The early days of internet shopping brought three huge benefits. First, it gave everyone access to goods that weren’t available at their local mom and pop shop.  Second, it allowed people to find the guy who sold the same item for half the price.  And third, internet sellers didn’t charge tax.  That meant a significant savings, on top of the other benefits.

Of course, government hated the fact that it didn’t get its cut, and so imposed a duty on internet sellers to collect taxes on their sales.  It presented a significant problem for sellers, as every local jurisdiction charged different percentages of sales tax, but that was the sellers’ problem.

A more problematic reason to collect sales tax was that it was killing local business.  Why pay an additional 8.25% for a good?  Brick and mortar stores not only had to pay rent, but had to collect tax. It wasn’t fair that they were put at such a disadvantage to internet sellers. Continue reading →

The math tells the story:

By December of 2014, “over 16,000 people had outstanding arrest warrants that had been issued by the court.” The report makes clear that this refers to individual people, rather than cases (i.e. people with many cases are not being counted multiple times). However, if we do look at the number of cases, the portrait is even starker. In 2013, 32,975 offenses had associated warrants, so that there were 1.5 offenses for every city resident.

This comes from the Department of Justice report on Ferguson, Missouri.  While the actual numbers on the street work out somewhat different, since the number of offenses and related warrants aren’t divided equally amongst the population of 21,000, the point remains:

That means that the city of Ferguson quite literally has more crimes than people.

But that just scratches the surface of the problem, because the underlying offenses aren’t all murders and rapes, robbery or drug dealing. They’re mostly petty infractions, where fines and surcharges are imposed that people can’t possibly afford to pay.  While you can’t get blood from a stone, you can get a whole bunch of warrants for failure to pay. Continue reading →

After the Supreme Court refused to bite on his appeal to emotion, and the suffering client was again left to ponder why her lawyers failed to mention that chances were good her cause would fail miserably, former judge turned lawprof turned radical victim advocate Paul Cassell tried an end run around the Constitution.

He went to Utah Senator Orrin Hatch, who picked up the torch with the Amy and Vicky Child Pornography Victim Restitution Improvement Act of 2015.  Hatch’s pitch for the law provides:

The Amy and Vicky Act creates an effective, balanced restitution process for victims of child pornography that also responds to the Supreme Court’s decision in Paroline v. United States. It does three things that reflect the nature of  these crimes. First, it considers the total harm to the victim, including from individuals who may not yet have been identified. Second, it requires real and timely restitution. Third, it allows defendants who have contributed to the same victim’s harm to spread the restitution cost among themselves. Continue reading →

A call came in asking whether I would be interested in working with another lawyer on a case.  The caller explained that he wasn’t dissatisfied with the other lawyer, exactly, but wanted a second opinion, a second head.  “Two heads are better than one, right?” he said to me.

Well, no.  Most of the time, two heads are not better, and often worse.

Aside from there being a platitude for everything (too many cooks spoil the broth), choices ultimately must be made.  Immediately after OJ Simpson’s acquittal, everybody wanted a “dream team” of lawyers, just like Juice.  Until, that is, they found out what a dream team costs.  Clients aren’t always good with numbers.

But the Simpson dream team did something smart. Each was charged with handling a specific aspect of the case, suited to their strength, so that they didn’t step on each other. Sure, there was massive conflict anyway, and some major hate grew out of the association, but it worked at trial, which is what they were there to accomplish. Continue reading →

In his invariably colorful way, Marc Randazza summed up the conflict at George Washington University:

This is a total douche v. douche fight.

On one hand, you have the YAF. I can’t see what is “un-Christian” about taking a class that makes you learn how to be nicer to other people — especially when those people are from a group that, until quite recently, didn’t have a lot of friends or supporters. When someone tells me that their religious beliefs conflict with spending a little time learning about how to perhaps not offend people, it makes me think that their religion isn’t worth a fucking damn.

This isn’t being “un-Christian,” or un-anything except hostile.

The Young America’s Foundation chapter at the Washington, D.C.-based academic institute has refused to participate in LGBT sensitivity training recently made as a requirement.

Continue reading →

Every professor tells her students that Wikipedia is not a viable source, which stops no student ever from first going to Wikipedia to learn about something. It’s not that it can be trusted, but that it is the digital keeper of our times.

