Friend of Charleston Shooter Charged: A friend of Charleston shooter Dylann Roof, the man accused of gunning down nine black churchgoers during a Bible study, has been indicted on charges of concealing information related to the shooting and making false statements to the FBI. Evan Perez and Catherine E. Shoichet of CNN report that 21-year-old Joey Meek, in the days after the shooting, told the press about Roof's drunken proclamations to start a race war and "do something crazy," and went as far as to hide Roof's gun from him, returning it the next day. Meek allegedly informed prosecutors that he had no knowledge of any specifics Roof had planned before he shot and killed nine parishioners at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal church on June 17, but prosecutors believe this assertion is "false, fictitious and fraudulent." Meek insists that no one ever took Roof seriously, so he never thought much of the statements he made…
News Scan
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Single vehicle crash near Banks
IDAHO STATE POLICE NEWS RELEASE - generated by our News Release ListServer DO NOT REPLY --------------------------------------------------------------------------- IDAHO STATE POLICE NEWS RELEASE District 3 Patrol 700 S. Stratford Dr., Meridian 83642 (208) 846-7550 Fax (208) 846-7520 For Immediate Release: Friday, September 18,2015 at 1:00 p.m. Please direct questions to the District Office On Friday, September 18, 2015, at approximately 7:55 a.m., the Idaho State Police investigated a single-vehicle, rollover crash on County Highway 17 at milepost 1, near Banks. Christina Bradshaw, 26, of Meridian, was driving westbound in a 2002 Toyota Rav. The vehicle drove off the left shoulder, rolled, and came to rest on its top. Bradshaw was not wearing a seatbelt and was transported by ground ambulance to St. Alphonsus Regional Medical Center in Boise. The crash is under investigation by the Idaho State Police. HG/NH -------------
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Q&A Roundup Part 1
I get a lot of questions over at my comic and on Tumblr, and try to answer most of them as best I can. Some get answered privately, but some are out there for all to see. It occurs to me that there may be readers of this blog who may not want to be seen reading a comic, or be caught dead lurking on Tumblr. Fair enough. But my ego’s strong enough that I think there’ve been a few exchanges you might be interested in. So I’m basically going to just cut-and-paste this and the next few posts from stuff I’ve already written in response to questions elsewhere. -=-=-=-=- First off, I love your comic and your blog. Reading your analysis has made me feel more informed when I read the results of court cases or existing law. Second, I have a question for you. From what I understand, many of the initiatives meant to overturn Citizens United (http://www.wamend.org/https://movetoamend.org/) have as part of their text “human beings, not…
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Q&A Roundup Part 2
I’m writing a response to an essay on “consent as a felt sense” and looking for a deeper explanation of mens rea and the reason why it ought form the basis for not just a legal system, but for the social norms of a community. I know there is some good discussion in the Elonis v. US case, but who are some good sources to read that really lay out the reason why we should (or should not) examine an actors mindset when judging culpability? Mens rea isn’t really the basis of our legal system, nor is it really the basis of social norms. Mens rea is the legal term for the mental state that makes an act punishable by the state. If I accidentally tripped on a crack in the sidewalk and fell on you, bruising your arm, yes I caused injury to you, but because I had no culpable mental state – no mens rea – that’s not an injury the law wants to punish me for. Whereas if I intentionally whacked you on the arm and bruised it, the state could send me to…
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Q&A Roundup Part 3
Hey Nathan, I’m ≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡, an AI MSc student. Your comic is great! : ) I have some questions. (1) The Good Wife, a show about lawyers, makes law knowledge seem a bit like a weapon to be used for attack and defence to help one navigate the civilized world. To what extent is this true? That is, what exactly is the utility of law knowledge without a license to practice it? Does being the best unlicensed lawyer in the universe turn you into a superhero or just an interesting dude? (2) Suppose hypothetically that the AI apocalypse will be upon us in 5-20 years. Will laws about AI rights be passed? Will the development of AI systems in uncontrolled environments become illegal in an effort to prevent it? (3) Along similar lines, it might, in the not too distant future, be trivial to surveil everything, everywhere, all the time. How does the legal system address this? How do you see the law evolving as these…
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Q&A Roundup Part 4
The officer gets his overtime. The defendant gets his freedom. But the victim doesn’t get his property back. If someone steals all of the money in my bank account, the police find a paper trail that shows who did it, but the courts suppress the evidence because the evidence was acquired unlawfully, then can I still sue them in civil court to get my money back or does the money become the thief’s property for all intents and purposes? Or is there a third option that I do not know about? The victim’s reaction is irrelevant to criminal law. Criminal law is about whether the state can punish an offender. The victim isn’t a party to the case, but is merely a source of evidence. The prosecutor doesn’t represent the victim’s interests in restitution, but the state’s interest in punishment. Restitution may be ordered as part of a sentence, but it doesn’t have to be. But just as the victim’s rights aren’t part of the criminal…
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Q&A Roundup Part 5
I made a thing for Radley Balko at the Washington Post on Qualified Immunity. Some people had questions about it over on my comic, which was about something completely different. One of the WaPo pages mentioned the elimination of the KKK under President Grant. Wait I thought that the KKK and Knights of the White Camilla weren’t so much defeated as succeeded in implementing policies after the compromise that brought Rutherford B Hayes into the White House? There’s no doubt that Reconstruction failed, and racist policies were certainly implemented as a result — but the KKK itself did cease to exist as an organization. Another KKK would eventually be formed in 1915 or thereabouts, but that original one was gone. The failure of Reconstruction is a fascinating area of our nation’s history that can be difficult to piece together, because almost everything written about it until maybe the 1960s was revisionist as hell. And even a lot of modern sources can be…
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Kim Davis Returns to Work
Attorney Page Pate joins CNN Newsroom from Atlanta and CNN Correspondent Martin Savidge in Morehead, Kentucky, to discuss the scene as Kim Davis returns to work after five days in… read more → The post Kim Davis Returns to Work appeared first on .
