Ah, the power of a young person who believes that his cause is just.  Baylor University’s Student Judicial Board may only preside over the small pond of Baptist college in Waco, Texas, but it still affects lives.

Baylor University’s student judicial board issued a no-contact order to members of the student newspaper on Thursday — an attempt to limit coverage of a student disciplinary case.

Junior Cody Coll, who was confirmed as the Baylor University Student Court court’s chief justice last week, said the order is within his jurisdiction, though he was “unsure” if prior chief justices have issued similar orders to student publications in the past.

“It’s within the purview of the chief justice to instruct the justices to not communicate with the media,” he said. “It’s also within the jurisdiction of the court to issue an order such as the one that was issued yesterday.”

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There is little doubt that the mistaken killing of a guy who had the tragic misfortune to be in a stairwell when a scared rookie cop discharged his weapon in a dark stairwell of the Louis Pink Houses in Brooklyn was wrong. It was no accident that the cops revealed the dead guy’s rap sheet, even though there was no question that he did nothing wrong here, but no one will be indicted for that.

Kings County DA Ken Thompson has obtained an indictment for Peter Liang’s killing of Akai Gurley:

A grand jury impaneled last week decided it was a crime. The jurors indicted Officer Liang on several charges, including second-degree manslaughter, said a law enforcement official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the indictment had yet to be unsealed. The other charges are criminally negligent homicide, reckless endangerment, second-degree assault and two counts of official misconduct, the official said.

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There were other options for the concerned relative in Anson County, North Carolina.  The relative could have called on the telephone, and kept calling until someone answered. Or called a neighbor.  Assuming those options didn’t work, the relative could have hopped in the car and made the drive to Gastonia.

Instead, the relative called the Gastonia police to check on the welfare of 74-year-old James Howard Allen.  A few hours later, they got their answer.

Police were called to the home of James Howard Allen about 10 p.m. Saturday because a relative of Allen’s in Anson County was worried about his condition, Gastonia police Chief Robert Helton said during a Sunday morning press conference.

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While it’s true that it’s all about the client, it’s not an absolute.  Jamie Koehler writes about clients withholding information from their lawyer.

The withholding of information can occasionally lead to that cringe-inducing moment at trial in which you are caught completely off-guard by something the government’s witness says on the stand.  Although I always tried my best to maintain my poker face when this happened, I could feel my client squirming in the seat next to me.  And it often led to an angry exchange afterward:  Really?  You didn’t think that was something I might want to know?  The defendant was usually sheepish about this.   I don’t know, one of them might say.  I thought you would try harder if you thought I was innocent.

To withhold information is to deceive.  Sometimes it’s by omission, as Jamison notes, and other times it’s by commission, where the client will tell you something, with his sincere eyes looking at you for belief, that is just an outright lie.

There’s a spiel I tell clients, that they don’t want their lawyer to be the stupidest guy in the room, and if everyone else in the room knows something I don’t know, or knows something different than I do, I’m that stupidest guy. Continue reading →

The write-up was the sort that could well show up in a commendation request, or more importantly these days, as proof of how dangerous it was to be a cop.

“While running towards my partner I saw the Hispanic male grab my partner with both his hands by his chest upper vest area and slammed him into a brick wall of the building. The Hispanic male held my partner up against the wall and began throwing elbows towards my partner’s face and head area,” McKnight said in a signed statement, echoing the account given by Robinson, according to the charging documents.

This, we might have been told, is why we don’t get it, why challenging the use of force by police reflects our naiveté, our disrespect, of the precarious position of a cop on the street.  This should make us ashamed of our doubting that it’s not easy being cop. Continue reading →

For reasons that elude me, Huffington Post Women published a post by Jeena Cho explaining that we should stop training lawyers to be jerks.  She begins with the obligatory anecdote.

