Another One For The Home Team

You might think that the undisputed facts here cry out for a jury determination, not just a judge’s.

But then a jury might get carried away by the whole dead, unarmed teenager thing, and find liability, and make a substantial monetary award. Then an appellate court would have to do the dirty work of throwing it all out after the fact.  As they usually do.

Better to never let the jury decide it at all.  Seventh amendment? Pshaw.  Judge Klausner knows better:

The video footage shows that Arian turned towards officers on three separate occasions and extended his arms outward towards them. … In each instance, Arian held a small, dark object in his hands and pointed it in the direction of officers. … Based on this footage, the court determines that no reasonable juror could find that Arian’s stance did not resemble that of an individual preparing to fire a gun.”

“Here, the undisputed evidence shows that Arian, in the process of fleeing from officers, took a shooting stance and pointed his cell phone at officers three times in a span of only 19 seconds

Yes, you read that right.  The deceased was “pointing” a cell phone.  Kind of hard to take pictures if you don’t point the camera at the subject.

The Court “determines” all right.

There should be a lawyers’ strike in LA over this, not that there will be.  Pity.

“…a society that punishes people for trying to be decent human beings is profoundly inhuman.”

An interview with David Graeber over at Naked Capitalism.

He’s talking mainly about economic disincentives to doing good in the world that appear to be a feature of our “capitalist” economy.

I can’t agree with a lot of Graeber’s verbiage – you know, “power structures”, things like that – and like the founding fathers I don’t care much for “democracy” either.  In other words, the democracy leaning to anarchy that characterized the Occupy movement and Graeber’s thinking about what to do at this point doesn’t strike me as being much of a solution to anything.

But in terms of identifying what’s wrong now, Graeber and I are in complete agreement.  While of course I approach all this from a different and somewhat less scholarly position – more ‘lawyerly’ than scholarly – the basics of the issue are the same for both Graeber and me.  In fact, I identified the debt problem – and a solution (updated here) – publicly before his most recent magnum opus (Debt – the First 5,000 Years) came out.

Graeber’s insight that the debt game has altered the role of government (“…which is increasingly becoming the legal cover and muscle behind debt and rent extraction”) is also important, but the solution to that is not so much to turn all of government and society upside down, which is the constant temptation of the revolutionary, but rather a return to first principles by the third branch of government (the judiciary) in general, and the legal profession in particular.

To take just one example, evictions are judicial processes.  As I have noted before, they are ridiculously easy to do, not to mention the fastest existing judicial process by far.  This is a reflection of a lot of what is wrong, true, but the solution is so simple:  change the law.

Do we have to change hearts and minds as well?  Certainly, and especially in the legal profession and the judiciary.

The anthropological approach to these issues is academically interesting and has a lot to offer, but it still amazes me how little regard there is for the legal profession and by extension – and somewhat distressingly – the rule of law.  The problems Graeber is speaking about fit very neatly – and pretty much entirely – into the ‘law’ category, much more so than the ‘anthropology’ category, but no one talks to lawyers about it.

That’s strange, I think, and maybe even a big part of the underlying problem:  a pall of despair over the rule of law and lawyers.

We’ve probably brought it on ourselves.

Lawyers Strike In the UK

Over cuts to Legal Aid funding.

Now, I don’t know enough about the situation to say for sure, but it certainly sounds like business as usual:  the most politically powerless will experience “austerity” first.  The only austerity the politically powerful will feel is less body weight when they literally lose their heads.  So in the interim, at least someone is making a fuss.  And it’s good to see lawyers assuming their proper role in the whole thing.

You would think we might have learned something, in the social sense, since the 18th century, but it appears we’re going down the same road the French did.

Anybody Want To Strike?

So, it’s the Bronx.  And in the courtrooms of the Bronx, unlike almost everywhere else in New York State including Manhattan, regular people – not just celebrities – are acquitted of crimes and awarded substantial damages in personal injury actions with some regularity.  Seems to be something about the jury pool.

But there’s no jury at the Appellate Division, First Department, to which the losing party can appeal.

So this jury in the Bronx awards some guy over $2 million on an excessive force claim because the police tased him when he was having a seizure, and it’s pretty lucky under those circumstances the guy wasn’t killed.  And on the appeal the Appellate Division reverses, throws out the entire jury award and directs that the case be dismissed. (h/t Scott Greenfield)

Their rationale for doing this was, basically, they took exception to the jury’s reasoning.

Now as I have noted many times in earnest (most recently here and here) - and as one of my colleagues has better illustrated through his/her customary satire – when it comes to jury verdicts there appears to be a rather pronounced double standard in the intermediate appellate courts:

In Part I, I trace the origin and history of courts’ purported deference to jury credibility determinations. I say “purported” because, when it comes to important matters like money settlements, courts have no hesitation about setting aside jury verdicts. See Behemoth Leviathan RR Co. vs. The Widow Jukes (1920). It’s only in criminal matters that the jury’s sense impressions become sacrosanct.

