Remember the Halcyon days when a cop had to claim a young black man made a furtive movement before he could justify the use of force?  Good times, but they’re in the past. We now have a new, even more nuanced excuse for a takedown, the “dehumanizing stare.”



And the puppy too?  It’s not entirely clear how 14-year-old Tremaine McMillian could simultaneously be holding his puppy and clenching his fists, but if the police say so, who are we to question? 

Tremaine McMillian learned a hard lesson about what it means to be young, black and armed with an intimidating stare. Turns out that you don’t even have to commit a crime to get choked out. All he did was shoot a few “dehumanizing stares” at officers who slammed him to the ground and put him in a choke hold. Police claim he was clenching his fists and looking menacing but the teenager claims that he was busy bottle feeding a puppy at the time.

“All of that body language alone is already letting the officers know that this is a person that now is obviously getting agitated and can become violent,” said Miami-Dade Police Detective Alvaro Zabaleta.

Zabaleta told CBS that the police report from the incident doesn’t mention a puppy.

“Of course we have to neutralize the threat in front of us,” he said. “And when you have somebody that is being resistant…that’s the immediate threat. At this point we’re not dealing or concerned with the puppy.”

Does Zabaleta watch himself, read his words, afterward and cringe, think aloud: “could I have sounded like I was more full of shit?”

Mothers, tell your children that they are not only to be kind and gentle with their new puppies, and not to raise a clenched fist when a police officer is anywhere in view, but also to avert their eyes, lest the police feel dehumanized, perhaps even bullied, and then do what they have to do to “neutralize the threat.”

And keep your cameras at the ready, because nobody would believe this utter load of crap being offered by Det. Alvaro Zabeleta and the Miami-Dade police. That they would be so ridiculously shameless isn’t so much a reflection on the police, as it is a reflection on how passive, how willing to bite on any nonsense they feed us, they view the public. 

Can’t you hear them back at the station, saying “tell them the kid gave us a ‘dehumanizing stare’ and we had to take a 14-year-old kid holding a puppy down.” 

“Come on, who would be stupid enough to believe that?”

Hey, you bought the “furtive movement.” Why not?

Update: And if you think Miami-Dade cops are twinkies for trying to justify their misconduct on Tremaine McMillian puppy-handed dehumanizing stare, how would they react to this:
 

Whenever I write about the corporate crime issues, many of those whose interest is flamed by the David versus Goliath fight of constitutional rights and the weak talking truth to power hit the back button on their browser as quickly as possible. They’re conflicted by whether their hate of the government is stronger than their hate of corporations. If there was a button for “a pox on both your houses,” they would be pounding it hard.

Just chill out, as there are significant parallels and lessons to be learned from how the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) has compelled multinational corporations to behave like sniveling sycophants at the beck and call of the government, and how this has empowered the Department of Justice to dictate its will to everyone.  I know, stories about the FCPA never involve a CEO’s face assaulting the boot of a federal agent, and there is rarely anyone to cheer for, but what happens to the most powerful tells much about what happens to the least.

From Joe Palazzolo at the Wall Street Journal Law Blog, an interview with “Nathaniel Edmonds, who recently left the Justice Department’s FCPA unit for Paul Hastings LLP.”

Though we don’t know how often it happens, the Justice Department sometimes  drops Foreign Corrupt Practices Act cases without bringing charges, even when prosecutors find potential violations of the law. Such an occasion is known within the agency as a “declination.”

Mr. Edmonds, who was a supervisor in the FCPA unit, told Law Blog in an interview that there has never been a public instance of a company receiving a declination when the conduct in question was found independently by the Justice Department. In other words, a  company increases its chances of a declination geometrically by telling on itself.

For starters, Mr. Edmonds says in a new client alert , a company has to have a strong and nimble compliance program in place — one that evolves with best practices. It’s the best proof of a company’s commitment to the law, which bars bribery overseas.

With that foundation, what happens when a company finds a potential problem on its own?

