Criminal Law

410. Translating the euphemisms

Posted on November 20, 2009
In my former life as a first amendment lawyer (well, as a low-level associate who glommed onto as much first amendment work as I could sniff out) I would, at least once a week, read these words or an excerpt from them: Thus we consider this case against the background of a profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open, and that it may well include vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials...

409. Let Sarah be Stephen

Posted on November 18, 2009
Sarah Palin has been getting a lot of unfavorable fact-checking attention for her insta-book, proving yet again that there's no such thing as bad publicity, unless you're a news-gathering organization and must explain why you put 11 reporters to the task...

408. Conventions

Posted on November 15, 2009
It's hard for any professional to question the conventional wisdom of his or her field. It's hard even to perceive the things one takes for granted.  The tendency is easiest to see in fields in which one has no emotional or financial investment, such as medicine...

407. Gomorrah (Camorra optional)

Posted on November 14, 2009
Roberto Saviano's Gomorrah has been celebrated as a brave book, and an eye-opening one, and as a beautifully-written one, and even (though this will never stop seeming improbable to me) as the basis for a movie.  But it's also a great book because of its universality...

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406. Recognition

Posted on November 13, 2009
In the CBS interview (see post 405), David Lisak described one way in which rapists choose their victims, or as the rapists themselves prefer to see them, their conquests.  Writing in the London Review of Books, Jenny Diski captured, in a skin-crawling way, the narcissism of rapists...

405. Consent defense

Posted on November 12, 2009
CBS News interviewed the psychologist David Lisak about "non-stranger rapes."  In just a few minutes he says a number of very interesting things.  For example, what if we prosecuted other crimes--say, auto theft--the way we prosecute rape?  Imagine the cross-examination: Q...

404. The highest standards

Posted on November 09, 2009
The last post described the crisis in Slovakia's judiciary, where ethical charges are being imposed to punish politically inconvenient judges.  The purge is being carried out by the Justice Minister of the governing coalition, which includes an explicitly racist party...

403. Le droit, c'est moi

Posted on November 06, 2009
From The Slovak Spectator, news of an open letter from 15 judges protesting disciplinary proceedings against one of their number.  Well, of course they don't like it, right?  But this story comes with a twist: The letter by the 15 judges cites cases of disciplinary proceedings against Judges Anna Benešová, Darina Kuchtová, Milan Ru?i?ka and Robert Urban to support their claim that disciplinary proceedings have turned into a tool of intimidation...

401. Mating habits of the domestic judge (western specimen)

Posted on November 04, 2009
A judge without dignity is like a wet cat or a newly-shorn sheep.  And by far the most effective way for judges to denude themselves of dignity is to take the stand in their own defense.  Like Tacoma's Judge Michael Hecht, who explained he went to a porno theater "hundreds of times" in order to buy soup for a quarter from the vending machine...

402. Mating habits of the domestic judge (eastern specimen)

Posted on November 04, 2009
Rhode Island is small.  Very small.  But small enough to require semi-retired justices of the state supreme court to move in with the deputies who double as their drivers?  The state's longtime Chief Justice Frank Williams took initial retirement last year, but then stuck around as a kind of emeritus justice, still deciding cases, receiving a per diem while drawing his pension--what they call "double dipping" around these parts...

400. How it's done

Posted on November 01, 2009
This blog has periodically asked what it takes to fire a judge.  (See post 60 and post 185.)  It's also frequently pointed out the extremes many judges have to go to before attracting the attention of disciplinary commissions.  (See post 326 and post 343...

399. My, aren't we special

Posted on October 29, 2009
I think it's probably coincidence that these two items appeared within days of each other.  But I don't think their results aren't coincidental.  First, from D.C. federal court: The Federal Trade Commission cannot force practicing lawyers to comply with new regulations aimed at curbing identity theft, a federal judge ruled today at the U...

398. Regal condescension

Posted on October 28, 2009
Over the summer New Scientist reported on research by Don Moore about the effect of the advice-giver's confidence on the willingness of humans to accept the advice: EVER wondered why the pundits who failed to predict the current economic crisis are still being paid for their opinions? It's a consequence of the way human psychology works in a free market, according to a study of how people's self-confidence affects the way others respond to their advice...

