TRIGGER WARNING:  There’s something in here to offend everyone.

Q: What do you call 100 lawyers at the bottom of the ocean?

A: A good start.

Does that bother you? Most lawyers will say no, at least to the extent that they aren’t bothered by the fact that they’ve heard the joke a thousand times already. But there will be some who are offended, who believe that this diminishes our worth.  Bullshit. It’s a joke.

What if we replaced “lawyers” in the joke with, say, feminists or, God forbid, lesbians? Does it change from funny to unacceptable, outrageous?  The answer likely turns on your sensibilities.  If you feel deeply about the target of the joke, the joke becomes unfunny.

You can explain your reaction by wrapping it up in rhetoric about historical prejudice, insensitivity, anecdotes of horribles that happened to a suspect class, or just string together empty, meaningless words that convey some vague impression of butthurt, but ultimately it comes down to one undeniable point: you can’t take a joke. Continue reading →

They may be loud and boisterous on the streets, but in the hallways of the courthouse, they speak mostly in hushed tones.  Even tough street kids know better than to get too loud, attract too much attention, in the one place where their bluster won’t pay.  Courthouse hallways tend to be unnaturally calm.

When 22-year-old Anthony Jones was tossed out of a Philly courtroom for wearing a hat, he broke that calm.

The incident started about 11 a.m. last Friday, when a court crier in Courtroom 706 ordered Jones to remove his hat and then booted him out when he became upset, Sen said.

In the hallway, Jones yelled and cursed, and Sen hurried to defuse things, Hoy and Sen said. (Sen didn’t represent Jones, but her employer, the Defender Association of Philadelphia, did.)

Paula Sen was a public defender, who happened to be there as Jones got loud and angry.  Richard Hoy was an old-time lawyer, sitting on a hallway bench, watching the drama unfold.

Of Jones, Hoy said: “There was obviously something [mentally] wrong with him. But [the] PD [public defender] had him 75 percent calmed down.”

Continue reading →

PrawfsBlawg is ten years old.  It was already going strong when SJ was born, led by a law professor named Dan Markel who was murdered last year.  Even though I disagreed with Dan about many things, I respected him, and wrote about Dan’s ideas many times here.  But Prawfs lived on, and now it’s ten.

Most of you don’t read Prawfs.  It’s an academic blog, bogged down by the language, concerns and interests that are unique to the legal academy.  It’s not always thrilling, particularly for the non-lawyers, and it was often disturbing when the prawfs navel gazed in the weird vacuum of ivy towered self-indulgence.  It was especially frustrating when prawfs wrote about the value of their scholarship, or how the education of law students would die a brutal, painful death if law school wasn’t all about their law review articles and brilliant theory.

In the early days of SJ, I sought to bridge the gap between academic blogs and the practical blawgosphere, a phrase coined by Mark Bennett in a post that has apparently been lost to the ages.  At another law prof blog, Concurring Opinions, Dave Hoffman took a stroll on this bridge, but he never quite reached the other side.  Now, years later, we rarely see any cross-over. What once held the promise of synergy is now gone.

At the time, I tried desperately (likely too desperately) to chide the prawfs into engaging with practicing lawyers on real legal issues in real-life terms, rather than the sanitized theories that held the occasional kernel of truth expressed in words that were nearly incomprehensible to the practitioner’s ear.  Conflict erupted.  Lawprofs found it unbearable to have their babies called ugly.  Lawyers were incapable of using the mitigated language of the academy, murdering a thousand words to say nothing, and being far more concerned that no feelings were hurt than any ideas were clearly expressed. Continue reading →

The killing of Timothy Russell and Melissa Williams in a hail of 137 bullets at the end of a car chase gave rise to a generic question, why do car chases so often end with death, even after the chase is over?  But now that Cleveland Police Officer Michael Brelo is on trial for involuntary manslaughter, a new question is raised: why won’t the other cops present testify against him?

A seventh police officer invoked her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination Thursday in the voluntary manslaughter trial of fellow Cleveland officer Michael Brelo.

Officer Erin O’Donnell, who participated in the Nov. 29, 2012 police chase and shootings that resulted in charges against Brelo, entered the courtroom with her attorney, Mark Stanton. Prosecutors asked her if she had told investigators the “whole story” of what happened on the night of Nov. 29, 2012, at which point O’Donnell invoked her Fifth Amendment right.

The answer puts the question back in the court of the prosecutors, as it raises the question of why they didn’t indict the other officers as well, or why they won’t confer immunity on the witnesses, thus taking away their right to invoke the Fifth. Continue reading →

Jails have become de facto repositories for people suffering mental illness, both because there is nowhere else to warehouse them and, well, they tend to break laws because they lack the ability to control their conduct.

Sure, their conduct may be harmful, and those who are on the receiving end may well appreciate that there are means to deal with the harm, but most of us would concede they need help rather than punishment if public safety and rationality are the goals. Except in Fairfax County, Virginia, where the Sheriff, Stacey Kincaid, was far more concerned with the rat on her team who revealed how they killed 37-year-old Natasha McKenna.

Natasha McKenna initially cooperated with deputies, placed her hands through her cell door food slot and agreed to be handcuffed, the reports show. But McKenna, whose deteriorating mental state had caused Fairfax to seek help for her, then began trying to fight her way out of the cuffs, repeatedly screaming, “You promised you wouldn’t hurt me!” the reports show.

