Few stories truly capture the insanity of sex offender registry laws than that of Charles Mader of Albuquerque, who became the subject of a manhunt by Bernalillo County Sheriff’s deputies when he moved from his current residence without satisfying his registration obligation. 

From KOB :

Charles Mader listed his address as a dumpster at 8th and Central in Albuquerque. As a convicted sex offender he must give the Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Department a physical address where he stays, so detectives can keep track of him.

Mader lists the dumpster because he is homeless, but BCSO detectives say Mader moved from the dumpster and didn’t report the move within ten days. That violates his sex offender registration requirements.

Mader didn’t end up on the sex offender registry for some innocuous conduct; he was convicted of trying to rape a six year old boy.  But this isn’t a matter of being sympathetic toward him.  Rather, it’s a product of creating laws that circumvent criminal law process by facile language (it’s civil, not criminal, so it doesn’t count) that are destined to produce outcomes that make it essentially impossible to comply.

It’s unclear why Mader moved from the dumpster.  Maybe he didn’t like what was happening to the neighborhood.  Maybe the business that owned the dumpster decided it no longer wanted a tenant.  But the idea that someone could live in a dumpster, A Dumpster, and use that as a registered address is absurd. 

How, exactly, he satisfied his registration requirement by listing the address of a dumpster is unclear.  Did his mail go to “Dumpster behind 1245 Main Street?”  Was this what legislatures intended in their zeal to protect the public?  Does the registration of a man living in dumpster protect anyone?

What can’t be forgotten is that no matter what Mader did to put himself in this position, he was arrested, convicted and sentenced for his crime.  He received the punishment that society has determined is appropriate to impose.  And then, when it’s all over and his “debt” is paid to society, he gets the right to live out his life in a dumpster, provided he registers with the local police.

On Monday, five deputies hunted for Mader and found him at a homeless facility north of downtown. Detectives on the scene were frustrated with Mader saying they have told him over and over again to register.

Mader told us on scene he wasn’t familiar with some of his registration rules.

Detective Pat Burke, who helped arrest Mader, says he has explained the rules to Mader at least a dozen times.

There’s a good chance that there’s something very wrong with Mader on all levels.  Is he intellectually challenged?  Is he psychologically impaired?  Is he just one really sick guy?  He could well be, and it would hardly come as a surprise to anyone in the system.  So many defendants are truly, sadly, very sick guys.  Even convicted sex offenders don’t ordinarily end up living in dumpsters unless there are other problems as well.  Under bridges, yes, but not dumpster.

Sheriff’s officials say Mader now could face up to 3 years in jail because this is his third offense for failing to register.

In a bad way, this may well be the best Mader has available, three squares and a bed for an extended period of time.  Of course, it’s an expensive proposition, since prison isn’t cheap, and it may not be the way he would choose to live.  And the chances of any problems he might have, psychologically and intellectually, being addressed are nil.  This is warehousing.  He was already warehoused, and that didn’t do much to turn him out on the street better than he went in.

The stories of people who have no business being on a sex offender registry, such as the 18 year old convicted for sex with his 16 year old girlfriend, or the guy urinating outside the bar, present on level of absurdity.  This guy, Mader, presents an entirely different level.  If the issue is that he should be sentenced to life imprisonment because the underlying offense involved molestation of a six year old, an outcome I find wrong but your mileage may differ, then it should be addressed at sentence.

Here, we have just another examples of the permanent underclass created by ill-conceived laws that are embraced without the slightest thought of unintended consequences and the new problems they cause.  Even assuming the worst, did Mader’s being duly registered in his dumpster home make any child safer?

Will anyone be better off three years from now when Mader goes in search of a new dumpster to call home?

H/T Doug Berman

While Balko is off investigating his roots, Peter Moskos is filling in at The Agitator.  He offers a curious self-description:

I’m Peter Moskos, a professor of Law and Police Science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. In some ways–as an ivy-league educated egghead, a tax-and-spend liberal, and a former police officer–I couldn’t be more of a miss-match for The Agitator.

