The City of Hamden was rocked this week by protestors angry about the shooting of a young woman, Stephanie Washington, by a Hamden police officer. Here’s my prediction – the City will pay the young woman $2.5 million to avoid a lengthy courtroom fight.
My phone lit up the evening of the shooting. Reporters wanted to know whether the City could withhold evidence of the shooting, which took place earlier that day.
“They can,” I told one reporter. The law enforcement privilege permits the police to keep evidence to...
April 21, 2019
I’ve been watching the baubleheads on the networks discuss the Mueller report, and I’m disappointed. From the left, cries for impeachment. From the right, claims of exoneration. And from the center, a wary appraisal – President Trump was never going to charged with obstruction, the Justice Department doesn’t, as a policy matter, indict sitting presidents.
Political operatives are murmuring: to impeach, or not, that is the question. How will it all effect the 2020 election?
This is white noise, sound and fury signifying nothing....
April 21, 2019
Within hours of Alex Jones and Infowars providing thousands of emails to lawyers for the plaintiffs in a lawsuit brought by surviving family members of the mass shooting at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012, the Huffington Post contacted Mr. Jones. We have your emails, they said. We’re going to publish them. Do you want to comment?
And when lawyers for Mr. Jones went to court in Connecticut this week, NPR read the pleadings filed by the plaintiffs before Mr. Jones had a chance to do so. NPR didn’t call to ask for...
March 27, 2019
Pathos is a recognized form of rhetoric. Until today, it had little real place in the law. The Connecticut Supreme Court changed all that with a 4-3 ruling in a case involving guns and the victims of the horrific mass shooting at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in December 2014. The Court’s ruling in Soto v. Bushmaster is no doubt en route to the United States Supreme Court, where, I suspect, minds more disciplined and less steeped in pathos will reverse.
If you were alive, sentient and in Connecticut on the morning of December 14,...
March 14, 2019
February 11, 2019
I’ve never worn blackface, but I’ve laughed when I’ve seen actors like Bing Cosby do so. Just like I laughed when I saw...
February 17, 2019
Yuval Noah Harari is an Israeli historian with a love for the long view, as in where did we, as a species, come from, the topic of his...
February 13, 2019
The panel of judges was uncomfortable. One judge wondered whether the United States government had brought the very issues it was...
January 3, 2019
I like to say the following to folks after one of my all-too-frequent displays of bad temper: “I’m sorry. I’m in AA. That outburst...
February 20, 2019
Gov. Ned Lamont lives in a bubble, and that bubble is impenetrable. I know this because he was once a potential juror on a criminal case...
February 20, 2019
I suppose it was inevitable that Connecticut’s Attorney General would sign on to California’s federal lawsuit seeking to block president...