To call it a “double standard” is, of course, putting it mildly.  It’s as if when a jury finds a criminal defendant guilty we wax poetic about the sanctity of the jury; but when a jury awards “too much” to some regular schmuck we’re practically delighted to second guess them.

Consider just this one aspect of such a ruling:  even if it is the Bronx, getting a jury exercised enough to award $2 million or more for a regular person takes a lot of doing by the attorney.  A lot.  No one who hasn’t done it could possibly understand what’s involved in any tangible way, and “no one” assuredly includes every member of the Appellate Division’s panel.

So one effect of the ruling is to generate discouragement and even despair among the Plaintiff’s bar.

And here’s another thing.  Just because a jury awarded $2 million doesn’t mean the Plaintiff can collect it, even if the appellate court doesn’t fuck with the verdict.  There might not be insurance available to cover it, for example.  Although in this case there probably was coverage, which is why the AD took such an interest and reversed, whereas in almost every other case where the favored litigant wins and the disfavored litigant loses the AD just mindlessly affirms.

That, too, lends itself to satire.

How does this go on in the appellate courts?  A very big part of the answer to that question is that the power differential between favored litigants (government, bank, insurance company) and disfavored litigant (non-famous, non-wealthy regular individual) is huge and there’s no way to bridge it.  No conventional way, that is.

Anonymous satire is all well and good, and we need to keep our sense of humor, but ultimately this is a classically corrupt court decision – and make no mistake that gross favoritism to the powerful is corruption, whether it’s conscious or not – that calls for a lawyers’ strike by the members of the disfavored litigants’ bar; that is, the criminal defense guys and the PI Plaintiff guys.

Unless and until the judges on the Appellate Divisions and elsewhere pay some price for their outrageous partisanship and toadying for the more powerful against the weaker there is no reason for it to stop.  Surely that decision deserves at least a one-day work stoppage and protest in the First Department.

You – we – have to make them pay.  We have a simple, easily accomplished, traditional and non-violent way to do that.  If we refuse to even try then the “system’s” continuing dysfunction is not just the Appellate Division’s fault.

SCOTUS’ True Leanings

It is the common thread that ties all of the otherwise seemingly diverse rulings and ideologies together:  contempt for, or maybe fear of, freedom and equality before the law for what might be termed “ordinary” folk.  This was on display in a unanimous ruling issued earlier this week in the case of Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum.

The statute at issue, 28 U.S.C. 1350 (known as the Alien Torts Statute) is a model of elegant clarity and simplicity from an earlier era, namely the era right around our nation’s founding:

The district courts shall have original jurisdiction of any civil action by an alien for a tort only, committed in violation of the law of nations or a treaty of the United States.

The one line statute gets clubbed to death in 35 pages of “statutory interpretation“, and eventually of course it winds up not meaning what it obviously says at all; indeed it more or less means nothing after the SCOTUS is through with it.  Sort of like 42 U.S.C. 1983, which ostensibly deals with an entirely different sort of wrong but to the SCOTUS it’s the same issue:  how to keep down the rabble in fly-over country and their ilk anywhere else in the world with the temerity to come into a federal court – a federal court! – making outrageous demands.  Remember the scene from the Wizard of Oz when they finally get in to see the Wizard?

Bad Wizard, SCOTUS!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZR64EF3OpA

Technically, the issue in the Kiobel case is whether the statute can be applied to conduct occurring outside the United States.  The obvious answer to that question is that this is precisely what the statute is for, and indeed it has no other intelligible purpose.  How the SCOTUS winds up deciding the opposite is illustrative.

First, let’s stipulate to the legion of cases dealing with questions of statutory interpretation wherein it is said that if the statute has a plain meaning, no further interpretation should be done.  The “plain meaning” thing is a favorite of conservatives in other contexts, such as when it makes a criminal defendant or a personal injury plaintiff or any other litigant who’s an individual going up against some institution lose; this time, however, the plain meaning of the statute favors the little against the big and so suddenly we don’t like “plain meaning” anymore.  Now we get to “interpret” the statute, which means we can rationalize throwing the little guy out of court, which is what we want to do in the first place because: a) little people are messy and unappealing; and b) if we open the courthouse doors to them they’ll clog up our dockets with their silly little concerns - like in this case, oh, genocide – when we have important criminal cases brought by the government that we have to address.

So how is this “interpreting” done so that it doesn’t seem to be the thought process I just described even though that’s what it really is?

Well, they start with this “presumption” on the first page of the opinion:

“[w]hen a statute gives no clear indication of an extraterritorial application, it has none,”

One might think that it’s a pretty clear indication that a statute has “extraterritorial application” if, without it, it’s unintelligible and without purpose – and of course you are never supposed to interpret a statute out of existence, that’s another rule of “interpretation” -but never mind that for now.

