Suicide by cop is a thing.  The police have come to recognize it and, in a bizarre twist of logic, felt the freedom of being able to shrug off the pull of the trigger because he wanted to die anyway.  But then, sometimes a guy doesn’t really want to die, doesn’t really mean to kill himself.

Many  people who threaten suicide do so as a cry for help, not to achieve the end result of their own death.  But that’s a nuance, like many others, that can elude a police officer.  So when the trigger gets pulled, it no longer matters whether it was a person bent on committing suicide or just crying for help. He’s dead. Accomplishment unlocked.

Who knows what Justin Way had in mind as he lay in bed with a knife.  He was drunk. He got the crap beaten out of him when he lost his job. He was feeling bad. Real bad.

On May 11, Justin Way was drinking and threatening to hurt himself. 

Way’s live-in girlfriend, Kaitlyn Christine Lyons, said she’d caught Justin drinking a bottle of vodka, which she took away from him to pour out. She said he was drunk, lying in their bed with a large knife, saying he would hurt himself with it. She called a non-emergency number in an attempt to get her boyfriend to a local St. Augustine, Florida, hospital for help—and told them she did not feel threatened.

Continue reading →

Dr. Kipnis wrote once in a “slightly mocking tone” about neo-feminism run amok.  Having long since established her own feminist bona fides, she thought herself above the fray, a voice not so easily disparaged by cries of hater and misogynist.  When Northwestern prof Laura Kipnis wrote again at the Chronicle Review, there was nothing funny about it.

When I first heard that students at my university had staged a protest over an essay I’d written in The Chronicle Review about sexual politics on campus — and that they were carrying mattresses and pillows — I was a bit nonplussed. For one thing, mattresses had become a symbol of student-on-student sexual-assault allegations, and I’d been writing about the new consensual-relations codes governing professor-student dating. Also, I’d been writing as a feminist. And I hadn’t sexually assaulted anyone. The whole thing seemed symbolically incoherent.

Coherence, as Kipnis learned, has nothing to do with it.

Things seemed less amusing when I received an email from my university’s Title IX coordinator informing me that two students had filed Title IX complaints against me on the basis of the essay and “subsequent public statements” (which turned out to be a tweet), and that the university would retain an outside investigator to handle the complaints. Continue reading →

Scott Sanders was just doing his job, as the Santa Ana assistant public defender representing accused mass murderer Scott Dekraai before Judge Thomas Goethals. But what he found not only compelled the judge to throw the entire friggin’ DA’s office off the case, but may have opened up a can of worms no one could have imagined.

Via Dahlia Lithwick at Slate:

After literally years of alleged misconduct involving jailhouses informants, as well as prosecutors’ repeated failures to turn over exculpatory material, Judge Goethals determined in March that the office can simply no longer work on the case of mass murderer Scott Dekraai, who pleaded guilty last year to killing his ex-wife and seven others at a beauty salon in 2011.

This is the sort of epiphany that brings tears of joy to the eyes of conspiracy theorists everywhere, not to mention those who decry the buying and selling of testimony by jailhouse snitches. Continue reading →

Unlike David Post, I’m a real American and couldn’t care less about soccer. Sure, I joined my high school’s inaugural junior varsity soccer team, but quit after a few weeks. Kicking was fun, but who knew there would be all that running? My people have no tradition of running.

But Post’s point on jurisdiction of the FIFA indictment should send shivers up your spine.

As the Times story notes:

United States law gives the Justice Department wide authority to bring cases against foreign nationals living abroad, an authority that prosecutors have used repeatedly in international terrorism cases. Those cases can hinge on the slightest connection to the United States, like the use of an American bank or Internet service provider.

Continue reading →

Reading the Second Circuit’s affirmance of District Court Judge Shira Scheindlin’s suppression ruling in United States v. Watson, my initial thought was that it was a shame that Judge Barrington Parker wasn’t on the panel.  The affirmance was written by District Court Judge Jed Rakoff, sitting by designation, suggesting an alignment of stars that rarely happens.

But Judge Parker has that patrician look to him, plus of course he’s a federal judge. having survived the mean streets of New Haven while a student at Yale. Would he be able to appreciate the fallibility of cross-racial identification?  Well, Judges Scheindlin and Rakoff did.

Tim Cushing at Techdirt provides the tl;dr version of the facts:

A couple of years ago, the NYPD was searching for a robbery suspect with the following description: Continue reading →

The routine seems so simple, as does the proper way of dealing with it, provided you don’t want to find out later you slit your own throat by being too smart by half.  Ask a half-interested person what to do when confronted by the police, and chances are pretty good that their answer will be, “say nothing.”  Or, the less sanitized version of the advice, shut the fuck up.

