Wednesday Writs for 11/28

Em Carpenter

Em was one of those argumentative children who was sarcastically encouraged to become a lawyer, so she did. She is a proud life-long West Virginian, and, paradoxically, a liberal. In addition to writing about society, politics and culture, she enjoys cooking, podcasts, reading, and pretending to be a runner. She will correct your grammar. You can find her on Twitter.

Related Post Roulette

10 Responses

  1. jason says:

    L11: One of my colleagues had a student who claimed that her mother died as an excuse for missing class. The next semester he had the student’s mother in class (no, she wasn’t a zombie). I also had a student who claimed her husband was MIA in Iraq. I thought she was lying for several reasons, but I was lucky that I never had to confront her, as she dropped the class.Report

  2. PD Shaw says:

    L3: Because a program of posting bail that started in October is not going to have any statistically significant results in November. On average, one-third of people released either on bail or on their own recognizance will fail to appear or commit a crime within a year of release. BOJ pdf The rate is lower for women, so if the program partly targets women, then it will show better results than these.Report

    • PD Shaw in reply to PD Shaw says:

      I’m not opposed to reforming bail, but most of what gets discussed is misplaced. In Illinois, requirements to ensure that bail is affordable has tended to increase the numbers held without bail.Report

    • Oscar Gordon in reply to PD Shaw says:

      Related: Hacking The Law

      The first segment is about bail reform. It strikes me that the success of such reform needs to be targeted. You need to pick people who are just caught up in the system, who want to get clear of it.Report

  3. [L6] I wonder if this is a matter of the demographics catching up. I read that most law school graduates are now women. But I’m guessing most lawyers selected to argue before the Court are very senior and in with the boys club?Report

  4. Michael Cain says:

    L10: A couple months back my wife brought home what she thought was a package of frozen cooked white chicken meat. The packaging was entirely opaque. The picture showed an attractive cooked chicken dish. I was quite surprised to open the package and find raw meat. I eventually went over the packaging inch by inch. You could infer that the contents were uncooked from the preparation instructions, in extremely tiny print. Or you could find the word raw in text about an eighth-inch tall. The law is crazy only in the sense that it doesn’t require much clearer, larger labeling, including pictograms for the significant part of the population that is functionally illiterate.Report

  5. Saul Degraw says:

    How the rich and powerful make their plea deals:

    https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/article220097825.html

    It was far from the last time Epstein would receive VIP handling. Unlike other convicted sex offenders, Epstein didn’t face the kind of rough justice that child sex offenders do in Florida state prisons. Instead of being sent to state prison, Epstein was housed in a private wing of the Palm Beach County jail. And rather than having him sit in a cell most of the day, the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office allowed Epstein work release privileges, which enabled him to leave the jail six days a week, for 12 hours a day, to go to a comfortable office that Epstein had set up in West Palm Beach. This was granted despite explicit sheriff’s department rules stating that sex offenders don’t qualify for work release.

    Report

  6. Kolohe says:

    The L7 link does raise an interesting question (which I had thought had been answered by the courts but I guess not). How much can criminal investigations be commodified before it runs afoul of the confrontation clause. Like, I already thought that DNA testing was pretty much already done at big central facilities (either within a state or shared between states or a contractor that services several governmental and other clients), with numerous employees that individually, just handle one facet of the overall process.

    How many people involved the process of collected, processing and analyzing forensic data need to be on the hook for questioning in a court of law?Report

    • Em Carpenter in reply to Kolohe says:

      Enough to establish chain of custody, in my opinion. But I’ve never had multiple chemists work on the same testing of an item. I have had a lab supervisor who did not participate in the actual testing sign the lab report, though, and in those cases I called in the chemist and the supervisor.Report