It’s not just for the fabulous wealth, prestige and public adoration that criminal defense lawyers put their butts on the line to speak out against the wrongs of the legal system and its power players. And sometimes, maybe more often than anyone realizes, the targets of criticism decide to pay the lawyer back. Fresno criminal defense lawyer and blawger at Probable Cause, Rick Horowitz, found this out yesterday.

I have thought, for some time now, that I knew just how bad things were getting in the United States, in terms of us becoming a police state.

Today, I was shown just how wrong I am. 

In fact, I didn’t know the half of how bad things have really gotten.

To be clear, as bad as the stories and videos that appear on CDL blawgs may be, there is a reasonable anticipation that we, lawyers, officers of the court as some like to remind us as if that means something, aren’t in the direct line of fire. They may hate us, but they won’t touch us. So we believe.

This morning, when I arrived at the Juvenile Justice Court for a case, I found four or five deputies at the front. A deputy district attorney was walking ahead of me. She went through the metal detector without stopping, and (I assume, based on the direction she was heading) on to her office. I put my bag on the x-ray machine belt, as always, and pulled out my identification to show, as always. But I was stopped.

“You have to empty your pockets.”

“What?,” I asked.

“You have to empty your pockets.”

“Why?”

Then came the story, the one they make up to justify what they’re doing. It may sound remotely credible, but it’s a lie. An excuse. Making up excuses for doing whatever they’re going to do anyway is a core talent of law enforcement. Of course, we’re not supposed to say this because it detracts from the dignity of the system. But make no mistake, it’s a set up.

And then one of them told me it was because of my blog post yesterday. He even specifically referenced the sentence that they found so offensive. “So now you’re a security risk,” I was told.

Because of something I wrote. Something which — I will admit — was offensive.

So Rick offended them.  And so he would pay for his offense. What was so offensive isn’t clear, as Rick has removed it from his blawg after he decided that it was more offensive than he intended, but notably fueling the anger by writing about their payback.

At any rate, the overreaction of the department today shows just how dangerous they can be. And, in fact, I suspect that’s just the start. It will not surprise me if something happens to me for what I’ve written. At least a few attorneys — including me — think that there was a plan in place this morning to set up a situation where I could be given a beatdown, which almost certainly would have been followed by criminal charges against me for “resisting arrest,” or “assaulting an officer,” or something similar to that.

Because that happens to more people than you could possibly imagine, more often than you would believe. And, as I said, there is reason to believe they were trying to set it up — reason enough that another attorney decided to stick around “just in case.” (Which is probably why it didn’t happen.)

There would have been damn good reason for Rick to have challenged his treatment, The idea that his criticism, offensive or otherwise, was cause for a lawyer to be subjected to an intrusive search that no other lawyer goes through because he spoke ill of law enforcement is an outrage and an affront to every blawger.  And his musing, that had he gotten angry and challenged their rifling through his briefcase, where his client files are held in sanctity, the next step would have been a loud protest followed by the sound of flesh being pounded. 

Instead of a post about how Rick Horowitz was treated as payback for saying something mean about the Fresno sheriff, this would be a story about how he was beaten and charged with resisting arrest.  There would be a press conference about how a lawyer went nuts as they were just doing their job, protecting the public against imminent threat, and the lawyer turned belligerent and violent. They had to protect themselves from this maniac. They just had to.

But Rick was neither a maniac nor a fool.  He kept his cool. He refused to play into their hands. He gave them absolutely no cause for a beating, and was fortunate that another criminal defense lawyer stayed with him so that there would be a witness to any lies that might be offered to justify what might come next.

How offensive was Rick’s criticism? It doesn’t matter.  Payback for being critical of law enforcement in a blawg is intolerable.  Rick has had much to say about his perception of the police state and the dwindling options available to us to stop the decline.  His voice has no doubt angered those who depend on the love and ignorance of the public for compliance to their authority.  He has pissed people off.

But Rick Horowitz will not suffer the indignity and payback in silence.  And every blawger, and reader, and judge, and person, should be aware that this is how the Fresno sheriff tried to teach Rick Horowitz a lesson.

Update: After this ball started rolling, some others felt it appropriate to not merely add their voice in Rick’s defense, but to disclose what Rick had written and subsequently deleted.  Most exercised the discretion to honor Rick’s decision to delete the offending language, even though it was readily available by cache if someone felt the need for the titallating details. It was not my place to reveal what Rick chose to delete.