Mr. Edmonds’s client alert is instructive here: stop the bribes, preserve the evidence and make sure the internal investigation is properly “scoped” — meaning that a company must rummage through the appropriate  business lines and subsidiaries, without straying too far or stopping short.

Given the pace of FCPA prosecutions in recent years, and the billions with a B in penalties assessed by the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission, [how to get a declination] is a question worth asking.

But how could they? I gave this company my life and made them a fortune, and they sacrifice me at the first chance they get?  I thought they loved me?

Not all potential [FCPA] problems, however, are appropriate for disclosure. After investigation, allegations of misconduct may not result in a determination that illicit activity has occurred. Problematic payments may not be sufficiently material to amount to an FCPA violation…

Prematurely attracting the government’s attention may, as a practical matter, shift the burden to the company to prove the absence of a corruption problem. Enforcement officials may feel the need as a matter of basic human nature to seek some type of resolution to a case where they have invested significant time and effort. Companies need to weigh the potential benefits of cooperation against the significant costs of initiating a potentially unwarranted government investigation.

At Volokh Conspiracy, Eugene offers an unusual paradigm to explain why the  new rules of engagement for university discipline being forced down the throats of higher education by the DoJ and DoE aren’t, as has been argued here, totally insane.  Among other things, it requires colleges and universities receiving federal funds to employ a “preponderance of the evidence” standard in determining guilt in their disciplinary proceedings.

First, let’s think of preponderance of the evidence, clear and convincing evidence, and proof beyond a reasonable doubt as probability thresholds. Preponderance of the evidence means that the university should expel or discipline the accused student if there’s just a bit more than a 50% chance that the student is guilty. Clear and convincing evidence might be seen as requiring a 75% or 80% probability, or thereabouts. Proof beyond a reasonable doubt might be seen as requiring a 95% probability. These are oversimplifications, to be sure, but they are probably the most helpful way of looking at these standards.

And each of these probabilities might correspond to a number n in the statement that “better that n students guilty of sexual assault remain at the university, with no discipline imposed, than one innocent student be expelled or otherwise disciplined.” Proof beyond a reasonable doubt would be something like “better that ten students who have committed sexual assault remain at the university unpunished than one innocent student be expelled.” Proof by clear and convincing evidence would be something like “better that three guilty students (but no more) remain at the university than one innocent student be expelled.” Proof by a preponderance of the evidence would be something like “better that one guilty student (but no more) remain at the university than one innocent student be expelled.”

Of course, in criminal cases the standard is proof beyond a reasonable doubt. In criminal cases, a person’s liberty or life is usually at stake, so the legal system does say, “better than ten guilty people go free than one innocent person go to prison (or be executed).” But that this is true in criminal cases doesn’t tell us whether the same should be true when something less serious — both in terms of tangible loss and in terms of public condemnation — is at stake.

That’s why in civil cases, the more likely than not standard is routine. If you sue me, alleging I breached a contract or injured you in some way, you can prevail under this standard, even if the result is that I am financially ruined.

Should we say “better that 10 rapists be allowed to stay at the university than one innocent student be expelled”? I don’t think so. “Better that 4 rapists be allowed to stay at the university than one innocent student be expelled” (the clear and convincing evidence standard)? I doubt it, partly because we don’t say this even when a lawsuit risking a defendant’s entire life savings is involved, or when the loss of a job and perhaps a career is involved.

Why is Scalia so enraged? Three reasons. First, that’s just his way. Second, he’s offended as a textualist—a judge who believes first and foremost in sticking closely to the wording of a statute. And third, like I said, this is the latest battle in a long-standing war.

–Emily Bazelon, Slate, 2013

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court widened what it called the “gateway” to reviewing claims of actual innocence that are made long after the one-year deadline expires. It’s a 5-4 decision, split between liberals-plus-Kennedy and conservatives. The opinions, by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Justice Antonin Scalia, read like a pitched battle in a long-simmering war. At the end, Ginsburg succeeds in opening what she calls a “gateway” to court for innocence claims that blow by the one-year deadline.