As support for this “presumption” the SCOTUS can go all the way back to 1932 and a case called Blackmer v. United States, but since the linguistic formulation of the presumption in Blackmer isn’t quite good enough for our purposes here – which is to screw the little guy – we’ve changed it in our oh-so-clever SCOTUS fashion.  See, Blackmer in referring to this presumption says: “… the legislation of the Congress, unless the contrary intent appears, is construed to apply only within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States…” and if you read that in context it’s not clear that the 1932 SCOTUS is setting up any kind of formal “presumption” at all; it’s probably just stating the obvious matter of factly.

But again, never mind.  We have an agenda - remember?  – screw the little guy.

So we go up to 1949 and now the off handed musings of the 1932 SCOTUS are formalized into a rule of interpretation, but of course intellectual honesty was more common then so they didn’t change the wording:

The canon of construction which teaches that legislation of Congress, unless a contrary intent appears, is meant to apply only within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States, Blackmer v. United States, supra, at 437, is a valid approach whereby unexpressed congressional intent may be ascertained.

That case is Foley Bros. v. Filardo.

Then we bring ourselves up to 1957 and the case of Benz v. Compania Naviera Hidalgo, and the language of the “canon of construction” has not been altered, but the 1957 SCOTUS adds by way of explaining itself further:

And so here such a “sweeping provision” as to foreign applicability was not specified in the Act.^[7] The seamen agreed in Germany to work on the foreign ship under British articles. We cannot read into the Labor Management Relations Act an intent to change the contractual 147*147 provisions made by these parties. For us to run interference in such a delicate field of international relations there must be present the affirmative intention of the Congress clearly expressed.

This language was dicta, summarizing the Court’s rationale not modifying the rule, but it sure came in handy as the Rehnquist SCOTUS began to come into its own in the 1990′s, with its barely disguised hostility to any ordinary-individual-initiated litigation, which apparently all belongs in small claims court, or maybe on Judge Judy, where the rabble can go and obtain whatever piddling relief they might deem themselves entitled to.  I mean, who cares, right?  We’ll let them sue each other.  Gives them something to do.

But again, we can’t come right out and say things like that, so we do a little mixing and matching:

In applying this rule of construction, we look to see whether “language in the [relevant Act] gives any indication of a congressional purpose to extend its coverage beyond places over which the United States has sovereignty or has some measure of legislative control.” Foley Bros., supra, at 285. We assume that Congress legislates against the backdrop of the presumption against extraterritoriality. Therefore, unless there is “the affirmative intention of the Congress clearly expressed,” Benz, supra, at 147, we must presume it “is primarily concerned with domestic conditions.” Foley Bros., supra, at 285.

The dicta of Benz gets combined with the rule of Foley Bros, and presto!  The “presumption” has acquired that draconian strictness pressed mercilessly down upon the rabble for which the Rehnquist court, Lloyd Blankfein and Jamie Dimon have become so widely admired.

It was 1991 and the case was EEOC v. ARAMCO.  That case dealt with the extraterritorial application of Title VII civil rights claims, a claim that would have failed under the older, less draconian formulation of the presumption anyway, but this is the Rehnquist SCOTUS and we’re really getting fond of applying really strict rules even when we don’t have to, as long as it permits us to tell the little guy ‘no’.

So now we’ve gone from 1932 musings, to a “rule of construction” and “presumption” by 1949 providing that “…unless a contrary intention appears…” US statutes do not apply extraterritorially to a tentative “..unless there is the affirmative intention of the Congress clearly expressed…” US statutes do not apply extraterritorially in 1991.  And this becomes how we do things.

And then by 2010 some poor slob is trying to sue an Australian bank in the wake of all that bankster perfidy, and of course we can’t have the rabble suing banks because we have our “policies” doncha know that this will all be handled by some “Troika” or other, and by this time we have our rationale “well settled” even though it’s a pretty major deviation from the original idea in 1932, but anyway it’s really handy and ladies and gentlemen I give you Morrison v. National Autrailian Bank.  And all the verbiage doesn’t really matter because the bottom line is, as it has been for so long now, that the bank wins and the little guy loses.

And so finally – and it had to come to this – the question becomes are we going to extend our illegitimate “presumption” so far that we will toss the rabble out of court even when the issue is human rights abuses under international law, which would seem to be specifically contemplated by the Alien Tort Statute when it mentions the “laws of nations”.  Of course this means, and the Plaintiffs in Kiobel alleged, things like extrajudicial killings, crimes against humanity, torture, arbitrary arrest and detention, and so forth.  The idea is that the international companies doing business (and having copious assets) both in Nigeria, where these things allegedly occurred, and the United States - to which the Plaintiffs fled and were in fact granted asylum – had a hand in these atrocities and by being forced to compensate the victims maybe they would think better of participating in such things and maybe even take some affirmative steps to ameliorate them, what with all the financial pressure of having to compensate victims and all.

