Public Defender Elected Mayor

Matthew T. Ryan, A Broome County public defender has been elected mayor of Binghamton, NY


Hizzonner

The local paper reports that: "During Ryan's early days in office, he will need to mend fences that have been damaged over the years: one with the police and one with city council. For 15 years, Ryan has been an assistant public defender. The job forced him to challenge many of the charges police brought against his clients. "I'm sure there are some concerns among the officers," he said. "I've had to grill some of them on the stand. But I want to make sure this is a safe community - safer than it already is." Ryan said he will meet with Binghamton Police Chief John Butler today to discuss the future and address several issues.

I'm looking forward to this one.

How often do you see this headline?

Cheerleaders face sex charges...

The perps

Damn Graham

Seems like Senator Lindsay Graham is introducing an Amendment that would strip those designated by the Administration as enemy combatants of the ability to seek habeas review in federal courts. Basically, this is an end-run around the Supreme Court's decision in Rasul v. Bush which held Guantanamo detainees have the right to challenge the legality of their detentions. Amazing, particularly in light of the fact that the big supremes just decided to take a case likely to break his way anyhow.

Georgia on my mind...

I was down in North Georgia last week giving a lecture to the Georgia Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. For a red state, I like Georgia. I like it mostly because I go down their fairly regularly (I teach every year at the National Criminal Defense College in Macon, GA) and because I have a some friends who do great work down there.


The Hills of North Georgia

Also lecturing at the GACDL conference was my good friend Pete Donaldson. Now Pete is a phenomenal lawyer (I won't even tell you how many murder cases he's won in rural Georgia) a great presence and a very dear friend, and he quoted something in his lecture that I thought was worth reproducing. He attributes it to Cynthia Rosenberry, and it captures nicely the basic contrast in the outlooks of criminal defense lawyers and most other people. In his talk Pete said...

"We, as criminal defense lawyers, are forced to deal with some of the lowest people on earth, people who have no sense of right and wrong, people will lie in court to get what they want, people who do not care who gets hurt in the process. It is our job – our sworn duty – as criminal defense lawyers, to protect our clients from those people."

I couldn't have said it better.

Are you kidding me?

Two whiny editorials in the Chicago Tribune infuriated me this weekend. Both were simpering accounts of how hard it is to be a journalist at a big newspaper. The first, by Jonathan Elderfield, a photo editor contained the following:


Something we don't see every day (but should)

"I am a picture editor at the Chicago Tribune. My job for the last year and a half has been to look at every hard news photograph from across the world and nation that comes into the Tribune's photo system. I have become intimately acquainted with death in Iraq, mostly with the death of the Iraqi people. While there are more than 2,000 dead servicemen and women, there are many times more dead Iraqis.

Every weekday I have seen images of Iraqi dead or of grieving family members. I have seen exploded cars, pools of blood, terrified children, dismembered bodies, bodies in mass graves. My job is to sort through these images of the dead, dying and grieving and to decide what is a good picture, what is acceptable to publish in the newspaper--or what is too gruesome...

It went on to say: "I cannot remember a workday in the last six months when I did not see the aftermath of a shooting or a car bomb. I don't have nightmares or post-traumatic stress disorder but I have images burned in my mind's eye of war atrocities:

There is the photograph of a family whose car was fired upon at night by soldiers in Tal Afar. It shows a frightened little girl, her face spattered in the blood of her dead parents, her screaming mouth wide open, and the legs and gun barrel of a soldier protruding into the corner of the frame.

There is the photograph of the mourning family of 9-year-old Ahmed, killed by a car bomb in Baghdad. The five adult faces I see are all screaming and wailing; their hands are raised to those faces in horror or prayer. The family huddles around the small wood box.

There is the photograph from Haditha that shows about 10 dead Iraqis packed in ice in a morgue--a scene that resembles a fish market. They had been executed in a stadium northwest of Baghdad. The Iraqi government had, in fact, identified them as fishermen."

Now let's be clear, Johnathan Elderfield is an accomplished photographer and seems to have his heart in the right place. Moreover there's no question that such images are incendiary. But leaving aside the whining tone of the piece, there is a much bigger and more infuriating question: Why are you, Jonathan Elderfield, the only one to have seen these pictures? Why is it that every time I open the paper I see antiseptic crap rather than the hard hitting news photos it turns out you've been sitting on all these months? The photos that accompanied the news piece were indeed graphic--far more graphic than anything I've ever seen in the tribune or elsewhere. They have the power to bring the horror of war home, and yet all they do is eat at you rather than the conscience of the nation. They ruin your lunch rather than affect public opinion. This seems to be a total abdication of your responsibility as a journalist and an editor, and rather than feel sorry for your pain, all I can muster is fury at your complicity in a whitewash that continues to cost innocent lives on a daily basis.


