Oklahoma was to execute Clayton Lockett and Charles Warner last night. Lockett went first. Things didn’t quite go as planned for Lockett, as reflected in this series of twits (to read from the bottom up) posted by Gideon.

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The South Carolina Supreme Court held that LegalZoom is not engaged in the unauthorized practice of law.  Before anybody cheers too loudly, it’s not because it’s such a great thing, but rather that:

“LegalZoom’s software acts at the specific instruction of the customer and records the customer’s original information verbatim, exactly as it is provided by the customer,” Newman wrote in the report, adding that its “does not exercise any judgment or discretion, but operates automatically in the same fashion as a ‘mail merge’ program.”

So it’s a piece of paper with legalish sounding words on it which is neither better nor worse than the input of the person using it. What a shock.  So LegalZoom did what companies do when they have a victory in court. They issue a press release, as noted by 3 Geeks and a Law Blog. Continue reading →

A bit of not too high tech is growing increasingly pervasive these days. No, not the video camera on cellphones, but the Automated License Plate Reader.  It’s got its benefits, like the ability to capture massive quantities of data about plates and their locations. But our reliance on tech, on science, has its downside as well, which usually manifests in blind reliance that a machine can’t be wrong.

Via Tim Cushing at Techdirt:

The mistake prompting this guns-drawn approach of Molner’s video could have been made by anybody. The ALPR read a “7” as a “2” and returned a hit for a stolen vehicle. The hit also returned info for a stolen Oldsmobile, which clearly wasn’t what Molner was driving. But that could mean the plates were on the wrong vehicle, which is also an indication of Something Not Quite Right.

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Reliable sources confirm that Stewart Baker is not a parody poster at the WaPo Conspiracy, but is in fact a real person.  Thus, his latest post, elevating the opinion of FISC Judge Rosemary Collyer over the opinion of Judge Richard Leon in Klayman v. Obama is not, I repeat, not meant as satire.

But what has to hurt is Judge Collyer’s dead-pan takedown of Judge Leon’s hyperventilating prose. And in a parenthetical, no less.  Summarizing Judge Leon’s reasons for not following Smith v. Maryland, Judge Collyer writes:

The NSA program, on the other hand, “involves the creation and maintenance of a historical database containing five years’ worth of data” and might “go on for as long as America is combating terrorism, which realistically could be forever!” Id. (italics and exclamation point in original).

Yes, indeed they were. Which raises two questions about Judge Leon’s opinion:

1. Is this the first judicial opinion rendered unpersuasive by its punctuation?

2. Was his CAPS LOCK key broken?

Hey, Stewart, did you draw a tin foil hat on Judge Leon too? Good one, Stew. Continue reading →

One of the recurring issues addressed here over the years has been how police and the disabled create a mix that ends with conflagration, and invariably the disabled person being the one who gets burned.  Or beaten. Or tased. Or worse.

For someone who is deaf, the problem is magnified for practical reasons. First, because they cannot hear a command, and therefore fail to comply, which appears to a cop as either a threat or disrespect, either of which is a good reason to inflict pain.

Second, they can’t explain their disability quickly and in a manner that cops won’t find threatening.  When cops are in “command presence” mode, they aren’t interested in learning about what the perp has to say. They want compliance, and they want it now. Everything else, like “hey, cop, I’m deaf,” can wait.

For these reasons, it’s critical that police receive training in dealing with the disabled, and particularly the deaf and hard of hearing. Continue reading →

It was less than effective to raise the question before the 9th Circuit, and that was with Eugene Volokh making the best possible argument out of a monumentally trivial, yet insignificantly irrelevant, line in an opinion where she otherwise won. And so what does Crystal Cox do?  Wait for it…

She does a pro se petition for certiorari to the Supreme Court. Oh, yes. Yes she does.

The sole purpose is to have the Supreme Court redact the sentence that offends her from the opinion.  And so naturally, she raised a few questions: Continue reading →

In the afternoon, Dr. SJ and I drove over to Jekyll Island, a quaint little place with some beautiful old houses and a pier with a place called “Rah Bar.”  We thought it was either a cute name or a Georgian typo.  As it turned out, it was both.  We ordered clams on the half shell, which appeared cooked, and a plate of crawdads.  We also ordered some libation.

As we sat there, discussing the relative virtues of Friedrich Nietzsche and quantum mechanics, an email came from a friend.  He was a new lawyer, but not a young one. And he told a story of his frustration and empathy, about how a client was treated fairly by one judge, while another was burned.  The idea that it was all so random, so pointless, was breaking his heart.  He will remain nameless for now, but can out himself if he wants. I would recommend he keep his identity private, but that’s just me. Continue reading →

SDNY Judge Jed Rakoff hasn’t been afraid to ask questions and challenge the “way things are,” which is most assuredly a virtue in an Article III judge. He sees the problem, according to his speech at USC Law School:

“Plea bargains have led many innocent people to take a deal,” Rakoff said. “People accused of crimes are often offered five years by prosecutors or face 20 to 30 years if they go to trial. … The prosecutor has the information, he has all the chips … and the defense lawyer has very, very little to work with. So it’s a system of prosecutor power and prosecutor discretion. I saw it in real life [as a criminal defense attorney], and I also know it in my work as a judge today.”

Five years? I wish. But still, his sentiments are clearly on target, that we’ve become a system of plea bargains, with “only 2 percent of cases in the federal system go to trial, and 4 percent of cases in the state system go before a jury,” and the prosecution dictates what that bargain will be. Continue reading →

The idea was floated four years ago.  At the time, I thought the idea had some merit, at least enough to warrant further consideration.  On the surface, many thought the idea was demeaning and unprofessional.

Maybe legal services from your local Wal-Mart is the right idea.  Maybe it’s got the seeds of the right idea.  Maybe Wal-Mart, via economy of scale or some of its other tricks, can allow lawyers to provide quality legal services at a significantly lower cost to consumers.  I’m not saying it can, but I am saying it’s time to start thinking seriously about such notions that are immediately written off as “absurd” by the bar, especially the formal groups who love to spout platitudes but never hold the hand of a client whose life has been ruined by the beloved system, “not perfect but the best ever created.”  We’ve got a platitude that forgives us every failure.  Spouting platitudes doesn’t do much to help clients.

The Wal-Mart lawyer is now a reality. Axess Law has opened offices in a couple of Wal-Marts in Canada.  Continue reading →

If nothing else, you’ve got to love the name.

While the “advice” may be pedestrian, shut up and be polite, one has to wonder whether a drunk driver is really in a position do much reading, no less thinking.  And should they blow?  Most lawyers say emphatically “no,” but the video doesn’t reveal whether that piece of advice, the most critical question confronting someone stopped for drunk driving, is given. Continue reading →