People v. State

That is, of course, an apology in this sense, not this sense.

Recently I removed from public visibility one of my earliest posts on this blog. The post was highly critical of a particular government employee I’d clashed with, for his role in a miscarriage of justice. Although I didn’t name him in the post, whom I was referring to was clear to some members of a community (unrelated to the legal profession) whose fellowship and opinions I value and respect. Although I was not pressured or even asked to remove the post, and although the post faithfully represented my honest (more…)

While I disagree with how he ties it in to the national health care debate, Norm Pattis’ recent blog post arguing that “Each and every American accused of a crime should have the right to a court-appointed lawyer and the funds necessary to investigate and present a defense” is close to the money. I argued for something similar in this comment thread at Scott H. Greenfield’s Simple Justice blog:

John Kindley wrote:

Here’s an idea: for people who are arguably not indigent but also cannot really afford private counsel, the state facilitates a “guaranteed defendant loan” to pay for such representation, secured by whatever assets (more…)

That’s the sound-bite from attorney Michael Hirsh, who represented Paul Hill (since executed) on appeal for killing a Florida abortion doctor and who may defend Scott Roeder against charges for killing Kansas abortion doctor George Tiller, responding to the Florida Supreme Court’s suggestion that allowing a defendant in such cases to argue a justifiable homicide defense to the jury would be an “invitation for lawlessness.”

Much more on the prospects for such a defense from different perspectives in the AP story at the link.

My earlier thoughts on whether Roeder deserves the death penalty are here.

This story via the Army Times (also covered here by Veterans Today) encapsulates what’s wrong with America:

In mid-June, Congine, 46, began flying the flag upside down — an accepted way to signal distress — outside the restaurant he wants to open in Crivitz, a village of about 1,000 people some 65 miles north of Green Bay.

He said his distress is likely bankruptcy because the village board refused to grant him a liquor license after he spent nearly $200,000 to buy and remodel a downtown building for an Italian supper club. (more…)

Compare and contrast . . .

Murray Rothbard, from his essay Do You Hate the State? (via Lew Rockwell):

I have been ruminating recently on what are the crucial questions that divide libertarians. Some that have received a lot of attention in the last few years are: anarcho-capitalism vs. limited government, abolitionism vs. gradualism, natural rights vs. utilitarianism, and war vs. peace. But I have concluded that as important as these questions are, they don’t really cut to the nub of the issue, of the crucial dividing line between us. . . . (more…)

Via Lew Rockwell: Howard Zinn’s essay Untold Truths About the American Revolution

The Murdering, Thieving, Enslaving, Unlibertarian Continental Army, by Stephan Kinsella

The Declaration and Conscription, by Stephan Kinsella

Robert J. Ambrogi at Legal Blog Watch points to this blog post by Ann Bartow at the Feminist Law Professors blog about the prostitution sting involving former Villanova law school dean Mark Sargent: Women selling sex are arrested and jailed, but the buyers go free?

Prostitution, while a blight on society, is a victimless crime, and therefore not a real crime at all. But if there is a victim, is it primarily the john or the prostitute? Isn’t what we find abhorrent about prostitution the inherent exploitation involved in the exchange, and doesn’t our common sense suggest to us that if anyone is exploited in that exchange it’s the prostitute? (more…)

One inspiration was Albert Jay Nock’s Our Enemy, the State.

Another inspiration is the basic libertarian idea that the agents-without-principals who make up the State have no more authority to violate natural rights than anyone else does, so that when State agents do what would be a crime if committed by anyone else they too act criminally. (Hence, the libertarian proposition that “taxation is theft.”) Many of them in a just world should themselves be defendants. (more…)

. . . but I think it might do this kid and his mommy some good. (Via Reason.) The commenters on the story at the link are spot on.

I sometimes feel like a broken record here at People v. State, so I’m glad to finally be able to take the cop’s side in one of these “cops gone wild” stories.