Do we want to look at this? No. Should we....?

From "In These Times"

Ryan Grim writes in "In These Times" that:

At some point, everyone ought to throw his or her political theory—whatever it is—up against the wall of reality to see if it sticks. I ran smack into that wall when the state shackled Mark, one of my best friends, and hauled him off to a dank, violent, maximum-security prison for a 17-year stay. His crime: possession of a spoonful of cocaine.


Mark?

Grim's point about the horror of war on drugs isn't particularly new, but it dies underscore the importance of personal narrative. The piece works not because he's got an important new thesis but rather because right there, up at the top he introduces Mark. It's an important lesson for those of us who write about the system. People make good stories, and the thought of Mark doing 17 years (which does seem an extraordinary sentence for a "spoonful") hits as hard as any of the arguments he expounds below.

You know you're old when...

Your contemporaries start running for office. Yes, indeed. Imagine my surprise upon finding that Kathleen Rice was running for DA of Nassau County against Dennis Dillon who is now 71 years old and has been in office for as long as I can remember.


Kathleen Rice

Now I remember Kathleen from when she started in the Brooklyn DA's office in 1992. She was very cute and rather feisty and though I never much like prosecutors, she wasn't too bad to have a case with. (At least that's what I think--it's possible too that I absolutely hated her but just don't remember). But as I read about her now, even with the haze of her cuteness and my not too terrible memories clouding my brain, I'm reminded of why the entire enterprise of running for DA is distasteful.

The truth is, almost the only way to gain points in a DA's race seems to be to attack your opponent for not being tough enough. It's the worst sort of feedback loop. "I'm going to punish the criminals even more harshly than you..." "More mandatory jail time!" And while Dillon is making an issue of a a pending perjury lawsuit filed against Kathleen alleging that she and others pressured a witness in a double murder to falsely identify Antoine Butts as the murderer. (Butts spent 2 years in Rikers Island before being acquitted at trial.) This doesn't seem to be working. Indeed, raising the question of overstepping the bounds of prosecutorial propriety, while important seems to be a loosing strategy.

Alito is scary...

Some more Alito decisions to keep in mind as we decide between outrage, horror and outright panic:

Alito voted to dismiss a case, brought by Inez Baker and three of her children, who said they had been mistreated by the police when they happened to visit an apartment during a drug raid. "There was," he wrote, "a good likelihood that visitors to the apartment were drug buyers. While it was certainly possible that there would also be some innocent visitors to the apartment (such as the Bakers), I think that there was probable cause to search anyone found on the premises."


Alito--Friend of the powerful

Or how about this: In a 1991 appeal in a murder case from the Virgin Islands in which the defendant had claimed self-defense, the trial judge failed to tell the jury that the prosecution had to prove that the killing was not in self- defense. The majority reversed on that ground. Alito disented. Though he acknowledged that it was possible that the instructions given confused the jury, he wrote, "the mere possibility of prejudice to the defendant is not enough to show plain error."

And as for covering our, often ineffective asses: In a 1997 case, the majority ordered a new trial for a man whose lawyer had advised him to plead guilty to possession of a firearm. Judge Alito disagreed, writing that the lawyer's advice "is properly viewed under our precedents as a tactical decision that, while perhaps debatable, remains safely within the expansive realm of constitutional reasonableness."

When a 1995 panel majority showed special consideration to a Pakistani man seeking to avoid deportation because he was caring for his sick brother, Judge Alito objected. He said that the decision of the Board of Immigration Appeals, or B.I.A., deserved respect and that the board had ruled that humanitarian considerations were outweighed by the man's conviction 10 years earlier for conspiring to import a pound of heroin.

Basically, Alito is the sort of judge who will protect corporations, defer to cops and generally screw the little guy, particularly if the little guy is poor, or Pakistani.

The real deal about prosecutors...

This story seems to me to capture one of the central problems that defense lawyers have with prosecutors. Though it seems that every prosecutor has learned to talk about how they never want an innocent person in prison, they're only out for justice etc, their actions, rather than their self righteous and self important public statements, regularly belie this claim. The problem is that the public only hears what prosecutors say, and rarely look at what they do. This is a case in point.


