Eric Garner paid with his life for making a simple mistake: He played street lawyer when officers tried to arrest him. The time and place to dispute facts with a cop is not on the street. It is in a courtroom. Resist an officer trying to arrest you, and you may well end up injured, or even dead.
Store owners on Staten Island had complained to local police that Garner was selling individual cigarettes, known as loosies, in front of their shops. Apparently, that’s against the law. It may well be a silly law, but it is a law that is on the books.
Daniel Pantaleo, a young police...
December 5, 2014
I’m a little too old for a mid-life crisis, but not too old, I hope, to admit that I’ve been wandering far too long in the dark wood of error. So let me cut to the chase: Individualism is dead; we are social creatures.
The rhetoric of individualism has sustained me for decades. It all started, I suspect, with a collegiate encounter with John Locke and his Two Treatises of Government. The notion that society, and government, are products of a social contract struck me like a thunderbolt, electrifying me for decades.
Why did it take a lifetime to realize that the notion...
December 5, 2014
It will take more than the Band-Aid President Barack Obama offers to staunch the bleeding wound caused by the police violence in Ferguson, Mo. The fact of the matter is the events in Ferguson reflect a broader crisis in legitimacy, a crisis brought about in large part by the federal courts.
Reacting to outrage over the shooting of Michael Brown, and to the heavy-handed reaction of the Ferguson police department in response to protests, the president wants better guidelines on the recycling of retired military equipment to local police departments. He also proposes federal funding to...
December 2, 2014
I sometimes wonder whether the truth really matters at all, especially in criminal courtrooms, where we play at the solemn work of justice while wearing blinders. Consider, for the moment, the case of State v. Dr. Lishan Wang, now percolating in the New Haven Superior Court. In what parallel universe do you offer a 48-year-old man a sentence of 40 years in prison and call it a bargain?
Dr. Wang, a medical doctor, stands accused of murder for gunning down another physician, Dr. Vajinder Toor, in Branford, in 2010. On the state’s theory of the case, the shooting apparently had...
November 30, 2014
November 19, 2014
There’s little doubt in my mind that the grand jury in Ferguson, Missouri, will not indict Darren Wilson and charge him with murder. And there...
November 15, 2014
The Roman orator Cicero defined a commonwealth, or a republic, as a group of people drawn together by common interests and a common conception of...
November 6, 2014
From time to time, a young person turns up at my office door looking for career advice. They are considering a career in the law. What, they ask,...
October 29, 2014
If I had Tom Foley’s tax accountant, there is one thing I most assuredly would not do: I would not run for public office pretending I had any...
October 26, 2014
There are secret courts operating in our midst, and I am not referring to those tribunals whose focus is national security. I’m talking about...
October 22, 2014
I'm not a fan of the Justice Department, so I ought to be rooting for Kurt Siuzdak, a 17-year veteran of the Federal Bureau of Investigation who has...