Sexting Cannot be a Crime

Unless burning down one's house without an insurance claim is. Unless killing one self is. Unless crashing one's care on purpose is. Why the ACLU is taking a complex privacy approach, is a mystery, unless it is to generate lawyer jobs.

When a Lawyer Does the Right Thing, I Admit It, and Express Approval

The French always lead culture. They said, Communism was dead in 1984, it was only five years later. They taught the English lawyer inscrutable lawyer language as a tool of power and profit. They had an Enlightenment, we fulfilled it in our American Revolution. Let's hope this is a harbinger of greater resistance to the enemies of our civilization.

Lessons of the Mentally Ill in Jails

Prison is inpatient treatment. The pretty good management of the mentally ill, constituting a third of all beds of jails, proves something. Inpatient care can be adequately provided, as it is in most urban jails, for a tenth the cost of hospitalization. The gold plating of inpatient care is to appease oppressive but worthless lawyer driven requirements of accreditation and to prevent second guessing in medmal litigation.

Second, the fact that prohibition of restrictive procedures impairs prison officials less than health care setting officials results in great strides in the reduction of the suicide rate in jails, but not in hospitals.

http://www.ncianet.org/suicideprevention/publications/prisonsuicide.pdf

Some of the same methods can be applied to prison murders and rapes, to markedly reduce them by the same percentage.

Government Goons Intimidate Grandmas Singing God Bless America

That is the Left method. The facts abandoned the Left 100 years ago. All they have for persuasion is force. This has an effect of pre-chilling future speech for the elderly frail patriots. Their organization should seek an injunction to prevent police intimidation at the next rally.

Alternative Explanations for the Low Crime Rate

1) Sentencing guidelines adopted by the federal and state governments incapacitated a larger fraction of the male population. The number of downward deviations from guidelines has not grown much. The making of guidelines discretionary for judges took place 5 years ago. It usually takes 10 years for a law to have its full impact. This factor should be assessed in 5 more years.

2) Obesity.

3) Video Addiction.

4) Marijuana consumption.

5) More sex, at a younger age.

Trial May Violate the Establishment Clause and Other Clauses

The adversary system violates the Establishment Clause. It comes from the disputation method of reaching some answer in Scholasticism. OK in 1270 AD, out of the question as an investigatory method today.

1) Imagine a Koran based jurisprudence. I read their hornbook. 90% of it is pretty good. Still, it would be appalling and unlawful to have legal procedures taken from there. There is a lot of church in the court, the architecture, the robes, the gavel, the high bench, the oaths, the standing upon judge entering the room, the pews, the stentorian tones, the high ceilings, the dressing up as if going to church on Sunday.

2) They got an answer, alright, but 100% of the time, it was incorrect by today's standards. There are no validity statistics to support this bonehead method. There are not even reliability (repeatability) statistics to support it.

3) Twelve strangers, using their gut feelings to detect the truth, will detect only likability, of the defendant, the witnesses, the lawyers, the judge's expressions of preference.

4) Rarity. Because over 95% of cases are settled by an agreement, the trial is a privilege of the rich. The trial, in practice, violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fifth Amendment for everyone coerced into a plea agreement.

5) To avoid the expense of a trial, the prosecution will use progressively coercive and intimidating tactics to get a plea agreement, even one completely unrelated to the original charge. Such coercion violates the presumption of innocence and subjects the defendant to extra-judicial punishment.

6) The person with the most experience in the court is the judge. He is prohibited from investigating for himself. Should he drive to the scene of the crime, just to get an idea, he will be impeached. This is so the lawyer gets its trial billing. The trial is therefore to generate income, not to arrive at any truth. The argument against inquisitorial judges is that they are biased in favor of the prosecution. They will relate better to police of their race, age, and sex. If evidence of such bias can be found, the judge should be impeached.

7) The jury brings the wisdom of the crowd. This benefit is completely negated by 1) excluding any juror with knowledge; 2) allowing open voting and debate after the first secret ballot, all subsequent votes reflecting the decision of the juror who is loudest, and the rest wanting only to go home. There should be only one secret jury vote.