While he only worked for two years on the streets of Baltimore as a cop, making it sound more like a research project than a career move, it was enough to become indoctrinated to the culture and mores of the secret blue society.

Self-descriptions notwithstanding, Moskos provides insight into mindset of how he as a cop, and now a guy teaching cops, sees the world.

It what might be end of a long (and glorious?) Baltimore police tradition, two officers were convicted of misdemeanor for picking up two 15-year-old boys and dropping them off far from home, one of them barefoot. The officers were acquitted of far more serious kidnapping charges.

Such shenanigans certain fall under then category of “informal justice,” but it was never clear if it was illegal discipline. Is a long lost walk good punishment all of the time? Certainly not. But might it not be the right punishment some of the time?

He then offers a personal anecdote:

One time I guy in my squad caught two kids throwing and breaking bottle early in the morning. We were a few months out of the academy and the kids were “gigged” with push-ups (ironically that is what we learned in the academy). Was this punishment technically legal? Probably not, but I thought it was one of the smartest thing I ever saw this officer do. A little discretion can go a long way.

The question isn’t whether we agree that the punishment inflicted by the cops, under these situations, was “appropriate,”  Some will. Some won’t. The question is whether you (or I), had we decided to take matters into our own hands with somebody else’s kid, and give them a little bitter medicine for their “shenanigans” would have been applauded by the very same cops who did it themselves.  Or arrested, prosecuted and convicted, including for the charge of kidnapping?

What is it in the cop mentality that makes them believe that their ultra vires choices are more wise, more acceptable, more appropriate, than anyone else’s? 

Consider what might have happened if the two 15-year-old boys had wandered through a tough neighborhood on their way home, been beaten and robbed, or maybe worse.  What if they were struck by a car?  Many 15-year-olds have no identification, and no one would have known who they were.  Their parents would have been clueless as to their whereabouts.  It could have been a tragic disaster.

What about the “gigged” kids?  How bad could push-ups be, right?  Unless one, unbeknownst to the cop, had a heart irregularity and died.  Oops. How long before a story emerged of how the kid had a history of abusing drugs to cover it up?

Given Moskos’ Harvard Ph.D., one would think that his obvious myopia had been worked out of him, that he could see the error of cop-think, the fallacy of its magical belief that police officers possess some greater ability to hand out their personal version of rough justice.  Clearly, this hasn’t happened.

Was this punishment technically legal? Probably not, but I thought it was one of the smartest thing I ever saw this officer do.

It’s quite surprising that Moskos’ point, that every kid who screws up doesn’t need to be put through the official juvenile justice system to teach them a lesson and get them on the straight and narrow, is conflated with the belief that this is best handled by the nearest beat cop.  How about parents?  How about teachers?  How about some recognition that wearing a shield doesn’t make you the arbiter of child-rearing and sound judgment?  They may teach you how to tase at cuffed prisoners who sass you in cop-school, but are you taught that your discretion is now superior to everyone else’s?

We tend to believe that cops are disingenuous in their approach to actions beyond the law, beyond the scope of their authority.  We think they know they’re doing wrong, but they just don’t care because they think their omnipotent.  From Moskos’ post, however, it’s evident that there is a belief that they are really doing a mitzvah, the right thing in setting kids straight without injecting them into a system that no one believes does them any good.

So with shield and gun in hand, the police try to do what they perceive to be the right thing on behalf of our children.  And it would be the same if they happened upon us doing the same, because only cops are imbued with the insight and moral authority to inflict their own brand of “justice”.  They do so with the best of intentions, but still thinking like cops.

By all appearances, the Toronto firm of solicitors is a fine boutique, experienced in a wide-range of international transactional work,  Best of all is their commitment to the client:

At Wagner Elliot LLP w e are committed to providing commercial legal advice of the highest quality at a sensible cost. Our service is: • personal • proactive and • practical Our charging policy is: • flexible • realistic and • totally transparent

If you are too trusting of the invisible, then you buy that $89 ebook that comes with the promise of instant riches, or you sign up for ear candling, or invest time and money with a charlatan. If you haven’t figured out how to discern the invisible stuff that’s true from the invisible stuff that’s a trick, you’re helpless in a world where just about every decision we make has to do with things that are invisible.

