I’m not much of a connoisseur of rap music, but this video struck home with me.
It’s not that I endorse the line about a cop having to die. Obviously, I don’t and have made the point more times than I care to remember that no one should die. All lives matter. I feel no compulsion to prove myself now. I’ve always been clear about being against violence for everyone. Continue reading
Granted, Hawaii is a long way from the mainland, but it’s hard to imagine that it’s this far from the mainstream.
An Oahu grand jury indicted 35-year-old Kramer Aoki last November on a third-degree sexual assault charge, a class C felony punishable by up to five years in prison. The indictment says that on Sept. 6, Aoki, as a law enforcement officer, knowingly subjected to sexual contact a person in custody.
Aoki is accused of placing his hand on the breast of a teenage girl he had pulled over for speeding. After the alleged incident, Aoki let the girl go with a warning.
One of the most despicable abuses of police power is the use of fear, or authority, to coerce sexual contact. There are instances of cops forcing women to perform oral sex to get a pass on an arrest or traffic ticket. Others just rape women. But amongst good cops, this sort of conduct is intolerable to most; there are lines that cops should never cross. Then again, others in law enforcement tend to see such conduct as a perk of the job, under some twisted vision of cops being “sexy” and deserving the occasional coerced sex act for being such brave heroes. Continue reading
Years ago, I got a t-shirt from the National Criminal Defense College in Macon, Georgia that read on the back, “I plead guilty to obstruction of injustice.” It was a cute shirt, but it carried a kernel of truth. It’s what we do. We obstruct. Criminal defense lawyers get in the middle of the smooth operation of law enforcement and make everybody’s job more difficult.
San Francisco public defender Jami Tillotson did her job the other day, and it was captured on video. Two guys, one of whom was her client, left court only to be seized by Sgt. Brian Stansbury. For reasons not entirely clear (though speculation is easy enough that the guys were potential suspects in some other case), Stansbury wanted to interrogate and photograph them. That’s his job, identifying suspects of crimes.
Tillotson came out, told Stansbury that she represented one but not the other, and on his behalf, asserted his right to counsel to preclude further questioning. She stood there and blocked his easy access to photographing her client, who was standing against the wall. Presumably, that’s where Stansbury put him, back to the wall. Continue reading
Today is my mother’s funeral, and so I’m off to fight the traffic on the Cross Bronx Expressway and the George Washington Bridge on my way to New Jersey. Because it’s really poor form to be late to your own mother’s funeral.
I’m not really in the mood to write anything today, so please go read something worthwhile elsewhere. And thanks to all for your warm wishes. It’s very much appreciated.
Since my last post about cops in Albuquerque, which included an update about the indictment of two cops for the killing of James Boyd, people have been sending me stories about how the cops have targeted District Attorney Kari Brandenburg in retaliation. I’ve resisted discussion of this, both because it’s friggin’ Albuquerque (which isn’t as fascinating as, say, New York) and because Brandenburg is the DA.
What I mean by that is that anyone who wants to be the District Attorney takes on turf fraught with choices, many of which carry some public or private animosity. When Daniel Donovan, the District Attorney of Richmond County (that’s Staten Island to you New Mexicans) sabotaged his grand jury presentment in the Eric Garner killing, I challenged his ethics. Same with St. Louis DA Bob McCulloch in the Michael Brown killing.
The argument in both cases was that the public was calling for blood, and the District Attorneys felt compelled to put on a play, present the case to a grand jury, while believing there should be no indictment. Rather than sabotage the presentment, I argued that their ethical duty was to announce that they would not indict, because they did not believe an indictment was proper, and suffer the consequences.
Most people thought this ridiculous. How could the prosecutors not bend to the will of the public? What choice did they have? Continue reading
In the team sport of politics, few things are more poorly tolerated than a traitor. It’s one thing for, say, George Will to question politically correct speech, but when a former liberal champion like Jonathan Chait does so, all hell breaks loose.
In a long-form article for New York Magazine, Chait took to task the ugliness of the new political incorrectness that had a few minutes in the sun in the late 1980’s, when feminist lawprof Catherine MacKinnon proclaimed herself Speech Queen for a Day.
MacKinnon’s beliefs nestled closely with an academic movement that was then being described, by its advocates as well as its critics, as “political correctness.” Michigan had already responded to the demands of pro-p.c. activists by imposing a campuswide speech code purporting to restrict all manner of discriminatory speech, only for it to be struck down as a First Amendment violation in federal court.
In Ann Arbor, MacKinnon had attracted a loyal following of students, many of whom copied her method of argument. The pro-MacKinnon students, upset over the display of pornographic video clips, descended upon Jacobsen’s exhibit and confiscated a videotape. There were speakers visiting campus for a conference on prostitution, and the video posed “a threat to their safety,” the students insisted.
From what I would assume to be a transcript posted by Jamison Koehler:
HEARING EXAMINER: I will tell you right now, I do not, unless you have an expert here to testify as it relates to the field sobriety tests, unless you can provide that testimony through an expert –
DEFENSE COUNSEL: — I have an expert right here –
HEARING EXAMINER: — I cannot allow that line of questioning.
DEFENSE COUNSEL: Let me try –
HEARING EXAMINER: Because you are trying to get the officer to say that the tests are not peer-reviewed. What does that mean? What does that mean to the officer?
DEFENSE COUNSEL: I don’t care what it means to the officer. What matters is what it means to you.
HEARING EXAMINER: Right. And so the officer says it wasn’t peer-reviewed, how do you refute that if you don’t have an expert?
DEFENSE COUNSEL: I have an expert. Right here. The officer is an expert. He has been certified multiple times in the administration of the test. Otherwise he wouldn’t be qualified to testify. Continue reading
Omar Rendon was a sergeant in the Marines, which is detailed so you realize that he was one of the good guys. You know, the brave heroes everybody talks about, who deserve our thanks. And indeed, they do, and he does. And he is a good guy, which didn’t really help him much.
From the Daily News:
Omar Rendon, 25, a former Marine sergeant, said he was sitting in his Acura sedan in an Ulmer St. parking lot in College Point, Queens while on his lunch break last week, eating a Subway sandwich and watching “Wentworth” on his cell phone, when an unmarked blue van pulled alongside him.
Two men in plainclothes said, “Police! Get out of the car,” and reached in to unlock the door, he said. When Rendon — a handyman at the commercial complex, which features a movie theater and a Toys “R” Us — asked who they were, he said he was violently yanked out of the car. When he asked to see their I.D.s, one cop punched him in the face, he told The News.
Could the Yale police have made a worse choice of students to pull a gun on? Not likely. The student turned out to be the son of New York Times columnist Charles Blow.
Saturday evening, I got a call that no parent wants to get. It was my son calling from college — he’s a third-year student at Yale. He had been accosted by a campus police officer, at gunpoint!
Blow’s commentary often addresses the state of race relations in America. I suppose it comes with the territory, though that would be a racist conclusion based on Blow’s skin color. He could just as easily be a fencing writer, though it doesn’t pay as well. In any event, that’s what he does. And he does it well, whether or not you see the world as he does.
According to the column, his son was doing what normal people who have no reason to think any cop would be interested in them do. Continue reading
Bye, Mom.
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I hope you will forgive me for not replying to each comment below, but thank you for your kind words and thoughts.