You tell me when this started to sound like a bad idea.

Back in 2004, Kenneth Daniels was representing a criminal defendant, Erica French, in Hardin County, Kentucky.  Erica, it turns out, had some information of value in another case.  The prosecutor in that case, Robert Stevens, had approached her about testifying in the other case.  Erica told Daniels that the conversation with Stevens had turned decidedly “personal.” 

This created some concerns for Daniels, and those concerns only deepened when Erica told him that Stevens had arranged to come to her house the next morning to review the defense lawyers’ cross-examination in the other case, in order to “prepare her to testify.”

Right.

Erica told Daniels that she was concerned that Stevens was going to make certain demands, and that if she didn’t give in to those demands, it was going to queer the deal in her own case.  Daniels then did two things.  The first was to assure Erica that her fears weren’t reasonable.  This turned out to be untrue, but, in the grand scheme of things, Daniels’ advice on this point was inconsequential.

That’s because the second thing he did was to install video equipment in Erica’s house, including a video camera set up in a vent in her bedroom.  He then told her to make sure she didn’t have sex with Stevens. 

The next day, Erica called Daniels to report about her visit from Stevens.  Turns out that she’d gotten everything on video.  But that part about making sure she didn’t have sex with Stevens?  Well… 

Daniels picked up the video from Erica, headed over to Stevens’ office to have a chat, and over the next few days also contacted the Attorney General’s office and the Kentucky Bar Association, and provided them a copy of the tape.

For his troubles, Daniels was indicted for video voyeurism, a felony in Kentucky and, later on, for intimidation, based on the claim that he tried to use the videotape to threaten Stevens.  He wound up entering a plea and going into a five-year diversion program.  A few months back, the Kentucky Supreme Court cut him a break:  it had suspended him for five years, but decided that if he got out of the diversion program earlier than that, it would reduce his suspension as well.  As long as it wasn’t reduced below three years.

And the prosecutor?  The one who’d used the power of his position to extract sex, which comes fairly close to some of the more progressive definitions of rape?  He lost his job, of course, was prosecuted for misdemeanor “official misconduct,” and was given a public reprimand by the Kentucky Supreme Court.

There’s a moral there somewhere.

I offered the county a deal one time with my appointed criminal cases:  I’d forego billing for the stuff I actually did, if they’d take the caps off and I got to charge them for all the time I spent sitting around waiting for something to happen.  Sadly, they turned it down, or I’d be writing this from Hawaii or some other paradise to which I’d long ago retired.

I was reminded of that as I was sitting in court yesterday afternoon.  I was waiting for my turn before the judge, but there were several sentencings ahead of me.  I wouldn’t have minded so much if the events ahead of me were pleas, like mine.  Those generally have a finite duration:  the prosecutor recites the deal, I say, yeah, that’s it, the judge goes through the guy’s rights, the client says he’s guilty, and it’s time to move on to the next case. 

Not so much with sentencing; like snowflakes, they came in myriad shapes and forms.  In this one, an attractive young lady lawyer felt compelled to share with the judge every detail of her client’s descent into the hell of drug addiction, and halting climb therefrom, a climb, the attorney assured the court, which would be aided by the strict monitoring that community control sanctions would assure.  As I listened to the lawyer regale the judge with her client’s litany of woe, I sensed a feeling very much like the one I get when the woman ahead of me in the grocery line has a bunch of coupons.  I found the lawyer’s presentation polished and articulate, and it was all I could do to keep from going up and strangling her with my bare hands, just to get things moving.

The second sentencing was shorter, and more amusing.  Another drug case — quelle surprise — and the defendant had been promised at the time of his plea that he’d get probation if he did some simple things, like start going to Narcotics Anonymous meetings and stay off of drugs.  Alas, that was asking too much.  What’s more, the defendant apparently subscribed to the theory that if one must fail, one should fail spectacularly:  with each answer to the judge’s questions, it became clear that the defendant not only had failed to abide by the judge’s instructions, but was supremely disinterested in doing so.  The judge tried his best to talk him back down off the ledge, to no avail.

A little while later, I ran into the attorney who’d handled the case, and we commiserated on the extent to which our clients will do their utmost to talk themselves into prison.  “The best part,” the lawyer told me, “is that as he’s being led away, the guy asked me to get his belongings from the back of the courtroom.  So I did.  Coat, keys, cigarettes… and a box of condoms.”

