Detroit man, what the hell? Didn’t we save the auto industry? Shouldn’t you guys be doing better now?
A Detroit prosecutor says that after budget cuts she can no longer afford to have prosecutors cover misdemeanor traffic and assault cases, so people are walking away from court scot-free when their prosecutors don’t show up.
We’re talking about drunk driving cases and one misdemeanor domestic violence case.
At least the Detroit prosecutor still has staff to sue the county executive over her budget or lack thereof….
Chief Judge Alex Kozinski speaking at Yale Law School last year.
Perhaps this should be “benchslap of a few days ago,” since it happened last week. But it’s never too late to read about Chief Judge Alex Kozinski, right?
This latest benchslap involves the Ninth Circuit setting aside a murder conviction. So you might expect the benchslap to be coming from a unanimous Supreme Court in a summary reversal.
But no. The benchslap — actually, make that benchslaps, plural — come from the Ninth Circuit. On the receiving end: the police, prosecutors, a state judge, and a federal judge. Names are named.
And I wouldn’t hold my breath while waiting for SCOTUS to reverse. This decision looks pretty safe….
A famed hacker, Andrew “weev” Auernheimer, was sentenced to 41 months in prison yesterday. A jury convicted Auernheimer of conspiracy and identity theft back in November stemming from his role in a scheme to snag the personal email addresses of over 114,000 iPad users, including Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Diane Sawyer, and Mayor Rahm Emmanuel.
Auernheimer argued that he acted as an uninvited “gray hat” hacker, grabbing the email addresses of customers for the sole purpose of exposing the flaws in AT&T’s security.
The sentence, at the upper end of the Guidelines range, is a far cry from the non-custodial slap on the wrist Auernheimer’s attorneys sought. There are two broad categories of response to the sentence. First, that Auernheimer is a completely terrible human being, but that his being a dick does not justify the harsh sentence. Second, that Auernheimer did not commit a real crime because he never intended to steal anyone’s identity and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act is a bad law.
To these arguments, I reply “yes it does,” and “who cares?”
I have to give Paul Bergrin some credit. This former federal prosecutor, accused of drug dealing, pimping, and murder, has been remarkably successful at eluding conviction for his crimes.
Bergrin was first arrested back in 2009. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for New Jersey, where Bergrin once worked before becoming a defense lawyer, brought him to trial. That trial, which took place in 2011, ended with a hung jury. Some time was taken up with appellate machinations (in which the U.S. Attorney’s Office prevailed).
A new trial, before a different district judge, got underway this January. And today justice finally caught up with the man that New York magazine famously dubbed “the baddest lawyer in the history of Jersey”….
Yesterday, Judge Thomas Lipps handed down a guilty verdict in the Steubenville rape case. For those living entirely under a rock, the Steubenville rape case involved two teen football players in Ohio, Trent Mays and Ma’lik Richmond, who carried an overly intoxicated 16-year-old girl from party to party, sexually assaulting her along the way.
The case garnered national attention after multiple pictures and videos of the events — some callously indifferent and others actively supportive of the rape — surfaced on the Internet, and the slow initial response of law enforcement triggered accusations that the local sheriff, Fred Abdalla, attempted to cover up the assault to protect the Steubenville football team.
Others have more eloquently explored the implications of this case for attitudes about sexual violence and social media generally. But the events in Steubenville speak to a cultural shift that will lord over criminal law for the next generation: the compulsive desire of jackhole criminals to document everything makes them really easy to catch.
Okay, obviously “stabbing a dude 23 times” is the blaring klaxon in this issue spotter, but there are a few other legal scrapes that led up to Caesar’s assassination. It wasn’t all coups and Senatorial intrigue; the Roman legal regime itself placed Caesar on a crash course with murder.
And a wild legal regime it was. Pretty much everything that led up to Caesar’s assassination involved Roman lawyers pulling shady technicalities on each other. The whole thing reads like an episode of Dallas with surprise agreements and quirky legal interpretations foiling the plots of influential people scheming against each other.
Earlier this week, Judge William Sylvester, the Colorado state judge presiding over the James Holmes trial, ruled that prosecutors are allowed to apply “truth serum” to Holmes if/when he decides to plead not guilty by way of insanity.