Foresseability Reconsidered, but Distinguished Professor Remains Clueless

Speaking of David Owen, Carolina Distinguished Professor of Law, University of South Carolina School of Law. Most tort law professors are biased in favor of the plaintiff side, where they are supposed to be neutral source of learning for their students. Most tort law textbooks read like Mein Kampfs for the plaintiff bar.

I understand, foreseeability was an attempt to limit defendant liability, since a type of strict liability existed prior to its introduction. Problems.

1) Foreseeability has its origin in Scholasticism. It is a power of God to foresee the future and to be able to change it. It is a supernatural power and any mention of it in a legal utterance violates the Establishment Clause. Not even the Medieval Church believed, man could foresee accidents, only the modern lawyer.

2) The foreseeability of future accidents or injuries is like that of the winning lottery ticket in the Pick 5. If the professor believes defendants should foresee rare accidents, then he should provide the winning lottery numbers for tonight. He is more likely to get those correct than to foresee a car crash in the most dangerous intersection in the nation. I can foresee the sun will rise in the East because it has done so a million times before, without exception, meeting this criterion of being more frequent than 51% of the time. I can foresee that more than 50% of people who jump from the fourth floor will because that has happened in the past and has great repeatability.

3) The burden of proof in torts is to reach the preponderance of the evidence, namely 51% likely to be correct. It is impossible to meet that burden if the chance of having the accident is not above 51% likelihood. So if it can be shown that, under the same conditions, an accident will take place 50% of the time, but less than 51% if the time, the burden of proof is impossible to meet.

If Torts Replace Violence, Does Immunity Morally and Intellectually Justify Violence?

A criminal defendant was falsely convicted and sued the prosecutor for withholding exculpatory evidence. He admitted the immunity of prosecutors. However, he charged the supervisors negligently trained the prosecutors, an administrative function, no part of the duties of an officer of the court.

In an unanimous decision, the Supreme Court held training was all part of the acts of the office, and rejected any liability. Prosecutors therefore have absolute immunity.

This is an appalling injustice. These are absolutely incompetent government slackers who need liability to motivate an improvement in what they do. They fail to prosecute the overwhelming majority of crimes. When they decide to prosecute, there is an unknown but large fraction of innocence. If the prosecutor embarrasses the office, he is an at will employee. He will likely lose his job after a suitable face saving interval.

So this is the question. If torts liability replaces violence, does immunity morally and intellectually justify violence?

Answering Mike Farrell and the Extreme Death Penalty Abolitonist

Dissent gets zero tolerance on that blog. They will not post any comment even asking questions of the blogger. That is because the facts abandoned the left 100 years ago.

Only incapacitation justifies the death penalty. Farrell needs to come here to hear the problems with LWOP.

1) License to kill. All crime after the first murder have absolute immunity. The license is far superior to that of James Bond, always second guessed by politicians.

2) Dose-Response Curve. You cannot obstruct a treatment then claim it does not work.

3) Transportation. It kill three orders of magnitude more innocent people than the death penalty. By the abolitionist logic, all transportation should stop, including being a pedestrian which kills 2 orders of magnitude more innocents than the death penalty.

4) Illegality of deterrence. One may not punish a defendant for the speculative future crimes of unknown parties. That violates procedural due process rights to notice and to a fair hearing.

5) Punishment is a waste of time and expense. These folks have shown themselves to be incapable of learning from their beatings, their arrests, their accidents. Furthermore, punishment may come from the Bible, and violate the Establishment Clause.

6) Cruelty of LWOP and of the average death. Let prisoners choose to accurately assess which remedy is crueler. Most innocent people (90%) will have a rough, prolonged, agonizing, humiliating filled with painful but pointless medical procedures. The latter are caused by the threats of lawyers to sue the doctor who refuses to do them. Thank the lawyer for the painful death without dignity that awaits most of us. Why is the murderer entitled to get a perfectly painless version? Thank the rent seeking lawyer, again.