In other words, this would be litigation having the salutary effects of compensating victims of human rights abuses and providing economic incentives to human rights abusers to stop being, well, human rights abusers.  And we have lots of lawyers in this country that need good paying work and maybe this would be good paying work for them so you kill two birds with one stone.

But this is the SCOTUS, and so obviously such litigation cannot be permitted.  This kind of thing is all handled by the State Department, just like financial institution corruption and wrongdoing is all handled by the Securities and Exchange Commission.  That way everything truly ‘important’ gets run through Washington, important referring to any sizable amount of money changing hands, or anything coming within arguable range of some DC determined ”policy” or other which increasingly means pretty much anything, period.  Because Washington apparatchiks and wonks like Ilya Shapiro are really smart and they should run everything, along with the morons prestigious economists at the Federal Reserve.

And I’ll just throw in that the SCOTUS is obviously wrong here.  The Alien Tort Statute’s only discernible purpose is to authorize just the kind of lawsuit the Petitioners in Kiobel brought, that is, a tort occurring outside the US.  Torts occurring inside the US are obviously cognizable in some state or federal court anyway, so the way they’re reading it the statute is purposeless nonsense.  And, are they going to apply that same “presumption” the same way when the USG wants a criminal statute to have extraterritorial application?

Ugh.

Servitude

This is not about helping “troubled borrowers“; it’s about maintaining the status quo, and in particular preserving the biblical adage that the borrower is the servant of the lender.

I would say that it is also dishonest, inasmuch as anyone with any relevant knowledge and minimal intelligence must be aware that this is not a real solution to anything.

There is a simple concept that is vital to understanding why Fannie and Freddie are extending “forebearance” to “troubled borrowers”.  Under the most basic principles of accounting, a loan is an asset – an account receivable – of the lender(s).  If the loan is written off as being uncollectable, the lender can no longer claim that it is an asset.  With enough write-offs like that, a lender goes under when the assets disappear, because the liabilities never do, unless you pay them or go bankrupt.

In other words this is about saving banks, not helping borrowers.

“Forebearance” is the only kind of solution the powers that be can contemplate because it keeps creditors creditors and debtors debtors.  The entire monetary and banking system depends on that.  But the very idea of “leniency” carries with it a class differential that we like to think we left behind us in the middle ages.  You can only be lenient to your inferior.  You can only accept leniency with gratitude towards your superior.

This characterizes a master-slave relationship, not a free market exchange of any kind.  Sooner or later such relationships rupture, often violently, for political reasons.  In the meantime, a solution could be had at any time that would resolve the economic and political problems before they become too serious, but such solutions have not really been seen since antiquity.  Jubilees used to occur because some wise and enlightened ruler realized it was necessary and not only decreed it but smoothed over the inevitable problems that go along with a jubilee.  In modern times, a jubilee will never come from an enlightened ruler.  It will have to come from an enlightened populace.

There is no reason to be optimistic.  As I’ve said many times, the scenario playing out is simply a 21st century version of Dickens’ literary portrayals of the conditions leading up to the French Revolution.

Although I must defer to David Graeber on the history and anthropology of all this.  I’m just a lawyer.

Sometimes.

On strike.  Sometimes.

NYPD 40 Years After Frank Serpico

And 40+ years later it might be worse in the NYPD.  The candidates for Mayor all believe either that the current police chief should be replaced or that an “Inspector General” should be appointed to oversee the department.

The issues might be different; Serpico’s ordeal centered mainly around bribes and payoffs, not brutality and ‘testilying’.  But the difficulties – and dangers – of taking on the police for wrongdoing in any serious way are still there.  Perhaps they will always be there.  Perhaps it is the nature of the beast.

You can change chiefs and it’s “…meet the new boss, same as the old boss…”  You can appoint an IG, or some other bureaucratic commissioner of some kind, and before long you get regulatory capture or revolving doors or – once again – bribes and payoffs.

In the end there may be no substitute for the practice of virtues, like courage and justice (but of course don’t forget temperance and prudence).  Our willingness – or unwillingness, as the case may be – to insist on decent and civilized behavior from our police departments will ultimately determine what kind of police departments we will have.  The people of Mount Morris, New York – at least those who vote – have displayed such a high tolerance for police misconduct that it’s fair to say they approve of it.  They have ignored brutal rape.  They could just as easily – indeed more easily – ignore murder:  one less complainant to deal with.

This is what it comes down to in a vacuum where the rule of law is suspended or does not exist:  force and violence.  And I have to say that that state of affairs always implicates the legal profession, which must have degenerated well before the general population.  The legal profession – especially including the judiciary - is the natural safeguard against law enforcement corruption.

