Siobhan Householder was told to wait in the room, so she did.  She was at the Summit County, Ohio, domestic relations court, waiting for a warrant to be vacated after missing a hearing, where she appeared of her own accord. No big deal, at first.

Sitting there with her purse, another bag and a plastic cup of soda, Householder took some Tylenol for a tooth infection while waiting.  All hell broke loose. Via Ohio.com:

After the deputy was there about two minutes, Householder said she took two Tylenol pills along with a sip of soda. She was taking a third when the deputy confronted her, she said.

“He said, ‘What are you taking?’ and I said, Tylenol,” she recalled. “And he said, ‘Spit it out’ and I said, ‘I can’t.’ I meant to say I can’t spit it out because I had already swallowed the other pills.

“But I didn’t even get that part out before he just yanked me up and threw me down on the ground and was trying to dig these pills out of mouth.

“And there was one [pill] in there and I couldn’t even get it out because he kept shoving his hand in my mouth and squeezing my face and pulling my hair at the same time.”

Wrestled to floor.

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Following on the heels of reason number 8, to learn that old white men are mean, stupid and just don’t get it, comes reason number 7 via USA Today.

[A]ccording to a study published by the Electronic Journal of Human Sexuality, nearly 70% of college students admit to having sent or received sexually suggestive text messages. Apps like Snapchat, make it easier than ever for students to share nude or partially nude images.

When one old white man went to college, students had sex. Lots of it. We also had cameras, but we didn’t necessarily take pictures of it.  I know, without pics, it didn’t happen, but that was a time where people had actual real life experiences, and had yet to realize they were supposed to share them with everyone they knew with visual proof. Continue reading →

In a letter to the editor at Newsday, a good question is asked about stop & frisk under new NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton as opposed to stop & frisk under old Commissioner Ray Kelly:

According to the Newsday article “Kudos go to Kelly” [News, May 10], New York City Police Commissioner Bill Bratton says he is comfortable with the number of stop-and-frisk stops now.

The numbers in the article, however, make me wonder whether the NYPD is heading in the right direction: 14,261 stops in the first three months of 2014 led to arrests or summonses in 20 percent of the cases. That compares with 99,788 stops that led to arrests or summonses 10 percent of the time in the same period in 2013.

That means under Commissioner Ray Kelly, there were 9,979 “good” stops, versus 2,852 for the same period this year. Aren’t we safer with more good stops?

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Paul Alan Levy of Public Citizen fame is one of those lawyers I’ve long admired and, sometimes, envied. He gets to spend his days taking on good causes for no better reason than they’re good causes.  For those of us who need to earn a living, the romanticism of representing for no better reason than because it’s right is the stuff of dreams.  And thankfully, there are guys like Paul around to do what they do.

When Paul took on the cause of Jennifer Choi, who was sued by Phoenix auto repair shop ToyoMotors for being dissatisfied with them, he stood on high ground.

In mid-2009, Jennifer Choi posted a scathing Yelp review of a Phoenix repair shop called ToyoMotors, contending that her car was diagnosed as needing repairs that other shops assured her were unnecessary, and that its fees were excessive by comparison with its competitors.  Four years later, ToyoMotors went on the offensive.  It signed on with “Demand Force,” a digital marketing operation that elicits positive feedback from customers to spray around the Internet.  A look at ToyoMotors’ page on DemandForce reveals a feel-good version of Yelp, featuring a slew of positive reviews, the sort of web page we would see more often if the recent European Court of Justice decision, allowing people to purge the web of unfavorable information they would like to be forgotten, were to take hold in the United States.

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Senator Joseph Robach (R-Rochester) has introduced a bill, S-7304, to make it unlawful to release the mugshot of a person unless and until the person is convicted.  From SYR.com:

Even if a person is acquitted, the mugshot can still circulate online for years. Some people argue a mugshot can change the outcome of a case.

“Viewing someone’s photograph after the fact, sometimes months after the fact, there’s a danger of them identifying in court the person whose photograph they saw instead of the person who actually committed the offense,” said attorney Donald Kelly with Tully Rinckey PLLC.

Innocent or guilty, once a photo hits the web, it can be saved by nearly anyone with access to a computer.

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When Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the administration’s disgraceful handling of clemency would not define the president’s last few days in office, there was applause. Sure, a bit of cynical snarling about the disingenuousness of finding religion in a lame duck term, but still. Anything that helped people (and even Jim Cole admitted that sentences were unduly severe, despite his role in advocating for them in the well) was better than nothing, a cynical ploy though it might be.

