Bail was set for Arthur Bogarez in the amount of $2 million, a high bail for sure but not an unreasonable one given the circumstances.  He was charged in a no-fault insurance scam, and found in Puerto Rico, where he was extradited to Brooklyn.  There was good reason to believe he was a flight risk if released.

But the court didn’t just set high bail. It also required an examination of surety, a hearing to ascertain whether the monies used for bail came from legitimate sources or his crimes, and whether the surety, the person(s) posting bail were doing so because they had a real affiliation to Bogarez or were straw sureties, people pretending to put up the bail as a front.

His wife, Karine Gevorkyan, sought out a bail bond for her husband’s release, and was turned down by two bail bondsmen. To be clear, bail bondsmen do not turn down $2 million bonds lightly. These are hugely profitable, and only turn unprofitable for two reasons: the defendant skips town or they aren’t going to be able to get the bond through, going through a lot of work and ending up with bupkis. Not to be dismissive of bondsmen, but they really hate ending up empty handed. Bail bonds are definitely intended as a profit-making business. Continue reading →

I’ve left little doubt as to how I view the murder of 12-year-old Tamir Rice.  Others disagree, with a heavy dose of “cop perspective” that an outsider can’t appreciate.  To find oneself on the business end of a threat to one’s life tends to weigh heavily on right and wrong, and the fine line between kill or be killed doesn’t make for an easy choice.

But whether Cleveland police Officer Timothy Loehmann was a killer or a cop invoking the First Rule of Policing is a matter of law, for better or worse.  My analysis of the law of Graham v. Connor is that it’s for the worst. The law permits a cop who pre-emptively perceives, through his magic cop voodoo, a deadly threat to kill first.  It’s very protective of police lives. It’s a death warrant for everyone else.  It’s bad law.

Yet, the backlash to the twin reports rationalizing a needless killing went orthogonal, abandoning law altogether:

But the reports show exactly what’s wrong with the dialogue surrounding police shootings. Instead of asking whether Loehmann’s actions were ethical, moral, or best practices, the conversation immediately shifts to whether they were legal. But legality doesn’t tell us anything about whether the shooting was preventable or acceptable — and that’s really what we should care about.

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A fraternity and sorority decided to throw a party, already a problematic act of oppression from gender-restricted organizations who would likely serve alcoholic beverages that could lead to rampant rape and sexual assault. But they didn’t stop there.

The local chapter of Sigma Phi Epsilon and the sorority Alpha Phi co-hosted the “Kanye Western”-themed party Tuesday night, with costumes playing off Kanye West and his wife, Kim Kardashian, the Daily Bruin reported. 

Surely, this would offend, and it did.

Leaders of student groups, such as the Afrikan Student Union, demanded a response from the university, noting the party was held during “Black Bruin Welcome Week.”

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At HuffPo, Nick Wing raises questions arising from police department policies on the disclosure of body cam footage.  Remember when some cops resisted the idea of wearing body cams? What about their privacy? What about the cost?

What about the privacy of people they dealt with during a shift who fell far short of newsworthy, who weren’t having their best day, who didn’t deserve to be subject to public exposure, ridicule perhaps, for having the misfortune of crossing paths with a cop?

What about the public’s right to know?

As the public searches for answers about what happened on that afternoon in March, a new set of concerns has emerged about police officers’ use of body cameras — and how, or if, the devices will promote accountability and transparency if the policies that govern the footage are overly restrictive. Continue reading →

My pal, Marco Randazza, is pretty keen on Columbus Day.  He’s of Italian heritage, and, well, it’s not as if Italians get a lot of holidays for one of their tribe. Columbus Day is pretty much it.

This is COLUMBUS DAY.

I’d like to invite anyone whose name ends with a vowel (Persians excluded) to raise their hands, extend their middle fingers, and flip off the Native Americans, the hippies, and everyone else in the International Association of Crybabies who has a piss and a moan about Christopher Columbus.

This is not “indigenous people’s day,” it is not “la dia de la raza” and it isn’t frigging “wear a beret, listen to Joni Mitchell, and wear patchoulli day.”