Alaska State Prison

William Osborne, a man locked up for more than a decade for a crime he says he didn't commit has been trying for years to get a DNA test to prove his innocence. Conclusive evidence exists, he's able to pay for the test himself but the prosecution has been stonewalling, seeking to prevent him even getting the test.

Their most recent salvo: An attempt to bias the judge hearing the motion to have the DNA tested by introducing a supposed "Confession" made to the parole board who had made it clear to poor Mr. Osborne that if he ever wanted to get out of prison he needed to confess.

He did.

Then they denied him parole.

Tests done in 1993 showed that the critical evidence in the case: semen recovered at the scene matched about 16 percent of the black population, a group that included Osborne. He asked for more advanced testing, but his attorney at the time refused, strategizing that the inconclusive results were in his favor because they showed the semen could have come from any number of people.

Far more advanced DNA tests are available now.
"Let's just get the condom and hair tested," his attorney has said. "That's what needs to be done. If they are so sure they have the right guy, just let us spend our money to get it tested."

Of course, while prosecutors insist that they'd never want to see an innocent man in prison, in countless cases like that of Mr. Osborne--who has already spent over a decade incarcerated for a crime he may not have committed, their actions speak far louder than their words.

They want convictions. They want finality. And if that means that men like Osborne rot, it seems that that is a price that prosecutors, at least, are willing to pay.

Hard to get much worse...

Yes it's true, even among the potential disasters, Alito couldn't be a worse choice. He is a conservative activist who doesn't even share Scalia's beliefs in the criminal context. Why? A quick look at Alito's bio should case fear and loathing among hardened defenders everywhere. Guess how he spent his entire pre-judicial career? You got it, as a prosecutor.


Assistant U.S. attorney, District of New Jersey, 1977-1981
Assistant to the U.S. solicitor general, U.S. Department of Justice, Washington, DC, 1981-1985
Deputy assistant U.S. attorney general, U.S. Department of Justice, Washington, DC, 1985-1987
U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey, 1987-1990

As Professor Berman at Sentencing Law and Policy points out: "Lawrence Lustberg, a New Jersey criminal defense lawyer who has known Alito since 1981 and tried cases before him on the Third Circuit, describes him as "an activist conservatist judge" who is tough on crime and narrowly construes prisoners' and criminals' rights. "He's very prosecutorial from the bench. He has looked to be creative in his conservatism, which is, I think, as much a Rehnquist as a Scalia trait," Lustberg says.

The difference between being in the mold of Chief Justice Rehnquist and Justice Scalia for the Apprendi-Blakely-Booker line of cases is quite pronounced and consequential. Because of Alito's criminal law background, the pre-hearing conversation and the hearing themselves would likely focus a lot on criminal justice issues (unlike what we have seen with Miers and with Roberts). Regardless of one's view on criminal justice issues, I think it is important and valuable for these issues to be a larger part of the public conversation about the work of the High Court and potential Justices."

Oops...

Don't you hate it when the cameras happen to catch your illegal and outrageous behavior? Some Cops in Elizabeth certainly do!

A police lieutenant has been suspended and others are being investigated after a cable television station filmed officers drinking on a city parking deck, smashing the windows of a vehicle, and bragging about shaking down a local business for free alcohol.


Watch those camera's boys!

Lt. James Kearns, 37, was questioned by the department's internal affairs unit Thursday. He did not acknowledge any wrongdoing, said Donald Fraser, attorney for Elizabeth Policemen's Benevolent Association Local No. 4, which includes the Superior Officers Association.

Footage shot by News 12 New Jersey shows officers gathering on a parking deck near police headquarters, some in marked patrol cars. Some of the officers grabbed containers of beer, and one was recorded bragging about shaking down a local tavern for the alcohol.

One of the officers uses a nightstick to smash the windows of a vehicle, which Mayor J. Christian Bollwage said was a decommissioned police vehicle. Another tosses a beer bottle at a squad car that drives up to the gathering, then drives away.

"Don't come up here if you ain't gonna drink beer with us," someone is heard saying on the tape.

Today could be the day...

In a few hours, I think we can expect an indictment of at least Scooter Libby and possibly others.


Scooter's in Trouble...

And as fabulous as it'd be to see Karl Rove frog-marched out of the west wing in cuffs (that's the way Rudy liked to do it when he was U.S. Attorney), I think it's unlikely Rove's gonna get it tomorrow.

