The internet used to be described as the Wild West, a place where there were no rules per se, but users kept each other in line with the fear that anyone behaving poorly would be met by others teaching him a good lesson on how not to act.  It may have resembled a school yard, but it worked.  And that meant the the well-intended saviors of propriety could keep their noses out of it.

Doesn’t sound familiar?  That’s because it’s all gone mainstream, more like a shopping mall with mall cops than the Wild West, with lawprofs writing lengthy yet boring articles on how to stifle speech and thought, how to impose their delightfully sweet vision of etiquette, and make the internet safe for shopping and political correctness.

Yet, below the veneer of shininess, of happy faces blowing kisses in the hope of making a quick sale, there remains the ugliness of those who use the internet for bad things.  Recently,  Marc Randazza, with some help from Popehat and others, outed one bad guy who created a website for disturbed people to post naked photos of others, and then  created a fake lawyer who the victims could pay to get their photos removed. 

Going to battle against slime on the internet is a mitzvah, a good deed, but often a difficult one to pursue.  The problem is that the forces of evil have a vested interest in winning the war, as they are making money off their diseased scheme, while the forces of good are merely trying to clean up the mess. One will spend his every waking moment fighting, while the other has to fit it in when he can. It’s not a fair fight.

But then Marc posted this :



While a somewhat different target, this is remarkably similar to the second stringers targeted by Marc, with the added component of this mutt including home addresses of his victims.  Here is  the text of the message to Hunter Moore.

While many fear Anonymous, as its nature precludes control by the forces who want to turn the internet into a happy place, there remains a truth, that the nature of the internet will never be fully controlled by laws, by courts, by well-intended hand-wringers.  They may be able to constrain individuals, but not the internet.

Despite the heresy of this coming from someone as “establishment” as a lawyer, my time online leaves me no doubt that despite the best efforts of governments, of academia, of control freaks, to make the rules of engagement online, they will never be able to control the internet.  To the extent that anything exists to constrain the forces of evil, it’s Anonymous.

Hate them? Hate that they can’t be controlled? Hate that they may make a choice with which you don’t agree, and be your bad guys?  This may well be true, but without Anonymous, there would be no way to strike fear in the hearts of these scum at all.

You may not like life in the schoolyard, but if you end up being beaten up by the bully, you will be pretty darned glad that someone bigger and stronger punches him in the nose.  This was how the web policed itself before you got here, and despite your best efforts to “civilize it” so you can use it to make a quick buck, it remains the last guardian of the internet.  Hate Anonymous all you want, but when things go bad, they will be our last defense.

Following the passage of an Animal Abuse Registry in Suffolk County, New York, animal rights advocates pushed Westchester County to dig a hole of its own.  While causing sadistic harm to pets has no justification, the leap from prosecution to creating an analog to sex offender registries, which immediately descended into a disastrous morass, is spreading.

The initiative in Westchester was backed by Roxanne Beecher, who appeared in favor of the new law as a member of he Westchester County Bar Association, animal rights committee.  She pitched the County :

Ms. Beecher stated that Westchester County ranks number 9 out of 62 counties in the state for cases filed for animal abuse and this is why they are asking for animal abuser registry.  She said 71% of abused  or battered women report that their abuser has hurt or killed animals, 32% of battered women with children report that their children have hurt or killed animals, and 25-48% of battered women report delaying leaving their abuser for fear of their animal being abused. 

She said there was a woman (not in Westchester) in a domestic violence shelter who received photos from her mother of her estranged husband cutting off her dogs ears with garden shears and he was threatening to hurt her other animals. This woman left the shelter to go rescue her animals and she has since disappeared.

Ms. Beecher continued by saying 40% of battered women report that they are forced to perform sexual acts with animals, 48% of rapists have committed acts of animal cruelty as adolescents, 30% of child molesters have committed acts of animal abuse, and 15% of active rapists also rape animals.

Sick stuff, for sure, and certainly more than enough to inform the legislators to be scared of these sick animal abusers. Except a bit of research fails to back up most of it.  Even the  Humane Society’s “fact sheet,” also unsourced, supported only Beecher’s first statistic. Other than that, the balance appears of dubious origin.