Thus, two kinds of serious errors: believing in invisible things that aren’t true, or insisting that the truth might not be. They’re caused by fear, by deliberate misinformation and by being uninformed.

How to discern between the two is our problem, not Seth’s.  That’s how marketing gurus roll.

The slope is becoming ever more slippery.  Only last week,  Brian Tannebaum wrote a provocative post about young lawyers learning to “fake it ’til they make it,” which brought out a surprising number of scoundrels asserting their droits moraux to hold themselves out in best possible light, even if that light is false and deceptive, providing that they believe that they haven’t stretch reality too far.  But at least these scoundrels were actually lawyers.  At least I think they were lawyers.

When all it takes is a website with some generic photos of buildings and the standard verbiage commitment to clients, it no longer requires lawyers to play lawyers on the internet.  The potential is huge, and it can save young lawyers a fortune in law school debt. 

There have been individuals who pretended to be lawyers before.   Dan Penofsky immediately comes to mind, a New York City Assistant District Attorney (and a pretty darn good one) who, as it happens, wasn’t a lawyer, but who managed to get away with playing prosecutor for decades. He tried a good case and was a formidable adversary.  And he didn’t even have a website.

The interwebz is the land of opportunity for the invisible, and as every social media guru and legal marketer points out, all it takes to gain fabulous wealth in the law is to know how to play the internet marketing game better than the lawyer next door.  So if you’re not as adept as your neighbor, or perhaps too shy and reticent to puff your way to fame and fortune, perhaps your best route to success is to get a job with a law firm that has mastered social media and self-promotion.

I hear Wagner Elliot, LLP, would be happy to take you on.  Just send in your equity stake and wait for instructions.

Walter Olson has a post at  Overlawyered about a proposed law before the New York Legislature to  ban the wearing of neckties by physicians in hospitals.

“Some lawmakers in Albany want a state law to prohibit doctors from wearing neckties in hospitals.” They cite a study showing that infectious bacteria might be “carried on ties and other loose-fitting clothing.”

Haters gonna hate.  But in Boulder County, Colorado, haters who say something are going to get convicted of a hate crime based on their words alone.

Adam Liptak writes about the 1996 murder case of Richard Rosario in the Bronx.  On its face, it’s another eyewitness ID case that was pretty common in the Bronx back then, where drugs and murder were similarly common.  And the state courts treated it that way, affirming the conviction and denying leave to appeal.  As routine as it gets.

Richard Rosario was convicted of a murder that took place on Turnbull Avenue in the Bronx on June 19, 1996, based on the testimony of two witnesses who had picked his picture out of a book of police photos.

Rosario was in Florida, and voluntarily returned when he found out the cops were looking for him in the Bronx.  He told them he was in Florida at the time the  murder occurred, and gave the cops the names of 13 witnesses to his alibi.  There was no evidence against Rosario other than the eyewitnesses from Turnbull Avenue. Rosario was represented by serial 18B counsel.

Mr. Rosario’s court-appointed lawyer did ask a judge for money to send an investigator to Florida to interview alibi witnesses. The request was granted, but the lawyer never pursued the matter, and her replacement mistakenly thought the request had been denied.

Rosario had two alibi witnesses, one of whom was his baby mama. The reason she knew he was in Florida was that she gave birth to his son the day after the murder.  It’s the sort of thing one remembers, but then, who can believe a baby mama?

He was convicted.  He appealed and the conviction was affirmed. He moved for leave to appeal to the court of appeals and it was denied. A routine murder conviction.

He brought a state court habeas, with seven additional alibi witnesses.  As reflected in the subsequent 2d Circuit decision,

The court . . . concluded that the government’s case was “strong”; that the prospective alibi witnesses “were, for the most part, questionable and certainly not as persuasive as the two witnesses who did testify”; and that the verdict was “unimpeached, and ‘amply supported by the evidence.’ ”

Though not perfect, defense counsel “represented Rosario skillfully and with integrity.” Routine.  Rosario then brought a federal habeas, and suddenly everything changed. And didn’t change.

