What kind of truck does an old judge drive, and why should you care?  Because that’s the sensibility of the geezer who’s going to make some decisions that dictate what will happen with your life or fortune.  In America, most judges are, well, old.

Conventional wisdom has it that wielding the gavel takes years upon years of lawyerly practice. Judging by that standard, the U.S. federal bench must be very effective, indeed: About 12 percent of the nation’s 1,200 federal judges are 80 or older, according to a 2010 survey by ProPublica. Eleven were over the age of 90, almost three times as many 20 years before. Other things that happened over those 20 years: the Internet. Plus smartphones, Twitter, Facebook, hacking, legal weed, etc., etc., etc. Plus dementia and senility, for some. On issues of the day, like privacy or hacking, can older judges possibly keep up?

On the one hand, they have the wisdom and experience gained from a lifetime, assuming you don’t look too closely at how their lives paralleled yours. On the other hand, they don’t have an adequate appreciation of the value of Facebook friends, or the insult of being unfriended by your former BFF. Continue reading →

It was one of those videos that didn’t seem to make much sense, the shooting and killing of Dillon Taylor by Salt Lake City Police Officer Bron Cruz.  Shaun King at the Daily Kos gave a moment by moment run down of what happened, but it clarified nothing.

At 0:17, Officer Bron Cruz gets out of his vehicle. You will notice people confused by his presence.

At 0:22, Officer Cruz walks past two men who were friends with Dillon Taylor.

At 0:24, Officer Cruz walks behind Taylor, who has on a white T-shirt and is listening to music. Continue reading →

A company in Israel, Odortec, makes a substance that is non-toxic and, the developers maintain, even drinkable.  It’s only got one drawback:

IT SMELLS like raw sewage mixed with putrefying cow’s carcass…

And, apparently, it doesn’t wash out of clothing easily.  On the bright side, the substance, called Skunk, is remarkably effective as a riot control measure.

Skunk, as it is appositely called, has been used by Israeli soldiers since 2008 to disperse Palestinian protesters. Now it has attracted the interest of law-enforcement agencies in America which, after riots in Ferguson and Baltimore, crave better ways to scatter rioters without killing or injuring them.

In Israel, where it’s been in use since 2008, the main complaint against it is that it’s been used against Palestinians.

Skunk has been used mainly to deal with the weekly protests against Israel’s “separation fence” that cuts through the West Bank; and increasingly over the past year at demonstrations in East Jerusalem. Sprayed from water-cannon, it has become the characteristic odour of Israeli-Palestinian confrontation.

B’Tselem, an Israeli human-rights group, reports that it found no health hazard, but still criticises it as a humiliating method used so far only against Palestinians.

Continue reading →

Make no mistake, Cesar Adrian Vargas is fully qualified to practice law in the State of New York. He graduated from CUNY Law School and passed the bar exam on his first try. That was in 2011.  Yet, he didn’t get to raise his right hand and take the oath on Monroe Street in Brooklyn.

After considering it for nearly three years, the New York State Supreme Court’s Appellate Division in Brooklyn approved Vargas’ application to the New York State bar. Five judges agreed that Vargas’ immigration status “does not reflect adversely upon his general fitness to practice law.”

Vargas’ “problem” wasn’t any question of his competence, his character or fitness to be a lawyer.  His problem, as reflected in the opinion of the Appellate Division, Second Department, was that he was born in Puebla, Mexico.

His mother brought him and his siblings to the United States when Mr. Vargas was 5½ years old, without lawful documentation to enter or remain in the United States. The family settled in the New York City area, where Mr. Vargas continues to reside today.

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Jane Doe, a pseudonym, moved to expunge her conviction before Judge John Gleeson in the Eastern District of New York.  It wasn’t that evidence came to light that she was innocent of the crime. It did not, and she was not.

It wasn’t that her conviction for healthcare fraud wasn’t relevant to her current circumstances.  She was a home health aide, it was directly relevant, at least on its surface. But as Judge Gleeson wrote in his decision:

I sentenced her to five years of probation supervision, not to a lifetime of unemployment.

Jane Doe’s background was fairly common, a mother of four whose husband left her, working as hard as she could. Still, she was unable to earn enough to pay her rent, no less feed her children. Continue reading →

There is a guy in Florence, Kentucky, who knows how to protect children. His name, shared by a curmudgeon pal of mine, is Mark Herrmann, and he took a video of a young child in his car seat in a running pickup truck with no parent present.

