Law & Law Enforcement

Now THIS Is An Irresponsible Biden Judicial Nominee…

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

The exchange above revealed much about the caliber of judicial nominees President Biden is presenting to the lock-step Democratic Senate majority.

The bio of this one, Quinnipiac University law professor Sarah French Russell, states that she “focuses her research and teaching on sentencing policy”–sentencing policy!!—“juvenile justice, prison conditions, reentry issues, ethics, and the problems of access to justice.” Ethics—when her response to being confronted outright with a letter she signed, advocating outrageous and radical measures, was to tell the assembled Senators that he had no memory of signing it and to deny that the letter said what it said…”Russell was previously Director of the Arthur Liman Public Interest Program at Yale Law School and taught in Yale’s Criminal Defense, Prison Legal Services, and Supreme Court clinics. Good old dependable Yale Law School!

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Ethics Dunce: Aspiring T-Shirt Entrepreneur Steve Elster

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

It’s come to this, has it?

Tracking the infinite variations of Trump Derangement is alternately entertaining and horrifying, often at the same time. This one is mostly just puzzling.

Elster, who is also a lawyer [inject multiple derogatory speculations here] is so impressed with his own wit and convinced that there are plenty of people whose taste is simiarly poor, whose brains are so pureed by wokism and Trump-hate, and whose willingness to proclaim their lack of political sophistication and IQ points is so unwavering, that it is worth going all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court to secure a trademark for what you see above.

The front of the T-shirt wittily <cough> refers to the low point among many low points in the GOP candidate debates that brought Trump the 2016 Presidential nomination, when Marco Rubio, trying to get the mud with Donald Trump (“Never wrestle with a pig. You both get dirty and the pig likes it” ) and stoop to crude ad hominem insults. I wrote about the incident at the time:

…when he appeared to be surging in the polls, though only because his competition was so repellent, Rubio made the decision to go “tit for tat” with Trump’s ad hominem attacks and vulgar rhetoric, making fun of the tycoon’s hair, fake tan, “little hands” and, ugh, presumed penis size. If that wasn’t bad enough, his delivery of the insults was atrocious, as he grinned and snickered while uttering these gutter attacks, looking like nothing so much as a smug 7th grader. With this, Rubio showed that he had as little dignity and respect for the office he was seeking as the disgusting boor people were turning to Rubio in order to reject. He showed that he lacked core values and integrity, and that his judgment, again, was terrible. At that point, Rubio’s support evaporated.

But Mr. Elkins, apparently, saw this sad display and thought, “Ha! Good one! I’ll have to remember THAT!” And so, as the wheel comes around for Trump again, Elkins designed that thing above and tried to trademark “Trump too small” with the drawing indicating a tiny pee-pee. Be proud, legal profession!

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Ethics Quiz: Personal Assistant Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

I almost called this, “Stop Making Me Defend Robert De Niro!’

De Niro proved beyond a reasonable doubt that he’s a toxic, narcissistic asshole when he was going around the country shouting “Fuck Trump” at various Trump Derangement gatherings. He’s a great actor, but at 80 he’s now in that difficult period of decline when he should be retired but can’t resist the paychecks or the sudden lack of public attention.

De Niro’s ex-personal assistant Graham Chase Robinson is suing him for discrimination, and the trial is not showing the actor in a very favorable light. As her various allegations were presented to him on the stand—-asking her to scratch his back, giving her degrading tasks, making unreasonable demands (like asking Robinson to “Uber him” a martini from a favorite bar at 11 p.m.), not respecting her personal time (he called her twice while she was at her grandmother’s funeral telling her to buy a bus ticket for his son), and being abusive (he called her a “fucking spoiled brat”), De Niro’s response was always some version of, “Big deal. So what?”

De Niro paid his personal assistant $300,000 a year.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

Is it unethical for someone to pay an assistant to accept abuse and disrespectful treatment?

