People v. State

Via Tampa Bay Fox (H/T Scott Greenfield):

A Pinellas County teenager says she was suspended from school and charged with a crime just for posting a karma comment on her Facebook page.

Allie Scott is a junior at Osceola High School. The 16 year old says it all started in the school parking lot last month when she parked her brother’s car in another girl’s spot. She was asked to move it, and when she did at the end of the day, the car had been scratched up with a key.

Without naming who she thought did it, she posted this comment on her Facebook page: “Oh, so you keyed my car. Your karma is going to be a whole lot worse than that.”

In light of this story, I fully expect to be arrested and charged criminally any day now for writing this recent blog post, especially since the target of my prayer for Justice was not (as was Ms. Scott’s) some unnamed private citizen but unnamed agents of the State. (Presumably, the only person whose feelings could have been hurt by Ms. Scott’s Facebook comment would have been the criminal actually guilty of keying her car. The same limitation is true of my blog post, which was directed only at those, whoever they are, and they are many, who are “responsible for innocent men and women sitting in prison this Christmas.” If the shoe fits, wear it.) But can you blame the State for wishing to nip in the bud even the mere desire of people for Justice by punishing its expression, even if that expression explicitly leaves Justice to God (or to karma)? After all, if enough people hope bad things happen to bad people, that hope could eventually lead them to become impatient with God and to make bad things happen to bad people, a class which includes a disproportionately high number of State employees. Marie Antoinette, among others, discovered how dangerous such impatience can be.

For the record, although the State itself has no qualms whatsoever with actually visiting evil upon those it deems evil or a threat to its interests, and although there is something to be said for wanting the evil of the bad man to be to him what it is to everybody else, I recognize, in spite of the blog post I refer to above, that wishing evil upon anyone, or laughing and rejoicing at suffering which befalls those who’ve inflicted unjustified suffering on others, falls short of the Christian ideals I profess: “Avenge not yourselves, for it is written, Vengeance is mine, I Will repay, saith the Lord.”

But those who wield and live by the sword of the State are in no position to judge.

Goodbye 2011, Hello 1984

One of my oldest and best friends, an artist type who like me is going through a rough patch in his life, out of the blue and apropos of nothing sent me the following text last night:

Dude. you are far too intelligent to be squandering your talents in this box. take charge of your life! all of us, our friends, admire you. though we all give you shit. you are the best of us! do it!

I texted him back:

Dude thanks man what you said is timely I’ve got some ideas they no longer involve being a hero they involve being a baker or something like that but in this day and age that is outside of the box I admire you too you and I are more alike than we would care to admit the real challenge in this life is to make an honest living if we can do that we have done something extraordinary it is okay if we are not paid for our poetry there are no paid ministers in the religious society of friends

But Jesus was still silent and said not another word, so that Pilate wondered at him.

You’re at Sanford and Son’s. Without legal justification, you shoot Fred twice at close range, intending to kill him, and he falls to the floor, with your gun still pointed at him. Lamont, seeing this, instantly pulls out his own gun and points it at you. Seeing this, you shoot and kill Lamont.

Can you claim self-defense as legal justification for shooting and killing Lamont?

No, you can’t, you say? Congratulations! You know the law better than all of the judges on the Indiana Supreme Court.

To all prosecutors, judges and jurors responsible for innocent men and women sitting in prison this Christmas, and for depriving their children of Santa Claus: Fuck you and yours too. God’s mercy is for the merciful and the just. You’ll get what’s coming to you, and I pray to the Baby Jesus you get it sooner rather than later. I hope your Christmas is as shitty as your victims’ will be.

From Chapter VII, titled “Illegal Judges,” of Lysander Spooner’s Essay on the Trial by Jury:

It is a principle of Magna Carta, and therefore of the trial by jury, (for all parts of Magna Carta must be construed together,) that no judge or other officer appointed by the king, shall preside in jury trials, in criminal cases, or “pleas of the crown.”

This provision is contained in the great charters of both John and Henry, and is second in importance only to the provision guaranteeing the trial by jury, of which it is really a part. Consequently, without the observance of this prohibition, there can be no genuine or legal that is, common law trial by jury. At the common law, all officers who held jury trials, whether in civil or criminal cases, were chosen by the people.