Beecher then informed the County that plenty of others have been busy enacting animal abuse registries:

Ms. Beecher stated that the following states currently have an animal abusers registry: California, District of Columbia, Louisiana, Maine, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts, Nebraska, Ohio, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia. 

Except a little research shows this, too, falls a bit shy of accurate.  According to the Animal Legal Defense Fund, the leading advocacy group supporting animal abuse registries, only three have been enacted across the country, all in New York, consisting of Suffolk, Rockland and Albany County. While registries have been proposed elsewhere, and have occasionally passed on legislative house (such as in Texas), they have never made it to enactment.

Clearly, Beecher’s “expert” advocacy offered a horribly scary picture of animal abusers, And it certainly comes as no surprise that no one appeared to speak in favor of animal abusers. But what of the Westchester Bar Association’s criminal defense members?  There may be nothing good to say about anyone who abuses animals, but there’s plenty to say about the creation of a registry that will turn yet another group, who like the hated “sex offenders,” will come to encompass the deserving as well as the undeserving, into second class citizens who will be unable to find work, homes or normal lives.

Or what of the advocates of domestic abuse, having their issue usurped by animal rights activists with statistics that seem absurd and incredible?  Do “40% of battered women report that they are forced to perform sexual acts with animals”?  Are “15% of active rapists also rape animals”?  How would it even be possible to arrive at such a statistic? Do active rapists respond to surveys? 

This contradicts the current theory about rape, that it’s a control crime rather than a sex crime. But if rapists spend their spare time raping animals (seriously?), then it’s not about control over another person, but about sick sexual gratification. Are rape advocates in agreement with this?

After hearing this litany of horrors, the Westchester County Board of Legislators  unanimously approved the animal abuse registry.

According to Tuesday’s Westchester News, new legislation will not only mandate that convicted animal abusers be listed in a public database of animal abuse offenders, but those offenders will also be prohibited from owning, adopting or otherwise possessing (or exercising control over) any animals.

The county legislators made their unanimous decision based upon known ties between animal cruelty and domestic abuse, citing testimony from Roxanne Beecher, Co-Chair of the Animal Law Committee of the Westchester County Bar Association…

Known ties?  Not until now, when this pitch is bootstrapped into some alternate reality where the blind adoption of these statistics will be repeated wherever the ALDF next seeks to pitch a registry.  And then it will appear in quickie research online, not because there is any foundation for it, but merely because of repetition, until the myth becomes the reality.

This is how bad law is born, and how the basis for bad law moves from fiction to reality.  While one might hope that legislators would seek to know the basis for such outrageous claims, rather than blindly embrace them as “known ties” when there appears to be no empirical basis for them, one might similarly hope that the criminal defense committee would appear to counter the animal rights committee, to warn of the hole they are digging and the fiasco they may be creating.

This isn’t about a lack of concern for animal abuse, for which criminal laws exist and abusers received well-deserved punishment.  This is about the growth of registries as a trendy reaction, like such other simplistic solutions as three-strikes laws and mandatory minimums, whose unintended consequences have proven to create problems far beyond the purported intent of these registries. 

Whether Westchester County would have enacted the animal abuse registry regardless of Beecher’s claims isn’t clear. Once a fashion trend begins, it can be hard to stop. There may be no one willing to speak out on behalf of animal abusers, just as there was no one to speak out on behalf of sex offenders, until the stories begin of outrageous and unintended applications that start destroying lives.  By then, however, it will be too late, as the registry was already unanimously approved based on once spurious, now “known,” claims.

After approval of the referendums in Colorado and Washington to legalize the recreational use of marijuana, some police stopped arresting people and some prosecutors dropped charges, even though the law has yet to go into effect.  The People have spoken, and they honored the spirit of their vote in advance of its technical application.  Some did, but not all.

From the New York Times :

In the uncertain weeks after Colorado’s vote to legalize small amounts of marijuana for recreational use, the answer in hundreds of minor drug cases depends less on the law than on location.

Hundreds of misdemeanor marijuana cases are already being dropped here and in Washington State, which approved a similar measure. Police departments have stopped charging adults 21 years and older for small-scale possession that will be legally sanctioned once the laws take effect in the coming weeks.