A federal magistrate judge ruled that Mr. Rosario’s trial lawyers were “objectively deficient for failing to adequately investigate petitioner’s alibi and present additional witnesses at trial.” There was, Judge Henry Pitman went on, “a reasonable probability that the jury could have found petitioner not guilty of murder” had it heard the missing testimony.

But Judge Pitman said that did not matter, because New York courts were entitled to use an idiosyncratic standard in judging the effectiveness of counsel, one that considers lawyers’ performances over all rather than their isolated errors.

The idiosyncracy is that New York hasn’t adopted the federal test of Strickland v. Washington as its standard for ineffective assistance of counsel.  Instead, it holds tight to People v. Baldi, a 1981 decision that differs from the federal standard because it doesn’t require that, but for the lawyer’s screw-up, there would be a reasonable probability that the jury would have acquitted.  Instead, it’s second prong requires that the lawyer’s mistake merely undermine “meaningful representation.”

What does that mean?  Not much if you’re sitting in the 2d Circuit and the state courts have already held that the lawyer’s representation, on the whole, was pretty good (aside from that one little screw up of not presenting the additional alibi witnesses).  The Circuit saw the problem as one of New York’s disingenuous creation.

New York has, to some degree, combined the two prongs of Strickland. Prejudice to the defendant, meaning a reasonable possibility of a different outcome, is but one factor of determining if the defendant had meaningful representation. New York courts look at the effect of the attorney’s shortcomings as part of the equation in deciding if the defendant received the benefit of competent counsel.

This approach, and the language of Benevento, creates a danger that some courts might misunderstand the New York standard and look past a prejudicial error as long as counsel conducted himself in a way that bespoke of general competency throughout the trial. That would produce an absurd result inconsistent with New York constitutional jurisprudence and the mandates of Strickland. Properly applied, however, this standard is not contrary to Strickland and, in the case before us, the court properly applied the standard.

Even though New York prided itself on a “more generous” standard, the Circuit rubbed New York’s nose in its own convoluted caselaw and the extraneous wiggly language that courts always slip into decisions to leave themselves an out for the next case where they should reverse but don’t want to.

What’s extraordinary about this decision is how utterly routine its handling within the court of New York.  From the banal and inexplicable neglect by appointed counsel to the rubber stamping of another Bronx murder down the line.  The language of the habeas denial, about how the case was “strong” and “amply supported by the evidence” is the mechanism by which courts blow off argument, recreate their own other-worldly reality and make the problem go away.

Got an iffy, troubling conviction?  Just write the words on paper that the evidence was overwhelming and suddenly it’s not iffy anymore.  It’s never quite clear what catches an appellate judge’s interest, distinguishing the knee-jerk, routine affirmance with the case that gets serious scrutiny and consideration.  It certainly doesn’t help when it’s another indigent appeal, like so many that flow in and out of court with interchangeable “affirmed, no decision” orders that put a conclusive end to hope.

But Rosario’s claim caught Judge Pitman’s attention, only to get caught in a battle over federal antipathy toward New York’s reliance on Baldi.  You want your own “more generous” rule?  Great, now choke on it.

It’s likely that state judges thinking about Liptak’s column are muttering to themselves, “you don’t understand, we get thousands of these cases, and they all begin to look alike, to blur, claiming innocence when they’re guilty as sin.  How are we supposed to know that this is the needle in the haystack, the one where the guy really was innocent? All these defendants look the same.”

Yes, it’s a very difficult job, being a judge (or, more to the point, being one of the tired lawyers working for the appeals court whose job it is to read through and write up the arguments in these many appeals).  But all the rhetoric in all the decisions about how wondrous the law is, or how ample the evidence is, or how meaningful the representation is, doesn’t mean much to Richard Rosario, who sits in prison for a murder that happened 1000 miles away, as he awaited the birth of his child.

