The great Jim Dwyer, for whom the New York Times should consider itself incredibly fortunate to have in its employ, didn’t let Ken Burn’s “The Central Park Five” go without notice.  It told the story of the five young men who confessed to a heinous rape of a jogger in Central Park, a crime that grabbed the anger of the city and gave birth to the word “wilding” in the minds of Sutton Place residents.

Except they didn’t do it, as DNA later revealed.

A fellow named Frank Chi watched the documentary and, apparently not a reader of SJ and unaware of the outcome, asked a relevant question: So what became of the prosecutor, Elizabeth Lederer?

Mr. Chi searched the Internet for the lawyer who prosecuted the case, Elizabeth Lederer. He saw that she was still an assistant district attorney in Manhattan, and is an adjunct member of the faculty at the School of Law at Columbia.

It didn’t sit well with Chi that these five boys were falsely convicted based in part on Lederer’s use of false confessions and false claims.

Ms. Lederer wrongly told the jury that hair found in the clothing of one of the boys “matched” hair from the victim, a seeming corroboration of the confused, rambling confessions. Even at the time, that overstated the evidence. More than a decade later, DNA tests would show that the hair did not come from the jogger.

She was not without significant responsibility for the debacle.  As District Attorney Robert Morgenthau later said

A comparison of the statements reveals troubling discrepancies. … The accounts given by the five defendants differed from one another on the specific details of virtually every major aspect of the crime — who initiated the attack, who knocked the victim down, who undressed her, who struck her, who held her, who raped her, what weapons were used in the course of the assault, and when in the sequence of events the attack took place. … In many other respects the defendants’ statements were not corroborated by, consistent with, or explanatory of objective, independent evidence. And some of what they said was simply contrary to established fact.

Who cared at the time? They were guilty. Lederer said so. Her supervisor, Linda Fairstein, was certain of it.  And if they were sure of their guilt, and the crime was heinous, and the City was outraged, that was enough. More than enough.  Except they didn’t do it.

Chi started a petition against Lederer to get her fired from her teaching gig at Columbia Law School, where her bio included the highlight of her career, the conviction of the Central Park Five.  The petition grew legs.

As of Thursday, more than 5,000 people had signed. “It snowballed,” Mr. Chi said in a telephone interview. “It really hit a nerve.”

And it should have hit a nerve. With an attention span that makes gnats jealous, this disgrace of the criminal justice system shouldn’t be forgotten, nor should the role of the participants in the fiasco be whitewashed.  It happened. We need to remember it happened, in homage to George Santayana’s admonition.

But true as that may be, it doesn’t answer the question of why pick on Liz Lederer.  Dwyer makes the point:

The petition against Ms. Lederer, in part, reduces her life in public service to a single moment, the jogger case. In fact, she has a lengthy résumé of unchallenged convictions in cold cases, having pursued investigations of forgotten crimes. No one lives without error. And designating a single villain completely misses the point and power of the documentary. The jogger case belongs to a historical moment, not any one prosecutor or detective; it grew in the soils of a rancid, angry, fearful time.

It was a bad time, a horrible time, when blind rage compelled a city to forsake reason and lust for blood.  And now that we’re beyond that moment when calm deliberation eluded us, where we can clearly see the terrible result of our knee-jerk demand for villains to blame, we shouldn’t repeat our error and focus our new rage on a new villain.

Yes, Lederer’s role in the conviction of five innocent youths shouldn’t be the highlight of her career, the piece she has chosen to include in her law school teaching bio as the aspect of her career her students should seek to emulate.  It’s the Paris Hilton Syndrome, the ugly desire for celebrity, even if it’s based on notoriety, to make a person stand out from the crowd, to “matter” in the only way anybody seems to these days, by connecting oneself to a high profile event.  It’s embarrassing standing alone, like a child screaming “look at me” to the grown ups, but it seems to be the preferred measure for lawyers.

Yet, Jim Dwyer is absolutely right when he writes, “no one lives without error.”  Liz Lederer’s life is not defined by this one disgraceful case.

My pal, Tamar Birckhead, who defended the monumentally goofy shoe-bomber, Richard Reid, whose legacy is the requirement that we go barefoot, if only for a few minutes, in airports,  made the same point in another context.

I’ve been occupied with putting myself out there (via print, radio & cable news) to share the message that even those charged with the most heinous offenses are still human beings, that we are each more than the very worst thing we have done, and that execution is morally wrong.