Targeted Killing Debate

The lawyer has granted national leaders immunity. It is OK to drop bombs on peasant weddings, perhaps by horrible mistake. However, it is unlawful to assassinate a leader seeking the eradication of one's nation. According to these collaborators, the killing of 7 million Germans is lawful, but the attempt on the life of Adolf Hitler would be unlawful if done when he was visiting Italy. It would infringe on the "sovereignty" of Italy.

Facebook Loving Criticism of Teacher is Protected Speech

The lawyer expert toward the bottom of the story says, threats are a different story.

Here is an analysis of a call to kill a Supreme Court Justice by Ann Coulter. It concludes that Supreme Court decisions require an imminence and physical likelihood before such threats can be prosecuted or even be considered unethical.

http://www.legalethicsforum.com/blog/2006/02/what_can_and_sh.html

That analysis applies to criminal prosecution and lawyer discipline. Whether it applies to school discipline is not clear. The Court wants to defer to educational authorities to maintain school discipline.

Federal Regulators Must Pay Legal Costs After Dismissal of Claim

Innocent defendants should use this case as a guide to deterring the federal government.

""The EEOC has presented the court with anecdotal evidence to show that some members of CRST's management occasionally violated CRST's anti-sexual harassment policy by failing to respond appropriately to sexual harassment in the workplace," wrote the judge in April. "However, the EEOC has not compiled the failings of CRST's managers in any meaningful way to show that CRST has a pattern or practice of tolerating sexual harassment in its workplace."

That was a "big finding," said Mathias. "Once the pattern and practice allegation was gone, you had 200 or so claims with nothing in common, no unifying characteristic."

The EEOC's argument, said Reade, "boils down to little more than bald assertions." The EEOC's litigation strategy, she added, "was untenable: CRST faced a continuously moving target of allegedly aggrieved persons, the risk of never-ending discovery and indefinite continuance of trial."

In an order last August, Reade dismissed the remaining claims of 67 women after finding the agency had "wholly abandoned its statutory duties" towards them by not conducting any investigation of their allegations.

In the fee application, Jenner said its attorneys and staff billed a total of 18,005.75 hours on the case and sought $7,121,569.25 at rates ranging from $151 to $825 per hour for this work. Simmons attorneys and support staff billed a total of 2,507.66 hours at rates ranging from $95 to $295 per hour and sought a total of $502,977.02 for their work.

Reade on Feb. 9 said several factors warranted a large award: The company's counsel successfully obtained a dismissal of the entire case; the case involved hundreds of allegedly aggrieved individuals and there was potentially massive liability to CRST.

She awarded the amount requested by Simmons for its work, but reduced Jenner's request to $3,501,394.63 after comparing the firm's rates to market rates prevailing in the local community. She also awarded reasonable out-of-pocket expenses totaling $463,071.25. In an earlier order, the court had granted CRST $92, 842.21 in costs."

Consider a Cross Claim Against the APA in any Mental Disability Claim

There is a duty among guideline makers to do no harm. If a set of diagnostic criteria is weak scientifically, and a lawsuit against an employer is filed, consider a cross claim against the negligent guideline maker, the APA.

1) This threat would make the APA more conservative in the sense of greater proof of validity for any new diagnosis.

2) It would deter the frivolous expansion of psychiatric diagnosis into normal but bad for you behavior. These no only stigmatize normal conduct unduly, it destroys the credibility of heavy duty, dangerous, psychiatric disorders.

3) Whatever the assets of the APA, they are dwarfed by the endowments of the parent universities employing the members of the DSM V committee.

Reasonable Stopping Distance and the Lawyer Dumbass

Traffic laws affect the entire population several hours a day. They have the most impact of any law subject. This is true even if one is walking. So, naturally, rules of the road are never covered in the core law school curriculum, and it is hard to find an elective offered.

Dumbass, here, is a lawyer term of art. It refers to someone with an IQ of 300, who enters law school, and emerges a mental cripple, from the criminal cult indoctrination that took place.