I would not have written what Rick wrote. If I had written it, I wouldn’t have deleted it. But Rick did, and that was his choice.  I can understand why he made that choice, even if it was not the same choice I would have made.  That said, it was not my place to “out” him by including the deleted language, nor was it relevant to the post. While it was a curious aside, it was only an aside.

The point of the post is what the Frenso Sheriff did to Rick for having written something on his blawg that was critical of them and they found offensive. It doesn’t matter, to me at least, what he wrote. Apparently, it mattered enough to others that they chose to “out” the language Rick deleted. I strongly disagree with that choice, and I regret my role in starting this ball rolling that ended with people who felt it was their place to “out” Rick Horowitz rather than honor his decision to delete it.

This could never happen, so there really isn’t any need to discuss it. Except it did. Via NBC :

Stephen Slevin, 57, was arrested in August 2005 in New Mexico’s Dona Ana County, charged with aggravated driving while under the influence and possession of a stolen vehicle, although Slevin maintains the car was lent to him by a friend.

Slevin had one medical examination after being arrested and was labeled suicidal, his lawyer said. He was jailed in lieu of posting a $40,000 bond.

Slevin was put into a padded cell, then solitary confinement, where a prisoner is supposed to get an hour of exercise and sunlight a day, except when nobody bothers to take him out of the cell. Slevin was regularly forgotten. He remained in solitary for almost two years.

By the time Slevin got out of jail, his hair was shaggy and overgrown, his beard long, and his face pale and sunken, a drastic contrast from the clean-shaven booking photo taken of him when he was arrested two years prior.

During his confinement, he fell into deep depression. Solitary confinement is a form of sensory deprivation, which is tantamount to torture. But hey, he was accused of drunk driving, which is tantamount to being a bad guy.  He was denied medical care, and pulled out his own tooth.

And he was neither tried nor convicted of any crime.

There are a million questions about how something like this could possibly happen. Where was the court? Where was the lawyer. He had family, but across the country and unaware of what to do about this. Thankfully, Slevin wrote his sister so she knew where he was. Had he been so severely mentally ill that he failed to do so, he would have simply disappeared from the world without anyone knowing what became of him.  Bear in mind, he was driving cross-country, so there was nothing to suggest that he would be in solitary confinement in New Mexico.

Dona Ana County, New Mexico, settled a federal civil rights suit with Slevin for $15,5 million. The County has dedicated more funds to its jails, because it must have been a shortage of money that forced Slevin to pull his own tooth. Problem solved?

Dona Ana County officials were tight-lipped about the case, refusing to answer questions about whether any jail employees were reprimanded or fired over Slevin’s treatment.

“We do not discuss personnel issues,” Jess Williams, Dona Ana County’s public information director, told msnbc.com on Wednesday.

What happened isn’t merely outrageous or deplorable, but impossible.  Every pretense of the legal system says this can’t happen. We love our platitudes of justice and liberty, and cling to them with devotion knowing that they make us so much better than everyone else.

Slevin’s lawyer, Matt Coyte, offered some insight.

Coyte, Slevin’s attorney, said greed on the county’s part was partially to blame.

“Talk to the [Dona Ana] County Commissioners who were around in 2000 to 2004 who knew this stuff was going on, and didn’t care,” he said. “Another side to this case is this jail was built to make money housing federal detainees. This is a border town. There are a lot of federal detainees from immigration issues, and the jail charges the federal government a particular amount of money for each detainee.”

But for Coyte, Slevin’s attorney, there’s still one more change that needs to be made: Dona Ana County Jail’s warden.

“If you were in the trial and heard what the person who ran the facility said, you would be appalled,” Coyte said. “I get lots of people [inmates] calling from that jail asking for help. Am I pleased that they’ve spent more money in the jail? Absolutely. I’m pleased that Mr. Slevin’s case has made a difference in the jail. But the same people are running it, and it’s an attitude of how you run something.”

While this may suffice for one jail, for one detained defendant, there are a great many other people, from corrections officers to the judge, who get to play public servants so that something like this can’t possibly happen.  And yet it did. Stercus accidit? No. Absolutely not.

There neither is, nor can be, an excuse for this every happening in the United States of America, and every person along the line, even close to the line, is personally responsible for what happened to Stephen Slevin.  Because in the United States of America, this cannot happen.

H/T Turley

This is another “dirty little secret” post about the inner workings of a criminal jury trial.  Under the Fifth Amendment, the defendant has an absolute right not to testify at trial, just as he has a right to give evidence on his own behalf if he chooses to. No big issue here.