. . .

We can all perhaps form some idea, though few of us will be likely to form any adequate idea, of what a different thing the trial by jury would have been in practice, and of what would have been the difference to the liberties of England, for five hundred years last past, had this prohibition of Magna Carta, upon the king’s officers sitting in the trial of criminal cases, been observed.

The principle of this chapter of Magna Carta, as applicable to the governments of the United States of America, forbids that any officer appointed either by the executive or legislative power, or dependent upon them for their salaries, or responsible to them by impeachment, should preside over a jury in criminal trials. To have the trial a legal (that is, a common law) and true trial by jury, the presiding officers must be chosen by the people, and be entirely free from all dependence upon, and all accountability to, the executive and legislative branches of the government.

I hate to admit it, but I think Gerry Spence is probably right. There is no Santa Claus. Furthermore, faith in his existence is arguably insidious:

I don’t know what they would do to us if we were teaching our children from the time of first thought that Santa Claus was a lying fiction that represented the degenerate corporate money structure and was created only so Americans would buy a lot of junk at Christmas for their kids in order to insure the profits of the corporate king.

And what would happen if you taught your kids that Jesus and Santa were in competition with each other—as a matter of fact, as it turns out, Christmas is not the celebration of the birth of Christ, but it’s the time when Santa comes and, if you are a kid from a poor family trying to scrape enough together to eat, it is obvious that Santa does not love you as much as he does the rich kid, because the rich kid got a new bike and you got nothing, which teaches that money and virtue are somehow related, and that being poor is the first sin.

But then Gerry goes on to conflate believing in Santa with believing in God:

I have no problem with the various religions or with Santa.  The human species is born with that overriding instinct of all instincts – survival –  the other side of which is the fear of death.  So we invent whatever belief systems are necessary to cope with that omnipotent fear, and we are born Baptists or Catholics or Muslims depending on the parents we drew out of the big basket in the sky.  Doesn’t seem like much of a basis to kill each other because of the parents, along with their beliefs, that we, and they, drew out of said big basket in the sky.

No honestly religious person can argue with the proposition that the propensity to kill, or even be angry with, each other over religion is one of the most diabolical temptations with which Satan has bedeviled the heart of man and besmirched the name of God. But it is awfully simplistic for Gerry to then dismiss religion itself as having been “invent[ed]” to “cope with” the “omnipotent” “fear of death.” I prescribe The Way to Divine Knowledge by William Law as an antidote to both Gerry’s confusion and the diabolical temptation he describes.

On a related note, Ryan at Absurd Results links to an extraordinary post by James Altucher titled “My Lawyer is Dead,” this excerpt from which “scares the crap” out of Ryan:

Tired starts when you can’t get up in the morning. When you can’t look your wife in the face and say good morning but there’s no way to avoid it day after day. When you have kids that you just don’t know how to support and you start losing the ability to care. When you have clients and you think, “ugh, not another f-ing one of these.” When you have to drive two hours to meet some shitty guy who you know is going to just get a free consultation out of you but you do it anyway.

Day after day. No day different. Maybe you had other dreams. but maybe you didn’t. Everyone told you that being a lawyer would make you a lot of money, would bring you safety. Safety that would protect you to death. But who are you going to make happy today? Your mother, because you are alive, her little baby? Your wife? Your kids? Your customers? The ones who appreciate your art? When will it finally matter?

Here’s how Altucher’s post ends:

And one day you wake up and everything feels light again. You don’t feel surprised about how happy you feel. It’s natural. There are no worries. No clients. No bank accounts. No bathroom stalls. You jump out of bed. The window is open and you fly out. You skim through the trees and laugh. You fly to the moon and back. You forget who your clients were. You forget what your name was. You forget the irregularities of the nuances in SEC law. You forget everything. You’ve shed your body a million years ago and you’re no longer tired.

You were a shitty lawyer. And now you’re not.

Indeed it is. The State doesn’t need the money it extorts from the people whose labor has earned it, and by disbarring and sending to prison a 69-year-old criminal defense lawyer (and forcing him on pain of harsher punishment to admit that he was “wrong”) and thereby terrorizing other producers tempted to follow his example, it satisfies the greed of that class which has discovered that it is easier to live by the sword of the State than by labor.