But prosecutors in more conservative precincts in Colorado have vowed to press ahead with existing marijuana cases and are still citing people for possession. At the same time, several towns from the Denver suburbs to the Western mountains are voting to block new, state-licensed retail marijuana shops from opening in their communities.

There was once a time when drunk driving prosecutions were based on a driver being drunk.  That meant that a driver was sufficiently impaired by alcohol that he could not adequately drive safely, and the tell-tale was his driving.  Then things got “scientific.”  Blood alcohol became the test, first at .10%, and later at ,08% when the former didn’t yield enough criminals.

The argument, initially, was that the numbers meant nothing. Alcoholics typically functioned just fine at .10%, as their livers were used to being filled with booze. Larger men and smaller women had very different physical reactions to two and a half beers. Then there was the notice question, how anyone was supposed to know what their BAC was at any given moment.

But in time, the science overcame reason, and absolute numbers answered all prosecution questions.  The only real problem was that it wasn’t actual science, but a quantifiable substitute for proof of wrongdoing.  Aside from criminal defense lawyers and a few drunks, nobody complained all that much.  Mothers Against Drunk Driving owned the public relations campaign, and nobody argued for the conduct that killed children. It’s a tough argument to make.

Now, there is a new kid in town, the next frontier of a life of perfect safety on the road: drowsy driving.

Roadside signs around the country have long warned drivers not to doze off behind the wheel with gentle catchphrases like “You Snooze, You Lose” and “Drive Alert, Arrive Alive.”

Now the campaign against so-called drowsy driving is moving to the courtroom, with law enforcement officials increasingly pushing to hold sleepy drivers criminally accountable when they cause fatal crashes.

The shift from polite chiding to prosecution follows successful efforts to criminalize other dangerous driving habits, like speeding, drinking alcohol and using cellphones. But drowsy driving, which the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety calls “one of the most significant, unrecognized traffic safety problems,” faces tougher legal hurdles. A blood-alcohol test can show whether a driver was drunk. Skid marks may betray a speeder. And cellphone records will reveal whether someone was texting right before a crash. But drowsiness is a personal and often fleeting state of mind that leaves no permanent record.

The push toward the courts has been supported by traffic-safety advocates, researchers and lawyers who say that when it comes to, say, driving without seat belts or driving while texting, educational efforts alone are rarely enough to change human behavior.

“The threat of criminal prosecution can go a long way to heighten driver awareness,” concurred Daniel Brown, a lawyer who is on the board of the National Sleep Foundation, a scientific and educational group in Washington.

At Volokh Conspiracy, Orin Kerr discusses a good ruling out of the 9th Circuit in United States v. I.E.V., where the court suppressed evidence seized by a border search conducted 100 miles inland.

Two teenage brothers drove their car up to the United States Border Patrol Checkpoint near Whetstone, Arizona, about 100 miles from the Arizona/Mexico border. A drug dog alerted to the presence of narcotics in the car. The car was directed to a second check point, and the two were asked to exit the car. They did so, and they consented to a search of the car. The drug dogs were then unable to find any drugs in the car and did not alert to any drugs on their persons. However, an officer observed that one of the brothers was acting nervous and repeatedly “touched his abdomen area.” Officers decided to frisk the two brothers for weapons.

During the frisk, the officers felt an object through one suspect’s shirt. They lifted off the suspect’s shirt and found a “brick-shaped object taped on the Defendant’s abdomen.” The then found a similar brick-shaped object taped to the other suspect’s abdomen. The opinion isn’t very clear as to exactly what happened next, but it seems that they ripped off the tape and took the brick-shaped objects, which contained marijuana. (The opinion just says that at that point the officers “seized the marijuana.”) The brothers were then charged with possessing marijuana, and they challenged the frisks as violating the Fourth Amendment.

The Ninth Circuit divided on whether the officers acted properly. The majority, Judge N.R. Smith joined by Judge Christen, concludes that the officers acted improperly and violated the Fourth Amendment because they lacked reason to think that there was a gun present as opposed to drugs.

An intellectually honest decision, particularly given how easy it would have been for the officers to make up a rationale to justify their fear that the brothers were armed. They didn’t. They told the truth. The law worked. Well, at least two-third of the way.