In theory, a majority of the Supreme Court has now agreed to such an exception. “Actual innocence, if proved, serves as a gateway through which a petitioner may pass,” Ginsburg wrote. But she also warned that “the exception applies to a severely confined category.” It is not enough for Perkins to assert that he has evidence of his innocence. He also has to show that “it is more likely than not that no reasonable juror would have convicted him in the light of the new evidence.”

In dissent, however, Justice Scalia says Congress should be furious. The court is not interpreting AEDPA, Scalia says, but rather rewriting it. SOS to Congress: “Judicially amending a validly enacted statute in this way is a flagrant breach of the separation of powers.” Attacking Ginsburg’s point that allowing for an exception to AEDPA’s one-year deadline merely brings federal law into line with the states, Scalia rockets into the derision stratosphere: “With its eye firmly fixed on something it likes—a shiny new exception to a statute unloved in the best circles—the court overlooks this basic distinction, which would not trouble a second-year law student armed with a copy of Hart & Wechsler.”

Oh, wait, one more insult: He also calls Ginsburg’s interpretation a “blooper reel.” (Ginsburg called all of this “bluster.”)

For Scalia, the moral of the story is clear: Innocence doesn’t—and shouldn’t—always win. “This court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is ‘actually’ innocent,” he wrote in 2009. Scalia lost that time, too. But in the end, the man he was writing about—Troy Davis—was executed for the murder of a Georgia police officer even though seven of the nine witnesses who testified against him at trial had recanted.

At the top of New Hampshire license plate, it boldly reads, “Live Free or Die.” This is an important lesson. Never believe license plates, as a Dover man learned when he applied for the “vanity” plate, COPSLIE.  From WMUR9 :

The Department of Motor Vehicles refused to issue a plate to a Dover man in 2010 that read “COPSLIE,” calling the text “insulting.” The DMV cited a state statute that says a vanity plate can’t be “ethnically, racially (insulting) or which a reasonable person would find offensive to good taste.”

Months later, the man was again denied “COPSLIE,” but the DMV approved his second choice, which can be read to say, “Great government.”

“If you praise the government, that’s OK. You can get a plate that does that,” he said. “If you criticize the government or agents of the government, that’s not OK. That’s how the petitioner is trying to frame his argument here.”

In the New Hampshire case, the state Supreme Court is doing something uncommon, soliciting opinions from people not directly connected to the case. The American Civil Liberties Union is planning to present an opinion, saying the state DMV made a mistake.

2006 when a single DMV employee decided arbitrarily that the word was offensive after consulting only the Urban Dictionary, an online source which defines words through user-generated content. Because someone on the Urban Dictionary defined “hoe” as “whore,” Mr. Junge’s plate was revoked.

The Court agreed with the ACLU’s arguments that the DMV cannot make First Amendment decisions arbitrarily. Instead, the DMV must show substantial evidence proving that a requested plate is inappropriate. While the Urban Dictionary may be an entertaining website about the English language, the Court acknowledged that it is not a reliable source for decisions about acceptable speech. In relying solely on the Urban Dictionary to deny Mr. Junge’s license plate, the DMV violated the First Amendment. The ACLU of Nevada applauds the Nevada Supreme Court for its decision to permit the “HOE” plate.

Women often argue that we would live in a kinder world if only they held the weapons. Not so in Sacramento, given how an unnamed female cop beat an unnamed male, proving that a woman can be every bit as bad a police officer as a man.



The video first appeared on CBS13, and the  Sacramento Bee picked it up from there:

According to a statement from the Sacramento Police Department, the incident began when the suspect entered a nearby store and began speaking unintelligibly. Fearing for her safety, a female employee in the store called 911. When officers responded, the suspect, who had left the store, reentered and attempted to barricade himself inside with the employee.