Tamar has been cable TV’s poster girl for lawyers defending terrorists, and gets her sound bite whenever there is a gap in the news cycle. Unlike Dwyer’s reference to Liz Lederer, Tamar refers to Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving Boston Marathon bomber.

See how that works?

Some will argue that neither the society, the media nor the courts will show such thoughtfulness to Tsarnaev, to be open-minded enough to recognize that this one event, horrible as it may be, isn’t the sum total of a human being’s life, as if he didn’t do good things too, have people who loved him, helped kittens.  Why then, they contend, should anyone be kind to Liz Lederer for her role in the Central Park jogger case, her role in convicting five innocent youths to be condemned to life in prison?

Because we are all far, far better off ending the cycle of anger and hatred toward others. As we hope for a larger vision for Tsarnaev, one that doesn’t demand he die for this horrible deed as if he did nothing in his life except this, we do better to apply the same beliefs to everyone, Liz Lederer included.

And Lederer removed the offending claim to celebrity from her Columbia Law School bio.

Much as the arguments made by former federal judge turned avenging angel for victims, Paul Cassell, usually come at the  expense of the constitutional rights of defendants (so what, they’re all scum anyway), he may be onto something this time.  Caution: Stopped clock ahead.

Via former NYLJ writer Dan Wise, Cassell rips the secret deal given long term snitch Felix Sater:

Sater’s 2009 guilty plea remained under seal until mid-March when Eastern District Judge I. Leo Glasser, who presided over Sater’s criminal case, ordered it to be made public.

The newly available plea made indisputable what was already widely known. Sater had been rewarded for his 11 years of cooperation with a lenient sentence—five years probation and a $25,000 fine. More significantly for Cassell, the sentence made no reference to restitution.

Restitution for what, you ask?  Only a $40 million stock swindle in 1998.

In written testimony delivered to a unit of the House Judiciary Committee, former U.S. Judge Paul G. Cassell, a professor at the University of Utah Law School, cited the Eastern District’s handling of cooperator Felix Sater’s guilty plea to having committed a $40 million stock swindle in 1998 as a prime example of why the enactment of a constitutional amendment protecting victims’ rights is necessary.

“Sadly,” he wrote, it is “my conclusion” that the Eastern District’s handling of the case, and judge’s granting of its request to shroud the plea in secrecy, “is hindering the public and this Subcommittee from learning how crime victims were treated in this case.”

But Cassell being, well, Cassell, this fairly obvious abuse of the system to benefit a government snitch is used to promote the bizarrely unrelated call for a constitutional amendment to “protect victims’ rights.”  You can bet that Cassell’s idea isn’t limited to only those defendants who sign on to become rats.

What happened in Sater’s sentence is hardly an example of the system at work, but rather the prosecution rewarding a particularly useful snitch for the “cooperation” he provided.  While most cooperators get negligible benefit, a rare few (like Sammy the Bull) get away with murder.  As it turns out, the government gets this weird myopia toward heinous crimes when the miscreant becomes their newest, bestest friend.  Suddenly, crimes worthy of death don’t seem nearly as horrible as they were the day before. It’s a miracle.

And when it comes to Sater, Cassell is right (wow, never thought I would write those words).  His $40 million swindle left a huge wake that the government apparently decided was okey-dokey with them.  But that’s not all. Oh, no. It gets worse.

The secrecy surrounding the Sater’s plea had been hotly contested by Long Island lawyer Frederick M. Oberlander, who in 2010 filed a derivative action in the Southern District of New York, claiming that Sater had used the secrecy afforded by the court’s secrecy regimen to perpetuate a $500 million real estate fraud.

Therein lies one of the great joys of being a world-class rat, gaining the love and devotion of an appreciative government for the gifts you’ve given.  If a $40 million scam wasn’t bad enough, add another $500 million to the mix.  Not bad money if you don’t mind being the government’s best friend.

So Cassell is quite right when he speaks to how the snitch-industrial complex allowed Sater to conceal his plea, evade the law’s requirement that restitution be imposed, and deprive the victims of his financial crime their hope of restitution.  And as it happened, the money Sater took has to be somewhere, though that somewhere isn’t in the hands of his victims.

But to bootstrap the problem of government cooperation and concealment into a plea for a general constitutional right for victims is where Cassell returns to his roots and abandons all reason.  Much as the forces of safety-first use the Boston Bombing to exempt anything connected with the T-word from anything connected to the C-word, Cassell conflates the abuse of government cooperation heaped upon victims with abusing criminal defendants by undermining their constitutional rights.  Do it for the victims.

