While Bill Bratton’s eyes are searching for broken windows in our homes rather than his, there remain other places, as yet unmentioned, where the windows are broken, shattered in fact, that need some attention.  Like the courtrooms of New York City’s criminal courthouses.

Much has been written about the concealment of Brady material, depriving the defense of critical information to show that a defendant is innocent or the cop on the witness stand is a lying sack of shit. But that comes after the fact, after the defense “discovers” that some mutt prosecutor buried the exculpatory material in the expectation that nobody would ever find it and throw it back in his face.  We all get outraged.

Yet, there’s another level that gets essentially no play, no discussion, and its window is just as badly broken. The broken window is basic discovery.  At its best, it’s so inherently limited in criminal cases in New York as to be laughable.  Still, it’s all we have, and the defense desperately needs the crumbs provided by law or we go in completely blind.

In most instances, state prosecutors have taken to giving “voluntary disclosure forms” with fill-in-the-blanks that correspond to the criteria provided by Criminal Procedure Law §240.20, which may (or may not) be relatively accurate and complete.  Judges couldn’t care less. You got the form?  Move on. Continue reading →

Mario’s boy became governor following his brief stint in the New York Attorney General’s seat.  That’s one prosecutor.  Not long after he took the very small step into the Governor’s Mansion, Andrew Cuomo boldly announced the creation of the Moreland Commission, to rid New York State government of corruption.

Two of its chairs were William Fitzpartrick, Onondaga County D.A., and Kathleen Rice, Nassau County D.A.  That’s two and three.  Cuomo promised that the Moreland Commission would be completely independent and could investigate anyone, anyone at all, even him, which lasted until it sent a subpoena to a company Cuomo used in his election campaign.

He immediately had his errand boy, Lawrence Schwartz, touch Fitzpatrick and quash the subpoena, and then shut down the Moreland Commission.  He pulled a quick Bush, announcing “mission accomplished,” then rolled up the carpets and turned off the lights.

The New York Times, inexplicably, noticed all this and called Governor Cuomo out. Continue reading →

The New York Times Room for Debate raises the question of whether the very old school method, reading the law, provides a “good way to avoid excessive law school debt and create different perspectives on the law?”  While the avoiding debt part is obvious, what it meant by “different perspective” is a bit less clear.  Are they asking, how does the law look to clueless, incompetent lawyers?

The participants range from Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, who shockingly thinks law school is critical and happens to have seats to fill at UC Irvine law school, to the great legal philosopher, David Lat, whose three hours as a lawyer preceding his glory at identifying tantalizing judicial divas by looking underneath their robes certainly provides a “different perspective” on the law, to Brian Tamanaha, whose Failing Law Schools book was a seminal work.

For those unaware, reading the law or apprenticeship as better describes it, was the normal way to become a lawyer a century ago.  In a simpler time, it was generally sufficient for a young man to apprentice with a more seasoned lawyer until he was ready to be entrusted with other people’s lives.  That was about 34,000 laws and a million opinions ago. Continue reading →

How to decide who gets to suffer the misery of Seattle cop Randy Jokela? Flip a coin.

It seems that Jokela either has the best nose for dope in all of Seattle, or he doesn’t care who suffers for his dislike of Seattle City Attorney Pete Holmes, who has been a strong supporter of marijuana legalization.  Either way, Jokela has been a remarkably productive cop:

In a Wednesday afternoon blotter post, Seattle Police Chief Kathleen O’Toole said she reassigned the officer to administrative duty after learning that he had written nearly 80 percent of all the marijuana tickets issued in Seattle between January 1 and June 30.

Sources confirm to KOMO News the officer’s name is Randy Jokela.

Continue reading →

Prosecutors walk into courthouses across the country with a breezy wave of their hand to the deputies and court officers who stand between Americans and their legal system.  They, of course, can be trusted, because prosecutors are the good guys.  But what about criminal defense lawyers?

In Fresno, criminal defense lawyer Harry Drandell walked into the courthouse that he’s been in a thousand times before.  Somehow, he managed not to do harm to anyone, provided you don’t consider defending the accused doing harm. Some do, you know.  It’s impossible to imagine the deputies at the gate didn’t know Drandell, didn’t recognize him and realize why he was there.  But security changed that day, and nothing is more important than security.  From the Fresno Bee:

Attorney Harry Drandell, 57, refused to let his wallet be scanned by deputies when he tried to enter the courthouse about 10 a.m., sheriff’s spokesman Chris Curtice said. Drandell then became angry and argued with deputies, who ordered him to leave the building. He refused, and scuffled with deputies when they tried to escort him outside. That’s when he was arrested and taken to Fresno County Jail.

