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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World War II vet, John Wrana, was 95 years old.  There are two things that one can immediately surmise from this detail: first, that people that age do some inexplicable things, and second, that they are physically fragile.  When the people at the home called the police, they no doubt realized these two things.

When the cops came out of the elevator at the Victory Centre assisted living facility with a shotgun, it occurred to the former manager, Lanny Gibson, that he may have made a horrible mistake.

“I think we realized at that point that something bad was about to happen,” said Lanny Gibson, who had just started the job and said he didn’t know the protocols in Illinois for handling uncooperative residents who needed medical treatment.

See, Wrana wasn’t being cooperative when it came to helping himself. It was all about helping Wrana. So they killed him. Continue reading →

Talk To The Hand, Old Man

Over cocktails, Above The Law’s Elie Mystal explained why “the answer” to the failures of prosecution of two cops, one in Ferguson and one in Staten Island, was a special prosecutor. He had made the point in a post at ATL Redline, where he explained that a special prosecutor, and not body cams, was the solution.

The problem, he explains in earnest, is that cops and prosecutors are buddies, as they should be.

But that adversarial system breaks down when it comes to cop crime, because district attorneys and the police are friends. Note: generally speaking we want them to be friends. Prosecutors are part of law enforcement. We want prosecutors and the police to work hand-in-glove to not only catch criminals, but also bring them up on charges that stick and lead to appropriate punishment. If you don’t believe me, just watch an episode of Law and Order. Things are better when the team is pulling in the same direction.

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It’s no M.I.T., but then again, the University of Chicago is no slouch either.  Yet, when it comes to a grasp of basic concepts, the rigor one expects of its students is apparently, well, lacking as reflected in this editorial in the student newspaper, The Chicago Maroon.

It addresses a report by the euphemistically-named Committee on Free Expression, whose mission was to “articulate the University’s ‘commitment to free, robust, and uninhibited debate and deliberation among all members of the community.'”  One might suggest that they don’t really need a committee for this purpose, but that would be naïve these days given the educational environment.

So this committee did its voodoo: Continue reading →