And just to close the loop, the United States Attorney’s office for the Eastern District of New York had this to say about the Sater deal:

Robert Nardozo, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office, said it would have no comment.

Of course not. If we don’t keep this stuff secret, how will they ever recruit enough rats to maintain a successful criminal justice system?

My pal and artistic muse, former Bronx Defender cum television maven David Feige, has an op-ed in the  New York Times that’s, well, quite brilliant.  Brilliant not just because he’s right, but because of the sheer simplicity of the idea. which could so fundamentally alter the dynamic of the criminal justice system to make it almost palatable.

Every year in New York City, more than a quarter of a million people are arrested and charged with misdemeanor offenses. The vast majority of those who don’t plead guilty right away are released without bail and ordered to return to court to fight their cases until they are concluded. But as William Glaberson reported in The New York Times on Wednesday, that can take a very long time.

Reducing the vast number of people charged with relatively minor offenses would go a long way toward easing this immense burden. But even without a shift in policing strategy, there’s one straightforward fix we can make: treat criminal cases more like civil cases by excusing defendants from appearing in court until the prosecution is actually ready to try them.

This happens even when prosecutors have advised the court in advance that they are not ready to proceed. The appearance requirement — which can cost a person weeks of lost paychecks and hours spent arranging child care — rapidly becomes onerous. As a result, more than 99 percent of those who initially want to fight the charges are worn down by the legal equivalent of “Waiting for Godot,” and eventually agree to plea bargains to end their cases. The same is true for misdemeanor cases in many other major American cities: the process has become the punishment.

So why not make criminal justice more civil? At least for nonessential proceedings, misdemeanor defendants who would prefer to let their lawyers do the work should be excused from having to appear in court. Or to frame it another way, courts should require a defendant to be present only when something substantive — like a negotiated disposition, hearing or trial — is really going to happen.

Judges already have the power to excuse defendants but they nearly always refuse to use it. A recent study by the Bronx Defenders, which provides free legal representation to poor people, found that vanishingly few judges would even entertain a motion to excuse a defendant — and among those few who did, even fewer ever granted such a request.

Most sitting appellate judges are reluctant to express an opinion about the negligible worth of a constitutional right in a newspaper op-ed, if for no other reason than they may well be called upon to decide an issue and, having already announced they don’t care much for the right, have conclusively demonstrated their bias. Not Seventh Circuit Judge Richard Posner.  Oh no, not Judge Posner.

From the Daily News :

This past Monday, Mayor Bloomberg said that in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings, the country’s interpretation of the Constitution “will have to change” in order to enable more effective prevention of and response to terrorist attacks and other violence, such as attacks on schoolchildren.

All of which is to say that he wants concerns with privacy to take second place to concerns with security.

I strongly agree, though I’m not sure that the Constitution will have to be reinterpreted in order to enable the shift of emphasis that he (and I) favor. Neither the word “privacy” nor even the concept appears anywhere in the Constitution, and the current Supreme Court is highly sensitive, as it should be, to security needs. The Court can and doubtless will adjust the balance between privacy and security to reflect the increase in long-run threats to the lives of Americans.

Is this a return to textualism or a living Constitution?  Some (like me) would argue that privacy pervades the Constitution, like the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, but Poser disagrees.  The word may not be there, but is it a stretch to conclude that the 1st, 3rd, 4th, 5th and 9th Amendments don’t relate, as the Supreme Court has held case after case, and protect our right to privacy?  Posner thinks so.

There is a tendency to exaggerate the social value of privacy. I value my privacy as much as the next person, but there is a difference between what is valuable to an individual and what is valuable to society. Thirty-five years ago, when I was a law professor rather than a judge, I published an article called “The Right of Privacy,” in which I pointed out that “privacy” is really just a euphemism for concealment, for hiding specific things about ourselves from others.

While he may say so, I doubt he values his privacy as much as the next person. He doesn’t  value privacy as much as I do. Probably not you as well. The problem for Posner is his understanding of privacy, “a euphemism for concealment.”  What a negative perspective.

It strikes me that Posner is projecting when he defines privacy so insidiously.  Sure, there are things people prefer to conceal, like the occasional passing of wind when outside of polite company, but it’s not just a matter of hiding one’s embarrassment as it is not offending others.  No one wants to be in an elevator with a guy who feels it’s not worth concealing.

