Wednesday Writs: Risk Management Edition
Alpine experts blow up an avalanche from an “Alouette” III in Germany, 2009. Photo by Bundesheer Fotos, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
WW 1: California has placed a moratorium on new hospice licensing after an audit found serious concerns with their operation. Hospice care used to be largely the work of charitable organizations but has become a huge business in recent years. Hospice care is intended for terminally ill patients with a life expectancy of less than six months, if their illness takes its expected course. A certification of such is required by a doctor before Medicare will pay. But some hospice companies are signing up non-terminal patients with promises of home nursing care, medical equipment, and even housekeeping, a practice which constitutes fraud and abuse which could total millions of dollars. Among the provisions of the bill is a prohibition on the practice of hospices paying recruiters for patient referrals.
WW 2: Minneapolis has hired a “risk management company” to study the police response to last year’s protests and riots in the wake of George Floyd’s death. Some say they are not confident about the firm’s ability to conduct an unbiased review; 7 of the 8 members of the review team are former law enforcement and the 8th was a firefighter.
WW 3: Alabama will use up to $400 million in Covid relief funds to build new prisons, after Governor Kay Ivy signed a bill approving the package. The funds are meant to fill in budget gaps, but the federal government has given states wide discretion on how to use the money.
WW 4: Trump has asked a court to make Twitter give him his account back, 10 months after the platform permanently banned him for tweets it said spurred the violence of January 6th.
WW 5: The FBI raided the headquarters of the NYPD Sergeants Benevolent Association, a police union currently under investigation. The head of the group, Ed Mullins, is embroiled in a feud with NYC Mayor di Blasio. It is unclear what the investigation is about or what the feds were looking for.
WW 6: An Ohio man who sued to make the hospital treat his Covid-19 with Ivermectin has died. While the man initially obtained a court order in his favor, the order was later overturned by the judge who noted the prescribing doctor had never met with the patient in person and had no admitting privileges at the hospital where the man was staying.
WW 7: The Supreme Court has rejected the most recent attempt to allow DC residents to elect congressional representatives. The lower court ruled against them, because they “don’t live in a state.” SCOTUS denied their appeal without explanation.
WW 8: A 96 year old German woman who worked as a secretary at a WWII concentration camp is free pending trial on 11,000 counts of accessory to murder. The woman skipped out on her first day of trial last week but was caught and detained for five days before being released again. She is next due in court on the 19th, where she will be tried as a juvenile; she was under 21 when she worked at the camp.
WW: 9: An appropriate Writs item for Spooky Month: How the Salem Witch Trials Influenced the American Legal System. The treatment of the accused was a horrifying primer in what not to do: No presumption of innocence, no representation, and more hearsay than you can shake a stake at. Also, “spectral evidence”, which is exactly what it sounds like.
WW1: We don’t have an aging population in the way that Japan or Italy does but this is going to continue as boomers age and a modern economy requires everyone to work. Obviously we don’t want the system being defrauded but until we hammer some additional coherence into the healthcare system the private sector will step in and bad actors will skim public money where they can get away with it.
WW8: I just don’t understand the point of this. By all accounts we aren’t talking about someone with any authority or who even participated in any killing. There’s nothing righteous about it.
WW9: To this day the Salem Witch trials are an inspiration to Catherine Lhamon and campus Title IX enforcers everywhere.Report
The thing about witch hunts, whatever the flavor of witch involved*, is that it’s not about the guilt or innocence of the accused, but the open display of righteousness of the accuser(s) and their enablers. Once you recognize that it’s a theater of the ego, the game is up.
*Be it a witch or those who otherwise offend the terminally woke.Report
In 2011, a German court decision expanded the list of people who should be charged and tried to basically anyone who ever worked at any of the camps in any capacity. A number of 95+ year-olds have been convicted since then.Report
I’m aware, and I think it’s immoral. Germany has owned its sins of the 20th century in a way that is hard to imagine another country ever doing (see, Japan). Having a handful of geriatrics die in prison over completely inconsequential action is IMO performative cruelty, not justice. Even if this level of scrutiny was justified it should have been done decades and decades ago. It’s totally unnecessary now and undermines the real work they’ve already done.Report
RE: WW8
We don’t have enough Na.zis for the system to prove it’s working. Ergo it needs to branch out to people who were close to them.
