Victim's rights

What kind of criminal defense attorney touts his support of victims rights? I don't think a competent one would. But Murray Newman does.

Walking across Russia

D. A. Confidential has a post about a book

This week's selection is a book that will make you glad to be you, and glad to be wherever the hell you are right now. It's called The Long Walk: The True Story of a Trek to Freedom
, by Slavomir Rawicz. It's a true story, and here it is in a nutshell:

A Polish Army officer, the author Rawicz, is captured and then tortured in the Soviet prison system and sent to the Gulags. Faced with misery in Siberia and probable death, he and a band of others escape and undertake a two thousand-mile long journey from the snows of Siberia through Mongolia, the Gobi Desert, and across the Himalayas toward British India and freedom.

It reminds me of a story my mother told me about her Uncle.

He was in the German army, at the Siege Of Leningrad.

Things weren't going well and it became clear that he was very likely to end up either dead or in a Soviet POW camp. He became separated from his unit (which is a euphemism for going over the hill).

He went down through Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, Austria, Switzerland (where he had a foot amputated because of frostbite), until he reached Italy and was able to surrender to US troops. He spent the rest of the war in a US POW camp in Arizona.

Since he spent the rest of his life after the war on a German military disability pension he never really talked alot about the details (the "separated for his unit" part was kind of a sticky point). But I always thought it made an interesting story.

CLE for lawyers

Every state bar has a continuing education requirment for lawyers. It's a good idea to require lawyers to keep up with new developments in the law, but as Scott Greenfield of Simple Justice points out, it's not always so clearly of professional value.

In talking about a mailer for a CLE course he recently got, the asks

There's no mention of who will be the instructor, and clearly this isn't a law firm, bar association or law school, but an entity whose purpose is to selling marketing. How the heck did this group obtain authorization to provide continuing legal education? Who in their right mind would give an PR firm the power to confer CLE credits for teaching ethics to lawyers? Apparently, the State of New York did so.

That struck a cord with me because a few years back I gave a talk at an event that gave CLE credit for lawyers in Texas. I'm not a lawyer and don't have any real credentials in the field.

I was teaching Business Analysis (statistics and operations research) at a small school in East Texas and was also a graduate student in Criminal Justice. As part of a CJ course in administrative law I'd written a term paper on the applicability of federal minimum wage laws to prison labor. When a business conference came up in San Antonio and I wanted to take a trip I put together a talk on that term paper topic and submitted the paper. It was accepted in a session that was approved for CLE credit.

I just remember thinking how weird that was -- my total legal education consisted of a Business Law course I'd taken as an undergraduate (and made in C in), a Constitutional Law course I'd taken as a CJ graduate student and the Administrative Law course I'd written the paper for. Not exactly what I'd consider a serious legal education. It made me wonder how serious they were about actual continuing education for lawyers.

8th grade texas history book

I don't check my sitemeter stats nearly as often as I should if I want to be a serious blogger but I did look at them this morning. Mostly I looked at where my referrals have been coming from.

I rank second on google for the search phrase "8th grade texas history book" because of this post about a book that included what Larry L. King thought about the effect of 8th grade Texas History on LBJ and my thoughts on the effect it probably had on George W. Bush.

Maybe this post, along with an added tag, will pop me up to Number One.

More on the drug war exception to the constitution

26 attorneys general submitted a friend of the court brief to the US Supreme Court which basically argues that government convenience in fighting the war on drugs trumps the Bill of Rights. It's not reasonable for us to expect the government to follow the Rule of Law if it's too much trouble.

Cops out of control

When there's a large snowstorm pretty much anywhere people often tend to take to the streets and play -- which involves things like throwing snowballs.

In DC the requirement to show deference to police, even when you don't know they're police, takes precedence over any normal sense of human frivolity.

UPDATE:
The idiot law school teacher Althouse thinks the Reason description is inaccurate because they use the term "brandish" when he didn't actually point the gun directly at people.

She doesn't seem to understand that if they'd actually meant "point" then that's what they would have said. She's been teaching law for way too long, the law being a field where words have no actual meaning.

Itialian Justice

Having the jury sitting in judgement of a young American woman suspected of loose morals (and murder) as they stare at a fresco of the Virgin Mary tells us pretty much all we need to know about Italian justice.

Tools

When I was a kid I knew a guy who was arrested for having a screwdriver in his back pocket. He was actually arrested for Failure to Display Proper Respect to an ego deprived cop but the reason given was Possession of Burglary Tools -- a screwdriver.

These days it would probably be a weapons charge, but back then it wasn't illegal to carry a knife.

Now we have courts referring to cell phones as "tools of the drug trade".

The agents reasonably concluded that Correa's cellular telephone, a "known tool of the drug trade," contained digital evidence about the conspiracy. United States v. Nixon, 918 F.2d 895, 900 (11th Cir. 1990).

It won't be long before your kids are being arrested for possession of drug dealing tools.