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Q&A Roundup Part 6
My comic was on hold for a bit this summer during a trial and the run-up to trial beforehand. I periodically reassured my readers that I was still here, and would be back once the “work” work was done. This spawned its own variety of reader comments. I had to reply to this one: I have this wonderful feeling that as the trials drag on the story of the “sorry for the delay” notes will be a searing tale of one lawyers descent into madness and redemption, maybe with some hot gypsies thrown in. That’d be pretty funny. Sadly, I don’t have time for madness. Maybe gypsies, ha! [UPDATE: Trial’s still going, but everything’s on schedule. Can’t complain. I’ll get back to this soon enough.] [UPDATE: Ditto today. Keep the faith.] [UPDATE: You know, I thought this would have been over by now. Screw it – I’ll spend some time on the comic tonight. Just a little. Just to keep it fresh in my mind.] [UPDATE: I didn’t…
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Wrongfully Convicted
I was wrongfully prosecuted, wrongfully convicted of state misdemeanor domestic assault, while located in Nottoway County Virginia, on 10/04/1997. My ex live in girlfriend who I at the time had no legal qualification for the term domestic other than a prior cohabitation exceeding one year limitations in common, came to my place of residence and proceeded with a falsified statements to local law enforcement that I had committed assault against her. Local Agents forced a court Judge to proceed with this charge under a prior cohabitation after much arguments for the Judge himself. The end result was a simple misdemeanor assault conviction. This charge never met the qualification for USC 922, at all, at the time period no mentions of loss of gun rights or loss of civil rights has been registered. Over the years many legal attempts have been made by myself for restorations of my gun rights. Following state guideline for restorations of gun rights the local circuit court systems…
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Wrong Ride
In 2009 the city of Philadelphia was going bankrupt and was confronted with the laying off of teachers, fireman, and police. One solution to the problem was to process warrants at a record pace. In 2009 I was extradited for a crime I never committed. I had a job as a salesman selling home security systems and was stopped by the police for a routine check of my credentials. They asked me If I ever lived in Philadelphia I said yes I just moved back to San Antonio in 2007. In 2005 I asked a woman to leave the house I rented due to her drug abuse. She lied, made a false report in 2005 that she was locked in the basement of my house for days. There was never a police investigation, arrest, or even a phone call about the matter until 2009. Consequently, I was held in a jail in San Antonio for 11 days waiting for extradition. The first 3 days I was locked in a cell with 8 other people with a toilet that had no door. Water was limited, and due to over crowding we had to wait to…
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Crootof on Accountability for Autonomous Weapons
Rebecca Crootof has posted War Torts: Accountability for Autonomous Weapons (University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Forthcoming) on SSRN. Here is the abstract: Unlike conventional weapons or remotely-operated drones, autonomous weapons can independently select and engage targets. As a result, they...
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Ohio editorial highlights civic engagement that marijuana issues can produce
This new Toledo Blade editorial about a recent local marijuana decriminalization vote highlights a variety of themes that I am always drawn to when discussing the various benefits of robust debate over modern marijuana law and policy. The subheadline of the editorial highlights its coverage: "Toledoans’ vote to decriminalize marijuana...<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/MarijuanaLaw/~4/0PxcXdmQnoc" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>
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Marijuana Case in Florida Thrown Out When Police Don't Make Effort to Preserve Evidence
As most people with a basic understanding of the criminal justice system understand, the state always has the burden of proof in a criminal case. That means the state is obligated to prove, with evidence, that the defendant committed the crime with which he/she is charged. A person is always considered innocent until the state meets that burden. Of course, if the state never produces sufficient, convincing evidence to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, the defendant remains innocent. Perhaps it is human nature for people to assume someone is guilty based on rushed and poorly researched media articles or even just an arrest on serious charges, but that is not how the system is supposed to work. Evidence controls. In a recent possession of marijuana case near Jacksonville, Florida, the state failed to preserve and produce evidence of the defendant's guilt, and the marijuana charge was thrown out. This revolved around an incident that took place while a local…
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Why Aren't Media Fact-Checkers Interested in Fiorina's Prison Whopper?