397. The power of the wig

Posted on October 27, 2009
In the cinders of Victoria, Australia, "The Hon. Rob Hulls MP, Attorney-General and Minister for Racing" (what makes you think I'm making fun of his titles?) gave a speech in which he said: I challenge the assumption that a truly independent and robust judiciary should not be able to withstand an element of public scrutiny - an engagement with the community that enables it to be stronger and more effective...

396. Settlement authority

Posted on October 21, 2009
My computer and I have taken turns being sick recently.  The computer, though, was under warranty, because it was a replacement for the one that ran afoul of the Death Panel.  How well I remember sitting in the uncomfortable plastic chair, too intimidated to shift my weight in case my thighs squeaked...

395. No P.A.I.N., no reform

Posted on October 11, 2009
Daniel Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness (and even a blogger, sorta), gave a talk at the Pop!Tech conference a couple years ago in which he explained why humans have such a hard time appreciating global climate change as a threat. I think it also goes a long way to explain things like today's heartbreaking LA Times package fo stories about throwaway children...

394. Without consent

Posted on October 08, 2009
The ever-present (for lawyers) danger of thinking that legal categories have real-world significance (see post 392) is shown again by Emily Bazelon and Rachael Larimore's Slate article about false accusations of rape.  The author's never get around to explaining what makes an accusation "false," so I'll do it for them...

393. The three-toed magistrate

Posted on October 05, 2009
From time to time I regret mean things I've said and done, such as in chapter 13 when I described federal magistrate judges as a special category of retired-in-place judges.  Not all magistrates give in to the job's vast inducements to intellectual sloth, I wrote, but many do...

392. "Deciding a case"

Posted on October 04, 2009
One of the real problems of being a lawyer is that, if you're not careful, you might begin to think that legal categories are meaningful outside of the artificial world of the courtroom. For example, the New York Times recently ran an article on the number of "cases" decided by the Supreme Court...

391. Et tu, Minnesota?

Posted on October 01, 2009
Minnesota judges have made a poor showing in this blog.  Sure, there was Minneapolis's Judge Hudlund embarrassing herself in her campaign for the Supreme Court and then trying to lie her way out of it (see post 366), but that was a campaign gaffe (=moment of unintended candor)...

390. How did they get away with it?

Posted on September 29, 2009
Perhaps the most astonishing thing about the gangster judges of Luzerne County, Pennsylvania (see post 389) is how long they got away with it.  It's not like they were sentencing children in secret, or even (if the stories are true) receiving famous mobsters in their chambers in a surreptitious manner...

389. Gangster law

Posted on September 27, 2009
Everyone knows it was pretty bad in Luzerne County (Scranton Wilkes-Barre) when the top-heavy courthouse was presided over by Judges Mark A. Ciavarella and Michael T. Conahan, who last February pled guilty to selling children to a private detention facility, but recently were permitted to withdraw their guilty pleas...

388. Judge Heckler-Sleaze

Posted on September 24, 2009
Yesterday the Washington Supreme Court heard oral argument in Yousoufian v. Office of Ron Sims.  The unusual thing is that it issued an opinion in the case over eight months ago, in an opinion written by Judge Heckler himself, Richard Sanders.  (See post 383...

387. Who decides?

Posted on September 18, 2009
The New York Times website this evening runs the same story three times, although nothing indicates that the reporters or editors understood it was the same story.  First, with a color photograph of a costumed man statistically likely to die young, is this headline: "Ruling May Blunt Sports' Anti-Doping Plans...

386. Go figure

Posted on September 17, 2009
Two divisions of the Department of Justice have released crime figures this month.  The press release from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, reporting the results of the National Crime Victimization Survey, says: The violent crime rate in 2008—19...

385. Cold feet, hot type

Posted on September 15, 2009
Fox News reports that authorities have identified the body of Annie Le, the Yale graduate student who disappeared just days before her wedding.  On the same web page they offer a video: "Cold Feet or Foul Play?"  Hey, they just report.  You decide...

384. The cord is light

Posted on September 13, 2009
The Supreme Court is going to screw up campaign financing again even worse than it already is.  That's a given.  These are the people, after all, who ruled that soft money could have no tendency to corrupt politicians forced to prostitute themselves to get it (see post 133) and that suing a sitting President is "highly unlikely to occupy any substantial amount of [his] time...

