As a follow-up to my earlier post about Eugene Volokh’s post-win motion to sanitize the 9th Circuit’s opinion about his pro bono client, Crystal Cox, having “apparently” engaged in some dubious behavior, a brief post to add the latest amicus curiae submission, this one on behalf of a fellow named Martin Cain.

In attempting to excise the Court’s reference to her underlying extortionate conduct from the opinion (Petition for Rehearing), Cox apparently provoked Mr. Randazza to provide the Court with more definitive evidence as to her conduct, directed at himself and at others. In her opposition, Cox asserts that the MBRR findings presented by Mr. Randazza – as they were at the time – were merely “proposed” and thus should be disregarded. (Cox Opp. to Mot. for Leave to File Amicus Brief) Amicus hereby seeks to present this Court with the MBRR’s final Findings of Fact, Conclusions of Law, and Final Order (“Order”).

Amicus here is the actual victim referred to in the MBRR’s proposed finding of facts and conclusions of law (Randazza amicus Brief, Exhibit. B). While it is true that those were merely “proposed” findings of facts and conclusions of law, Amicus is in possession of the final Order. Continue reading →

For those who care to debate the heady question of whether law is a business or profession, of the merit of non-lawyer, who have neither an ethical duty nor fiduciary relationship, ownership, meet Emanuel Roy and Peter Mayas.  They’re lawyers, but of the sort that follows the business path rather than the profession path for which I often advocate.

From the Sun-Sentinel, via Walter Olson at Overlawyered:

Patrick Coulton’s lawyers ripped him off to the tune of $275,000 and left him to rot in prison.

The bizarre legal soap opera began in March 2008 when Coulton was arrested on federal drug and money-laundering charges for smuggling cocaine and marijuana.

His family hired Roy, who was a lawyer in New York and Florida at the time, and Roy brought his friend, Mayas, a Plantation attorney, on board too. Continue reading →

A recent column in the Harvard Crimson by student Sandra Y.L. Korn raised a firestorm by challenging the foundation of academic freedom:

When an academic community observes research promoting or justifying oppression, it should ensure that this research does not continue.

The concept isn’t novel, the elevation of political correctness over the search for unpleasant truth. I had this weird inkling that it was related to something here long ago, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.  I shrugged it off. At my age, forgetting things is like breathing.

Then an email arrived. Brief and unsigned, the only indication of its sender being its gmail address of “lattice.theory.” Continue reading →

Having followed Kerri Kaley’s struggle to enable herself and her husband to fight charges of dubious merit since the circuit, an old question arose: Would the law that grew like a fungus in the bad, old drug days of forfeiture law that gave rise to such discreditable decisions as Monsanto, be perpetuated now that they were being applied to people who society didn’t inherently despise?

The Supreme Court answered the question in Kaley v. United States, a split decision by Justice Elena Kagan: Hell, yes!

In this case, two indicted defendants wishing to hire an attorney challenged a pre-trial restraint on their property. The trial court convened a hearing to consider the seizure’s legality under Monsanto. The question presented is whether criminal defendants are constitutionally entitled at such a hearing to contest a grand jury’s prior determination of probable cause to believe they committed the crimes charged. We hold that they have no right to relitigate that finding. Continue reading →

It’s not as if New York Law School Professor Robert Blecker hadn’t staked his claim as the intellectual leader of the Kill ‘Em Now crowd already.  He’d been out there, pounding the pavement to drum up business in advance. So when the review copy of The Death of Punishment, published by Palgrave Macmillan, arrived, I was all ready to rip it to shreds.

It opened as I would have expected of anyone who sought to take ownership of the joys of capital punishment, immediately forcing me to wonder what trauma happened to Blecker in his formative years to stunt his intellectual growth and leave him an emotional cripple.  Maybe it was the simplistic notions instilled in him as a child, eye for an eye, revenge, retribution?

But a lousy thing happened on the way to hating Blecker’s book.  Aside from the inexplicably warped view of capital punishment, there was a grudging respect for him. He was no mental midget, not by a long shot. This was a very smart man. Continue reading →

Anyone who has ever sought to persuade another that their feelings on a subject are irrational knows that it’s a waste of time. Feelings aren’t based on reason; they’re feelings. Ultimately, it always devolves into, “well, that’s how I feel,” and the time spent discussing it is lost forever.

We used to be a society that embraced the “sticks and stones” mantra, which has since fallen into disrepute.  For many, it’s been replaced with the assertion that hurt feelings are every bit as real and painful as broken bones, and for them, this is not an issue worthy of discussion. That’s how they feel.

But the substitution of tangible harms with emotional harms has become a driving force in the call for new crimes outlawing and punishing things that give rise to hurt feelings. Continue reading →

An oft-repeated meme on the interwebz, and certainly one of my favorites, comes from a Peter Steiner cartoon, first published in The New Yorker on July 5, 1993.

Bearing in mind that Steiner recognized, more than 20 years ago, that we rarely have a clue we’re dealing with online, he was prescient.  But just how prescient is made clear by Glenn Greenwald at The Intercept: Continue reading →

Criminal defense lawyers are often accused of being callous, if not despicable, toward the victims of our clients’ crimes.  We know they happen, and we may well feel the pain caused to others, but we shut that out of our mind in order to fulfill our function to our client. We have a job to do, and we do it.

But in Tarrant County, Texas, television station WFAA-8, an ABC affiliate, did something unusual.  After Stewart Richardson* offered his apology, via a reporter, to the parents of young boy, 2 years old at the time he was left in a vegetative state because of Richardson’s drunk driving, the boy’s mother, Loubna Khader, asked WFAA if they would accompany her to the jail, with cameras shooting, to confront Richardson directly.

The station agreed, and the result was an extraordinary video. Continue reading →

Derek isn’t the only Jeter making news around these parts, even if these parts are extended to reach Bloomfield, New Jersey. Marcus Jeter was looking at five years, facing charges of “trying to elude [police], resisting arrest, [and] assaulting a police officer.”

What makes this remarkable is its unremarkability. No one, but no one except his lawyer and those who cared about him, would have blinked an eye had Marcus Jeter gone down on the charges.

It all began when police were called to Jeter’s home in Bloomfield, New Jersey.  After a brief conversation, Jeter left his residence as no charges were filed.

Jeter was driving down the Garden State Highway when everything suddenly changed. Continue reading →

Bill Keller will soon step away from the New York Times to lead the Marshall Project and save the world, but as a columnist, the opportunity to start early is open to him and he’s already taken his first/parting shot:

I’ll begin by making his excuses. The president’s powers in this area are limited. The action (and there is a lot of it right now) is mostly at the state level. His first term was entangled in economic crisis and health care. This president has faced tireless and often petty resistance from the Republican House on almost every initiative. Historically Democrats have risked being Willie-Horton’ed if they don’t maintain a tougher-than-tough-on-crime posture. And African-American constituents — who are also disproportionately the victims of crime — are not necessarily bleeding-heart voters. In short, it was probably naïve to assume that Obama was going to be the Criminal Justice Reform President.

There is little choice but to begin with excuses, Continue reading →