When the medical examiner announced that the death of Ronald Reagan’s press secretary, James Brady, 73, was a homicide, he opened a national wound.  He was shot in 1981, 33 years ago, by John Hinckley, who was trying to assassinate Reagan to impress actress Jodie Foster.

Hinckley was tried for attempted murder and found not guilty by reason of insanity.  But that was attempted murder. Now that the medical examiner has concluded that Brady’s death was homicide, a new crime exists, and raises the question of whether Hinckley should be tried for it.  In the interim, Hinckley’s sanity has improved.

Hinckley, 59, has been confined to St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington and has received psychiatric treatment since his acquittal in 1982. Since 1999, he has been allowed outside the facility, with his unsupervised visits to his mother’s home in Williamsburg, Va., gradually expanded to 17 days.

The legal question of whether Hinckley can be convicted of murder is tricky.  Eugene Volokh does an interesting analysis for the legal issues/stumbling blocks to conviction. Continue reading →

This is one of those meta posts, in response to angry emails sent me about why I’m such a horrible person.  One lawyer wrote to condemn me for occasionally including my own war stories in posts while denying other lawyers the same opportunity.

Why are your stories more worthy than mine?

Well, they aren’t, but you’ve asked the wrong question.  The problem isn’t that your stories are unworthy, but that this is my blog.  Tell your stories all you want on your blog.

My story was directly on topic and added your beloved “illumination,” yet you deleted it.

Well, it wasn’t quite as on-topic or illuminating as you think, but that’s not really the issue.  The issue is that every lawyer has war stories, and every lawyer loves telling their war stories.  When we sit around in the bar after a hard day in court, we’re all raconteurs, regaling each other with the bizarre and the ridiculous. Oh, how lawyers love to tell stories. Continue reading →

In a way, the story of the guy who called himself Stephen G. Dickerman, lawyer, and took a $10,000 retainer and charged $400 an hour is pretty funny.  He managed to convince clients in his Brighton Beach office that he was a lawyer. He managed to get himself admitted to practice in the Eastern District of New York as a lawyer. He managed to glom a profession by usurping the name of a lawyer who ceased practicing in 2008, and nobody knew.

What does that tell you about lawyers?  What does that tell you about judges?  What does that tell you about the people who hand over money to lawyers?

The New York Times article offers little insight into what gave him away, but lauds his “skill” at impersonation. Until he got caught.

Law enforcement officials say they are not certain who the accused man is; they only know that he is not Mr. Dickerman. The actual Stephen G. Dickerman was a lawyer for more than 40 years, but has not renewed his license since 2008. Court papers say the impostor then used the real Mr. Dickerman’s attorney registration number to set up shop for himself, charging $400 an hour for legal advice. Continue reading →

Within minutes of learning of the suicide of Aaron Swartz, the internet knew exactly what pushed a brilliant young man to the edge:  The government singled out Swartz, unique among all others because of his hacktivist politics, and a United States Attorney decided to destroy him to further her political career.

His family said so. Even Harvard lawprof Larry Lessig said so.  The myth was born, and grew to the size of a behemoth, in a flash.  Those of us who were so cruel as to suggest that the certainty of the hacktivists in their uniqueness were derided for not appreciating how Swartz was different.

But there remains a side of this tragedy that the geek community misses. Government overreaching, “bullying” as Lessig calls it, didn’t start on the day Aaron Swartz was arrested.  The eulogists, friends, watchers from the Hacktivist side seem to think this was an affliction that happened only to Swartz. Continue reading →

While much is written about the innocents caught up in the criminal justice system, reality is that many who find themselves in custody have good reason to be there.  Among this group, unfortunately, are people who suffer significant mental illness. They can be violent. They can be irrational. They’re crazy. For police, dealing with crazies is part of the job. At least it should be.

When a crazy ends up in a precinct lockup, the next step is to call in EMTs to transport a person to a hospital for treatment.  In a very real sense, that this is the route chosen reflects a grasp that the mentally ill aren’t necessarily criminals, but people in need of medical treatment.  It may not be a fully developed grasp of the difference between a person acting out a psychotic episode and a criminal, but it’s better than nothing.

Yet, one would hope that the recognition that a person in custody is crazy would stem the urge to react to their craziness in kind.  That wasn’t the case at the 67 Precinct in Brooklyn, where Emergency Services cops, theoretically trained to handle such situations, lost it big time.  From the Daily News: Continue reading →

Of the many abused words in the current social media lexicon, few are as rife as “rights.”  What was once described as desires or wishes has morphed into a right, and gotten remarkable play from sympathetic ears, for whom the rhetoric drowned out the noise of the machinery necessary to make it happen.  The EU’s “right to be forgotten” has proven quite squeaky.

