Keep your government hands off my Medicare

That’s been my favorite line from these town hall meetings about health care reform.  The above was allegedly uttered by a gentleman in South Carolina to his Representative, Robert Inglis.

I had the opporuntity to attend the town hall meeting today with my Rep, Chet Edwards.  I admit I don’t know a whole lot about Chet Edwards, other than that he’s a Democrat who keeps getting reelected in a red part of a red state.  Even after he got redistricted to take Foot Hood away from him and to add College Station to his district, he still won.  So I don’t know if that means he’s really doing something right, or he just has a lot of dirt on people.  But since he’s a Democrat in a conservative part of Texas, he’s been getting some heat over this whole health care mess.

My plan was to attend the CLE today at the Brazos Center, and then slip on over to the town hall when the CLE ended.  My plans were thwarted when I found a divider between the CLE section and the town hall section of the Brazos Center.  By the time the CLE was down, the line to get in was backed out through the parking lot and into the street.  I wasn’t about to wait for that.

While waiting in my car for the 10 minutes it took to go 200 feet to get out of the parking lot, I got a pretty good look at the line.  It seemed to be representative of College Station.  Overwhelmingly white, and a mix between people under 25 and people over 60.  One younger guy was carrying a sign that said “No Forced Abortions.”  Another older gentleman had a sign that said “The same people who ran Hurricane Katrina now want to run your health care.”  I liked that one, although he could have worded it better.  And I’m going from memory, so he may have actually worded it better.

As I drove home, a thought regarding the health care reform hit me.  Maybe it’s a simple thought, but I’m a simple man.

One of the biggest complaints I hear from people in town is that they don’t want to pay for someone else’s heath care.  OK, I have had private health for four years now.  Let’s say, for example, I’ve paid a total of $3,000 in premiums.  I’ve only been to the doctor once in that time.  An unfortunate result of too much alcohol and poor depth perception.  I went to the walk in clinic, sat in the lobby for an hour, and spent another 45 minutes waiting in other various rooms.  I probably spent a total of 15 minutes getting my foot x-rayed and talking to the doctor about it.  My co-pay was $30.  So total, my insurer has taken $3,030 from me.

And let’s say I used $1,000 of resources, between the x-ray machine (which was all on computers and was pretty cool) the x-ray techs and the doctor; that’s probably not a terribly unreasonable estimate.  To keep the numbers simple, let us say I’ve cost them another $30 in administrative costs, utilities, etc.  So I’ve used a total of $1,030.  There’s still $2,000 left.  Now what’s happened with that money?  I haven’t gotten it back since it hasn’t been used.  As far as I know, my insurer hasn’t invested it and will be giving me a return.

So what has that $2,000 been used for?  I don’t know, maybe new rims for a doctor’s Porsche.  Or, more likely, it’s been used to pay for the health care of another person.  It seems to me that I’m still paying for someone else’s health care.

But I’m just a simple lawyer, so I could be wrong.

Slaves With White Collars

Tyler Durden: Man, I see in fight club the strongest and smartest men who’ve ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.

A post over at Above The Law about contract attorneys caught my eye the other day.  Big Debt, Small Law was featured as a new blog they liked, so I read what he had to say.

Holy crap!  I am ever thankful I have my job and not doing what this guy does.  He describes doing contract document review as a cross between a Dickensian sweatshop and 1984’s Ministry of Love. Lawis4losers notes that as bad as those kids who just took the bar exam have it trying to find a job, the job you take to try to pay off those student loans may be even worse.

At Paul Weiss, for example, they crammed 120 people into a basement room that NYC  fire code rated for 80. This was in 2005. Like steerage passengers on the Titanic, we labored in the bowels of the building, right alongside the boilers and HVAC equipment. Lacking air conditioning and adequate ventilation, many came down with colds that went untreated due to the lack of health insurance. A cockroach problem soon erupted due to the crumbs and food garbage strewn about the cellar floor, which was treated with multiple Raid roach fogger bombs. The morning after the exterminators finished, dead roaches littered our keyboards and even crawled, stunted but still living, from the floppy drives and servers!