“Looks like you’re gonna have a fun afternoon,” I said. 

Speaking of criminal law, I’ve noticed that almost all of my posts lately have dealt with the subject.  There’s always been a pronounced tilt in that direction on this blog, but I usually have sprinkled in an occasional discussion of some aspect of civil law.  Haven’t done that in a while.

Which is surprising, considering I’m an expert on the subject.  At least, Lexis thinks so.  A couple months back, I got an email from them, saying that they were going to be offering a new feature — “Expert Commentary” — and they’d seen my blog and figured that I’d be perfect for the part.  Five commentaries, two to four pages each, each on a case involving some aspect of civil procedure or evidence.  They’d pay me three hundred dollars a pop, which, they acknowledged, was not market rate for the time it would take (then again, there’s not exactly a line forming outside my door of people wanting to pay me to write these blog posts), but, they assured me, the big thing wasn’t the money, it was the prestige of having people click on a particular case and seeing “Expert Commentary by Russ Bensing.”

Figuring that, along with the proverbial three-fifty, would get me a cup of the Caramel Frappucino at the nearest Starbucks, I went along with it.  For my first commentary, I picked Hayes v. Oakridge Home, a case on arbitration out of the 8th District.  (If you’ve got Lexis, click on the get document feature and use the cite 2008 Ohio 787.)  I put together a nice little piece explaining the law in this rapidly-developing area, little of which makes any sense, but it sure did after I got done with it.  I sent it off, and the guy at Lexis — I guess he’d be called my handler, if he worked for the DEA and I was his snitch — sent back an email telling me it was very well written and exactly what they were looking for.

So I sat back and waited for the phone to ring off the hook with people demanding my expertise.  A few weeks later, when it hadn’t, I decided to check out the Hayes decision on-line and see how my work had been handled.  Sure enough, there it was, just a few lines under the caption:  “Russ Bensing on Hayes v. Oakridge Homes and Enforcement of Contractual Arbitration Provisions,” in big bold print.

And in equally big bold print, a “($)” sign next to the “Expert Commentary” right above that.  Turns out that unless you’re one of those big law firms who have signed up for every database and feature that Lexis offers, to the point where they even come out and do your laundry once a week, you’re not going to be able to read my words of wisdom unless you pony up $50.

In fact, I can’t read my words of wisdom unless I want to shell out the money.  What’s worse, they edited the “teaser” — the couple of sentences you get to read for free — so that it doesn’t make any sense.

Fifty bucks was what I made for sitting around for an hour in court yesterday afternoon for my plea.  I think I’ll wait ’til my expert commentaries hit video.

Russ’ Excellent Adventure.  As I told you earlier this week, I spent yesterday morning in Cincinnati in oral argument before the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals.  Actually, it wasn’t “the morning”; it was about ten minutes.  I was one of ten defendants’ counsel sharing ninety minutes of oral argument about the events of the ten-week trial of the Outlaw Motorcycle Club on various RICO counts back in 2004.

Two other lawyers in my office tried the case, and they got me assigned the appeal.  Seemed like a good idea at the time, until I realized two things.  First, although I know a fair amount of constitutional law, I know very little Federal criminal law, especially about arcane subjects like the RICO statutes.  Second, the transcript, as mentioned, was 8,100 pages, and that isn’t even the half of it:  the appendix, which in Federal appeals comprises the transcript and all relevant documents, like the indictment, motions, journal entries, etc., came to 30,000 pages. 

This, in turn, produced a twin series of recurring nightmares over the course of my representation.  In the first, I would get a journal entry from the appeals court, before I’d even looked at the transcript, telling me my brief was due in 20 days, with no extensions permitted.  (A variation of the “didn’t study for the final and don’t know where it’s being held” dream.  Yes, I’ve had that one, too.)  The other was one in which I would do what I believed was sufficient research, and finally write the brief and send it off, only to get the government’s reply, which was rich with phrases like, “Defense counsel’s buffoon-like reliance on US v. Wilmot is misplaced, given that the case was specifically overruled by this court four years ago,” or “Defense counsel’s imbecilic insistence on an analysis of the RICO statutes which has been rejected by every court it has been presented to suggests that his brief serves no purpose other than to lay the foundation for a claim of ineffective assistance of appellate counsel.”