The practice of the cardinal virtues wouldn’t be so praiseworthy if it was easy to do it.  But we can’t tolerate it being impossible.  When virtue is punished and corruption is rewarded this is both a terrible injustice inflicted on the victims and also a massive social problem.  The results for Frank Serpico were mixed.  The NYPD’s track record and public image have ebbed towards integrity and flowed towards infamy multiple times since the now obscure Knapp commission hearings Serpico’s virtue helped bring about.

Corruption will always be with us, I guess.  But if that’s the case, then the Frank Serpico’s of the world are utterly indispensable.  They stand between us and the abyss.  Yet how many people know who Frank Serpico is as compared with how many people can identify Kim Kardashian?

Some days it doesn’t look good, and I’m not just talking about the stock market.

Outrageous And Routine

It’s good that Greenfield is on this one.  A lot of lawyer-bloggers should be.

Read more about it here.

A couple of points.  There’s nothing at all unusual about the evidentiary ruling in this case, as wrong and blatantly partisan as it is.  This is what judges do:  they use their position to preserve the status quo.  That means they don’t like acquittals in criminal cases and they try to prevent them, which is to say they try to ensure guilty verdicts.  And they really don’t like “high” jury verdicts in civil cases in favor of lowly individuals and against institutional litigants, so they do what they can to prevent them.

And as the linked story shows, they can do quite a lot.  They can eviscerate your case so that you can’t really present it fairly to a jury if you follow their rulings.  They put you in a position where you either have to comply with their rulings and lose, or defy them and risk contempt findings, mistrials and assorted other consequences that ordinarily will also mean losing.

One commenter to Greenfield’s post suggests an interlocutory appeal.  Probably the optimal thing under the circumstances without going too far afield, but of course an interlocutory appeal is going to delay things beyond what any plaintiff’s lawyer would have reasonably budgeted for the time the case would take; no matter how wrong the ruling appealed from, it is quite unlikely to succeed; the Plaintiff’s lawyer would probably have to finance the appeal out of his own pocket and might not be able to; and even in the unlikely event that an appeal is successful, the trial judge can and will continue to undermine the Plaintiff’s case in other ways, and will probably be able to undermine any appellate court’s directions on remand, too.

This is the reality of the situation.  It has nothing to do with the ‘law’, and despite the judge’s remarks it has nothing to do with conserving judicial resources; it’s about who has power over who.  Any individual Plaintiff’s case going up against an institutional litigant is extremely fragile.  It’s easy for a judge to fuck it up when they want to, and of course they want to, and there is no really effective system-approved remedy for that.  Going to trial hamstrung is no remedy.  Getting held in contempt is no remedy.  And appeals are no remedy either.

The second point is this:  the case has wider social ramifications, especially for the Oakland area.  Indeed, unlike the vast majority of criminal cases brought by the government, this case is actually socially important, and it’s a prime example of why we have courts and permit causes of action for civil wrongs where we compensate wrongfully injured people.  The alternative, in context, is free rein for certain segments of society – police and banks come to mind – to injure others of lesser status with impunity.  This leads eventually to civil unrest and lawlessness.  And Oakland is fertile territory for civil unrest and lawlessness.

So I think the answer to this judge’s malevolent ruling isn’t an interlocutory appeal – it is a lawyer’s strike.

Lawyers Strike In India

I’m not saying it’s common there, but this does seem to come up from time to time.

You don’t want to overdo it, of course.  The tactic loses its effectiveness if it is overused.

Here’s a quote from one Tis Hazari:

“Lawyers of the country are very much aggrieved by the misdeeds of the police which has not learnt lesson from the past and has forgotten the fact that lawyers are guardians of democracy and are capable of taking stringent action against the erring police officials,” he said.

And beyond that:

Vinod Bhardwaj, Secretary of Shahdara Bar Association also said there was complete suspension of work at Karkardooma Courts complex and around 300 laywers also staged a protest in the court premises against the government and the police.

This lawyer-striking business is not a ‘market’ phenomenon, but it does address the kinds of problems with police, prosecutors and judges that are also an issue in the United States.  Unless you buy into “American Exceptionalism“, in which case we don’t acknowledge such problems even if they exist, because we’re too special to have them.

The principles are the same here as in India, of course.  The courts can’t function without lawyers on both sides, without losing its pretense to objectivity, fairness and due process.  So if lawyers on one side, and their clients, are constantly getting screwed they can stop playing the game and the system closes.  I wish the courts would do their job without being pressured like that, but they don’t.  In New York State, where I am, the biggest problem is the Appellate Divisions.  Their “jurisprudence” is mainly the stuff of satire.  Of course it’s important to keep your sense of humor, but it’s more important to address the underlying problems in a serious way.

The lawyers in India are doing that; the lawyers in the United States are not.  And this is one of the reasons the United States has come to be regarded as a “prison nation“.

The practicing bar – the part of the legal profession that matters – needs to revisit first principles.  If they do that, it’s hard for me to believe they wouldn’t see the virtue in lawyer strikes, sparingly used as a system corrective when the system is broken and incapable of self-correction.