We occasionally have that issue with various other rare crimes.Report
I’m sure they will soon be holding trials for people who were Hitler Youth when they were in grade school.Report
WW5: Amazing, LE is raiding the guys house and DIDN’T kill his dogs (pitbulls even!)! Such restraint…Report
Earlier this week, the SCOTUS relisted three cases challenging the authority of the EPA to effectively regulate greenhouse cases. Relisted means that the cases will continue to be discussed at the Justices’ weekly conference where they decide which cases they will hear. All three cases are an invitation for the Court to reverse Massachusetts v EPA (2007), where they held that the Clean Air Act not only allows the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases, but requires them to do so.Report
WW6: A local judge entered a TRO requiring a hospital to administer Ivermectin to a patient on a ventilator, and then dissolved the TRO the next day when the hospital filed its appearance. On second thought, the judge found that TRO did not preserve the status quo, and that the hospital had not been given adequate notice and should be heard.
The patient had been described as having been on a ventilator for several weeks, the hospital had exhausted its course of treatment, and he had less than a 30% chance of survival. His wife-guardian said that her husband expressed a desire to use the drug, which they were familiar and comfortable with from their dog-breeding operations. They promised to sign liability waivers.
The hospital said his condition had stabilized and were concerned the treatment would cause organ failure (perhaps connected to the discovery of a cyst on his liver). The hospital also said that he no longer had an active viral infection, which might have been the most important factor if the hypothetical purpose of the drug is to act as an anti-viral agent (i.e., it was too late).
The prescribing doctor has a tele-medicine practice in the Chicago area, and has prescribed Ivermectin for dozens of people who had tested positive, mostly without ever seeing them. The attorney was from West Seneca, New York.Report
WW 7: Retrocession, or, if you’re feeling frisky, let’s break-up California into three states for your free Senators… while simultaneously changing the Reapportionment act of 1929 to the smallest state standard.
After that, let’s solve the border issue by moving the borders south…
You can sign-up for my substack at the link belowReport
During one of the peaks of drug cartel violence, there were rumors of the northern tier of Mexican states declaring independence and immediately asking the US to give them territorial status and occupy them to restore order. The business community leadership was supposedly behind it. At various points in US history, the request would probably have been honored.Report
In the 1980’s as Louisiana’s oil patch went through one of its market driven declines, we had a state senator give a floor speech where he suggested that Louisiana’s government budgetary woes could be ameliorated by Seceding and attacking the refineries in Houston. His logic went that if we did, the Army and Marine would have to rebuild all our roads as a necessary contingency of the invasion, and the state would somehow become eligible for billions in foreign aid.Report
Ah, the Mouse That Roared strategy :^)Report
Good way to shatter either your economy or your civilization.Report
This is one of those funny counterfactuals where imagining failed states asking for assistance would solicit a NO electorally… but “Empire, Baby” we’re fixing these failed states would elicit a YES.
With the exact same counterfactual results.
Bonus counterfactual: Team NO and Team YES would flip opposition purely on the posture.Report
WWW ?: No charges brought against shooters engaged in a running gun battle near downtown Chicago during rush hour, killing one and injuring several bystanders and shooting into multiple residences as the battle moved from car to a house one group fled into. Despite video of the incident, direct observations of the police and some of the strictest gun laws in the country:
“A police report reportedly stated Foxx’s office cited “mutual combatants” as a reason not to press charges. “Mutual combatants” is a phrase cops use to describe, for example, two people who agree to go outside a bar and fight. Police infamously used the concept as an excuse not to investigate the case of David Koschman, the young man who died in 2004 after being punched by a nephew of a former mayor.”
https://chicago.suntimes.com/2021/10/4/22709602/chicago-austin-shooting-gangs-no-charges-aldermen-editorialReport
Pretty sure the bystanders were not mutual combatants, and I would imagine the firearms charges would be pages long…Report
It’s a class one felony (aggravated discharge of a firearm) to discharge a firearm into a building from outside the building when one knows or reasonably should know the building is occupied. That’s four to fifteen years, and I stopped after reading the first type of aggravated discharge felony. People get charged for discharging firearms in urban, non-controlled settings all of the time because its inherently dangerous even if they are “just goofing” around.