Of course, none of that materialized:  I got through the transcript, wrote a brief which apparently analyzed the appropriate issues in an appropriate fashion, and got up and gave an argument for which none of the judges felt compelled to laugh out loud, let alone throw vegetables at me.  Nightmares don’t usually come true. 

Except for that one about the test.

Boys and their toys.  I’ve always marveled about the contrast in police work between the suburbs and the city here in Cuyahoga County.  You’ll go to a pretrial on a rape case that happened in Cleveland, and the police report will be three pages long; a report on a shoplifting out of the suburbs will be four times that. 

I had a pretrial on a drug case earlier this week, out of North Olmsted, one of the western suburbs.  The detective was there to explain what had happened, and he led me through the chain of events, beginning with “complaints of drug activity at that address,” leading to a controlled buy of drugs, and shorly thereafter culminating in a raid conducted by the city’s SWAT team.  “SWAT team?” I said.  “What’d you need the SWAT team for?”  The detective assured me that they had a “formula” for deciding when to bring the SWAT team along, and my client was “off the charts.”

This was all over a controlled buy of sixty dollars worth of marijuana.  My client was 52 years old, had a fourth degree felony drug abuse in 1994, and an aggravated assault in 1980.

Guys, if you need a SWAT team for something like that, you probably shouldn’t have one.

Technology marches on.  I talked a few days ago about the Supreme Court’s decision on capital punishment in the Baze case, and Doug Berman’s Sentencing Law & Policy blog had an interesting alternative take on the decision: 

a majority of the Justices’ opinions (4 of the 7) cited to websites, and I counted a total of 13 references to website materials.  Among the cites, Justice Stevens’ referenced a forthcoming law review article now appearing only on SSRN, and two opinions cited to two distinct transcripts from legal proceedings that have been made widely available through on-line posting.

Needless to say, Ohio remains behind the curve in that respect; I’ve yet to see a decision, either from the Supreme Court or any of the appellate districts, which cites anything on the Internet.  In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if most judges’ understanding of how the Internet works paralleled that of Alaska Senator Ted Stevens: 

They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the Internet. And again, the Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It’s not a big truck. It’s a series of tubes. And if you don’t understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it’s going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.

That may change.  There are several judges at the 8th District who read this blog with some degree of regularity, and I ran into one of them the other day, who told me that they’d briefly discussed citing my blog in a recent opinion.

Apparently, everybody sobered up after that, but I’m getting those tubes ready just in case.

Travel day for yours truly; I’m off to Cincinnati for an oral argument before the 6th Circuit.  I’m representing one of fourteen defendants, members of the Outlaw Motorcycle Club, who were tried back in 2004 on various RICO, drug, and gun charges.  The trial took ten weeks, and resulted in an 8,100-page transcript.  Talk about justice delayed:  my client was sentenced to eight years in prison, and had spent four years in prison awaiting trial.  The trial took place, as noted, in 2004.  You do the math.

There are going to be 11 defendants at oral argument, sharing 90 minutes of time.  I’d suggested that we have just one lawyer do the argument, while the rest of us stood in the background and chanted, Greek-chorus-like, something appropriate, like “they’re not guilty,” or “no justice, no peace.”  Cooler heads prevailed.

Anyway, I don’t have time to do much blogging, so I’ll just toss out some random observations about Baze v. Reese, the US Supreme Court’s decision last week affirming lethal injection as a constitutional method of imposing the death penalty.  Not surprisingly, the 7-2 decision resulted in seven opinions from the nine judges:  a three-man plurality opinion, five concurrences, and one dissent.  The most curious of the opinions was probably Stephens’, in which he suggested that the death penalty was unconstitutional, but nonetheless concurred in the judgment. 

I’m opposed to the death penalty, although I have qualms about it.  I used to be morally opposed, but there is some recent research which suggests that capital punishment does have a deterrent effect.  (You can read a good article about the debate here.)  If it’s true that the death penalty saves lives, that puts its moral opponents in a quandary:  you’re actually arguing for a policy — the abolition of capital punishment — that will result in more deaths.

The possibility of executing an innocent man is certainly a factor — at last count, 128 people had been freed from death row upon determination that they were innocent — but to be blunt, there’s very little evidence that anyone who’s been executed since the death penalty was restored in 1976 was actually innocent.  What’s more, given the concept of residual doubt, which is applied at both the the trial and appellate levels, it’s hard to see that happening in the future.