Then, six members of the Sheriff’s Emergency Response Team, dressed in white full-body biohazard suits and gas masks, arrived and placed a wildly struggling 130-pound McKenna into full restraints, their reports state. But when McKenna wouldn’t bend her knees so she could be placed into a wheeled restraint chair, a lieutenant delivered four 50,000-volt shocks from the Taser, enabling the other deputies to strap her into the chair, the reports show.

Continue reading →

When the New Yorker published the travesty of Kalief Browder, an innocent youth lost to a system that couldn’t have cared less about him, it made an impact on those whose job it’s supposed to be to prevent this from happening.  And after wringing their hands, they put together a scheme to make a rusty, broken machine run again.

The justice system plan announced this week by Mr. de Blasio and Judge Lippmann calls for judges to prioritize the cases of the 1,500 or so people who have been held for more than a year without being convicted. The goal is to resolve half of those cases within six months. Cases that cannot be disposed of by plea bargain will be assigned a fixed trial date.

Well, baby steps at least.  That there are 1500 people in custody for more than a year who are innocent is a problem, though not as much as it would be if they had been detained for three years, like Browder.  And they are innocent, because under our jurisprudence, everyone is innocent until they have been convicted.

And that number doesn’t touch those who are out on bail or their own recognizance, but laboring under the threat of conviction and imprisonment.  Think about applying for a new job with a monthly court appearance hanging over your head, not to mention trial should the day ever finally come, and, worse still, incarceration afterward.  Unsurprisingly, many employers are less than sympathetic to such circumstances. But I digress. Continue reading →

Following his agreement to be interviewed about his very public announcement that he was no longer Michael Slager’s lawyer, David Aylor was taken to task for his “artful” attempt to claim he wasn’t condemning his client while throwing him under the bus.  A few lawyers didn’t grasp why this wasn’t cool, but most found the conduct outrageous.

Bad enough? Sure, but as subsequent reports demonstrate, it was only the beginning.

SLED agents arrived at the scene at 10:29 a.m. April 4, about 51 minutes after Patrolman 1st Class Michael Slager fatally shot Scott in the back as Scott ran away. They later asked Slager to answer some questions.

“When our investigators spoke with … Slager at the scene, he said he was represented by an attorney,” SLED spokesman Thom Berry said Tuesday. “We stopped questioning him and contacted his attorney.”

Continue reading →

The argument back in the 1960s and early 1970s was that if a young man was old enough to die for his country in the rice paddies of Vietnam, he was old enough to sip a beer before they buried him.  And indeed, the argument had sufficient appeal that most states reduced the drinking age, as well as the voting age and age of majority, to 18.

When I arrived at college, a brash 17-year-old who had long since gotten a ridiculously bad fake ID in Times Square showing I was of the requisite age, there was a bar in the student union.  A bunch of us from my freshman dorm headed straight over after dinner, and bonded.  We were not, at first, particularly responsible drinkers, but then, we were mere steps away from home.  And so night after night, we stumbled and survived to drink another day.

In due time, the novelty wore off and we became more responsible drinkers, though I suspect a great many happy times for all occurred in the interim.  At the very least, we all had a great time and nobody died of alcohol poisoning or was accused of rape.

At Reason, Robby Soave argues that the 1986 change in law, where states were coerced to raise the drinking age to 21 or lose federal highway funds, has given rise to a plethora of terribles today. Continue reading →

Edit: What follows is, I regret to say, wrong. As reflected in the update below, my commentary was premised on a mistake of law, for which I apologize.  Unlike police officers, my mistake is not worthy of forgiveness, and I do not want any reader to be made stupider by my error.

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To the extent those who seek to trivialize North Charleston Police Officer Michael Slager’s killing of Walter Scott can find some comfort, it was that Slager was justified in stopping Scott for a broken tail light.  First out of the box on this claim was former criminal defense lawyer turned shameless TV slut, Geraldo, who argued that this “righteous stop” somehow diminishes the crime of murder:

Putting aside the pandering stupidity of Gerry’s point, it suffers from one huge flaw. He’s wrong.  At Slate, Cristian Farias does what Geraldo failed to do. He did what a good lawyer should do, and looked at the law. Continue reading →

I’ve known Mike Cernovich for years, long before he chose to take a stand in Gamergate and became a primary object of hatred for Social Justice Warriors.  His law blog, Crime & Federalism, has been on my blogroll since 2007, and he brought many strong and illuminating points to the fore.  That said, he’s also made clear that he was not ashamed of being a man, or being the man he was.

Not being a gamer, I never became embroiled in Gamergate.  It wasn’t that I shrugged it off out of some reluctance to join in battle, but that I didn’t know or understand enough about the issues to bring anything useful to the discussion.  I had nothing illuminating to offer, and there were others who were far more knowledgeable and involved.  I chose not to be that dilettante.

Cerno, on the other hand, leaped into the middle of it, mostly under his twitter handle of @PlayDangerously, and at his other blog, Danger & Play.  As he did before, he owned his opinions, for better or worse, and became a target for hatred and revulsion by SJWs.  As the target, he gets cool twits from random people like this: Continue reading →