One of the things that distinguishes a blawg is that it relies on news media as a source of information. Sure, there are times when a blawg initiates a story, particularly about a legal opinion or court occurrence, but bigger stories come from bigger media.  And a blawger’s view is only as good as the information provided by the trusted source.

Like, oh, say Greta Van Susteren, Slate or Newsweek, all of whom were taken in by Patrick @Popehat’s hilarious parody twitter account DPRK News Service.  This was a funny example of how confirmation bias, rush to reportage and the utter lack of fact-checking plays out.  Less funny was Baltimore FOX affiliate’s WBFF report of protestors chanting “kill the cops.”

Last night, Baltimore’s WBFF aired a video of protesters chanting “kill a cop”– evidence, it claimed, of murderously violent rhetoric on the part of anti-brutality protesters in Washington, D.C. The only problem? The protesters weren’t chanting “kill a cop” at all, and there’s video evidence to prove it.

At a time when overheated rhetoric spawns violent reactions, this was the sort of monumentally irresponsible reporting the leads to bloodshed. Continue reading →

Two New York City police officers, Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos, were executed while sitting in their cruiser in Brooklyn.  They were murdered by Ismaaiyl Brinsley, who ran away, then killed himself.  Brinsley came up from Maryland to find two random cops to kill. And he did.

These murders are, and are not, connected to the killing of Eric Garner and Michael Brown. And Akai Gurley and Tamir Rice.

The double killing comes at a moment when protests over police tactics have roiled the city and other parts of the nation. Since a grand jury declined to bring criminal charges in the case of Mr. Garner, a black Staten Island man who died after a police chokehold in July, protesters have filled the streets on numerous occasions. Those protests followed more violent ones in Ferguson, Mo., after there were no charges in the police shooting of Mr. Brown, an unarmed black teenager.

These cops had nothing to do with any of these killings, but they were cops.  To the crazies out there, for whom all cops are the enemies, and to whom the only solution is to kill cops, they are the personification of their anger and frustration.  The insane mind contorts its vision of the world in ways no one can quite predict, but it’s not as if this was hard to see coming. There are a lot of crazies out there. A lot. Continue reading →

The Indiana Supreme Court reversed its Court of Appeals, which held the public intoxication statute’s language unduly vague.

Indiana’s 2012 public-intoxication law makes a criminal of someone who, while drunk in a public place, “harasses, annoys, or alarms another person.” (The statute improved upon the state’s previous public intoxication law, which made it illegal to be drunk in public, period.)

The Supreme Court didn’t see the problem.

There is little doubt that the subjective application of the term “annoys” would lead to absurd results and exceedingly broad discretion in enforcement. However, recognizing that statutes need not precisely state the prohibited conduct and should be read to avoid absurd results, principles of statutory interpretation instruct this Court to read a reasonableness standard into our public intoxication statute when analyzing the term “annoys.”

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Oh sure, Chad Chadwick now gets an outpouring of support, but what about then?  What about the efforts of the brave SWAT team?  This was how it was reported in 2011:

Officers were called to the Century Apartments in Sienna Plantation on Sienna Springs Boulevard around 9 p.m. Tuesday after a man called 911 to say his friend was thinking about doing something violent.

Missouri City police said the friend, Chad Chadwick, refused to come out of his third-floor apartment after a fight with his wife.

Violence? Wife?  This was serious. Dangerous. This calls for the heavy armor.

After several hours of failed negotiations, SWAT officers barged in and used a Taser gun to get Chadwick under control and handcuffed him at 1 a.m. Wednesday, officials said.

Before he was handcuffed, police said Chadwick punched two officers in the face.

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It’s that time of year again! Time to recognize the effort and thoughtfulness of criminal law blawgers with our annual Best Criminal Law Blawg Post, which has been dedicated to the memory of our dear friend, Joel Rosenberg.

