Unlike my buddy Josh Blackman, it doesn’t strike me as a huge victory that the 1st Circuit reaffirmed the right to record police in the public performance of their duties. So while we can find something positive to say about the decision in Gericke v. Begin, it’s more in the Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead mode than anything new. Yeah, a right we possess remains a right we possess. Woo hoo! Well, it could have gone the other way too, so that’s something to celebrate.

But the opinion, after reaffirming what was already the law, put a lot more effort into the caveat:

This is not to say, however, that an individual’s exercise of the right to film a traffic stop cannot be limited.

Boom. There it is, the grand right in a few black letters, and then the lengthy explanation detailing how to circumvent and eliminate it. Thanks for the roadmap, bro. Continue reading →

Following the horrific mass murder by Elliot Rodgers in Isla Vista, California, and his rant of hatred toward women, discussion erupted about how most mass murderers were male, and therefore the “issue” wasn’t guns, or mental illness, but gender.  This had been raised before, but gained little traction. Because of the express misogyny this time, and the connection was easier to see, it was different.

A discussion on twitter ensued, where some people who are otherwise deeply concerned with such issues as civil rights but who had turned into censors because men were mass murderers.  The discussion ended quickly, when the idea that correlation does not prove causation, post hoc ergo propter hoc, was wholly unfamiliar. When logical fallacies become the basis for a discussion, it’s time for me to leave.* Continue reading →

In one of his occasional literary forays not involving four-letter words, my buddy Marc Randazza gets in touch with his inner Luddite at the Legal Satyricon and has an epiphany.

Perhaps I sound like a neo-Luddite, but I think the time has come for a little bit of retrograde thinking when it comes to technology. We are in a bad relationship with a mistress made of silicon, and maybe it is time to break up with her.

Is this technology really making our lives better? I remember being a young man who spent a lot of time at the beach and not a lot of time working. AT&T had an ad campaign that said “Have you ever sent a fax from the beach? You will.” It was presented to us as a promise. It was presented to us as a gift, that we would be able to spend more time at the beach, because we could work from anywhere and we would be freed from our desks and chairs and monitors.

Both promises and curses come wrapped in the same bow. Like Marco, I too remember that ad campaign, and had a similar reaction.  Why would I want to fax from the beach?  Fax. What a quaint concept. But I digress. Continue reading →

Josh Blackman, who attends the future of the new normal of reinvent law-type conferences, brought this back:

I recently attended the excellent CodeX FutureLaw 2014 Conference, which for the first time, had a solid discussion on the implications of legal ethic to potential innovations in the law. Serving as the bearer of bad news from the ABA was Will Hornsby.

Will summarizes the ABA’s position on UPL–in short, this is an issue for the states, not the ABA to decide.

Two fundamental regulatory obstacles limit online legal service models – the unauthorized practice of law and the ability to capitalize legal services. What we all need to realize clearly and at the beginning of this conversation is that the practice of law and the rules and laws that pertain to these issues are regulated in the US at the state level. This is the difference between the US and the UK and Australia.

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The biggest target was Lulsec hacker John Hammond, who ended up catching 121 months, but now that it’s time to bring Hector Xavier Monsegur’s work for the government to a close, his 5K1.1 letter reveals his “extraordinary cooperation.”

A prominent hacker set to be sentenced in federal court this week for breaking into numerous computer systems worldwide has provided a trove of information to the authorities, allowing them to disrupt at least 300 cyberattacks on targets that included the United States military, Congress, the federal courts, NASA and private companies, according to a newly filed government court document.

The hacker, Hector Xavier Monsegur, also helped the authorities dismantle a particularly aggressive cell of the hacking collective Anonymous, leading to the arrest of eight of its members in Europe and the United States, including Jeremy Hammond, who the Federal Bureau of Investigation said was its top “cybercriminal target,” the document said.

When Hammond left his sentencing courtroom, he held his first in the air and proclaimed; Continue reading →

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One mystery is why cops decided that 8th grader, Javier Payne, needed to be hassled in the first place.  When news first broke, the claims were the usual ones made to justify the damage when there was nothing else to claim:

A spokesman for the police department said two teenagers were arrested, ages 13 and 14, at approximately 11 p.m. Officers charged both of the suspects with resisting arrest, obstructing governmental administration and assault.

But when a cop puts a kid through a plate glass window, you have to say something.

The 14-year-old boy sat on the stoop of the Hookah Shop in the Bronx, blood pouring from his chest and filling his lungs, and thought: This is what it’s like to die. Moments before 11 o’clock Saturday night, the boy, Javier Payne, had been smashed through the store’s plate glass window by a police officer who had stopped him after an altercation with a man on the street, witnesses said.

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Delicate little flowers aren’t born, they’re made.

— Abraham Lincoln, Second Battle of Bull Run, 1862

A master’s student at the University of Wisconsin, Anthony Llewellyn, didn’t like his professor, Sally Vogl-Bauer. She was, he maintains, mean to him.  So mean that following his dismissal from the University, he made a YouTube video. [Trigger Warning: Really lousy video ahead]

If the video is any reflection of his communication skills, the question isn’t whether Vogl-Bauer was too mean, but whether there’s any rigor in Wisconsin’s admission standards. Nonetheless, they let Llewellyn in, and he took Vogl-Bauer’s required course.  He did not think well of his professor. So, he let it be known. Continue reading →

Three guys whose work and ideas I respect wrote that the presumption of good faith is wrong.  It began with an article by Andrew Cohen at ThisWeek, and was followed up by Gideon at A Public Defender, then Radley Balko.  Much as I may appreciate their sentiment, the foundational error of posts cannot go unnoticed.

Cohen started by writing:

When I was a young man learning the law, I was taught about the “good faith” in which all public officials are always and forevermore presumed to be acting. This presumption, this so-called “implicit covenant,” is an axiomatic cornerstone of both civil and criminal law. And why not? Our courts are busy enough these days without requiring judges to peer into the motives and the biases of the parties moving through our justice systems.

What a tidy but self-defeating fiction the “good faith” presumption has revealed itself to be over my 25 years in the law. The more I study criminal justice, the clearer it is to me that public officials on every level of our justice system are wholly unworthy of the benefit of the doubt the law ascribes to their actions.

While his 25 years in the law aren’t quite the same as my 30+ years, considering his involve writing about it from the outside while mine are formed by being smacked around in the trenches, I can’t disagree that public officials have done as much as possible to make us cynical about their motives.  Continue reading →

It started with Arielle Lipsen walking into a DEA raid at her family’s smoke shop, Purple Zone, in Alpine, Texas. It ended, to the extent it’s anywhere near an end, with Arielle’s letter of apology, a image of which appears on the Brewster County Sheriff’s facebook page. In between, a friend of Arielle’s, Tom Cochran, posted a picture and explanation of what happened to her.

“She was having a conversation with a female agent, and trying to give the agents the lock code,” Ilana Lipsen claimed. “She was trying to tell them there was no key, but a code. There were too many officers and about half of them were doing nothing, then this one agent charged at her, threw her, kicked her legs out from under her, and when she was falling, her leg brushed up against his leg. That’s when he said ‘you’re trying to beat a federal agent’ and shoved the butt of his rifle into her neck.” (via BigBendNow)

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