Here’s Henry George on taxation:

We propose to abolish all taxes save one single tax levied on the value of land, irrespective of the value of the improvements in or on it.

. . .

That the value of the land alone would suffice to provide all needed public revenues—municipal, county, State, and national—there is no doubt.

. . .

It would get rid of taxes which necessarily promote fraud, perjury, bribery, and corruption, which lead men into temptation, and which tax what the nation can least afford to spare—honesty and conscience. Since land lies out-of-doors and cannot be removed, and its value is the most readily ascertained of all values, the tax to which we would resort can be collected with the minimum of cost and the least strain on public morals.

. . .

When we tax houses, crops, money, furniture, capital or wealth in any of its forms, we take from individuals what rightfully belongs to them. We violate the right of property, and in the name of the State commit robbery. But when we tax ground values, we take from individuals what does not belong to them, but belongs to the community, and which cannot be left to individuals without the robbery of other individuals.

And here, via Roderick Long, is an excerpt from an article by an economist in the 7th edition (1830-42) of the Encyclopaedia Britannica explaining why no people “not altogether enslaved” would tolerate an income tax:

Taxation of Income Impracticable

The difficulties in the way of assessing income are of two sorts: 1st, The difficulty of ascertaining the amount of the annual revenue of different individuals; and, 2nd, Supposing that amount to be known, the difficulty of laying an equal tax on income derived from different sources.

It would be useless to dwell at any considerable length on the first of these heads. Incomes arising from the rent of land and houses, mortgages, funded property, and such like sources, may be learned with tolerable precision; but it neither has been, and, we are bold to say, never will be, possible to determine the incomes of farmers, manufacturers, dealers of all sorts, and professional men, with anything like even the rudest approximation to accuracy. It is in vain to attempt to overcome this insuperable difficulty by instituting an odious inquiry into the affairs of individuals. It is not, indeed, very likely that any people, not altogether enslaved, would tolerate, in ordinary circumstances, such inquisitorial proceedings; but whether they did or did not, the result would be the same. The investigations would be worthless; and the commissioners of an income-tax would in the end have nothing to trust to but the declarations of the parties. Hence it is that the tax would fall with its full weight upon men of integrity, while the millionaire of “easy virtue” would well nigh escape it altogether. It would, in fact, be a tax on honesty, and a bounty on perjury and fraud; and, if carried to any considerable height – to such a height as to render it a prominent source of income – it would undoubtedly generate the most barefaced prostitution of principle, and would do much to obliterate that nice sense of honor which is the only sure foundation of national probity and virtue.

Thus commented Bill St. Clair on a post by Claire Wolfe in which she asks a very pertinent question: What if Ron Paul won?

If Ron Paul wins (and is not assassinated by the people the government is really of, by, and for), I for one would love to see him eliminate forthwith the Department of Health and Human Services, since he recognizes that DHHS is unconstitutional, and since he has already promised that if elected President in 2012 he’ll eliminate the Departments of Energy, Housing and Urban Development, Commerce, Interior, and Education.

Back in 1999 a congressional colleague of Dr. Paul’s, Dave Weldon, who like Dr. Paul is a pro-life physician, sent to Dr. Paul, and to every other member of the U.S. House of Representatives, a law review article I wrote which demonstrates that women have a legal right to know that induced abortion increases breast cancer risk and that the National Cancer Institute (which is part of the National Institutes of Health, which is part of DHHS) are bigger liars than Big Tobacco ever was.

Hopefully he remembers.

Jay P. Greene’s Blog, which is focused on education policy, gives me a hat tip in a post by one of his friends, Greg Forster, titled “Choice Is Not Chaos.”

On the topic of education policy and the subject of Greg Forster’s post, I’ll quote Thomas Jefferson again, who in 1810 wrote in a letter to Judge John Tyler:

I have indeed two great measures at heart, without which no republic can maintain itself in strength.

1. That of general education, to enable every man to judge for himself what will secure or endanger his freedom.
2. To divide every county into hundreds, of such size that all the children of each will be within reach of a central school in it.

But this division looks to many other fundamental provisions. . . .

