People v. State

When the underlying issue is his own sanity, and when he himself is Exhibit A in support thereof.

The denial of Bryan Brown’s application for admission to the Indiana Bar was nothing but tyranny, and leads me to assume that I myself am practicing law on borrowed time. I’ve met Bryan, and he’s far fitter than I to practice law.

Please pray for Bryan as he argues his case to the Seventh Circuit next Thursday at 11:30 a.m. EST.

Doug Berman:

By turning this case into a capital prosecution, prosecutors ensured jurors would have to be “death qualified” and thus would know from the outset that prosecutors wanted Anthony executed for her alleged crimes.  Though sometimes death-qualified juries may show a greater willingness to convict, here I suspect that the death-qualification process could have primed the jurors to expect a forensic smoking gun showing conclusively that Casey Anthony murdered her daughter in cold blood.  When no such smoking gun was presented by the prosecution, the jurors may have ultimately been much more willing (and perhaps even eager) to find reasonable doubt on all serious charges.

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COMPARE Glenn Greenwald’s July 4th post on the motives of Bradley Manning with Bryan J. Brown’s “July 4th Primer — to the Indiana Supreme Court,” consisting of his final filing with that court in his unsuccessful bid to be admitted by them to the practice of law in Indiana. (Background on Bryan’s case is here, here, and here.)

CONTRAST Jeff Gamso’s July 4th post contrasting the relative “necessity” of dissolving political bands in 1776 and now with Norm Pattis’ July 4th post contrasting the trial in 1770 of the British soldiers charged with murder for their role in the Boston Massacre with the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in 2011 in the case of Harry Connick, District Attorney v. John Thompson (throwing out a $14 million jury award for an innocent man who was imprisoned for 18 years, including 14 on death row, because prosecutors hid evidence that exonerated him).

[Title inspired by J. DeVoy at the Legal Satyricon, Scott Greenfield at Simple Justice, and of course Trey Parker and Matt Stone.]

A skeptic might theorize that Osama bin Laden is in fact not dead but alive and well in the CIA witness protection program somewhere. After all, the best evidence of his death has already been buried at sea, and U.S. officials are trying to decide whether a photo they have of his corpse is just too graphic to release. After all, Osama has been great for government business over the last ten years. His “disappearance” now won’t undo or slow down any of that, and the timing couldn’t be better for Obama.

I myself don’t go so far (despite the U.S. government’s habit of telling outrageous lies to “its” people). I merely note that the killing of bin Laden by Team America doesn’t make me feel any safer. Quite the opposite. And the threat of reprisals for his death is already being used by U.S. officials to remind us how much we need them.

You know what would make me feel safer? If the government which purports to act in my name stopped fucking with people all over the world.

“Governments don’t live together, people live together.” (H/T Bryan Brown at the ArchAngel Institute.)

Recently I described myself as a “Christian Deist” in a comment on this interesting blog, written by a lawyer who was denied admission to the Indiana bar by the Indiana Supreme Court apparently because of a legal philosophy similar to my own and his purported resistance to and criticism of the psychological evaluation of his sanity required by the Board of Bar Examiners because of the fact that years before his application for admission he had been arrested several times for protesting at abortion clinics and had refused to pay an unconstitutional civil judgment for attorney fees against him related to such protests. (Norm Pattis writes today regarding the disbarment of F. Lee Bailey and the fact that judges rather than juries decide such questions: “Deciding whether an aggressive, and often controversial, lawyer should remain at the bar is not a decision I would trust to a judge, ever.”)

What I mean by describing myself as a Christian Deist is illuminated by the following two articles, my discovery of which online was prompted by my discovery in a bookstore yesterday of Tolstoy’s The Gospel in Brief:

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