Holmes, you may remember, is the jackhole who allegedly (to the extent he has not yet entered his own plea) murdered 12 people and injured 58 others in an Aurora, Colorado movie theater during the premiere of The Dark Knight Rises. He’s expected to cop an insanity plea, citing a bunch of troubling facts, including the fact that he was obsessed with the Joker, leading him to dye his hair orange, which, when you think about it, undermines his obsession claim since the Joker clearly has green hair.
But the decision to forcibly inject Holmes with so-called “truth serum” to test his insanity claims, not only sounds like a plot device from a really terrible Bond movie (let’s just assume Die Another Day), but it also seems like a genuinely terrible legal ruling….
Sitting in judgment of another human being is difficult. This case in particular has not been an easy one … [with] material that degrades the human spirit.
– Judge Paul Gardephe, thanking the jury that just convicted Gilberto Valle, the so-called “cannibal cop,” of conspiracy to kidnap.
* If you’re at NYU, the Law Review has been holding out on you with a private stockpile of outlines. Prometheus brings them to the masses. I don’t know why this person chose a terrible movie for a pseudonym. [PrometheusNYU] UPDATE: We crashed that link…here’s the new one.
* If you’re doing your taxes in Minnesota, you’d better be using H&R Block, because the authorities have warned taxpayers not to use TurboTax. [Tax Prof Blog]
* Burglar foiled by “supernatural figure.” [Legal Juice]
* Judge Dolores Sloviter, the former Chief Judge of the Third Circuit, announced that she’s taking senior status. That should lighten the load on her law clerks… [Legal Intelligencer]
* Earlier today, Staci was on HuffPo Live talking about the plight of recent law school graduates. Video after the jump….
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Ed. note: The Asia Chronicles column is authored by Kinney Recruiting. Kinney has made more placements of U.S. associates, counsels and partners in Asia than any other recruiting firm in each of the past six years. You can reach them by email: asia@kinneyrecruiting.com.
Deal flow has clearly picked recently up for most US associates, counsels and partners in Hong Kong/China and Singapore. We are on the phone with a lot of these folks on a daily basis, many of whom we have known for years. Further, the head of our Asia team, Evan Jowers, and Kinney’s founder and president, Robert Kinney, frequently meet in person with leading US partners in Asia to assess their needs and keep on top of the inside scoop at as many firms as possible. The need for legal recruiting help in Asia from experienced recruiters appears to be live and well. In March, Evan and Robert were in Beijing at such meetings, in April, Evan was in Hong Kong, and for half of June Evan will be in Shanghai and Hong Kong. Thus its pretty easy for us to tell when there has been an across-the-market pick up in capital markets and corporate work.
On an average day in Asia when Evan and Robert visit firms, they typically have 5 to 9 meetings a day, mostly with US partners in the market. The reason they have these meetings is not simply because Kinney makes a lot of US attorney placements in Asia and that a particular firm may have openings; instead these are just visits with friends. After years of working together as business partners, the folks at Kinney are actually these peoples’ friends. The firms Kinney work closely with in Asia (which is just about every law firm – call us if you want to know the one firm in the world we will never place anyone with again, ever, and why) look forward to the visits, or at least act like they do. After seven years in the market, many of the client partners are former associate candidates. Also, these US partners see Kinney as a very good source of market information as well, because they know how deep their contacts are in the market and how frequently they are speaking to counterparts at peer firms.
In a land that is right here and in a time that is right now, a technology has arisen so powerful that it can replace basic human document review. Is it time to bow down before our new robot overlords?
First, here’s a little story about me: my life in the legal world began as a paralegal. My first case was a GIANT patent infringement case that was already six years old and had involved as many as five companies, multiple US courts, the ITC and an international standards committee. I knew nothing about any of this.
On my first day, my supervisor (a paralegal with at least eight other cases driving her crazy) sat me down in front of a Concordance database with a 100,000+ patents and patent file histories. “Code these,” she said. I learned that “coding”, for the purposes of this exercise, meant manually typing the inventor’s name, the title of the patent, the assignee, the file date, and other objective data for each document. I worked on that project – and only that project – for at least the first six months of my job. After a week or so, time began to blur.
What I know, in retrospect and with absolutely certainty, is that as time began to blur, so did my judgment. So did my attention to detail. If you could tell me that I did not make at least one mistake a day – one inconsistent spelling, one reversed day and month, one incorrectly spaced title – I frankly would need to see your evidence. I would not believe it. The human mind is trainable but it is not a machine.
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Detroit man, what the hell? Didn’t we save the auto industry? Shouldn’t you guys be doing better now? 