And in 1816 Jefferson wrote in a letter to Joseph Cabell:

If, however, it is intended that the State government shall take this business into its own hands, and provide schools for every county, then by all means strike out this provision of our bill. I would never wish that it should be placed on a worse footing than the rest of the State. But if it is believed that these elementary schools will be better managed by the governor and council, the commissioners of the literary fund, or any other general authority of the government, than by the parents within each ward, it is a belief against all experience. Try the principle one step further, and amend the bill so as to commit to the governor and council the management of all our farms, our mills, and merchants’ stores. No, my friend, the way to have good and safe government, is not to trust it all to one, but to divide it among the many, distributing to every one exactly the functions he is competent to.

Albert Jay Nock explained:

The common view of Mr. Jefferson as a doctrinaire believer in the stark principle of “states’ rights” is most incompetent and misleading. He believed in states’ rights, assuredly, but he went much farther; states’ rights were only an incident in his general system of political organization. He believed that the ultimate political unit, the repository and source of political authority and initiative, should be the smallest unit; not the federal unit, state unit or county unit, but the township, or, as he called it, the “ward.” The township, and the township only, should determine the delegation of power upwards to the county, the state, and the federal units. His system of extreme decentralization is interesting and perhaps worth a moment’s examination, because if the idea of the State is ever displaced by the idea of government, it seems probable that the practical expression of this idea would come out very nearly in that form.

That’s a comment, which I second, on this YouTube video of Ron Paul’s responses at the ABC Iowa GOP debate:

(H/T LewRockwell.com)

Screw my principles, I’m voting for the man. See also:

(H/T Bryan Brown)

“As a moral proposition, it is perfectly self‑evident that, unless juries have all the legal rights that have been claimed for them in the preceding chapters, ‑‑‑ that is, the rights of judging what the law is, whether the law be a just one, what evidence is admissible, what weight the evidence is entitled to, whether an act were done with a criminal intent, and the right also to limit the sentence, free of all dictation from any quarter, ‑‑‑ they have no moral right to sit in the trial at all, and cannot do so without making themselves accomplices in any injustice that they may have reason to believe may result from their verdict. It is absurd to say that they have no moral responsibility for the use that may be made of their verdict by the government, when they have reason to suppose it will be used for purposes of injustice.

. . .

Every man, therefore, ought to refuse to sit in a jury, and to take the oath of a juror, unless the form of the oath be such as to allow him to use his own judgment, on every part of the case, free of all dictation whatsoever, and to hold in his own hand a veto upon any verdict that can be rendered against a defendant, and any sentence that can be inflicted upon him, even if he be guilty.”

— Lysander Spooner, An Essay on the Trial by Jury (1852), Chapter X

“With this in mind, it is interesting to observe that although all our public policies would seem to be in process of exhaustive review, no publicist has anything to say about the State system of land-tenure. This is no doubt the best evidence of its importance.”

Nock added in a footnote:

The French school of physiocrats, led by Quesnay, du Pont de Nemours, Turgot, Gournay and le Trosne — usually regarded as the founders of the science of political economy — broached the idea of destroying this system by the confiscation of economic rent; and this idea was worked out in detail some years ago in America by Henry George. None of these writers, however, seemed to be aware of the effect that their plan would produce upon the State itself.

Perhaps, then, this idea (supported to a greater or lesser extent by, among others, Leo Tolstoy, Mark Twain, Albert Einstein, Milton Friedman, William F. Buckley Jr., Clarence Darrow, Martin Luther King Jr., Winston Churchill, Henry Ford, John Dewey, Aldous Huxley, Ralph Nader, etc.), rather than Thomas Jefferson’s “Ward System” or Lysander Spooner’s “Trial By Jury,” is the one thing needful, from which these other necessary and essential reforms would naturally follow.

I’ve invited readers on several occasions to compare for themselves the “intellectual integrity” of the 2-1 Indiana Court of Appeals decision that would have freed Tyrus Coleman on Double Jeopardy grounds with the “intellectual integrity” of the 5-0 Indiana Supreme Court decision reversing the Court of Appeals and reinstating Mr. Coleman’s conviction and 45 year sentence. Let’s do that together now, shall we? It won’t take long. (For the factual background of the case and boilerplate summaries of the law of collateral estoppel / issue preclusion / Double Jeopardy, you’ll need to read the decisions themselves.)

