It’s not that the crime with which William Payne is charged will make him particularly sympathetic, even with the usual caveat that the guy is innocent because he has yet to be proven guilty.  Yes, we all adore the innocent, but the $25,000 bail was good enough to keep him coming back for more.

That is, until the assistant district attorney claimed he tried to run her down.  From the Buffalo News:

The Erie County assistant district attorney prosecuting Payne had claimed that he drove within a couple feet of her following the first day of his rape trial.

[Judge Kenneth] Case revoked Payne’s bail and declared a mistrial last Tuesday after prospective jurors waiting to be screened for possible selection in Payne’s rape trial overheard discussions at the Erie County Courthouse that the assistant district attorney was involved in some sort of traffic incident on Monday evening.

The assistant prosecutor said she had gotten a clear look at the driver’s face and identified him as Payne. Continue reading →

In a complaint eerily reminiscent of Rakofsky v. The Internet, Eric Turkewitz is being sued by former orthopedist turned defense expert witness Michael Katz because Queens Supreme Court Justice Duane Hart found Katz to be a liar.  And how, one might wonder, can we be certain, absolutely certain, that Justice Hart found Dr. Katz lying?  The complaint says so:

The surreptitious (and misleading) videotape should have resulted in an immediate mistrial, but Justice Hart inexplicably concluded that Dr. Katz lied concerning the length of the examination despite the fact that he clearly testified he could not remember how long the examination took. Justice Hart proceeded to berate Dr. Katz both on and off the record during numerous subsequent proceedings and inexplicably demanded that Dr. Katz contribute money towards a settlement with plaintiff. Justice Hart called Dr. Katz, among other things, a “no good liar” and a “thief” and implied that he was a “spy” with “little beady eyes.”

The problem is laid bare that Katz, having gotten slammed by the judge as a liar, Continue reading →

When word broke of the Kansas murders by 73-year-old White Supremacist Frazier Glenn Cross, the cries for hate crime prosecution immediately rang out.  After all, if anyone deserved to be prosecuted for a hate crime, it was this killer.

As Judge Kopf notes, the murders of three people were the height of irony.

[A] former “Grand Dragon” was going on a shooting spree at the Jewish Community Center and nearby retirement village in Kansas City. The shooter killed three people. Two were Methodists and one was Catholic.

The oldest victim was a physician and a grandfather who was taking his grandson, the second victim and a 14-year-old singing sensation, to an audition at the Center. The third victim was a Catholic woman who worked as an occupational therapist assisting the visually impaired. She was visiting her mother at Village Shalom. Thankfully, no Jews were killed or injured. Continue reading →

Once a week, an email comes in announcing the greatest way to get new “leads” ever. All I have to do is hitch my reputation to some internet scheme that blatantly lies to the public, and clients will flock to me.  One of my favorites is this:

So what if the scheme is deceptive, since it’s not me saying these things, right?  After all, some non-lawyer (or new lawyer) decided to dwell in the gutter of entrepreneurship, and they’re the ones running the scheme. The lawyer just signs up to get cases. He has no say about what the scammers are doing.

Well, thankfully, the Indiana Supreme Court held that the lawyer is responsible for the deceptive and unethical practices of the lead-gen website scheme to which he lends his name, his reputation and support. Continue reading →

Those charged with the security of the United States of America from threat say that the threats are real, and they are doing what they have to do to save us from harm. And I believe them.  Not because I know anything more than anyone else, but because there has been harm and there are forces out there in the mist that do not look kindly upon my homeland.

So why then am I not an acolyte of Stewart Baker?  Because this is nothing more than a “belief,” something I choose to accept in the absence of evidence.  It’s faith. And faith only takes me so far.  The government occasionally reveals stories of its successes, but they tend to show less success and more manufacture of a success where no threat would exist if the government had kept its nose out of it.