But it’s only human to expect a person to explain things or deny guilt. And jurors, if anything, are only human.  In some respects, it’s reminiscent of trying to argue to a jury that a confession was false and coerced, both in the sense that jurors refuse to believe that anyone would falsely admit to a crime they didn’t commit (who would ever do such thing?) and that if a person didn’t commit a crime, he would want to say so. In the mind of most people, the idea that they wouldn’t seize the opportunity to deny guilt is inconceivable.

When a defendant decides not to testify in a New York court, he can request an instruction to the jury :

Defendant Not Testifying

The fact that the defendant did not testify is not a factor from which any inference unfavorable to the defendant may be drawn.

Kinda tugs at the heartstrings, right? That’s it. That is the sum total of the instruction. Try that out on someone and see if it changes the entire course of human nature.

There are reasons for a defendant not to testify, ranging from the introduction of prior bad acts or criminal convictions, which may have no bearing on the commission of the crime for which he’s on trial, but clearly serve to suggest that he’s of a criminal ilk and has a propensity to commit crimes, to the defendant not being particularly bright or well-spoken.

Testifying in a criminal case is extremely difficult, which is why police are trained in the academy how to do so and appear credible and deflect when caught in a lie.  While defendants can be prepared for trial testimony, it doesn’t serve to overcome either their history or innate lack of ability, or any of the many other deficits or problems they may bring to the stand.

Even defendants with clean backgrounds, a decent education and of reasonable intelligence tend to testify poorly. Giving testimony is entirely different than engaging in normal conversation, and under the immense pressure of the witness stand, even the best, most innocent defendant can fall apart, get angry or misspeak. When that happens the consequences are disastrous. And most defendants don’t fit the bill anyway.

Ironically, if a defendant does testify, the prosecution then gets an instruction about his interest.

Interest/Lack of Interest

You may consider whether a witness has any interest in the outcome of the case, or instead, whether the witness has no such interest.

[Note: Add if appropriate:

A defendant who testifies is a person who has an interest in the outcome of the case.]

In other words, it’s up to the jury to decide whether every other witness has an interest in the outcome of the case. The jury is instructed that the defendant, on the other hand, alone, is an interested witness.  The defendant, alone, has a motive to lie.  The jury s told that defendant, alone, is the only witness whose testimony is inherently biased.

Does a defendant have a motive to lie? Not if he’s innocent. Does the defendant have an interest in the outcome? You bet.  But that doesn’t mean it’s a bad thing, though anyone trying to argue the point will get a smackdown by the court that will resonate through the jury room until the verdict comes in. The defendant’s interest is to be acquitted. If he’s innocent, as he’s theoretically presumed to be, this isn’t an affront to the trial.  And yet, that’s exactly what the instruction says. The defendant wants to be found not guilty, so unlike every other witness at trial, the jury must infer that self-interest infects his testimony. He can’t be believed.

Non-lawyers are shocked to learn that there is nothing to be done to explain legitimate reasons why a defendant who, in the minds of ordinary folk, should testify and either explain what happened or deny his guilt.  The lawyer isn’t permitted to do so, and the judge won’t allow it. Even to try is to invite commentary by the court that will impugn the defense and the defendant. 

Not only will the jurors persist in their expectation that any innocent defendant would take the stand, but their expectation will be reinforced by the judge’s admonition about trying to circumvent the lack of testimony.  In the worst case scenario, the judge will say the defense “opened the door” to the issue of the defendant not testifying, and allow the prosecution to offer its view on why this lying, scum criminal wouldn’t subject himself to the search for truth.

Much as inroads are being made with regard to such issues as false confession, the unreliability of eyewitness identification, there has been little concern about the impact of the non-testifying defendant and the instructions given the jury, or the ability to argue to the jury.  While the former happens with relative rarity, the impact of the non-testifying defendant is pervasive, happening in most cases and suffering from the same infirmity.

This is a monumental gap in the fairness of a trial.  Like it or not, every juror thinks the defendant ought to testify. Like it or not, the jury instruction is worthless to change a juror’s expectation. Like it or not, the impact to the defendant is devastating. And it happens all the time.