He was booked on suspicion of trespass in a public building and resisting arrest.

Continue reading →

As the bar exam takers this week learned the hard way, technology’s promise isn’t always kept.  Sure, it’s shiny and, when it works, can serve as a tool that makes life a bit easier. But when it doesn’t, such as Examsoft’s bar exam failure to allow test takers to upload their answers, it turns into a nightmare.

And yet, those who pray to the tech god as the answer to all the problems mankind can create persist in their belief that somehow, some way, it’s the solution.  The ABA Journal will be holding a “hackathon” in Boston next week, this one dedicated to Access to Justice, which is the cute name given the disaster of people who can’t afford legal representation.

The theme of this hackathon is Hackcess to Justice – and there is prize money to be had. A total of $3,000 will be awarded to the top three hacks, with $1,500 to the winner, $1,000 to second place and $500 to third place. (Read more at this Challengepost page.) Continue reading →

The United States Department of Justice has grown fat and lazy.  Way back when, G-men had to go out and make their cases, find evidence of crimes and get their criminal.  It was hard work,  Then, they figured out a really cool trick: use their ever-increasing clout to beat people into submission with threats of life plus cancer sentences, and turn them into snitches.

Snitches are a panacea for the government. They made everything easy, gave them access to “evidence” that served any purpose they wanted and facilitated the arrest and conviction of any target of their choosing.  And they never had to leave the office.

So there they sat, munching donuts and making threats, as they scared the daylights out some poor schmuck, who then flipped to serve their new master, the Department of Justice.  Ah, the good life. For federal agents and prosecutors, at least. Continue reading →

Via Radley Balko, the story of Roger Carlos’ beating in San Antonio reflects a disconnect from reality that ought to shame Police Chief William McManus into, at the very least, a tearful, heartfelt apology.  But no, it doesn’t.  Not even close.

Roger Carlos was in the 10600 block of Westover Hills Boulevard taking photos of a building that will soon be home to his wife’s medical practice, when he was approached by three officers around 2:30 p.m.

The cops were looking for a drug suspect, Josue Gonzalez, who ditched his car in the parking lot of a restaurant a few hundred feet away.  No Gonzalez. One Carlos.

“All three of them started beating me on the head,” said Carlos, who still showed visible signs of the beating when he spoke with KENS 5 weeks after the incident.

“It was unbelievable. I couldn’t believe it was happening to me.” Continue reading →

Even after the dubious correction posted by the Gothamist about NYPD Police Commissioner Bill Bratton’s pronouncement of “what is democracy,” where the asserted duty to “respect” police morphed into a duty to “respond” to police, the dysmorphic vision of our relative roles in society remained manifest.  Not to feed into the anger and craziness, but the primary duty, the first responsibility, is Bratton’s to make his cops treat people with respect and courtesy, not the other way around.

This is dangerous turf to discuss.  For those filled with anger and hatred toward the police, as an occupying force subjugating the citizenry through the abuse of their authority and force, this feeds into the cries for resistance and violence.  If the cops are going to break into your house at night, or beat the living daylights out of you before figuring out if you’re the guy they even want to beat (and putting aside the entire question of the wrongfulness of the beating at all), then must we not resist? Must we not defend our lives, our homes, our families against this “band of violent thugs” called the police?

The adage heard too many times is “better to be judged by twelve than carried by six.”  It’s uttered by both sides, and a foundational justification for the First Rule of Policing.  But it’s hard, if not impossible, to argue that not all police are violent, malevolent, when a person finds themselves on the receiving end of arbitrary violence at the hands of the police.  Continue reading →

The anti-revenge porn advocates have put out an infographic with statistics that have found their way into articles on the subject and, ultimately, the discussion supporting its criminalization.  Pounding these numbers has proven a very effective tool in the argument that this is a misogynistic plot by evil men to viciously harm women, and has bolstered the pervasive narrative justifying the need to create new crimes to protect women.

Scott Stroud, an assistant professor of communications at the University of Texas, has put these claims under scrutiny in a Journal of Mass Media Ethics article, The Dark Side of the Online Self: A Pragmatist Critique of the Growing Plague of Revenge Porn.  By no means does Stroud diminish the ugliness of Revenge Porn websites or the harm they do, but he does parse the statistics to reveal that the narrative employed by advocates, and repeated by others who believed they were accurate, do not bear out.

There are two main reasons why a pragmatist inquiry would insist on a rich pluralism in understanding and critiquing revenge porn. First, many of these sites proffer in female and male victims, and some of the first revenge porn postings were of male musicians (Dodero, 2012, April 4). One might argue that there appear to be more females posted than males, and that there are more sites dedicated to females only than mixed-sex sites.* Continue reading →