Here, in the following two paragraphs, is the entirety of the Indiana Supreme Court’s “analysis”:

Here, Coleman seems to contend that because of the brief interval between the two shootings, they necessarily amounted to a single transaction. Thus, the conclusion is that Coleman’s general fear of death or great bodily harm applied equally to Jermaine and Dye. This argument is unavailing. To begin, Coleman was charged separately with the murder of Jermaine and the attempted murder of Dye. See Appellant’s App. at 17. It is true that in the first trial, the trial court did not instruct the jury on the elements of self-defense separately with respect to each victim. See Appellant’s App. at 112. However, during summation Coleman’s counsel specifically addressed the separate shootings and argued each was justified by Coleman’s reasonable imminent fear of death or serious bodily injury from Dye, and then from Jermaine. See Tr. 1 at 378, 382-83, 388, 390-94.

Further, for the sake of argument we accept as true that the jury’s acquittal of Coleman on the murder charge in the first trial was based on its belief that Coleman acted in self-defense. But, the jury could have rationally concluded that the act of self-defense was in response to the conduct of Jermaine only. The jury was not bound to believe that Coleman likewise acted in self-defense with respect to Dye. Stated differently, the jury could very well have determined that Jermaine so threatened Coleman and others on the property that he was justified in using deadly force to protect himself and others from Jermaine. The record shows for example that an armed and agitated Jermaine had attempted to gain access to the studio in pursuit of Sharpe, and that although Coleman fired his weapon first at Dye, it was only Jermaine and not Dye who actually pointed his own weapon at Coleman. And there was testimony that Jermaine fired his weapon in Coleman’s direction. Tr. 1 at 208, 300-02. Coleman responded by firing at Jermaine resulting in fatal injury. In essence the acquittal relating to the murder of Jermaine even if based on self-defense did not amount to the jury determining that Coleman acted in self-defense with respect to the attempted murder of Dye. Thus, in retrying Coleman the State did not relitigate an issue that was necessarily decided by the jury in the first trial. Instead, the jury was asked to make the determination of whether Coleman acted in self-defense when he shot Dye. This issue was not decided during the first trial. Thus, collateral estoppel did not bar relitigation.

Here was the Court of Appeals’ analysis:

In order to acquit Coleman of murder based upon self-defense, the jury must have determined that Coleman reasonably believed that deadly force was necessary to prevent serious bodily injury to himself or third persons or the commission of a forcible felony. Because of this determination, the jury necessarily had to find that, when he shot Jermaine, Coleman was not committing a crime that was directly and immediately connected to the confrontation, that he did not provoke a fight with another person with the intent to cause bodily injury to that person, and that he had not willingly entered into a fight with another person. As the shootings of Dye and Jermaine happened within three seconds of each other, the jury’s determination must have meant that Coleman had not willingly entered into a fight with Dye, that he had not provoked a fight with Dye with the intent to cause bodily injury to Dye, and that he was not committing a crime that was directly and immediately connected to the confrontation. Stated another way, the jury must have believed that Coleman was in a place that he had a right to be; that he did not provoke, instigate, or participate willingly in the violence; and that he had a reasonable fear of death or great bodily harm. See Kimbrough, 911 N.E.2d at 635. Therefore, in acquitting Coleman of murdering Jermaine based upon self-defense in the first trial, the jury must have necessarily decided that Coleman’s use of force against Dye was also not a crime. If Coleman’s use of force against Dye was a crime, then the jury could not have reasonably determined, pursuant to the final instructions given, that Coleman’s use of force against Jermaine was justified. Thus, the doctrine of issue preclusion barred the State from re-litigating the issue of whether Coleman’s actions against Dye constituted attempted murder.

Now, let’s go back to the two paragraphs of the Supreme Court’s “analysis” in light of the Court of Appeals’ analysis.

The first paragraph rejects as “unavailing” an argument that was never made. Coleman didn’t contend that simply “because of the brief interval between the two shootings” his “general fear of death or great bodily harm applied equally to Jermaine and Dye.”

