People v. State

. . . for leaving this comment on a post at John Regan’s blog about a motion Regan and Norm Pattis have submitted to the SCOTUS on behalf of Sephora Davis (Background here, here, here, here and here):

That is some lawyering. Good for Norm for jumping in, and godspeed to you and Sephora.

And good on Marc Randazza for not deleting this comment on a post in which he professed his atheism and asserted, inter alia, that “[i]f you believe in a magic space zombie Jew, you’re not rational enough to be president either”:

Hmmm… I would then assume that you could heap the same scorn on someone for their lack of beliefs…. so I will. The writer of this blog is a pompous ass know it all who thinks that his way is the right way. He is no better than those he despises. But….. that’s the way it always is.

Have a nice day.

UPDATE: I want to make clear that I don’t agree with the comment posted on Marc’s blog. I actually agree with the main point of Marc’s post. I just think some bloggers should have thicker skins.

Norm Pattis has a very interesting post up today about Lysander Spooner and his Essay on the Trial by Jury. (Norm, a prominent Connecticut trial lawyer whose recent book includes a Foreword by F. Lee Bailey and an Introduction by Gerry Spence, credits yours truly with directing his attention to Spooner. I’ve sometimes second-guessed the value and purpose of this blog. Posts about the actual practice of law or actual court decisions have been few and far between, and, on the other hand, the folks at the Center for a Stateless Society illuminate the principles of anarchism more eruditely than I. But if I’ve facilitated a little cross-pollination, bringing some anarchism to trial lawyers, maybe some Georgism to anarchists, and maybe even a little religion to anarchists and trial lawyers, maybe this blog hasn’t been a complete waste of time.)

Norm’s post concludes:

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Jeff Gamso has a post up today noting the addition of a few blogs to his blogroll. He also notes: “I should probably consider deleting a couple of blogs from the list, but it seems wiser to add.  Because you never know.” I don’t have any reason to think my blog was one of those he had in mind for possible deletion (there’s several blogs on his roll that seem not to have been updated in some time), but it did cross my mind, and its crossing of my mind prompts me to ask myself once again what I’m doing, both on this blog and with my life in general.

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Norm Pattis has a reflective post up today that reveals a lot about his personal story, and the place of the Bible in that story, that I didn’t know before. Norm’s post concludes:

Michelle Bachmann is a true believer. For a time, I wanted to be just like her. But I lost my faith. It broke my heart, and this heartbreak makes me wary of those who wave their faith as a rallying banner. If God is there, He most certainly is silent. The Bible doesn’t speak; we read it, and find in it those truths that serve our interests. That’s a long way from grace abounding.

For my part, I mark reading the following passage in The Brothers Karamazov, while stationed at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard during my first year in the Navy, as the “first time in my life I consciously received the seed of God’s word in my heart”:

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[with apologies to Benjamin Tucker]

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First, Norm Pattis:

Two things struck me from afar about why the defense won this case, and both come down to rules broken by Casey Anthony’s lawyer. If Mr. Baez had tried the case according to the textbook, he might well have lost it.

According to Norm, these two unconventional things were: (1) laying out in opening statement and arguing for in summation a theory of how Casey’s daughter died, even though he kept Casey from testifying and wasn’t able to offer any actual evidence supporting this theory at trial; and (2) arguing to the jury that the case against Casey was not strong enough to support a penalty of death, even though punishment is not supposed to be a consideration during the guilt phase of trial.

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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).

SPOILER ALERT! Don’t read the title of this post if you haven’t finished reading Norm Pattis‘ new book, Taking Back the Courts: What We Can Do to Reclaim Our Sovereignty, as those are the words with which it concludes.

I’ll write more about the book later, once I’ve actually finished it, but wanted to note the coincidence of Norm’s (perhaps hyperbolic) embrace of “chaos” with my (perhaps hyperbolic) embrace of “chaos” in my last post, titled “Chaotic Good v. Lawful Evil.” (Incidentally, for the edification of my non-geek readers, “Chaotic Good” and “Lawful Evil” are “alignments” in Dungeons & Dragons.)

What follows is an email I sent today to Norm Pattis, with links to pertinent posts on various blogs added:

Norm,

I am completely disgusted by Greenfield’s hit piece on you. The guy’s a raging hypocrite. Look at his very first blog post at Simple Justice. It clearly had in mind as an audience and was directed to potential clients.

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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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A Judicial Strike? Only In France; U.S. Judges Lack The Courage

John Brown and the Grapes of Wrath

A Simple Reform Of Adam Walsh Act — Rebuttable Presumptions

Norm Pattis in his most recent post provides an important qualification to what I took him to say in his previous post (“When politicians seek to mobilize supporters with martial and military metaphors and symbols, they are now accused of inciting violence. This is utter silliness.”) about the shootings in Arizona:

In the case of Jared Loughner we will never know to a certainty what caused his actions. But denying that hate speech and a low-brow, knuckle-dragging political culture had anything to do with his actions seems a lot like calling cigarettes health food. Denying the relation of speech and acts is a sign of something far worse than cancer, however: The denial is a form of declaring meaningless the very concept of culture or political society.     (more…)

This is great stuff:

When I say that I am not alone in thinking sometimes violence is a necessary response to our own government, I am referring to the Founders of the United States of America. We may not like to think about it, but if they had not violently responded to what was then “our government,” the United States of America would not exist today; would never have existed.

But the words and actions of the Founders are instructive for us today not because they violently overthrew the government in place at the time. Or maybe not “just because.”     (more…)

Norm Pattis on Secrecy, Terror and a Cowardly Government:

The Patriot Act and its sickly progeny have been used for all sorts of decidedly unpatriotic things in the past few weeks. The Government is, for example, seeking account information about Twitter users. It flashed a subpoena at Twitter headquarters in San Francisco ten days before Christmas: Turn over records but don’t tell anyone we asked, the Government demanded. Only cowards and tyrants hide their tracks with threats. Twitter stood its ground, and the truth can be told: Uncle Sam is wetting himself because WikiLeaks has toid the truth about what he does when he thinks no one is looking.

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