We were paid $21 an hour, straight time, and required to work from 9 am to 11 pm seven days a week. Forbidden to use the firm’s lavish upstairs restrooms, they had all 120 of us split a pair of airplane sized-bathrooms that were on the Concourse level under the Rock Center, open to the public and a favorite bathing spot for the homeless. One affable homeless chap named “Bones” would use the lone toilet in there as a foot bidet, rinsing his diabetic ulcer in the excrement-caked shitpot and yelling “I’m in here motherfucker!”every time one of us coders needed to relieve himself. Most of us just went next door and used the Heartland Brewery’s bathroom (did I mention that restroom breaks of over six minutes had to be deducted from one’s timesheet? As a coder, bowel movements can quickly cut into the bottom line).

Paul Weiss also blocked the fire exits with box upon box of the corporate shit-paper that arrived daily by the truckload like grist to a mill. Had a fire broken out, we would no doubt have burned to death in a modern day Triangle Shirtwaist incident, engulfed in flames while helplessly beating on box-blocked doorways. To work there was to truly feel expendable, utterly worthless and really just downright sub-human. The partners should all be ashamed of themselves.

The glorious profession of law.  It sounds like the BigLaw motto should be “Abandon all hope ye who enter here.”    Lawis4losers goes on to describe the life of a contract attorney at another BigLaw firm.  And he rightly begins his post by telling anyone who’s starting law school in fall that this is a cautionary tale.  He points his guns at the law schools, the ABA, BigLaw, and comes out blazing.

Sadly, for most incoming One L’s that isn’t how this dreadful mistake will play out, despite propaganda to the contrary in those glossy admissions brochures. Instead, most will cold-send bales of resumes into a dead chasm of silence, eventually scrounging for document review temp-work at rates lower than a truck driver, bricklayer, or garbage man earns. Or there’s the “networking” farce, where you print reams of resumes on that creamy, ivory cotton-weave Staples resume paper and shove them in the face of every gray-haired loser at an alumni cocktail reception. I attended one of these once, and the first older-looking guy on the scene was gang-rushed and sent to the hospital as a horde of recent grads bum-rushed him with an avalanche of cover letters! I believe he was pronounced dead shortly thereafter, having choked on a peel-and-eat shrimp during the melee. I later learned he wasn’t even a lawyer, but instead a catering director merely there to inspect the buffet. Such are the risks one runs when overseeing events for desperate law school grads.  Just posting a craigslist ad for an entry-level lawyer is like strolling into Ethiopia with a box of Dunkin’ Dounuts and saying: “Hey, anyone here got the munchies?”

Bad as they are, these temp jobs (even with the recent plunge in rates and overtime) still pay far better than small ambulance-chaser firms, many of whom have cut salaries into the low 30s (annually) in this gruesome bear market. The supply of lawyers outstrips the number of available jobs by an absurd ratio, and this problem continues unabated since the ABA will accredit anyone who opens up a lawschool in the spare bay of his garage. Did you hear about Philly’s new “Drexel School of Law?” What the hell is a “Drexel,” anyway? Wasn’t he the younger brother of Screech on Saved by the Bell? And then there’s the infamous Thomas M. Cooley Law School in Michigan, who received accreditation for having more “O’s” in their name than any existing law school. But I digress.

Ouch.   I read both his entries (can’t wait for the next one) and several of the blogs he linked, which are now linked in my blogroll.  I especially enjoyed Exposing The Law School Scam.

I started this post with one of my favorite lines from Fight Club for a reason.  It sums up law school.  When you sign up, you’re promised a 95% placement rate and a starting salary to put you in the middle to upper-middle class of most cities.  And for those of you who are extra special, you get six-figures to create and push around endless volumes of paper.  But it’s all built on a house of cards.  We just need more people out there saying it.  I’m glad to see there’s now another voice out there.

Be All That You Can Be, In The Juarez Cartel

Even with President Obama having his summit in Mexico with Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Mexican President Felipe Calderón, most Americans just don’t fully understand how screwed up things are down at the border.  Heck, I really don’t understand and I live in a border state, albeit a good 6 hours from Mexico.

