New Kid on the Block

I've added to the list of Other Blogs to Read a comparatively new blog:  The Open File: A Website about Prosecutorial Misconduct & Accountability.  Here's how they (whoever exactly "they" might be) describe themselves.

This website is the culmination of the work of an informal collection of lawyers, law professors, law students and policy advocates who are concerned about prosecutorial misconduct.

We believe that prosecutors generally are honest and ethical. We also believe that too often, prosecutors – whose job it is to enforce the law – violate the laws and Constitution of the United States as well as the ethical rules of the legal profession. And too often this misconduct goes unaddressed. As the 2011 U.S. Supreme Court decision Connick v. Thompson demonstrates, even when judges issue decisions finding egregious, intentional misconduct, prosecutors are rarely held to account.

The Connick decision inspired us to examine the nature of prosecutorial misconduct, the systems that incentivize such behavior, and the processes and institutions which might hold prosecutors accountable when misconduct occurs. We hope that by drawing attention to these issues, we will spark a dialogue that will promote greater respect for the law and for the legal profession.

Ephemera? C'est moi.

Scott Greenfield, distinguished member of the inaugural (and so far only) class of the Blawg 100 Hall of Fame,* notes that he and his blog are part of the dearth.  As, I suppose, are we all.

At least, we are if Justin Bieber Peters is to be believed.  Justin is the blogger (not blawgger, you'll notice) at Slate's new blog, "Crime." The blog is necessary or at least justifiable, Justin explains, because

there's a dearth of smart, non-sensationalistic crime coverage on the Internet these days.

Oh. And it appears that Slate's brought Justin in and started this blog to make sure that the internet will continue to have no actual "smart, non-sensationalistic crime coverage."

But I digress. Or more precisely, I wandered off track before ever really getting on track.
 
Justin and Slate are, of course, wrong.  There's plenty of first-rate coverage and discussion, smart and not sensational, of crime and criminal justice and related issues on the internet.  (There's also plenty of twaddle, but that's a different post.)

See, it's not just crime bloggers and their (our?) ilk.  It's all of us who are out there (here?) on the web.  Including Scott and the others in the Hall of Fame.  We're not just dearth, we're trivia.
Yesterday, it was announced that the Ohio Supremes issued amendments to the Rules governing the practice of law in Ohio. In particular, they dicked around with the state's mandatory continuing legal education requirements.
Now, MCLE is inherently a bullshit scam.

Ohio lawyers are required to obtain a minimum of 24 hours of approved continuing legal education every two years.  Among those hours must be "Thirty minutes of instruction on substance abuse, including causes, prevention, detection, and treatment alternatives," sixty minutes on Ohio's ethics rules, and another sixty on "professionalism."  That leaves 21½ hours every 2 years for lawyers to gain substantive education in something somehow related to law or legal practice or running an office.  My god, it's a wonder there's a lawyer anywhere in the state who isn't spectacular.

It's nonsense.  I do nothing but criminal law.  I can satisfy my requirement by spending those hours reading the newspaper while sitting in an auditorium listening to someone drone on and on about the "residential real estate transactions," doubling my "work enjoyment and productivity," Ohio oil and gas law, "demystifying" retirement plans, financial planning for lawyers, and the like.  (Those are just a few of the CLE programs offered by the Ohio State Bar Association during December; there are lots of other providers in Ohio and around the country, and of course other programs offered throughout the year.)

Sure, I can and do take CLE programs related to what I do, that are relevant and useful. That's not the point, the point is that I could satisfy the requirements without being taught (forget learning, which is something altogether different) anything of value to my practice or my clients. What we know, of course, is that every lawyer who cares makes serious and continued efforts to stay current and to learn new and relevant stuff. The lawyers who don't care won't be any better practitioners because they fulfill CLE requirements.

Anyway, the Supremes issued revised CLE rules to take effect in 2014, and I was reading them over earlier today and discovered, well . . . .

