One of the earliest posts at SJ was about the case of Martin Heidgen*, a 25-year-old who, drunk and driving the wrong way on the Meadowbrook Parkway, caused the decapitation of a beautiful 7-year-old flower girl, Katie Flynn, on her way home from a wedding, along with the driver of the wedding limo, Stanley Rabinowitz. It was a horrible death, the sort that raised bile in anyone’s throat.

That post was written March 1, 2007. Yesterday, more than six years later, the New York Court of Appeals ruled on the case.  In the interim, similar cases came along, suffering from the same legal flaws, such as Franklyn McPherson, another drunken kid who killed.

Other things happened in the interim as well. The Legislature passed “Katie’s Law,” creating the crime of aggravated vehicular homicide.  And the Court of Appeals decided People v. Valencia, Continue reading →

The first I learned of this was a few years ago from Mike at Crime & Federalism, though I can’t find the link now (Here it is, thanks Mike).  Now, it’s all over the news. The knockout game.

I imagine it’s some variant on stupid, powerless youths attempting to substitute brute force and cowardice for their feelings of worthlessness.  Coming from a criminal defense lawyer, and some will most assuredly need a criminal defense lawyer if they aren’t killed before reaching that point, please know this:

You will get no sympathy. You will get no admiration. This is a dehumanizing blight, and it will come back to haunt not only those who do it, but as it appears to be a game played (at least for now) by young black men, your age and your race.  A lot of people worked very hard to try to end racism, and many died for it. It was not so you could devolve into animals for some sick amusement and pretend machismo.

As much as I hate to put it this way, no one will weep if you do this and terrible harm comes to you.  This is about as sick as it gets. Your moment of glory doesn’t make you tough or manly, but a pimple in need of popping, and there will be no shortage of people willing to do so.

And for any others who think this is funny, your encouragement of this disgrace will come back to haunt you as well. Any fool can sucker punch someone.  It proves your haters right. That is the only thing this accomplishes. Don’t do it. Don’t tolerate anyone else doing it.

Occam’s Razor is a principle of logic that says the simplest solution that accounts for all known facts is usually correct.  It’s neither absolute nor necessarily easy to figure out what is fact or assumption, given many people’s tendency to replace reality with the crutch of “common sense,” but this isn’t about the joys of lex parsimoniae.

Whether it’s a picture or the story that goes with it, or a combination thereof, when what purports to be “known facts” are so inherently contradictory or nonsensical that Occam’s Razor can’t be applied, there is a problem.  That’s what comes of Tim Cushing’s post at Techdirt, and it’s very ugly: Continue reading →

Another life rule: Never pass up an opportunity to quote George Santayana.

Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

The legal bubble burst in 2007, when talk of New York Biglaw to $190,000 changed to will Biglaw survive? Since then, things haven’t recovered back to 2007 levels, so the Future of Reinvent the New Normal of Law crowd have indulged in a laundry list of changes supported by empty rhetoric, prognostications of flying cars with ABS (the brakes, not the Alternative Business Structures used to conceal the unlawful practice of law), and people with no institutional memory deciding that it all makes sense to them.

At the Wall Street Journal Law Blog, however, Jacob Gershman was struck by the analogy between what happened with dentists and what has been happening with lawyers over the past six years. Continue reading →

Far be it for some northerner to question the choices made by the fine people who hum Sweet Home, Alabama.  If you people want to prove Neil Young right, knock yourselves out.  But Yankee-entitlement allows me to get down on my fellow New Yorker, Nino Scalia, and so I shall.

What the hell is wrong with you, Nino?

The Supreme Court of the United States denied cert in Woodward v. Alabama, where a jury, by 8-4 vote, decided not to kill Mario Woodward for murdering police officer Keith Houts.  In most places, that would be the end of it. But not Alabama. Continue reading →

When the Supremes decided Padilla v. Kentucky, that non-citizen defendants were entitled to be advised of the immigration consequences of a plea before deciding to take it, they answered the pressing question of whose job it was to do so with the anticipated “dump it on the defense lawyer.”  After all, it was a burden, and who better to burden?

In a trio of cases, the New York Court of Appeals has held that immigration consequences are no longer “collateral” to a plea (which apparently suggests that somebody in Albany finally put away the pocket part that includes Padilla), but rather integral to the decision to cop out.

Our resolution of this issue is grounded in the right to due process of law, the bedrock of our constitutional order. That guarantee, most plain in its defense of liberty yet complex in application, requires us to strike a careful balance between the freedom of the individual and the orderly administration of government. Continue reading →

What do the following people have in common?

Retired Federal Judges

Robert J. Cindrich was appointed to the federal bench in 1994 and served as a United States District Court Judge for the Western District of Pennsylvania for ten years.

David H. Coar was appointed to the federal bench in 1994 and served as a United States District Court Judge for the Northern District of Illinois for sixteen years.

William Royal Furgeson, Jr. was appointed to the federal bench in 1994 and served as a United States District Court Judge for Western District of Texas and the Northern District of Texas for nineteen years. Continue reading →

Years ago, before the world wide web was even a twinkle in Tim Berners-Lee’s eye, clients would come to my office and tell me what happened during their interaction with police.

“Why did you do that?” I would ask.

They would explain to me some variation of the “lady down the street” told them that’s what they should do, because that was the law.  The law.

But now we have the web, the internets, all the accumulated information of humankind at our fingertips, and surely with unfettered access to every statute, decision, article, post, commentary, everyone now knows better?  The law, now open 24/7 for your reading pleasure. Continue reading →

Jim Dwyer, who is the closest writer to Jimmy Breslin around, admitted in the New York Times to committing a crime.

Walking down Eighth Avenue a few weeks ago, I made sure my backpack was fully zipped shut. Inside was a modest stash of pot, bought just an hour or so earlier. A friend knew someone in that world, and after an introduction, then a quiet, discreet meeting, I was on my way to the subway. Never before had I walked through Midtown Manhattan with it on my person. There were four cookies in vacuum-sealed pouches — “edibles” is the technical term — and then a few pinches of what was described as “herb.” Continue reading →

Four days after James Holmes shot up an Aurora, Colorado movie theater, Fox News reporter Jana Winter revealed Holmes’ private diary showing him to be utterly insane.  Had the prosecution accepted Holmes’ plea of guilty, this would have been a footnote to the story, but this was big and guilty wasn’t good enough. They needed a 13th dead man, and so the case went on.

At first, the government demanded that Winter reveal her source, as somebody clearly did the dirty by revealing evidence to a reporter in the face of a gag order. But things changed, when it became clear that the private diary was disclosed by a “corrupt detective” whose credulity will be central to the defense at trial.  The defense may not have much, but the identity of who the liar within law enforcement may be is as critical a piece of evidence for the defense as there is. Continue reading →