It seems to me, though, that with Harriet gone, we might well see a 'fuck you' S.Ct appointment hard on the heels of tomorrow's indictments. I'm talking someone like Jones or Bork, someone destined to provoke the kind of fight republicans want--a filibuster fight that'll distract from the damage the Plame inquiry is going to inflict.

It's going to be an interesting day and a fascinating few weeks.

Bye Bye Bing..

A man who repeatedly called a Hong Kong judge a crook in open court is guilty of trying to intimidate the court and interfere with the administration of justice, the High Court has ruled. Bing Choy, 61, was not present in court to hear the ruling, and must now be arrested in order to face Justices Michael Hartmann and Azizul Suffiad to be sentenced for his crime.

Since 2003, Choy has indicated in letters to the court that he considers the proceedings unlawful and has never appeared in court to defend himself.

Choy, a nonlegally trained advocate, has appeared in court more than 50 times representing his own or other companies. He is renowned for verbally abusing judges.



Tuesday's conviction relates to events in 2003 when he launched a tirade against the vice president of the Court of Appeal, Anthony Rogers, calling him a crook 36 times in 30 minutes.

Choy's invective was a "sustained, scurrilous, abusive attack," an "exercise in intimidation" and "constituted in itself a form of violence," Hartmann said Tuesday.

In April 2003, while representing Phoon Lee Piling, both as its director and legal advisor, Choy asked to have Rogers disqualified from hearing his civil appeal, because "evidence" showed him to be a "crook," "dishonest" and biased.

Choy claimed that in cases from 1996 and 2000 Rogers had ruled against him in a manner that was "fraudulent" and "obstructed justice." Then in May 2003 he attacked Rogers verbally in court.

"How can a crook sit in a competent court to hear an appeal?" Choy said at the time.

Double Dipping for Death

The House bill that would reauthorize the USA Patriot Act anti-terrorism law includes several little-noticed provisions that would dramatically transform the federal death penalty system, allowing smaller juries to decide on executions and giving prosecutors the ability to try again if a jury deadlocks on sentencing.



The bill also triples the number of terrorism-related crimes eligible for the death penalty, adding, among others, the material support law that has been the core of the government's legal strategy against terrorism.

Under the proposals, 41 crimes would be added to the 20 terrorism-related offenses now eligible for the federal death penalty. Prosecutors would also find it easier to impose a death sentence in cases in which the defendant did not have the intent to kill.

In one example cited by Human Rights Watch, "an individual could be sentenced to death for providing financial support to an organization whose members caused the death of another, even if this individual did not know or in any way intend that the members engage in acts of violence."

But critics are most concerned about procedural changes related to juries, including a provision that would allow a trial with fewer than 12 jurors if the court finds "good cause," with or without the agreement of the defense.

The bill would also give prosecutors a chance to try again if a jury is deadlocked over a death sentence. Currently, a hung jury at sentencing automatically results in a life sentence.

Dumping on Africa Again

Much of the used computer equipment sent from the United States to developing countries for use in homes, schools and businesses is often neither usable nor repairable, creating enormous environmental problems in some of the world's poorest places, according to a report to be issued today by an environmental organization.



Unusable equipment is being donated or sold to developing nations by recycling businesses in the United States as a way to dodge the expense of having to recycle it properly. While the report, written by the Basel Action Network, based in Seattle, focuses on Nigeria, in western Africa, it says the situation is similar throughout much of the developing world.

"Too often, justifications of 'building bridges over the digital divide' are used as excuses to obscure and ignore the fact that these bridges double as toxic waste pipelines," says the report. As a result, Nigeria and other developing nations are carrying a disproportionate burden of the world's toxic waste from technology products.

According to the National Safety Council, more than 63 million computers in the United States will become obsolete in 2005. An average computer monitor can contain as much as eight pounds of lead, along with plastics laden with flame retardants and cadmium, all of which can be harmful to the environment and to humans.

Still Going....

The number of prisoners in the United States rose again during 2004, the Department of Justice's Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) announced today. (A Sunday, mind you to insure minimum press effect). Yep, we now have over 2.2 million people behind bars.



The number of inmates under state jurisdiction increased by 20,759 (1.6 percent) and the number under federal jurisdiction by 7,269 (4.2 percent). The total increase in the number of inmates in 2004 was nearly identical to 2003 and about 8,000 fewer than in 2002.

