Over on my comic, reader Martenzo this morning asked: While this is off-topic for the current chapter, I got curious after reading about the recent Bundy acquittal in Oregon. Are you ever going to cover jury duty in greater detail, and will you mention jury nullification? Are you, as a...
I’m writing a response to an essay on “consent as a felt sense” and looking for a deeper explanation of mens rea and the reason why it ought form the basis for not just a legal system, but for the social norms of a community. I know there is some...
Over lunch today, the head of one of the NYPD’s powerful police unions* emailed a shrill “open letter” to the press, blaming the “armchair rhetoric” of columnists and pundits for the worsening relations between the police and the communities they serve. Here’s the email: To all arm-chair judges: If you have...
The purpose of a trial is not to discover the truth. Sorry. Whether civil or criminal, bench or jury, the purpose of a trial is to decide on an “official version” of the facts. The purpose of the justice system is to make an enforceable, hopefully final, decision about a...
As we all know, Judge Scheindlin ruled that the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk program was unconstitutional. This should have come as no surprise. Our Fourth Amendment law forbids a police officer from stopping you without first having reasonable suspicion to believe that you are up to no good. Police officers were stopping...
Prompted by a tweet from Scott Greenfield this morning, we read a short editorial the New York Times did a couple of days ago, arguing that federal and state prosecutors should adopt open-file discovery policies, in order to limit Brady violations and promote justice. We’d missed it the first time...
In this Information Age, it is hard to grasp sometimes that everybody does not know everything. And yet it is so. It is common knowledge, for example, that dinosaur fossils are the bones of creatures that lived scores of millions of years ago, that terrorist hijackers flew planes into the...
One of our bugbears here at The Criminal Lawyer is the excessive number of federal crimes — particularly those that are created by regulators rather than by elected legislators. We’re not alone in this concern, and over the past several months we’ve noticed what can only be called a growing...
Wanda: What would an intellectual do? What would… Plato do? Otto: Apol- Wanda: Pardon me? Otto: Apollgzz. Wanda: What? Otto: Apologize! Well, no. He probably wouldn’t. Not Plato. And certainly not in the case of Troy Davis, whose final clemency request was denied this morning, and who now faces execution...
First, a shameless plug: Tomorrow, we’ll be participating in a Dow Jones webinar for Private Equity and VC types, discussing how the current environment of insider-trading prosecutions affects them, and what they might do about it. (Link here, if you’re interested.) Of course, those guys aren’t so much...
We wrote recently on our distaste for those on the defense side who persist in playing games. It should go without saying that it is far worse for the prosecution to play games. And yet it happens all the time. Ideally, when the prosecution has done its job right, it’s...
Sex offender registries aren’t necessarily a bad idea. For whatever reason, there are certain people who get off on molesting little kids or raping people, and who are not likely to be rehabilitated by a stint behind bars. It’s how their sex drive is wired. If they get caught...
Odds are, if you’re reading this, you’ve lived an admirable life. You applied yourself in school, got a good job, and worked hard to be a valuable member of your community. Through your own efforts, you’ve probably earned a position of respect and responsibility. Maybe you run your own...
It looks like we spotted the trend. Unfortunately. Last week we noted that, when faced with an ambiguous statute, some on the Supreme Court are now willing to read new language into the statute, rather than toss it back to Congress to do it right. And we wondered if that might...
There are four Mondays left in June. Four more days in which the Supreme Court is expected to announce its decisions in the 27 or so cases still out there this term. That’s about one case per day from now till then. We’re picturing the Justices pulling all-nighters, stacks of...
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