My major problem with capital punishment is its distortive effects on the criminal law as a whole.  The penalty is so qualitatively different from everything else that it consumes far more attention than it otherwise might warrant, leading to changes changes in the law which have little effect on the death penalty, but great effect on other aspects of criminal law, even though those effects might not have been intended. 

For example, habeas corpus used to be a widely used mechanism to obtain relief from constitutional violations in state courts.  As a result of perceived “abuses” in the process, which resulted in capital defendants postponing their dates with the execution for a decade or more, Congress in 1996 passed the Anti-terrorism and Effect Death Penalty Act.  As anyone who does habeas nowadays can tell you, the AEDPA imposed such great restrictions on the use of habeas, and made the standard of review so deferential, that relief is almost impossible; a recent review of 1,946 non-capital habeas cases showed that 7 — count’em, 7 — had been granted.

A similar result arose from the use of life imprisonment without parole.  Originally, it had been proposed by opponents of capital punishment as an alternative to death.  It may have been effective in that regard; Gallup now shows that the public, when offered the choice between imposing death and imposing life imprisonment without parole, is fairly evenly split. 

Or it may not have been effective.  The authors of this Harvard study concluded that offering the penalty as an alternative had little consequence:  the frequency of death being imposed in states with LWOP was not any different from the frequency of it being imposed in states which didn’t offer that alternative.  What did happen, though, was that the number of people serving LWOP drastically increased.  Why?   Because once the penalty was adopted, legislatures applied it to a wide range of crimes, such child rapes, “third strike” laws, and so forth.  The net result was that the number of people serving LWOP has tripled since 1992; defendants who never would have been at risk of suffering a death sentence are now in prison for life.

Given the infrequency with which the penalty is imposed any more – only 42 people were executed in the US last year — I’m not sure the game’s worth the candle.

And there’s an element of unreality to it, too, which is captured by this portion of Stephens’ opinion in Baze, discussing the first of the three-drug “cocktail” used in executions:

Because it masks any outward sign of distress, pancuronium bromide creates a risk that the inmate will suffer excruciating pain before death occurs. There is a general understanding among veterinarians that the risk of pain is sufficiently serious that the use of the drug should be proscribed when an animal’s life is being terminated. As a result of this understanding among knowledgeable professionals, several States—including Kentucky—have enacted legislation prohibiting use of the drug in animal euthanasia.  It is unseemly—to say the least—that Kentucky may well kill petitioners using a drug that it would not permit to be used on their pets.

Actually, an advanced course.  LawProse.org is a web site run by Bryan Garner and dedicated to the better legal writing, and on getting you to pay Bryan Garner money to tell you how to do better legal writing.  Nothing wrong with that.  One of the interesting features of the site, is the Educational Videos, which features short excerpts from interviews with a wide variety of judges, including Supreme Court Justices, telling you what they do and don’t like.

Some of it is fairly banal.  A recurring theme is that judges have to wade through a lot of briefs, so you should make sure yours stands out a bit.  How?  Make sure they’re not badly written.  Gee, that’s helpful.  Actually, Clarence Thomas comes up with a somewhat interesting take on this:  if he sees a 20-page brief, that’s the one he’s going to pick up, rather than the one that maxes out the Court’s limit of 50 pages.  And some of it is contradictory.  Scalia says don’t bother writing a summary of your argument:  “I mean, why would I read the summary if I’m going to read the brief? Can you tell me why I should read it?”  But Thomas says that a summary is essential, because it’s a preview, “like, what’s going to be on TV next week.”

But Garner’s also posted a section on the web site which contains the complete interviews with eight current Supreme Court Justices.  (Souter declined the invitation.)  I haven’t gone through it all, but it makes for some interesting listening, discussing not only the justices’ views on briefs, but their own legal writing experiences.

One thing I got a kick out of was Scalia’s comment about typos in briefs.  “My goodness, if you can’t even proofread your brief, how careful can I assume you are” about the legal citations?

I’m a little more forgiving about that sort of stuff, but on the other hand…  A year ago, I took over an appeal to the Supreme Court in a criminal case.  The assignments of error the other lawyer had put together for the brief in the court of appeals were as follows:

I. The sentencing criterea imposed by the State of Ohio through Revised Code 2929. as interpreted in State v. Foster 109 Ohio St.3d 1 violates the Sixth Ammendmant of the Constitution of the United States.