383. Judge Heckler

Posted on September 12, 2009
CNN is reporting that the Congressman from South Carolina, Preston Brooks, who attacked and beat Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner with a stout cane, has raised a million dollars from his admirers in just the past couple of days. I suppose we should be grateful that, while the Palmetto State's tradition of political thuggery remains intact, it has evolved over the decades from attempted murder to Fox News-style attribution of bad motives...

382. Happy Labor Day

Posted on September 07, 2009
How better to celebrate Labor Day than with a visit to Big Debt, Small Law?  Subtitled "Dirt poor lawyers in a filthy rich town," it reaches hilarity with its language.  Scrape away the inspired invective (though why would you want to?) and you're left with a thoughtful and convincing economic and social analysis of the condition of recent law graduates from private-but-not-exclusive-enough law schools...

381. Cars

Posted on September 05, 2009
What is it about judges and parking spaces?  65-year-old Judge Robert Nalley of Charles County, Maryland - a bit of Maryland southeast of Arlington - demonstrated the aptness of Above the Law's name when he let the air out of a cleaning lady's tires...

380. Don't think of it

Posted on September 01, 2009
If you had told me six months ago that Americans could work themselves up into spittle-spraying rages in defense of their insurance companies, I might not have believed it.  Forgive me for doubting you. The New York Times reported that in his Saturday radio address, Wyoming Senator Mike Enzi charged that they - you know, them - wanted to "intrude 'a Washington bureaucrat in the relationship between a doctor and a patient...

379. Sessions' laws

Posted on August 31, 2009
The Sotomayor confirmation hearings were pretty sad.  It's not that I expect meaningfulness, or even necessarily meaning, but it would be nice if the participants could avoid actively misleading C-Span viewers. Alabama's Jeff Sessions describes himself as one who enjoyed a "distinguished legal career," and he was once proposed for a federal judgeship himself, and he wasn't turned down for lack of ability (not that that's necessarily a disqualifier, anyway), but for certain, ahem, speech patterns of the type you'd expect from an Establishment white Alabaman of a certain age...

378. Bigforest

Posted on May 30, 2009
Well, obviously Sonia Sotomayor is going to be confirmed.  As some Republicans have belatedly realized, once they allowed people like Newt Gingrich to make her ethnicity and gender the chief issue, they assured her confirmation, barring only a dead-girl-or-live-boy or, you know, nanny-tax sort of revelation...

377. Otherworld pt. 2

Posted on May 23, 2009
Jeffrey Toobin has a profile of Chief Justice John Roberts in this week's New Yorker, revealing that George Bush's judge-pickers knew what they were doing when they named Roberts to the court. In the course of pulling back the curtain to reveal that an upper-crust man who devoted his adult life to Republican causes before receiving the best patronage job in America from a Republican president is, in fact, a Republican, Toobin writes: After four years on the Court, however, Roberts's record is not that of a humble moderate but, rather, that of a doctrinaire conservative...

376. Otherworld pt. 1

Posted on May 20, 2009
Post 375 linked to this article about Justice Souter's lachrymose farewell speech to the Third Circuit conference. The article contained this weird passage: Without lawyers and the lawyers who go on to be become judges, he said, society would be prone to "private acts of vengeance...

375. Replacing the 69-year-old virgin

Posted on May 17, 2009
The problem with finding a replacement for Justice Souter is that it matters so much. If only our Supreme Court justices were judges! In one of the more sanctimonious pieces of nonsense to come out of the Supreme Court in recent years, Justice Ginsburg once wrote: Unlike their counterparts in the political branches, judges are expected to refrain from catering to particular constituencies or committing themselves on controversial issues in advance of adversarial presentation...

374. Your dishonor

Posted on April 09, 2009
The mass media has a simple rule of thumb for measuring the newsworthiness of any story about the judiciary: it's not news unless it's been done to death already. That's why you hardly heard about about Knowles v. Mirzayance, decided two weeks ago, and what little coverage there was missed the only particularly significant thing about it...

373. Oh, well, that's okay, then

Posted on April 05, 2009
In New Mexico Territory, an Army colonel faced a court of inquiry - the equivalent of a grand jury or preliminary hearing - looking into his conduct. It seems that he marched his troops into town where they laid siege to the private residence of a person against whom the colonel had taken a personal dislike...

