“Our procedure has been always haunted by the ghost of the innocent man convicted.”

That observation was made by Judge Learned Hand in a case back in 1923.  Those of us in the criminal justice system keep that ghost at bay by reminding ourselves that the vast majority of accused criminals plead guilty, and that with all those constitutional protections, and the greater precision of forensic science technologies…  Well, yes, innocent people are convicted from time to time, but it can’t be very many.

Maybe, and maybe not.  A month ago, I wrote a post about 174 people who’d been imprisoned and had their convictions overturned when DNA evidence subsequently exonerated them.  I mentioned then that mistaken eyewitness identification was the  major factor in almost 75% of those wrongful convictions.  

Now, 174 cases isn’t a lot — we have over 2,000,000 people in prison right now — but there are an awful lot of cases where DNA evidence plays no part, despite what people who watch CSI might think.  How many cases have you had which were dependent solely on eyewitness testimony?  Gary Graham was executed in Texas back in 2000 based solely on the testimony of a witness who’d seen him for a few seconds from 40 feet away; prior to picking him out of a lineup, she’d been shown a picture of him alone.

I mentioned a month ago that while reforms of identification procedures were taking place elsewhere (even the Dallas County Prosecutor — Dallas – was instituting them), the pace of reform in Ohio ranged from glacial to non-existent.  I said at the time that the defense bar wasn’t even pushing any of this, and that this had to change.

Well, I’m going to do my small part for change.  Most of the people who read this blog are criminal attorneys (though not all, as I learned last week).  So, for those of you who do practice criminal law, some suggestions on what to do with the case that rests on identification:

First, become conversant with the proposed reforms in police procedures.  The Wisconsin Attorney General published a policy manual requiring certain procedures be followed, and the manual contains an excellent summary of the science behind the requirements.  At the least, it’ll give you some ideas for cross-examination and voir dire. 

On that subject, spend some time figuring out how you’re going to attack the identification, from pretrial on.  There’s some excellent stuff out there on that, like this article, which gives some tips on educating the jury about the identification process and its pitfalls.

While you’re educating the jury, don’t forget educate the judge.  You’re doing that for a couple of reasons.  First, you’re likely to file a motion to suppress the pretrial identification, and secondly, you’ll want to ask for jury instructions on the subject.  Filing a motion with a bit of heft to it — making the judge aware of the recent research and case law on the problems of misidentification — goes a long way toward that.  This amicus brief by the Center on Wrongful Convictions contains just about everything you’d want on those subjects.  You don’t have to use the whole thing (no duh), but check because it might contain stuff that’s especially helpful for you.  For example, did you know that there’s substantial research to show that the presence of a weapon during the crime significantly reduces the witness’ ability to make a correct identification?  It’s called “weapon focus,” and there’s even case law indicating that expert testimony on the subject is proper.

As for the motion to suppress, one case you’ll want to include is the 8th District’s decision in State v. Williams, which I discussed in detail here.  It’s one of the very few reversals of a trial court’s denial of a motion to suppress an ID, and contains an excellent analysis of the factors a judge should weigh.

in the event that you’ve got a client with money to spend, you might want to have him cough up some for expert testimony, and there are a number of resources available for that.  Keep in mind that, at least according to this study, if the prosecution gets their own expert, it’ll pretty much cancel out yours.  Also keep in mind that while the use of expert testimony on eyewitness identification has been sanctioned since 1985 in Ohio, the expert can only testify as to problems with eyewitness identification in general, rather than the problems with a particular witness.

And those jury instructions?  You should of course ask for the Telfaire instruction.  And yes, I know, in Ohio the question of whether to give the instruction is “a matter committed to the sound discretion of the trial court,” as is just about everything else anymore.  But if you’ve done a good job educating the judge, you’re likely to have him exercise discretion in your favor, and if he doesn’t and the right kind of case, you might have laid sufficient groundwork for getting an appellate court to agree that the discretion was abused.  In fact, don’t necessarily stop with a Telfaire instruction.  There’s abundant research which shows that “cross-racial” identifications are even more unreliable than ones where the suspect are of the same race as the person making the identification.  Here’s a case where the New Jersey Supreme Court reversed a robbery and rape conviction because the trial judge refused to give a charge on cross-racial identification.