II. The trial court erred in imposing the maximum consecutive sentence allowed upon the appellant, violating the constitution of the Sate of Ohio and the United States of America.

III. The trial court erred in allowing bail money, provided by the wife of the appellant to be applied to fines levied, constiuting an unlawful taking of property in violation of the Constitution of the United states and the State of Ohio.

Frankly, if I’d been the judge, I probably would have put the brief down at that point, too.

Oh, and if you’re wondering, this wasn’t an assigned appeal.  The lawyer had gotten in the low-to-mid five figures for this masterpiece.

I couldn’t get into the blog all day yesterday — but why I am telling you this, because you couldn’t, either — and so I come home last night to find an email from the hosting service telling me that they were “having issues” with their “upstream DNS Servers” and that my account “has probably gotten caught up in the upstream service DNS migration that took place yesterday which is not under our control.” 

The remedy for this, I was told, was to “update your Domain Name Servers (DNS) settings in your domain registration account.”  After that, I was advised to “leave a ticket in our Client Support Center” and that they would ”make sure that the domain propagation takes place immediately.”

This made as much sense to me as it does to you.   I won’t bore you further with the details, which involved several calls to Customer “Support,” and a lengthy if ultimately useless conversation with someone who, through a thick Indian accent, identified himself as “Steve.”  Still, I managed to do what I was supposed to, then sat back to await the propagation of my domain, which, somewhat unsettlingly, I found vaguely reminiscent of the “master of my domain” Seinfeld episode.  It was then that I learned that, for the blog hosting company, “immediately” meant “when we get around to it, probably within ten hours or so.” 

Well, at least they didn’t reach the levels of suckitude that AT&T has achieved, as I’ve lovingly chronicled here, here, and here.  Then again, that’s setting the bar pretty high; my dealings with the phone company have led me to conclude that they hire only those too incompetent or morally bereft to find employment as used car salesmen.

Needless to say, if I can’t get into my blog, I can’t write anything for it, so I don’t have a post for you today, other than this.  (And it won’t take a lot of time figuring out whether this should go in the “Rants” category, will it?)  You can read my post from yesterday, which you didn’t see anyway, on the Ohio Supreme Court’s decision on Wednesday on sex offender residency laws.  That’s right below this one. 

Actually, there were several significant decisions from that court last week, and even one from their counterparts in DC.  I’ll talk about that on Monday, and then other stuff during the week, including the possibility of a US Supreme Court decision on using dirty words.

On that last point, I certainly explored that territory fully last night.

See you next week.

You know that old Woody Allen line about how 90% of life is just showing up?  That’s particularly true if the place you’re supposed to show up is the Probation Department.  (more…)

A month ago, I blogged about the the two days I spent in trial defending “Jamie,” a 46-year-old transvestite accused of possessing a crackpipe, the nadir of what most observers had already concluded was an otherwise undistinguished legal career.  (If you can’t wait for my autobiography to come out, you can read about it here.)  The outcome of the case depended upon the jury believing Jamie’s denial that the crack pipe found at her feet belonged to her.  Apparently, in weighing the credibility of a drag queen against that of two police officers, the jury felt that the scales were decidedly tipped in favor of the police by virtue of Jamie’s twenty-six prior criminal convictions.  Who knew? (more…)

I’m not big on the idea of drug legalization.  I don’t buy into claims like this one, that we could get $31 billion in additional revenue simply by legalizing marijuana and taxing it.  I don’t buy into the idea that decriminalizing drugs will make them safer, or that it will get rid of the criminal element which deals them.  For those who think that legalization will result in regular commercial entities dealing with production and supply, two words:  products liability.  And the blunt fact is that a lot of people don’t do drugs simply because they’re illegal.  If anyone really believes that more people aren’t going to do crack and PCP and heroin if it’s legalized, they’re dreaming.

But lordy, sometimes this “war on drugs” stuff becomes so breathtakingly stupid that it makes my eyes bleed.  Like, courtesy of Drug War Rant, comes this story about a Texas 7th-grader who found himself on the wrong side of the front lines of that war:

Mr.  Ortiz said the family’s ordeal began Oct.  19, when his son picked up a bottle of hand sanitizer from the desk of his fifth-period reading teacher at Killian Middle School in Lewisville.  He rubbed the gel on his hands and smelled it.

