There are 169 bikers in jail in Waco, now that Jeff Batley made $1,000,000 bail.

As Mark Bennett pointed out, the million dollar bail set for these bikers, due to nine dead and 18 injured in the Twin Peaks melee, is off the charts. Continue reading →

If Earl Warren and Albert Camus fought George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, who would win?  That’s the question posed by Bill Otis in his rejoinder to George Will’s conservative case against the death penalty.  It’s rather surprising to learn that Otis is so on top of internet memes.

But first, the lead-in comes from no less an interested party as Paul Cassell at Volokh Conspiracy, who writes:

George Will recently wrote an op-ed in the Post, advancing the “conservative case” against the death penalty.  My friend Bill Otis has written this strong response.

This is noteworthy only for its indication of Cassell’s tacit endorsement of Otis’ obsession with making the trains run on time.  Will begins with the assertion that capital punishment is withering away in America, and offers a “threefold” justification for the conservative case against the death penalty, as reflected in dark red Nebraska’s effort to abolish it. Continue reading →

Nobody likes the fact that corporate crime ends up with the payment of a big fine and a deferred prosecution agreement.  It’s so unsatisfying, there being no perp walk, no face to hate and ridicule, no physical embodiment of corporate evil to name and shame.

That the problem might have more to do with the poor fit of criminal laws to corporate conduct doesn’t soothe the townspeople holding torches and pitchforks. They want blood, dammit, and don’t they deserve it?

In the government’s latest round of collecting donations from bank customers against their will, $5.6 billion this time which will of necessity be passed through to the townfolk as “new and improved” banking products and hidden fees to better serve you, the government proves that it’s not afraid of going after big banks. Continue reading →

The New York State Bar Association, unlike bar associations in some other states, is a club lawyers can join or not, depending on the need for another impressive certificate to hang on the ego wall to prove to potential clients that you’re worthy of getting paid. It’s a voluntary organization, consisting of some folks who want to improve the law, and some folks who adore being on committees.

One such committee is Ethics, where a bunch of lawyers with dubious qualifications offer advisory opinions on what we’re ethically allowed to do.  Despite the fact that so many around the blawgosphere mistaken believe that these ethics opinions reflect the “rules” for the practice of law, they are merely “advisory,” meaning that they carry no greater force of law than if I set up the SHG Ethics Committee requiring lawyers to wear shoes instead of those ridiculous black sneakers that some lawyers think they can get away with.

That said, the NYSBA’s advisory opinions are given some persuasive authority by the Departmental Disciplinary Committees, which have actual authority over lawyers, all of which makes the inane sophistry ridiculed by Appellate Squawk* worthy of note.

Scene: Courtroom.

A.D.A. Tightskirt:  We’re offering a plea to 20 years on condition that the defendant waive his right to appeal anything whatsoever in any case past, present or future including ineffective assistance of counsel. Continue reading →

The former Chief of Police of Mt. Airy, Georgia, together with his wife, will get 25 weekends in jail.  Upon hearing that, some might cheer. After all, it’s not often a cop gets jail, and 25 weekends is nothing to sneeze at, right?  But maybe not this time.

Richard Scott Burton, the former police chief of the tiny northeast Georgia town of Mt. Airy, was staring down 31 felonies — two counts of aggravated child molestation, one of child molestation and 28 of first-degree cruelty to children.

His wife, Cheryl, was looking at the same, minus the molestation. The possibility of decades in prison loomed over the couple, accused of abusing and neglecting their four adopted children for years.

Within the “pantheon” of crimes, molesting children has long been considered the one that is most disgusting, most intolerable.  And in this instance, unbearable, as it smacks of “buying” kids, via adoption, to be abused.  If ever there was a crime worthy of utter revulsion, Burton committed it.  Continue reading →

The other day, Ken White at Popehat created a laundry list of tropes about free speech.  While some may nitpick it around the edges, it’s remarkably good as it debunks the mindless cesspool of feelings about speech that has overtaken actual thought.  Charles C.W. Cooke connects this to a survey at YouGov.