372. Linkages

Posted on March 24, 2009
CQ Press used to be Morgan Quitno but that's not where the name's Q comes from. CQ, as opposed to MQ, had something to do with Congressional Quarterly once, but apparently no more, unless the company's history was written by Tony Gilroy, writer-director of Duplicity, in which case it might mean Congressional Quarterly will now be published from MQ's hometown, William S...

371. "I just violated that sealing order."

Posted on March 23, 2009
The manuscript of For the Sake of Argument was sent off to the publisher earlier this month and came back copy-edited a little over a week later - a bit more quickly than in the old hand-set letterpress era of the 1990s. Back then, we mailed paper to each other, if you can imagine that...

372. Linkages

Posted on March 23, 2009
CQ Press used to be Morgan Quitno but that's not where the name's Q comes from. CQ, as opposed to MQ, had something to do with Congressional Quarterly once, but apparently no more, unless the company's history was written by Tony Gilroy, writer-director of Duplicity, in which case it might mean Congressional Quarterly will now be published from MQ's hometown, William S...

370. Good riddance, Chief Justice Taylor

Posted on November 15, 2008
From a fatuous Slate article I learned that Michigan's Chief Justice Clifford Taylor was ousted by the voters. Taylor was a contemptibly bad judge, already featured twice in these hallowed pixels. (See post 216 and post 144.) Here's what the Trial Lawyers had to say about him...

369. "Trust us"

Posted on November 02, 2008
California's Proposition 5, which would do all sorts of strange things to the state's Penal Code, changing the way Californians actually live, has predictably been overshadowed by Prop 8, which has only symbolic importance for its most ardent, passionate and aroused supporters...

368. "I have not been convicted"

Posted on October 31, 2008
Senator Ted Stevens declared yesterday in a debate that "I have not been convicted.”  And never mind that he was convicted of seven felonies. I can think of two explanations for his logic: he's clinically insane; or, he's so confident his convictions will be reversed on appeal that he considers them as good as reversed already...

367. Life's a Blitch

Posted on October 25, 2008
On Wednesday a Tennessee judge, Ronald E. Darby, was indicted. He sits on the court of General Sessions - what used to be called JP court, hearing misdemeanor and small claims cases - in Benton County, up in the northwest part of the state, not so very far from the southern tip of Illinois...

366. What's the matter with Minnesota?

Posted on October 23, 2008
How can a state that produced Scott Fitzgerald, Giants in the Earth and my father produce politicians like these? First the Congresswoman. Now the Minnesota Supreme Court candidate. First there's Congresswoman Michele Bachmann. Her remarks about Obama and other Congress members got the press...

365. Incoherence watch

Posted on October 18, 2008
I recently ran across the profile of the eponymous hero of the Brennan Center for Justice, which begins:Justice William J. Brennan, Jr. is universally regarded as one of the most influential and liberal justices of the second half of the 20th century...

364. Fifth Circuit sleaze

Posted on October 11, 2008
This blog has recently been sadly remiss in documenting the many judges in this great land who put their reputations on the line - and, oftentimes, succeed is successfully blowing them up - merely for the honor of a mention here.My friends, I offer no excuses but when elected I will immediately fire somebody for it...

363. We deserve better

Posted on October 04, 2008
A long, long article in last Sunday's Times Magazine began: "Every generation gets the Constitution that it deserves."  That, I guess, explains Plessy v. Ferguson and the whole legal structure of Jim Crow.  The article, entitled "When Judges Make Foreign Policy," continues with the following helpful summary of attitudes about international law:One view, closely associated with the Bush administration, begins with the observation that law, in the age of modern liberal democracy, derives its legitimacy from being enacted by elected representatives of the people...

362. Mere reality

Posted on September 30, 2008
On Monday morning in Tijuana, 12 bodies were found piled up on the street.  The grisly discovery capped four days of violence that has shaken the sprawling Tijuana metropolitan area and forced Baja California state officials to plead for more federal police to help control the city...

