Beer We Can Believe In

By now we all know about the bizarre triangle of Cambridge Police Sargent Jim Crowley, Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates and President Barack Obama.  No rehash will be given because if you’re the type of person who lives under a rock and has no idea what I’m talking about, it is extremely unlike you’d be reading my blog.

Having moved past the reaction, reaction, re-reaction, judgment and all the rest of the sound and fury surrounding the event, we’ve moved onto the reconciliation phase.  This Thursday, the three will meet, drink a brew of their choice and attempt to put the whole thing behind them so that the nation may get on with their lives.

This is a great idea and one that I’d like to see happen more often.  Maybe we could solve the Middle East crisis if Israelis and the Palestinians could just get together over a couple of cold ones.  But I take issue with the President here.

It will be Bud Light for Obama, Blue Moon for Crowley and Red Stripe for Gates, the White House says.

With all due respect, Mr. President; Bud Lite?  You have an historic oppurtunity to put beer in the spotlight, and you chose a watered-down, mass-produced lite lager that was originally marketed towards women?  No no no no no.

Now, I understand that you don’t want to dictate what kind beer your guests will have.  Not offering them a choice won’t play well with those talk radio types who think you’re a socialist.  Maybe offering them a choice of various craft brews.  You’re a Chicago guy, you could have gone with a Goose Island 312 Urban Wheat.  Or maybe invoke the Founding Fathers and have yourself a Sam Adams.  Heck, get all left coast on us and pick up a sixer of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale.  Or Dogfish Head, or Bell’s or…anything other than Bud Lite.  It’s not even owned by Americans anymore.  This could have been the change we all needed to believe in.  A change away from crappy, mass produced lite lagers.  A change where you brought good beer to the masses.

But I understand, Mr. President.  I doubt you had much of a choice in the matter.  There’s no doubt in my mind that as soon as you announced that you were having Professor Gates and Officer Crowley over for a beer, your various media consultants and image specialists and spin doctors went into overdrive trying to find what beer would make you appeal to the everyman.  I understand where they are coming from.  Let’s face it, there’s a lot of people out there who think of you as one of those pointy headed know-it-alls, what with your fancy book learnin’ and all.  Drinking something like Founder’s Breakfast Stout might not play well with Joe Six-Pack.

Rather than being a historical moment for American beer, the President picks a beer much like all the politicians in Washington.  Watered down and made to appeal to the largest number of people possible without giving them anything.

Backed Up Worse Than Houston Traffic

On Sunday, our local newspaper had a story concerning the backlog of cases each of the five Brazos County courts has.

On Friday, District Judges J.D. Langley and Steve Smith presented commissioners with a stark reality in regard to their caseloads. Each of the five courts housed in the Brazos County Courthouse — the 85th, 272nd and 361st district courts and the two county courts at law — has more than 1,400 pending cases on its docket.

The result, the judges said, is that defendants in criminal cases sometimes must wait in long lines to stand trial. If they cannot afford to post bail, they could spend years behind bars before being convicted or acquitted of a crime.

Some of that delay is caused by procedural motions and intentional efforts by defense lawyers to drag out the process, the judges acknowledged, but the cases should be moved through the legal system faster.

There are five courts in Brazos County, three district and two county courts.  My first thought was that there’s no way each court has 1,400 pending cases.  Then I remembered that there is a whole other side of the law that I don’t mess with.  There are plenty of civil cases out there, and when those are factored it, the 1,400 number sounds very reasonable to me.

My problem with the story is, how do you define a backlog?  A case that has been pending for more than 6 months?  Maybe more than a year?  Would a year-old, Class B Theft case be considered part of the backlog when a year-old capital murder isn’t?

The other problem with there’s no comparison to anyplace else in Texas, either counties roughly the same size or a comparison to bigger or smaller counties.  There might be a backlog here, but how does it compare to the rest of Texas?

Now, there’s no doubt that Judge Langley and Judge Smith are absolutely right.  If you want to take your case to trial, be ready to wait.  That’s not always a bad thing, but it can be incredibly frustrating for defendants.  Especially if they’re not out on bond.  One solution proposed is a new magistrate court.

The judges have asked the county to fund either a new magistrate court or an impact court to help get control of the docket. A magistrate judge would handle items on the judges’ dockets that do not require a jury trial, including hearings on temporary orders, pleas and motions to revoke probation.

