Sending off your baby to college at Clemson, your eyes may be a bit teary but you have the comfort of knowing that this fine institution of higher learning will demonstrate the care and sensitivity you would demand be shown your child.  And it will be on the test.

[T]he South Carolina university is asking students invasive and personal questions about their drinking habits and sex life as part of what they’ve billed as an online Title IX training course.

“How many times have you had sex (including oral) in the last 3 months?” asks one question.

“With how many different people have you had sex (including oral) in the last 3 months?” asks another.

Invasive? Well, yeah, but then, this is college and sex (including oral) is part of the game.

“We believe you’ll enjoy the assignment,” the email, provided to Campus Reform, reads. “It is an engaging and informative online course, created with students for students. It will provide you with useful information regarding sexual violence and relationships. The course promotes a healthier and safer campus environment.”

Continue reading →

Adults who ride bicycles on the road with cars present a problem, and they know it.

When I drive my car, I get mad at cyclists who weave in and out of traffic, won’t move over, never stop at a red light and flip me off when I come within eye contact of them — the self-righteous bastards. When I ride my bike, I hate all those people in cars, some of whom are texting while driving — far worse than driving drunk.

Timothy Egan in the New York Times argues “[I]f each side could just think a little more like the other side, it would go a long way toward improved safety.” It’s unclear how exactly that would work, or what problem that would solve.  Sure, we should all be more careful, less hostile and aggressive, when on the road, regardless of our chosen vehicle.  But even if bikers suddenly stopped daring drivers to run them down, and drivers started driving competently, would that change things?

Cities are changing, quickly, to accommodate the new urban commuter. It’s not quite like the transformation from horse carriages to backfiring internal combustion engines, but a revolution is underway. Uber, Lyft and other ride services make it easy not to own a car. Bike commuting is at an all-time high in many cities.

But lanes for cyclists and signage for special routes might offer little more than the illusion of safety.

Continue reading →

Q: What happens when a police officer finds a 5-year-old special needs boy by himself a couple of blocks from the school house?

A:  Suspend the child.  At least, if the principal is Denise Segars-McPhatter, and the school is Early Childhood Center School 82.  What, you thought the cop did something wrong? Not this time.

From the Buffalo News:

A 5-year-old boy with special needs managed to grab his jacket and bookbag, leave his kindergarten class, get down a flight of stairs and walk out of a Buffalo elementary school undetected Tuesday.

A police officer on patrol around noon happened to spot the child nearly two blocks away in the East Side Kensington-Bailey neighborhood and returned him to Early Childhood Center School 82. Shortly afterward, the child’s mother got a call from a school staffer.

To apologize?  To beg forgiveness?  To seek the mercy and understanding of parents from those in loco parentis?  Nope. Wrong loco. Continue reading →

When we were young, asset forfeiture was only used against evil drug kingpins, to take the profit out of crime, because we were pure at heart and would never tolerate an abuse of the vast power entrusted to us. 

–Paraphrased from a Washington Post op-ed John Yoder and Brad Cates

These aren’t two random lunatics, but two men in whom the United States of America reposed huge power to wreak havoc with the fundamental underpinnings of our legal system.  And they did.

John Yoder was director of the Justice Department’s Asset Forfeiture Office from 1983 to 1985. Brad Cates was the director of the office from 1985 to 1989.

I can still remember sitting in the judge’s chambers on my first asset forfeiture conference, the judge looking sternly at the AUSA and saying, “you know, the law abhors a forfeiture, right?” It’s unbearably quaint today. I suspect newer judges aren’t even familiar with the maxim, no less interested in uttering it.  And it’s all because of Yoder and Cates. Continue reading →

Lead paint. It was a far better paint than anything we have today. It stuck. It held. It was damn fine paint. But when it did come off the walls, and was eaten by children because it tasted sweet, it caused brain damage, loss of impulse control and a slew of other problems. In 1978, lead paint was banned from household use. In the scheme of things, brain damage was deemed far worse than paint that lacked durability.

At Hercules and the Umpire, Judge Richard Kopf raises a troubling problem based on Rick Nevin’s theory that the elimination of lead paint in the environment was a causal force in the decline of crimes rates.  The TL:dr explanation is that

Excessive lead exposure due to paint chips, car and truck fumes and otherwise can permanently drive down the IQ of a child and, at the same time, it can permanently reduce the child’s ability to control his impulses. Those twin harms tend to produce a criminal when the child grows up. Before lead reduction efforts by the government, crime rates rose, but after government lead reduction efforts, crime rates fell. That’s why you see reduction in crime rates for younger men, but no reduction, or even an increase, in crime rates for older men. Presumably, many of these older men have suffered the deleterious effect of excessive lead exposure when they were children, but the younger men have been spared.

