Singapore is where crime goes to die. The country is well-known for having strict laws against crime and even stricter punishments for criminal offenders. Caning gets a lot of press, probably because beating people with sticks sounds barbarous.
State-sanctioned killing is also fairly barbaric, and Singapore does it with even more gusto than our own United States. Singapore has a “zero tolerance” policy for drug use, which means drug users in Singapore can be hung by the state.
Now, Singapore’s deputy prime minister says the country will be loosening the rope around drug offenders. But druggies in Singapore shouldn’t get too excited…
* Colin Powell continues his tradition of saying the right things only when he has no power to do anything about it. [CNN]
* A new poll shows Americans think it’s more “morally acceptable” to kill criminals than to love somebody of the same sex. After I saw that poll, I turned to Jesus and said, “Now your failure is complete.” [Atlantic]
* This strikes me as a pretty frank way of looking at bias in the LSAT. [LSAT Blog: Ace the LSAT]
* Kashmir Hill was on the Kojo show talking about the Dharun Ravi sentence. Sure, like she’s never been taped having a gay hook-up. [The Kojo Show]
* Black people who wear hoodies get shot to death, and white people who wear hoodies don’t live up to their IPO expectations. What a lovely post-racial world some people seem to be living in. [Dealbreaker]
* Here come the men in black. Won’t let you remember. Here come the… what are you doing? Decapitate him? Come on, he’s not an alien, you get that we just saw a movie, AAAAHHHHHHHH NOOOOOOO. [New York Daily News]
According to new research from Columbia Law School, this man was executed for a murder he did not commit.
Earlier this week, a group of students at Columbia Law School, along with law professor James Liebman, released a 400-page report detailing the story of a Texas man who was, according to the report, executed for a murder he did not commit.
Released online in The Columbia Human Rights Law Review, the narrative has received massive press attention in the last two days. Many in the media have already described the terrible story as a potential answer to Justice Scalia’s famous quip that if the United States ever executed the wrong man, “the innocent’s name would be shouted from the rooftops.”
The details of Carlos DeLuna’s story are far too numerous to fit into a single post, but keep reading for the key plot points. We also spoke with Shawn Crowley, a 2011 Columbia Law graduate and a co-author of the paper. She talked with us about how the project shaped her law school experience, and she gave some suggestions for other students who are looking for a more personal, relationship-based time in law school.
* Dewey need to take a look at the Biglaw industry in general before more firms implode? Hell yes, says an author who’s written on the economics and management of law firms. [DealBook / New York Times]
* Wal-Mart was served with its first shareholder suit over its alleged bribery scandal, because the only thing on rollback this week is the price of the company’s stock shares. [Reuters]
* Does diplomatic immunity give you a free pass for getting handsy with the maid? Guess we’ll see next week, when a judge rules on DSK’s motion to dismiss his civil suit. [New York Daily News]
* As long as you’ve got money, the TSA will totally look the other way if you’ve got suitcases filled with drugs. Vibrators, on the other hand, are simply out of the question. [Bloomberg]
* As of yesterday, Connecticut became the seventeenth state to kill the death penalty. But not so fast, death row inmates. You still get to die. Isn’t that nice? [CNN]
* Franchise agreements be damned, because even judges can understand that sometimes, you just need to eat a delicious sandwich while you’re getting a lap dance. [KTVN]
The lethal injection room at San Quentin State Prison.
Debating the death penalty never gets old in the United States. Sometimes it cools off for a while, but if you wait long enough it always bubbles up again. These days it’s getting hot out here on the West Coast, where a ballot initiative aims to roll back the state’s death penalty and replace it with life without parole. The initiative would replace Proposition 7, passed in 1978, which made California’s death penalty law “among the toughest and most far-reaching in the country.”
At the center of the debate are two men — one of them a former prosecutor from New York — who helped pass the death penalty bill in California 30 years ago. Now they have completely changed their tune. What prompted this change of heart?
Last week, we saw some big news in the Stephen M. McDaniel murder case. In a bond hearing, prosecutors told the court about another internet post allegedly made by McDaniel, the Mercer Law School graduate who stands accused of murdering classmate Lauren Giddings. The newest post was particularly unsettling and gory.