I can get behind this idea.  Brazos County currently has one magistrate court.  That court handles duties for the county courts four days a week, and district court one day a week.  An additional magistrate that would save the district court judges a lot of time to try cases and move cases through the system faster.

The problem is, of course, money.  But the powers that be seemed to be supportive of the courts.

“We are going to look at what we want to be able to do,” he said. “The district judges have wanted another magistrate for probably the last two years, and I have put it off for the cost factor. And I think now we are getting to the fact that the population is growing so much in Brazos County that we have got to handle those cases.”

He said the current commissioners court meeting room in the County Administration Building or an unused old justice of the peace office in the courthouse could be used to hold trials or hearings.

Sims indicated that helping the courts was a top priority and that he would make room for the additions in the budget.

Hopefully with the remodeling of the courthouse, Brazos County will get some additional courts as well.

The Lawyer Fashionista

It never fails to amaze me what some people think is appropriate attire for their court date, especially for criminal court.  I would think that if you’re going up in front of a person in a black robe with the power to send you to TDC if you get wise, you might want to dress like you’re going to church as soon as you get done with court.

I imagine, that back in the day everyone went to court wearing a suit.  Attorneys, clients, baliffs, court reporters, etc.  Like when you watch footage of an old baseball game and everyone in the stand is wearing a suit.

Sidenote, I’m watching the Tigers and Rangers right now.  Grandy had a great homer in the top of the first.  How on earth did people sit in the stands during a ballgame in August wearing a suit, and not die of heat stroke?  Even in a northern state it still gets plenty hot during the dog days of summer.

Back on topic, I was in court the other day.  There was a girl there, probably in her early 20’s who was representing herself.  I always wonder about people who represent themselves, but that’s another topic for another day.  This girl was pregnant, and wearing a shirt that said: “I’m Popular With Boys.”

I’d love to know the train of thought that lead to her deciding that shirt was appropriate to wear for her court date.

Bücher verbrannt, um die Kinder

Roughly translated, “burning books to save the children”.

Some citizens of West Bend, Wisconsin are looking to have themselves and old-fashioned book burning.  No, there’s not some new Harry Potter book turning the kids into devil-worshipers.  Instead, there’s books in the young-adult section that are explicit, and someone of them even are even “gay-affirming.”  Oh, the horror!

The strife began in February when West Bend couple Jim and Ginny Maziarka objected to some of the content in the city library’s young-adult section. They later petitioned the library board to move any sexually explicit books — the definition of which would be debated — from the young-adult section to the adult section and to label them as sexually explicit.

Ginny Maziarka, 49, said the books in the section of the library aimed at children aged 12 to 18 included homosexual and heterosexual content she thought was inappropriate for youths.

She and her husband also asked the library to obtain books about homosexuality that affirmed heterosexuality, such as titles written by “ex-gays,” Maziarka said.

“All the books in the young-adult zone that deal with homosexuality are gay-affirming. That’s not balance,” she said.

Naturally, the library didn’t necessarily appreciate it when Jim and Ginny Maziarka (who will be referred to as Ned and Maude Flanders for the rest of this post) telling them how to do their jobs and refused to move the books.

The library did not agree with the Maziarkas’ suggestions, and the couple appealed to the library board. Ginny Maziarka, a mother of four, began blogging about the issue and the local newspaper picked up the dispute, sparking the opposition.

By the time the library board met on June 2, each side had collected more than 1,000 signatures backing their position. Dozens of residents spoke at the meeting before the board — still including the outgoing members — unanimously voted to keep all policies the same.

The demand to move the books was always going to be problematic because no authority has determined that any of the titles are pornographic or obscene, Tyree said.

OK, so Ned and Maude didn’t get their way.  You’d think that would be the end of it, right?  Wrong.

Outside West Bend, the fight caught the attention of Robert Braun, who, with three other Milwaukee-area men, filed a claim against West Bend calling for one of the library’s books to be publicly burned, along with financial damages.

The four plaintiffs — who describe themselves as “elderly” in their complaint — claim their “mental and emotional well-being was damaged by [the] book at the library.”

The claim, unconnected to the Maziarkas, says the book “Baby Be-bop” — a fictional piece about a homosexual teenager — is “explicitly vulgar, racial and anti-Christian.”

