Perhaps the nicest thing any judge could say about public defenders is that they’re too zealous in the defense of their clients.  It should happen everywhere, except in the courtroom of Hind County, Mississippi Judge Jeffrey Weill. He’s having none of it, according to Jon Rapping.

Judge Jeffrey Weill seems to believe public defenders should be more deferential to him and less passionate in the representation of their clients.  Apparently disapproving of the zealous advocacy of one public defender, Judge Weill removed her from all of her cases and, according to Public Defender Michelle Harris, to identify any specific behavior that violated the lawyer’s professional obligations to her clients, or the court.

The story is frustrating, in that Weill fails to offer anything the PD did, “any specific behavior,” that justifies, or even explains, what got him bent out of shape.  As described in the Clarion-Ledger, the biggest issue is that the PD, Allison Kelly, wins too much. Continue reading →

Just before the great recession of 2007, not a day went by without some calling for “work/life balance.”  That was the complaint that expectations stemming from being paid too much were interfering with Millennials’ God-given right to enjoy themselves and have a seat at the bar for happy hour.  Then jobs disappeared and the only seat they could afford was on mommy’s couch in the basement.

Is it back?  At What About Clients?, Dan Hull gets teary eyed for Justin’s needs.

Read or skim in Entrepreneur this month the article “This Is How Millennials Want to Be Managed“. It’s a “happy workplace” piece and you can get its gist and message in a flash. We’ve all seen them before.

Finish it? Good. Thanks for reading. At the risk of sounding old, mean and cranky, let me make two quick comments.

So the Slackoisie got jobs, and they’re back to demanding that the world revolve around them?  Some dope started, built and succeeded in creating a business, only to be told by some happiness consultant its survival depends on adapting the business to meet the feelings of its newest hire? Continue reading →

When Northwestern professor Laura Kipnis wrote her post for the Chronicle of Higher Education, she must have anticipated that some folks would not take kindly to her thoughts.  After all, it was about gender, and had a “slightly mocking tone.”  When it comes to gender, some people just can’t see the humor.

But the reaction on campus could not have been more pitch-perfect.  Not for those who raised their metaphorical torches and pitchforks, but for Kipnis.

Last Monday, about thirty Northwestern anti-rape activists marched to their school’s administrative center carrying mattresses and pillows. The event was a deliberate echo of the performance art project of Columbia student Emma Sulkowicz, who is lugging a mattress everywhere she goes on campus for a year to draw attention to the university’s failure to expel her alleged rapist. At Northwestern, the target of the protest was not a person accused of assault, but the provocative feminist film professor Laura Kipnis. Her offense was penning a February essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education, titled “Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe,” which argues against her school’s ban on sex between professors and students, and more broadly against the growing obsession with trauma and vulnerability among feminists on campus.

That the “anti-rape activists” would choose Sulkowicz as their martyr heaps irony upon irony, as she persists in her performance art despite having her accused “rapist” cleared twice of wrongdoing, and having provided the bulk of the evidence of his innocence herself, albeit conditioned on the usual excuses that make all men guilty because of their innocence. Continue reading →

A basic tenet of due process requires that a law give a defendant notice of what conduct is criminal.  Without such notice, there would be no way to know that it shouldn’t be committed. So it comes as no shock that the New Jersey Supreme Court held that section 3 of the Bias Intimidation law, N.J.S.A. 2C:16-1, was rejected as unconstitutional in State v. Pomianek.

While the other prongs of the crime remain untouched, a facial challenge prevailed against the third prong:

A person is guilty of the crime of bias intimidation if…

(3) under circumstances that caused any victim of the underlying offense to be intimidated and the victim, considering the manner in which the offense was committed, reasonably believed either that (a) the offense was committed with a purpose to intimidate the victim or any person or entity in whose welfare the victim is interested because of race, color, religion, gender, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, or ethnicity, or (b) the victim or the victim’s property was selected to be the target of the offense because of the victim’s race, color, religion, gender, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, or ethnicity.

In other words, a crime occurs because the victim felt intimidated, and the victim’s feelings weren’t unreasonable.  As the New York Times reported: Continue reading →

The Drug Enforcement Administration has been so incredibly effective in eradicating demon narcotics that it no longer has any cartel kingpins that require its time and, instead, its agents can hang around bus stops.  Bet you didn’t realize that these guys deserved a statue.