So, as of a few weeks ago I’m banned at Scott Greenfield’s popular Simple Justice blog. Here’s the scene of the crime. In reply to Scott’s last comment (“My favorite thing about your comments is your self-deprecating metacognition and utter lack of defensiveness.  It’s what I admire most about you.”), I wrote: “You too can become self-deprecating and lose your prickly defensiveness with a little effort. I’m rooting for you. You can do it!” For that Scott (SHG) sent me an email banning me from his blog and stating that my last comment was “evidence of your behaving like a pompous little asshole.” Now, if in fact SHG’s comment claiming to admire me was not intended by him to drip with sarcasm, I would wholly agree with his assessment of my behavior, as I would have drastically misunderstood him. However, given what I”ve seen of SHG’s “prickly” demeanor towards other commenters who venture to comment on his blog, I have no (more…)

There is a compelling logic to the pro-life position, and so it would seem to the thinking that led Scott Roeder to kill George Tiller, M.D.:

Everyone recognizes that it is murder to kill a one-day-old baby. But there’s no material difference between a one-day old baby and a fetus one-day before its due date. It’s nonsensical to think that the mere act of being born and breathing the air makes the one-day-old a “person” with legally-cognizable rights in a way that the about-to-be-born fetus is not. The one-day-old is completely clueless. He sleeps and sometimes cries, and doesn’t open his eyes much. His life could be snuffed out without him really knowing what he’ll be missing, without the fear and anguish of loss that (more…)

Highly recommended, from The Distributist Review: Capitalism as an Unnatural System

The other day I randomly was thumbing through a collection of C.S. Lewis’ spiritual works and unexpectedly came across this passage from The Problem of Pain:

Some enlightened people would like to banish all conceptions of retribution or desert from their theory of punishment and place its value wholly in the deterrence of others or the reform of the criminal himself. They do not see that by so doing they render all punishment unjust. What can be more immoral than to inflict suffering on me for the sake of deterring others if I do not deserve it? And if I do deserve it, you are admitting the claims of ‘retribution.’ And what can be more outrageous than to catch me and (more…)

Aspiring to union with what is best in my fellow men, I do not embrace the connotations of the label “anarchist,” though being true to myself and others compels me to reluctantly embrace the label. Anarchism simply and essentially means a deep and radical skepticism towards authority. Our first allegiance should be to the Truth. Authority only has value insofar as it serves the Truth, and unfortunately lends itself to the perversion of the Truth. Paradoxically but truly, anarchism and conservativism (properly understood) are woven together by common threads. Both are humble in their estimate of the wisdom of the self and of other selves, and harbor disdain for “the best laid plans of mice and men.” As G.K. Chesterton wrote: (more…)

Mark Bennett at Defending People recently opined, in a post about Iraqi tribal leaders’ negative reaction to an American soldier being spared the death penalty by an American jury for raping and murdering a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and murdering her family: “People’s basest instincts – retribution, to name one at play here – are the same the world over. That the American criminal justice system is better than many is not attributable to the character of our government officials, but rather to the principles that constrain them.”

I commented: (more…)

Patrick at Popehat, in a post titled Blogging The Black Dog, asks blogging readers of Popehat: “What keeps you doing it?  How do you motivate yourself to post day after day?” Speaking for myself, I answered as follows in this comment:

The question of motivation is intensified for the beginning blogger, as I am. While many of us and even many popular bloggers like to think they “write for themselves,” critics be damned, the popular bloggers certainly have a motivational advantage, in that it’s difficult to get up the gumption to spend a significant amount of time writing something substantial if you know hardly anyone’s going to read it. A solution I hit on in my previous blog was to make my blog kind of an index of my commentary on other (popular) (more…)

As I daily scan through the titles of new blog posts from around the web on my Google Reader, Scott H. Greenfield’s Simple Justice blog is one, indeed presently the only one, which I invariably read every day. Yet, I would be among those he’s presumably referring to when he wrote yesterday: “Some have called me prickly about how I manage the comments on my blog.” We had this exchange earlier yesterday in the comment thread of his post titled Lawyer Fashionista: Dressing Down, on why lawyers should dress formally and conservatively (i.e., for men, suit and tie) when in court:

I wrote: (more…)

Schwarzenegger, in an effort to get California voters to approve a package of ballot initiatives that would have increased taxes and otherwise diverted cash flow to the government, has been warning his subjects of a “doomsday” budget that would, among other horrors, necessitate the release of non-violent prisoners. The voters by a wide margin didn’t give a rat’s ass and rejected the initiatives, and thus doomsday is apparently upon them.