In the process of extricating him from the store, the suspect became combative and was able to “physically overpower” one of the responding officers, continues the release, thus justifying the need for pepper spray, baton strikes, and additional assistance from other responding officers.

Combative is one of those words that police use that doesn’t mean what you think it does. Shielding one’s face from baton blows? Combative. Using one’s hands to stop a police dog from crushing one’s throat? Combative. Trying to prevent a female officer from beating one to death? Combative. See how that works?

Unfortunately, the unnamed male was combative, by police standards.

Shortly after taking the man into custody, the release states, officers “noticed that he was unresponsive,” at which point he was taken to a hospital and pronounced dead.

Not that they killed him, but that the officers “noticed” that he was dead. They are trained to be observant, you know.  This is the imaginary conversation that ensued.

Hey, Sally, do you notice that this fellow isn’t moving?

Why no, Chet, I hadn’t noticed. But now that you mention it, you’re right.

I wonder why, Sally? He was moving before, when I was holding him on the ground so you could beat him repeatedly with your baton.

Not a clue, Chet. Sometimes, these things happen. He probably had hypertensive heart disease. A lot of men his age die of heart disease, you know.

Yeah, Sally, you’re probably right. He should have paid more attention to his diet.

There is a somewhat natural inclination to draw an analogy between what happened here and what happened to David Sal Silva in Kern County, but to do so would be to ignore two salient details. The first is that the woman who took the video got it into the hands of CBS13 before the police seized it as evidence. The second is that the officer with the baton was a woman, which means the unnamed man died a more gentle death in the hands of the police.

There’s a new scraper in town.  When the word came in, I strolled over to Bob Ambrogi’s  Law Sites to see who it was.  The name is , and no, I won’t make the play on its name because it’s too easy. If this seems like deja vu all over again, it is. Scraper USLaw, run by some kid who goes by the name Gregory Chase while sitting on the couch in his mother’s basement hoping to earn enough off his website to pay for his Cheetos fix, tried to get away with this years ago. It failed.

So naturally, someone new comes along thinking they’ve discovered an untapped resource, someone else’s content, and can parlay that into cash in their pocket. The mechanics are simple: Take a blawg’s RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed and use it to recreate someone else’s content on your website. Maybe there’s a link back to the original, maybe not. Maybe there’s acknowledgement of the author, maybe not. Regardless, they glom the full content created by someone else, add nothing to enhance its value, and offer it up.

The day after Ambrogi noted its existence, the obvious question was asked.

Afterwards, a reader emailed me asking a key question my post did not address — that of whether Law Ratchet is violating the copyrights of the publishers and bloggers whose stories it is picking up.

For many of the articles Law Ratchet picks up, it is republishing them in full on its own site, complete with images.

In my mind, there’s no question that a blogger grants an implied license to the content in an RSS feed. However, because it’s implied, I’m just not sure of the license terms. So, in theory, it could be an implied license to permit aggregators to do whatever they want.

On the issue of copyright law, we did invest a fair amount of time researching the matter. I would hazard to guess that you are familiar with the copyright issues given your experience with media law. We carefully analyzed the issues and suffice it to say that we believe that Law Ratchet is well-positioned on the merits of the legal issues.

Suffice? No, “you say so” doesn’t suffice. In fact, what you “believe” is worthless.

Will and I embarked on this venture to create a better experience for lawyers to consume and discover legal news. In doing so, our goal has been to work with content providers and to forge mutually beneficial partnerships with authors and publishers. In fact, we believe that the only way Law Ratchet will succeed in the marketplace is with their cooperation and partnership.

© 2007-13 Simple Justice NY LLC. This feed is for personal, non-commercial & Newstex use only. The use of this feed on any other website is a copyright violation. If this feed is not via RSS reader or Newstex, it infringes the copyright.

Scott,

 

The content from Simple Justice has been removed from Law Ratchet.  If you would prefer that the first few lines of your posts appear, with a link to the original article, please let me know.  We will also reach out to other authors who have concerns about if and how their content is presented. 