We conceal aspects of our person, our conduct and our history that, if known, would make it more difficult for us to achieve our personal goals. We don’t want our arrest record to be made public; our medical history to be made public; our peccadilloes to be made public; and so on. We want to present sanitized versions of ourselves to the world. We market ourselves the way sellers of consumer products market their wares — highlighting the good, hiding the bad.

All this may be true, but this ignores another side of privacy that has nothing to do with concealment. It ignores modesty. It ignores humility. It ignores the desire to preserve the sanctity of ones thoughts from being on public display.  It’s not that we can’t conduct ourselves well and properly in public, but that we are entitled to a quiet time when we aren’t on display.  It’s not that we have anything to conceal, but want the opportunity to indulge our peccadilloes, whatever they may be. 

For the most part, the op-ed makes it appear that Posner is only talking about video cameras on every street corner, every building, constantly watching our every public move.  The argument in favor of such surveillance is much like the argument for videotaping police in the performance of their duty.  They’re in public, where we are lawfully entitled to watch them, so no harm done.

But there is a difference. We are what the government euphemistically calls “private citizens.” The police, in contrast, are called “public servants,” also euphemistically.  Both words begin with “P”, but fall on opposite ends of the spectrum. While it may be true that our public actions are generally observable, it’s also true that there is no good reason to keep private citizens under constant surveillance. Our every movement isn’t anybody’s business.

Even so, if this was as far as Posner was prepared to go, there would be sound argument to allow it, provided one embraced the whole post 9/11 “everything has changed” rhetoric, particularly given that video caught the Boston Bombers.  This proves that if we were all bombers, it would make perfect sense.  But is that all Posner is talking about?

Civil liberties groups, notably the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Electronic Privacy Information Center, of course do not limit their concerns to surveillance cameras. They worry, too, about governmental surveillance of people’s computer files and other stored data.

But I don’t think they appreciate that this is a two-way street. Surveillance technology used by our government is also used by our enemies. We must keep up; we cannot resign from the technological revolution.

The cameras on every corner appear to be the start of the death of privacy.  Your hard drive?  The cloud? Server farms in Maryland?  That’s where the really good secrets are hidden, and the government needs them to protect us from our enemies. Remember that technology train we all have to hop on or miss?  Nobody realizes that Judge Posner is driving that train.

If it came from anyone else, the police union would protest. But it came from the brass. The  New York Times reports on the defense of the NYPD in the trial of Floyd v. City of New York, before SDNY Judge Shira Scheindlin on the constitutionality of stop & frisk:

Ten percent of them were malcontents who worked as little as possible. Unless they are being paid overtime, officers seem to avoid writing summonses. Indeed, some police officers need to be weaned of the idea that they are paid to drive around in their patrol cars, eating doughnuts.

“I think we’re charged with trying to get the police officers to work, do the things that they’re getting paid for.”

In some precincts, Mr. Esposito noted, most enforcement activity, like ticket writing, occurred when officers were paid time-and-a-half overtime, instead of during their regular workweek.

“It’s a question as to why they can see activity when they are being paid overtime as opposed to not being able to see activity when they are on straight time,” Mr. Esposito testified.

Or is it not a question of “seeing activity” at all, but needing a make an extra buck and nabbing the nearest kid to do so?


Unofficial photo of support for New York City Police Officers from their brothers in California. Person on the left is undercover.

What is happening at this trial, where the police management has now verified the accuracy of almost every negative stereotype about police there is, from donuts to laziness to greediness to caring nothing about the public to putting their own financial self-interest above that of society, in a scorched earth war to preserve their authority to toss young black men at will, is that every myth built around New York’s Finest is revealed as a sham. 

Whether they win or lose, there is no denying the perception of police from their own that contradicts the carefully crafted image of police developed over the past 100 years. Are there great cops? Sure, but only 10%.  Good cops, yes, but they aren’t nearly as honorable, honest or motivated as they would have us believe?  Bad cops? Yup, we’ve got them too.  And which cop arrested the defendant? Which cop is on the stand? Which cop is telling the truth? 

And it’s only because there were enough lousy, lazy, worthless cops that they were forced to set “goals,” which are quotas with fewer letters. But it’s no big deal.

But perhaps the most defiant testimony came from Chief Michael Marino, who said that the “simple truth of the matter” is that the monthly quotas which officers complained about were quite low.

“The number I set was so low that I could do it in one day,” Chief Marino said about his time commanding a Brooklyn precinct.

“And reasonably do it without hurting anybody or picking on anybody.”

It would be easy without hurting anybody when done by a good cop, according to Chief Marino.  But they’re not all good, and so they do hurt people. They do pick on people. Because some think their job is to drive around in patrol cars eating donuts all day.

