carrying with him. He said $800. His passenger said $1000. Police asked the passenger for consent to search the car, and she allegedly gave it, though the encounter doesn’t seem to have been filmed.

Police found a safe in the trunk of the car. Once again, this was unfilmed, but it is possible that officers were briefly blinded as their pupils converted to novelty-sized dollar signs.

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Fault Lines?  Yes, Fault Lines, the best criminal law commentary on the web, reflecting all points of view rather than your favorite echo chamber, dedicated to making readers understand how it all works from the people who actually do what others merely write about.

Fault Lines can now be found at FaultLines.us. It’s been re-established as a New York non-profit for educational purposes under FL Foundation Inc. If you appreciate hearing from real defense lawyers, judges, prosecutors, scholars and investigators, show your love with a donation to keep Fault Lines alive.

And if you see any problems with the new site, please let me know so we can deal with them. As managing editor of Fault Lines, I thank everyone for reading Fault Lines and your support.

Not everyone who passes through a TSA checkpoint upon entering (or, when they totally screw up, even as passengers are leaving the airport) the secure area of an airport has an unpleasant experience. And who doesn’t want them to catch a terrorist, even though they’ve never actually done so. But for those who have enjoyed the euphemistically-challenged deeply personal hard work of TSA agents to play their role in security theater protect you, they aren’t nearly as much fun as some might believe.

One aspect (of many) that has been particularly troubling is the way that the TSA has basically enabled sexual assault of travelers. If you felt that wasn’t too bad, have no fear, the TSA is apparently increasing the sexual assaulty nature of these searches:

The new physical touching—for those selected to have a pat-down—will be be what the federal agency officially describes as a more “comprehensive” physical screening, according to a Transportation Security Administration spokesman.

Denver International Airport, for example, notified employees and flight crews on Thursday that the “more rigorous” searches “will be more thorough and may involve an officer making more intimate contact than before.”

Got that? I love the way they dance around the fact that this is randomly allowed sexual assault on people who just want to travel somewhere. But it’s described as “physical touching” that is more “comprehensive” and “may involve an officer making more intimate contact.”

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The early days of the internet made a promise to America and the world, that it would eventually provide access to the accumulated wisdom of mankind. Our art. Our music. Our ideas. Our knowledge. All of it. There for the taking, should you choose to partake. They were heady times.

As the mothership of social justice, UC Berkeley found itself in an awkward position when the Department of Justice dropped the hammer on its free online content.  Berkeley’s response was a threat: let it go or else.

The University of California, Berkeley has announced that it may eliminate free online content rather than comply with a U.S. Justice Department order that it make the content accessible to those with disabilities.

DoJ refused to blink, as it had law, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and the demands of social justice on its side. It would not acquiesce. Berkeley made good on its promise. Continue reading →

The Trump administration finally revealed its second try at the immigration ban that conclusively proved in its first iteration that there wasn’t a person in the administration with a clue how to do this whole governance thing. It was nothing short of a manifesto of incompetence, notwithstanding the president’s inability to grasp why it wasn’t well received.

So they apparently found someone in Washington with sufficient understanding of law to revise the Executive Order.

This order is much more narrowly tailored, providing exemptions not just to those with green cards and other valid visas, but also people with significant contacts to United States, students, children, urgent medical cases, and other special circumstances—and Iraq is necessarily treated as a special case—as well as spelling out reasons for the remaining restrictions.

Having corrected some of the most shockingly idiotic errors in the original order, such as the inclusion of legal permanent residents and visa holders, has Trump finally cleaned up his mess while keeping his promise to keep those nasty Muslim refugees from terrorizing our nation? Not exactly. Continue reading →

The Supreme Court split 5-3 on whether the “no impeachment” rule for jurors remains constitutional when a juror is overtly racist during deliberations. The facts of the case were quite flagrant, with a juror injecting strong racial animus* into the jury’s deliberations.

• Pena-Rodriguez “did it because he’s Mexican and Mexican men take whatever they want.”
• Mexican men are physically controlling of women because they have a sense of entitlement and think they can “do whatever they want” with women.
• Pena-Rodriguez “was guilty because, in [Juror H.C.’s] experience as an ex-law enforcement officer, Mexican men had a bravado that caused them to believe they could do whatever they wanted with women.”
• Where Juror H.C. used to patrol, “nine times out of ten Mexican men were guilty of being aggressive toward women and young girls.”
• Pena-Rodriguez’s alibi witness was not credible because, among other things, he was “an illegal.”

How this juror managed to avoid detection during voir dire is both a mystery and unsurprising. It’s remarkably easy for a juror to appear totally open-minded while harboring prejudice. Say the right words and that’s that. Not until deliberations did his biased view of Mexicans become obvious. Continue reading →

Having spent the past week driving from San Francisco to New York, meeting and listening to those deplorables wearing John Deere baseball caps and working in unsavory jobs that are necessary to keeping a nation functioning, I learned some things.

They’re just like you. They care about their family, their country, the downtrodden and the marginalized. They care about hard work, honesty and integrity. They want everyone to do well, to be well, to thrive.

They are smart and stupid, concerned and confused. They are just like you. Continue reading →

Demands for investigations? Impeachment? Counter-demands for an investigation? For what? Jonathan Turley raises a study about moral outrage, perhaps the foremost weapon of our age as it justifies the mindless devolution into emotion without all that annoying baggage of knowledge and facts.

As our politicians went on the air to vent their disgust over Russians trying to influence our election, there was an interesting study published this month on moral outrage in an academic journal, Motivation and Emotion.  The researchers found that moral outrage is rooted, not in altruism, but self-interest — often to affirm one’s own status and avoiding responsibilities or guilt.

“Individuals,” the study notes, “respond to reminders of their group’s moral culpability with feelings of outrage at third-party harm-doing.”  The most astonishing aspect of this study is that it was not done entirely on Capitol Hill.

Well, that sucks, since all the deeply passionate social justice seekers sleep better at night knowing their true purpose is the betterment of humanity, and not just affirming their own status as social justice warriors. But that doesn’t mean the moral outrage, embraced for less than altruistic reasons, isn’t justified, right? Continue reading →

He’s best known for his book, The Bell Curve, which might have mustered some mainstream scholarly interest but for its chapters 13 and 14.

It’s central point is that intelligence is a better predictor of many factors including financial income, job performance, unwed pregnancy, and crime than one’s parents’ socio-economic status or education level.

Cool enough, but then he did what, even in 1994, was an unforgivable sin. These two chapters question the role of race in intelligence.

While the authors were reported throughout the popular press as arguing that these IQ differences are genetic, they write in the introduction to Chapter 13 that “The debate about whether and how much genes and environment have to do with ethnic differences remains unresolved,” and “It seems highly likely to us that both genes and the environment have something to do with racial differences.”

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See you when I get back.

If I get back.