Color me unsophisticated, but I just don’t see where the government, in California or anywhere else, gets off spending money it doesn’t have. But the root of the problem seems to be that neither state constitutions nor the U.S. Constitution (particularly since the 16th Amendment) recognizes any natural limit to the State’s taxing power. If the (more…)

UPDATE: Judge Jerome Frese comes into work on Saturday to do the right thing and set bonds for the protesters.

Here’s the chronology: Alan Keyes and others were arrested a week or so ago for committing misdemeanor trespassing on Notre Dame’s campus while protesting Obama’s upcoming commencement speech on Sunday. They promptly bonded out of jail by posting bond in an amount established by the courts’ presumptive bond schedule. On Thursday, judges of the St. Joseph County Superior Court, Circuit Court and Probate Court signed, but did not announce, a new emergency local rule, under which, according to the South Bend Tribune, “individuals arrested for the second time on a misdemeanor count can no longer bond out. Those individuals must remain in jail until a hearing (more…)

I haven’t watched Fox News Channel since shortly after the Iraq War began. I now believe that I’ve been missing one thing and one thing only by my absention: Fox News Senior Judicial Analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano. I’d heard from places like lewrockwell.com that he was one of the really good guys, but didn’t realize just how good until reading this excerpt from his new book Dred Scott’s Revenge. I have to wonder whether his law-abiding, jackboot-licking colleagues at Fox News comprehend just how radical of an anarchist they’re consorting with. Here’s the last few paragraphs of the excerpt (but read the whole thing):

Whatever any government does (unless it is preserving freedom by enforcing the natural law) should be (more…)

From Jonathan Turley: Reid: Torture Might Have Been Illegal But Still “Right” Thing To Do

In a recorded interview, Reid says this: “Something everyone has to weigh is this, we’re a nation of laws and no one can dispute that, but I think what we have to, the hurdle we have to get over is whether we want to go after people like Cheney.” And then this: “There are a lot of decisions that are made that are right that may not be absolutely totally within the framework of law.”

Reid’s latter assertion is certainly true — the written law manufactured by legislators like Reid has only an occasional (more…)

Granted, this letter was written in 1835, prior to the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery. Then again, we now have the 16th Amendment.

From Lysander Spooner’s Letter to the Members of the Legislature of Massachusetts:

In the first place, I object to the oath to bear true allegiance to the Commonwealth, and to support the Constitution. The right of rebelling against what I may think a bad government, is as much my right as it is of the other citizens of the Commonwealth, and there is no reason why lawyers should be singled out (more…)

From the New York Times: Money Shortage Forces Cut in Cases to Be Prosecuted.

This is a “crisis” defense attorneys should want to encourage, and one would hope that district attorneys should realize that their duty to the public requires that they first cut “crimes” without victims (including felonies such as drug dealing) before they cut crimes with victims (including misdemeanors such as simple assault).

Funny though how federal prosecutors never seem to be short on cash.

Norm Pattis makes some good points in this post on the qualities he would like to see in the next justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. I particularly appreciated this pithy remark: “Originalism finds justification for the status quo in reverence for the past and must somehow find accord with our three-fifths of a president.”

