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Recent Blog Posts
Shame on You, Brett Ligon
Here, they have a party for the assistant District Attorney.... They have cake and cookies and speeches, lots of clapping and back slapping, and then, a gold coin is given to that prosecutor to memorialize their "Queen for a Day" status. The prosecutor is given a gold coin to hang on their wall and everyone is made to recognize the happy occasion.
(Montgomery County, Texas criminal defense lawyer Kelly Case's blog)
So what's the occasion? Promotion? The birth of a child? Board certification? Potty-training success?
Oh, no no no no no.
The Montgomery County, Texas District Attorney's Office, under the direction of Brett Ligon, has an odd celebration that is performed when one of its prosecutors obtains a life sentence.
(Emphasis added.)
Sometimes people need life sentences. But a prosecutor's job is to do justice, and there is no more justice inherent in a life sentence than in probation. By making a show of rewarding life sentences, the Montgomery County District Attorney turns what should be a quest for justice into a game in which the sentence is the score.
God Help America
Did you know that US Government-Paid mercenaries at DynCorp are in the business of procuring young boys to be raped by Pashtun warlords? (John Nova Lomax, Houston Press, H/T Ravings of a Feral Genius.)
DynCorp officially denies that there was anything dirty going on.
You probably didn't hear about it at the time because the Afghan government formallly asked that our government cover up the nothing-dirty-going-on, and our government seems to have complied.
But the story broke via WikiLeaks and The Guardian, and the US legacy media have, of course, been all over it. Here's the New York Times's coverage; here's the Washington Post's, and here's CNN's.
Attorney John C. Osborne
I wrote about John C. Osborne here:
The lawyer who promises to get the accused in a federal cocaine conspiracy case out on conditions of release is unethical and a liar.....What happens next? My bet is that once the lawyer has been paid and four weeks have passed and the client is still incarcerated, the lawyer will "discover" some reason that the accused cannot get out on bond.
A little over four weeks later, I was proven prescient:
Today the lawyer I described in this post called me.... He wanted to know why his client (my former client) had been detained. I probably should have made like Matlock and flipped him off. But instead, I explained to him the presumption of detention in a federal drug conspiracy case with a possible sentence over ten years. I also explained that the particular magistrate who heard the detention hearing will most likely never grant an accused release over the Government's objection. Why I had to educate was beyond me; he is the one who made the client promises that nobody could possibly keep, and now he's talking like I somehow dropped the ball.
Crazy Days
I think the Apostle John might have left it out of Revelations, but isn't one of the signs of the pending Apocalypse (or at least TEOTWAWKI) that the only person in Washington DC making any sense is Ron Paul?:
On Wikileaks (h/t Paul Kennedy):
And on the TSA:
Sgt. William Palmer
I can imagine the ribbing in the police locker room: "Man, Bill, that Joel Rosenberg guy really punked you. He schooled you on the law on video, then got the county to start investigating you for assault, and rubbed it in across the internet. I wish I'd been there, I'd have..." followed by one of those fantasies that are so easy to come up with five minutes after the event is over, involving false arrest and probably unlawful force.
Sergeant William Palmer, not feeling very alpha, takes it in silence-he's not going to tell these guys that he didn't arrest Rosenberg at the scene because, dagnabbit, he thought Joel was probably right about the law-but he fumes and wonders. The teasing continues, aided by Rosenberg's unremitting use of social media to twit Palmer, until finally Palmer decides to get back at Rosenberg, and swears out an arrest warrant (PDF).
Chain of Fools
Fun with Google:
Federal criminal conduct usually falls under one of seven categories.
Never mind the outrageous grammar; I'd like to know who is stealing from whom. These are websites by Scorpion Design, by Net Media Markets, and by this guy, who seems to have rolled (stolen?) his own:
(Yes, Mr. Newcomb did in fact manage to misspell his firm's name in the masthead.)
When you look at that guy's page source, you see this:
The Garza Law Firm, PLLC is also in Knoxville. When you Google them, you learn that:
And well they shoulds....
Mandamus in John Green Case
Channel 11 is reporting that the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has ordered that the hearing in the John Green case on the unconstitutionality under the Eighth Amendment of Texas's death penalty procedure be stayed. The parties have 15 days to brief the issue.
Here's the State's Request for Reconsideration, which prompted the court to act:John Green State Request for Reconsideration of Mandamus
And here's Green's Brief in Opposition:John Green Brief in Opposition to State's Request for Reconsideration of Mandamus
Sometimes Polite Language Will Not Suffice
When asked for a newspaper-safe synonym for "chickenshit," the best I could come up with was "disrespectful."
John Green Death-Penalty Hearing and Pat Lykos's Game
I spent a good part of the day today watching the hearing in Judge Fine's court on the constitutionality under the Eighth Amendment of Texas's death penalty procedure; read my tweets on the subject (hashtag #VIII) here.
The issue, as I discussed here, is whether death-penalty practice in Texas creates such a significant risk of executing an innocent person that the death penalty constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. The risks arise out of some factors that are unique to death-penalty cases (for example, death-qualified juries) and some that are inherent in criminal trials (for example, unreliable forensic evidence).
Today's witnesses: Dick Dieter from DPIC, Professor Sandra Thompson from UHCL, and two of the defense investigators (laying out what the defense believes to be the State's evidence).
Notable line: Alan Curry, for the State: "I have been ordered by the District Attorney to stand mute." Pat Lykos has decided that the appropriate way to deal with this hearing, in a case in which she is trying to put a man to death, is to play games.
Many Murderers Are No More Mentally Ill than You
Elaine Sharp is quoted in Lane Wallace's shallow and amateurish Are All Murderers Mentally Ill? article (which somehow made it into the Atlantic):
You see, I truly believe that murderers are mentally ill.... Their brains don't work like the rest of ours do. To deliberately kill someone requires crossing a profound boundary. Most of us couldn't do it. We couldn't even think about it. But they can. They do. Why? Because they're mentally ill. And fundamentally, as a society, I believe it is barbaric to kill people who are ill.
(H/T Simple Justice.)
I have never known Sharp to suffer from silliness, but that's just silly.
If you define "mentally ill" as "doing things that most people don't do," then all murderers are mentally ill-as are all geniuses. Even if you add a normative element to the test ("mentally ill people are people who do antisocial things that most people don't do"), you still paint with too broad a brush, and you add an unscientific "you're mentally ill because the rest of us agree that you're mentally ill" component. Mental illness-like any illness-should not be a matter of popular consensus.
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