After the Republican Debate Wednesday night, numerous media outlets published "fact-check" stories regarding claims made during the debates. So far I have not found a single "mainstream media" fact-check story that has questioned Carly Fiorina's whopper, "Two-thirds of the people in our prisons are there for non-violent offenses, mostly drug related."As this pie chart illustrates (click on the graph for a larger view), that is not remotely close to the truth. Why the silence? This graph is created from data from the last BJS report on prisoners available before the debate. (A new one came out the day after.) It combines the populations of state and federal prisons to produce a total figure. The BJS breaks the numbers down by the "most serious offense" among the crimes for which each prisoner has been sentenced and groups them into broad categories.The two-thirds non-violent claim is patently…
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Massachusetts Appeals Court Decision in Commonwealth v. Daly Invalidates Conspiracy Conviction
While it is not a crime to think about committing a crime, or in general to talk about committing a crime, it is a crime to agree with someone else to commit a crime. Usually one additional thing is required, an “act in furtherance” of the conspiracy – something to demonstrate that the agreement is not mere idle talk. This is the crime of conspiracy. It requires two people. It is an amorphous crime, something prosecutors love and defense attorneys detest, because it has such open-ended reach. Where the conspiracy is to distribute drugs, the “act in furtherance” is dispensed with. All that is necessary to commit the crime is that you agree with one other person to distribute illegal drugs. You don’t need to do anything – you only need to agree with another that you will do something. The Massachusetts Appeals Court recently, in Commonwealth v. Daly, (Sept. 3, 2015) set at least a lower limit on the…
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Kerrison on Race-Based Medicalization of Addiction
Erin M Kerrison (University of Pennsylvania - Jerry Lee Center of Criminology) has posted White Claims to Illness and the Race-Based Medicalization of Addiction for Drug-Involved Former Prisoners (Harvard Journal on Racial & Ethnic Justice, Vol. 31, 2015) on SSRN....
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They Took My Children
My wife and I bought a beautiful four bedroom, three level, single family home in 2006. We moved in from an apartment that was under a quarter a mile away. Our five children, two boys aged seven and one, and three girls aged fourteen, six and two all moved in with us. It was April/May of 2007 just before school closed. One evening I came home and the younger children told me that our oldest daughter had gone to the neighbor’s garden during her absence, uprooted her flowers and planted them in our garden. I saw the newly planted flower plants but she denied the fact. I spanked her and there were marks on her skin. The following day the social worker at the school got to know about the altercation. She was taken by the police and they opened up an inquiry. The police came home while I was at work and they left a message that I report at the Station which I did immediately. I wrote my statement and gave the facts…
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I’ve been subpoenaed as a witness in a car accident. What does it mean?
Imagine that you’ve had the misfortune to witness an automobile accident. The case has since escalated, and at least one party to the lawsuit has chosen to subpoena you, hoping that the information you possess will help them either prove or defend their case. What can you do now? Do you have any rights at all? Serving as a Witness in a Personal Injury Case Subpoenas come in two distinct flavors. The “subpoena ad testificandum,” or subpoena to testify, compels you to appear as a witness in someone’s case. This may entail giving a deposition during the pretrial discovery period or providing live testimony during the trial itself. The party that issues your subpoena must pay you a daily witness fee and reimburse your travel expenses. Providing Documentation While it does not always force you to appear in person, the “subpoena duces tecum,” or subpoena to produce evidence, does demand that you release from your possession any documentation…
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TEEN SEXTING—IT CAN BE MORE SERIOUS THAN YOU THINK
Facebook, Instagram, selfies—we live in an age of instantaneous electronic communication. The teens of today share the details of their lives via social media; they seem to spend much of their time snapping photos to share and conversing by text message. But some teens go beyond sharing the everyday details of their lives—they share the intimate details of their lives or the lives of others by engaging in what’s commonly called “sexting”. Sexting is the sending of a nude or revealing photo of oneself or of another person to someone via cell phone text messaging. Certainly teen sexting is a cause for concern to parents and often ends up causing the teens involved a lot of embarrassment, but the consequences of teen sexting can be far worse than an angry parent and teenage embarrassment. While many states have laws that specifically address teen sexting, California does not. In the State of California, a teen who is caught sexting or, even…
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