Via Kevin Underhill at Lowering the Bar, the Attorney General of the United States of America, Eric Holder, explains his understanding of the United States Constitution in a letter to Senator Rand Paul :


What Holder does not say is that the Constitution prohibits the president from killing American citizens on American soil without trial, conviction and all the constitutional niceties that exist to protect us from the government. Holder does explain, however:

Well, the word “no” does appear in that letter, but only as part of the phrases “no intention of doing so,” “we hope no President will,” and “no choice,” none of which are really what I was looking for there. In fact, they are the opposite of “no.”

Just to review, the Attorney General just said yes, the President does have “the power to authorize lethal force, such as a drone strike, against a U.S. citizen on U.S. soil, and without trial.”

Carney said Attorney General Eric Holder sent a letter to Paul Thursday [March7, 2013] clarifying the administration’s stance on the issue, which generated considerable controversy on Twitter Wednesday as Paul’s filibuster unfolded.

“Does the president have the authority to use a weaponized drone to kill an American not engaged in combat on American soil? …. The answer to that question is no,” Carney said, quoting Holder’s letter. (POLITICO has posted a copy of the very brief letter here.)

This video has gone viral, so it’s likely you’ve seen it already.  But just in case you haven’t, it’s worth a few minutes of your time.



No doubt there will be plenty of commentary by people far more knowledgeable than I about the accuracy of the data and economics, and then there will those with political agendas to further who will explain why it’s all their enemies’ fault, and if only they were in charge, you would be rolling in dough.

One critical feature of this video, however, is that we live in a world of delusion, where we neither appreciate where we stand relative to everyone else, nor where all the money actually resides.  If it’s not in our pockets, and it’s not in our neighbors, or friends, or family’s, pockets, where is it?

We continue to harp on the American dream. We believe in our hearts in American exceptionalism.  We hear that every person should go to college and end up in a corner office with a home, two cars and a chicken TV dinner in every oven.  We believe in the promise our nation has made to our parents, us, and our children.

Maybe somebody isn’t telling us the truth? Maybe they’re just stringing us along because we want to believe that if we do it right, play by the rules, put our noses to the grindstone, we will have that fabulous life on Primrose Lane?  Maybe people of every political persuasion are voting with their hearts and not their minds?

There may be someone in the top 1% who stops by here occasionally and feels some sense of duty to others to treat them kindly, but more likely not. They’re too busy putting caviar on their dog’s chow and pondering why the people who aren’t in the money haven’t figured it out yet.  Not really.

A question by my pal, Fritz, was raised by this story out of Chicago :

Court records show that the Army veteran was set to start a new job with the state, with solid pay and benefits, until Chicago police hauled him out of his house in his boxer shorts.

No judge had signed a warrant for [Frank] Craig’s arrest. Instead, police themselves had issued an “investigative alert” ordering Craig’s arrest for a robbery that occurred four months earlier.

The alert was based on detective work later judged so shoddy that it led to taxpayers reimbursing the innocent man half a million dollars for a false arrest that caused him to lose his job and the family home to foreclosure.

How, he wondered, could it be that police simply failed to obtain an arrest warrant and did as they pleased?

Critics say the internal police alerts, absent a bona fide warrant, sidestep constitutional protections. Officers act like judges, critics argue, in a process so open to abuse that the police-issued alerts are rarely allowed into the FBI’s fugitive database used by police across the country.

An Illinois appellate judge who was once a police officer recently called for alerts to be banned.

“It’s so easy for (police) to get a warrant. They should just do it right,” said that judge, Marcus Salone.

They should, but they won’t. They won’t in Chicago. They won’t in New York. They won’t where you live. The reason is quite simple: they won’t because there is no incentive to do otherwise. No matter how nice the authority conferred by an arrest warrant, there is no remedy for failure to arrest without one. 

Obviously, an arrest for a crime that occurs in front of the cops has an exigency component that explains why they don’t stop, call a judge and await a warrant as the suspect gets away.  Similarly, following a suspect in hot pursuit presents another situation where a warrant might get in the way.

But in the case of Frank Craig, arrested months after the alleged crime occurred, there is no impediment whatsoever to obtaining an arrest warrant.  There is also no penalty for not obtaining one. An arrest without a warrant is still an arrest. Complain as one might, it doesn’t mean that the person is unarrested, or falsely arrested. The arrest isn’t nullified and the defendant goes free. The defendant doesn’t get a walk. The penalty for police ignoring the opportunity to obtain a warrant of arrest is a big, fat, nothing.

If the police arrest a person in his home without a warrant, any evidence they find may be suppressed, and the statements may be suppressed, but if the cops aren’t looking for evidence or don’t care about a blurted confession, then that doesn’t matter. They got the body, and that’s what they came for.