While I’ve had some harsh things to say about bad cops over the years, there is nothing I’ve written as damning about the general worth of police officers as this.  Don’t take my word for it. Take the sworn testimony of retired Chief Esposito.

In one of the most bizarre videos of court interactions yet, a young woman, Monica Contreras, complains in family court in front of hearing Master Patricia Donninger about being sexually assaulted by Marshal Ron Fox. Donninger, deeply dedicated to the law and with an abiding concern for the rights of those appearing before her, ignores Contreras completely while playing with her 2 year old daughter.

Bad enough? Wait for it…after Contreras is confronted by Fox and Marshal James Kenyon, she’s arrested and taken into custody.  For what?  Watch and find out.



The  Las Vegas I-Team reports on the background:

Monica Contreras went to family court with her 2-year-old daughter in August 2011. She was in the courtroom only a few minutes on a routine divorce case. Her husband filed for a Temporary Restraining Order against her during their divorce. He never showed up in court so the order was denied.

According to internal court documents, as Contreras was leaving, family court marshal Ron Fox ordered her into a waiting room for an unexplained drug search.

Contreras said Fox touched her buttocks, breast, and ordered her to lift up her shirt. A later internal investigation by Clark County courts validated her claims. Contreras went back into the same courtroom and told hearing master Patricia Donninger that her requests to have a female marshal handle the search were ignored.

Contreras kisses her daughter before being sent to jail. Her young daughter was sent to Child Haven. Two months later, Contreras filed a complaint with Court Marshal Internal Affairs.

Sources tell the I-Team, investigators were shocked they had not heard of the alleged courthouse sexual assault from family court Lt. Steve Rushfield. After a six-month internal affairs investigation, Fox was fired.

Nobody from Clark County courts told Contreras that her claims were validated. She only recently found out from the I-Team.

His attorney declined an on-camera interview but claims the marshal’s arrest was legal because nobody in the courtroom tried to stop him.

Adam Liptak, in his  New York Times Sidebar column, raises what at first blush seems like a ridiculous question: If life without parole is unconstitutional for juveniles, is it permissible to sentence a child to 100 years in prison? Isn’t the point that children should not be sentenced to die in prison?

That sounds straightforward enough. But there are two ways to understand the decision, Graham v. Florida.

One is formal. The court may have meant only to bar sentences labeled “life without parole.” On that understanding, judges remained free to impose very long sentences — 100 years, say — as long as they were for a fixed term rather than for life.

Alito said it was fine in his dissent, but that’s Alito and it was only said in dissent, so who cares?

The other way to understand the decision is practical. If the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment requires that young offenders be left with a glimmer of hope that they may someday be released, it should not matter whether they were sentenced to life in so many words or as a matter of rudimentary actuarial math.

Whether it’s called “life” or a term of years in excess of any remote chance of ever getting out is form over substance.  Sure, everyone thought the Supreme Court’s Graham decision meant something for juveniles, reflecting its rejection of the overly harsh “child predator” myth and a recognition that children haven’t developed the maturity and responsibility sufficient to be held so accountable, and punished so severely, that their life was over.  That’s what we thought.

Except they never quite said so, and have since taken a pass on the opportunity to clear up the confusion they invariably leave behind.

“Some courts have held that such a sentence is a de facto life without parole sentence and therefore violates the spirit, if not the letter, of Graham,” Judge John M. Rogers wrote for a unanimous three-judge panel. “Other courts, however, have rejected the de facto life sentence argument, holding that Graham only applies to juvenile non-homicide offenders expressly sentenced to ‘life without parole.’ ”

Applying the reasoning of the Graham decision to long fixed sentences, Judge Rogers added, “would lead to a lot of questions.” An appeals court in Florida last year listed some of them in upholding a 76-year sentence meted out to Leighdon Henry, who was 16 when he committed rape.

“At what number of years would the Eighth Amendment become implicated in the sentencing of a juvenile: 20, 30, 40, 50, some lesser or greater number?” Judge Jacqueline R. Griffin wrote for the court.

The Supremes denied cert to Chaz Bunch, who was 16 when convicted and sentenced to 89 years in prison, making him eligible for parole at 95, after the 6th Circuit affirmed his sentence.

While it seems too obvious for argument that a sentencing court can’t do one way what would be unconstitutional another, so that if life without parole violates the 8th Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment, so too would a 100 year sentence.  To suggest otherwise is sophistry of the Alito sort.