Don’t be afraid to be bold.  One of the major problems here is that the legal standards for testing the reliability of identifications, particularly the key Supreme Court case of Manson v. Brathwaite, were established over thirty years ago, and the research since then has undercut much of the rationale for those standards.  (For example, one of Manson’s key criteria for determining reliability of the identification is the degree of confidence of the person making it; research, however, shows that’s virtually irrelevant in determining the accuracy of the identification.)  If you really want to be proactive, you might want to check out this law review article, which summarizes some of the problems with Manson and makes arguments for how the legal standards should evolve to what we now know about the identification process.  This isn’t pie-in-the-sky stuff.  Several courts have moved beyond Manson; the Georgia Supreme Court, for example, has directed that jurors no longer be instructed to consider an eyewitness’s confidence in evaluating the identification.

There’s a lot of stuff that needs to be done here.  It’s getting done in other states, and there’s no reason it can’t be done here in Ohio.

I go out to a local municipal court for the preliminary hearing on a murder case. It’s scheduled for 1:30, but it looks like several other things are scheduled for that time, too. The judge’s lunch for one; she’s heading out the door as I’m walking in. At 3:00, a rumor makes the rounds that she’s back. The bailiff assures me we’ll be starting in ten minutes.

He’s only off by a factor of four. At 3:40, they call the first case: a guy charged with firing a gun in the air.  It takes thirty-eight godawful minutes to try (not that I’m counting), the procedure as tedious as the verdict is predictable: guilty, and off to the slammer for 60 days.

Surely I’m next, I say; but no, now we have to hear the case of a guy who made two mistakes.  The first was going through a red light, the second was the cop who flagged him down an asshole.  (Surprisingly enough, the latter isn’t a crime; under the First Amendment, speech can’t be punished unless it constitutes “fighting words.” I did a brief on the issue a few years back, and you’d be amazed at what you can say to a cop without crossing that line.  My personal favorite was one where the defendant had said, “Just because you’ve got a fucking badge you think you can fuck with people” and “Fuck you and your gun, money talks so I’ll walk.”  Incidentally, the defendant was a woman.)  The appellate court will have to sort it all out, if it comes to that:  another twenty-five minutes, another guilty finding.

So finally it gets time for my case, only three hours and twenty minutes after it was scheduled to start. The prosecutor calls me up to talk with me. The detective on the case is sitting there giving me the fish eye.

“You know your guy made a statement,” the prosecutor tells me.

“Yeah. So what did he say?”

“Don’t you know?” chimes in the detective. “He’s your client. You talked to him, didn’t you?”

“Yeah,” I say sweetly, “but I wasn’t holding a rubber hose when I did.” I’m saddened by the fact that we aren’t going to be friends.

He turns out to be the first witness. He testifies that the dead guy was killed by a gunshot, and that it was a homicide.

“Objection, he’s not the coroner, he can’t testify to that.”

“He was at the autopsy,” the prosecutor replies.

“And that makes him a pathologist? If he watches the Space Shuttle take off, does that make him an astronaut?”

So the prosecutor starts to have the detective testify to what the witnesses told him, but I object, and fortunately the judge never got the memo about hearsay being admissible at a preliminary hearing. I’m not exactly surprised the witnesses aren’t there to tell us themselves what they saw.  According to the brief article in the paper, the dead man had been standing on a street corner with a bunch of other guys at 2:00 AM.  I don’t know what they were doing, but I’ll bet it wasn’t collecting for UNICEF.  Which is why the cops were so anxious to have my client talk to them; otherwise, all they had was the testimony of a bunch of dopers.  And that’s assuming they showed up at all.  I would’ve loved to have them here — the only real benefit of a prelim is to get a free shot at cross-examining the state’s witnesses — but if I couldn’t do that I sure as hell didn’t want to listen to somebody else telling me what they said.

Now the prosecutor reaches deep into his quiver for his sole remaining arrow:  my client’s statement.  He marks the statement and shows it to the cop.  When he gets to the part where he’s going to tell us what the defendant said, I object. “Basis?” asks the judge.