As of Dec. 31, 2004, there were 2,267,787 people behind bars in the United States, of which 1,421,911 were held in federal and state prisons (not including the 74,718 state and federal inmates incarcerated in local jails), 713,990 in local jails, 102,338 in juvenile facilities, 15,757 in U.S. Territory prisons, 9,788 in Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities, 2,177 in military prisons and 1,826 in Indian country jails (as of June 30, 2003).

The Federal Bureau of Prisons operated the largest prison system at year-end 2004 (180,328 inmates), followed by Texas (168,105), California (166,556), Florida (85,553), and New York (85,533).

Here's a state by state breakdown:

U.S. 1,433,793 1,408,361 1.8
Federal 159,137 151,919 4.8
State 1,274,656 1,256,442 1.4

Northeast 161,121 163,494 -1.5

Conn. 13,240 13,587 -2.6
Maine 1,961 1,951 0.5
Mass. 8,688 8,814 -1.4
N.H. 2,448 2,434 0.6
N.J. 26,757 27,246 -1.8
N.Y. 63,751 65,198 -2.2
Pa. 40,931 40,880 0.1
R.I. 1,894 1,983 -4.5
Vt. 1,451 1,401 3.6

Midwest 248,896 246,583 0.9

Ill. 44,054 43,418 1.5
Ind. 23,939 23,007 4.1
Iowa 8,525 8,546 -0.2
Kan. 8,966 9,132 -1.8
Mich. 48,883 49,358 -1.0
Minn. 8,758 7,865 11.4
Mo. 31,061 30,275 2.6
Neb. 4,038 3,976 1.6
N.D. 1,238 1,147 7.9
Ohio 44,806 44,778 0.1
S.D. 3,088 3,016 2.4
Wis. 21,540 22,065 -2.4

South 576,292 565,380 1.9

Ala. 25,257 27,272 -7.4
Ark. 13,668 13,244 3.2
Del. 4,087 4,122 -0.8
Fla. 85,530 82,003 4.3
Ga. 51,089 47,200 8.2
Ky. 17,140 16,190 5.9
La. 36,939 36,047 2.5
Md. 22,696 23,230 -2.3
Miss. 19,469 19,569 -0.5
N.C. 30,683 29,394 4.4
Okla. 22,913 22,448 2.1
S.C. 22,730 22,942 -0.9
Tenn. 25,884 25,403 1.9
Texas 157,617 156,534 0.7
Va. 35,564 35,067 1.4
W.Va. 5,026 4,715 6.6

West 288,347 280,985 2.6

Alaska 2,632 2,629 0.1
Ariz. 31,106 29,722 4.7
Calif. 164,933 162,678 1.4
Colo. 20,293 19,671 3.2
Hawaii 4,174 4,167 0.2
Idaho 6,375 5,737 11.1
Mont. 3,877 3,620 7.1
Nev. 11,280 10,543 7.0
N.M. 6,111 5,934 3.0
Ore. 13,167 12,695 3.7
Utah 5,916 5,681 4.1
Wash. 16,503 16,036 2.9
Wyo. 1,980 1,872 5.8

Anyone Need a PD?

It's about time...

A judge on Wednesday threw out the murder conviction of David Lemus, the second of two men who wrongly spent more than 14 years in prison for the shooting death of a bouncer at a Manhattan nightclub.


Lemus
Lemus and Olmado Hidalgo were convicted in the 1990 shooting of Palladium nightclub bouncer Marcus Peterson. The same judge threw out Hidalgo's conviction in July after finding he was unconnected to Lemus or anyone else involved in the incident.

Hidalgo was deported after his exoneration. The prosecutors say they'll retry Lemus.

“I think it's absurd and unfair, and I hope that [Manhattan District Attorney] Robert Morgenthau comes to his senses before he does it,” added Carol Kramer, the jury forewoman in the first trial. “Just leave these guys alone. Let justice be done now."

I couldn't say it better.

Judge Davis Slap Down

Judge Chester Davis who jailed Ronald Wayne Childress Jr essentially for not doing what the prosecutor wanted in a domestic violence case was reversed last week. Judge William Wood Jr. of Superior Court ruled yesterday that Davis did not follow the proper procedure in sending Childress to jail.


Neither Judge Childress nor Judge Davis

Good for Judge Wood. Bad for Mr. Childress who had already served his entire sentence.

In Other News...