That leaves the second paragraph. Look at it closely. Its entire substance is comprised of this conclusory assertion:

[T]he jury could have rationally concluded that the act of self-defense was in response to the conduct of Jermaine only. The jury was not bound to believe that Coleman likewise acted in self-defense with respect to Dye. . . . In essence the acquittal relating to the murder of Jermaine even if based on self-defense did not amount to the jury determining that Coleman acted in self-defense with respect to the attempted murder of Dye.

Now, contrast that again with the Court of Appeals’ analysis. It’s as if the Court of Appeals had argued “Socrates is a man; All men are mortal; therefore, Socrates is mortal,” and the Supreme Court responded with “Socrates is not mortal. Because we said so.” But in this case, an innocent man is serving a 45 year prison sentence, and his children are growing up without a father, because they said so.

After I wrote my last post, I thought, as I often do, that I’d just written something controversial and, not unreasonably, likely to get me in “trouble” with the Indiana attorney Disciplinary Commission.

But a moment’s reflection reminded me just how un-American this whole notion that “public confidence” in the State is a good thing is. Even were the government much less evil than it currently is (and government at its best, according to Thomas Paine, is but a necessary evil), it would be un-American to “trust” it.

This is because presuming the government Guilty is a necessary corollary of the presumption of Innocence accorded actual living, breathing human beings. You’re on a jury and the State is asking you to convict the man sitting at the table in the courtroom furthest from you? Locking a human being up in a cage like an animal is normally a heinous crime, so presume the government Guilty and its intentions malicious until it has proved to you the defendant’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. (And since the State doesn’t trust you to determine the consequences for the defendant should you convict him, and doesn’t even trust you with the knowledge of what it intends to do to him should you convict him, you should accordingly interpret this burden to be sky-high.) A state supreme court has reversed a court of appeals decision that would have set a man free, and has thereby reinstated his conviction and 45 year prison sentence? Presume it Guilty unless it published a carefully reasoned and factually accurate justification of its momentous decision and explained exactly why it thought the court of appeals got it wrong. Congress just passed a bill authorizing the President, at his discretion, to “declare” (in secret) a citizen of the United States to be an Enemy of the State and to detain him without trial until the end of the “War on Terror”? For God’s sake, presume it Guilty:

Via Doug Berman, U.S. District Judge James Zagel said today, in sentencing former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich to 14 years in prison, that the damage caused by Blagojevich

is not measured in the value of money and property.  The harm is the erosion of the public trust in government; [people’s] confidence in and trust in government.

Sounds to me like Blago deserves a medal along with a prison sentence. The judge’s 14 year sentence itself justifies “erosion of the public trust in government.” See (also via Doug Berman) this op-ed, by the the director of the Federal Criminal Justice Clinic at the University of Chicago Law School, published in the Chicago Tribune prior to Blago’s sentencing:

Rod Blagojevich is a lucky man.  He is lucky that the U.S. attorney’s office is asking U.S. District Judge James Zagel to send him to prison for only 15 to 20 years.  He is lucky that the prosecution is not asking for him to do 30 years to life in prison, which is the amount of time called for by federal sentencing guidelines — the laws that set punishment in federal cases based on the severity of the crime.

Blagojevich is especially lucky that he is not my recent client, a drug-addicted man who grew up on the South Side and pleaded guilty to selling two ounces of drugs to a government informant for $200. I represented this man, and the same U.S. attorney’s office asked Zagel to follow the sentencing guidelines strictly and send him to prison for up to 27 years. Luckily for Blagojevich, the prosecutors filed a motion asking for a far lighter sentence for the former governor who, they themselves contend, deeply damaged the integrity of the political system by trying to hand over a U.S. Senate seat in exchange for $1.5 million in donations and then blatantly lied about his conduct on the stand.

But hell, for all I know Blago is innocent of the charges for which he’s been convicted. Sure, Blago, after boisterously proclaiming his innocence in the media for all that time until he was convicted, now admits “I’m guilty,” and the judge in determining his sentence dutifully gave him (presumably years of) credit for “accepting responsibility,” but this kind of tidily coerced “confession” means nothing. And even his “confession” itself further erodes “public trust in government,” by underscoring the essential nature of politics a/k/a law-making:

There is a line between routine politics, horse trading and campaign politics… I thought they were permissible and I was mistaken.