When I was a young lawyer, I was invited to sit in on a deposition with one of the managing partners at the firm. This was my first deposition, and one of my first experiences coming face to face with an adversary. When I got to the conference room, I asked opposing counsel and his client if they wanted anything to drink and if they were comfortable. I don’t recall if they asked for anything, but what I do remember is what happened after the deposition. The managing lawyer pulled me aside and told me never to do that again. It was not my job to offer water or make the opposing side comfortable and in fact, it was my job to do the opposite. To make them as uncomfortable as possible.

She took this “mentoring advice” to heart, but explains that being the “most aggressive lawyer in the room” didn’t work for her.  Her own mentoring advice is to lead with kindness:

We can debate whether such tactics work or not. However, to me, it doesn’t matter. Even if not offering water did somehow give us a slight edge, I still believe I should have offered it. I became a lawyer to pursue justice and to help people. This means that I have to maintain my humanity.

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The crime of resisting arrest is one that conceptually disturbs a great many people.  Putting aside the cognitive dissonance when that’s the only crime charged, most would contend that it’s the crime of arrest, not the lack of cooperation with police in effectuating our own arrest, that should matter.  If a person is being arrested for a crime they didn’t commit, why should it be a separate crime not to facilitate their own wrongful arrest?

New York City Police Commissioner Bill Bratton doesn’t see it that way. Not at all.

On Wednesday, NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton urged state legislators to consider increasing the penalty for resisting arrest from a misdemeanor to a felony. The change, he argued, would help New Yorkers “get around this idea that you can resist arrest. You can’t.” It would also give cops an easy way to turn victims of their own worst impulses into the worst class of criminal.

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A friend of mine told me about his going to couples therapy.  Both he and his wife assumed the therapist would listen to their respective stories, decide which one was right, and name a winner in the marriage game. The winner would do a happy dance while the loser would acknowledge defeat.  It didn’t turn out that way.

Instead, the therapist explained how both he and his wife were entitled to their feelings, offered some ideas for how to disagree more productively and awarded no points to either side. After a few sessions, they begged off. They finally had one point of complete agreement, that couples therapy was a waste of money.

Psychology is about feelings, and can accommodate contradictory feelings.  Law cannot. My friend wanted a verdict, and instead got a tummy rub. It resolved nothing, when their purpose in going was resolution. The New York Times offers an editorial on campus rape that does the same.

Both campus activists who believe there’s an epidemic of sexual assault and skeptics who doubt there’s a widespread problem can at least agree that a clearer picture would be useful.

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There was, at minimum, fairly good reason to be concerned that Tom Kendall posed a threat to Vancouver, Washington police.  After all, Kendall had just fired his rifle at another car during a dispute, hitting a woman in the face. Bad stuff.

The confusing series of events first began at about 8:30 a.m., when 58-year-old Kendall, behind the wheel of a silver Buick, pulled his car up to the intersection of Northeast 63rd Street and Andresen Road in Vancouver alongside his neighbors, Erich and Abigail Mounce. Kendall and the Mounces were due in court at 9 a.m. in an ongoing dispute. From his car, Kendall pulled out a high-powered rifle, fired it at the couple’s vehicle and fled the scene.

Abigail Mounce was shot in the face, and her husband, who was driving, sped away to the hospital. Abigail Mounce survived the shooting.

Clearly, Kendall was a guy to approach with extreme caution.  Which offers no explanation for the shooting of 55-year-old Brent Graham, who was kind enough to call in a report of an abandoned car. Continue reading →

For those who’ve never had a blog, I see SJ via a “dashboard,” which offers me all the options and information necessary to actually drive this beast.  While you see it from the public face, I’m constantly seated in the back room, and rarely see how things look up front.  This means I sometimes miss something obvious to you, but then, I also get to see a whole bunch of stuff that you don’t.

That’s right. It’s cool to have your hands on the wheel of this truck.

One of the things I see is incoming hits and links, other websites, blogs, newspapers, chatrooms, that have linked to something here.  It’s always interesting to see who is linking so I often take a peek.  Sometimes, it’s painful, as the link will come from a website promoting an idea I find repugnant.  Other times, it’s just kinda curious, as happened the other day when I spotted some incoming reads from a fountain pen forum. Continue reading →