At first glance, the post seemed like it could be a smoking gun. But things are never as simple as they seem: rumors are going around that the post is a fake. Because, as Above the Law readers know, don’t believe everything you read in online comments…
* Dear readers, legal pundits, regular pundits, and the public at large: Please stop with this nonsense of how Sandra Fluke should sue Rush Limbaugh. Because I swear to God, if you guys make me indirectly defend Limbaugh, I will wear you guys out like the dirty little sluts you are. [Politico]
* Which founding partner of a major law firm has abs of steel? [Dealbreaker]
* A ranking of top moot court programs. I wouldn’t be surprised if the schools that are best at moot court are the schools that spend the most time lying to their students about how there’s a single goddamn employer out there who cares about moot court. [TaxProf Blog]
* People think I hate cops, but I have nothing on Republicans in the Indiana House of Representatives. Those guys are such cop haters that they want to pass a law to make it okay to kill them if they enter your house. All I want is to be able to get away with saying “yo’ mama” if they try to falsely arrest you in your own home. [Recess Appointments]
* This legal assistant reminds me of what Lane Pryce might have said if he had been sacked for a job as a legal assistant. [Roll on Friday]
* Really, it’s the pro-death penalty crowd that wants us to be more like Communist China. [A Public Defender]
* Congratulations to the new leaders at Ms. JD. [Ms. JD]
* Michigan man sues movie theater for overpriced snacks. He’s not suing for amount they charge to see movies over the past atrocious season, he just wants to spend less while he’s sucking down Goobers and watching them. (One quick side note on the Oscars ’cause I was sick last week: F*** you, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Maybe they should re-release Margin Call with Zach Quinto replaced by a French mime so you guys might notice something at least 1% of this country cares about.) [Huffington Post]
Stephen M. McDaniel, the Mercer Law School graduate accused of killing classmate Lauren Giddings, made an appearance in court this morning. As you may recall, Giddings’s decapitated torso was found on June 30 in Macon, Georgia, and thus far, police have been unable to recover the rest of her body.
Last month, we mentioned that Bibb County prosecutors intended to seek the death penalty for McDaniel. Today, in court, the alleged murderer received formal notification of his fate if he is found guilty of the charges levied against him.
McDaniel’s arraignment hearing has been set for February 7, but his lawyers raised some interesting issues today. What sort of motions will they be filing on their client’s behalf?
We’ve previouslywritten about the mailroomof death at Sullivan & Cromwell. To make a long story short (read our prior posts for the full background), a mailroom mix-up at 125 Broad Street caused an Alabama death-row inmate to miss a deadline for filing an appeal. The Eleventh Circuit rejected the condemned man’s attempt to reopen his case.
Presumably feeling bad for what had happened, S&C appealed to the Supreme Court. The firm hired a leading SCOTUS advocate — former Solicitor General Gregory Garre, now a partner at Latham & Watkins — to argue that prisoner Cory Maples shouldn’t forfeit his life because of S&C’s screw-up.
This morning, the Supreme Court handed down its ruling in Maples v. Thomas. What did the high court have to say?
Watch to find out what some of our subscribers received in their May box!
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We currently have a number of active openings for associate roles at US and UK firms in HK / China, Singapore and two new in-house openings. As always, please feel free to reach out to us at asia@kinneyrecruiting.com in order to get details of current openings in Asia, as well as to discuss the Asia markets in general and what we expect for openings later this year. Our Evan Jowers and Robert Kinney will be in Beijing the week of March 25 and Evan Jowers will be in Hong Kong the week of April 1, if you would like to meet them in person.
The US associate openings we have in law firms are in the usual areas of M&A, cap markets, FCPA / white collar litigation, finance, and project finance. The most urgent of our top tier (top 15 US or magic circle) law firm openings in Asia (among many other firm openings that we have in Asia) are as follows:
• 2nd to 5th year mandarin fluent M&A associates needed in Beijing and Hong Kong at several firms;
• Korean fluent 2nd to 4th year cap markets associate needed in Hong Kong;
• 2nd to 5th year Japanese fluent M&A associates needed in Tokyo;
• 4th to 6th year mandarin fluent cap markets associate needed in Hong Kong;
• 2nd to 4th year M&A / cap markets mix associate needed in Singapore.
The last time I flapped my wings your way, I tried to make at least enough noise about your mobile phone to make you more than a little bit uncomfortable. I hope I did. If enough of us become anxious enough about the known and unknown unknowns and knowns in our mobile phones, then we can start making wise decisions about how to manage that information and its resultant investigations.
Today, I’d like to put a finer point on the last installment’s topic by asking a question that seemed to catch most attendees off-guard at a conference panel that I moderated last week: is there discoverable personal information in a mobile app? Our panelists’ answer was a uniform “yes” with one stating that, if he had to choose only one type of data that he could discover from a mobile phone, he’d choose app data. Why? Because there’s simply so much of it and because almost all of it is objective – not just user-created like an email – but machine-tracked like GPS, usage duration, log in and log out times, browsed web addresses, browsed actual addresses. Also, most of us seem to have the idea that data doesn’t actually “stick” to our mobile devices the way it “sticks” to our hard drives. Maybe there’s a disconnect based on the fact that our phones are mobile so we assume the data is mobile to?
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