Judge Kozinski dissents, reasoning that where there may be drugs, there may be guns, justifying a frisk of the suspects for guns.

While Judge Kozinski is often on the side of the angels when it comes to adhering to doctrine, even though it lets the bad guy walk, not this time.  This time, its the unwritten presumption that wherever there are drugs, the law should presume there are guns. 

Common sense tells us that people engaged in legitimate business don’t tape bricks to their bodies. This would be true even if the encounter had been on a street corner in Pocatello, but at a checkpoint on a highway heading from the Mexican border, after a dog had alerted to possible drugs? Any officer who sent I.E.V. on his way without finding out what he was hiding under his shirt should have been fired for incompetence.

There it is, the enemy of proof and the cheap backdoor when there is no reason to be had: common sense. When you can’t explain something logically, just chalk it up to common sense and leap right over that huge gap.

Of course, there is a much simpler answer to the issue of incompetent border patrol agents letting a suspect go because he’s constrained by the Constitution. Got probable cause? Get a warrant. Too much work? Too nebulous a justification for a warrant?  Bummer. That darn Constitution keeps getting in the way of catching the bad guys.  But Alex, you know this is how it works.  You know sometimes the guilty go free. You’ve even held as much.  Why eschew the Constitution this time?

The bugaboo of drugs has given rise to no shortage of convenient myths that the judiciary has embraced to create exceptions to the Constitution.  Guns and drugs are integrally connected. Dogs are magic and honest and cute as the dickens. Cars with drugs emit odors that can be smelled from great distances and at high speeds. Cars with drugs aren’t covered by the Fourth Amendment in any event, because, well, they’re not.

My utter rejection of the use of “common sense” to leap tall buildings and logical and evidentiary gaps is been explained many times before. There is no such thing. It’s a really cool fallacy used to appeal to facile assumption when facts and the laws of physics won’t support the conclusion. It’s pulled out of the bag of tricks when reasonable doubt stands in the way of conviction.  Never use “common sense” around here unless you want to get an eyeful.

So drug dealers don’t use guns? Of course they do, when they do. And when they don’t, they don’t.  And when the drugs are taped to the abdomen of mules, like these brothers, there is little chance anybody put a gun on them as well.

But who cares?  The question isn’t how many facile assumptions can be made to justify circumvention of the Constitution, but whether the officers involved had a reason to fear for their safety.  They didn’t. They said they didn’t. They offered nothing to suggest, despite their lack of subjective fear, there was an objective basis to believe they did, or should. Judge Kozinski’s leap to the contrary, there is no intrinsic rule of nature that anyone in possession of drugs is presumed to be armed, and yet Kozinski chides (he does that, sometimes) the majority of his panel for being “out of touch”:

It’s easy enough, sitting safely in our chambers, protected by U.S. Marshals with guns and dogs, surrounded by concrete barriers and security cameras, to say that officers in the field had no cause to fear for their safety. But if we’d been there when I.E.V. and his brother pulled up in their car, heard the police dog alert and seen one of the suspects fidget like he was reaching for a weapon, I’d have dived for cover into the nearest ditch, and my guess is I wouldn’t have been the first one there.

This would have been such a great benchslap, if only he came out the other way.  But there is another failing to Judge Kozinski’s dissent that goes unnoticed. Not until the officers searched and found a brick of marijuana taped to the defendant’s abdomen do they have evidence of drugs.  Search first, then justify the legality of the search by what’s found?  Not around these parts, cowboy.

Perhaps I’m naive (as I’ve been accused a few times lately), but I’ve come to expect better of Judge Kozinski, who is usually on the more fearless side of constitutional interpretation.  Come on, Judge. Pick yourself up, dust yourself off and get your judicial butt out of that ditch.  You’re right, you probably wouldn’t have been the first one there, but do you really want to hang out in a ditch with others who wring their hands out of fear of the consequences of adhering to the Constitution?  I didn’t think so.