You've always been able to get CLE credit for legal publications designed primarily for lawyers or judges. The publications have to be about the law (or something within a short plane ride's distance of the law). Nothing new there.

The new part is that the articles or books are supposed to be substantive. You know, not pure bullshit. It's right there in Regulation 403(D).

The article or book shall be of substantial or scholarly quality.

If the CLE requirements are to mean anything at all, that's fair.  You shouldn't be able to get special credit for complete and total rot.  (Say, for the kind of stuff Justin Peters is churning out.)  Still, how do they decide what's substantial or scholarly in its quality?  Ah, to learn that, you have to read the second sentence of 403(D), the one that lists the stuff that doesn't qualify because it lacks a certain je ne sais quoi. 

Well, I might not know quoi, but the Supremes do.

Insubstantial articles or books, such as self-published materials or blogs, shall not be eligible for credit.

Look, it's easy to make too much of this, and frankly it doesn't matter to me since I routinely get far more hours of CLE than the overlords demand.  And I really don't take it personally.  It's not me the court's dissing.  It's the enterprise.

To be told that what I do is "insubstantial" not because it actually is insubstantial (hey, who am I to judge) but because it's a blog . . . .

As my mother rarely actually asked, What am I? Chopped liver?

I've been at this a bit over three and a half years.  I've put up more than 900 posts containing god only know how many hundreds of thousands of words.  I've been praised and damned.  I've been sued.  I've cited court opinions and scholarly works.  I've parsed statutes, discussed constitutional theory (and theories).  Publishers (including some academic presses) send me books to review on the blog.

Russ Bensing, a Cleveland blawgger, writes a mini CLE program every damn week on the criminal law opinions that have come from the Ohio courts and on criminal justice topics generally. 

Rob Brenner writes about appellate decisions.

Doug Berman's Sentencing Law and Policy has been cited by the Article III folks in the fancy building in DC.  (OK, Doug's not licensed in Ohio, but he lives and works here, and he's got a fucking blog.)

And that's just Ohio and just criminal law types (and actually an incomplete list).

As I said, I don't need any more CLE credit.  That's not why I write this stuff.  And there are days when it is insubstantial.  Not because it's a blog. But because I'm not writing things with substance. 

I'll take a share of the blame here.  I should have read the proposed regs and submitted comments.  So should Russ and Rob and maybe Doug.  And maybe we could have got Tom Goldstein at SCOTUSBLOG or Howard Bashman from How Appealing.  Maybe Jonathan Adler at Case could have sent a comment and even published something on Volokh that would have got his co-bloggers there to write. 

On the other hand, the Supremes claim to have been at these revisions for a year.  You'd think in that time one of them (or one of their staffers) might have noticed that there's some serious stuff out there along with the piffle.  

Of course, there are many things you'd think.  You might even want to blog about them sometime if you have a blog.

If you do, remember that it will be "insubstantial."

--------------------
* As opposed to me, who once again failed to find a place in the 100. Hall of Fame be damned. I'm stuck in the minors, can't make it to the show.

New Blog on the Block, New Blogs on the Lists

They come and go, these blogs do.  And I can tell you from experience that it takes some effort to keep one going. Maybe it's easier if you have a plan and a focus.  I'm not sure about that. (After all, I never really had one.)

Anyhow, that's why I'd typically wait a month or more to see how a blog develops.  But Todd Bussert's new Federal Prison & Post Conviction Blog has been going so strong since he put it up that, well, I'm just giving him some props now.  

But when it came time to put a link on the side, well, somehow the list was getting too long and messy.  So what I did was cull a few of the blogs there, ones I should add that update pretty constantly, and create a new list "Other Blogs To Read."  I put the ones I culled there, added Todd's, and stuck in another few I've been remiss about:

• John Wesley Hall's Fourth Amendment.com
• Kevin McGrew's Intellectual Competence & the Death Penalty
• Michael O'Hear's Life Sentences Blog
• P.S. Ruckman, Jr.'s Pardon Power
• FAMM's Sentence Speak
• Alexandra Natapoff's Snitching Blog

And while I was at it, well, there's been no excuse for my not previously plugging the Philly Law Blog by the Fishtown Lawyers, Jordan Rushdie and Leo Mulivihill.  Just added that one to the longer Blog List.