This raised the question posed by Judge Kopf, and the one that is at issue here:  Assuming Nevin is correct, what does a judge do with this? Continue reading →

Because they’re not the entitled Slackoisie. Because they say so.

1. We play by our own rules.

2. We don’t take the first answer given to us.

3. We don’t care about getting into trouble.

4. We’re willing to work for nothing if it means being happy… Despite being in debt.

5. We know how to beat the system.

6. We’re always trying to change the game.

7. We have social media on our side. Continue reading →

Apple!  Yay!!!  iPhone!  Yay!!!  iOS8!  Yay!!!

Apple said Wednesday night that it is making it impossible for the company to turn over data from most iPhones or iPads to police — even when they have a search warrant — taking a hard new line as tech companies attempt to blunt allegations that they have too readily participated in government efforts to collect user information.

During the Lavabit fiasco, geeks explained with as much aplomb as they could muster how technology could solve government intrusion by making it impossible, with a few deft keystrokes, to get its nasty mitts on anything.  Ironically, nobody adores alphabet soup more than the government than geeks.  SQL? Cool.

Already, applause can be heard.  And Android will follow suit any moment now. Continue reading →

When Jason “J. Rock” Austin’s lawyer, Richard Kling, prepared for sentence, the charges for which the defendant stood convicted were for drug dealing.  But this is America, and he stood in a federal court, which opened Austin up to sentence for “related conduct,” an innocuous way of saying that the murders of Chicago Detective Robert Soto and Kathryn Romberg were also on the table.

When the State sought to prosecute Austin for the murders in 2008, the case fell apart.  He was arrested, and then released after witnesses against him recanted and claimed they were coerced into pointing at J. Rock.  But that case would have required a jury to be convinced of his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.  This was a federal court in America, so it was no longer necessary.

Holding hands and crying softly in a packed federal courtroom, the victims’ relatives listened as U.S. District Judge Joan Lefkow found Austin accountable for the slayings while sentencing him to 35 years in prison on the drug charges.

“I do believe it is very likely you committed these murders,” Lefkow told Austin. “You destroyed two innocent lives…You deprived families of their loved ones, deprived children of their parents.”

Continue reading →

In the middle of the night, someone breaks into your home through the window.  What’s a guy to do? What’s a guy to do in Texas?

[T]he simpler explanation is that he was awakened by armed men breaking into his home and did what he thought he needed to do to defend himself. Especially since that’s exactly what these raids are designed to do: take you by surprise.

So Marvin Louis Guy fired.

Police Detective Charles “Chuck” Dinwiddie, 47, and Officer Odis Denton, 37, were shot as they and other officers served the narcotics search warrant just after 5:30 a.m. Friday at 1104 Circle M Dr. Apt. 3 in Killeen.

Dinwiddie died at 1:30 p.m. Sunday in the intensive care unit of Scott & White Hospital.

All the reasons that make perfect sense from the police point of view for executing a narcotics search warrant in the dark of the night, no-knock, no announce, no nothing except a SWAT team’s shock and awe, are the same reasons why the people in the house, awoken from sleep by armed men bursting in, shoot before asking “who’s there?” Continue reading →

Everton Wagstaffe went into custody in January, 1992. He was 23 years old.  And there he stayed, even after he was told to pack his bags and leave on parole.  From Jim Dwyer at the New York Times:

Everton Wagstaffe, who refused to leave prison on probation because he viewed it as a surrender of his claim of innocence in the death of a teenage girl, learned on Wednesday that he had prevailed in a struggle that he began from behind bars nearly 23 years ago.

Over the years, he has refused to accept release on any terms — such as parole or probation — that would imply he had something to do with the kidnapping and death of Jennifer Negron, a 16-year-old girl whose body was found on a street in the East New York section of Brooklyn on Jan. 1, 1992.

That was a principled decision.  Some would argue monumentally foolish, but principled.  Maybe, after spending 15 years in prison, engaging in what Dwyer describes as “guerilla legal battle” and “relentless campaign” to prove his innocence, he had no place left to go. His co-defendant, Reginald Connor, walked out after serving his 15 years. Continue reading →