Unlike the other Beauty Pageants in the blawgosphere, the idea here is to provide a platform to revisit the excellent work done over the past year.  Past winners of the JDog prize are luminaries of the blawgosphere,  Ohio’s Jeff Gamso, Connecticut’s Gideon Strumpet, Texas’  Mark Bennett, Arizona’s Matt Brown and Fishtown’s Leo Mulvihill.

Here’s the deal: Continue reading →

Sometimes boys hit other boys. Girls too, but let’s pretend for the sake of this post that gender isn’t really important, because the boy who hit another student here is 8-year-old Dakota Nafzinger, and he’s just a boy.  Whether he hit a boy or a girl isn’t clear.

There’s no indication that the hit was a big deal, beyond the fact that it happened. It’s not good that it happened, but then, it’s not the first time that a boy hit a boy either.

Except Dakota is blind, and he hit another boy with his cane.  That’s the long white thing that blind people use because they can’t see.  I add that as a tip from my buddy, The Blind Guy, who informs me that there are still a lot of people out there who can’t figure out why blind people have long white canes.

A representative of the North Kansas City School District said that the cane is property of the district that was given to him during enrollment, and it was taken away when he hit another student with it. She said a pool noodle was given as a substitute because he needed something to fidget with.

Continue reading →

Breezing through the news, the manly image of Cleveland Police Patrolman’s Association boss, Det. Jeffrey Follmer, hit the screen.  He struck me as comical, the cartoon version of a third-rate city’s tough-guy cop.  Just too much of a dumbass not to laugh at.

But after some contemplation of this bald beagle, it occurred to me that as buffoonish as he may have seemed, he was likely sitting there with a gun strapped to some part of his body, and Tamir Rice was still dead. There should be no laughing at Follmer. Continue reading →

Reversing the Appellate Division, First Department, the New York Court of Appeals held in People v. Graham Reid that a search incident to arrest can’t be based on the very evidence found during the search.  Kinda seems obvious, notwithstanding the fact that the defendant lost before the trial court and the intermediate appellate court, which affirmed his conviction for which he’s serving an indeterminate sentence of two to four years for possession of a switchblade.

The defendant was stopped for drunk driving:

[P.O. Jacob] Merino stopped the car and approached it. He saw that defendant’s eyes were “very watery” and his clothing was disheveled. There were plastic cups in the car’s center console, and the officer detected an odor of alcohol.

No big deal, even though, as it later turned out, the defendant’s blood alcohol content was zero.  As in not drunk in the slightest. But, there is always that smell, which unfortunately can’t be captured as evidence, and so we must rely on the officer’s senses and honesty. Continue reading →

In a post about some of the inexplicably ridiculous things coming out of 7th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Richard Posner’s mouth about privacy lately, Judge Richard Kopf included this in a comment:

In my experience, particularly with Title III interception applications, government’s agents and lawyers are careful not to lie or mislead. By the way, in this District no agent appears seeking a Title III order (or even a search warrant) without an Assistant United States Attorney who has carefully reviewed the submission appearing with the agent. With Title III interception requests, the applications cannot even get to a judge without approval from a senior DOJ official at Main Justice after careful review.

To anyone who has never had to make a Franks motion, this may offer some measure of comfort.  A Title III warrant is for wiretapping, one of the most intrusive measures available to the government. The idea that the feds are listening in should strike fear in the hearts of all, and only happen (if at all) under the most limited of circumstances, and then with the strictest of limitations.  After all, when a person is whispering words of love to a spouse, there really isn’t a good reason for some G-men recording it for playback at the Christmas Party. Continue reading →

Following the Supreme Court’s watering down of police expectations in Heien, a few people asked for examples of what they were talking about when they approved “objectively reasonable” mistakes of law.  Fortunately, there is a video out of Victoria, Texas.

Dashcam video from the incident posted by Raw Story, above, shows officer Nathanial Robinson, 23, pull over Pete Vasquez, 76, at Adam’s Auto Mart in Victoria, Texas, as “Under Ground Kings” by Drake blares from the cruiser’s radio. Continue reading →