Check 'em out.

Updating the List Again

It's not easy to keep a blog going over the long haul.
And so it's time once again to prune the blog list a bit.  I don't do this lightly.  A couple of months off (say, Infamy or Praise) won't get me to delete, nor will a declaration of retirement (Simple Justice).  And there are special cases.  Capital Defense Weekly is simply a wonderful resource.  And Blonde Justice is, well, Blonde Justice.
Sad farewells, then, to Jamie Spencer and his Austin Criminal Defense Lawyer blog and to Robert Smith, Bidish Sarma, and Sophie Cull of A Criminal Enterprise.  If either starts up again with anything like regularity, they'll be back.
In the meantime, a couple of additions.
Brand new, but already exciting, the Wrongful Convictions Blog by Mark Godsey of the University of Cincinnati College of Law, the Center for the Global Study of Wrongful Conviction, and the Ohio Innocence Project, along with a supporting team.
And I've been remiss for too long in not linking to the remarkable compendium of death-penalty related news and commentary, Steve Hall's Stand Down Texas Project.

A Warm, Albeit Belated, Welcome

Were there any doubt, this would have resolved it.

Defendant appeals from a judgment of the Supreme Court of Kangaroo County (Budweiser, J.) convicting him after a jury trial of the felony of failure to report a suspicious package on the subway.
. . .
Equally silly is defendant’s argument that the mere fact that the package contained only gnawed chicken bones and greasy napkins was sufficient to render it a non-suspicious package. The clear legislative intent was to criminalize the failure to report packages that appear suspicious, not packages that actually are suspicious, which would require looking inside them, creating the very danger to public safety that the statute is intended to protect against which.

That's from a post last December by the pseudonymous Appellatesquawk who claims to be a lawyer representing indigent criminal defendants in New York, which I take it means he's a public defender. As a PD, of course, he doesn't have to market himself.  He also doesn't market his blog which, although it hasn't been quiet, has certainly been secret.

Now, though, it's been discovered.  From Greenfield to Bennett to me.

The man (?) can write.  Prose fueled by righteous anger and more than a dash of wit.  More importantly, he speaks the truth.

Appellatesquawk added now, to the blogroll.

Fiddling with the Blogroll

It's that time again.  I should probably consider deleting a couple of blogs from the list, but it seems wiser to add.  Because you never know.

At one time, and for reasons I can't begin to remember (it might even have been an accident), I removed Matt Kaiser's blog from the list.  But in the last couple of months he's been doing absolutely terrific stuff reporting on wins in the federal courts of appeals.  He's back on the list as of this morning with the Federal Criminal Appeals Blog.

Then there are the blogs that should have been on here for some time.  Walter Reaves, who writes the Waco Criminal Law Blog from the city of the same name inTexas, is always interesting - never more than when he talks about science and bogus science and forensic evidence.  Nathaniel Burney, a criminal defense lawyer in New York, writes The Criminal Lawyer.  

I've also made Eric Meyer happy (though he may not notice), by acknowledging his change of name.  No longer a Military Underdog, his blog now calls itself the Unwashed Advocate.  And so it now appears on the list.

For reasons that may have something to do with blogger, may reflect my own incompetence, or may properly be blamed on sunspots or Dick Cheney or an impractical-joking deity, I still can't get the feed from Norm Pattis's blog to work, so there's a link to the blog but no indication of what he's written lately.  And although I just added Burney's blog to the list, the reference to what's supposed to be his latest post is in fact to one from a few weeks ago.  He's written a bunch since then.  The link to their blogs will take you to the top even if there's no proper rcognition of their work.

