"I'm afraid that you don't have a constitutionally protected right to a lawyerplease, and in fact no such thing exists."
"You think you're so big, with your fancy spaces between words. Well look who's spewing gibberish once I take them away!"
I made this comment elsewhere, and I admit that I don't have a firm basis for it in the caselaw. But even under the nonsense reading, I don't think you can escape the conclusion that a 'lawyer dog' is a kind of lawyer. It might be an unavailable or nonexistent kind of lawyer, but it's a kind of lawyer. At which point I think the cops were obligated to respond to it as such: "We can't get you a 'lawyer dog', there's no such thing," rather than simply ignoring it.
4: I vaguely recall a similar case in which a suspect requested an "honest lawyer".
4 seems right to me. Also I want lawyer dogs to be an actual thing.
May it please the Court, woof woof woof woof woof. Woof.
On the internet, no one knows you're not being the change.
10: Oh, honey, we're all emotional support lawyers. Some of us are better at it than others, but that's a big part of the job.
Surely lawyer dogs must exist outside of New Yorker cartoons and 1970s Disney movies.
What's weird is calling out the "lawyer dog" bit. That sentence is enough of a mess that a court shouldn't have any trouble finding that it's not an unambiguous request for counsel without going there. It's basically "if you're determined to believe I'm guilty, then I want a lawyer," which leaves a motivated court considerable room to interpret.
In the criminal justice system, dogs are represented by two separate but equally important packs: the crime dogs who investigate crimes and the lawyer dogs who prosecute the offenders.
Already cast: McGruff
Open call: lawyer dog
13: If a biscuit lawyer exists, I want one.
15: Not enough ambiguity.
I want a lawyer biscuit if one exists.
" I don't think you can escape the conclusion that a 'lawyer dog' is a kind of lawyer"
A) I love this sentence
B) surely a lawyer dog is a sort of _dog_? Bred either to assist lawyers (cf German shepherd dog) or to hunt them (cf. bird dog, deer hound).
An upward-facing latch on a watertight door.
13: that was my reaction, too, and in fact I think that this opinion doesn't really turn on the phrase "lawyer dog" at all--it turns on the fact that defendant's "demand" was couched as a conditional. It's pretty clear from the brief discussion and the precedent he relies on that if the defendant had said "if y'all think I did it ... why don't you just give me a lawyer," this judge would have arrived at the same conclusion (I don't know enough about this area of law to know whether that outcome is right or not; certainly it's stupid, but that doesn't mean it's wrong). But that if anything makes it worse, because pretending to think that the defendant was actually talking about a "lawyer dog" is purely gratuitous.
13, 22: As not a lawyer, you lawyers sound completely insane. He clearly means that he wants a lawyer if they are serious about him having committed a crime.
Oh, maybe I see what you mean. They're just questioning him. They're collecting evidence, so the conditional nature of the request is the problem. Not that there's a lack of clarity in what he meant.
If a biscuit lawyer exists, I want one.
They totally exist. Biscuit law is a surprisingly prominent part of English tax jurisprudence.
23: But you have to remember that much of criminal procedure consists of constructing very thin justifications for why constitutional rights can't get in the way of imprisoning people who stupidly incriminate themselves. Or at least that was my impression when I took crim law in 1989 and I doubt that it's gotten more defendant-friendly in all the years of Republican courts since then.
The greatness of 9, just to be explicit, is amplified ten times by the fact that lk didn't settle for the more obvious joke.
Aren't the New Orleans police sort of famously shitty, like cops-as-paid-assassins-shitty?
When I lived in Louisiana I was more afraid of the police than I was the bad guys and I look like a white republican.
When I lived in Louisiana I was more afraid of the police than I was the bad guys and I look like a white republican.
Just remembered Suspect Device by Greg Peters. Sad now.
30-31: I once spent a night in the Orleans Parish Prison.
I was trying to photograph someone being abused by cops -- this was decades ago, long before that sort of photography became fashionable. I ended up cuffed to the guy that I was photographing.