And yet the Supremes weren’t sufficiently concerned with Bunch’s homecoming at age 95 to take the case and refine their message, leaving circuit courts hanging as to whether Graham means what it says or says what it means.

The reason seems most like to be Judge Griffins question: if a term of years that serves as a de facto life sentence is no good, then what is acceptable?  How many years is acceptable under the 8th and when does a sentence cross the line?  If a defendant is younger than 18, can you add the difference in years to the end of the sentence since his life expectancy will be longer?  Okay, that last one seems a bit too trial, but still it’s part of the equation, and it’s one of many smaller question that have and will arise:

Could the number vary from offender to offender based on race, gender, socioeconomic class or other criteria?” Judge Griffin asked.

That is a reasonable question. But Bryan Stevenson, the executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Ala., said it was the wrong one. “The idea isn’t to get the person as close to death as possible before you deal with the possibility of their release,” he said. It is, rather, to give juvenile offenders a sporting chance, perhaps after decades in prison, to make the case that they deserve to get out, he said.

While the words “sporting chance” may be a bit flip, the point remains. These are children, and there should be some hope of redemption and return to society, if only for the last few years of a life in being.  But putting that concept into action is hard work, and it appears the Supremes, having opened the door to the question, have no answer.  So rather than finish the job they’ve started, they will spend their time ironing their robes while Chaz Bunch’s 89 year sentence goes unreviewed.

If it were up to me, the answer would be that any sentence imposed on a juvenile that’s long than it takes for a police officer’s pension to vest would be unconstitutional. But then, I’ve yet to get a call from my senator informing me that my name has been put in the mix for the next Supreme Court opening.  For me, 100 years is a lot of life to lose. Too much.

The point that any other driver who ran a kid over would have been tried by now can’t be ignored. That Brooklyn DA Chuck Hynes has yet to get off the dime a year after Tamon Robinson was killed can’t be attributed to anything other than the fact that the driver of the RMP was a cop.  They must “investigate,” where it would be prosecute if it was anyone else.

The  Daily News makes the point:

The official accident report states the police car was stopped on a footpath outside the Bayview Houses last April when Robinson “did run into” the vehicle, causing him to fall backward and strike his head.

Cops were in pursuit because Robinson, 27, had stolen paving stones from the project’s grounds. But multiple witnesses came forward, saying Robinson was deliberately mowed down by the cops.

Faced with the conflicting accounts, Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes hired an accident reconstruction expert in Massachusetts six months ago who has no ties to the NYPD.

And to date…nothing.  Robinson was being chase because cops believed he stole some paving stones, although friends told the  New York Times that he had permission to take them. And then there were the initial police reports following his death.

When officers arrived, Mr. Robinson ran toward his building, but a police car hit him before he reached it, according to a police report about the events, which took place around 5:30 a.m.

This wasn’t controversial until the “official report” came into being, which told a different story, that he “did run into” the cruiser.  Like the dead man “did run into” the speeding bullet aimed at his head.  It’s not that the cops didn’t care deeply for Robinson’s welfare, as reflected in their yelling “wake up, wake up” before “bouncing him off the hood of the car.”

To make the story even more trite, the City then  sent Robinson’s mother a bill for $710 to repair a dent in the car that killed her son, sending it off the a collection firm for payment.  After the Daily News disclosed the collection effort, the City backed off.

A spokeswoman for the city Law Department said the notice seeking $710 was “sent in error” to Tamon Robinson, a 27-year-old who was killed in April as he fled from police who had spotted him stealing paver stones outside the Bayview Houses.

“We regret that Mr. Robinson’s family received a collection notice,” said Law Department spokeswoman Kate Ahlers. “We recognize that this involves a tragic case.”

The bill was sent in September, 2012.  Tamon Robinson was run down by the cruiser on April 12, 2012.  He laid in a coma for six days before he died.  Chuck Hynes, who couldn’t believe the initial police reports or anything said by the people who watched Robinson get run down, hired a professor about six months ago.

If this wasn’t a cop behind the wheel, would the one year anniversary of Tamon Robinson’s death pass without the district attorney having indicted and prosecuted the perpetrator?

Or maybe if the person run down had lived on a cul-de-sac rather than the Bayview Houses, the investigation would have moved along apace.  Either way, paving stones in Brooklyn are safe. People, not so much.

And if you’re bothered by the write up using the passive tense, “did run into,” it’s not a deliberate act of irony but just the way they do these things.  It makes them sound more official so you won’t mind that a year has passed, a kid died, and nothing has happened.