Simple example in traffic law. The reasonable stopping distance is always said to be a car length per 10 mph. That is true. Typical stopping distance from 60 MPH is about 120 feet, and one may assume the average American car used to be 20 feet long. However, this stop is from 60 mph to 0 mph.

In traffic, the car ahead may be traveling at 55 MPH, the car behind at 60 mph. The speed difference is 5 mph. It is not 60 MPH as it is with the full stop test of braking distance. The reasonable stopping distance required to prevent a collision is therefore roughly half a car length, or 10 feet. If it takes 45 feet to slow down from 60 to 55 mph, then the car ahead has traveled 40 feet. The real distance to avoid a collision is 5 to 10 feet.

The 6 car lengths are required to come to a full stop. Doing so in the passing lane of a highway is not just careless, reckless, and irresponsible. It is insane. One will be killed. Furthermore, the trucker trying to avoid a stopped car in the left lane will likely do something that will injure himself and many others driving around his truck.

The lawyer dumbass forgot something here, common sense. I have not been able to find this defense in a case of tailgating, aggressive driving, or careless driving.

Mother Country Has a Drop in Crime Rate

Whatever the causes, they are unknown, and cross national. I think we are talking about video and computer addiction, obesity epidemic, feminist, PC education.

Here .

"There was an unexpected 8% drop in crime recorded by the police in the 12 months to September with falls in burglary, robbery and violence despite the recession, according to the quarterly crime figures (pdf) published this morning.

The Home Office data also confirms that the murder rate in England and Wales has fallen (pdf) to a 20-year low, with 651 homicides in 2008/09 – 102 fewer than the previous year.

The latest British Crime Survey, based on people's experience of crime, also published today, shows that crime was broadly stable over the 12 months to September 2009 in England and Wales. However, it reports that the risk of becoming a victim of crime has fallen to a new historical low of 22%."

Neither Deterrence nor False Convictions are Valid Arguments For or Against the Death Penalty

The rate of innocence is not an argument against the death penalty. Anyone using it that way must stop using any form of transportation until the problem of accidental deaths in crashes has been "solved." We need a moratorium on cars, trucks, planes, subways, bicycling and walking. These kill 1000 times as many people as the death penalty, and 5000 times as many innocent people as the death penalty. These crashes kill 40,000 people who have committed no crime, without procedural due process, without trial. They made the mistake of driving over black ice. They are dispatched by crushing and slicing by metal edges emerging during the crash. There were over 10 times as many children executed by by vehicles, as they walked, as there were death penalties carried out.

No. The rate of innocence is being used as a pretext to abolish the death penalty. The abolitionists will use the slightest mistake or imperfection to try to shit the death penalty down. Therefore the use of the rate of innocence represents a form of bad faith. Bad faith gives moral justification to invalidate the advocate.

The rate of innocence does justify something else. Tort liability of the judge, and of the prosecutor to the defendant. If jury misconduct took place and it was not immediately reported openly, the jury should have tort liability. Let each of these careless parties carry liability insurance to cover their carelessness.

*****

In the deterrence argument, one executes one person to scare another, and to prevent that unknown other from murdering an unknown victim. It is unclear if the typical murderer calculates the odds of getting caught, of being found guilty, and of undergoing the death penalty. It is unknown, if the death penalty can have such an effect. The death penalty has been blocked and is too rare to generate the statistical power needed to answer the question of deterrence. See the discussion on the dose-response curve.

Assume, powerful deterrence. For example, every execution saves 10 murder victims. Executing the person to have an effect on another violates the procedural due process right of the defendant to a fair hearing. His life is being taken to benefit someone completely unrelated to the crime.

The Word, Reasonable. Christmas Greeting from the Supremacy, and Why this Holiday is so Important to the Lawyer, even the Non-Believer

The word reasonable is the central word of American jurisprudence. Does it carry its dictionary meaning? Is its meaning ever clearly delineated in law school? Does it refer to the behavior of someone with good common sense? The answer to those is, no. If any of these meanings were to be used, they would cause a mistrial. This commentary is addressed to the most atheistic, anti-religion lawyers possible.

