On December 14, 2012, Adam Lanza, a troubled young man, walked into an elementary school and killed or seriously wounded more than two-dozen people, most of them children. He used an AR-15 rifle, a killing machine manufactured by Bushmaster Firearms International LLC. Military and law enforcement officers use the weapon in their work.
Few civilians actually hunt for game with the weapon. It kills so savagely it would destroy the meat a hunter might want to eat.
Why did Adam Lanza have the gun?
The simple answer is that his mother bought it and either gave it to him as a...
April 22, 2016
State and federal law enforcement agencies make millions of dollars each year manipulating asset forfeiture laws. Generally, these laws permit seizure of items -- including houses, cash and cars -- that are the fruits or instrumentalities of a crime. If forfeited, the funds, whether cash or liquidated property, typically go to police departments.
Lawmen are plenty aggressive when it comes to seizing money, and prosecutors are often aggressive in perfecting these claims. By an odd twist of law, one needn’t be convicted of a crime to lose assets.
...
April 15, 2016
We’ve reached the breaking point. We’ve each become gods in our own idiosyncratic religions, idols served by congregations of one. The result is a public space reduced to warring imperatives. Welcome to the end, as in the logical conclusion, of pluralism.
I’m talking, of course, about the furor over North Carolina’s legislation involving public accommodations. The law calls, in part, for folks to use public restrooms based on their genders at birth.
Shocking, isn’t it? If you were born a man, you must urinate with other men.
This requirement is...
April 15, 2016
I was in court the other day when I erupted in a tone loud enough to be overheard by others: "You know, Aristotle once said that it is hard to be angry to the right degree, at the right person, at the right time. He preached moderation and wisdom. You're not being moderate or wise."
Bystanders seem startled to overhear a lawyer preaching Aristotle to a client in the corridor of a criminal courthouse. But so it goes.
Anger is the pulse of the courts. We lawyers, we sometime counselors at law pressed into the service of people at their worst, know all about the corrosive power of...
April 7, 2016
March 31, 2016
I’m at a loss to explain to my client why she cannot have the book I sent her. But it is so. The warden will not permit her to accept a Daily...
March 24, 2016
Erin Andrews and Hulk Hogan have me wondering about St. Augustine’s pears. Is something like a meaningful sense of sin taking...
March 22, 2016
I’m thinking of sending David Brooks of The New York Times a scholarship. I’d like him to attend Gerry Spence’s Trial...
March 17, 2016
Merrick Garland, eh?
Throw that fish back. He’s just more of the same. We need a new kind of justice on the Supreme Court. We need...
March 3, 2016
Harper Lee died before the reckoning, but she saw it coming. I’m betting she even foresaw Donald Trump’s ascendancy. She was a realist...
February 28, 2016
Forgive me for being churlish, curmudgeonly, even, but Apple Inc. has thus far fired far wide of the mark in its dispute with the Federal Bureau of...