In yet another rehash of how and why false confessions happen, with yet another sanitized view of how it can be addressed, Doug Keene and Rita Handrich at  The Jury Expert go on at length to remind us of what we already know: false confessions happen and they’re best addressed if the stars align, judges allow what they rarely allow and jurors are just as incapable of distinguishing a false confession from a true one as they’ve always been.

One of their key takeaways is that if all the players in the drama were more inclined to believe that false confessions occur, and care, it would go a long way toward eliminating them.  They suggest some fixes, such as banning deceptive interrogation tactics, videotaping, using transcripts (to focus on content rather than “shifty appearance”), shortening interrogation sessions, presuming guilt and educating jurors about false confessions.

Curiously, they omitted the most obvious solution to the false confession problem, have the interrogating officers give the suspect a foot massage while he sips a green tea latte.

While nowhere in this lengthy quasi-academic post is the Reid technique mentioned, the answer boils down to eliminate all the methods that police find effective in getting a suspect to talk (excluding the time-proven rubber hose), and false confessions can be reduced. 

Of course, so would true confessions. So would all confessions. And that is the problem in the first place.  The point of interrogation is to get people to talk, not to get them to tell the truth. As anyone who has ever tried a case would expect, a commentary by Larry Barksdale to the post is far more real and enlightening than the post itself. You have to scroll down to the end to read it, and there’s no independent link to take you straight there.

Barksdale, with “forty years of law enforcement experience,” is an assistant forensics professor at the University of Nebraska, and his thoughts are well-written, clear and has the unmistakable smell of a cop’s perspective. While the main body of the post is tedious and a bit fantastical, Barksdale’s commentary is real and illuminating.  For example:

Assumption 4: Everyone has a price tag.

This is a button to be pushed by the interviewer that goes far beyond money alone. Good citizenship appeals, lessening of culpability, money, revenge, spitefulness, fear of exposure or harm to oneself or significant others, self-promotion, sense of guilt, and wanting to get the interrogation over with are some of the buttons that can be pushed to get information. The utility of button-pushing includes the not guilty as well as the guilty. The duty of the interviewer is to be persistent in pushing those buttons to get the maximum information from every source.

Assumption 5: There are rules to play by.

For example, waterboarding is not permitted by civil law enforcement agencies in the United States. Private and public interviewers are trained in the limits of the rules. These rules are not always clear however, and experienced law enforcement officers know that the rules change on a regular basis. In my 41 years as an active law enforcement officer, the required process for Miranda warnings has changed numerous times. At one time there was not a requirement to read Miranda warnings on misdemeanor arrest situations. Few law enforcement officers read Miranda on traffic citation cases if the offense, such as a speeding violation, did not have a penalty that included incarceration.

However, in 2012, on felony and misdemeanor arrests, when the person is in custody or there is a possible jail sentence, the rule is to read Miranda warnings. Twenty years ago, the requirement was to “read” Miranda when an investigation focused upon a person and that person was in custody. Today, the rule seems to be that Miranda only needs to be read if a person is in custody and only if they are not familiar with Miranda rights. Hence, if you are standing on a street corner “talking” and then let the person go, you do not need to read Miranda rights if you can testify you were “only gathering information and had no immediate plans to arrest the person.”

When I first started in law enforcement in the late 1960s, it was acceptable to put a pencil between a suspect’s fingers and squeeze the fingers to use pain to cause a person to talk. I even recall being told that if a female was resisting arrest or not being cooperative that squeezing and twisting her nipples would make her cooperative. Over the years, I have attended interview and interrogation schools in which several days were spent on developing “lies” that would convince a person that you had information about physical evidence or information from an accomplice or informant.  It is not easy to be a good liar. It takes training and practice for most people, because “good” people are raised to tell the truth.

In 2012, in the United States, civil police practices are such that inflicting physical pain or touching intimate body areas are not allowed and would be criminal behavior by the police. Blatant lies that can be construed as coercing a person are often suppressed in a confession.   A response to this issue is to say something such as “What would you say if I told you we had your fingerprints that matched, and your DNA is on the bathroom door?” An awareness of the rules, a compliance to the rules, and a willingness to test the boundaries of the rules are the mandate of contemporary law enforcement interviewers, in the quest to maximize the gathering of information.