Mr.  Ortiz said he believed the matter was over until Tuesday when he was served with a petition charging his son with delinquency for inhaling the hand sanitizer to “induce a condition of intoxication, hallucination and elation.”

You’ll be happy to know that prosecutors dropped the charges after deciding “that the common cleaning gel is not an abusive inhalant under the Texas Health and Safety Code.” 

If only it were all funny.  A little over a year ago, I blogged about a drug raid in Atlanta that resulted in the death of a 92-year-old woman.  She’d thought the SWAT team members who broke down her doors were burglars, and shot at them; they returned fire, killing her.  Six months later, two of the officers involved pled guilty to manslaughter and perjury; it turns out that they’d lied to get the search warrant, then planted drugs in the house after they’d killed Johnston.

This isn’t the only instance of a drug raid gone wrong; the Cato Institute has a nice map of what it terms “botched paramilitary raids,” going back over twenty years.  In fact, just a couple weeks ago Chesapeake, Virginia police did a drug raid on the home of Ryan Frederick on the basis of an informant’s tip that he was growing marijuana.  As the police were breaking down the door, Frederick, who’d been burglarized a week earlier, fired a gun, killing a police officer on the other side of the door.  He’s now been charged with first degree murder and simple possession of marijuana.  Simple possession of marijuana?  Yep.  Frederick, who has no prior criminal record, had three joints in the house.

The people over at the Drug Policy Alliance think they know the reason for all this.

They’re probably right.

Almost a year ago, I highlighted the case of Burdge v. Supervalu Holdings.  Burdge had shopped at one of the defendant’s stores, paid by credit card, and received a receipt which — the horror, the horror — contained the card’s expiration date, in violation of Ohio’s “credit card truncation” statute.  As I’d mentioned, Burdge was so outraged by this that he shopped at the same store a dozen more times, then sued them under the statute.

Turns out that Burdge and his lawyer had pulled the same scheme at numerous other stores.  The problem was that the statute required proof of actual damages, and Burdge had none.  The trial court in Supervalu threw out the lawsuit, just as courts had done in the previous cases.  This time, though, the 1st District also hit up Burdge and the lawyer for about $3,000 in sanctions, finding that the lawsuit and appeal were frivolous. 

In fact, as I also mentioned at the time, the apparent intent of the lawsuits was to use the statute to get retailers to pony up some money in order to avoid litigation.  In another case, a movie theatre had agreed to settle a case with the pair for $2,500; when the settlement check arrived a day late, the lawyer claimed the settlement was off, and demanded $5,000.  The defendant told the lawyer to get lost, the plaintiff sued, and the court threw it out, which was affirmed by the appellate court.  

Well, it appears that the lawyer has gotten himself a new client, as I’d suggested, but, as the 5th District’s decision last week in Stromp v. Fifth Third Bank indicates, is sticking to the same routine.  This time, it was a lawsuit against a tavern.  The parties agreed to settle for $5,500, with payment due by May 30, 2006.  The plaintiffs didn’t sign the agreement until May 31, but when payment wasn’t made until a week later, the lawyer said the settlement was off, and continued the litigation. 

The plaintiffs even continued it after the court ruled that the settlement was valid and should be enforced.  The trial court didn’t cotton to that, and ordered an award of over $10,000 in sanctions against the plaintiffs and their lawyer for pursuing the litigation after the settlement was ordered into effect.  The court of appeals affirmed.

Back in the Supervalu case, the concurring opinion noted

What is particularly disturbing about the contrived nature of this frivolous action, as discussed above, is that. . . an attorney, licensed to practice in this state and sworn as an Officer of the Court, would facilitate this type of exploitive litigation to the detriment of the defendant, the court system, and the practice of law in general.

Well, make mine a double.  Every time one of us files an idiot claim like this based upon some hypertechnical regulatory statute, or sues a school district because little Susie didn’t make the cheerleading squad, or comes up with some absurd theory of relief like “reckless and negligent use of a bathtub,” it makes the rest of us look like a bunch of cheap whores.  And, because it happens so damned often anymore, the public doesn’t need much convincing on that score. 

If you went to law school so that you could file bullshit cases like these, you went for the wrong reason.  And if the courts decide to start hitting you up in the pocketbook for it, well, sooner or later maybe you’ll learn your lesson from it.