Friday Roundup
The Kansas connection. I did a post on Monday on sex offender registration, but most lawyers know that registries aren't limited to those offenses. We have an arson registry in Ohio. Tennessee registers animal abusers, and Utah has one for white collar crimes.
The idea behind sex offender registration is that if you know that there's a convicted pedophile in your neighborhood, you'll be more protective of your children. Whether that does any good is another story; since 90% of child sex crimes are committed by someone known to the child, you're much better advised to protect your kids from your boyfriend or from Uncle Mark. Still, at least there's some logic there.
I'm not sure how that applies to other crimes. Knowing that your next door neighbor has a penchant for torturing animals would surely be helpful in deciding whether to let Rags and Muffin play outside, and you'd certainly move your portfolio to another brokerage if you knew that yours employed someone who'd previously swindled clients. But arson? What if I learn that the guy two doors down is on the list? What am I going to do, move? Make sure that he doesn't buy matches?
Kansas has decided to take this one step further, and has created a drug offender registry, which now includes 4,600 people. There's legislation pending to abolish it, primarily because it costs money and there's not a shred of data to indicate that it serves any purpose.
Hypothetically, I suppose that it does fit in with the model of ensuring an informed community; as a retired police chief who's lobbying against repeal testified, "If you're raising children in the neighborhood, it's good to know there is someone down the street convicted of selling or manufacturing, so maybe they won't send the kids to get candy there on Halloween."
Of course, there's a flip side to that, as a law professor pointed out: "Imagine I move to a new city and I don't know where to find drugs. Oh, I can just look up people on the registry!"
I think that reflects on the naiveté of law professors in general; my experience with drug dealers is that they're a bit circumspect about dealing with someone who calls them out of the blue and says, "Hey, I'm new in town, know where I can score some blow?" From what I've been told, in the absence of a drug registry in Ohio, prospective Cleveland customers might be better advised to check in with the waitstaff at several downtown drinking holes.
The four words every defense lawyer must learn. I ran into a defense lawyer I know the other day. Great guy, very personable, and after over a decade in practice in which he's been assigned hundreds of criminal cases, he'd just tried his first felony case to a jury. That's basically because his business model doesn't include trying cases; if he can't work out a deal, he'll withdraw. On this occasion, he'd tried to do that a week before trial, and the judge wouldn't let him off. So he had to try it, and it didn't go well.
He told me that his big revelation was that defendants shouldn't take the stand, which to anyone who's practiced criminal law for more than twelve months is as insightful as saying that people can be mean. He not only advised his client not to do that, he told me, but "I made sure to put that on the record."
"Why?" I asked. It went right over his head. Why would you tell the judge and everybody else about the confidential advice you'd given your client?
This isn't the worst offense of that nature. The worst is the Frye hearing, where the prosecutor tells the judge what the plea offer is, and the defense lawyer stands up and tells the judge that against his advice, the defendant declines the plea offer. You might as well stand up and say, "Judge, I know you don't like to have your time taken up by a trial where the defendant is obviously guilty, but I want you to know that my client's the asshole here, not me."
A lawyer told me about witnessing such an exchange in the courtroom of a judge, a former prosecutor not normally inclined toward concern for defendants. At the conclusion of the lawyer's statement, the judge said, "Okay, now that you've covered your ass, what about your client?"
Those four words? The client comes first.
There's frivolous lawsuits and there's ... well, California. I took a seminar in appellate law last October, and one of the things they taught was original actions -- writs of habeas corpus, mandamus, prohibition, procedendo, and quo warranto -- that can be filed in the appellate court. Nothing I learned suggested that I should expand my practice beyond the three or so of those I've filed over the years.
Apparently, there's an additional writ you can file in California: a verified petition for traditional writ of mandate. A couple months back, Claudia Ackley filed one seeking to order California to "recognize Sasquatch as a hominoid or primate (Giganto Horridus Hominoid and/or Gigantopithecus) type of species, also known as Bigfoot, and as an indigenous mammal living within the State of California."
Ackley also wants California to stop infringing on "the constitutional rights of Petitioner as it relates to her concerns regarding Sasquatch." She doesn't specify how California is doing this, but I suspect it might have something to do with the state declaring her to be a member of the species fruitus loopus. The lawsuit and Ackley's years-long pursuit of evidence of the existence of Sasquatch is lovingly, and hysterically, detailed in this post on Lowering the Bar. Definitely worth a read.
By far, the least surprising aspect of Ackley's suit is that it was filed pro se.
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