And while President Obama hangs out in Guadalajara, saying all the right things needed for the nightly news sound bites back home, the drug war continues to rage on in Juarez.  The news today?  A soldier from the US Army is accused of being a hitman for the Juarez Cartel.

A U.S. soldier arrested in connection with the killing of a Mexican drug cartel member in El Paso, Texas, allegedly worked as a hit man, court records say.

Pfc. Michael Jackson Apodaca, 18, was one of three men arrested Monday in connection with the shooting death of the mid-level drug cartel member who also worked as an informant for the United States, according to a complaint affidavit.

Apodaca joined the Army a year ago and worked as a crew member on a Patriot missile launcher, officials at Fort Bliss in El Paso told CNN.

“He was in the top of his class,” said Dave Jackson, his grandfather. “You talk to all his sergeants. He’s a good soldier. Now, before he went in (and joined the Army), he was in, he was in with a bad crowd.”

My first reaction was complete surprise.  Then after I thought about it for a minute, I thought to myself, “I’m surprised this hasn’t happened sooner.”  Now, lest you think I am some type of Army-hating, freedom hater, I assure you that isn’t the case.

There was an AP investigation/story a couple days ago which found more corruption among border agents. As a side note, the AP story I linked is worth reading.

An Associated Press investigation has found U.S. law officers who work the border are being charged with criminal corruption in numbers not seen before, as drug and immigrant smugglers use money and sometimes sex to buy protection, and internal investigators crack down.

Based on Freedom of Information Act requests, interviews with sentenced agents and a review of court records, the AP tallied corruption-related convictions against more than 80 enforcement officials at all levels — federal, state and local — since 2007, shortly after Mexican President Felipe Calderon declared war on the cartels that peddle up to $39 billion worth of drugs in the United States each year

The obvious question about the study is: are there more corruption law enforcement officials as the Drug War has gotten bloodier over the last few years, or has the US placed more of a priority on prosecuting these cases?

That’s one factor in my lack of surprise that the Juarez Cartel had someone in the Army.  The other factor, gang activity in the Army.  You can be a white supremacist or part of a street gang, it doesn’t matter.  If you want to go to Iraq, the Army will figure out a way to get you over there.

Combine those two things, border corruption and gangs in the Army, and it’s actually surprising this hasn’t happened sooner.

Fight Night in Beantown

One of the funniest things in all of sports is a baseball fight.  Mostly because no one ever actually fights.  Sure, there was the time that Nolan Ryan, the grizzled old veteran put a whoopin’ on young, snot-nosed punk Robin Ventura.  And when he was a Tiger, Kyle Farnsworth body-slammed someone on the Royals; which caused me to be disappointed when the Tigers traded him that year.  Then he came back in 2008 and gave up 12 earned runs in 16 innings.  That didn’t make me like him that much.

Last night’s “fight” between the Detroit Tigers and Boston Red Sox was a pretty good one.  To set the stage.  Two nights ago, Miguel Cabrera was plunked by Brad Penny in what looked to be an intentional pitch.  In return, Edwin Jackson hit Kevin Youkilis.  Later in the night, Brandon Inge got hit.  Three players hit in one game.

Then last night, Cabrera got hit again by Junichi Tazawa.  Now Tazawa didn’t look good at all last night.  His command was such that he could throw a ball toward Boston Harbor and miss the water.  But, when you hit the other team’s star player two times in two games, there’s going to be repercussions.  The next inning, Rick Porcello threw inside on Victor Martinez and then plunked Youkilis in the back.  Rather than calmly take his base, Youkilis flipped out, charged the mound, threw his helmet at Porcello and then ended up at the bottom of the pile when Porcello gave him a nice hip toss.

Complete bush league actions by Youkilis.  As a Tigers fan, I hate seeing Porcello in the middle of the pile.  The kid has got a million dollar arm and the last thing you want is him getting hurt in a fight.

I don’t believe that Porcello intended to hit Youkilis either.  It looked like a fastball that slipped out of his hand.  His body language as Youkilis is charging certainly isn’t a “bring it on” type of pose.  And, Avila looked shocked that Youkilis was charging, not an indication that he knew a beanball was coming.  If you’re a catcher, the last thing you want is the batter to actually make contact with the pitcher.  Your job is to grab him.

