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 […]
Despite the pyrotechnics and other distractions of the week commencing Monday, July 2, 2018, no one who reads local news could have avoided the story of Indiana Attorney General Curtis Hill making an ass of himself (allegedly) at an end-of-session legislative party in Indy during the early morning hours of March 15th. “Legislative leaders” are […]
Let me begin by confirming my belief that “driving while Black” is an actual phenomenon, though perhaps less common than perceived by some. My belief is supported by the credible reports of Black clients and others describing traffic stops for nebulous cause. Since my evidence is anecdotal and not statistical, I cannot make any conclusions […]
The case is Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission decided June 4, 2018 in the SCOTUS. “Decided” may be too generous a description of a majority Opinion crafted to avoid the hard questions still lurking. Jack Phillips owned the mentioned Cakeshop during 2012 in a Denver suburb. At the time in question Colorado law […]
As discussed in my Article of February 20, 2018, law enforcement (FBI and local) failed the students and faculty of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School before the massacre of February 14, 2018. The failure was the (apparently systemic) turning of a blind eye and deaf ear toward early warnings of the threatening behavior of […]