I totally agree with the authors, Douglas L. Keene and Rita R. Handrich, that people confess to crimes when they did not commit the crime. I accept the reasons put forth as valid explanations of what leads to people confessing to crimes when they did not do the crime. I concur that withholding information that would tend to disprove the validity of a confession is a miscarriage of justice. Inflicting physical pain, deception, psychological abuse, and other acts that fall outside the legal definition as acceptable interview and interrogation behavior have no place in the behavior of the civil police. I wholeheartedly support review, supervision, and punitive personnel actions for law enforcement personnel who violate the rules.

However, the authors also seem to suggest that the primary culpability in cases of false confessions lies with the law enforcement component of the process. I do not agree with this. Outside of intentionally or grossly negligent violation of rules both statutory or administrative, the culpability lies also with the practicing attorneys and the courts.

Assumption 1: There are no absolutes. 

No one tells the truth because there is no such thing as the truth. The truth is only what is accepted in court as fact. Research in cognition and perception seem to bear this out as phenomena of the human condition. Law Enforcement officers are therefore in the information gathering business. It is their job to get as much information as possible on a given event. In any event, an interviewer gets only the first best story, or, as it is often facetiously called, the “first best lie.”

When I read Case Western Reserve’s law school dean, Lawrence Mitchell’s, op-ed in the New York Times (thanks all who sent me links, though I read the Times too, ya know), I quickly issued a typically snarky twit :

Case Western Law Dean Lawrence Mitchell in @NYTimes op-ed: Do these hotpants make my butt look fat? http://tinyurl.com/crdcwgd 

Taking   potshots at unnamed critics is fun.

The hysteria has masked some important realities and created an environment in which some of the brightest potential lawyers are, largely irrationally, forgoing the possibility of a rich, rewarding and, yes, profitable, career.

Translation: Getting people to spend $200,000 for a 50/50 shot at a legal job of any kind is getting harder every day.

The starting point is the job market. It’s bad. It’s bad in many industries. “Bad,” in law, means that most students will have trouble finding a first job, especially at law firms. But a little historical perspective will reveal that the law job market has been bad — very bad — before. To take the most recent low before this era, in 1998, 55 percent of law graduates started in law firms. In 2011, that number was 50 percent. A 9 percent decline from a previous low during the worst economic conditions in decades hardly seems catastrophic. And this statistic ignores the other jobs lawyers do.

If we define “law graduates starting in law firms” in the broadest way possible, by counting every single job any law graduate in the class of 2011 got at a law firm, 41 percent of law graduates whose employment outcomes were recorded (this data is missing for 4 percent of ABA law graduates in the 2011 class) got a job with a law firm.  If we define “starting in law firms” to mean “got jobs as lawyers with law firms,” which is surely how readers will interpret that phrase – that is, if we don’t count people who got jobs as secretaries, paralegals and clerks, i.e., jobs they could have gotten without acquiring a law degree first – that percentage drops to 34.7 percent.  If we limit the phrase to full-time lawyer jobs, the percentage drops to 32 percent. If we exclude new grads who listed themselves as members of “firms” consisting of one lawyer (themselves) that figure becomes 29.5 percent. Statistics  here.

I started law school in 2002 and graduated in 2005.  Prior to going to law school I had heard rumblings about how being an attorney was not as profitable as the schools made it out to be.  I was also warned by other attorneys that it was very stressful.  Unfortunately that information did not sink in and I bought the hype that [average-ranked law school] offered.  So I spent three good years of my life working on a degree that I believe should have only taken two.

Then reality really hit when I entered the job market.  It was not good.  You could find jobs but for $40,000 to $50,000.  At first I thought that it was me, that I had not done the right things, ie kiss up to the right people, done unpaid internships, etc.  So I decided to hang up my own shingle.  I opened my own office, and tried to make a go of it.  It has been an incredibly difficult five years.  For many of those years I would blame myself for not doing better; I began to believe that there was huge mistake that I was making or I had made that had alienated clients, or that I wasn’t advertising properly, or any number of things that could be attributed to an office that produced income, but not that much.  I worked long hours by myself trying to satisfy clients that could not be satisfied.  I panicked at little mistakes, and thought the worst case scenarios for every misstep.  It was a miserable existence and it put me in a depressive state with bouts of anxiety that were difficult to control.