Also, InMD’s link to Simple Justice highlighted that the handguns had switches that converted them into fully automatic. Maybe the feds will ride in.Report
Wait, you’re saying you don’t think they filled out the ATF forms and paid the tax?Report
I’d like to see a list of folks who aren’t being charged.
(If one is a nephew of a former mayor, for example.)Report
I don’t think so. Scott Greenfield’s always essential take is here:
https://blog.simplejustice.us/2021/10/06/chicagos-foxx-refuses-to-charge-mutual-combatants/Report
“Tough On Crime” is going to come back, good and hard.
We’re going to relearn things that our grandparents learned and our parents forgot.Report
I’d like to think we can do better. But will we? Not as long as the thought leaders are all in on woke solutions. Lack of sleep leads to terrible judgment.Report
AnarchoTyranny is going to end poorly.
Probably.Report
It will end poorly to the limited extent it is even tried. More likely it will be talked about enough to confirm to the normies that its adherents are dumb and insane and convince them that their grandparents were really onto something all along.Report
Unfortunately, I think you’re right. A fair amount of the gunplay here in Chicago is in white, relatively affluent areas. One thing they don’t like is bullets flying around the neighborhood.
That said, I think decades of police and prosecutorial laziness are showing here. It used to be the suspected offenders would be scooped up, slapped around, and turned over to the tender mercies of the judicial plea bargain system. Foxx is actually asking CPD to come up with some evidence she can use in court before she lets them get charged. The question is can she get the ship turned before she’s relieved of command.Report
Let’s be real though. Poorer black neighborhoods don’t want it either. Not in Chicago and not anywhere else.Report
I’d thought that gangs strongly tended to respect neighborhood borders?
Or is it just that there’s so much gun play that even the spill over is a lot?Report
That’s a good piece. Scott is usually pretty practical on these types of things. The rumor has long been that Foxx is angling to use this office as a step towards another office, possibly the Senate when Durbin retires, or at least somewhere in Washington. So her constituency would be some future sponsor, but seems like that had to have gone up in smoke with the Smollett fiasco.Report
Based on the linked report, why would those inside the house be charged? Sounds like they were confronted/attacked on the street, retreated to the house, were fired at, and returned fire.
How does that differ from self-defense/“castle doctrine”-style defenses?Report
The State does not necessarily need to disprove self-defense, certainly not to bring charges; it’s an issue that needs to be effectively raised by the accused and it sounds like nobody is cooperating. The related issue is that raising self-defense claims constitutes an admission that you did the act, but argues that under the circumstances the act was justified. The State’s biggest problem is that with multiple shooters, they may not be able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt any specific shooter committed murder. There is not a lot of incentive for any of the shooters to talk.
(Illinois castle doctrine applies when people have entered a dwelling or violently attempting to enter, so it may not apply here. Maybe the bullets are an entry.)Report
That makes sense. Thanks for the explanation.Report
It’s possible that NO ONE is talking. Not the shooters, not the witnesses, not the victims.Report
WW9: You’re saying that the Salem Witch Trials were the model for civil forfeiture?Report
Well done.Report
WW9: I thought that spectral evidence would involve using a spectroscope to analyze the elemental composition of some substance. It could be a legitimate thing.
Fun fact: Spectrum and specter are doublets, both derived from the Latin spectrum, meaning appearance or specter. Spectrum might be one of the best conserved words in the English language, ultimately being derived from the Proto Indo-European *spéḱtrom.Report