 

Almost 2 weeks ago, we filed a registration with the U.S. Copyright Office to appoint an agent to receive DMCA notices.  Although we haven’t received confirmation of the registration yet, we will very soon put up a copyright section on our website to allow parties to communicate with us.  As we communicated before, we will respect the wishes of authors or publishers who requests that their content be removed.

 

Law Ratchet does not generate any revenue: we do not charge a subscription fee, we do not deploy ads, and we do not resell content.  We will announce in the near future how we intend to partner with authors, many of whom are excited by the benefits of reaching a larger audience. 

 

Apologies for any misunderstanding and for not having a clear process up earlier for you to request your content to be removed.

 

Regards,

Derek Chau

CEO, Ratchet Technology

Scott,

 

I want to sincerely and personally apologize.  I acknowledge that my first reply was insufficient.  We clearly operated in a way that caused you and others to be upset. That certainly wasn’t our intention and we are sorry.  We acknowledge and respect the concerns raised by you and your readers.  In addition to an apology, we are taking steps to address these concerns.

 

First, you were absolutely right to call us out on “scraping” content from some websites: for some sources, we had partial RSS feeds and scraped the remainder of the article from the source website.  We stopped doing that today and you were right for drawing attention to it.  We honestly didn’t appreciate or anticipate the effect on authors.  Now we do.  Because of your comments, that stopped today and we no longer scrape.   The portions of article that had been scraped in the past will be removed from our site.

 

Second, we recognize that we did not have adequate copyright notices page on our website; while we filed for the DMCA registration about two weeks ago, it hasn’t come through.  We are working now to improve the webpage to more clearly include contact information for copyright-related concerns.

 

Third, we haven’t adequately communicated to you and the broader community what Law Ratchet actually is and how it works.  Putting any sales pitch aside for the moment, Law Ratchet is a pre-populated RSS reader, and similar in function to the many other RSS readers available on the market.  Our distinguishing characteristic is that we went through many blogs and put them in relevant categories so that it would be easier for a typical user to pick up and use right away.  We genuinely (perhaps naively) figured that most authors would be excited by the prospect of having their RSS feeds discovered by more people.   Because of the concerns you have raised, we will work to improve our communication with content publishers.  We will also provide an opt-out option to make it easy for them to have their content removed from the site.  

 

Again, my apologies.  We are working diligently to apologize to and respond to all authors who have expressed concerns.  We welcome sincere and open dialogue.

 

Regards,

Derek Chau

I accept Derek’s apology, his good will representation that his new business will not continue to engage in scraping, and Law Ratchet will base its future efforts on contributing to the blawgosphere rather than being a parasite, feeding off it for his own benefit. To his credit (and to my great surprise given his first email), Derek chose not to “double down,” and it must have been a very difficult thing to do. I respect that he faced up to what was very wrong here and dealt with it.

As far as I’m concerned, this apology ends the matter. I plan to make clear to Derek what things he should not be doing if he doesn’t want to make his business a pariah and defendant. Feel free to let him know any thoughts you have as well.  While I have serious doubts that his business model will work, I wish him well now that the scraping is behind him.

In an homage to those who died in the service of their nation, the  New York Times published an article and image that struck home.



The perfect uniform, laid out as if someone was within it, evokes the sense of perfect loss, perfect emptiness, that one feels toward the fallen Marine who will be put to rest in it. One cannot help but feel the loss, and sentimentality, as well as the rightness of honoring the man for whom the uniform is prepared.

Yet, it also raises a troubling notion. 

The soldier bent to his work, careful as a diamond cutter. He carried no weapon or rucksack, just a small plastic ruler, which he used to align a name plate, just so, atop the breast pocket of an Army dress blue jacket, size 39R.

“Blanchard,” the plate read.

And so Staff Sgt. Miguel Deynes labored meticulously, almost lovingly, over every crease and fold, every ribbon and badge, of the dress uniform that would clothe Captain Blanchard in his final resting place.