Man fell from Eden. This Fall made his intellect subject to being misled by temptations, deadly sins, emotions, some very negative. So logic and intellect are not useful guides to moral decision making.

Reason has a specific meaning in the world of Scholasticism. St. Thomas Aquinas was its most prominent philosopher. Henry of Bratton was a student. He wrote the case book, from which English and American law emerged almost fully formed.

To those two, reason is the human faculty that perceives God. Thomas goes to a great length to show the New Testament is the sole, reliable guide to righteous, moral decisions.

In technical Scholasticist terminology, reasonable refers to conduct guided by the New Testament, a book about the life, thoughts, and acts of Jesus Christ.

The reasonable person is a fictitious character and must be fictitious. He is Jesus Christ. And his standards of due care and conduct violate the Establishment Clause of this secular nation. That illegality is the reason the word is never defined in law school, nor anywhere else legal.

Merry Christmas to the lawyers. You should celebrate this day because it holds a very special meaning to the lawyer.

Pharmaceutical Executive Speaks Out Against Animal Rights Terrorists

This is a moral duty. He has paid a high personal price.

Many patient direct action groups should be formed. These would be family members of patients who benefit from technology, including that tested on animals. They would bring the fight to the terrorists and all left wing enemies of clinical care. They would beat them, burn them out, then kill those who do not learn. These terrorists are threats to the survival of their loved ones. Killing them has full moral justification. It should be done during the commission of a terrorist act, to preserve a possible legal justification.

From USA Today, "CEOs may feel under attack like never before, but few have experienced it like Dan Vasella, CEO of Switzerland-based pharmaceutical giant Novartis (NVS).

This past summer, animal rights activists went to his hometown village and painted "murderer" on the church. A week later, they desecrated the graves of his sister and parents. Then they set fire to his Austrian vacation home. Most CEOs respond to loud criticism by staying quiet, but Vasella, 56, decided to go public and do media interviews and lobby for tougher law enforcement throughout Europe. He spoke to USA TODAY corporate management reporter Del Jones about what leaders should do when anger crosses the line. Following are excerpts edited for clarity and space.

Q: What do you get from confronting enemies? You're not going to change their minds.

A: You win public support. With that, you can achieve anything. Without public support, you cannot achieve anything.

Q: This Q&A makes no attempt to determine right and wrong in animal testing debate. But aren't you helping activists by giving them the soapbox they desire?

A: I don't believe so. It's my duty as a citizen to speak up when illegal actions take place. Suffering in silence doesn't help anybody. You have to stand up. You have to fight for something. If everyone remained silent, then the people who are violent would prevail.

Q: Other drug companies have not fought this so publicly. Aren't you putting a bull's-eye on Novartis?

A:No. If others duck to stay off the radar, that's a bad recipe.

Q: CEOs in a variety of industries have told me that they get anonymous threats through the mail and elsewhere. Should they go public?

A: The general advice that security departments give is: Don't respond, don't react, and we'll handle it. In the U.K., police are much more active than in continental Europe. There was a bomb case in the U.S. a few years ago, and the FBI became active, but that activity passes by when nobody dies. My advice to others is to be cool and react with logic, be prudent, take precautions, but do not panic and be afraid. Be willing to engage (with activists) if they have a point, if it's appropriate. We've engaged with Greenpeace and with Médecins Sans Frontières International (Doctors Without Borders). But sometimes their objective is to create fear and uncertainty, a terroristic attempt at psychological tension.

Q: Are CEOs wrong when they file a police report but stay quiet?

A: In many instances, that may be right, but I think there is also a line which one has to draw. It's a judgment call. It should be a deliberate decision and not an emotional one. In my case, people understood because what happened was so outrageous.

Q: If you were to do it over again, would you do anything differently?

A: I would go public earlier, immediately. We should have done more to engage politicians and the press in making them aware what was going on, because we need the public to understand.

Q: Has your response done anything to stop the behavior of your antagonists?

A: It's calm right now, but I don't think that they have changed in any way their fundamental attitude and actions. We have more support on the political side in continental Europe. Changing laws is a multiyear process, but we have never encountered so much support as now.