It’s unclear how Joni Mitchell is to blame, but musical choices are hard to explain. That said, John Oliver asked, “how is this still a thing?”  There is a laundry list of complaints about Columbus, ranging from his “discovering” a place where people already lived, to his personal traits: Continue reading →

Andy begins with a quote he says he heard from a judge back when he was a baby prosecutor in the Southern District of New York.

I know you lied in your testimony, but I understand why you believed you had to do it.”

If there was an audible sound in the courtroom after these words left the lips of the sentencing judge, it was my jaw caroming off the floor. I was a young prosecutor and it was the mid Eighties, before federal sentencing reforms substituted the public’s sensibilities for the judges’ in the matter of serious crime.

He goes on to claim that the judge then let a defendant, convicted of selling coke, compounded by perjury, walk.  No cite. No case name. No nothing. I call bullshit. Before the sentencing guidelines were held mandatory in Mistretta, no one walked out the door for drug dealing. Continue reading →

It’s been 11 months since 12-year-old Tamir Rice was shot and killed by Police Officer Timothy Loehmann.  After the inexplicably long “investigation” period, Cuyahoga County prosecutor finally released two reports on the killing. They did so yesterday, a Saturday, the day when news gets released to die in silence.

The conclusion was foregone: The murder was reasonable.

The county prosecutor hired two “outsiders,” meaning they weren’t connected to the Cleveland Police Department. But as outsiders go, they were as inside as it gets. There was the report of retired FBI agent Kimberly A. Crawford.  And there was the report of S. Lamar Sims, a Colorado prosecutor. Both arrived at the only conclusion they could, given their mandate.

“Officer Loehmann’s belief that Rice posed a threat of serious physical harm or death was objectively reasonable as was his response to that perceived threat.”

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At Fault Lines, Jessica Gabel Cino emphasized the magical influence DNA has had on the criminal justice system.

With the exception of DNA, no single forensic technique has the potential ability to establish a definitive link of an evidence sample to its source.   Potential, however, can be very different from reality, and even DNA evidence has its limitations and weaknesses. The latest reality check: the statistics utilized in the interpretation of DNA mixture evidence could be so wrong that they require retesting of thousands of cases.

That reality check, brought to you courtesy of the Texas Forensic Science Commission, which was aware of the problem for a while but finally got around to making it public, is that DNA mixture analysis not only failed to meet the one in gazillion probability to which prosecution analysts typically testified, but was in fact one in fifty.  Oops. Sorry. We bad.

But that comes from the maturation process of science, a reality that’s always denied until it can’t be denied any longer. Today’s gold standard is tomorrow’s total malarkey. Continue reading →

Having been accused once or twice of being a quart or two low on empathy due to my refusal to allow personal feelings to trump reason, I approached an op-ed in the Chicago Maroon with my usual trepidation. It was written by Lily Grossbard, “a first-year in the College majoring in gender and sexuality studies.”  The headline was, “The myth of the coddled college student.”

Geez, I wonder what she’s gonna write.

Trigger warnings are frequently lampooned as “coddling” students, or as shielding them from exposure to the difficulties of “the real world.” I would argue, however, that not only are trigger warnings of crucial importance for protecting the emotional and physical health of the student body at large, but they also actually allow for, and even promote the discussion of triggering topics.

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You’re one of the lucky few. Fresh out of law school and employed. Not just employed, but employed and getting a decent salary. You’re happy. Your parents are thrilled, hoping you will someday move out of the basement.  The world is your oyster. Then two weeks in, not having been given that corner office you felt certain you deserved, your magical world comes tumbling down around you.

And you must ask yourself the hard question: Are you exploited?

At Above the Law, Shannon Achimalbe* explains what that means.

But for some of you, things will not turn out the way you expected. You’re not given the raises and bonuses you were promised. You go to meaningless court hearings. Your boss angered a judge so he sent you to court to endure the judge’s wrath. Your assignments seem like glorified document review looking for obscure keywords in 15-sentence paragraphs. In sum, you feel overworked and underappreciated. Continue reading →