It’s painful to pass up an opportunity to slam the Drug Enforcement Agency for overreach, for impropriety, for ignoring the constitutional rights of Americans.  But then, how can it be blamed when mindless newspaper editorials cry sad tears? How can the DEA be blamed for doing what the law allows?  Damn, this hurts.

Christopher Moraff writes about the DEA’s latest dive into people’s private lives.

The DEA has claimed for years that under federal law it has the authority to access [Oregon’s] Prescription Drug Monitor Program database using only an “administrative subpoena.” These are unilaterally issued orders that do not require a showing of probable cause before a court, like what’s required to obtain a warrant.

Oregon has fought the DEA’s efforts, and won in the district court.  Continue reading →

A “situation” happens, cops are called and they arrive at the scene.  At that moment, they have to figure out why they’re there, what is happening, who is at fault.  Sure, some instances are pretty obvious, such as one body lying dead on the ground, but the majority of calls are for less significant offenses, more amorphous situations.

This puts a huge amount of discretion and burden on the cop’s plate. He can do two things. The first is engage in the heavy burden of thinking. The second is the far easier task of assumption, going with whatever strikes the cop as the more likely scenario. The former involves investigation and, god forbid, effort. The latter only requires prejudice and the idiot’s love of “common sense,” the knee-jerk adoption of belief without reason.

Gatney Yaw learned this at a gas station in South Houston.

He didn’t want to talk and drive, he said, but just as he was about to finish the call, someone came over to his window and started asking him about money, as KTRK first reported this week. He tried to shoo the person away—but before the woman would leave, another woman came around to his passenger window and sneakily grabbed Yaw’s keys out of the ignition while he wasn’t looking, he said. Yaw got out of the car, chasing the woman, who started essentially playing monkey-in-the-middle with Yaw’s keys with two other people. One of them put the keys in her purse, and Yaw grabbed her, trying to pull her purse away. Continue reading →

No matter how many times agenda-driven lawprofs cried that the First Amendment didn’t protect speech that made people sad, and mean curmudgeon lawyers replied bullshit, there was little question that eventually, the vague laws enacted to protect feelings from harsh words would reach the courts and their constitutionality would be determined.  That happened in North Carolina, where the state’s cyberbullying law was considered in State v. Bishop.

As was the case in New York, the North Carolina Supreme Court held that the law failed.

As one would expect, the facts are nasty and reflect the sort of hateful conduct that makes one wonder what is wrong with people.

During the 2011-2012 school year, defendant and Dillion Price were students at Southern Alamance High School. Starting in the fall of 2011, some of Price’s classmates began to post negative pictures and comments about Price on Facebook, including on Price’s own Facebook page. In September 2011, a male classmate posted on Facebook a screenshot of a sexually themed text message Price had inadvertently sent him. Below that post, several individuals commented, including Price and defendant. Price accused the posting student of altering or falsifying the screenshot and threatened to fight him over the matter; defendant commented that the text was “excessively homoerotic” and accused others of being “defensive” and “pathetic for taking the [I]nternet so seriously.”

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Daniel McGowan made three mistakes. The first landed him in federal prison. The second landed him in SHU, the kinder, gentler name of Special Housing Unit because solitary confinement sounds too unpleasant. The third was thinking that just because he was a federal prisoner, he still had constitutional rights. The Second Circuit put that notion to an end.

Via Cristian Farias at the Huff Post:

Daniel McGowan, an environmental activist whose prosecution for “eco terrorism” was the subject of an award-winning film, was finishing his seven-year term at a Brooklyn halfway house when he wrote a HuffPost blog post that contained details about a secretive prison where he had spent years in isolation.

There was nothing particularly revealing about what he wrote: Much of it had been made public in an ongoing civil rights lawsuit he and other low-risk prisoners filed in federal court in Washington challenging their placement there, for no other reason than their political views or who they are.

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Yes, it’s been a while since last I lorded my exemplary good taste in legal sartorial splendor over you losers who wear suits without vents and shoes with square toes. But the time is ripe for the return of my sound advice, because I know how much you care about casual wear to fill your work/life balance wardrobe.

Yes, this is about the beloved tee. T-shirts matter, and nothing matters more than to use a tee for virtue signalling, and there is no greater signal of virtue than to don the gang colors of law enforcement.  But, but, but, you ask, where can I find such a glorious shirt?  The hero t-shirt club, of course.