361. Normalization

Posted on September 29, 2008
Tanae and her cousin, Mishay Williams (Mishay), were standing on the porch outside Tanae's house.  [FN3. Tanae was 14 years old and Mishay 12 years old at the time of trial.] ...  Tanae's 16-year-old brother, Deron Calhoun (Calhoun), and their mother walked to an ice cream truck at the corner of 41st and Naomi Streets...

360. Do the hustle

Posted on September 28, 2008
Okay, here's a new one on me.  I wonder how long this sort of thing has been going on: Two Rhode Island lawyers, including the brother of Providence's mayor, and a co-conspirator were sentenced in U.S. District Court in Boston for conspiracy to obstruct justice, obstruction of justice and making false statements...

359. Best shot

Posted on September 26, 2008
The Sixth Circuit recently issued a routine little opinion, U.S. v. Mayberry.  I'm not sure why they bothered to publish it.  I guess it says something new about federal sentencing (all I know about the subject is that it would be unconstitutional if any state did the same)...

358. Instant evolution's gonna get you

Posted on September 25, 2008
A few weeks ago, the comic strip Pearls Before Swine - written by a recovering lawyer, Stephen Pastis - featured Pig, Rat and Goat standing behind a table or wall or something, all looking the same way.  (In Peanuts,  the wall had stones and they rested their elbows on it, but then Schulz hadn't gone to law school...

Big changes coming

Posted on September 22, 2008
I recently signed a contract for a second book to be published in 2009.  (Here's information about the first.)  The newer new book, to be called For the Sake of Argument: Life in the Law, will be published by Kaplan Publishing, the trade-book division of the big test-prep company...

We're all going on a summer holiday ...

Posted on July 18, 2008
... vigilantes can look for Joel Jacobsen in Archangel, Qom and Santiago.  Back next week.

357. Disposable people

Posted on July 13, 2008
I've always thought of the criminal law as a reflection of society's attitude toward the weak.  And even if you weren't weak before you were attacked, there's nothing quite like a bullet to weaken you.  At least in the Western states, with the "no duty to retreat" ethos, our courts are gung-ho about encouraging people to take care of it themselves...

356. In the same old voice

Posted on July 05, 2008
It's interesting to note how much a reader reveals about him- or herself by leaving a comment at this blog.  For instance, the "difference" feminists, inspired by Carol Gilligan's Ina Different Voice, have taught us that heartfelt expressions of emotion are characteristically feminine, and yet the pseudonymous comment left at post 304, by far the most emotionally-naked ever left on the site, somehow strikes me as written by a male...

355. The misuses of history

Posted on July 02, 2008
"Historians have long winced at the crude ways that literary scholars and others have wrenched writings out of their historical contexts for aesthetic and other present-minded purposes."  That's from Gordon S. Wood's collection of book reviews (or, really, essays using book reviews as take-off points), The Purpose of the Past: Reflections on the Uses of History, which is far more entertaining than any description can make it sound...

354. Almost unfair

Posted on June 29, 2008
The end of the Supreme Court's term had me feeling a strange and unexpected emotion: pity.  These nine people seem so badly out of their depth that criticizing them seems almost unfair, like making fun of your local public-access-TV host and perennial candidate for office...

Whatever Happened to Justice?

Posted on June 28, 2008
Please pardon the Lemon Pledge smell, but this blog had gotten dusty.  I've been away on a top-secret mission but now that the deal has been announced in Publishers Marketplace and the advance check has been deposited, even a lawyer such as myself, with a lawyer's steel-tripwire readiness to anticipate the absolute worst that could happen, can just about believe things are going to work out...

353. Unbalanced

Posted on April 06, 2008
While recently clearing a layer of wood-pulp debris from my office ("Don't toss that!  It might come in handy some day."), I came across a law review article by Richard D. Friedman, Framer of the current sixth amendment.  Friedman has written a few gazillion articles about the confrontation clause -- in fact, it's difficult to find a recent article about the confrontation clause that he didn't write -- but this one was published before the March, 2004 constitutional convention that amended the amendment...

352. Diminished capacities

Posted on March 30, 2008
It's time to pay another visit on Alabama Circuit Judge Stuart Dubose.  (See post 191 and post 306.)  The Alabama Judicial Inquiry Commission filed a pretty spectacular complaint, but it was topped by Judge Dubose's answer -- which was then topped by the Alabama Supreme Court...