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The Great Stupid, Halloween Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Trick-or-treaters over 14 in Chesapeake, Virginia can be charged with a misdemeanor. Norfolk, Suffolk, Portsmouth, and Virginia Beach nearby bar kids over 12 from trick-or-treating. Rayne, Louisiana, and Jacksonville, Illinois, also ban teenage trick-or-treaters. An ordinance in Belleville, Illinois, slaps insufficiently immature door bell-ringers with a $1,000 fine.

Morons. The same communities don’t punish juvenile adults who have spoiled the kids holiday by expropriating it. The theory these silly places have adopted is, we are told, that they are trying to reduce teenage crime. I believe there are already laws against teenage crime. Most of the same elected officials who are pushing these laws also wanted to force teens to wear masks not too long ago.

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Serious Question: Has Vice-President Harris Not Read The Bill of Rights, Or Does She Just Want The Government To Ignore It?

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

This would be an “Incompetent Elected Official” post, except a) we already know Kamala Harris is incompetent, and b) her penchant for talking nonsense, gibberish or idiocy long ago reached Julie Principle proportions. But other Democrats, notably Hillary Clinton, have appealed to ignorance, emotion and hysteria by doing what Harris did yesterday as part of the wholly predictable Democratic Party/progressive/mainstream media attack on gun rights after a mass shooting tragedy. This one, as you probably know already, was in Maine, and unusually deadly, so the gun-grabbing fanatics and the “Do something!” crazies were really licking their chops.

On stage with Australia’s Prime Minister at an event yesterday, Harris blathered, “Gun violence has terrorized and traumatized so many of our communities in this country. And let us be clear, it does not have to be this way, as our friends in Australia have demonstrated.”

As usual, Harris required a translator. It doesn’t have to be “this way” in Australia? Have our communities been terrified there? How has Australia demonstrated what is possible or desirable in the United States? It hasn’t, of course: it hasn’t even demonstrated that it is possible to eliminate mass shootings in Australia, where the National Firearms Agreement of 1996 made semiautomatic weapons and shotguns illegal and mandated the confiscation of close to 650,000 firearms.  The NFA requires Australians to wait 28 days before they purchase a gun to allow extensive background checks. Applicants must obtain a license and a permit, be over 18 years old, provide documentation that the weapon will be stored securely and complete firearms safety training. They must also provide a “justifiable reason” for owning the gun, and self-defense doesn’t qualify. A requirement less stringent than this was just struck down as unconstitutional in New York.

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So: When Does The Supreme Court Get Its Apology From The Dobbs Hysterics?

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Statistics based on research by the Guttmacher Institute seem to indicate that legal abortions increased slightly in the United States in the first six months of 2023 compared with 2020. The assumption is that states with more permissive abortion laws absorbed patients traveling from states with more restrictive laws, and access to abortion pills increased.

Thus the feminist and progressive narrative that Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision last year created a “Handmaiden’s Tale” hellscape where women were compelled to give birth to children they did not want was, as those inclined to be rational realized, inflammatory propaganda designed to support unhinged attacks on the six Justices in the Dobbs majority. The lie also proved to be a useful Democratic Party election weapon.

As Justice Alito stated clearly in his opinion, the ruling over-turning Roe v. Wade was not a pro- or anti-abortion ruling, but a necessary decision to uphold core Constitutional principles while striking down a badly reasoned precedent. The Constitution does not include a right to abortion, and the Founders would have been horrified at the very thought. Nor is abortion a proper matter for a national law, other than a Constitutional amendment.

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Unethical Quote Of The Month & Incompetent Elected Official Of The Month: House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

“Many of these lawmakers on the other side of the aisle who had their hair on fire about what appears to have been an inadvertent action taken by Congressman Bowman, to which he is now being held accountable for, within the criminal justice system, regularly defend violent individuals who overran the Capitol on Jan. 6, as part of an effort to halt a peaceful transfer of power. And these violent individuals brutally beat and seriously injured 140 police officers, on the day of the insurrection. And many of them, who are having a panic attack, publicly, about Jamaal Bowman have actually defended or refused to comment on the violent mob on January 6.”