For us old guys, like me and Mitchell, we’re debating the virtues of a profession.  For the writer of this email to Campos, it’s his life.  Mitchell waxes vague. The writer lies awake in his bed at night wondering how he will feed his children in the morning.  I’m damn angry about this.

It’s not that making the decision to go to law school, to become a lawyer, has no virtue. It is, or at least used to be and can be once again, a worthwhile and important profession.  It’s that the marketeering, the law porn, reflected in Mitchell’s empty prose is designed to do one thing, and one thing only: obscure the downside and deceive the unduly optimistic.

As much as I may rail against deceptive legal marketers for pushing their naive, ignorant or scummy lawyer-clients ahead in the race to the bottom, their smiling faces have nothing on this law dean.  His words will comfort parents who remember lawyers as being prominent members of the community, with fine houses and manicured lawns, who want nothing more for their children than to be secure in a comfortable life, guaranteed by generations of vested Solomons. 

And their children, unclear of where their life should be and seeking refuge from a troubled world, assume that following the crowd will assure them that they will get that BMW and corner office.  All those smiling faces on law school websites can’t be wrong.

Yet the email to Campos reflects the brutal reality.  The writer concedes the depression his choice brought him, and later in the email, admits to thoughts of doing harm to himself.  Would it bother you greatly, Dean Mitchell, is you found out some kid read your op-ed, became a lawyer, and took his life?  Or would that just be collateral damage to the more important cause of filling your law schools empty seats?

It’s time to make it plain. Cut the crap. These are real people’s lives you’re screwing with. Law deans don’t get a free pass on bullshit any more than anyone else.

Among the many fascinating things that appear in the Simple Justice mailbag every day, aside from the many requests for pro bono representation of your “worst travesty of justice ever” because the only evidence against you is seven eyewitnesses, four of which come from priests, one of whom baptized you, high-definition video taken from three angles, and your signed and written confession taken in the presence of counsel (that thief who stole all your money), are solicitations to check out the latest, greatest  start-up concept ever. How cool is that?

One arrived yesterday from a company called Jailbase. Yes, I misread it the first time too, but in a fit of twitchy fingers, opened it and found this:

Hello, we are developing a mugshot mobile app that will allow you to identify people against county jail mugshots. We thought your users would be interested.

While researching the technology, which has been around for multiple decades, JailBase noted that facial recognition technology has previously been primarily used by government and large corporations. Given a photo, it allows the user to search for similar faces in other photos. Recent advancements in the technology has led it to be more accurate and affordable, allowing JailBase to bring this technology to the public in the form of a mobile app to match people’s photos with police mug shots.

JailBase runs a website that collects 1000’s of mugshots a day from county jails. These mug shots are considered public record. Currently, users of the website can search by name for people they know that might have been arrested, then sign up for arrest notifications. JailBase will be adding the ability to search for arrested individuals by face. The public will be able to take a photo of someone using their mobile phone and instantly see possible mug shot matches.

With the development of a working prototype to give people the ability to use a photo of a person to find out if they have an arrest record, JailBase has launched a crowd funding campaign to finance the completion of the project, which they hope to achieve by March 2013. People who give to the campaign will have the opportunity to exchange their donation for rewards, including a full version of the mobile app once it is released.

In juxtaposition to the many instances of police (usually at the behest of school administrators) taking infantile pranks and turning them into very real prosecutions of children, four cops in North Providence, Rhode Island,  took the law into their own hands and did what one would imagine Andy Griffith would have done 50 years ago.

Four police officers in Rhode Island are being investigated for making five boys do pushups on the side of a street as punishment for damaging a mailbox.

Acting North Providence Police Chief Paul Martellini said a woman called police Friday morning to report her mailbox was damaged. Officers soon found a bright yellow sports car that matched the description, he said. Several teenagers were inside.

Mayor Charles Lombardi told WPRO-AM on Monday the officers thought the best way to reprimand the teens was to have them do pushups.

So they made the boys do a dozen pushups, gave them a stern warning to never vandalize a mailbox again, and sent them on their way.  No cuffs. No tasers. No criminal records. And for this, the community built them a statue, right?  Not exactly.