The  Washington Post has a curious article about how criminal defense lawyer Robert Miller, bored waiting around for a jail visit, decided to rate the place on Yelp.

Lawyer Robert Miller has visited five prisons and 17 jails in his lifetime, but he has reviewed only three of them on Yelp. One he found “average,” with inexperienced and power-hungry officers. Another he faulted for its “kind of very firmly rude staff.” His most recent review, a January critique of Theo Lacy jail in Orange County, Calif., lauds the cleanliness, urban setting and “very nice” deputies.

Miller gave it five out of five stars.

The problem is that few people pick their jails. Five stars. One star. Whatever.

As Miller acknowledges, it’s not the kind of helpful testimonial commonly found on Yelp, the popular consumer reviews site many people turn to for recommendations on, say, bowling alleys and Chinese takeout. But as Yelp grows more popular — logging 36 million reviews as of last quarter — lawyers as well as prison inmates and their family members have turned to the site to report mediocre food and allegations of serious abuse. They join the enterprising reviewers who have used Yelp to critique traffic signals and public bathrooms.

While it can be informative if a family member wants to know just how bad, or not so bad, the life of their loved one is going in the can, it’s not the same as Chinese takeout.  But it struck me as to whether this was the new wave of communication, the new way to complain even if there was no choice involved.

This stuck on my radar because of a post at an anonymous blog called  Unclean Hands about how the families of prisoners were treated by the guards when visiting their loved ones.  The author writes of a young grandmother and her two young grandchildren, presumably going to visit the daughter/mother, while the writer, a lawyer, observed as she waited for a prison visit.

The three waited at the metal detector for Officer Tackleberry, who ignored them for at least 15 minutes while pretending to shuffle papers and talk to B. and me. I squirmed as Tackleberry was so polite and kind to us, and again explained that the whole prison goes to shit when she takes a day off. I looked over at the family, trying to catch their eyes to silently apologize for being white, for being a lawyer, for wearing a suit, and for being treated nicely. We got friendly chit-chat. They got rude, sharp, and exasperated barks.

Finally, Officer Tackleberry made her way over to the metal detectors to inspect the family. The little girl, dressed all in pink with cute, freshly-done twists in her hair, went too quickly after her brother, almost skipping through. The entire family was forced to go back through the metal detectors one by one as punishment.

Neither the grandmother nor grandchildren were guilty of anything beyond caring for someone inside, and yet the guard treated them like subhuman garbage, a nuisance to be dismissed at best.  The author simultaneously felt the anger any caring and rational person would feel about the needlessly poor handling of human beings, while feeling the guilt of being a lawyer, receiving the preferential treatment that institutions tend to provide.  It’s not that lawyers are treated well, but not nearly as offensively as nonlawyers.

While in the waiting room, I felt humiliated. Later, when I was inside the visitor’s room saying goodbye to my client, I saw the little girl dressed in pink on her mom’s lap, the mom dazed and crying, rocking her baby girl tightly. Then, the anger socked me in the gut. Not only is these children’s mother in a maximum security prison–G-d knows what happened to get her there and what it did to them, not only are these kids without her on a daily basis, but in order to get to see her, they must go to a scary prison every time and be yelled at, humiliated and debased. This seven year old and eleven year old know more about the system than I do.

Some lawyers are obliged to visit jails and prisons on a regular basis, and they tend to both know “the ways” of the particular institution and often even the personnel. It’s useful to smooth the process, which is usually terribly time-consuming (read wasteful) and unpleasant.  But what lawyers endure is nothing compared to what families endure, what children endure.

Even lawyers play nice with guards. Getting on the wrong side of a guard can make things far worse. The delay in getting in can be counted in minutes or hours, and that’s at the guard’s discretion.  They may have rules about such things, but piss off a guard and watch as names can’t be found, papers get lost, communications are missed, and you sit there and wait.  And wait. And what are you going to do about it? Leave and go to another, more amenable prison?

Despite their treatment, the grandmother and her charges have no choice but to silently endure the idiocy, the abuse, the discourtesy of the guards. To be fair, it’s not always that way, and I’ve seen guards treat visitors as with relative kindness.  But if they want to be abusive, there is no one to stop them.  And if the visitors don’t care to suffer the abuse, too bad. There is no place else to go, no place to complain.

Maybe they can leave a review on Yelp about the prison, urging people not to be warehoused there for the duration of their sentence.  Or maybe the message is that if a loved one is imprisoned, abandon them rather than have to tolerate the discourteous guards.  Go to a nice restaurant instead.