Assigned Roles, “Making A Living” And Lawyer Blinders

As a result of the division of labor, among other things, we all have parts to play in the economy.  We’re responsible for some few things.  Certainly not everything.  Not even everything pertaining to some small component of everything.  If we work on an assembly line we might only be called upon to put a few bolts in an exhaust manifold, a tiny component of a car, which is itself a tiny component of the larger transportation industry, which itself is just one component, albeit a major one, of the developed economy that despite its problems we are still lucky to be a part of.  Even if that means we are a bit less self reliant, manly and ruggedly individual than we used to be.

Nevertheless, it would be fair to say that economically the more a person is responsible for, the more important he or she is seen as being, and the more that person is paid.  Leaving aside for a moment how responsible these people in fact are, this is nevertheless the idea.  The CEO of General Motors is highly compensated compared to the line worker because he is responsible for the whole company, not just a few bolts in a few manifolds.

Of course this is all economics.  Economics is an important subject.  But in civilized countries it has never been thought to be the alpha and omega of guiding or evaluating conduct in society.  I’ve dealt with this elsewhere:  on an economics basis alone you cannot quarrel with Al Capone or other criminals.  If advancing yourself unjustly at the expense of others is seen as par for the course, society will come unglued.

Standing above purely economic concerns stand the professions, probably still the most prominent among which are medicine and law.  I say “purely”.  Because nothing of any significance can be done without financial wherewithal, and that includes medicine and the law, but the professions are not solely about economic concerns.  There is bodily health and healing.  And there is justice.  And these are more like preconditions to having a functioning economy of human beings in the first place, sort of like Kant’s idea that space and time are not really “things” themselves, but rather a priori preconditions for perceiving things in the first place.

But there’s this danger that the members of the professions themselves can forget all that.  If they ever knew it, that is, so few of them having read Kant and all.

From an economics perspective the practice of law is not intelligible.  There are very important things to be done that do not pay; there are relatively unimportant things that do.  Historically – but not now – we often paid lawyers handsomely and gratefully when the occasion presented itself, at least in part because of the former.

But of course maybe it all is economics after all, because implicit in that particular trade-off was a social bargain imposed upon the lawyer:  when the very important but non-paying thing that has to be done comes up, the handsomely paid lawyer had better well do it.  And truth be told many small practices – at least the ones I am familiar with – observe all of this, albeit somewhat haphazardly and informally.  They operate as wealth redistribution agencies with regard to legal services, using the well-paying clients to keep afloat and using any leftover time for needy clients and needful work that doesn’t pay.

Now admittedly this discussion is all a bit academic in real life, because the legal profession as a whole is so corrupted and moribund.  But academic discussions are not entirely without value if they tell you why something is awry, because maybe then you can know what to do about it.  If you can do anything, that is.

If anything can be done, might be a better way of putting it.

In any case, now that we’ve reached the question of knowing what to do, let’s look at this, via Scott Greenfield:

Consider this: Nearly half of those who graduated from law school in 2011 did not quickly find full-time, long-term work as lawyers.

The quoted dean has, to put it mildly, a talent for understatement.  And of course Greenfield is all over it in response:

Quickly? How about not at all. Not long-term. Not short-term. Not slowly. As for the ones who did, how about at salaries that can’t carry the debt-load while feeding themselves, no less their families, or terminal positions that run dry when the case is over, or dead-end positions that will never provide a future?

And of course this is the economic aspect of the problem, to which both the dean and Greenfield are acutely attuned.

But this is a profession, remember?  So when the dean, steeped in academic pettifoggery and tin-eared as he is, points out something else:

Yet the need for legal representation has never been greater. In New Jersey, where I teach law, 99 percent of the 172,000 defendants in landlord-tenant disputes last year lacked legal counsel.

…he’s onto something, isn’t he?  It may seem absurdly focused on system wide professional concerns rather than economic ones, with the “trench lawyer” firmly mired in the latter while the academic remains mired in the former, but the end result is just two lost souls talking past each other.

There is a lot of work that lawyers should be doing.  And it is true that at present it doesn’t pay, so it doesn’t get done.  That doesn’t mean that it will always be that way.

These people need legal help, for example.  Can’t see any money in it for the lawyers, though.  Not in the short term anyway.  But there could be, later on.  It really depends on what judges do.  And a lot of things are like that.

If judges started doing their jobs, which is applying the rules of law even-handedly instead of toadying for the rich and powerful to whom they owe their positions, legal work for the poor would wind up being effective, rewarding and remunerative.  And then there are a lot of lawyers to do the work.

But truth be told, and unfortunately, this idea turns the system on its head.  Independent lawyers, being important components of the system at least inasmuch as the system requires them for credibility, could do that if they tried, but they don’t want to.  They’re concerned with making a living for themselves.  As much as they resent the pecking order that is the real law operating in practice – the government wins, the bank wins, the insurance company wins, the big firm wins – they accept their assigned role and fight those they think are beneath them for the crumbs falling off the table of the higher ups.  It makes them fundamentally no different from those higher ups:  they’re players in the same system, just bit players instead of heavy hitters.