Coincidentally, the Chief Justice of the Indiana Supreme Court announced his retirement today, and the Indiana Attorney General had this to say:

I was privileged to have been present at the investiture of Chief Justice Shepard in 1985 and he has fulfilled his pledge to transform the Indiana Supreme Court into one that is nationally respected and whose legal insight and analysis serves to lead the development of the law.

But Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz is “nationally respected,” and wrote back in 2003:

I have argued cases all over the world, and I have never encountered a legal system as result-oriented as that of Indiana or a chief justice as self-protective as Chief Justice Randall Shepard . . . .

As for the Court’s “legal insight and analysis,” compare the intellectual integrity of its less than 2 pages of “analysis” in the case of Tyrus Coleman with the intellectual integrity of the analysis in the court of appeals’ decision it overturned, thereby condemning to prison for decades an innocent man whom the court of appeals would have freed on Double Jeopardy grounds. Does it not drastically erode “public trust in government” to thus deprive a man of his freedom, and his children of their father, with such meager explanation, on what seems like a whim or worse?

IOZ got some grief from a commenter the other day for espousing anarchy while refusing to set forth his personal vision for a just society, of how he thinks things should be and how he thinks things should work. I myself have set forth my own vision multiple times on this blog, and did so again in a comment on IOZ’s post:

I don’t think a “grandiose plan to remake society” is called for. Get rid of the legislators; get rid of the judges (but not the jurors); get rid of the federal, state, and county governments (except, perhaps, as confederations of even smaller governments); and you’ll still have Law. You’ll still have what Nietzsche called the “song of the necessary, the single and irreplaceable melody.”

Another commenter made a good point in response to the commenter who was giving IOZ a hard time:

what you’re clutching at seems to be this: how does one utter the words “power be properly asserted by the proverbial people” or “heedless, half-cocked campaigns” or “fraudulent national accountancy” or “monstrosity” without having some sort of critical frame (which critical frame is itself a system)?

See, I don’t harbor any illusions that civilization as we know it will ever be “reformed” into anything remotely resembling a just society. My vision for a just society is principally just a “critical frame” for condemning civilization as we know it. Civilization as we know it will break before it will be “reformed,” before it becomes just. By eroding “public trust in government,” by recognizing the State as Our Enemy and as the coldest of all cold monsters, we hasten the arrival of that impending apocalypse.

So again, Gov. Blagojevich: Thank you for your service.

By publicly announcing my support for Matt Brown’s Tempe Criminal Defense blog in my last post I didn’t mean to slight the other worthy contenders for the 2011 ABA Journal Blawg 100 in the Criminal Justice Category.

In a recent comment on Jamison Koehler’s blog I credited him with “prompt[ing] what I regard as some of the better posts on my blog.” (Whereas I typically don’t have anything to add to Matt Brown’s posts, because I find myself agreeing with pretty much everything he writes.) But Jamison appears to be leading the race in the Criminal Justice category by a lot of votes, so he won’t miss mine.

(more…)

If you’re visiting this page the old fashioned way (i.e., not in an RSS feed) you’ve probably noticed a couple minor changes. The first is the removal of the red circled A (standing for Anarchy is Order) which until today graced the right sidebar. This is not because I’ve mellowed out but because I just updated to the latest version of WordPress and after I did so this image inexplicably enlarged to about 10 times its former size. Once I figure out how to fix this glitch, if I ever do, I’ll put it back.

I’ve also added a link in the right sidebar to a new blog I’m experimenting with, freelegallance.com. Thus far I’ve only posted there once, a couple months ago, but the idea is to use that blog as a platform to expand my work as a freelance legal research and writing assistant and to post information about new developments in the law as coolly and collectedly as I can, while continuing to do here whatever it is I do here. I’ve also tried to add a footer to my posts here in the RSS feed linking to the new blog. I guess I’ll know if that worked once I hit publish.

For various personal and professional reasons (which may be readily discernible by regular readers of this blog), I am phasing out most of my regular law practice (primarily by slashing my advertising budget) and am looking to expand my work as a freelance legal research and writing assistant to other lawyers. The most positive of these reasons is that, since my days on law review at the University of Wisconsin, legal research and writing is the aspect of the law I’ve found most fulfilling and at which I believe I’m most proficient.