The brother of the guy being abused also got arrested after he identified himself and asked the cops where he needed to go to make his brother's bail.
Everyone local that I talked to about this had a story about how they or someone they knew had been falsely arrested.
When my father (a college professor) told one of his graduate classes in Baltimore my story, a student came up to him afterward and said, "Yeah, that happened to me too."
When I got out, I generally raised hell, and was on the local evening news, which was apparently picked up by CNN. The cop (for ostensibly unrelated reasons) had been kicked off the force by the time I went to trial.
Internal affairs found the cop guilty of something like "discourtesy." There was some heavier charge that they felt I hadn't proved, and the internal affairs guy told me I should be grateful that there was any finding in my favor at all.
I ended up signing a release promising not to sue, and they dropped the charges. I was pissed, but my lawyer told me that if you spend a month in jail in New Orleans on fraudulent charges, you can recover a couple of thousand bucks. The suit that I signed away was worthless.
Since there were two other witness-cops, he also told me he couldn't guarantee that I wouldn't be convicted.
The charge was great: "Interfering with police." It's true -- they would've beat the hell out of that guy if I hadn't been there with my camera.
Everybody involved was white, and it was the first time in my life I really internalized how privileged I was. They didn't even break my camera! (Though I never actually took an incriminating picture.)
A black guy, or even a white guy less media- and legal-savvy than me, would have had a very different outcome.
My dad was a judge, so I didn't really have to wait for adulthood to realize that.
15 I'll let you know if I change careers
32 is the objectively correct attitude in nearly every place I have lived. Which is not to say there is a high likelihood of the police messing up you life, just that it is the larger of two small probabilities.
On topic because it's more weird lawyer tricks: Charley, if you're around, any thought on the current goings-on at Guantanamo?
wow! such client! very bail! much innocent! amaze!
41 After 8.5 years without missing DC a single day, I'll admit that I wish I could drop in on Judge Lamberth's courtroom tomorrow morning.
We call it cookie law.
A-and they CALL it - cookie LA-A-A-AW...
But seriously, he said "lawyer, dawg. "Lawyer dog" is a (willful? probably) mistranscription of what he said, and shouldn't be the basis for any analysis.
(I don't know enough about this area of law to know whether that outcome is right or not; certainly it's stupid, but that doesn't mean it's wrong).
I dont know if that outcome is consistent with and compelled by existing precedent, but I feel comfortable saying it's wrong.
45 if it's not willful it's illiterate.
If such can be said of the vernacular.
45: Southern Law Enforcement Dawg with relevant social commentary.
I think lawyers could use dogs as paralegal aides in the early stages of criminal defense representation. The dog could carry in a card that says, "You'll be much better off if you stop talking."
As pointed out elsewhere, this basically means any non-English speaker has no rights if the police don't (or don't want to) understand.
He asked for an abogado! Must be one of those privileged millennials, probably wants it on toast too- well, we feed all prisoners the same thing, smartass.
|| Holy shit! I'm on the HealthCare exchange right now because my "provider has withdrawn from the market" and the cheapest plan costs 74% more than what I am currently paying.
That's an extra $500 a month out of my pocket for crap coverage. I blame Trump, but I also blame Obama. |>
Very relevant to the thread:
7 Johnson has the chutzpah to compare the sociopathic rantings recited above to the work of Johnny Cash and Bob Marley. ECF 336-1 at 2. The government welcomes this comparison, as it illuminates the distinction between art, on the one hand, and autobiographical gang propaganda, sporadically set to a drum track, on the other.
Context:
Motion to exclude the rap videos Note that the Johnny Cash and Bob Marley references come from an opinion cited in the motion not original to the motion.
Government response (includes footnote above).
Also, what the fuck is the difference to me between and HMO and whatever isn't an HMO? Why am I even supposed to have to know that?
HMO is shittier and cheaper, except in California.
Also Osama Bin Laden (or someone in the compound anyway) was a Steam user and had downloaded Counterstrike...
HMO means the network is more tightly restricted.