The problem is an old one, a right without a remedy.  The Fourth Amendment may require a warrant for unreasonable searches and seizures, but the only remedy is suppression.  This isn’t going to help the defendant who is arrested without a warrant in the defense of his criminal case.

The courts say the Constitution doesn’t necessarily require a warrant to arrest someone. That’s particularly true of cases of hot pursuit when police witness a crime. But the leeway gets murkier the more time elapses between the crime and the arrest, especially when police want to arrest the suspect in his or her home.

Murkier? Well, yes and no. Is it wrong? Is it unjustifiable?  Is Judge Salone right that it’s just so easy to get a warrant these days that it’s inexcusable for police to arrest without one?  Of course, but until the law provides a remedy for a warrantless arrest, it’s all talk. Cheap talk at that.

What people fail to appreciate is that we have a plethora of rights and responsibilities that the Constitution and the law impose on government.  We just have no penalty for ignoring them. And so they are ignored. That’s how incentives work, with the police taking the route that is easiest for them when there is no down side to doing so.

But then, if there was a remedy, what would it be? Should murderers walk free because they were arrested without a warrant?  Should anyone arrested without a warrant get payment from the government for the violation of their rights?  What is the prejudice? Where is the harm?  How do we distinguish between the person who deserves to be busted no matter what and the person for whom a warrant should have been first obtained?

These are hard questions, and would give any judge a headache. It’s so much easier to just say “meh” and let the police arrest at will and deal with the consequences later.  After all, Frank Craig’s bad arrest netted him a half million dollars. Isn’t that good enough?

If I, in a car, struck a guy in front of me on a motorcycle, I would certainly be contrite if not a bit in fear of his being more than a little miffed at what happened.  But then, I’m not a cop.

What is fascinating is how the cop doesn’t miss a beat arguing that the fellow in front of him was not only in the wrong, but that what he did was illegal. There is no possibility that the motorcyclist was at fault, just as there is no doubt whatsoever that the cop who rear-ended him was. And yet, it’s hard to argue the point with a guy with a gun and a shield.

The officer, being particularly gracious that evening, agreed to let it go without ticketing the motorcyclist. What a great guy! It must have been the motorcyclist’s lucky day, especially since he had his video going.

While the motorcyclist likely had some damage to his bike as a result of being hit, at least the scenario ended better for the biker than this encounter. which cost Ottawa Hills Police Officer Thomas White ten years of prison.  One can’t help but wonder what the cop in the video above would have done if the motorcyclist had been less respectful and appreciative of the officer’s largesse.

Edit:  Police Officer Thomas White’s conviction  was reversed (in a 108 page opinion!) on the basis of improper instructions on the use of deadly force and mistaken belief.  Mike McCloskey’s paralysis from the waist down due to his being shot by White was not reversed.
 

This is a shameful navel gazing post about blawging and its love/hate relationship with other forms of social media. If it’s not of interest, don’t waste your time reading any further.

Following a post yesterday, there were a bunch of comments on twitter. I responded as I typically do, with my not-quite-subtle point that comments about a post would be better made in the comments to the post rather than twitter. There may also be comments on Facebook or any other social media format, but since I don’t bother with those, I wouldn’t know.

The reaction was also typical: it’s not up to me to dictate where others choose to comment. True. I can’t demand that anybody do as I want and leave their comments here rather than elsewhere, but that really isn’t the point.  It’s not about my dictating anything to anyone, but rather about my asking others who have made a choice to engage in a discussion to talk in the same room.

Blawg posts exist here. People who read the posts read them here. If they give rise to something worthy of their interest, that’s great, as one of the most valuable aspects of blawging is to engender discussion. But what’s the point in having a discussion about something here when the discussion is happening somewhere else?  It means that none of the people who read the post here know about the discussion, join in the discussion, learn from the discussion or even think about the discussion.

As my friend,  Nino Pribetic noted, it’s not as if the posts here are entirely unrelated to twitter. I use a feed that automatically twits a new post so that anyone who cares to know that I’ve written something will know about it and have a link available to read it.  He’s correct, that by using this automatic feed, I’ve voluntarily included twitter in the realm of places where my posts can be found.  Does this make it my fault? Perhaps, or at least to the extent I’ve inserted a different medium into the mix, I have no cause to complain.