Despite the efforts Joe Arpaio, of one of the most absurd and looney sheriffs in the country, two months ago, a state judge found it is illegal for Arpaio to refuse to transport female inmates to a medical facility for an elective abortion.


Sheriff Joe with Pink Underpants

And Arpaio isn't alone. Missouri officials must let a pregnant inmate have an abortion, the Supreme Court said Monday, rejecting an appeal by anti-abortion Gov. Matt Blunt, a Republican.

Missouri, which has some of the strictest abortion laws in the country, argued taxpayers should not have to pick up the tab for transporting the woman to an abortion clinic.

The Court Giveth and the Court Taketh Away

A scary harbinger: The Supreme Court said Monday that death row inmates do not automatically have a right to a jury trial to determine whether they are mentally retarded and therefore ineligible for execution.


Awesome Public Defender
Robert Hooker of Pima County

Three years ago, the court barred executions of the mentally retarded, on grounds that they violated the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

Justices left it up to states to determine whether inmates are retarded.

Pima County Public Defender Robert Hooker said he wasn't surprised by the decision, but was disappointed.

The Supreme Court has now decided to leave the decision of who is mentally retarded in the same hands as those who once determined it was OK to execute the mentally retarded - judges, Hooker said.

"This means a lot more mentally retarded people are going to be killed,"

Let this be a lesson...

The compassion of a Long Island woman, Victoria Ruvolo, who was nearly killed 11 months ago when a 20-pound frozen turkey was thrown into the windshield of the car she was driving, helped secure a lenient jail sentence on Monday for the young man who was charged with the crime.



The defendant, Ryan Cushing might have faced as much as 25 years in prison on the multiple felony charges originally brought against him in the attack, on Nov. 13, which broke every bone in Ms. Ruvolo's face and left her with brain injuries.

The Suffolk County district attorney, Thomas J. Spota, and Mr. Cushing's lawyer, William Keahon, seemed genuinely awed by the victim's temperate sense of justice. Had she taken a different position than she did,Mr. Keahon said, my client would have been incarcerated for many years. This to me is a very spiritual thing."

Indeed.

NJWeedMan is pissed off...

Don't even ask me what search term led me to NJWeedMan's site but his bloviating is (or will be to most public defenders) priceless. And, of course there is this shot of him in what he calls his "Fuck You Court Shirt"


The NJ WeedMan's "Fuck You Court Shirt"

Judge "Sick" Ric Howard Struck Before...

Scratch the surface and it's amazing what you'll find. Exactly three years ago, the Justice Policy Initiate wrote a piece looking at juvenile sentences.

Guess who they spotlighted? That's right: Sick Ric Howard:


That's Sic Rick holding the map

Here's what they wrote:

"Instead of focusing on anomalies, we need to look at more typical cases like that of Adam Bollenback, a 17-year-old mentally disabled boy with a history of substance abuse. At age 16, Adam stole a six-pack of beer from a neighbor's garage and then managed to slip away from a patrol car after being caught. Not only was he prosecuted as an adult; he was given a 10-year prison sentence. During the sentencing, Judge Ric Howard noted approvingly, "This sentence is going to break your spirit right now."

The guy deserves the moniker.

Following the sentencing, Adam's lawyer asked that the boy be segregated from adult inmates, but Howard rejected the request, stating, "He's an adult, and he's going to be treated as an adult."

That's just great.

In an interview following the sentencing, the garage owner, Charlotte Coadic, said, "If I had known [his age], I wouldn't have called the cops, I would have given him a good tongue-lashing and sent him home."

I bet that if she knew that the poor mentally ill kid would come before a sadist in a robe, she might have even spared him the tongue-lashing.

Everyone must get Jailed...

Reason 7,655 you should never, ever call the police (even if you're a "victim")

A judge in Forsyth Superior Court ordered yesterday the release of a man who was jailed for contempt after he didn't testify against a girlfriend who was accused of assaulting him.

Prosecutors in domestic court had expected Ronald Wayne Childress Jr. to testify Tuesday against his girlfriend, Jennifer Lynn Atwood. However, when Childress took the stand, he testified that Atwood had not assaulted him.

Judge Chester Davis of District Court nonetheless found Atwood guilty of simple assault and sentenced her to four days in jail. Davis then ruled that Childress had lied under oath and sentenced him to four days in jail as well.

So what do we know about Judge CHESTER DAVIS?