But the error of originalism is even more radical than proponents of the “Living Constitution” generally recognize: As the patron saint of this blog, Lysander Spooner, laboriously and rigorously proved, the U.S. Constitution itself (and therefore the government derived from it) is of No Authority. Some of Spooner’s argument is anticipated in Thomas Paine’s Dissertation on the First Principles of Government, where Paine affirmed that (more…)

Updated: the other shoe drops … POKER:

The companion legislation to [Barney] Frank’s bill will allow the United States Government to extract tax revenue from the internet gambling industry. The bill’s text notes, “Each licensee… shall be required to pay an internet gambling license fee by the end of each calendar month in an amount equal to two percent of all funds deposited by customers during the preceding month.” In terms of how the costs can be passed onto the end consumer, HR 2268 states that the 2% fee “may not be deducted from the amounts available as deposits by the person placing a bet.” Individuals are expected to pay income tax (more…)

Section 2422(b) of Title 18, United States Code, provides, in pertinent part: “Whoever, using … any … means of interstate … commerce … [e.g., an internet chat room] knowingly persuades, induces, entices, or coerces any individual who has not attained the age of 18 years, to engage in … any sexual activity for which any person can be charged with a criminal offense, or attempts to do so, shall be … imprisoned not less than 10 years or for life.”

The Seventh Circuit recently held in United States v. Gladish, 536 F.3d 646 (7th Cir. 2008), that, to be guilty of attempting to persuade a minor to engage in criminal sexual activity in violation of 18 U.S.C. 2422(b), “you must intend the completed crime” and take a “substantial step” toward its completion, and that explicit sexual talk on the (more…)

From Above the Law comes the hilarious saga of Bert J. Van der Werff, a self-described “experienced law student” who posted an ad on Craigslist offering to “answer your legal questions” for $5 per question. The Above the Law commentariat had a field day with this ill-advised enterprise, calling Mr. Van der Werff a doofus and worse for his audacity in thinking he was qualified to answer legal questions when he apparently didn’t even know that it is illegal for non-lawyers to do this kind of thing. When readers of Above the Law loudly called this to his attention, he posted a public apology and withdrew the ad from Craigslist.

I don’t have much sympathy for Mr. Van der Werff, partly because it appears that he is not in fact even a law student, (more…)

When I was a young man, before I could legally go to a bar or vote, I played chess for money and glory. Not much money or glory, mind you, as my abilities seemed to plateau at a level far below my early-adolescent dream of becoming the next Bobby Fischer. But I would on the occasional weekend pony up from my meagre paper-delivery earnings a $25 or $50 entry fee and play in a chess tournament against adults and other nerdy kids. These entry fees funded a prize pool for the winners. On a few occasions, I actually won some of this prize money, when there were age group prizes or prizes for non-expert rated players.

My youthful enthusiasm for chess eventually faded (though I still enjoy the occasional pick-up game), but in recent (more…)

Mark Bennett at Defending People has one of the most sensible and succinct takes on the issue of torture that I’ve seen. Here’s the take-home line: “If Jack Bauer can show that torture was the least of the available evils, he shouldn’t be convicted. But that’s for him to prove. This puts the torture memos in new light, incidentally. ‘Imminent’ harm isn’t harm that’s going to happen sometime after you seek legal advice.”

We all can imagine a scenario (e.g., ticking time bomb, terrorist in custody who knows the code) where we would be hard pressed to find fault with a government agent doing whatever was necessary to protect innocent lives. Heck, there was a Law and Order episode where one of the detectives kept shoving a kidnapper’s head in the toilet until he (more…)

In a comment over at Simple Justice, I was not as hopeful as Scott Greenfield about the significance of the Second Circuit’s equivocal reversal of EDNY Judge Jack Weinstein’s gutsy and brilliant 236-page decision in U.S. v. Polizzi. On closer examination of the Second Circuit’s opinion, however, I am more able to share some of Scott’s optimism. Judge Weinstein’s decision held, among other things, that

The American petit jury is not a mere factfinder. From the time the right to trial by jury was embedded in the Constitution as a guarantee to criminal defendants through the Sixth Amendment in 1791, it has been expected to bring to court much of the wisdom and consensus of the local community. See Part IV, infra. (more…)