Martellini said he has ordered an internal investigation and would not immediately comment on whether the officers’ actions were appropriate.

Clearly, the cops acted as judge, jury and executioner, conceptually a position that most are disinclined to relegate to the police.  As Chief Martellini ponders whether this was “professional” behavior, he asks the wrong question.  It wasn’t.  Professional behavior would have compelled the officers to arrest the youths and turn the matter over to prosecutors, ultimately resulting in a determination of guilt or innocence, and if the former, a life saddled with a criminal conviction. Now that would have been the way a “professional” cop behaves.

Instead, they did what a cop would have done a few generations ago, when the idea of hanging a criminal record on every stupid kid would have been considered absurd and outrageous by pretty much everyone, cops included. 

Given how police are inclined to explain away as justified the needless deaths of innocents without blinking an eye, why is Chief Martellini not reacting with, “what the hell is wrong with you people”?  This could explain:

Martellini is acting chief because Chief John Whiting was recently convicted of stealing money from a stripper’s pocketbook after a car chase last year.

Once a department is perceived as dirty, even doing the right thing presents questions that aren’t so easily swept under the rug.  But this?

The problem is that these four cops did what one might hope they would do when dealing with dumb kids; the only additional thought is whether they had to pay to repair the damaged mailbox. They should. And maybe buy the person who suffered the damage a dozen donuts for the trouble they made. Case closed.

But the inclination of years past to trust police is long gone.  Praise these officers for taking the law into their own hands and you’ve taken a giant step onto the slippery slope of police misconduct.  Sure, this time the punishment, a dozen pushups, seems right on the money, but what about next time? A different set of cops, a different place, and it’s a taser and a few kicks in the head.  Suddenly, their notion of street justice doesn’t give us a warm and fuzzy Mayberry feeling.

On the one hand, putting the handling of punishment in the discretionary hands of cops doesn’t strike many as a good idea. There have been far, far too many times when police have demonstrated that they so utterly lack the judgment and discretion to control vicious urges, violent tempers and the knee-jerk resort to the weapons of their trade, to ever willingly go down the road to Mayberry.  Especially when it comes to children.

Yet, in this instance, what happened was clearly the best outcome for all involved.  The alternative of prosecution and potential criminal record would have ruined lives over a stupid, juvenile act. The boys needed to learn they can’t destroy things, that vandalism isn’t fun or cool.  But once the lesson was learned, they similarly need the chance to grow up and lead productive lives, unencumbered by the yoke of the criminal justice system. 

Let’s come to grips with reality here: no child is better off for having become embroiled in the system. Some may have engaged in conduct sufficiently serious that it can’t be avoided, but they are no better for it. When the offense is more prank than crime, and can be effectively dealt with by a good metaphoric spanking, we are all better off.

But because we are constrained to remember history so we don’t repeat it, we’re just not inclined to trust the police to handling things well either.  What a mess.  What a shame that there is no going back to Mayberry because most police aren’t Andy Griffith.  And if Andy Griffith came back again, he would likely find himself sitting at a desk, gun and shield surrendered, and under investigation. 

H/T Steve Magas, the Bike Lawyer

Like weeds, they popped up around the blawgosphere yesterday.  Blawgers (and bloggers) who want their fans to vote for them in the ABA Journal’s annual beauty pageant. Trying so very hard not to appear desperate and pathetic in their quest for validation, they humblebrag, they gently ask, they call to action, they ask for votes so that they can prove their worth.

The win has been worth paying for votes, or as was the case when a blog from New York Law School was in the mix, marshalling all tuition payers to vote up their baby.  Lawprofs have laid bare their souls for the honor of being able to claim they are the sexiest academic in the blawgosphere, while n00bs have grasped their eminence to pontificate about how they make their magic happen.

In some jesting on twitter by  Mark Bennett yesterday, the Trial Warrior, Antonin Pribetic, who masquerades as a Canadian blawger named Edith, offered a  simple truth in moment of uncommon clarity (not uncommon for Nino, but for twitter):

@MarkWBennett Frankly, SJ and DP will both likely lose, for the simple fact that you and @ScottGreenfield are not nice.