(Not the same judge)

A quick google search turned up the following questionnaire:

Chester C. Davis
Home address: 1447 Country Meadow Lane, Kernersville, 27284
Date of birth: Nov. 7, 1942
Education: B.A., Davidson College; J.D., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Occupation: District Court judge
Family: Married; three children; two grandchildren
Political experience: 13 years as a judge
What makes you best qualified: I am not opposed.

Go Boyce...

In a dissenting opinion filed in the capital case of Moore v. Parker, Judge Boyce Martin of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit wrote that "the death penalty in this country is arbitrary, biased, and so fundamentally flawed at its very core that it is beyond repair." Among his many criticisms of the way capital punishment is applied in the U.S., Martin specifically noted his concerns about the issues of innocence, inadequate defense counsel, and the overall arbitrariness of the system. He wrote:


Judge Martin

I have been a judge on this Court for more than twenty-five years. In that time I have seen many death penalty cases and I have applied the law as instructed by the Supreme Court and I will continue to do so for as long as I remain on this Court. This my oath requires. After all these years, however, only one conclusion is possible: the death penalty in this country is arbitrary, biased, and so fundamentally flawed at its very core that it is beyond repair.

DA Sentenced to 18 Months for Lying About Sex With Informant

Though this is old news, it did fit nicely with my exchange with Tom about the preferential treatment prosecutors get. In this instance about a year ago, a South Georgia district attorney was sentenced to an 18-month prison term for lying to federal agents about an improper sexual relationship with a confidential informant.

He pled guilty to charges of lying when FBI agents asked whether he had ever had sex with a defendant in his district. Ellis said he had not, but Jody Manning, a drug defendant and informant for Ellis, told federal agents he had forced her into a sexual relationship.


(inexplicably this is what google returned for a search of the term
"sex with snitch")

In a more recent follow-up Law.com (a place with a fairly staid journalistic tone) reported the following concerning the 11th circuit's reversal of his conviction:

The 11th Circuit's unpublished -- or, non-precedential -- decision seemed unusual. Judges Gerald B. Tjoflat, William H. Pryor Jr. and visiting Senior 9th Circuit Judge Arthur L. Alarcon issued their one-paragraph ruling just two days after oral argument, and it was based on an issue Ellis' lawyer, Michael J. Bowers, recalled barely came up during the discussion.

He served less than half his sentence.

The book is done...

With all the birthday festivities, I forgot to mention that on Friday, I turned in the most recent (and pretty much final) draft of the book.


It publishes in May.

Bad Little Prosecutor

Alas, more stories of scummy prosecutors and their evil deeds. How about this Washington County prosecutor suspended for stealing a defense attorney's notes It's true!


Suspended Prosecutor

Washington County Prosecutor Cynthia L. Winkler was suspended from practicing law for 120 days over a dispute that began when a chief deputy prosecutor tore a page of notes from a defense attorney's pad during a court hearing. According to the charges filed with the Indiana Supreme Court Disciplinary Commission, Winkler and Chief Deputy Blaine Goode admitted Goode had taken the page of notes during a February 2003 trial without the defense attorney's knowledge, purportedly to secure a writing sample from the defendant. Goode got a 60-day suspension.


The pair failed to reveal they had the paper when the defense team was searching for it. The defense lawyer later spotted it under Winkler's file folder. Winkler and Goode said in court papers they wanted to compare the man's writing with that on a recipe for methamphetamine that was being used as evidence in his drug case.

The Goode News...the two will return to the prosecutors office after their suspensions.

Here's the decision:

The More I Hear, The More I Believe

That, as Molly Ivins wrote: "we are in trouble." The Miers nomination is a huge hoax--the joke's on the democrats. This woman is awful.



There is no question in my mind that Miers' chief qualification for this a S.Ct seat is loyalty to Bush. And what that means is that she will be the fifth vote on the court to overturn Roe vs. Wade.

She's not a genius--she's a hack--as Charles Krauthammer, explained it: "The issue is not the venue of Miers's constitutional scholarship, experience and engagement. The issue is their nonexistence." And that fact makes it easier for her to engage in conservative activism unconstrained by constitutional analysis. In other words I predict she will become the most partisan judge reasoning toward a predetermined political end.

And as I said above, don't be fooled by the old paper trail...Miers' church states on its website that it believes in biblical inerrancy, full immersion baptism, original sin and salvation dependent entirely upon accepting Jesus Christ. Everyone else is going to hell. And without any sense of a countervailing judicial philosophy, That's a scary place from which to reason.