No matter what though, it was a good one last night.  Hopefully the Tigers can take the next two games and split the series.

Adding Insult to Injury

Back in March of this year, Derek Copp, a student at Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Michigan (Go Lakers!) sold 3.3 grams of marijuana to an undercover officer working with the West Michigan Enforcement Team and became another victim in the War on Drugs.  The WEMET was one of those multi-county drug teams that we in Texas have fortunately gotten rid of.

Now the police have made their buy, they know who Copp is.  He apparently doesn’t know that this new buyer is an undercover, what would be the best way to handle this?  Now, far be it from me to second-guess the infinte wisdom of our drug warriors, but here’s what I would do.  Get an arrest warrant, park an unmarked car in the parking lot, and wait for Copp to leave for class.  No fuss, no muss, right?

But, what’s the fun in that.  The WEMET must have been watching DEA on Spike TV and saw all the fun that the DEA officers had kicking down doors in Detroit.  So instead they staged a raid on his apartment.  On March 11, 2009 at around 9:00 pm, the WEMET comes in heavy.  Even though the officers planned to go in with guns blazing, the rest of the residents in the apartment complex were not evacuated or apparently even warned.

The police do the whole nine yards, they get to have their fun.  Kick in the door and shine a bright light on the kid.  When Copp raised his hands to shield his eyes from the light, Ottawa County Sheriff’s Deputy Ryan Huizenga fired one shot, hitting Copp in the chest.  Copp was unarmed and no guns were found in the apartment.

The shooting set off several protests at GVSU, along with protests at Michigan State and Michigan.  The protests at MSU and UM didn’t really surprise me, but GVSU is in rural, conservative law & order west Michigan.

Thankfully, Copp has seemly made a full recovery and has returned to classes.  He plead guilty to delivery of marijuana and received 18 months probation, and the chance to have his record expunged if he succesfully completes it.

Now, that part isn’t terribly interesting in the whole scheme of things.  Just another shooting in the War on Drugs, where the police have to kick down doors to rid a college campus of the dangerous scourge of marijuana.  What’s one more unarmed kid getting shot as long as it keeps people from getting high?  I’m sure there’s still people in west Michigan who believe Reefer Madness is a documentary.

The interesting part is what happened to Deputy Huizenga.  It seems that 99% of the time, the Sheriff (or Chief) dutifully sends the officer to desk duty for a few weeks and then issues a report saying “policy was followed” and that’s the end of it.  When I first read about the shooting back in March, I fully expected that to be the end result, that the deputy reacted the Copp’s sudden movement (caused the police crashing through his door) and that the deputy was justified to protect himself and his fellow officers.

But, I was wrong.  Hey, it happens.  Instead, Deputy Huizenga admitted he exercised a “lack of due caution” and plead guilty to reckless discharge of a firearm.  He was sentenced to six months probation, 80 hours of community service, and a $400 fine.  Copp had stated he supported the plea bargain agreement.  The Ottawa County Sheriff has reinstated Deputy Huizenga and he is back to his normal job on road patrol.

Maybe something positive can come out of this.  In a move that really surprised me, Judge Brad Knoll noted that the police bear some of the burden in causing this whole mess.

The judge said Wednesday that Huizenga is not the only one to blame for the shooting.

“Frankly, there is a degree of blame that could be spread around here,” Knoll said.

He noted Copp’s decision to sell marijuana and ignore drug laws, but also the practice of conducting nighttime drug raids. Knoll said the case offers “some cause to consider the advisability of nighttime drug raids” and said judges bear some responsibility as well when approving search warrants.

“I’m hoping we can all learn from this incident and be grateful something more serious didn’t happen,” he said.

Still, he said Huizenga ultimately has responsibility over his weapon.

“It was your gun, your bullet that struck Mr. Copp,” he said.