But at HuffPo, Megan Quattlebaum pours some cold water on the joyous festivities by reminding us that there are 2,785 applications for clemency, people who have damn good reason to seek the mercy of the executive, that are growing moldy while the DoJ and White House are throwing themselves a party over how merciful they are, at least in the press.

Late last month, the Department of Justice announced a laudable initiative to seek out nonviolent drug offenders with long prison sentences whom it will consider for clemency. The initiative is open to federal prisoners who meet six criteria, including that they have served at least ten years of their sentence and likely would have received a substantially lower sentence if convicted of the same offense today. The goal, according to President Obama, is to help “restor[e] fundamental ideals of justice and fairness” to our penal system by releasing those who “would have already served their time and paid their debt to society” had they been sentenced under current law. Continue reading →

For those whose fond law school memories have yet to fade completely, you may still have some tiny recollection of admin law’s peculiar crutch called Chevron deference.  The notion is that if Congress hasn’t spoken directly to an issue, the courts will defer judgment to that of an administrative agency because they have magical voodoo powers.

It’s one of those legal fictions where the courts presume the agency to know how to administer its law because of its specialized knowledge, as opposed to its members being appointed because they shared a dorm room with a politician when both were back at Rosemary Hall.  It relieves a judge of the responsibility to think, to rule and to be responsible for his decision, by allowing the judge to shirk responsibility and shift the blame to the agency.

Such an animal exists within the federal criminal law sphere as well, called the United States Sentencing Guidelines Commission. No, it’s not quite a perfect analogue to an administrative agency, nor does anyone mention Chevron deference, but there is the same awed expectation of voodoo, the facile presumption of mad skilz, that allows judges to pass the buck. Continue reading →

Of the handful of case names familiar to just about anyone with a reasonably full set of teeth, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka stands tall.  It was announced from the bench 60 years ago today, May 17, 1954.  It changed our nation.

The opinion was written by then-new Chief Justice Earl Warren, former three-term California Governor and Attorney General, a Republican appointed by Dwight D. Eisenhower.  Also on the Supreme Court was Robert Jackson, former Attorney General and Chief Nuremberg prosecutor, and mentor to 1952-3 law clerk William Rehnquist.

An old buddy of mine, John Q. Barrett, one-time fed turned crim law professor at St. Johns Law School, has maintained the Jackson List for the past generation.  As a member, I’ve had the enormous good fortune to receive John’s Jackson emails, with details, stories and background about  Justice Jackson.  This timely story arrived last week, which I share in full: Continue reading →

In a New York Times Room for Debate essay, Tim Wu sums it succinctly:

At Thursday’s F.C.C. public meeting, Chairman Tom Wheeler declared, with Lincolnesque firmness, that he would stand second to no one in his defense of net neutrality.

“I will not allow the asset of the open Internet to be compromised,” he said. Citing his experience as an entrepreneur and venture capitalist, he said he knew personally what artificial barriers to entry look like. There will be no fast lane, he declared, “I don’t like the idea that the Internet could be divided into haves and have-nots, and I will work to make sure that does not happen.”

Disaster averted, as Wheeler declares the internet to be safe from the machinations of smacking down those will refuse to grease the tubes with green, so that everyone, anyone, can access the web on the same footing. But…

[T]here is a gap between his speeches and the actual rules. The rules say, for example, that “our proposed no-blocking rule would allow broadband providers … to negotiate terms of service individually” with content sites provided that they are commercially reasonable, and don’t harm Internet openness.

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Pandering to fear and ignorance is far easier than trying to think hard or, harder still, explain something thoughtfully.  The limit may be one’s ability to explain well, but more often it is the ability and willingness of others to listen, to think, to care about anything beyond their transitory self-interest.  And when it comes to self-interest, there is nothing more likely to trump reason than safety.

So when North Dakota State University Police and Safety Office Director Ray Boyer decided to ban its budding fencing club from campus, the pitch was easy:

“What is more at issue is a society that has been conditioned to violent and often deadly behavior as a result of individuals’ use of weapons on campuses and in schools, that has led to a public reporting of these incidents with an expected police response to use deadly force to end the threat.”

“When the public sees someone displaying a sword in public in a hostile manner with another individual, it is reasonable for me to believe today that they would call police with an expectation that police respond with equal or greater force.”

“Sometimes the safest way is simply to have no weapons, real or perceived, on campus.”

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