To facilitate this expansion, I am offering my services as a legal research and writing assistant (at least for now) at the very bottom of the customary price range for such services.

Such assistance can take many forms, at both the trial and appellate levels, from simply researching the case law on a particular issue and summarizing the holding of each case, to writing more formal memoranda, to drafting briefs for filing in court. I recently assisted an experienced and highly-competent appellate attorney by providing basic research at the beginning of the appeal, which he built upon in drafting the brief. I then reviewed the draft and suggested various changes, most of which he incorporated in the final draft. All of this was done by email and fax machine, since we resided in different cities.

Feel free to email me at john at kindleylaw dot com if interested.

Odds and ends from around the web:

Ron Paul, Obstetrician: No Abortion, No Federal Money

Are Law Schools and Bar Exams Necessary?

Secession Is Always Illegal

‘What Kind of Government?’

Oral Argument, scene I — Appellant’s opening

Summary Execution Is Not A Joke. Hillary Clinton Should Resign.

The Virginia State Bar v. Free Speech

Public Defender Loses Lawsuit Over His Courtroom Scuffle with Deputies

The Most Confused One Minute of All Time?

Jonathan Turley on the abuse of a wounded man and the parading and stripping of his corpse.

“We can conceive an understanding, superior to human, to which that truth appears intuitively which we can only discover by reasoning. For this cause, though we must ascribe judgment to the Almighty, we do not ascribe reasoning to him, because it implies some defect or limitation of understanding. Even among men, to use reasoning in things that are self-evident is trifling; like a man going upon crutches when he can walk upon his legs.” — Thomas Reid (1710-1796)

Questions surface about citizenship of crime spree suspect

(more…)

The body of a man from South Bend who was hiking the Appalachian Trail was found near the trail by other hikers on August 12, and investigators say “the circumstances of his death are suspicious.” His trail name was “Stonewall.”

My trail name was “Zeno.” I hiked the trail for two months, from Mount Katahdin in Maine to Mount Greylock in Massachusetts, during the summer before I started law school in 1996. During that summer, two women were murdered near the trail down in Virginia, a case which apparently still remains unsolved.

Very, very sad.

No. No it doesn’t.

Usually what I get is “What a joy to find someone else who tnihks this way,” or “Whoa, things just got a whole lot esaeir,” or “I’m so glad I found my solution onilne,” but today somebody with a URL promoting hair loss treatments tried to leave, on this old post consisting entirely of the quoted words of Martin Luther King, Jr., this exquisitely spelled and punctuated comment:

The heart of your writing whilst sounding reasonable in the beginning, did not settle perfectly with me personally after some time. Someplace throughout the paragraphs you actually managed to make me a believer but just for a while. I still have a problem with your leaps in assumptions and one would do nicely to help fill in those gaps. In the event you actually can accomplish that, I would certainly be amazed.

I’ve had a blogroll in the past, but got rid of it because I didn’t want it to be as long as a list of all the blogs contained in my Google Reader, because it seemed somewhat difficult to decide which blogs to include on the blogroll, and because at one time it was my goal (long since abandoned) to more frequently link in posts themselves to everything in my Google Reader that I found of interest and wanted to recommend. If I had my druthers I’d write a new post saying simply “read this” every time Jeff Gamso wrote a post, every time Norm Pattis wrote a post, every time John Regan (aka Atticus aka Strike Lawyer) wrote a post, every time IOZ wrote a post, every time Matt Brown wrote a post, and every time any new post is written on any of the blogs listed on my newly installed blogroll to the right, but that’s no way to write a blog. And that’s basically my criteria for being on the blogroll: I can basically recommend everything they write and/or they’ve been gracious enough to include me on their own blogroll.

I confess that I joined the Navy at the age of 17 in large part because I wanted guidance in how to live. I was not raised by my mother or father, for reasons I won’t go in to here, but to this absence I attribute the absence of a certain assurance in my path that I felt I should have but didn’t. Joining the Navy was to me an appeal, from the mixed messages that had up till then buffeted me back and forth, to an authority that I knew was widely respected by “society.”

(more…)