And now that the 2d Circuit has made sure that the New York Courts know that they screwed up, they still leave Rosario sitting in prison.  Because they are all too happy to squabble over words, but don’t really care too much about some guy named Rosario sitting in prison for a murder in the Bronx.  Routine.

Over at Crime & Federalism, Mike makes a fascinating connection between the five stages of grief and the experience of the inadvertent criminal defendant:

A person charged with a crime may go to prison. He may be raped. He won’t know his children. He will be, for the rest of his life, a convicted felon. One part of his life is indeed over. He is dying.

Yet we often don’t treat clients as people facing terminal illnesses. Instead we become frustrated when they won’t follow our advice. Yet no matter how sage the advice is, the deaf cannot hear – and a client in denial may as well be deaf and blind.

Kübler-Ross model for client counselling

As its name suggests, there are five stages of grief – denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance.

Consider, for example, the requirements one must meet to become a licensed Marital and Family Therapist:

Experience Requirements

104 weeks of supervision

3,000 hours of supervised work experience.

Yet any new law graduate is expected to competently handle divorces and criminal cases. Divorce, as my good friend Norm Pattis told me, “is one-part homicide, one-part suicide.” Even the spouse who wants the divorce feels somewhat dead inside, since hurting someone you once loved is damaging to all but the sociopathic.

When the Supreme Court decided in  Padilla v. Kentucky that the burden of informing defendants of the collateral consequences of a plea, a burden  that I argued should be rightly on the shoulders of the court rather than the lawyer, the question remained whether the duty to inform about collateral consequences of a plea was limited to immigration or everything in the world.

University of Arizona lawprof  Gabriel Chin wrote about the extent of the burden imposed by  Padilla.

Padilla held that defense counsel have an ethical obligation to advise their clients of the possibility of deportation when pleading guilty. The inescapable logic of Padilla is that counsel’s duty will extend to warning about other serious collateral consequences as well. Putting more demands on overburdened defense counsel raises a number of issues. First, how can public defenders, who are already challenged in providing basic representation add more to their duties? Second, how can defense counsel, who are not specialists in collateral consequences, be aware of the hundreds or thousands of potential collateral consequences which could apply in any given case?

Although Padilla means more work for defense attorneys, it also promises better outcomes for clients.

There were spontaneous celebrations in the street, in Times Square and at the Site.  Patriotism was all the rage.  It was little different than any other street celebration of death anywhere in the world, but Americans are special and whatever we do is different.  Even the execution of our enemies.

When President Bush announced Mission Accomplished, nothing changed.  When our anger was directed at one man, a symbol of the attack on the World Trade Center, it served as a focal point for our anger.  Almost ten years later, the symbol is gone, and Americans have taken to the street to celebrate death.

This is nothing like May 1, 1945, when we learned of the death of another devil.  He wasn’t a mere symbol, and his death meant that our fathers and sons would be coming home.  The war was over.  It took a mere week until Victory in Europe was declared, and it was truly over.  And we returned to our lives.

The death of Osama bin Laden may be cathartic to many, and perhaps this will serve a more important end then the mere death of a man.  There are many issues swirling around his death that will no doubt be fleshed out further in the days ahead, but people were giddy with joy at this one man’s death.  Just as others we despise were giddy with joy when the Twin Towers fell.  We have a new bar by which to measure ourselves, lower than it’s ever been before.

So now that another mission has been accomplished, will we raise the bar?  Will we be able to walk around our nation without being forced to show identification upon demand of armed men?  Will we be able to walk onto an airplane with our shoes on?  Will laws passed in a frenzy to allow the protectors of our safety to listen to our private words be repealed?

When before in history has one inconsequential man been so influential?  The body may be cold, but the legacy lives on in our daily lives.  Soon, there will be speech reminding us that the war on terrorism must still be fought, and that we, Americans, must still sacrifice.  And it will slowly sink in that nothing more happened than one more body has been taken in the never-ending war.  The reason is obvious, that no war has ever been so useful and productive in persuading good people to succumb to fear.