No more so than when Capital New York revealed that certain pages had been edited by computers with IP addresses at 1 Police Plaza.

Computers operating on the New York Police Department’s computer network at its 1 Police Plaza headquarters have been used to alter Wikipedia pages containing details of alleged police brutality, a review by Capital has revealed.

Computer users identified by Capital as working on the NYPD headquarters’ network have edited and attempted to delete Wikipedia entries for several well-known victims of police altercations, including entries for Eric Garner, Sean Bell, and Amadou Diallo.

Continue reading →

The Gawker headline may have jumped the gun.

Why Wasn’t the Brooklyn Subway Shooter Arrested?

The short answer is that 69-year-old William Groomes may still be arrested, may still be prosecuted, for murdering Gilbert Drogheo.  But no, had it been someone without a shield, even one that said “retired” on it, and the right to carry a concealed weapon in New York City, his arrest would have been immediate.

Another piece to the puzzle was that Drogheo wasn’t a very good victim.

The incident started during rush hour on Tuesday when Groomes stepped between Drogheo and Evering while boarding the 4 train. A law enforcement official told the New York Times that the younger men began taunting Groomes, who tried to ignore them. “At one point, they called him a boy,” the official said. “He says: ‘Don’t call me boy. I’m not your boy.'” One of the men reportedly punched Groomes in the head, and according to the Associated Press, they pushed him down into a seat on the train.

Continue reading →

When they came up with the idea for a sex offender registry, tapping into the mythic fear of stranger danger to give the appearance of doing something to protect the public, at least legislators had what appeared to be a rational basis. Sure, it was nonsensical and played upon baseless fears that some guy was about to snatch, rape and murder your kid, when the truth was that Uncle Sam was far more likely a culprit.

But it made us feel safer, so we applauded.

And we immediately started the inevitable slide down the slippery slope of calling any offense remotely related to a sex organ a sex offense, requiring that people be put on the registry for the neighbors to see. If there were neighbors, since we enhanced the laws to limit their ability to live anywhere except under a bridge far from the rest of humanity. Continue reading →

Mayor Bill de Blasio’s Vision Zero initiative is a salve to the heartrending stories of tragedy on the streets of the City.  After all, any time someone gets hurt, there must be a criminal to pay.  Well, maybe not “any time,” as the New York Times explains:

The new law, which makes failure to yield a misdemeanor instead of a violation, has led to several arrests since it took effect last August. One was of a bus driver who struck a 15-year-old girl in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, last month, pinning her and severely injuring her leg.

The bus drivers’ union, taking the wrong message from the arrests, has angrily defended its members and thrown its support behind a misguided City Council bill that would exempt bus drivers from the law. It says drivers are being scapegoated as criminals and unfairly pressured to be both safe and on time — which is hard to do on streets choked with pedestrians jaywalking and flouting red lights.

Much as I lack a deep love for public sector unions, the bus drivers’ union has a really good point here.  And if they had a union, so would the cab drivers. And the uber drivers, if there were any. And every driver, for that matter. Continue reading →

Twitter is suffering from growing pains.  Sure, it seemed like a ridiculous idea when it first launched, but as it turned out, it wasn’t. Not by a long shot.  Why remains something of a mystery to me, but then, who cares what I think. Old guys are certainly not the barometer of new technology.

But then, we’re not entirely out of the loop either.  That Twitter had complaints coming in about the tone and content of some users has long been a known issue.  Per that bastion of deep thought, The Verge, it appears that Twitter’s CEO now admits the error of his ways and will take up arms to end it.

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo is taking personal responsibility for his platform’s chronic problems with harassment and abuse, telling employees that he is embarrassed for the company’s failures and would soon be taking stronger action to eliminate trolls. He said problems with trolls are driving away the company’s users. “We suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform and we’ve sucked at it for years,” Costolo wrote in an internal memo obtained by The Verge. “It’s no secret and the rest of the world talks about it every day. We lose core user after core user by not addressing simple trolling issues that they face every day.”

Trolls are easy to spot. They’re the people who annoy us. Then again, we’re the people who annoy them.  But Costolo’s concern is for his “core users,” and he’s kind enough to tell us who they are: Continue reading →