Pardon Me, Joe

For most of us, the only time we consider the propriety of a sentence is when it applies to some outlier conviction we read about in the funny pages. What never quite makes it to our radar is the tens of thousands of mundane convictions of defendants whose names mean nothing beyond their families, friends and, in some cases, victims. At the moment of sentence, a process that’s primarily voodoo as an honest judge might admit, passions are strong and consequences taken seriously.

But what about 20 years later? Continue reading →

Tuesday Talk*: After The Deputy Crosses The Line

The video was more than enough for most people to conclude that the inexplicably unnamed Riverside County Sheriff’s Deputy was not merely wrong, but substantively no different than any other home invader. Others saw the potential for gaps in the context that might somehow make the deputy look less offensive, and so manufactured background facts the might exculpate the deputy or at least raised questions.

The contextual facts, however, were of little help to the deputy. They only made him look worse.

According to the video, a minor answered the door after the deputy rang the bell. Captions in the video say the minor closed the door after seeing the deputy, only for the deputy to open the door and let himself in. Continue reading →

The Death of Supreme Court Confidentiality

To a criminal defense lawyer, confidentiality is a core value. It is, for lack of a less religious word, sacred. We know things. We learn things. We possess information that would be of extreme interest to others, whether at a cocktail party or in the courthouse hallway. We have great stories that would fascinate friends and acquaintances alike.

The information is often about people we dislike, maybe even despise, and revealing it will do great harm to people we would love to harm And yet, we will take our stories to our grave. At least I will. Continue reading →

ALJ Requires Starbucks To Re-Open Ithaca Stores

An old-school union-busting gambit is to threaten employees that if they vote for a union, management will shut the business down and they will be out of work. What good is a union going to do for you if you have no jobs, they would argue. And this was an unfair labor practice under the Wagner Act, which protects the rights of workers to unionize without retaliation.

But Starbucks didn’t threaten to close three stores in Ithaca, New York. It closed three stores. Shut the doors. Took out its barista machines. Locked the doors. It claimed it was because the stores were unprofitable and had high management turnover. But an NLRB Administrative Law Judge found that it was just to bust the union in violation of Section 7. Continue reading →

The Attack Was Clear, But Was It Self-Defense To Shoot?

There is little question that Scott Hayes, a pro-Israel protester and Iraq war veteran, was the victim of a forceful attack by an apparently pro-Palestinian passerby. The video leaves no doubt.

In the course, Hayes fired his lawfully carried gun and shot the attacker. Continue reading →

Seaton: Alaska Travelogue Six, Ketchikan

Ketchikan is a town on an island in the land grouping near the bottom of Alaska if one looks at a map. This is kind of funny to me because I was so disoriented on direction during this cruise I could’ve sworn the town was farther north. Locals will tell you there’s three ways to get to Ketchikan: boat, plane or birth. Those folks born in Ketchikan are really proud of it and wear their pride in such a manner that makes them hate Juneau a whole hell of a lot for some reason.

I’m not sure where the Juneau hatred comes from. Part of me thinks it’s something akin to a high school rivalry. Then I hear some of the vile shit people in Ketchikan say about people from Juneau and I want to exclaim “Have you no decency, sir or ma’am? Where’s the civility and camaraderie of being fellow denizens of America’s last frontier?” Continue reading →

Surviving The End of University Racial Preferences

This campus admissions season was the first under the new rule of SSFA v. Harvard, banning the use of racial preferences in admissions. Predictions of disaster permeated the campus debates. After all, without racial preferences, how would colleges fulfill their self-imposed goals of diversity, equity and inclusion? While some colleges desperately sought ways to circumvent, even ignore, the law, others complied. Did the sky fall?

The percentage of Black freshman at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for instance, declined from 15 percent last fall to 5 percent for this fall. At Amherst College the number fell from 11 percent to 3 percent. Other schools have reported less precipitous but still noticeable drops, such as from 18 percent to 14 percent at Harvard, 10.5 percent to 7.8 percent at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill — a taxpayer-supported public university in a state where 23 percent of the population is Black — and 15 percent to 9 percent at Brown University, a school that has spent considerable energy looking at its early ties to the slave trade. Yale and Princeton held relatively steady, but an overall trend is clear.

Continue reading →

The Value of Persons Who Reform

On trial, I never refer to my client as “the defendant.” He’s Joe Smith, or whatever his name happens to be, because I want the jury to see him as a human being. Whether this makes a real difference to the jury is unclear. It’s one of a thousand things that happen at trial, and there is no metric to figure out whether it helps. The best I can argue is it can’t hurt, and there’s no downside to doing so. So why not?

Pamela Paul argues that the trend to euphemism, to vilifying one word as stigmatizing and replacing it with more words, has a cost. She has a point. Or two. Continue reading →

Did Harris Win Or Did Trump Crash And Burn?

We’re no more informed about what Kamala Harris’ policies are or what she will do as president. She still makes those smug faces. She repeated her empty mantra of “turning the page” over and over, as if that illuminates anything. But damn, did she bait Trump and he fell for it, devolving into the Trumpiest Trump possible.

Haitians eat dogs because he saw it on TV? World leaders respect him because Viktor Orban said so? People don’t leave his rallies early because he’s not a tedious incoherent bore? Crime is through the roof and the FBI are lying about it? Tariffs are paid by Chi-na? Continue reading →