On the other hand, there are far too many stories of harm happening to good people at the government’s hand in the name of protecting us, and these stories provide foundations that don’t require me to squint hard, cover my ears and merely believe. They allow me to know.  And what I know isn’t pleasant. Continue reading →

There are three players in the school to conviction pipeline: the school. The police. The judge.  When one of the three demonstrates some element of objectivity and reasonableness, issues that arise with regard to students’ conduct manage to get handled without absurd consequences. But when the trinity defers to each other, absurdity ensues, as it did at South Fayette High School.

The underlying story, only touched upon here and the full details of which are provided at the above link, was that a student with an intellectual disability was being bullied in class, and the school failed to address it. He decided to record a day in class for his mother, after which he brought to his principal, Scott Milburn.  The principal heard the audio recording and required him to delete it, then called in the police.

Principal Scott Milburn called South Fayette Township police Lieutenant Robert Kurta to the school to interrogate her son in the presence of Associate Principal Aaron Skrbin and Dean of Students Joseph Silhanek. The defendant testified before Judge McGraw-Desmet that he was forced to play the audio for the group and then delete it. Love says by the time she arrived at the school, her son was surrounded by school officials and the police officer and was visibly distraught. She says Principal Milburn advised her that her son was “facing felony wiretapping charges” because he made a recording in a place with an expectation of privacy, and that Officer Kurta agreed. Continue reading →

Victor Medina sent me an email from his Apple iToy questioning whether anyone would have the nerve to solicit a sex worker at the wage being offered for a lawyer “position” on Craig’s list:

Seeking Attorneys for online legal services (pay – $2 per minute)

So I pulled out my handy-dandy calculator and ran the numbers. That would be $120 per hour, which would bring a smile to many an indigent defenders face.  Is this a problem?  Well, perhaps the problem is that, aside from the 5 minute minimum (again, with the calculator, that would be $10), there is no assurance that anyone gets any more.

The business offering this windfall is called LawModo, which explains its purpose in this video: Continue reading →

In his on-going deconstruction of D. C. Magistrate Judge John Facciola’s order denying the government’s warrant to search all the emails of its target, Orin Kerr at WaPo Conspiracy takes the court’s Second Memorandum Opinion to task. The government lost again, for having done nothing more than switching some language from Exhibit A to B, cosmetic changes as the judge called it.

Judge Facciola’s new opinion reminds me of why I think it is necessary for such reasonableness issues to be litigated ex post in the context of adversarial litigation rather than announced ex ante in response to ex parte warrant applications. The reasonableness of executing the warrant is something that ordinarily would be analyzed ex post in the context of adversarial litigation.

In his first order, the judge strongly hinted that the better solution was to allow the keeper of the emails, in this case Apple, to search for the government, then turn over only those emails that were responsive to the government’s need for evidence. Or, the government could just knock down Apple’s door and raid the place, if the warrant is approved. Continue reading →

In breathtakingly short order, the Third Circuit has issued its decision in United States v. Andrew Auernheimer a/k/a Weev.  Weev won.  Tor Ekeland picked him up last night, just in time to audition for the next Hobbit movie.

And lest anyone think that the Weev has grown soft and contemplative in the can, his twits (no doubt by his friends in Weev’s name, since Weev was in prison at the time) show otherwise. Continue reading →

Yet again, marketing guru Seth Godin has managed to put into words one of the things that has long pissed me off but defied my ability to explain.

Lock in is what happens once you have a lot of followers on Twitter… it’s not easy to switch. Same with all social networks. And operating systems too–it takes a lot of hassle to walk away from iOS.

Once a company has achieved lock in, one way to grow is to appeal to those that haven’t been absorbed (yet), to change the product to make it appeal to people who need it to be simpler, dumber and less powerful, because (the company and its shareholders understand) the power of the network becomes ever more irresistible as it scales.

Forget, for a moment, that he uses Twitter as an example. It doesn’t matter. His point is that you create website/product/system A and it works. It gains traction. People like it, use it, enjoy it. Continue reading →