One could make a reasonable argument that this story has a happy ending, or at least as happy of an ending as you can get when the story involves the police shooting an unarmed college student.  Derek Copp is alive and will have the chance to get this cleared off his record.  Deputy Huizenga was actually forced to face the music, but happily (at least for him) he gets to keep his job.  Considering how many abuses of police power get written off as “proper policy”, the fact that he was brought up on charges is pretty amazing.

And in the end, the Drug War will rage on.  How many more Derek Copp’s will there be before we end this nonsense?

Always Look on the Bright Side of Life

There’s a lot of things wrong with the American justice system as it stands today.  This is a view of both people who are part of the system, and the general public.  Lawyers on our side of the bar see an increasingly pro-state mentality both from people and the government.  When soon to be Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor is introduced by Sentaor Chuck Schumer by him touting that she votes for the government a lot as a selling point, it’s easy to get frustrated.

“She has agreed with Republican colleagues 95 percent of the time,” Schumer said. “She has ruled for the government in 83 percent of immigration cases, against the immigration plaintiff. She has ruled for the government in 92 percent of criminal cases. She has denied race claims in 83 percent of the cases and has split evenly on employment cases between employer and employee.”

On the mysterious side of civil law, the attorneys in the class action lawsuit against Ford for their Explorers that rolled over walked away with $25 million.  Consumers got a coupon good for either $500 off a new Ford SUV or $300 off any other Ford vehicle.  Approximately one million consumers were part of the class.  To date, 75 coupons had been redeemed.  Not 750,000.  Not 75,000.  Not even 750.  75.

Which leads to my next question, why on earth am I not a class action plaintiff’s lawyer?

I do have a point here, in case you’re wondering.  And it’s this.  Japan is having it’s first jury trial in 60 years.  That’s a long time ago.  It’s not really an American style jury trial either.

Six jurors are working with three judges to decide a verdict in the case of 72-year-old Katsuyoshi Fujii, who has been charged with murder.

Until now Japanese trials have been decided by a panel of judges.

Some might argue the system has it’s benefits.

In the past the justice system in Japan has been notoriously secretive, with a system of judge-only trials and private police interrogations.

Criminal trials currently have a 99% conviction rate, and there are increasing concerns that the system of judge-only trials and private police interrogations leads to false confessions and the conviction of innocent people.

I’m sure prosecutors dream of the day they don’t have to bother with those pesky juries or worry about such silly things as “Miranda” and “the rights of the accused”.  Express-lane justice, that’s the dream.

This was a bit of news that surprised me.  We all know there’s plenty of countries out there that don’t offer their accused the right to a jury trial.  Places like North Korea, Cuba, China and other totalitarian regimes.   As an ignorant American, I would have just assumed that a first world country like Japan would have a jury system.  Reading about the jury system on Wikipedia was quite interesting.  In Canada, the accused only has the right to a jury trial if the punishment is greater than five years.  India and Israel do not have juries.  In Germany, lay people act with professional judges to decide the verdicts.

So no matter how bad we think we have it in the USA, no matter how pro-government the sentiment is, everyone accused of a crime still gets their day in court.  From a speeding ticket to capital murder.  Whether you’re a homeless guy living on the streets or the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, you (in theory) are all equal in the eyes of the law.  Whether or not you actually have that equality is another topic for another day.

Now, that is not to say that as criminal defense lawyers, we should just sit back and think that because we have it comparitively good in here, we should just roll with the punches.  Not at all.  As criminal defense lawyers, it’s our job to keep the government in check.  Even if the defendants in the US have more rights than most other countries in the world, that doesn’t mean that they can’t be ignored.  It’s up to us to never take this rights for granted and to make sure the rights of our clients are preserved.

You Know You’re Famous When…

You remember Kathryn Winkfein, right?  That 72 year-old great-grandmother who had the audacity to stand up to Travis County Deputy Constable Chris Bieze, your typical Big Man With A Badge (BMWAB).  I blogged about it here and here, complete with my own parody of The Little Old Lady From Pasadena.  Sure, she made YouTube and some of the local stations, but now she’s going to get the Colbert Bump.

I can’t get the video to embed, here’s the link.  I tried, WordPress doesn’t like to embed videos that aren’t YouTube or Google.

Yes, Stephen Colbert, the voice of reason in America takes on the Taser.