YouGov’s latest research shows that many Americans support making it a criminal offense to make public statements which would stir up hatred against particular groups of people. Americans narrowly support (41%) rather than oppose (37%) criminalizing hate speech, but this conceals a partisan divide. Most Democrats (51%) support criminalizing hate speech, with only 26% opposed. Independents (41% to 35%) and Republicans (47% to 37%) tend to oppose making it illegal to stir up hatred against particular groups.

Support for banning hate speech is also particularly strong among racial minorities. 62% of black Americans, and 50% of Hispanics support criminalizing comments which would stir up hatred. White Americans oppose a ban on hate speech 43% to 36%.

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A 20-year old black man, Terrance Kellom, was shot and killed by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer, Mitchell Quinn.  You probably didn’t hear about this.  After all, there is a lot of news, and you can’t hear it all. But what if Kellom was shot in the back, much like Walter Scott?  Why do you know all about Walter Scott’s killing, but nothing about Terrence Kellom?

Terrance Kellom, a young black man who was killed during an arrest in Detroit last month, was shot in the back, the attorney for Kellom’s family claimed Friday — a claim that appears to contradict a federal officer’s earlier allegation that the shooting was justified because Kellom had charged at him with a hammer.

Mitchell Quinn, a special agent with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, shot Kellom the afternoon of April 27 during a raid at Kellom’s home in Detroit, according to Quinn’s lawyer and others. Several officers on a multi-agency fugitive apprehension task force were serving an arrest warrant for Kellom, 20, who had previously been charged in several crimes and was wanted as a suspect in an armed robbery of a pizza delivery person.

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It doesn’t matter if the underlying offense was serious or trivial. Don’t show up in court when you’re required to do so? Bench warrant.  Don’t pay a fine on time? Bench warrant. A warrant here, a warrant there, and next thing you know, you’ve got 1.2 million bench warrants on your hands. That’s a lot of warrant.

“Warrants never go away. There’s no expiration date,” Bratton said in an interview with The Associated Press. “It would be great to get rid of a lot of that backlog. It’s not to our benefit from a policing standpoint to have all those warrants floating around out there.”

While some warrants are for people who committed crimes, say robbery, others are for offenses like drinking in public.  Among the problems is that when a warrant falls, a person is taken into custody, held and, after about 24 hours, taken before a judge. Often, the offense itself would be disposed of without jail, maybe some community service, maybe even dismissed, but the warrant means they spend a night (at least) in jail, plus are exposed to the additional. and more serious, charge of bail jumping.

In light of the “crime” originally charged, it all can seem pretty crazy: Continue reading →

Jeff Blackburn, chief counsel and one of the founders of the Innocence Project of Texas, has had enough. He’s resigned from the organization,* and explains why**:

When we founded this project 10 years ago we were part of a movement. That movement was a loose coalition of groups devoted to freeing the innocent and changing the criminal justice system from state to state.

We did our part. We got people exonerated. We got good legislation passed. We made history with the Tim Cole case. We stayed small, democratic, and focused on reforming the Texas system. We created some great relationships with law enforcement officials and forensic scientists. We built a  resilient, authentic, and independent outfit.

While we were doing that, the New York-based Innocence Project went from being a small nonprofit to an organization with a multi-million dollar budget. As its size grew, so did its appetite for money and its need to control the reform movement. What was once a movement has now become a business.

Continue reading →

Jessica Cooke was on her way from Norfolk to beautiful Ogdensburg, New York, at the tippy-top of New York State where the predominant industry is prisons, when she came to a border checkpoint.  A CBP agent decided to have her pull over for a secondary screening, meaning a dog sniff, claiming she was “nervous.”  Contrary to popular belief, there is no Nervous-O-Meter 2700 to register and provide confirmatory proof when someone is so incredibly nervous as to evoke criminality, so we’re left with only the agent’s word.

Cooke got a little tired of waiting around for the brave pooch, and confronted the CBP agents, recording it on her cellphone.

At Reason, Jacob Sullum runs through the plethora of constitutional rights that should apply given that this is a person who is traveling from one place in America to another, as she is fully entitled to do.
Continue reading →