At Techdirt, Mike Masnick writes about how the ethereal “right to be forgotten” has gummed up the Google works:

Google notes that the process is entirely one-sided and they only get information from the person wishing to delete information from search engines:

We generally have to rely on the requester for information, without assurance beyond the requester’s own assertions as to its accuracy. Some requests turn out to have been made with false and inaccurate information. Even if requesters provide us with accurate information, they understandably may avoid presenting facts that are not in their favour. As such, we may not become aware of relevant context that would speak in favour of preserving the accessibility of a search result.

Continue reading →

It was a suppression hearing before the late EDNY Judge Gene Nickerson, with co-counsel Lynne Stewart.  I have no recollection of who the assistant was.  The nurse practitioner from the emergency room was on the stand.  Judge Nickerson had a disconcerting habit of spinning his chair so the back was facing the courtroom. Every once in a while, someone would say “Judge?”, and he would answer, “I’m listening.” It pays to be sure.

As the nurse practitioner began to explain, to a reasonable degree of medical certainty of course, that the broken bones in the defendant’s face could be explained by the bruise on his skin in the precise shape of a Glock, Judge Nickerson spun around in his high-backed chair and showed keen interest.

He then seized the questioning, to show that sometimes a fellow can fall of his own accord, strike the pavement that was sadly beneath him, and get a bruise in the oddest of shapes.  The judge explained that he knew all about this. He knew science, and no nurse practitioner was going to convince him otherwise. Motion denied.

The New York Law Journal has a story of judges who are taking a “crash course” in science. Continue reading →

Put enough exceptions next to each other and you come out with a decision like State v. Jeremy Kelly, a case of such extraordinary wrongfulness that Gideon at A Public Defender has twice now dissected it in great detail.  Gid gives the short version of the undisputed facts:

The relevant facts are important because they are preposterous: the police were looking for a man named Gomez, for whom they had a warrant for violation of probation and had allegedly received a tip that he may be armed. They, while cruising in the South End of Hartford near his residence, observed two individuals walking on the sidewalk.

Because there was a gas station at the end of the street that was known to be a spot for drug sales, the officers concluded that the men had come from there. They then decided that one man fit the description of Gomez; the other was Kelly. They observed the two men walk up the driveway of a house and while one “turned his foot as if about to run” they continued to walk slowly to the rear.

Deciding, based on this, that criminal activity was afoot, the police ordered them to stop. Kelly informed [them] that he lived there, but that didn’t matter. The police ordered them to “come here”, at which point they ran. Kelly was subsequently arrested and charged with possession of drugs. They guy they thought was Gomez was actually not and was instead a fellow named Burgos.

Continue reading →

A comment about the arrest of Ramsey Orta, the guy who shot the video of Eric Garner’s killing, was notably unilluminating from the perspective of the case, but quite clear about the commenter’s bias:

is anyone really surpirsed by this turn of events ??

really ?!!?

It’s always obvious to those for whom it’s always obvious.  It makes for an easy, simplistic view of the world.  This view is the same for those on the other side of the street, who similarly see no questions, no issues, no doubts.   That role today is being played by retired Jersey City Police Captain Robert Cubby:

We have watched in disbelief as the worst nightmare a police officer can have comes true. An NYPD officer applied what was falsely called a choke hold. Moments later, the perpetrator gasped for air and died in the hospital. Continue reading →

At the WaPo Conspiracy, Eugene Volokh recounts the questioning of FIRE’s Greg Lukianoff by United States Civil Rights Commissioner Michael Yaki at a briefing on sexual harassment law in education.

Yaki, who now holds a significant position in the framing of our institutional vision of civil rights, was a former senior adviser to Rep. Nancy Pelosi, and member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.  For those counting political affiliations, this should make it clear.

The issue under discussion was whether college age youth, in light of the Supreme Court’s holding that their brains are still developing and therefore should not be subject to the death penalty, are not similarly particularly vulnerable to harm from hurtful speech such that free speech should take a back seat to campus speech codes designed to protect them.

COMMISSIONER YAKI: But it has nothing to do with policies [likely a mistranscription of “politics” -EV]. It has to do with science, and it has to do with the fact that more and more the vast majority, in fact I think overall in bodies of science is that young people, not just K through 12 but also between the ages of 16 to 20, 21 is where the brain is still in a stage of development. Continue reading →