That, of course, is right, but wrong. Refuse to give pedigree and you’ll sit in a cell forever. Failure to respond to a question can sometimes be used against you, and end up being the very proof that nails you to the wall. Miranda warning are only required for custodial interrogations, but what’s custody is a moving target these days. The rule ought to be clear, easy enough for a non-lawyer to follow and apply without needing a lawyer to explain how not to incriminate oneself. No such luck.

But at least there’s the second prong of invocation, which is even better than the simplistic advice so many offer. Ask for a lawyer. Not whether you ought to have a lawyer, or that you think a lawyer might help, but just that you want your lawyer. Even if you don’t have a lawyer, it doesn’t matter. Just utter the words.  Not only does that require the police to cease interrogating you, but it has the secondary benefit of being unwaivable except in the presence of a lawyer.

If you invoke your right to remain silent, assuming you do it properly and at the right time, and in light of inculpatory questions, you can still blow it by waiving that right by speaking.  That’s right, you wise asses who feel compelled to mutter some snarky comment after invoking, you blew it.  But if the right you invoke is counsel, you can’t undo it without a lawyer. Continue reading →

One of the more vapid trends within the legal profession is mindfulness, a word that conjures up images of, well, nothing much.  Oh, the horrible stress of being a lawyer, and so a cottage industry of happy-talking folks has arisen to take you away from your personal misery.  How wonderful that must be.

People are wasting valuable thinking time on meditation and mindfulness and should stop trying to clear their heads, an Oxford University academic has claimed.

Theodore Zeldin said too many people were avoiding using their brains and instead escaping into a state of blank mental oblivion.

Zeldin makes an assumption that may not be valid, that people were using their brains before “escaping into a state of blank mental oblivion.”

“It’s important not to think just about yourself,” Dr Zeldin told the Hay Festival. “You think that trying to avoid things by doing exercises which free the mind from thought and will empty out minds.

“I think mindfulness and meditation are bad for people, I absolutely think that. People should be thinking.”

Continue reading →

The New York Times characterizes the settlement agreement reached between the Department of Justice, Office of Civil Rights, and the Cleveland police as “tough standards on force.”  By most accounts, it’s something Cleveland needed.

The agreement is part of a settlement with the Justice Department over what federal officials have called a pattern of unconstitutional policing and abuse in Cleveland. The department found in a review released late last year that police officers here used stun guns inappropriately, punched and kicked unarmed people, and shot at people who posed no threat. The episodes often went unreported and uninvestigated, investigators found.

And in the rare instance that the cop was prosecuted for his conduct, he walked. But I digress.

As Vanita Gupta, head of OCR said, “today’s agreement really should serve as a model for those seeking to address similar issues in their communities,” which makes no sense at all. It should be a model for all police departments, not just those where cops are out of control. If the rules are right, they’re right for all cops. Continue reading →

Nebraska Senior District Court Judge Richard Kopf is a crafty old man.  He knows how to play an audience, and does so with finesse when he writes of a death* he can “cheerfully” support.

Last Sunday, Michael Ryan died on death row in a Nebraska prison. He was 66. He had been there 30 years. According to the Omaha paper, he was suffering from terminal brain cancer.

For me, Ryan’s death is a pleasant surprise. I know that sounds bad, but it is manifestly the truth.

It’s not an arbitrary bomb tossed into the blawgosphere to goad those of us who are steadfastly against the death penalty.  Judge Kopf backs it up. Continue reading →

David Washington’s Hyundai first hit a Jeep, then a street sign.  It came to a stop in an intersection, when Police Officer Shaun Jurgens arrived.  He found Washington sitting in his car, strapped in by his seat belt, staring blankly straight ahead.

The call, that a car hit another car, isn’t of the sort that should strike fear into the hearts of cops. Accidents happen. Cars hit cars. Sure, the driver of a car could be a mass murderer, or a pastor. It’s not the sort of problem raising an immediate fear of violence and potential harm.

So the first thing Jurgens did was tase the driver, and then an extra healthy dose of pepper spray, followed by those carefully taught, deeply professional words, “get out of the car or I’m gonna fucking smoke you.”  Cops often forget they say such rehearsed lines when they later testify about what happened. Judges prefer not to hear such harsh language, as it disrupts the dignity of the courtroom.

But Jurgens wasn’t done with the 34-year-old Washington. Continue reading →