Braun, who says he is president of a Milwaukee group called the Christian Civil Liberties Union, said he singled out the book because it “goes way over the line” with offensive language and descriptions of sex acts.

Now we’ve really gone down the rabbit hole.  It’s one thing when Ned and Maude get upset and stir up some fuss with the library.  But now we’ve got a group of people suing for $120,000.  That’s $30,000 for each of these crazy old bats that saw the book in a library display.  But I’m guessing for the CCLU, it’s not the money, it’s the principle.  And that principle is burning books you don’t like.

That’s right.  You just watched this man advocate that people go to the library and either rip the books in half right there, or check them out so that they may take them home and burn them.

Here’s what I find so incredibly frustrating people like Ned, Maude, and Crazy Old Mr. Braun.  They want to to censor what they don’t like in the name of keeping everyone else safe.  That somehow these self-appointed arbiters of everything that is just and moral know what’s best for all 30,000 people in West Best, WI.  They go get everyone riled up, cause all sorts of trouble such as costing four library board members their positions for not bowing down to the Mob Of All That Is Moral.  But then they have the balls to go and say something like this:

“We want parents to decide whether they want their children to have access to these books … and we want the library’s help in identifying [them through labeling and moving],” Maziarka said. “It’s just common sense.”

Whoa there, Maude.  You can’t advocate moving books around that you don’t approve of, and then turn around and say you want parents to decide whether or not their children have access to the books.  Especially when you’re the one who indirectly brought the book burners to West Bend.  Here’s the deal, if parents in West Bend, or anywhere else don’t want their kids to read such books, that’s up to them.  It’s not your job to decide what’s appropriate for everyone else in town.

And the greatest irony of them all, if someone tried to force Maude to take down her blog, or tried to cut off Crazy Old Mr. Braun’s microphone, you know they would be crying censorship until they were blue in face.

But when they’re doing the censoring, it’s OK.  Especially if it’s for the children.

Officer on Officer Violence

Tensions between local law enforcement and the FBI is a hallmark of TV shows and movies.  Everyone knows how it works.  The simple local cops catch a case, and then the FBI swoops in and to hog all the glory.  The movie generally ends with the FBI looking incompetent and the locals getting the bad guy in the end.

Down in Mexico, tensions between the local police and the federales have way more consequences than just who gets credit for the bust at the end of the movie.  A federal judge in Mexico City ordered the arrest of 10 Arteaga municipal police officers from Michoacan state, in western Mexico.  The officers were arrested in connection of the torture and murder of 12 federal police officers.

The dead officers were part of more than 5,000 troops and federales that have been deployed to Michoacan, home to the La Familia cartel.  Yes, I know that the word “the” followed by the word “la” is redundant.

So why might these federales have been killed?  The answer is from the “stating the obvious” files,

The federal government believes that local police and officials have long been in the pay of the drug gangs.

What will Mexico’s federal government announce next?  That the sky is blue, or that water is wet?

According to The USA Today, a beat officer in Mexico City is paid about $700 a month, and that’s in the richest area of the country.  I attempted to find some kind of average salary across Mexico, but didn’t have any luck.  I would guess that local police in other areas make less.  So what’s any officer going to do to supplement some income?  Work for the cartels, it sure beats being killed by them.

Naturally, the response of President Calderon is to send 1,000 feds to Michoacan.  Is it going to make any difference, or will the bodies just keep piling up?  As both the US and Mexico continue their quixotic War on Drugs, I’m guessing it will sadly be the latter.

A New Dillinger?

I always enjoy a good gangster movie, so I went and saw Public Enemies last night.  I’m also in the middle of the book.  The book is excellent so far, but it suffers the same problem Manhunt (another otherwise great book) did.  There are a lot of people and it can get tough to keep track of everyone.

The movie does a good job of taking a book that covers the lives and crimes of five criminal gangs (John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd, Barker-Karpis, and Bonnie & Clyde) and paring it down to a two hour movie.  Dillinger is the main focus of the movie, and Johnny Depp does a great job.  Floyd and Karpis make brief appearances, Nelson shows up at the end of the movie, and Bonnie & Clyde aren’t even mentioned.