351. Legal traditions

Posted on March 20, 2008
In 2003, the Supreme Court sternly set its face against overtly racist policies in the Dallas DA's office.   It would no longer tolerate blatant racism in jury selection practices in 1963.   (See post 312.)   Yesterday the justices just as firmly went on record opposing the jury selection process in a single Louisiana trial in 1996...

350. Magical thinking

Posted on March 18, 2008
In the Davis v. Washington decision of a couple years ago (see post 127), Justice Scalia's opinion for the Supreme Court contained a footnote explaining that suppression of evidence under the sixth amendment has no deterrent effect on police officers:Police investigations themselves are, of course, in no way impugned by our characterization of their fruits as testimonial...

349. Spitzering in the sticks

Posted on March 15, 2008
Although I try to avoid focusing on parochial interests -- and, to be frank, there's something liberating about writing about people who don't have the power to revoke my license to practice my profession -- nonetheless Albuquerque's ex-Presiding Judge John Brennan has already rated a mention, thanks to his  arrest for cocaine possession...

348. Less is more, more, more

Posted on March 11, 2008
Courtesy of the always-worthwhile New York Supreme Court Criminal Term Library - I keep thinking there must be a clever pun in there somewhere; I mean, it's the name of a blog, isn't it? - here's an NPR story about privatizing the police:In the past, remote communities like this one [i...

347. Intellectual dishonesty watch

Posted on March 09, 2008
A few weeks ago I suggested, at tedious length, that the patron saint of all that is twinkly, Irish and liberal about the American judiciary appeared in public badly underdressed at certain points during his long career.  (See post 337, post 338, post 339 and post 340...

346. Constitutional algebra

Posted on March 05, 2008
During the past week I've been preoccupied with preparing a PowerPoint talk about Crawford to a training conference for victims' advocates and allied professionals.  It's not easy trying to make Crawford make sense to non-lawyers (or to lawyers, either, but then you don't need to: lawyers have been trained to accept without questioning arbitrary pronouncements from the Supreme Court)...

345. Incapacitative effect

Posted on February 24, 2008
The February 27 New Republic has a review of a book about neoconservatives that includes a passing reference to "the madmen at AEI", meaning the American Enterprise Institute.  On the same page, just one column over, is a long, meandering review by someone described as "a psychiatrist [and] a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute...

344. ABCs of judging

Posted on February 13, 2008
We met Florida's Judge Michael E. Allen in post 272.  He got in trouble with the otherwise-rational Florida Judicial Qualification Commission by poaching on its turf.  As the Commission explained in its complaint, it's unethical for a judge to let the public know about what goes behind the smooth blond wood paneling  of its appellate courts, because the judge is supposed to tell the Commission instead...

343. Judge Woody

Posted on February 11, 2008
Really, the competition for a featured place in this blog is getting out of hand.  I want to assure all my judicial readers that, whatever you might think, it's not necessary to go to the lengths of Las Vegas Judge Nicholas Anthony  Del Vecchio to get your name featured here...

342. From the mouths of babes

Posted on February 10, 2008
Not real babies, of course.  They never say anything deserving of scorn.  But recently the Kansas appellate courts have ingenuously revealed things that more worldly-wise judges have learned to cloak in wordy euphemism.  The first case is officially "unpublished" and Kansas is one of those states that continue to hide their unpublished opinions, presumably because their authors have something to hide...

341.1 Judge Harry Pregerson Memorial Frontage Road

Posted on February 09, 2008
Good ol' Anonymous posted a comment to the main road of this post explaining the origin of the Judge Pregerson Memorial MixMaster, even supplying a link to a New York Times article explaining the judge's deep involvement in the development of the project...

341. Judge Harry Pregerson Memorial Interchange

Posted on February 04, 2008
When I was in Los Angeles this past week, I had occasion to drive the rental car through the Harbor Freeway / I-105  interchange.  Curiously enough, I-105 seems to have acquired at least three nicknames: the Century Freeway, the Glenn Anderson Freeway (distinctly Chicagoish, that one) and the airport freeway...