Meanwhile the system to which they all belong is collapsing.  It no longer performs even the most rudimentary function of distinguishing between guilt and innocence, its very raison d’etre.  Yet like some warped petty bureaucracy, this catastrophic flaw is seen as just one among many:

Like the statistics for rape, the statistics for drug offenders are suspect. Ask an AUSA and almost every co-conspirator is a major player. Ask a defendant and they’re just a cog in the wheel. But like those whose concerns are limited to the wrongfully convicted innocent, suggesting the guilty can rot in hell, the Times plays up the low-level offenders angle, even as Judge Gleeson knows better.

So, Judge Gleeson and Scott Greenfield know better.  The wrongfully convicted innocent are one problem with the system, the over long sentences of the guilty are another.  It’s just all one big system making its occasional mistakes and we all play our parts, and as the wizened veterans of the trenches our job is to “fight”:

In the meantime, however, we have judges like John Gleeson, and we do better by continuing to fight, to argue, to persuade, others to appreciate and follow his lead. As long as defendants are prosecuted, we don’t have the luxury of feeling defeated and giving up.

Of course it’s just a coincidence that the “system” we preserve by “fighting” inside of it provides our living.  Or at least for some of us it does.

So let’s get this straight:  you have a branch of the government one of whose primary tasks is to identify and exonerate innocent accused persons that renounces that obligation at the highest levels, suggesting that that task can be punted back to the executive branch because of its power to “pardon”. (See part IV of that brief.  Why does that even have to be argued?)  And besides that, and worse, refuses in practice to apply the rules of law even-handedly across the board while of course claiming the opposite, blatantly favoring certain kinds of litigants such as the government, banks, and insurance companies over everyone else.

And the solution to all this is….”legal practitioners“?

The alternatives to “pie in the sky” solutions can’t entirely consist of fiddling while Rome burns.  A lot of lawyers should take off the blinders.

Lawyer Risk Management And Another Troubling Cop Incident (Updated.)

But not “troubling” for the reason(s) most people think.  If there were a national conversation, outside of a few obscure blogs (blawgs?), about the power imbalance in the criminal justice system this story would be played big all over the country.

As things stand, it will just be another squalid little tale from an upstate New York backwater, where a police officer apparently (allegedly) killed – indeed, allegedly murdered – his own son in the proverbial “isolated incident”.  The incident, while a factually extreme example, is not “isolated”.  Far from it.  It’s part and parcel of the larger problem.

It’s important to get this distinction, which sadly might be too subtle for many people:  the story here is not that the police officer abused his power; rather, the story is that a police officer could ever conceive of abusing his power in this manner to begin with.  The former is the stuff of “isolated incidents”.  The latter is intrinsically related to systemic abuse of power that trickles all the way down to the police department of Perry, New York, where the police officer in question plied his trade.

There aren’t a lot of details in the story, but it appears that the shooting death occurred more than half a year ago and there was no doubt about who had done it.  The inference, then, is that some evidence was procured in the intervening six months that led someone in authority to believe that the shooting was not an accident, as the officer had first claimed.

And without of course prejudging anything, another inference:  the evidence would have to be strong enough to convince whoever decided to prosecute that they could convict a police officer.  This being no mean feat, it’s fair to conclude that the police officer committed a major screw up if such evidence exists.

Perhaps some readers can understand how dangerous this all is:  narcissists and psychopaths with badges and guns and an inner certainty that they are invincible.  Assuming the truth of the charges against this officer, I can point once again to this, the hopefully now infamous Ashley Baker statement.  This statement is the kind of evidence that should get any criminal caught, even if the criminal happens to be a police officer.

Yet after more than 9 years, not only has the police officer/criminal not been caught, but the beloved “system” has backed him entirely and has done to his victim exactly what the cop wanted it to do.

Here’s another fair inference:  every cop in Mount Morris, New York, where this contemptible fraud and atrocity over Sephora Davis occurred, knows exactly what happened.  It’s the stuff of legend within that tiny but still way overstaffed department.  And you know what else?  Perry, where the cop who killed his son has been “working”, is right across the County line from Mount Morris, and the same officers often cross-pollinate both departments, both departments being widely regarded as depositories for cops with questionable backgrounds.

And another thing, directed to certain lawyer-bloggers who have largely acted like dimwitted simpletons in assessing some of the facts and concerns I have written about on this blog in connection with the Sephora Davis matter.  I have in mind in particular the concern over my own personal safety, and to a lesser degree my client’s, arising from the whole affair:  again, assuming the truth of the charges, this cop murdered his own son and was obviously convinced he could get away with it.  We don’t know anything about the motive, but it’s certainly a fair inference that there was one.  We know with certainty that Dana Carson (who is still a police officer) and others more or less known or unknown have and have had for 9 years a strong motive to kill me.  Under the circumstances it is not, of course, comforting that there are some and possibly many having this motive that are unknown to me.