So I tell her. I talk about the well-established evidentiary rule, derived from the common law, that a confession cannot be introduced unless and until there is some independent evidence of the commission of a crime. The corpus delicti, “the body of the crime,” that’s what the rule is called, I tell her. I recount the lack of evidence so far, I regale her with the wholesale violations of my client’s rights that produced the reviled statement, I impress upon her the need to safeguard the defendant’s liberties, hoping with the forcefulness of my presentation to cover my argument’s only real weakness: 

It’s all complete, utter bullshit. The rule has no application in a preliminary hearing, nor does the question of the constitutional validity of the statement.

But the judge doesn’t know that, or at least isn’t sure. So after ten minutes of argument, she decides to take a recess to research the issue.

By this time, it’s 5:30. My client tells me, “You talk pretty good.” I say, “Yeah, so do you.  If you’d kept your mouth shut, you’d be walking out of here right now.”

Finally, the judge comes out; the prosecutor and I crowd around the bench, eagerly anticipating her ruling. Which is:

To continue the case until Monday morning.  By which time the prosecutor will have had the opportunity to get a grand jury indictment, thereby making the prelim moot.

That’s why I love my job. It gives me such a sense of accomplishment.

The big decision out of Washington last week, of course, was the Court’s fourth smackdown of the Bush administration’s policy on detainees.  In Hamdi v. Rumsfeld and Rasul v. Bush back in 2004, the Court held that US citizens detained on American soil had to be given a “meaningful opportunity” to challenge their detention, and that the detainees at Guantanamo Bay were entitled to some sort of due process in American courts.  Two years later, in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, the Court threw out the military tribunals that the administration had set up, holding that the president was required to consult with Congress on that.  Last week, in Boumediene v. Bush, the Court held that Congress couldn’t strip the Guantanamo detainees of habeas corpus rights.  SCOTUSBlog provides links to all the coverage and analysis you could want on the decision. 

Nothing out of Columbus save for a couple of disciplinary decisions, so we’ll move right into the court of appeals cases, although there’s not a whole lot there, either… (keep reading…)

There oughta be a law, Vol. 47.  Two scourges of American law in the past several decades — the idea that any bad result should be the subject of legislative remedy, and the unfortunate tendency to name those remedies after the victims of the bad results — have combined to produce the Megan Meier Cyberbullying Prevention Act.

Meier was the 13-year-old who committed suicide last year after a 16-year-old boy she’d befriended on the Internet made hateful remarks to her on her MySpace page.  Except, it turned out, there was no 16-year-old boy; as this article recounts, Megan’s correspondent was actually “the mother of a former friend of Megan’s who allegedly created a fictitious profile in order to gain Megan’s trust and learn what Megan was saying about her daughter.”  Megan’s understandably distressed parents called for “some sort of regulations out there to protect children,” and into the breach leapt Reps. Linda Sanchez (D-CA) and Kenny Hulshof (R-MO) with HR 6123, which provides

Whoever transmits in interstate or foreign commerce any communication, with the intent to coerce, intimidate, harass, or cause substantial emotional distress to a person, using electronic means to support severe, repeated, and hostile behavior, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.

“Communication” runs the gamut of the New Technology, including “email, instant messaging, blogs, websites, telephones, and text messages.” 

Now, we could spend some time discussing the First Amendment problems with this proposed legislation, but we really don’t have to, since it’s so obviously unconstitutional.  We could talk about how at least this would prevent tragedies similar to what happened to Megan and others, except as far as I can tell, there were no “others”; Megan’s case appears to be unique.  We could talk about how lucky we are that Congress has nothing else to do than this, having solved all the other problems bedeviling the country.  But it cost me $62.78 to fill up my Honda Accord the other morning, so we’re not going to talk about that, either.

You don’t write, you don’t call… If you do want to talk about dumb laws, there’s this story from China:

A draft law in Liaoning province makes it an obligation for adult children to contact or visit their parents regularly.

I wouldn’t have guessed that there’s a Jewish Mother lobby in the Chinese legislature.

Things I didn’t know, Vol. 48.  Another lawyer alerted me to RC 2921.38, which carries the alarming title, “Harassment with bodily substance.”  The statute provides that no one

with intent to harass, annoy, threaten, or alarm another person, shall cause or attempt to cause the other person to come into contact with blood, semen, urine, feces, or another bodily substance by throwing the bodily substance at the other person, by expelling the bodily substance upon the other person, or in any other manner.

The protected class includes only law enforcement or those in detention facilities, unless the perpetrator has the HIV virus, hepatitis, or tuberculosis, in which case everyone is covered — no pun intended – and it’s a third degree felony instead of a fifth degree felony.

