Probable Cause

I haven’t posted much lately, I know.  To be frank, I’ve considered just taking down my blogs.  I’ve struggled with the decision as to what to do — and tried to understand why I feel the way that I feel.  It’s not that I don’t have things to say: I’ve written numerous posts.  I just never complete them because, well…it hardly seems worth it. 

Our system is irrevocably broken.  Nothing short of a new Revolution would fix it.  And I’m not at all sure the Americans of today can fix it even then.  We can only, at best, tear down the present Tyranny. 

And why is that? 

(more…)

I haven’t written for long enough that the last few days I’ve been jonesin’.

The problem isn’t that I haven’t had anything to write about.  Quite the contrary: I’ve had too much to write about.  The problem is that what I’ve had to write about made me so angry that I decided to try to cool down a bit first.

(more…)

If I walk up to you and slap you in the face because your music is too loud and I can’t think, or because you’re acting carelessly and have damaged some of my property, or nearly knocked me down, several things may happen.  First off, in perhaps the “best case” scenario, I’m likely to be arrested.  In a worst case scenario, I may be shot and killed.  In almost no scenario that I can imagine will you thank me for bringing the problem to your attention.  Nor are you likely to modify your behavior because I slapped your face.

Yet every day we — collectively, as a society — slap others around and expect to change behaviors, even if we don’t necessarily expect our victims to thank us for bringing the fact that we think they have (or are) a problem to their attention.

(more…)

I did not want to write this post. Mirriam finally made me do it. She didn’t twist my arm or anything, although I suspect if she were in California and she wanted to, I might let her.

No, she added her voice to that of several others who have written about Arizona’s new law written by idiots to stop the unstoppable: immigration.

Legal or not, immigration is unstoppable. It’s how almost all of us got here.

And, if you really think about it, almost none of us got here legally. At least, not if you’re white.

(more…)

Well, I think the line has finally been crossed.  Tonight I’m going to start looking into what it takes to purchase a gun or two.

(more…)

Defense attorneys — and on rare occasions even prosecutors or judges — frequently bemoan the fact that those meant to enforce our laws do not always play fair.  We complain about things like police states. We complain about things like the loss of civil liberties, including the right to a fair trial. We complain about the gradual erosion of the United States Constitution and the fact that the so-called “parchment barriers”¹ therein contained against the abuses of the government which that document constituted are, these days, less strong even than that.

Most people, however, upon hearing this think, “Ahhh…those damn defense attorneys.  Always coddling criminals.” (more…)

1. James Madison, one of the Founders of the United States, once argued against a “Bill of Rights” because he felt it was a “parchment barrier” against abuses by a government.  Sometimes, I think that if he’d won out, we might be better off; Jefferson felt that “[t]he tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”  Jefferson said this blood was liberty’s “natural manure” and said, “God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion.” [↩]

Yesterday, I was sitting in court waiting for a case to be called when I became aware that the accused minor in custody was in the process of making an admission to a crime.

What caught my attention is the nature of the crime.

(more…)

Cops lie.

If you haven’t the moral courage to hear that and consider what should be done about it, then go somewhere else: you’re not going to be happy reading this blog post.  (Be sure to stay away from Injustice Everywhere, too.)

(more…)

A judge whom I consider a good man — and who I believe I would be pleased to call my friend if ever that were possible — nevertheless lost his temper with me recently during an off-the-record discussion.  The subject of the discussion and the way the court lost its temper is why I had to write this post.

Two things should be noted before I “get into it.”  First, whether the court or anyone else believes me on this, I’m writing this because a driving force in my life is the Jewish concept of tikkun olam. In other words, I want to work cooperatively to leave the world a better place than it was when I arrived.  If I can’t do it cooperatively, though, I will nevertheless work to do it.

The second thing is the corollary to that desire: I’m not writing this to further anger the judge (though given the court’s refusal to give serious consideration to this issue, that may be a sadly unavoidable side effect of my comments).  Rather, I wish to explain what I was unable to say due to the chilling effect of the court’s reaction to my off-the-record comment — and to the fact that others had started to filter into the courtroom.  I’m hopeful — since I know some judges read my blog — that this post might help explain why it is the right for the court to change its position on this one issue, and why it should be ashamed if it does not.

So what were we talking about?  And what did I say that so enraged one of the few judges I would love to be able to call my friend?

(more…)

It’s amazing how often history reports itself in things both small and large. 

I recently ran across one of the small things in this passage from Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here:

“Remember our war hysteria, when we called sauerkraut ‘Liberty cabbage’ and somebody actually proposed calling German measles ‘Liberty measles’?”  (Sinclair Lewis, It Can’t Happen Here (2005 ed.) p. 17, originally published in 1935.)

Can I interest you in some “freedom fries”? 

(more…)