Lazy Links
Glenn Greenwald knocks another one out of the park, but his quoting with approval the following by John Cole gave me pause:
One thing that even the dim bulbs in the media should understand by now is that there is in fact a class war going on, and it is the rich and powerful who are waging it. Anyone who does anything that empowers the little people or that threatens the wealth and power of the plutocracy must be destroyed. There is a reason for these clowns going after Think Progress and unions, just like there is a reason they are targeting Wikileaks and Glenn Greenwald, Planned Parenthood, and Acorn. . . .
Politics makes for strange bedfellows, but I reserve the right to cheer for Wikileaks while maintaining my longstanding contempt for the arch-hypocrisy of Planned Parenthood as well as my indifference to the deserved demise of Acorn.
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In a recent email exchange, one of the country’s foremost and sanest authorities on jury independence / nullification pointed me to the online presence of a student comment by Francis X. Sullivan which I happened to be an editor of prior to its publication in the Wisconsin Law Review in 1999: “The Usurping Octopus of Jurisdictional Authority”: The Legal Theories of the Sovereign Citizen Movement. As I recall, at the time I was perplexed by the article and questioned its practical value, despite Frank’s excellent writing, having never before encountered the bizarre and incoherent theories described in it. Fortunately, the senior editors recognized its value and voted to publish it. I’m glad they did, as I have since run into these theories in the real world and now better appreciate Frank’s excellent and valuable taxonomy of them.
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One of my favorite blawgers criticizes another of my favorite blawgers for Going Too Far. I think they’re both right.
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The trial of the former Pennsylvania judge who allegedly sentenced “Kids-for-Cash,” Mark Ciavarella Jr., is well underway. One of the former judge’s alleged victims was quoted as saying on the eve of his trial, “I hope and pray everything he did, it comes back to him 20 times harder.” Amen.
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Scott Greenfield redeems his recent unwarranted dissing of “anarchy” with this:
It strikes me as fundamentally contrary to the judicial function to demand that a judge comply with precedent that he believes to be unlawful. It’s not for lack of appreciation of precedent, or respect for appellate authority, but for the ability of a judge at the trial court level to achieve the result he believes to be correct. To expect judges to do harm in their rulings strikes me as nonsensical, and reduces the judicial function to ministerial.
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Rick Horowitz posts an interesting take on the tension between a criminal defense attorney’s need for his client to tell him the truth about what really happened in order to mount an effective and fully informed defense and the ethical rules prohibiting criminal defense attorneys from knowingly facilitating the presentation of false testimony in court:
I don’t want to hear from you that you are guilty, that you did the deed — at least not if, after telling me all this, you want me to put witnesses, including you, on the stand to testify about how you were in London at the time the Fresno Mini-Mart was robbed.
You have the right to remain silent. When it comes to being a witness against yourself — that is, when it comes to spilling the beans about your guilt — no one, including me, can compel you to do that.
Mark Bennett in response posts an equally interesting comment:
For my part, I would rather have my client tell me the truth and then not testify than lie to me and then testify falsely. But if a client first told me he did the deed, and then told me he didn’t, I wouldn’t automatically assume that the second story was a lie.
And back in his very first post at Simple Justice, Scott Greenfield wrote:
For the purpose of representing a client, I assume that everyone is guilty in order to remove that taint they feel and enable them to speak freely to me about what happened. This is by far the most important thing they can do to aid me in preparing their defense. As I frequently tell clients, I don’t want to be the only person in the room who has no clue what really happened. If a client lies to me to minimize their guilt, they have taken away my most valuable weapon on their behalf: knowledge.
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