Of course, that’s rather benign treatment.  A month ago, an HIV-positive man was sentenced to 35 years in prison in Texas for spitting on a police officer, on the theory that his saliva was a deadly weapon, despite the Center for Disease Control and Prevention finding that no one has ever contracted AIDS from saliva. 

(At which point, Walsh leads me back to the car, whispering “Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinato — er, Texas.”)

Okay, no more politics, I promise.  Well, after this… 

If I was John McCain, I would use every last dollar in my campaign spending account to buy up all the copies of this picture and make sure that no one ever saw it again.

See you on Monday. 

I’ve mentioned before that the 8th District is arguably the most 4th-Amendment-friendly appellate court in the state, and that view was further vindicated last week in State v. Alexander.  The police had received info from that old standby, the “confidential informant,” that Alexander was selling drugs out of his house.  They attempted to set up numerous controlled buys over several months, but, according to the CI, Alexander had to call them off because he never had the drugs the CI told the cops he’d agreed to sell.  The police also occasionally surveilled Alexander’s home, but saw nothing which indicated drug activity.

Finally, the cops monitored another conversation, in which the CI and Alexander agreed on a purchase.  Well, maybe it was Alexander.  It turns out the cop had never spoken to Alexander, and the person on the other end of the line didn’t identify himself.  The cop ventured his “opinion” at the hearing that it was Alexander, but that was based solely on the word of the CI.

Nonetheless, the cops set up a stakeout for where the buy was to take place, and sure enough, Alexander pulled into a driveway near the meeting place.  Without waiting for the drug deal to go down, the police immediately stopped Alexander, pulled him out of the car, and found a package of cocaine.  They used that to get a search warrant for a house, where they discovered additional drugs, scales, cash, and a gun.

The trial court tossed all that out, and the court of appeals affirmed.  The central issue, of course, was the legitimacy of the stop of Alexander’s car.  The court held that the stop wasn’t permissible, because previous efforts to purchase drugs hadn’t been successful, the police surveillance didn’t corroborate the CI’s allegations, and there was nothing other than the CI’s word that the guy he arranged the drug buy with was Alexander.  The court even determined that the good faith exception didn’t save the search warrant, for pretty much the same reasons.

In a way, the case presents one of the more maddening aspects of Fourth Amendment Law.  An advantage I have in writing about 8th District cases is that I know the judges, and I can say with confidence that a different trial court or a different appellate panel could have easily come up with a different result.  Frankly, even I’m a bit on the fence as to the stop of Alexander; if the police monitor a call in which someone who allegedly drives a gold Cadillac agrees to sell an informant drugs at a particular time and place, and at that particular time and place somebody pulls up in a gold Cadillac, I think a lot of judges would conclude that a police suspicion that a drug deal would go down went beyond an “inchoate hunch.”

On the other hand, this case, unlike so many others in this area, at least provides a guidepost for future police actions.  If there’s a lesson for the police to learn here, it’s a simple one:  wait until the deal goes down before making the bust.

If you skim over the 8th District’s decision in State v. Fears last week, you’re probably not going to find anything out of the ordinary.  The defendant had been convicted of gross sexual imposition, and he appealed, claiming that the court had erred in allowing in certain evidence, the prosecutor had committed misconduct in closing argument, and the judge had improperly sentenced him to the maximum of five years. 

None of that went anywhere.  The case stemmed from claims that the defendant had sexually abused his daughter, and the defendant had testified on direct about how he’d worked several jobs to support his kids, in an effort to show that he was a decent father.  The state cross-examined him about the number of children he had (by other women), what their birthdays were, and so forth, in an apparent attempt to show that he wasn’t.  The appellate court found the state’s questions were proper to rebut a “pertinent trait of character offered by the accused,” under Evid.R. 404.  And, of course, there was the old sanctuary of harmless error, the court noting that “there was overwhelming evidence of appellant’s guilt.”  And, of course, the sentence was within the statutory range, so that’s with that, especially given the judge’s finding about the defendant’s “lack of remorse.”

All well and good, except if you skpped over the first few paragraphs of the opinion, and didn’t check the docket, you wouldn’t have realized that the defendant had been tried on 31 counts of rape, 31 counts of kidnapping, and 12 counts of gross sexual imposition, all with sexually violent predator specifications.

