Dog sniffs. Dog hits. Dogs have wonderful sense of smell and will alert either when they smell something, when their handler wants them to alert or just whenever because they’re dogs. Yet, dog hits remain one of the unmovable bits of probable cause despite their having no more validity than a coin toss because the Supreme Court justices, like all judges, love cute puppies.

Yet the New York Court of Appeals has decided there is a place even cute puppies can’t sniff without a warrant. Continue reading →

One might think defending the indigent would be woke enough to soothe the insipient outrage that permeates the majority of the membership of United Auto Workers local 2325, but as expressed in lawyerspeak by union representative Niteka Raina, it barely scratched the woke surface.

“Being a public defender should inherently mean you’re against f—ing genocide,” lawyer Niteka Raina wrote in a ranting email to coworkers obtained by The Post.

“But I guess legal aid is so desperate for attorneys the organization just lets anyone stay these days, oof.

“Ya dumbf—k genocide supporters,” Raina comtinued. “The united states and israel are both settler-colonial entities and both shouldn’t f—ing exist, ya dips—ts.””

Continue reading →

To get away from the Atlanta judge and jury, former Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows (as opposed to the other three chiefs of staff under Trump) argued that whatever happened with regard to his conduct in and relating to the Georgia 2020 vote, it was part of the job. In an opinion by a well-respected conservative, Chief Judge William Pryor, for a unanimous court, Meadows got one hell of a spanking for his efforts.

At bottom, whatever the chief of staff’s role with respect to state election administration, that role does not include altering valid election results in favor of a particular candidate.

Continue reading →

Two things can be true at the same time. The screws at Rikers can be a cruel, sometimes criminal, lot toward their treatment of jailed pre-trial and sentenced detainees. Some of these detainees are violent and uncontrollable. The ugly reality, and it is extremely ugly, is that jails are dangerous, awful places that do almost nothing well aside from segregating people from  outside society.

What they cannot do is isolate the bad dudes, whether they’re the corrections officers or the inmates, from others within the jail but for solitary confinement. The very progressive New York City Council wants to end the practice. Continue reading →

My pal Carl, better known on the twitters as @HistoryBoomer, was kind enough to stop by Casa de SJ for dinner last night. Among our varied conversations, not the least of which was his eating peccadilloes, we talked about the kids. As a prof, Carl has a closer view of what young people are thinking and saying than an old lawyer like me, and his sense was that the unduly passionate are mostly on the fringes, with the majority of students reasonable, kind and open-minded. It was truly good to hear.

But then, what to make of this Harvard/Harris poll? Continue reading →

In the fevered minds of “leftists” (for lack of another “acceptable” word, I’ll use the word chosen by Kathryn Joyce and Jeff Sharlet in their In These Times post and adopted by Michelle Goldberg in the New York Times), their once-fellow travelers are turning away from the truth and beauty and joining the right.

Joyce and Sharlet’s broadside largely obsesses over bold-faced name converts, from Matt Taibbi  and Naomi Wolf to Russell Brand and Dave Chappelle. Goldberg tries to take it a step further, because who among us doesn’t form our view of the world based on Russell Brand? Continue reading →

Hey everyone! Your humble humorist is still plugging away at the big bastard of a post I write every year—the SJ Year in Review. Don’t worry, that’s coming next week. I thought while we waited, I’d regale you with a retooling of a bit I came up with two years ago.

It’s the holiday season, after all, and this time of year we’re getting Christmas cards and those long-winded, rambling Christmas letters people send updating you on the lives of everyone in their families. Consider this my Christmas letter to you all this year. Except mine’s got better jokes than your Aunt Tammy’s and mine’s set to festive music.

Mr. Tom Lehrer, will you kindly get us started? Continue reading →

Maybe it’s like the “reply all” error, where a private note intended for one person ends up in the hands of the very people you didn’t want to see it. Or maybe it was that Boston Mayor Michelle Wu’s city council relations director, Denise DosSantos, didn’t appreciate the virtues of segregation. Either way, the email went out, and so too did the cat from the bag.

A Wu administration official, on behalf of the mayor, mistakenly sent all Boston city councilors an email Tuesday inviting them to a holiday party that was meant exclusively for “electeds of color,” prompting an apology and mixed reactions.

Continue reading →

Over the past decade, public defenders’ offices, at least in New York, have become increasingly dedicated to social justice. While the lawyers who took on the representation of the indigent always trended to the left, the offices became increasingly progressive rather than liberal,  and increasingly intolerant of anyone who wasn’t dedicated to the farthest left fashions.

More than a few of the long-time public defenders have told me that if they applied for a job today, they wouldn’t get it because they were insufficiently woke. They say it as if it’s a joke, but it’s no joke. They live in fear of the younger lawyers, who will attack them at the slightest hint of heresy. Continue reading →

Ed. Note: Chris Halkides has been kind enough to try to make us lawyers smarter by dumbing down science enough that we have a small chance of understanding how it’s being used to wrongfully convict and, in some cases, execute defendants. Chris graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a Ph.D. in biochemistry, and teaches biochemistry, organic chemistry, and forensic chemistry at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington.

In 1989, Han Tak Lee and his daughter were staying in a 1000 square foot cabin in Pennsylvania when a fire destroyed it, claiming his daughter’s life. In 1990, Mr. Lee was convicted of first degree murder and arson, and sentenced to life without parole. The evidence against him included identifying one ignition point of the fire by the presence of crazed glass, thin, irregular fractures. The collapsed furniture and bed springs, spill patterns (pour patterns?), and deep charring and alligatoring of wood were also taken as evidence of a very hot fire; therefore a deliberately set fire. Crazed glass is created by cold water hitting hot windowpanes. Nor are collapsed furniture springs, pour patterns, alligator patterns or depth of charring of wood accepted any longer as evidence of arson. Continue reading →