Selfies are cool, and really cool selfies are really cool. Can you blame a kid for wanting to get that really cool selfie?  Well, yes. Yes you can when the price of being really cool is the destruction of an object that’s managed to survive intact for a couple of hundred years until some selfish fool decided that his pic was more important.

Via HuffPo:

Most museums have pretty strict rules when it comes to taking pictures and touching valuable, breakable objects. So you’d think actually climbing up and sitting on a statue wouldn’t even cross your mind. Right?

Wrong. In the quest for the ultimate selfie, one student at a museum in Milan, Italy, actually broke a statue after climbing onto its lap. Continue reading →

Yulia Abair was new to the United States, having recently arrived from Russia and married an American.  But she was determined to make something of herself, starting her own massage therapy business and studying nursing.  Already, you no doubt get the same sense as the government, that this is a woman up to no good.

But the bank tellers sealed the deal.

The bank tellers told investigators that the money had a “musty,” “mildewy,” or “dirty” odor, as if it had been kept in a basement rather than freshly drawn from an ATM. Prosecutors inferred from the odd smell that the money must have come from an illegitimate source and brought the full force of the federal criminal law down on Abair.

Abair sought to buy a home in Indiana. To do so, she needed the funds from the home she sold in Moscow and deposited into her Citibank account there. Citibank was too busy filming its new commercial about how much it loves us to allow the transfer to happen. The old account was in Abair’s maiden name while the US account was in her married name, a far too complex problem for a bank to address. So she did what she had to do to buy her house. Continue reading →

If a teacher asks a student to do something, most will comply.  That’s the nature of a trusting and compliant relationship, where students believe that those in positions of authority wouldn’t tell them to do something wrong.  But if the teacher is Kelly Racca at Clovis North High School in California, there could be a problem, according to a lawsuit.

From the Fresno Bee:

Two Clovis North High School students have sued the Clovis Unified School District, saying a school employee asked them to participate in a drug sting on campus without the consent of their parents or police.

The plan allegedly hatched by Kelly Racca last March went horribly wrong: after the drug buy, the two students were unlawfully interrogated by police and threatened with arrest, the Fresno County Superior Court lawsuit says.

It began when Racca convinced a female student to go undercover for her to buy marijuana Continue reading →

The story they tell is that there is no way to stop revenge porn except by the enactment of new laws that reflect a cavalier disregard for the First Amendment. That it also serves to elevate their profile in the process, well, can’t be helped.  Except, it’s nonsense, as shown by the $385,000 judgment obtained by Marc Randazza against revenge porn site You Got Posted, Eric Chanson and Kevin Bollaert.

The woman sued as “Jane Doe,” and the federal court for the Southern District of Ohio awarded her a judgment of $385,000 against Kevin Bollaert and Eric Chanson on March 18, 2014. The Court awarded the plaintiff $150,000 each on two child pornography claims, and $10,000 on her right of publicity claim. Additionally, the Court awarded the plaintiff $75,000 in punitive damages based on Bollaert and Chanson’s conduct. In total, the Court awarded $385,000 against Kevin Bollaert and Eric Chanson. Additionally, the Court prohibited Kevin Bollaert and Eric Chanson from ever again publishing her images.

They can’t be sued? There is no effective civil remedy?  There has to be a new criminal law, and it’s such a critical need that collateral infringement of free speech is just an unfortunate, but necessary, consequence?  Well, no. Not at all. Continue reading →

While this may appear to be beating a dead horse, what happened to Antwuan Ball was so outrageous, so contrary to every notion of due process, that it’s shocking. And yet, the D.C, Circuit Court of Appeals upheld it, without breaking a sweat.

To recap, the defendants were charged in a massive crack conspiracy, plus violent crimes. They went to trial, which took 8 months. The jury deliberated for more than two months before returning a verdict.  They acquitted on all counts, except a single distribution count of 600 grams of crack.  Great result? Not so fast.