Needless to say, I wasn’t at the trial, but if a jury comes back on a 74-count indictment and says “not guilty” 73 times, while there may be a number of adjectives which describe the state’s evidence, “overwhelming” isn’t one of them.  It doesn’t seem implausible to suggest that maybe the jury didn’t buy any of the state’s case, but decided it had to convict the defendant of something, so it picked the least serious charge.  It doesn’t seem implausible to suggest that the trial court decided to penalize the defendant for the charges the jury found him not guilty on — I’m not sure that “remorse” would be the logical reaction for someone who’d just been acquitted of 73 of 74 counts against him.  It doesn’t seem implausible that a court of appeals might take all this into account before deciding on the significance of any trial error.

Or it may be that Richard Fears just caught one immense break.  I had to run over to court between writing this post, and I happened to run into the lawyer who’d tried the case, who’s a good friend of mine.  I told him that one of his cases was going to make my blog, and, as might be expected, he thanked me profusely and told me that he’d immediately hire some new associates to take on all the new business that such a mention would generate.  He also told me that in addition to getting Mr. Fears off on all but one count, he’d gotten another case against the defendant — for, as you might have surmised, gross sexual imposition and kidnapping — dismissed for pre-indictment delay.  And, for his troubles, was rewarded with the defendant filing a complaint against him with the bar association.

So perhaps justice was done, as it so often is, by happenstance rather than intent.

Looks like there’ll be an uptick in the Cleveland body count.

Last July 4, Terrance Hough decided that he’d had enough of his next-door neighbors setting off fireworks.  So, after grabbing the .40 caliber semiautomatic he kept on a kitchen shelf, he marched next door to confront 24-year-old Jacob Feichtner.  Feichtner looked at Hough, incredulous.  “What are you going to do, shoot me?”

Wrong question.  Hough did, and then, as Feichtner lay on the ground, Hough stood over him and fired two more shots into him.  Two of Feichtner’s friends, Katherine Rosby and Bruce Anderson, were sitting with their backs to this, having mistaken the gunshots for fireworks.  Hough shot each of them twice in the back.  Hough then started to return to his house, but heard another woman screaming.  He turned, took a draw on her, holding the gun with both hands, and fired two shots.  One struck her fiance in the elbow as he pushed her out of the way, and another stuck her in the finger.

Those were the final shots in Hough’s gun.  He walked back into his house, leaving his last two victims wounded and Feichtner, Rosby, and Anderson dead.  He had used hollow-point bullets.  An ordinary one might have penetrated cleanly, but a hollow-point spreads on impact, trashing the internal organs of the victim as it moves through the body.

Oddly enough, Hough wasn’t some crazed street punk.  He was 36 years old, with no criminal record; in fact, he was a Cleveland firefighter.  That last factor led to one of the more bizarre excuses advanced in recent years for criminal behavior:  Hough’s conduct, some claimed, was due at least in part to his resentment at Cleveland’s residency restrictions, which require municipal employees to live within the city’s boundaries.

Now, there are certainly arguments to be advanced, both pro and con, on the issue of residency restrictions.  The Ohio legislature, never at a loss for things to do, chose to get into the act with the passage a couple years back of RC 9.481, prohibiting municipalities from imposing such requirements.  I’d venture my opinion on the subject, but I’ve got a dog in this fight:  I live in Westpark, one of the nicer areas of Cleveland — and yes, I realize that’s akin to saying, “one of Adam Sandler’s more thought-provoking movies” — which is also heavily populated by Cleveland policemen and firefighters seeking to satisfy those residency requirements.  Abolition of the requirements might lead to “blue flight,” resulting in a reduction in the value of my property to a figure more in line with what the average house in Cleveland fetches any more, which is something on the order of a top-of-the-scale toaster-oven.

So I won’t get into that.  I’ll just note the irony that on the same day the jury decided to spare Terrance Hough from the death penalty and instead sentenced him to life imprisonment without parole, the Cuyahoga County Court of Appeals decided that RC 9.481 was an unconstitutional infringement on home rule.

By the way, if you’re keeping score on this, of the appellate courts that have ruled on the issue, the 2nd District has upheld the statute, while the 3rd District, 6th District, 9th District, and now the 8th have struck it down.