Where the movie fails is it doesn’t give you the context in which these bank robbers existed and why they were so popular.  I don’t know if Director Michael Mann just assumes everyone knows about the Great Depression and that the banks and bankers weren’t exactly popular among the masses.  Or, maybe as others have suggested, the director is not a guy who bothers with context or backstory.  He puts you in the lives of the characters and you follow them.

Which lead me to my thought for the day.  Could we have another John Dillinger?  Not just another bank robbery, but one that’s well known and something of a folk hero.

If it was going to happen, today would be the perfect time period for it.  Banks and bankers might even be less popular than lawyers now.  If someone came it and said they were robbing the banks as a way to strike a blow for the common man, it would probably resonate with a lot of people.

That being said, they probably wouldn’t even last as long as Dillinger did.  Banks and law enforcement are more sophisticated.  A high enough reward would probably get him ratted out.

If anyone is reading, do you think we could ever have enough folk hero/bank robber again?

Riding While Intoxicated

A couple weeks ago Dallas/Kaufman attorney Robert Guest had a post about the Public Intoxication statute in Texas, and how it is over broad and a general catch-all type of statute for the police to use.  It got me thinking about a case I had a while ago.

We’ll call my client Defendant X.  Defendant X was stopped by law enforcement.  Defendant X was then subjected to the dog-and-pony show of field sobriety tests and subsequently arrested for DWI.  In the car with Defendant X was a sibling, Passenger Y.  This presented a problem for the police.  It may have been debatable whether Defendant X was OK to drive, but it was clear to everyone involved that Passenger Y was in no shape to drive.

So what to do?  They can’t release the car to Passenger Y.  They can’t tow the car and leave Passenger Y by the side of the road.  Well, I suppose they probably could.  Passenger Y wasn’t driving, so the police can’t arrest the person for a DWI.

But when DWI fails, there’s always the fallback, PI.  Passenger Y was arrested for Public Intoxication and everyones’ problems were solved.  The police didn’t have to worry about what to do with Passenger Y, and the local municipality stood to make a little money off of a PI citation.

Texas Penal Code § 49.02 is the PI statute, and it reads:

A person commits an offense if the person appears in a public place while intoxicated to the degree that the person may endanger the person or another.

Let’s look at Passenger Y’s situation.  Were they in a public place?  Yes, the side of a state highway would be considered a public place.

Were they intoxicated?  At the very least, they appeared to be intoxicated.  The officer attempted to do field sobriety tests.  There was no breath or blood work done however.

Now, was Passenger Y intoxicated to a degree that they were a danger to themselves or another?  That seems to be a pretty board range there.  A prosecutor could probably put forth a decent argument that anyone who’s intoxicated presents a danger to themselves.  And as Robert Guest notes, the Courts seem to agree with this line of thinking, citing two cases.

Where defendant was walking down the middle of the street in the middle of night, appeared glassy-eyed and unsteady on his feet, arrest for public intoxication in violation of Tex. Penal Code Ann. § 49.02(a) was proper. Williams v. State, 1997 Tex. App. LEXIS 3314 (Tex. App. Houston 14th Dist. June 26 1997).

And

A person commits the offense of public intoxication if that person appears in a public place while intoxicated to the degree that he may endanger himself or another; the danger need not be immediate, it is sufficient if the accused renders himself or others subject to potential danger. Null v. State, 1997 Tex. App. LEXIS 2646 (Tex. App. Houston 14th Dist. May 15 1997).

Potential danger?  Unless you’re a bubble boy, there is potential danger in just about every single action we take every day.  Just today, I could have slipped in the shower, spilled hot coffee on myself, and driven off the road into a tree, dying in a firey explosion.  And I’d be sober while doing all of that.

Was Passenger Y a danger while riding shotgun in the car?  Common sense would say no, but the courts would probably say yes.

Moving at the Speed of Smell

Clients are often unhappy with the speed, or lack thereof that their case moves at. I always tell them that the government moves at it’s own pace. And it’s usually slow.

Back in May, I sent an email to the Texas Department of Public Safety.

Today, I recieved an answer. No sorry it took so long to get back to you or any explanation. Nothing.

I suppose sometimes the government moving slow works out. I was able to type this post on my iPhone while I waited in line to get a traffic ticket taken care of.

The Ivory Tower is Crumbling

Remain calm. All is well!