THE T-SHIRTS OF REAL AMERICAN HEROES

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The idea of an official commission to investigate prosecutorial misconduct would hardly seem like a threat to life as we know it.  It will no doubt be staffed by the usual suspects, the blue ribbon types who speak in moderated tones and have a proven facility to make excuses and rationalizations for impropriety whenever possible. Like the Civilian Complaint Review Board types, who quickly become co-opted into officialdom.

That prosecutors who engage in impropriety have to already endure stern lectures in the rare instance when they’re caught is bad enough. And if they do it again, well, then they have to endure another stern lecture. That will show ’em.

And so, the idea of a state prosecutorial misconduct commission to address impropriety received a less-than-loving embrace from . . . prosecutors.

District attorneys made an 11th-hour appeal to state legislators Wednesday to oppose the creation of a commission to investigate complaints about overzealous or unethical prosecutors and recommend sanctions, including possible removal from office.

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It’s different.  There is no explanation, no rational justification for why it’s any different than a murder, or any other battery, or, frankly, any malum in se offense, but that doesn’t stop the self-serving hypocrites from trying.  The vapidity of the claim was obvious in Stanford professor Estelle Freedman’s op-ed on the Brock Turner case and the need to change the legal system’s view of rape and sexual assault:

But Judge Persky’s fate, whatever it is, may be less important than the reaction ignited by his sentencing. The energies unleashed by this case present a potential to reframe the issue of rape. What we need is a sustained critique of unequal privilege before the law and a true understanding of the deep and lasting damage that sexual assault exacts on its victims and their families.

Feel it? Feel that “deep and lasting damage”?  No mention of the deep and lasting damage of a murder. Not of a beating. Just sexual assault, which is different because, something, something, it just is. Continue reading →

Much interest has been raised by the intersection of Donald Trump’s “complaint” about United States District Judge Gonzalo Curiel’s “bias,” and the efficacy of seeking the judge’s recusal not because there is any legitimacy to the bias argument itself, but that Trump’s making a stink about Judge Curiel’s heritage and associations creates a new level of antagonism.  This, of course, gives rise to no legal basis to seek recusal.

There are two points to be made: first, that behaving like a jerk (whether you think Trump was racist or had a legit beef) cannot give rise to demanding recusal based upon the jerk behavior. Second, that there may well be actual antagonism as a result of such behavior, such that the judge is, in fact, biased against a litigant, doesn’t change the fact that it would be legally untenable to allow this to serve as a basis for recusal.  After all, if that were allowed, anybody could create a rift with a judge they didn’t want by calling the judge a name, thus accomplishing by being offensive that which they couldn’t accomplish otherwise.

That the judge might now really hate the litigant because of his actions has nothing to do with it.  And that’s how legal doctrine works, as it should.

So why then is it entirely different when the government seeks to separate a defendant from his lawyer?  Say hi to the Curcio hearing, which was held after United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Preet Bharara, prevailed in compelling two defense lawyers to appear before a grand jury to reveal their client’s confidences. Continue reading →

What are the chances Oklahoma, of all places, would be on the cutting edge of high tech? Yet, when it comes to glomming money, they’re on it. Like flies on shit.

The Oklahoma Department of Public Safety has purchased Electronic Recovery and Access to Data machines for installation in Oklahoma Highway Patrol and Oklahoma City police cruisers, according to an Oklahoma Watch report published Tuesday. The device tells officers the balance of prepaid debit cards and gift cards, and allows them to seize the money if they determine it’s suspicious. ERAD readers also can provide limited information about pretty much any card with a magnetic strip, including bank debit cards and credit cards.

This explanation is slightly flawed, which is understandable given its source. You see, ERAD enables cops to seize money.  Whether they “determine it’s suspicious” or not is spin, and even as spin goes, it’s wrong. Continue reading →

There are rapes. And then there’s, well, not rape.  Just as one doesn’t prove the other, it cuts both ways. And the finding against a male student at Lynn University was the sort of thing that gives rise to the core concerns that colleges have no business getting into the Title IX rape business.

The impetus for the accusation wasn’t that the female student thought she was raped, but that she was pushed into making the accusation. According to the suit filed by the male student, she went to the Boca Raton police.

The suit says that Boca Raton Police found that Doe and his accuser had consensual sex at a dorm party with alcohol last fall, and called her belated rape claim “unfounded.”

Though she filed the rape claim against Doe with Lynn’s Campus Security office the day after their liaison, in a video-recorded interview with female detectives at the police station, the accuser never claimed he had raped her, according to Doe. The police report says she told them her friends and parents wanted her to accuse Doe.

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