340. Intellectual dishonesty epic (finale)

Posted on February 03, 2008
(Here's part 1 of this epic.)How can you tell when a judge is up to something?  One sure giveaway is the emotive adjective or adverb.  I always tell my students that the strongest argument is the quietest: "The Supreme Court just decided this issue last week...

339. Intellectual dishonesty epic (pt. 3)

Posted on January 25, 2008
Caminito, Bonino and Noia all confessed to murdering Murray Hameroff.  They were tried together, and the jury found their confessions voluntary.  Noia chose not to appeal.  But after 14 years, Caminito got a federal judge to vacate his conviction, based on the judge's finding that the police acted "satanically" by questioning him "almost continuously" for 27 hours, leaving him alone in an unheated cell for 7 of them...

338. Intellectual dishonesty epic, pt. 2

Posted on January 17, 2008
In its May 23, 1955 edition, Time Magazine ran this story:Just about dinnertime, on May 11, 1941, a garment worker named Santo Caminito was picked up by New York police for the holdup-murder of Coney Island Merchant Murray Hameroff. Although Caminito had never been arrested before, the cops were sure they had their man...

337. Intellectual dishonesty epic, pt. 1

Posted on January 12, 2008
On February 15, 1941, Murray Hameroff was shot and killed in front of his home on Stillwell Avenue in Coney Island.  Charles Noia confessed to police he was the triggerman.  His two accessories, Santo Caminito and Frank Bonino, separately confessed...

336. "A judge's sinful but legal conduct"

Posted on January 09, 2008
It's rare that a story about a judge manages to be both too bizarre and too vague for inclusion in this Judges' Hall of Fame, but the celebrated story of Cleveland, Tennessee's Judge John B. Hagler is very nearly disqualified on both counts.  The newly-exed ex-judge did something very, very, you know ...

335. Crime stats

Posted on December 28, 2007
The year's end always brings stories about crime stats.  The New York Daily News has a story headlined "New York started with 8 murders in 1887."  If you're tempted to believe that number reflects the real homicide rate that year, they were building a bridge for your purchase...

334. Better for whom?

Posted on December 20, 2007
Ronald Dworkin's work is routinely described with such daunting superlatives as "the most important systematic contribution to Anglo-American legal philosophy made since the mid-1960s" (hard to tell if that's intended as a compliment, and you have to pay money to view the concluding paragraph online, so I guess we'll never know), although it seems strangely unphilosophical to dye one's hair, as he appears to have done in this official photo...

333. The next justice

Posted on December 16, 2007
Christopher L. Eisgruber (I don't mean to be rude, but with a last name like that, is the middle initial really necessary?) has written The Next Justice: Repairing the Supreme Court Appointments Process, a well-meaning, mildly interesting and thoroughly exasperating book...

332. Law, the anti-science

Posted on December 15, 2007
The scientist and science writer Bob Park recently published a column in the New Scientist containing this passage:Richard Feynman described science as "what we have learned about how not to fool ourselves". Science depends on openness: we expose our scientific findings, including the details of how they were obtained, to the scrutiny of the scientific community...

331. Judicial indiscretion

Posted on December 14, 2007
In Delaware, it's pretty big news that the state Supreme Court upheld the murder conviction of Michael Jones.  Shortly after a warrant was issued for Jones' arrest for homicide, he got into a car with a couple friends, one of them named Cedric Reinford:While the three were in Reinford’s car, Jones killed Reinford by shooting him three times in the head...

330. Dead professor driving

Posted on December 13, 2007
I've long thought that one of the reasons judges are so concerned about traffic stops is the potential of a traffic stop to wreck a judge's career.  Just look at Ohio's Justice Resnick (see post 33), Arkansas's Judge Davis (see post 36) and New Mexico's own Judge Brennan...

329. Law in aspic

Posted on December 11, 2007
Imagine a history professor who built his career on the study of presidential press releases, viewing them not as eruptions of public mendacity or even as examples of public relations technique but as the true measure of each administration's achievements...

328. A great judge, except for that

Posted on December 02, 2007
I was reminded of Daniel J. Martinez (see post 327) by the case of Judge Restaino (see post 326).  Soon after Martinez was acquitted of two extraordinarily brutal crimes that he almost certainly committed, setting off an entirely justified uproar, a friend of the Martinez family wrote a letter to the editor of the Santa Fe Reporter, the alternative weekly...