At sentencing, the district court nevertheless found that all three defendants had engaged in the charged conspiracy and, based largely on that finding, sentenced them to terms of imprisonment ranging from fifteen to nearly nineteen years. Continue reading →

In a very lengthy law review article published in the Alabama Law Review, Northern District of Iowa Judge Mark W. Bennett (the “other” Bennett) and American University Lawprof Ira Robbins have done an empirical survey of the impact of the defendant’s statement to the court on federal sentencing.  It’s a disturbing study.

Allocution — the penultimate stage of a criminal proceeding at which the judge affords defendants an opportunity to speak their last words before sentencing — is a centuries-old right in criminal cases, and academics have theorized about the various purposes it serves. But what do sitting federal judges think about allocution? Do they actually use it to raise or lower sentences? Do they think it serves purposes above and beyond sentencing? Are there certain factors that judges like or dislike in allocutions? These questions — and many others — are answered directly in this first-ever study of judges’ views and practices regarding allocution.

Putting aside the methodologies, the backend of the article contains Continue reading →

Many videos have allowed distant eyes to learn that a police officer killed a person for no good reason, ending our slavery to conflicting statements about what happened and facile rationalizations of how it couldn’t be helped.  Before then, we could pick a side and believe or not, but we could never know.

The increasing availability of video has fundamentally altered the equation of mindlessly siding with probability by conclusively proving that police are sometimes wrong, and when they are, they tend to lie about it or manufacture absurd justifications to excuse their wrongs.  And people are increasingly unwilling to believe them no matter what our lying eyes tell us.

Then comes a video like the dash cam that captured the shooting of 70-year-old Bobby Canipe by York County, South Carolina, Deputy Terrance Knox. Continue reading →

The New York Times editorial chalks it all up to money.

The current Congress is the place where virtually all legislation, however urgent or reasonable, goes to die. Yet out of this stew of partisan mistrust and dysfunction there may come one promising and unexpected achievement: the first major reforms to America’s broken criminal justice system in a generation.

With two bills pending in Congress with bi-partisan support, the Smarter Sentencing Act, to cut some mandatory minimums for non-violent crimes, and the Recidivism Reduction and Public Safety Act, to promote rehabilitation with jail-time credit, we are poised for reform of some sort, and the Times raises the question of “why now?”

Reforms like these were unthinkable even a few years ago, when the Republicans’ longtime tough-on-crime dogma — echoed by Democrats who fearfully fell into line — drove irrational sentencing laws. Why have things changed so quickly? In a word, money — or the lack of it. Continue reading →

When Elie Mystal first told me that Breaking Media, the corporate overlord of Above the Law, was going to try to throw a conference about blogging, I wondered whether he was trying to ask me to give a presentation or sit on a panel, perhaps. Nope. They wanted nothing to do with me, though David Lat later offered me a 15% discount off the price of admission.

Painful though it was, I passed on Lat’s gracious offer.  And then Marc Randazza emailed me, that he was coming to New York to be on a First Amendment panel at the conference, and would I meet him for lunch.  How could I say no to my buddy, Marco?  When the conference rolled around, I asked Marc where we would go to lunch, and he replied, “The Yale Club.”

I know. Randazza at the Yale Club? I can’t even type those words without chuckling, but that’s where the conference was being held, and Breaking Media was paying for lunch there anyway. Continue reading →

The New York Times calls him a minnow, swimming with the sharks of Dewey LeBoeuf.  When the indictments were announced, everyone knew who the big machers at Dewey were, but Zachary Warren?  At the time, he was a fresh-faced kid out of Stanford working as a “client relations manager,” a non-lawyer paid to do what the big fish at biglaw told him to do. Big deal.

But since then, Zachary Warren went to Georgetown Law School, made law review, clerked for District Court Judge J. Frederick Motz in Maryland, and then a clerkship on the 6th Circuit for Judge Julia Smith Gibbons, and was admitted to the California and D.C. bar.  He has a job offer from Williams & Connolly waiting for him. Not too shabby.  Still, he got burned by the basics.

Mr. Warren may have been naïve, but he thought he was being questioned as part of a civil Securities and Exchange Commission investigation. He thought he might be a witness, and thus did not need a lawyer. Only too late did it dawn on him that he might be a target of a criminal investigation. Continue reading →