A few days ago, a reader sent me a link to a JD Underground thread and suggested that it would enlighten me as to how young lawyers were thinking. The thread began with a question,  Might start non-profit–what services to provide?

I’m thinking about opening a non profit and providing free/hugely discounted legal services so I can get the PSLF* and also gain some experience…What are some basic, easy to learn services that I can readily offer clients to build up volume? I’m thinking form-filing stuff at this point, but any advice would be appreciated.

There is certain virtue in this question, though it may not be obvious at first.  The person asking the question is thinking about alternatives to address his circumstances, most notably the crushing debt load. He (I assume it’s a “he”) is trying to do something rather than sitting on the couch eating Cheetos and pondering the misery of his choice to go to law school.  He’s trying.  He gets points for that.

The problem arises from that part of the question which seeks “some basic, easy to learn services.” Or to put it differently, what practice area of law requires no knowledge or skills?  Some of the responses include:

Bankruptcy seems like a good fit. Chapter 7 and 11. I don’t know tons about it but I think consumer 7s and 11s are fairly easy to learn.

…you’d be better off getting a job at legal aid.

tenants rights cases, restraining orders, small claims advice, non-complicated wills are a few things that spring to mind.

Help parents of special ed kids who have no choice but to put their kids into public schools. Special ed advocate, attend IEP meetings so the parents can’t get ambushed, etc.

To the credit of the forum, there are others who challenge the ease with which someone who “the only thing is I don’t really have any real skills” could perform these functions.  The problem is that the OP’s question has but one mission, to address the repayment of student loans.  Nowhere is there a suggestion of any desire to be a lawyer, to practice law, to practice any particular area of law. The only criteria is what is so easy that someone with no skills can do it.

There was recently a very troubling post at  the Puddle where Chris Bradley, an occasional lawyer when he isn’t writing marketing copy, instructs the groundlings that the only thing needed to successfully handle a deposition is to “show up.”  Jordan Rushie at  Philly Law Blog wrote about the need to actually have a clue when doing depositions.  Alex Craigie, At Counsel Table, ripped a broader swathe by noting that lawyers are not potted plants.  As for “just showing up,”

It’s not enough. Or nearly enough.

And in a footnote:

I mean no disrespect to monkeys, trained or otherwise.

If all lawyers need to do is just show up, then we may well have no raison d’être. And indeed, it may well be that in certain traditional lawyer roles, the “expertise” that might have been required 100 years ago has since been commoditized and minimized.  It may well be that some of our functions no longer require a lawyer and can be adequately handled by a non-lawyer, a paraprofessional, the hard-working but nice man who puts your trash in the back of his oddly-shaped truck. 

To the extent this is true, then it’s time we parse our functions and open the door to non-lawyers, or people with less expensive qualifications who are more than competent to satisfactorily handle the matter.  I’ve made  my suggestion as to what should be done, not that anybody cares.

But if the question asked at JD Underground is what practices areas of the law are best suited for a person who is without skills or a clue, the answer is clear: None.

Sure, there are time when a particular service ends up going smooth and easy, requiring little if any thought and filling in the blanks ends up being more than sufficient. But then there are also times when a well-placed bit of insight can turn sufficiency to excellence. More importantly, there are times when that insight can prevent what appears to be sufficient at superficial blush from turning into disaster.  That’s what distinguished a lawyer’s services from a form-filler.

The other question is whether there is any area of law, any niche at all, that this person gives a damn about.  Does it interest him? Does he feel he might make a difference and help people? Is there any tug, even the slightest, that draws him toward an area of law?

It’s understandable that a law student facing crushing debt must deal with the harsh reality of his poor choice, but that choice is made all the worse by what appears to a lack of purpose in entering the law in the first place.  If the only issue is what he can do that requires no skills, then why go to law school at all?  Because mommy assured you it was the a guaranteed path to middle class stability?  Because dad wanted you to be a “professional?” 

If there is no area of law that interests you, then get the hell out. You won’t be a good lawyer. You won’t be a happy person, spending your days doing something that holds no interest for you solely to put to use your expensive and poorly chosen education. Deny you ever went to law school so you can find a real job, and use the income to pay for your wayward youth.

But trying to find a niche in the law where no skills are needed only compounds disaster.  I agree with Craigie, that this reflect no “disrespect to monkeys, trained or otherwise.”  If you can’t be a real lawyer, don’t be a lawyer at all.

* PSLF stands for public service loan forgiveness.