And for my last bit of incompetence, I still can't get the Jamison Koehler link to link to his blog rather than his website, though the link to the latest entry does go there.  That really pisses me off, but I'm stumped.

3976 - and Counting

I interrupt my regular blogging to just plain marvel at an extraordinary achievement.  Snark free.

Simple Justice just celebrated its fourth birthday.  Over four years, Scott Greenfield has put up 3,976 posts.  That's an average of 2.72 a day.  (I did the math.)  

They're not snippets, not headlines ripped from somewhere else, not scraped from other blawggers, not reproductions or summaries of statutes or rules, not notes to call him if you need a lawyer.  They're an ongoing, substantive explanation and education and (with the aid of an army of reader-commenters, but it would pretty much do it all by itself) conversation on law and lawyering and integrity.  He's called out the social-media-scam-artists, the faux lawyers, the let's-kick-the-shit-out-of-some-innocent-kid-just-for-grins cops, the corrupt and the incompetent.  And he's praised and explained and respected and honored and . . . .

Look, anybody can keep a blog going for years.  Hell, if you don't take it down, you can put up one post and it will sit there for years and have unremarked anniversaries.  That's the way of the internet.

I've been writing this blog for almost 21 months now which in blawgger years makes me, I figure, something of an early-middle-aged guy rather than my real-world quickly-approaching-social-security age.  I've written what seems to me a whole lot, but I'm a piker compared to Scott.  I can barely comprehend it.  

It's not just the time.  I know he types faster than I do, and I know these posts don't really take all that long to bang our.  It's the commitment and the quality.

He is one of the beacons in this world of serious criminal law bloggers.  

Four years.  Wow!

So Happy Anniversary! or Happy Birthday! or Happy Blawggiversary! or whatever the right phrase is.  

You've earned a day off.

Please, don't take it.

Welcome to the Blogosphere

Steve Bright is searingly brilliant.

He's a practicing lawyer, a law professor, a passionate advocate for the poor, for people of color, for those dispatched from society either to the netherworld of prison or to the execution chamber.  He is president and senior counsel of the Southern Center for Human Rights.  He's one of the sung heroes, and deservedly so.

And he's now the "publisher" and at least occasional author of a blog, Second Class Justice.

Here's how he describes what SCJ is all about.

SecondClassJustice.com is about ending the unfair and discriminatory treatment of people in the criminal justice system by documenting that treatment.  Contrary to the constitutional guarantees of due process and equal protection of the laws and the etching “Equal Justice Under Law” on the Supreme Court building, the kind of justice people get in America’s courts depends very much upon the amount of money they have.   Poor people are deprived of their liberty – and even their lives – because they cannot afford competent legal representation.   The rich and guilty often have a better chance of avoiding conviction than those who are poor and innocent.
Race matters too.  The criminal justice system is the part of society least affected by the Civil Rights Movement.  Race influences every aspect of the system from arrest and charging decisions to the exclusion of people of color from juries to sentencing disparities influenced by race of both victim and defendant.
Courts are failing in their fundamental purpose to protect the constitutional rights of the accused.  Elected state court judges are often more concerned about the next election than the Bill of Rights.   Federal courts apply technicalities – procedural rules made up by the Supreme Court and the Congress – to avoid enforcing the Constitution more often than they confront injustices presented to them.  In addition, the courts simply refuse to recognize racial discrimination that is before them.
This page documents examples of second class – and sometimes third world – “justice” for the poor and people of color in the hope that knowlege will someday overcome the indifference, hostility and racism that have affected the criminal justice system throughout America’s history, and bring about a just, fair, humane and reliable system.

Go there now.  Check it out.

BECAUSE SHE DID: SLEAZY BLAWGERS EDITION

I've only been at this for a few months now, which makes me something of the new guy on the block in this blawging business. But I've been a lawyer for a whole lot longer, and a sentient being for longer still. Some ethical points are self-evident (you know, the ones that you learned in kindergarten).

