The drama queen’s house of cards has collapsed. According to police, Cook County Prosecutors, and the most credible information made public to date, the black, gay actor known as Jussie Smollett falsely reported the alleged racist, homophobic attack upon his person in late January of this year. Experience has taught me to be skeptical, if […]
Tyson Timbs looked like a typical small time drug dealer, though he made the predictable, unconvincing claim that he was busted with heroin in his Land Rover on the occasion of his very first offense. Timbs had a more credible claim that his Land Rover was purchased with money unrelated to criminal activity. He pled […]
I confess to harboring conflicting feelings pertaining to the jury demand in criminal cases. Our model of criminal justice has at its center the “doctrine” that conviction requires proof beyond reasonable doubt of a defendant’s guilt. This “doctrine” serves both the (wrongly accused) innocents and those among the guilty against whom the evidence may be […]
Laertes (son of the murdered Polonius in Shakespeare’s Hamlet) famously said of his father’s killer (Hamlet, by the way) that he would “cut his throat i’ the church.”¹ To Shakespeare’s audience, church was a place where God was certainly watching and where commission of a mortal sin could bring eternal consequences. Laertes didn’t care. And […]
The exchange of sexual favors for financial gain is prostitution. Those who engage in the practice are prostitutes or whores. According to Uncle Ned (See Uncle Ned’s Corner), there are three types of men. The first type doesn’t buy whores. The second type buys whores with their own money. The third type buys whores with […]
Two SCOTSI Opinions from last week involve a constriction or pruning of Article 1 Section 11 of the Indiana Constitution. Language within Section 11 closely mirrors Fourth Amendment language. Still, the SCOTSI has consciously chosen to give Section 11 an independent interpretation with respect to protection from unreasonable search and seizure. That independent interpretation sometimes […]
If Franz Kafka and Lewis Carroll somehow collaborated to draft traffic regulation statutes, their work product could not be any more chaotic, absurd, or unknowable than IC 9-21-5-11 pertaining to (temporary) worksite speed limits. My recent weekday road trip to the downstate funeral of a cousin forced me to traverse mile after mile after mile […]
This article is prompted by recent publicity about drunk driving plea agreements in Lake County, Indiana. I decided to write on the topic after reading in the July 20,2016 edition of the NWI Times of Lake County Prosecutor Bernard Carter’s new policy of no “reduction” plea agreements for drunk driving defendants. When I entered the […]