Don't forget to look at gold plans, there's a weird side affect where in a lot of places the gold plans are now cheaper than the silver ones.
Make new plans, keep the old.
One is silver and the other gold.
Don't forget to look at gold plans, there's a weird side affect where in a lot of places the gold plans are now cheaper than the silver ones.
Dude, I'm so bronze. Silver and gold are more expensive than my rent.
61: As long as you've checked your price, not just sticker price. It has to do with interaction with the subsidy.
My employer-provided health insurance (counting the employer's portion and my own) is more than my mortgage if you don't include property taxes. It's been that way since before Obama was president.
61: As long as you've checked your price, not just sticker price. It has to do with interaction with the subsidy.
I am currently funemployed self-employed, so I have no idea how much money I'm going to make next year. The subsidy is providing a lot of incentive to keep it low.
And the deductible and copays provide a lot of incentive not to actually use the health care services we are paying for. I'll continue avoiding the doctor and purchasing grey-market meds over the internet, thank you very much.
Speaking of the authoritative allocation of values, I think the new Republican tax plan would save me enough for a summer vacation somewhere nice. Or, if I took the family, somewhere at least nicer than Nebraska.
We'd have to drive, of course. Not enough to pay for plane tickets.
|| Gothamist writers vote to unionize, billionaire shuts down the company. Christ, what an asshole. |>
I'm pretty sure that's illegal in some form- you can't fire employees for voting to unionize, but shutting down the whole company to lay everyone off may be a loophole?
I'm pretty sure that's illegal in some form
I'm sure Attorney General Sessions will get right on it.
67: God dammit, I am sick of shitty/crazy billionaires.
I want to start a disruptive guillotine-blade-sharpening business and see if I can get VC funding for it.
70.2: Repubs already on it. Gonna smack those guys where it hurts with reductions in corporate, pass-through, and estate taxes. Thank god the WWC spoke so clearly last election.
Is there any meaningful way to boycott TD Ameritrade for people who aren't assholes?
Oh, fuck. I just figured out who that is. It's the dad of the bald guy who is governor of Nebraska. Who spent his family's money to restore the death penalty when the legislature outlawed it.
They have their name on the College World Series stadium that you drive by if you forget how to get to the airport by the new (much faster) way and take the old way.
Apparently there is a court case that says the one thing you are allowed to do to retaliate is close the whole business.
Unless the Rosenblatts killed puppies with kitten, I'm now upset about the college world series despite not caring about it.
It would be nice if some liberal billionaire stepped up to fund the Shmothamist website, and the entire editorial and technology staff from the old place moved over en masse.
I wonder how much money he lost to prove his point.
On the OP, the linked article provides a bit more detail - specifically that
-- this was a 6-1 decision, not just one judge going rogue;
-- the decision rested (as 13 points out) on previous decisions that you have to make an unambiguous request for a lawyer for it to count; just saying "maybe I need a lawyer" doesn't count.
This is what Crichton's five colleagues (including chief justice Bernette Joshua Johnson) thought, and Crichton decided to write a concurring opinion just to emphasise the point that you have to make an unambiguous request, and (unwisely) cracked a joke about a request for a "lawyer dog".
72: Ricketts, or the Ricketts family, owns the Cubs. So you can boycott baseball... in the spring...
I don't think that's sufficient punishment, but it does help.
Further to 81, if the judges seem to have been particularly favourable to the prosecution this time, that might be explained by the nature of the statement that the defence is trying to have ruled inadmissible.
Possibly, because it is a horrible crime. But, I think requiring a very specific and unambiguous request for a lawyer before it counts as invoking your constitutional right to counsel is a bad idea. In most of the country, demanding something directly and unambiguously from an authority figure is taken as rude and, particularly if done by black people, unnecessarily confrontational. Hence, people usually hedge these requests with qualifiers like "maybe" or "if it isn't too much trouble" or what you have you. The (I think intended) point of this kind of decision is to make it easier for police to use the intimidation of their office to get people to confess. Which, on the face of it, may not seem like a bad idea. Except that there is a very long history of police getting powerless, non-assertive people to confess (often people with diminished mental capacities) at the expense not just of constitutional rights but if finding the actual criminal who did the crime.