The glory of this day has been wrapped in the sorrow of the family of victims of 9/11, with proud voices saying that this will bring them closure.  I hope it does, but I suspect it won’t.  Instead, it will just remind them of what they’ve lost, and force them to relive the horror.  When they do, they will take no comfort in the death of a symbol. 

The families of those who died, and lived, will wonder why the day they waited for so long doesn’t fill the void in their hearts.  Many important people will tell them that it does, and it should, but it won’t. 

Whether Osama bin Laden has ascended to his virgins or lies cold at the bottom of the sea, we will continue to live with his legacy.  No mission will be accomplished until we shed the trappings of fear he started and the bar our government lowered in his honor.

Addendum:  When my son awoke this morning and I told him what happened, he asked, “Did we win the war?”  I bet a lot of children will ask that question this morning.

The City Attorney of Surfside, Florida is very angry at bloggers.   Lynn Dannheisser says the bloggers are evil, lying scum, and have tarnished her reputation.

The target of her vitriol is a blog called Save Surfside, local citizens who aren’t any more thrilled with Dannheisser than she is of them.  Of course, since Dannheisser is paid about $170,000 of public monies for her efforts (not including what’s paid to her boyfriend, who she hired as outside counsel to Surfside), the situations aren’t quite the same.  Another difference could have something to do with the threat by Surfside officials to call in the state’s attorney’s office to identify and prosecute the evil citizens who challenge important public officials.

Via the Miami New Times :

In July 2010, town commissioner Edward Kopelman threatened to have the State Attorney’s Office investigate “the true identities and true authors” behind the blog and its local counterpart, Who Controls Surfside?, both of which have been critical of town government.

So Save Surfside retained a law firm to write a letter to Kopelman, demanding that he cease his “bullying” tactics.

You have to give the locals some credit for not playing cut and run when threatened. You have to give them even more credit when you learn which law firm they turned to.

The name of the law firm is the Randazza Legal Group. Which apparently thoroughly confused Dannheisser.

Randazza . . . Randazza . . . the names sounds familiar to me too.  So Dannhaisser did the lawyerly thing and wrote a letter, which began:

[F]irst things first, This is the first I have heard about your firm. I was wondering if your law firm has any affiliation with the Randazzo’s Restaurant in Coral Gables, Florida.  It is an excellent restaurant and I wanted you to know what great food and what a great reputation the restaurant has in the community.

Clearly, there was a vowel issue at the end of the name Randazza/o, but that happens a lot with this swarthy Mediterranean-type names.  Not that anybody with the name Dannheisser is someone to ignore the proper spelling of a name, even if she has an affinity for Italian food and compulsion to seize the opportunity to express her foodie feelings.

Yet, spelling issues aside, as well as her lack of familiarity with such an ethnic sounding name, it still struck me as awfully familiar.

Could she be talking about Marc John Randazza, the Legal Satyricon?  The guy who took down Glen Beck?  My old pal Marco?

Why yes she is.

The Randazza law firm’s  Jason Fischer responded to Dannheisser’s letter:

As a final point, we are obviously not affiliated in any way with Randazzo’s Little Italy restaurant in Coral Gables. Though we are well acquainted with that establishment’s quality cuisine. We presume that you were simply trying to make some kind of joke – one which nobody found particularly amusing, but one which was quite illustrative of the clear failure on your part to appreciate the seriousness of the charges that are being leveled against your employer. We trust that, should you continue to advise Town Commission on matters of constitutional compliance, you will crack fewer jokes and more volumes of case law.

While I’ve no doubt that Lynn Dannheisser is a brilliant lawyer, which is how she secured the position as the very important attorney for Surfside, Florida, and can hold her own on any variety of issues that a practitioner of municipal law might face, she really might want to be a bit more circumspect of ridiculing one of the foremost lawyers on internet first amendment cases in the nation.  It’s possible he knows a bit more in his little niche, and probably prefers not to have whiny Dannheisser make fun of him for having a name similar to an Italian restaurant.

Lest anyone be unclear, my general rule of thumb on interent first amendment issues is whoever retains Randazza wins.  And if he’s lucky, gets an awfully fine meal out of the deal.