Because someone could snatch the kid and force him into a life of human sex trafficking. Or worse!  The Florence police think Herrmann is a hero. Continue reading →

On grandma’s internet, a company called eBay made a boatload of moolah by skimming a piece off the top of thousands of counterfeit Louis Vuitton purses.  Vuitton wasn’t amused, and pressured eBay to end the sale of counterfeit bags, even though ironically the auctions didn’t prevent a single legitimate sale.  After all, buyers of ridiculously expensive plastic purses were not looking to eBay for knock-offs. But it did dilute their brand.

But where was the message from the feds that this must stop, that this new-fangled internet could hurry the downfall of civilization by providing an outlet for cheap ladies’ accessories?  It’s not that the silence was deafening, but that everyone understood that the internet was going through growing pains, and part of those pains involved dealing with its use by those who might use the new forum for illicit purposes.

Yet, when time came for SDNY Judge Katherine Forrest to impose sentence on convicted Silk Road impresario Ross Ulbricht, it was all about the message.

Ahead of Ulbricht’s sentencing Friday, prosecutors in his case have sent the judge a 16-page letter asking that Ulbricht be given “a lengthy sentence, one substantially above the mandatory minimum.” And one of the reasons for that harsh sentence, the Department of Justice attorneys argue, is to “send a clear message” to anyone who would follow in Ulbricht’s footsteps and create the next Dark Web drug market.

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Today is Day Three of Fault Lines, and for the benefit of you slackers who haven’t yet bothered to read — and show me the love, do I ask for too much? — here’s what you missed thus far:

WELCOME TO FAULT LINES: MONITORING AMERICA’S CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM

PLEADING DIRTY: DO PLEA BARGAINS CORRUPT THE SYSTEM?

POLICE BRUTALITY: FROM MICHAEL BROWN TO MICHAEL BRELO

TSA SECURITY THEATER: WHEN THE SHOW BOMBS

“PERFECT STORM” FOR POLICE REFORM: WHY CLEVELAND MIGHT BE DIFFERENT

SORRY, SCOTUS DIDN’T SAY WHAT YOU WANTED IT TO SAY IN ELONIS

Aside from my posts, Fault Lines has posts from Cristian Farias, slumming from his writing at New York Magazine, Tamara Tabo, slumming from her teaching at Thurgood Marshall Law School in Houston and Greg Prickett, a 20-year police vet who practices law in Fort Worth.

Each brings their own perspective and style to Fault Lines. It’s worth your time to take a look, guaranteed or a full refund.

For a brief and shining moment, sanity returned to journalism as Sabrina Rubin Erdely was revealed to have sold a lie about a rape that never happened.  The University of Virginia was not amused. Rolling Stone magazine retracted the story and apologized for sucking.  Erdely was found walking down dark alleyways, bumping into walls, over and over, mumbling “so what, so what?”

It almost seemed as if the media remembered the one word that required a trigger warning more than any other: facts.  Then the moment devolved into another word, excuses, and spittle shot from advocates’ mouth, striking anyone within earshot.

At the New Republic, freelance writer Jessica Luther seeks to rehabilitate advocacy journalism with an argument against facts, against relying on evidence when there are feelings to be told.  She begins by taking issue with Mike Taibbi’s offer of a very cautious approach:

Then Taibbi, without being asked, offered some advice on how to report on sexual assault. “One way around that, you know, would be for people to cover cases that have already been adjudicated… so that the reporters don’t have to go out on a limb to say that this or that happened. They can rely on something that happened, that’s already been proven in court,” he said.

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The United States Supreme Court issues its long-awaited decision in Elonis v. United States. How cool is that?

Via Ken White at Popehat:

So what did the Supreme Court do?

Screw everything up.

Wut

The Supreme Court could have ruled on just Section 875(c) — it could have just said “this statute requires proof of subjective intent.” It could have gone further and ruled on the First Amendment, saying “the First Amendment requires subjective intent to prove a true threat” or that the First Amendment doesn’t require that.

Instead, seven justices ruled that Section 875(c) requires the government to prove something more than what it did, but not exactly what.

Continue reading →