Here's one: Don't steal. Here's another: Don't lie. Here's a third: Don't pick on guys who are bigger and tougher than you are.

One of the things I've learned in these few months blawging is that there's a community here, at least among the serious criminal defense lawyers. (Actually, serious criminal defense lawyers have always been a community.) I've never met these guys, but I've found a number around that country that I'd recommend in a minute to someone who needed help in their communities. They demonstrate their seriousness and their commitment and their passion and their work ethic and their sense of decency and their willingness to help others every day on their blawgs. I'm reasonably confident that they'd get my back if I needed them to.

Then there are the bottom feeders. There is, for instance, Melina Benninghoff of Fresno, California who claims that her practice is "100% Criminal Defense" and that she also does family law and personal injury (so that her claim of being "100% Criminal Defense" is a lie). She steals content from serious blawgers like Mark Bennett for her own blog. Then threatens them when they point it out (though she does the threatening through a purported intermediary whose grasp of English is nearly as bad as her sense of ethics). The intermediary (or perhaps Melina herself) is also engaged in something of a cross between identity theft and stalking, apparently in revenge for Bennett's objecting to having his posts stolen.

There are any number of reasons, some of them good, why people don't trust lawyers. And when we're out here on the web, when we lay ourselves out, reveal our beliefs and attitudes, our passions, our concerns, we open ourselves up.

And then the Melina Benninghoffs come along. She's an ethics complaint in waiting, a disbarment to come. She's a liar and a thief. Even if she's a great litigator (and it's hard to imagine that she is), you shouldn't hire her. You don't want her in your corner.

But if she has an enemies list, it'd probably be an honor to be on it.

So long, Skelly

One of the side benefits (maybe the only side benefit if you count the opportunity to mouth off at will as a direct benefit rather than a side one) I've discovered over the two and a half months I've been writing this blog has been the discovery of other legal bloggers or "blawgers" as they say (a term I haven't decided whether I like or hate). I check them out to see what is being/can be/should be done on a blawg. (And, of course, what shouldn't be.) I check them out for news, since there's much of interest that otherwise would slip below my radar. And I check them out for ideas to write about.

Every couple of days I find a few new ones, new to me, that is. Some I bookmark to revisit. Some I run from as quickly as possible.

But there really are the ones that stick.

From some of those I've absorbed things that I think will make me a better lawyer. From some I've taken things that remind me to be a better lawyer. From some I've taken a sort of kinship. It's always good to be reminded that you're not in this business - I'm speaking of criminal defense, but blogging, too - alone. (Though some I wish would quickly get out of criminal defense and go someplace where they might do less harm.)

I've become a pretty steady reader of a few and an occasional commentor on some of those and some others. The commenting isn't self-aggrandizement, I hope. It's a recognition that we're all in the same school. Besides, I'm a loudmouth, which is much of why I got into this in the first place, and if I think I have something to say, well, I'm gonna say it now. (Which is, by the way, the title of a great old Phil Ochs song which you can hear here.)

You can find some of the blawgs I'm reading in the blog links on the right side of the page down below the excessively long list of tags. I keep fiddling with that list, adding folks that I find consistently worth my time to read, deleting others as I realize they're out of the business or are losing my interest or never should have had my interest in the first place.

The struggle today is what to do about Arbitrary and Capricious, the blog of the PD who calls himself Skelly Wright. I've never met him, but I've been reading him every day, and going back and reading through his archives. He's a font of encouragement and news and passion and. OK, I'm blathering. It ain't Shakespeare, but it really is one of the best - and not just according to me. And as of late last night, it's on "hiatus." I've been reading it for a couple of months now. It's on my blog list, right at the top. Do I take it down now that it's over?

Not for a while, anyhow, I think.

Keep on keeping on, Skelly.