Q: Where do yet get your courage?

A: If I ever came home from school and said I felt unfairly treated by a teacher, my parents never said the teacher was right. They said: You have to stand up and defend yourself. You occasionally prevail. That gives strength inside, which not everyone had the luck to experience.

Q: If CEOs went more on the offensive, would they have to worry about the safety of themselves and family?

A: I don't. There was a period when I was more alert, a normal reaction. Now we are conducting our lives as we used to. Of course, there are security measures that have been taken, but you can never protect everything.

Q: If you were the leader of the animal rights group, what would you do differently to get your point across and cause change?

A:You put me in a difficult position to argue for them. Certainly, any criminal actions won't lead to success in the long term. The only way to proceed is to engage in dialogue."

Judge Rejects Necessity Defense of Killer of Abortion Doctor

Necessity sometimes can trump the Constitution. It was designed to save lives, and not to allow individuals to impose a policy change on their own. The judge may have gotten his additional evidence had the homicide taken place during the abortion of a viable fetus. The killer should have researched the law. No attorney could have advised him on setting up the defense of a homicide better.

From USA Today, " A judge ruled Tuesday that Kansas law doesn't allow a so-called "necessity defense" in the trial of a man charged with killing one of the nation's few late-term abortion providers.

The decision was another blow to lawyers for 51-year-old Scott Roeder, who has confessed to shooting Dr. George Tiller on May 31 and says it was necessary to save "unborn children." Roeder listened intently, at times twiddling his thumbs nervously under the defense table, as the judge gave a lengthy recitation of case precedents that mostly undermined that contention.

In his ruling, Judge Warren Wilbert cited a 1993 criminal trespassing case involving an abortion clinic in which the Kansas Supreme Court said that allowing a person's personal beliefs to justify criminal activity to stop a law-abiding citizen from exercising his rights would "not only lead to chaos but would be tantamount to sanctioning anarchy."

But he noted that the 1993 case dealt only with a property rights issue, whereas the case involving Roeder has elevated the argument to whether it is justified to take one life for another.

"That is certainly not a position I want to be in -- because I am not God," Wilbert said.

The judge said he has heard enough evidence to anticipate what might be presented at trial. He noted abortion is legal and told attorneys he found it difficult to consider the shooting of Tiller in the back of a church on a Sunday morning, with no overt act by Tiller himself, as an act spurred by an imminent threat of death or bodily harm."

Statute Drafting is Human Experimentation. New Statutes Should be Thoroughly Pilot Tested.

Every current and proposed statute should be proven safe and effective, or be void. Safe and effective is at the core of due process. So a law imposing the death penalty for witchcraft violates Fifth Amendment Due Process.

First, prove a harm from a crime, either physical, economic, or permanently emotional. Merely upsetting acts are protected by the First Amendment. Peeing in the street would be harmful, in generating cleanup costs, spreading disease, etc. Private prostitution produces mutual benefit, pleasure and earning. If the person objects to forced prostitution, that is covered by kidnapping and enslavement laws. Consent should remain a defense.

Second, prove that criminal sanctions reduce the rate and the cost of harm to a greater extent than the cost of enforcement, and apply the least restrictive sanction. If a torts approach can be shown to work, enable that in the statute. So if speeding must end, does a police car in the bushes reduce the average speed on the road, or does a speed camera, generating emailed fines to all speeders reduce the average speed? Prove that a reduction in the average speed results in a benefit, such as fewer accidents. Prove that the value of the accidents prevented exceeds that of the enforcement camera and that of the total of the fines collected.

Third, test each law, its enforcement methods, and unintended consequences in small jurisdictions. They apply to a state. If still effective and beneficial, then make the law federal or mandatory in every state by the usual constitutional methods.

Lastly, set out the dose-response curve. If a remedy is too small or weak, it does not work. If it is excessive, it becomes toxic. For example, I would boycott the shops on the road with the automatic speeding tickets. We want to find out that bankrupting effect when tried at the county level, and not after the remedy is national.