Among the magic words that police will use, and judges will approve, to justify a person’s seizure at will, perhaps the worst offender is “too.”  Too much of anything places a person outside whatever the officer feels is “normal,” thus raising suspicions.

Of course, it may be that the person stopped merely fails to conform to whatever expectations the officer has. Or has other things going on in his life that the officer is unaware of.  Or that it’s just an excuse to seize and pursue further investigation, since it’s just an itty, bitty word and only requires three letters to type it into a report. Most cops are up to the task. Continue reading →

Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman, to his enduring credit, cares about the reality that New York has far more poor than lawyers for the Legal Aid Society could ever hope to represent.  While his tenure as Chief Judge will be short lived, he plans to leave behind the machinery to make a dent in the gaping hole called “access to justice.”  From the New York Times:

Lawyers who work for big corporations in New York but are not licensed to practice law in the state will be allowed to do pro bono work under a new rule meant to ease an acute shortage of legal representation for the poor, the state’s chief judge, Jonathan Lippman, announced on Monday.

The rule change, which takes effect on Wednesday, is the latest in a series of measures that Judge Lippman has championed in recent years to reduce what he calls “the justice gap.” New York is the fourth state to let out-of-state lawyers working as counsel for corporations offer their services to the poor, without restrictions. Continue reading →

And the desire to invent the next cool thing moves forward. So what if it’s not really new? So what if it’s hardly cool? So what if it has the ability to cause all sorts of mischief? We love apps, and seriously, isn’t that what the digital world is all about?

Via the Tampa ABC affiliate:

TAMPA, Fla. (AP) — In a high-tech effort to battle crime, the Tampa Police Department recently launched a free smartphone app.

With a few clicks, city residents can submit anonymous tips to police and learn about unsolved crimes and “most wanted” criminals on their iPhones or Androids. Continue reading →

When I received the email from Dan Hull at What About Clients/Paris? it wasn’t hard to imagine the look of exasperation on his face.  There are few people in the blawgosphere who have had their content ripped off more consistently than Dan, and unlike the rest of us whose posts ended up on some scammer’s website, Dan’s was different. The thief always seemed to be a lawyer.  Lawyers just wanted what Dan wrote.

This time it was a young Dallas/Fort Worth criminal defense lawyer named , who had lifted wholesale one of Hull’s best known and most appreciated posts, his 12 Rules of Client Service. This was first posted in 2006 and may be the post for which Hull is best known. Continue reading →

Best line:

The right to divorce isn’t as upbeat a topic as the right to marry…

While discussion of gay marriage tends to focus on equality and the right of every person, no matter what their sexual preference, to be part of a loving relationship, the fact is that marriage isn’t merely an “institution,” but a legal status.  And when loving relationships turn less loving than they once were, the ending of that legal status can only be accomplished by another legal status, divorce. Continue reading →

When the video first appeared, it was more fuel for the fire of bad cops. Bad, bad, bad, because we know bad cops happen and, well, they aren’t always our favorite people. So we’re disinclined to consider the possibility that maybe the bad cop isn’t so bad. Mix in Dunkin’ Donuts and, well, it’s too perfect.

See what a bad cop Daniel Chu is? An official-ly person said so, and we want it to be so, and so we believe. Dan Halloran, a Republican and Libertarian, Continue reading →

The ABA Journal, striving for relevance, announced its seventh Blawg 100 Beauty Pageant.  The good news is that SJ is no longer in the mix.  Whether that means the brain trust has finally tired of my musings or SJ has been put out to pasture following its inclusion last year in the inaugural Blawg 100 Hall of Fame isn’t clear. Either way, it’s gone.

The bad news is that some of the contestants still don’t get the message, and pretend this somehow makes them important in the scheme of the blawgosphere.  Now, they matter. People will be impressed with them, their words will matter. Continue reading →

It’s like an implausible sitcom story that somehow worked, and all the other networks rushed to put on bad copycat shows of their own.  Take pre-school teachers, mix in some innocent little children and tie it together with sexual abuse and the ritual murders of babies and animals. Bingo: primetime.

Except it wasn’t a bad TV show, and it cost too many people too many years of their life until the show was canceled. The latest was Fran Keller, who was released after spending 21 years of her life in prison because of this ridiculous yet beloved scenario of ritualistic abuse.  And this came right on the heels of the release of the San Antonio 4.  This was the progeny of the McMartin Preschool Case, the fantastical scenario that gave rise to a hysteria that swept the nation, or at least parts of it.

It pitted children against horrible people who sexually abused them and murdered babies. Continue reading →

When a police officer shoots someone, there is invariably an investigation that follows.  Forget that the outcome of the investigation tends to be a foregone conclusion, and consider that they still go through the motions. Of course, the police strongly prefer when the officer’s story aligns with the facts, and this becomes even more important when the facts are shown via video.

There are, therefore, two primary routes to be taken following a police shooting: First, question the officer about what happened and why he decided to shoot to kill rather than protect and serve.  If he tells the truth, then his story will be confirmed by subsequent evidence, ranging from witnesses to the event to the omnipresent video. Continue reading →

The heyday of the Beastie Boys came well after my music appreciation days waned. But apparently they had some misogynistic song about girls back then which now embarrasses them. Punk rock had a way of doing that, songs that shocked in ways that should remind everyone writing today that their words will still be around later when they’ve grown up.

Thirty years later, GoldieBlox stole the song, put its own lyrics to it so that it could use it in a commercial to sell stuff to girls. There was a video of it available when it happened, but it’s since been removed.  Not because the song was pretty awful, both in the first place and the remake, and not even because the Beastie Boys were particularly beastie in demanding that GoldieBlox not use their song. Continue reading →