Also, the conditional in the statement ("if y'all think I did it") that is being used to claim the request was ambiguous was met. They did think he did it.
Maybe one of them was sceptical?
85 is dead on. That is, the decision does hang on the conditional nature of the request. But even in the absence of racial issues affecting how forthright the defendants felt comfortable people, normal, ordinary communication incorporates a lot of indirectness and hedging that is neither meant nor understood sincerely.
Imagine if the defendant had been a sweet little old lady, who had said "Could you possibly get me an attorney, if it wouldn't be too much trouble?" It might be a lot of trouble to get her an attorney, and regardless of how much trouble it actually would be, the request is definitely conditional, so it's not unambiguous. And she also seems to be asking for information about whether it would be possible for her to get an attorney, rather than actually asking for an attorney.
Does it make any sense at all not to treat her utterance, legally, as a request for an attorney? I think it's inescapable that she thought she was unambiguously requesting an attorney, and also inescapable that any ordinary listener would understand that. The 'ambiguity' is only there in the same way that "Yes" is a good answer to "Excuse me, do you know what time it is?"
And I don't think the utterance of the defendant in this case was really any more ambiguous than that of my imaginary old lady. The caselaw on this point is awful.
Mr. Rapist's lawyer protects Mr. Rapist, but the general principle that you should be able to get a lawyer if you want one and the police are questioning you protects me*.
* Or the behind-the-veil version of me that isn't surrounded by lawyers and wasn't raised to ask for a lawyer and then go silent if the police started to question me about anything more than a traffic ticket.
90: Also, there's a perverse issue, where only people who are ultimately convicted of serious crimes have any incentive to keep litigating over the procedural propriety of the arrest and conviction process. A defendant who looks sympathetic based on the facts on the record is a defendant who didn't ultimately spend much time in jail, and the procedural issues around their arrest are moot.
So thinking about these cases in terms of it being okay to treat this particular defendant badly, because he's guilty of something awful, is always going to lead you to erode constitutional protections.
People should use Columbo as a teaching tool to remind kids of the importance of shutting their mouth. I'm not saying I want kids to murder somebody, but if they do, I think they should know enough not to stand around chatting with police about how, if somebody did commit a murder, this is how they would have done it.
90, 91: I wasn't condoning it in 84, just pointing it out.
And, yes, the whole business of "did he ask for a lawyer? Yes but did he really ask for one? Or did he just issue a hypothetical statement about the desirability of lawyers in general?" is deeply suspicious, as 89 says. There should be a caution on arrest that includes actually asking the suspect "Do you want a lawyer? Answer yes or no" as well as "do you understand these rights?"
Literally the first thing I learned in teacher training is that you never ask a question of the form "Do you understand X?" because people will say yes to please authority or save face.
Could you explain that again?
If security at the entrance to the gated community hadn't kept him out, X-Dawg could have protected Senator Paul from his neighbor's beating.
I'm probably hurting America by making light of assaulting a libertarians while mowing a lawn.
I don't know, Moby. My pacifism has been sorely tested by delight.
I'm also always cheered when a doctor winds up in the paper for a punching another doctor. It confirms my uncharitable suspicions.
95 I run into this all the time dealing with cow-orders (fequently helpers and those in menial roles). What's the preferred way to formulate this so I know I'm understood?
You could stop carrying around that riding crop.
103 Cow-orders s/b cow-orkers of course.
103: You get them to repeat the information back to you. "What will you do now/ What do I want/How does this work?" How you do that with colleagues calls for tact, of which I have little.
106 Thanks. It certainly sounds odd but I don't think the tact thing will matter as much to these guys who are already in a subservient role (I make a point of not being an asshole of course, and thanking them for their efforts.)
106: To be tactful, I tend to phrase it as "Give that back to me to check that I explained it right?" Saying it so that if they didn't get it straight, it was a flaw in my explanation, rather than in their understanding.