Federal drug agents may be racially profiling and unjustly seizing cash from travelers in the nation’s airports, bus stations and train stations. A new report released by the Office of the Inspector General for the U.S. Department of Justice examined the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA)’s controversial use of “cold consent.”

What makes this unusual, to the extent it is unusual, isn’t that it happens, but that Mike Horowitz, DoJ Inspector General, calls out the DEA for engaging in these “interdiction” approaches.

When it comes to exceptions to the Fourth Amendment, none is better than consent, which vitiates all protections that might otherwise be available to an individual to protect themselves from a search.  Continue reading →

There is little doubt that the insertion of a law enforcement “tactical” expert in the trial process will have an overwhelming impact on the jury’s “understanding” of what they see on video.  The word “understanding” is in scare quotes because it is, in this usage, scary: there is nothing remotely resembling understanding coming out of the clash of experts informing the jury what they’re seeing.

Rarely is it as flagrant as in the Dallas case of Jason Harrison, a mentally ill man killed by the two officer who came to help.

Harrison’s mother had called 911 the morning of June 14 to request that officers come to her Red Bird home to help bring Harrison, who his family said was bipolar and schizophrenic and off his medication, to Parkland Memorial Hospital.

She had called police frequently for help with her son, who often stopped taking his medicine, Sean Harrison said.

Officers Andrew Hutchins and John Rogers, who both have training dealing with the mentally ill, shot Harrison five times after he disobeyed their commands to drop the screwdriver. They were protecting themselves after Harrison lunged at them and moved the screwdriver in a “stabbing motion,” said their attorney, Chris Livingston.

Continue reading →

When word spread like wildfire that United States District Court Judge Mark Fuller of the Middle District of Alabama was a wife-beater, and then pleaded guilty (Edit: this is wrong, see update below)  to it, the only question left was whether he would skulk out of the courthouse on his accord or have to be dragged out kicking and screaming.

As an Article III judge, Fuller had life tenure in the position, subject to good behavior.  Wife beating certainly isn’t good behavior, but it would require impeachment by the Senate to remove him from office. And bad though it seemed, it wasn’t something he did on the bench, though his judicial career had its share of controversy.

The Alabama judge was criticized for sitting on cases brought by the government even as his aviation company was getting hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxpayer-funded business. Appointed by a Republican, he was denounced for putting a former Democratic governor in manacles after a corruption conviction.

He was the talk of the courthouse for having an extramarital affair with his courtroom assistant, and for his messy public divorce.

Continue reading →

Almost every lawyer and lawprof, upon learning of Robert Durst’s confession caught on video and microphone and aired in the finale of HBO’s “The Jinx,” thought the same thing:  He’s toast. Staring into a bathroom mirror, he muttered:

“What the hell did I do? Killed them all, of course.”

Then came the questions. But isn’t it hearsay? What about Miranda? How can it be authenticated? What about chain of custody?  Was it an illegal wiretap?  Lawyers shook their heads. Continue reading →

When Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts gave his speech to the Fourth Circuit Judicial Conference in 2011, academics everywhere cried sad scholar tears.

Specifically Roberts claimed that legal scholarship is not relevant to the work of lawyers and judges, saying he . . . believes there is a great “disconnect between the academy and the profession.”

Roberts continued, “Pick up a copy of any law review that you see, and the first article is likely to be, you know, the influence of Immanuel Kant on evidentiary approaches in 18th Century Bulgaria, or something, which I’m sure was of great interest to the academic that wrote it, but isn’t of much help to the bar.”

Mean, hurtful words indeed.  So mean, so hurtful, that they still sting today, which is why Richard Re at PrawfsBlawg felt compelled to prove them to be lies. Continue reading →

As challenged in a New York Times editorial, the confirmation of Loretta Lynch for attorney general, which apparently isn’t otherwise problematic to senators of either party, is being held captive to more political concerns.

What does the abortion issue have to do with the prevention of human trafficking? Nothing.

What do either of those things have to do with Loretta Lynch, whom President Obama nominated more than four months ago to succeed Eric Holder Jr. as attorney general of the United States? Even less.

Yet Ms. Lynch’s confirmation as the nation’s top law enforcement officer — which seemed like a sure thing only a few weeks ago — is being held hostage to last-minute political mischief.

Continue reading →