Since the first of the year, Mark Bennett has performed yeoman’s service to the blawgosphere and the law.  He has given us the gift of a thorough, thoughtful and legally irrefutable explanation of why the anti-revenge porn laws fail to satisfy existing First Amendment law, and why advocates of such laws have deceived and misled in their efforts to convince otherwise.

This is a gift that Mark has given to the rest of us, no strings attached. While the advocates have either posted their positions on big league websites like Forbes or been quoted approvingly by others as an appeal to purported authority, being law professors such that anything they say about the law must be true, by those who support their cause, Mark’s gift is available for any journalist who wishes to accept it.

The gift is out there, free to anyone who wishes to be honest and accurate about the failures of these laws to comport with the First Amendment, the concept for which the people at Charlie Hebdo died.  For a few minutes after that, many people took an interest in free speech, but that quickly changed to free speech provided it was speech they liked and valued. Continue reading →

No, not getting your hands on one of those adorable babies in need of love, but cars, cash and other crap that local cops grab and send off to the Feds for adoptive civil forfeiture.  Out of the blue, Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the Department of Justice is no longer in the business of doing all the dirty work for local police departments.

Via WaPo:

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. on Friday barred local and state police from using federal law to seize cash, cars and other property without warrants or criminal charges.

Holder’s action represents the most sweeping check on police power to confiscate personal property since the seizures began three decades ago as part of the war on drugs.

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Remember when every story about campus rape began with that glorious claim, that one in five women will be sexually assaulted in college?  Good times. And then they went and blew it all to hell, because, well, it was just total nonsense.  It turns out that the real number is .61%, not 20%.

Just as the narrative being used to turn all sexual interactions into rape and sexual assault, at the woman’s pleasure, was unraveling, a new statistic hit the media that brought joy to neo-feminists everywhere:

Certain feminists were almost gleeful Monday when they discovered a “study” that seemed to confirm their worldview that a large chunk of the male population just want to rape.

The study, announced in Newsweek, showed that 1 in 3 college boys in North Dakota would rape a woman if they could get away with it. Continue reading →

After making the decision to take on the Milwaukee Police Department in the Ronald Carter case, where the police were caught dirty by destroying evidence — a car, no less — in a cop shooting, one would think they would throw a parade for Eric Brittain. Hell, they did for the district attorney, so why not a good guy?

Instead, Milwaukee turned on him. The cops. The judges. The system.  No criminal defense lawyer was going to embarrass the polka capital of Wisonsin and get away with it, and so they did everything possible to make Brittain’s life miserable.  Including Brittain being held in contempt four times.

Four?  Well, that’s something, right?  Under the Nancy Grace school of culpability, where there’s smoke, there’s fire, which certainly means that Brittain must deserve it or it wouldn’t have happened.  After all, it couldn’t be just because his calling out the Milwaukee cops and system for wrongdoing made the yokels angry. That would be improper. Continue reading →

At Defending People (Post 2015.20 for those of you who miss the Dewey Decimal System), Mark Bennett writes an homage to listening.

Listening is vital to trial lawyers. It’s probably more important than any other single skill, but it is less studied, less trained, and less practiced. Lawyers often don’t listen very well. I’ve seen egregiously bad examples from all sides of the criminal bar; many times I’ve wanted to shake a lawyer or judge by the collar and shout, did you not hear what that person just said?

One might suspect that Bennett has, in this paragraph, fully covered the subject with a bit of fascinating personal commentary thrown in for good measure. You would be wrong.

So I was thrilled to discover, via the Twitter Machine, Jennifer Romig’s Listen Like a Lawyer blog. It’s not really about listening like a lawyer, of course, since lawyers don’t listen very well, but about lawyers listening better.

Romig’s posts are lengthy, substantive, and link-rich. She’s writing for lawyers about things that lawyers need to know. (Before every trial I’m going to ask all of my juniors to read her recent post on second-chair listening.) This is the practical blawgosphere at its best. More, please.

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Mount Holyoke College was the first of the Seven Sisters, a woman’s liberal arts college to provide available and appropriate dates to Ivy League boys in the old days when college students still went on these things called “dates.”  It remains an all-female institution, even as the Ivy League has gone co-ed, because no guy wants to go there.

But this celebration of womanhood has hit a snag.

Women’s college Mount Holyoke has decided to stop performing Eve Ensler’s classic play “The Vagina Monologues.” The college has been annually performing theater classic for decades, but since Mount Holyoke redefined its definition of “woman” to include transgender students, many felt the play was neither inclusive nor representative of the student body.

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It can be heart-breaking to see a man cry and prostrate himself before the court:

Sniffling back tears, William Ruscoe told Superior Court Judge Robert Devlin Friday he was sorry for his actions.

“Please show them (his children) the justice system their daddy worked to uphold for nearly 20 years is also fair and compassionate,” Ruscoe urged the judge.

Ruscoe was a cop.  Not just a cop, but the advisor to the Trumball Connecticut Police Department’s police explorer program, where high school students interested in becoming cops could be taken under wing and trained in the ways of blue.  One of those students was a teen-aged girl. Continue reading →

Crying that Mayor Bill de Blasio has “blood on his hands” may be the sort of wild rhetoric that plays with the public, with those who adore and appreciate the heroic cops who keep them safe from the mongrel hordes, but it turns out that cops are still cops.  Much as they may extoll their virtues for public consumption, what they really care about is . . .

The in-house battle erupted over the issue of what patrol officers really need — an apology from Mayor de Blasio or better equipment and more officers to back them up on the streets.

“This is what my members want!” a cop yelled near the end of the raucous meeting. “They want more cars, better vests, more manpower!”

This happened during a meeting of PBA delegates in Queens, where the real business of policing happens.  And for all the touchy-feely crap that’s been spewn for public consumption of late, the bottom line remains the same as it’s always been, the First Rule of Policing. Continue reading →

Some guy on Facebook wrote some really sick stuff.

“Let’s just get this over!” Kinch wrote in one post. “Race war, Civil, Revolution? Bring it! I’m about as fed up as a man (American, Christian, White, Heterosexual) can get!”

“It’s obviously coming to a boiling point! I say ‘F*CK IT’!” Kinch stated in another angry post. “I’m ready now! Sooner or later, I would say sooner than later! Thought I could make a difference, thought it would get better! See the morale fabric of this Country get so trampled I wanna call it! GAME ON! I think we need a cleansing! Just me? What say you?”

Kinch happens to be Bobby Kinch, Las Vegas police detective and guy with a gun and shield, courtesy of the government.  His rants were so bizarre, so outrageous, that even his fellow cops couldn’t take it. Continue reading →

Brian Ferguson was a student at the Waxahatchie campus of Navarro College, a two-year school in Texas. This wouldn’t be anything particularly notable, but for the fact that Brian was autistic, and attended special needs classes.  It’s really pretty cool that Navarro offers such classes, and gives a student with autism the opportunity to make the most of himself.

Well, that’s done now, after Brian mistook a female student for someone he knew.

A Waxahachie man who has autism was kicked out of college classes because he mistakenly hugged a woman he did not know and kissed her on the top of her head, according to the man’s mother.

Brian Ferguson, 20, was attending special-needs classes at Navarro College’s Waxahachie campus when he thought he recognized a young woman in the hallway, said Ferguson’s mother, Staci Martin.

The woman, who has not been identified and could not be reached for comment, turned out to be a stranger.

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