—House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), the man every Democrat in the House voted for to be Speaker, “explaining” why Rep. Bowman shouldn’t be censured by the House for breaking the law, indeed two laws, as well as violating the House ethics code. 

To be blunt, this statement by Jeffries exhibits the approximate ethical comprehension of a Cocker Spaniel. It reveals him to be a shameless liar and an ethics corrupter:

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Surprise! The ACLU Takes A Break From Partisan Advocacy And Defends Free Speech

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

I guess the erstwhile “non-partisan” individual rights organization has to do this once in a while so it can claim it hasn’t become the Democratic Party ally that it is, but the gesture is still welcome.

Yesterday, the American Civil Liberties Union argued that the gag order the judge overseeing former President Trump’s federal 2020 election criminal case in D.C. slapped on him is unconstitutionally broad and vague….which, of course, it is.

“Former President, and now Defendant, Donald Trump has said many things,” the ACLU wrote in a court filing. “Much that he has said has been patently false and has caused great harm to countless individuals, as well as to the Republic itself. Some of his words and actions have led him to this criminal indictment, which alleges grave wrongdoing in contempt of the peaceful transition of power. But Trump retains a First Amendment right to speak, and the rest of us retain a right to hear what he has to say.”

Naturally, the ACLU doesn’t have the guts to weigh in on Trump’s side without including a gratuitous attack on: can’t have the group’s Trump Deranged supporters taking offense, after all !

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Minneapolis’s Woke And Deluded DA Foiled By An Ethical Judge

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Good.

In 2019, 39-year-old Steve Markey, sitting in his car in Minneapolis, was murdered during an unsuccessful carjacking attempt. The two teenage suspects both fired shots at Markey. They were arrested the next day after a string of other violent crimes. Both confessed to the murder.

Minneapolis’s DA before the current woke District Attorney Mary Moriarty said he would try the defendants as adults. One of the defendants, Husayn Braveheart (above), now 20 years old, fought to have his case remain in juvenile court where the punishment would be more moderate than in adult court: his co-defendant received a 22-year sentence when tried as an adult. In November 2022, the Minnesota Supreme Court ruled that Braveheart should be certified for trial as an adult after determining the State had met the burden of proof on a series of public safety factors including Braveheart’s culpability and his history of failing to participate in diversion programs and other therapy.

But at a pretrial hearing in August, Moriarty announced that she had entered into a plea agreement in which Braveheart would serve just 1 year in a workhouse and 5 years of probation.  Under the deal, the 20-year-old would serve no prison time for murder.

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Where Have You Gone, James Donovan, Our Nation Turns Its Fearful Eyes To You…[Updated]

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Woo woo woo.

Yesterday, I was moved to re-watch “Bridge of Spies,” the excellent Spielberg and Coen Brothers-told tale of James Donovan, the lawyer (portrayed by Tom Hanks) who negotiated the release of Francis Gary Powers in exchange for convicted Soviet spy Rudolf Abel. Maybe something in the deep recesses of my mind was triggered by yesterday’s post about the rigged prosecution, trial and conviction of the four Minnesota police officers involved in George Floyd’s death. What was striking about the movie was that Donovan is shown being recruited by his law firm to defend Abel, described as “the most hated man in America” at the height of the Cold War, to demonstrate to the Soviets that we guarantee a fair trial and zealous legal representation to everyone accused of a crime, irrespective of public opinion and the nature of the crime. Everyone has the same rights.

Donovan did defend Abel, even though it is made clear in the film that the judge was determined to see him convicted and that Donovan himself as well as his family were endangered by his taking the case. After Abel was convicted despite the fact that the evidence used by the prosecution should have been excluded as the “fruits” of an illegal search, Donovan appealed the result all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, defying his firm’s opposition to him continuing the case. His partners argued that the unpopularity of Abel risks alienating clients. Donovan’s initial representation sent the required symbolic message, they said, and even though the conviction may have been unjust, there was no reason to be obsessed with those due process and rights details, not for an enemy spy who might have been facilitating an enemy’s nuclear attack.

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