“It’s more than an honor,” Sergeant Deynes said. “It’s a blessing to dress that soldier for the last time.”

Gently, he laid the pieces onto a padded table. Black socks protruded from the pants and white gloves from the sleeves. The funeral would be a closed coffin, but it all still had to look right.

“They are not going to see it,” he said. “I do it for myself.”

In the aftermath of  the killing of Hofstra student Andrea Rebello by  the eighth bullet from a police officer’s handgun, the  reaction of the police union is precisely what one would expect.

Nassau’s police union president blamed the armed parolee for a Hofstra student’s death and fiercely defended the officer Tuesday who shot and killed the 21-year-old woman and the gunman as he held her in a chokehold.

“We back his decision 100 percent,” James Carver, president of the Nassau County Police Benevolent Association, said at a news conference in Mineola. “There’s only one person responsible for what happened early Friday and that’s the ex-con.”

“There’s some second-guessing going on by people who think maybe he should have stayed outside the house, but our job is to get inside there and make sure we can protect as many people as we can,” Carver said.

There should be no misunderstanding about why Hofstra student Andrea Rebello is dead: The life of this 21-year-old Tarrytown resident ended tragically because Dalton Smith, a career criminal who had spent the vast majority of his adulthood incarcerated for serious, often violent crimes, invaded her home and menaced Rebello and others (including her twin sister) with a loaded gun.

But even while there is no question where to hang the blame, there are questions that need to be answered, some of which stem from the fact that this felon was in a position to commit the crime:

Should Smith have been paroled after he served nine years for attempted armed robbery and criminal possession of a weapon?

Was it appropriate to let Smith out once again, in February, after he had been jailed for violating that parole? Will we learn that the local parole office is understaffed?

Was Smith pursued as actively as he should have been once a warrant was issued for his arrest in April, again for violating parole?

The other issues involve the review of the police response in the tense and chaotic minutes after they arrived at the crime scene.

Second-guessing the officer who fired seven bullets into Smith and one into Rebello, killing both, is not the point. That officer was faced with numerous split-second decisions, starting with whether to enter the house and ending with whether to fire. If Andrea Rebello had lived, the officer would be hailed a hero.

Few people who stumble on a blawg realize there’s history.  For those of us who have been doing this awhile, there can be quite a bit of history, enough that we don’t quite remember all we’ve written.  Every once in a while, someone will find an old post and feel compelled to put in their 2¢, and we are reminded of words that disappeared from the front page years ago.

In the intervening years, new things come up and old things are sometimes revisited. More often than not, the subjects of posts from back then remain issues, and ought to be evergreen.  Unfortunately, that’s not the nature of blawgs, and people who need to read old posts never do, and people who write blawgs don’t repeat themselves for the benefit of newcomers. 

This was all brought to mind when a young lawyer left a comment at a post by Houston criminal defense lawyer Mark Bennett at Defending People from December 1, 2007, nearly six years ago.  The post was entitled How to become a federal criminal defense lawyer.

Six years is forever on the interwebz, long before Joseph Rakofsky was retained to represent Dontrell Deaner. He was still a student at Touro Law School at the time. Had he read this post, perhaps he wouldn’t have taken on the case and set in motion the course of events that destroyed his career. Perhaps not.

The post offers some truisms about the practice of law.

So the first and most impor­tant thing for the aspir­ing fed­eral crim­i­nal lawyer to know is this: you don’t know squat. Accept that with calm humil­ity and good cheer. You may have edited the law review … and cap­tained the mock trial team … at Yale. You are not pre­pared in the slight­est to defend peo­ple accused of crimes any­where, let alone fed­eral court. Even if you spent years as a state pros­e­cu­tor, even if you spent years as a defense lawyer in state court, even if you served as a fed­eral pros­e­cu­tor, you are now offi­cially a fed­eral crim­i­nal defense new­bie, and a new­bie you will remain until you have tried sev­eral fed­eral crim­i­nal cases to juries as a defense lawyer. Plead­ing peo­ple guilty does not count. Only after you’ve tried some cases as defense coun­sel in fed­eral court will you know squat.

