Probable Cause

You’ll have to forgive my choice of title — or not, I don’t really care — the story that inspired this post makes me angrier than just about anything I’ve heard recently.  If it makes you feel better, pretend the actual title was “Ex Parte, In Parte.”

“Justice” Thomas — you know, the dude who was appointed to the United States Supreme Court notwithstanding allegations of repeated sexual harassment of a young woman who worked for him when he was a mere judge — says that criticizing judges decision-making is a bad thing.

“Justice” Scalia tells us that we’ve come a long way, baby, to get where we got to today, where the people involved in capturing and convicting “criminals” — with the average American committing three felonies per day, that would be most of us under the new regime — are so professional that we don’t need the exclusionary rule anymore.

And Scott Greenfield, a criminal defense attorney in New York, tells us about a case of a judge who was having an extramarital affair with the prosecutor during a murder trial which resulted in — surprise! — a conviction.

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Recently, a rather astounding ruling — astounding to those of us who practice criminal defense in the United States, anyway — came out of a courtroom in Santa Ana, California.

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Look, we don’t see eye to eye.  I get that.  You have your view of the world; I have mine.  And our jobs require us to be key components in an adversarial system.

And even though it’s sometimes fun, or funny, to joke about it, “adversarial” doesn’t mean we’re enemies.

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