Nino also suggested that there might be an element of comment trolling involved, meaning that my purpose was to seek more comment to the post.  He’s right and wrong. I don’t get paid any extra based on the number of comments (this is a snarky remark, since I don’t get paid at all for blawging), but then, there is an aspect of feedback that makes doing this more interesting most of the time. So the more thoughtful comments on the blawg, the more fun it is for me. 

The point is that anyone who feels that something written here is worthy of comment would do well for themselves and any other readers to have the discussion here, where the post exists.  To discuss it on twitter is to exclude other readers, to deny them your thoughts. Sure, the person’s twitter followers will see their twit, and perhaps they too will have read the post, but other readers won’t.  The best that can come of it is a mini discussion off to the side somewhere, where no other reader is able to hear.

And then, of course, there is the question of whether twitter, with its 140 character limit, is really an appropriate format to discuss much of anything. But given that it happens anyway, my guess is that ship has sailed.  Half the twits I read make no sense to me as people try to jam in what might be a comprehensible idea by leaving out as many words as possible and truncating their thoughts to the point of gibberish. Or maybe I just don’t get the shorthand.

In any event, my hope is to explain why I ask that comments to a post be left as comments here rather than elsewhere.  No, I can’t stop anyone from saying or doing anything they please, but I don’t have to encourage or enable it either.  And if you can bear the nightmarish captcha, do me a favor and leave your comment here. Is it too much of me to ask?

When James Holmes  shot up a theater full of people at the midnight showing of The Dark Knight Rises, killing 12 and wounding 58, in Aurora, Colorado, most immediately thought the dude had to be insane. Who else but a crazy person would commit such an atrocity?

But as any criminal lawyer knows, crazy isn’t legally insane.  Under Colorado law, which was changed in 1995 following the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan by John Hinkley to toughen it up, the  burden is to show by clear and convincing evidence that the defendant suffered from genuine mental illness, and that he was unable to distinguish right from wrong. While this is a very tough standard, the difficulty doesn’t end there. It’s not enough that the defense offer its medical experts to show that Holmes met the legal definition of insanity, but that they offer up the defendant to the state for examination as well.

Larry Pozner wrote  an op-ed in the Denver Post explaining the problem:

My response to the email was typically skeptical. A company that was doing continuing education for physicians wanted to break into the legal market, and asked if I was willing to speak with them. It went on to push a bit too far, suggesting that it was in my interest to become involved with them as they were going to be the best CLE provider ever and would do wonders for my prestige.

So I responded by asking if they were a for-profit enterprise, and whether they were asking if I was so desperate to be hooked to such a prestigious enterprise that I would happily give up my time and reputation to make them money. A lot of lawyers do that, you know. It’s a marketing thing, where lawyers beg to be on television or speak at conferences, for free and on their own dime, so people think they’re important lawyers while the business putting on the show makes money off them.

But I received a reply that surprised me. Yes, they were a for-profit business, but what they really wanted was to ask me whether I thought it was possible to do quality CLEs online, and whether lawyers gave a damn about quality CLEs or just getting enough credits to make it past the guardians of the bar.  So I bit.

My view was old school, that CLEs had become a joke, particularly given that lawyers now get credit for such critical skills as “how to market” and “how to get the most out of your iPad.”  How many clients get all warm and fuzzy knowing that this is the sort of advanced training their lawyers deem critical?  The business model was to run counter to this slide into the gutter, to provide what they believed to be top quality education.  Would lawyers be willing to pay for it?

If the choice is crap versus quality, and the price point was essentially the same, my hope is that lawyers would flock to good quality CLEs rather than crap.  But there was a secondary question as well: The CLEs would be delivered over the internet, not in person.  Would this change things?

As it happens, I stumbled across a post by lawyer-turned-marketer/coach Roy Ginsburg at the Puddle who wrote a post about this very issue. While my normal modus operandi is to point out the superficiality and general worthlessness of the death of letters there, this was different. The same reader who would avoid anything remotely resembling depth of thought because it makes his head hurt would be the very lawyer to whom these CLEs were directed. After all, how would I know whether they want quality CLEs?  How would I know if they care whether the CLEs are live or memorex?  Plus, the title of this post comes straight out of Roy’s subheading.

Can Live Survive?

Plenty of older lawyers still prefer being in the same room with a qualified expert. Some younger lawyers, too, will prefer that format. But it won’t be long until the boomers retire and most CLE is provided online. If your bar association is now offering 40 live programs per year, that number will decrease every year going forward.