Strong words. They weren’t quite as controversial to the new lawyer then as they are today, as the dearth of jobs for new lawyers hadn’t yet sunk in, but still they were harsh to their ears.  Bright and shiny faces, ready to take the world by storm, being told they knew squat.

The lawyer who stumbled upon this post the other day, now years later and in the age when many new lawyers hang up their own shingles because they have no other choice, took this old post of Bennett’s and overlaid today’s sensibilities.

As a young attor­ney, with life expe­ri­ence, your com­men­tary is some what offen­sive. Accord­ing to your expert fig­ures, nearly 80 per­cent of cases set­tle. In that regard, we as lawyers, minimize expo­sure, tak­ing into account the facts of the case. It does not take years of expe­ri­ence to size up a case. With regard to defend­ing a crim­i­nal client. I sub­mit that a young hun­gry attorney, that excelled in mock trials, is absolutely ready to try a case. In fact, given the facts of your arti­cle, much more so than you were in your first bank rob­bery case.

I am a hum­ble lawyer and know that there is more to learn each and every day I prac­tice. I watch and lis­ten to sea­soned attor­neys and hope that I will be able to speak as elo­quently as them and grasp the law as they do. How­ever, if you pre­pare as a young lawyer, you can make up for lack of expe­ri­ence. [Broken into two paragraphs for readability.]

This self-proclaimed humble young lawyer, “that excelled in mock trials,” contends that he’s more than ready to do whatever he decides he’s ready to do. “It does not take years of expe­ri­ence to size up a case.” He can, he says, make up for his lack of experience by preparing. 

Perhaps he believes that experienced lawyers don’t prepare, plus have experience?  Perhaps this is just the rationalization of a child with nothing remotely resembling thought. That song, I believe I can fly, plays in my head.  Believe all you want, but don’t jump off the roof. You cant fly.

Worse than the self-serving delusion of inherent competence, however, was his schooling Bennett:

And at the end of the day, when you pull back the cur­tain on crim­i­nal law, the fact is the great wiz­ard of oz is just a man. You are not as impor­tant as you might think and you your­self should be more humble and will­ing to be a men­tor from a place of humil­ity rather than arrogance.

Forget the irony of the padawan telling the master how to teach, and note instead the irony of this young lawyer’s chastising Bennett for his lack of humility. Teach me as I demand to be taught, the grasshopper admonishes, as if he does a favor by allowing the mentor to bask in his youthful importance.

Bennett, a patient fellow, responds that in a decade or two, the young lawyer will read his words and recognize their foolishness. I was not so kind. I am not as patient as Bennett. But the young lawyer was compelled to finish his lesson:

This whole take your med­i­cine and leave the prac­tic­ing of law to sea­soned lawyer is somewhat amus­ing. I have the same three let­ters after my name as you. I fully under­stand my place as far as being some­what new to the pro­fes­sion, but believe in teach­ing and men­tor­ing from a place of encour­age­ment and empow­er­ment, not from a place of fear and doubt.

If I was hum­ble, I would not respond to the sea­soned defense attor­ney, telling me that he does not want to hold my hand, as I try and forge ahead just as he did years ago? I can say that I am hum­ble and will­ing to learn, just smart enough to know that In years to come I will teach from a dif­fer­ent place than your arti­cle sug­gests. That in and of itself would be considered by some to be wis­dom. [Again broken into two paragraphs for readability.]

So this is the new notion of wisdom? At least this young lawyer’s foolishness brought this old post of Bennett’s back onto the radar, and for that his comment was worthwhile. 

Maybe it’s time to recycle things written in the past that remain as appropriate today as they were when first posted. It’s a shame that good advice is lost to time on the interwebz. Clearly, the need for it remains as much today as it did then. Maybe moreso.