If you’re a law prof, you better start stocking up on brandy snifters and patches for your tweed jackets.  Your days if living high on the hog (no law prof would ever actually use that expression) are coming to a close.  So says Indiana University law professor William Henderson.

In fact, Henderson even goes so far as to compare law schools and professors to General Motors in the 1970’s.  It’s not a bad comparison.  I grew up in a town where GM was one of the main employers, both white collar and blue collar.  Fortunately my town has a few other things going for it so it hasn’t completely turned into a wasteland.  Slowly but surely, there have been less and less GM jobs in town, and in state while Michigan collectively stuck it’s head in the sand and just somehow assumed things would get better.

It is one thing to acknowledge that we lack good answers–that part is forgivable.   But it is quite another to ignore or minimize the problem because, quite frankly, it really does not affect us personally.  All of this reminds me of my youth in Cleveland, Ohio during the 1970s and 80s.  Lots of my friends’ parents worked for General Motors, which offered high pay, amazing benefits, predictable hours, and long vacations.  No one else seemed to have it so good.   I remember thinking at the time that GM was both complacent and invincible.  It turned out that I was only half right.   So I worry about my own industry.  Do I have the mindset of a GM employee circa 1979?  God, I hope not.

I don’t know what law profs do all day, but in my mind, it’s a pretty sweet gig.  I was reading my alumni magazine and I saw that an associate professor I had for a couple classes has gotten tenure.  Her reward for making tenure was to go on a sabbatical with a trip to Europe to present a paper on some obscure topic.  Sign me up!

The crux of Professor Henderson’s piece is that law schools aren’t offering any solutions to the madness that is going on in the legal field today.  If anything, I’d argue that the law schools are making it worse.  There are too many law schools churning out too many lawyers; while tuition increases and the BigLaw business model is failing.  And what are the law professors doing to help remedy this situation?  It doesn’t look like they’re doing much.

On the other hand, the thought of sitting around all day drinking brandy and debating arcane legal topics sounds intriguing.  Does anyone know a school that needs a crim law professor?

When You Can’t Run, Use The Taser

Let’s say you’re the chief of police in a small town in…I don’t know…eastern New Mexico.  Just for fun, we’ll say the name of the town is Tucumcari.  What a funny name, sounds a lot like turmeric.  And let’s say that a local mother comes to the police station with her daughter because they are fighting over a cell phone.  After the mother has been at the station, presumably being chastised for her (apparent) lack of parenting ability, you discover the girl has run off.

Pop quiz, hot shot.  What do you do?

1. Tell the mom to go back home and work everything out.
2. Try to sit down with the girl and her mother, and see if they can be reasoned with.
3. Chase the girl down and shoot her in the face with a taser

If you answered “3″, congratulations!  You have what it takes to Chief of Police in Tucumcari, New Mexico; because that’s exactly what Chief of Police Roger Hatcher did in that very same situation.

Naturally, Chief Hatcher says he didn’t have a choice.

Hatcher said he returned to department headquarters and talked to Aikin, who had a bloodied lip and scratches from a fight.

Hatcher said he found the girl at George Molinas Park.

Hatcher said he got out of his vehicle, called to her and she ran in front of his patrol car across Monroe Street without looking for traffic.

Both were in a dead run when the Taser was fired, Hatcher said.

Hatcher said if he’d been able to grab her and put her on the ground, he would have done it instead of firing the Taser.

What kind of phyiscal fitness standards does the Tucumcari Police Department have?  It would appear that Chief Hatcher didn’t pass the “be able to outrun a 14 year old girl” requirement.

And what were the effects of the Less-Lethal® Taser on the 14 year old girl?

Akin said the dart entered her daughter’s skull, and she remains in pediatric intensive care after undergoing surgery Friday morning at University of New Mexico Hospital.

Hatcher reportedly tased Kailee once in the back and once in the head. She needed 18 staples and six stitches to close the wound.

I’m sure this will just be written off as a flesh wound.  Afterall, the girl made the mistake of running, she didn’t listen to The Big Man With The Badge (who couldn’t catch her).  She needed a little attitude adjustment, the 50,000 volt kind.  Sure, Chief Hatcher only did it because he was worried about her safety.  There’s nothing more safe than shooting electricity through someones head when they’re running.  It’s almost as safe as you can get.

Another example of the taser being used as an attitude adjuster.  Funny how Taser doesn’t mention this incident on their blog.