It came via a twit by FAMM’s Mike Riggs, retwitted by Radley Balko. and was sufficiently alluring to compel me to read:

Federal appeals court rules driving with your hands at 10 and 2 is suspicious behavior and thus grounds for a stop.

Well, that’s pretty friggin’ awful, and the link was to Huff Post Crime, so I clicked.  And what do you know, it was an article by Larry Bodine.  Larry Bodine?  Well, yeah, that Larry Bodine.  Failed lawyer turned failed marketeer, turned editor of failed Lexis-Nexis’ Lawyers.com, who now describes himself as “journalist lawyer,” providing “legal news for regular people.” Continue reading →

For those who have never had the pleasure, visiting a client in jail is not one of the more pleasant aspects of a criminal defense lawyer’s job.  Jails smell weird. The screws are not always the most accommodating of people. It wastes a huge amount of time, as a five-minute conversation takes hours to accomplish. And if you’re a woman, don’t go near the joint with an underwire bra or provocative clothing. Oh no.

As an aside, it’s not entirely pleasant for clients either.

So as signs were posted in attorney visiting rooms alerting us to the miraculous convenience of video chatting with inmates, who couldn’t be happy?  After all, most of us have computers, and most of our computers have cameras in them these days. And we could sit at our desks, or in Starbucks sipping a mocha frappucino as we felt deep empathy for our client’s eating a sandwich of American cheese and the finest institutional bologna available, and engage in meaningful, privileged communication.

Except Travis County jail. Continue reading →

The White House and Department of Education have gone full court press because, as announced through a star-studded video, we have a big problem.

Whether it is a big problem is hard to say, even though the video takes it as a given.  The just-released report of the White House task force to Protect Students From Sexual Assault begins by saying so, and simultaneously saying that they need to begin a study because, well, they actually have no clue whether it’s a big problem or not. Continue reading →

At Sentencing Law & Policy, Doug Berman received an email from someone who works in the federal courts.  While it’s not quite explained, it appears that Doug credits the email as being from someone who is indeed an “insider,” even though it’s posted under the pseudonym “Joe FedCourt.”

The entire email is definitely worthy of a read, maybe two, as it’s quite hard to follow, but it includes this:

As if it is their place to step in and question ANY Article III judge.  This only follows upon what we have seen this past year, with Defenders running to the Hill, talking to DOJ about clemency, and discussing indigent defense with the press.  The mechanics of how justice is administered in this country, in terms of the allocation of resources and the scope of jurisdiction, is exclusively the purview of the Judicial Conference of the United States and should be recognized as such.  The Conference could have gotten more money for judges’ chambers and court staff if it weren’t for people like the Defenders sucking up all the oxygen last summer and fall!  Not to mention magistrates undermining confidence in the Conference as people wonder who the hell is running the Judiciary!!!

Continue reading →

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.

Continue reading →

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.

Continue reading →

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 →