If you’re in the latter districts, you might want to hold off on the fireworks.

About a year and a half ago, I detailed two 8th District decisions regarding Children & Family Services and sovereign immunity.  In the first case, discussed here, C&FS had been sued for leaving an abused child in custody of her mother, who shortly thereafter killed her.  The second, discussed here, involved a suit against C&FS for permitting a father to sexually abuse his three-year-old daughter during a supervised visitation.  In both cases, the trial court granted summary judgment to C&FS, and in both the 8th District reversed.  I didn’t have a lot of confidence in the appellate court’s analysis in either case.

Neither did the Supreme Court, apparently, because last week it reversed both.  In the first case, O’Toole v. Denihan, the court rejected the twin underpinnings of the lower court decision:  that C&FS, when notified of the abuse, had a duty to notify the police, and that the child endangering statute created civil cause of action against C&FS.  In the second, Rankin v. C&FS, the 8th District had held that liability arose under the “special relationship” exception to sovereign immunity.  As I’d pointed out, that exception predated the passage of the current sovereign immunity statutes, and Supreme Court ruled likewise, holding that only the express exceptions to immunity under the statute are applicable.  In both cases, the Court also held that the evidence was insufficient to show that the agency employees had acted recklessly.

The Court decided one other case on child abuse, Kraynak v. Youngstown Bd. of Ed., holding that the duty to report abuse under the former statute was to be determined under a subjective, not an objective, standard.  The statute’s since been amended to provide for an objective standard, so this case has only historical value.

On to the courts of appeals, where we finally have some 8th District cases to play with… (keep reading…)

Outtakes from the War on Drugs.  This article from Reason magazine’s online edition features a walk-down-memory-lane refresher course for us boomers of the best (i.e., most absurd) anti-drug commercials of the past several decades, including chucklers like these:

• Pee-Wee Herman Says No to Crack—and Jail Time. “Everyone wants to be cool,” the uber-ironic Saturday morning children’s show host admits in this ad made as part of a sentencing deal after Pee-Wee’s 1991 arrest for masturbating in a Florida movie theater. “But doing it with crack isn’t just wrong. It could be dead wrong.”

Videos and everything.  Sit back and watch as the waves of nostalgia come rolling in.

What Bill of Rights?  After a while, you just have to wonder.  First there’s this story out of Prince William County in Virginia:

Prince William County is moving to enact what legal specialists say are some of the toughest measures in the nation targeting illegal immigrants, including a provision that would direct police to check the residency status of anyone detained for breaking the law — whether shoplifting, speeding or riding a bicycle without a helmet.

Okay, maybe I can see that.  Immigration’s a problem in certain areas of the country.  Sure, there’s a Supreme Court case from back in 1983, Kolender v. Lawson, which struck down a California law requiring a person to provide “credible and reliable identification” if he was stopped by police, but that was based on the vagueness of the law — it didn’t define what “credible and reliable identification” was, and maybe the law in Prince William is a little clearer.  Still, it strikes me as a bit too akin to the “let me see your papers, please” request more commonly expected when crossing the border into Iron Curtain countries twenty-some years back.

But then I get to this:

D.C. Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier announced a military-style checkpoint yesterday to stop cars this weekend in a Northeast Washington neighborhood inundated by gun violence, saying it will help keep criminals out of the area.

Starting on Saturday, officers will check drivers’ identification and ask whether they have a “legitimate purpose” to be in the Trinidad area, such as going to a doctor or church or visiting friends or relatives. If not, the drivers will be turned away.

Now, understand something.  As you’ve probably figured out if you read my stuff with any regularity, I’m a pretty liberal guy, and on the continuum between rights and order, you’ll find me fairly far over toward the “rights” side.  Still, it is a continuum; there may be situations where you have to nudge the slider a little bit further toward the “order” side. 

But how could anybody believe that “military-style checkpoints” in civilian areas are consistent with any concept of individual liberty, and how did a person who does believe that get to be a chief of police of a major American city?

Texas justice.  Courtesy of the Volokh Conspiracy, this is my kind of discovery order. 

Breaking the rules.  Yeah, I know, the three rules here are (1) no politics, (2) civility, and (3) no politics, but this one was too good to pass by:

For sports fans at least, the most significant decision out of the US Supreme Court this past week might have been a case they decided not to hear. (keep reading…)