The point being that if this personality type – narcissistic and psychopathic – which is disturbingly common among police officers (and, by most educated estimates, much more common in the Mount Morris and Perry police departments) is capable of such a despicable crime against a fellow officer who also happens to be his own child, how much risk do you think there is to an outsider who has crossed them, is a popularly despised “defense lawyer” and seems to have no friends or supporters of any significance?  How easy would it be to arrange that person’s death with no one suspecting anything?

Maybe it’s my military background, but this strikes me and I think should strike any reasonably prudent person as a real and tangible risk.  Not a probability, for those unfamiliar with the idea of “risk management”, but probability is not the earliest point at which you take steps to mitigate risk.  By the time a serious risk (such as, say, that you will be murdered) is probable you are already behind the curve in preparing to mitigate it.  Of course, there is no certainty unless and until the risk has been realized, but at that point you absolutely know what to do – or in this case you know that nothing can be done.

In other words, anyone in the kind of position I have been in who didn’t take steps to address such a risk would be very foolish indeed.  And it is fair to question the judgment of those who scoff at simple prudence in such a deadly serious context, a professional context with which they claim expertise and hard earned familiarity.  It isn’t just prosecutors that face risks to their safety as a result of their work, and it’s a far more difficult situation for defense lawyers.  Like everything is.  That shouldn’t surprise even the most foolish of the criminal defense bar.

Update:  Only a day since the Perry cop story broke and it has disappeared from most of the local news outlets.  Not here, but it’s buried pretty deep even on YNN.

Part of the reason is that it’s a difficult story to run with because, as the article indicates, the police who are charging their fellow officer are being really tight-lipped about just what evidence they have that has convinced them that it was a murder and not an accidental killing.  It had better be really good evidence:  they concede that the victim was shot only once.  And the defendant in this case is a cop, the one kind of criminal defendant that a jury is likely to acquit.

But I think the real problem is that the story “has no legs” because the narrative that cops can be criminals is highly, highly disfavored in the media, primarily for reasons of self interest, both short term and long term.

Maybe that should change.  After all, the narrative made for a pretty decent and profitable movie 20 years ago:

 

Ho-Hum

A peculiar foible of criminal defense lawyers is habitual contrariness, at times mindlessly practiced even when the contrariness is irrational.  Or worse.

Is law school largely a scam?  Probably.  A worse scam than the rest of “higher education”, or Congress, or mortgage lending, or for that matter lending of any kind through the banking system, or maybe even the legal profession as a whole or the justice system itself?  Doubtful.

We live in the fallen world, not paradise.

The question is:  What is to be done?  This involves more than critiquing and complaining that no one is really doing anything.  Or really wants to.  Although that is pretty much where Scott Greenfield leaves it:

And they’re coming up with schemes to cure their ills…All these hungry little buggers they’re sending into the profession need to find a way to pay off their loans and keep their mommies from crying, and if you read their blogs and websites, they’re smarter, more aggressive, more caring and, yes, more experienced than you. Baloney, you say? Yeah. So what? They’re doing what they’ve got to do to survive, and niceties like integrity are for old guys. They’re fighting for their lives and, frankly, have completely rationalized ethics out of the picture. And since they are all brilliant (ask them, they’ll tell you), they see no net harm from a bit of puffery…Are any of these schemes going to make a better legal profession? For a bunch of smart people, these schemes strike me as pretty darned inadequate, both for law students, for the profession or, most importantly, for clients.  But then, if we leave it up to the lawprofs, what should we expect?

 

I don’t think it’s fair to characterize younger, “hungry” lawyers as insufficiently ethical or integrity challenged, whereas the old wizened sea dogs like Greenfield are increasingly lonely but integrity-filled paragons.  That’s absurdly self-serving under the circumstances.

For lawyers there’s a lot of work to do.  I mean, the system is seriously fucked up and people are getting seriously screwed over.  The problem is getting paid for it, which is to say paid for what is actually needed:  helping the people getting screwed over.  The screwees, not the screwers.  Practically by definition, the latter can pay you but the former cannot, or at least not very well.  So the profession has gravitated inexorably towards representing the latter.

Well, that’s one problem anyway.

Scholarship is so not the problem, which is why law schools aren’t so much an obstacle to improving the profession as they are irrelevant.  The law is not, and should not be, an imposingly intellectual endeavor.  Not that long ago many lawyers went to law school right out of high school.  In fact, many lawyers didn’t go to law school at all.

So really we are looking at an economics problem.  And like all economics problems in the modern world, it is really – underneath it all – a political problem.  In other words, a power distribution problem.

So I thought this little anecdote (via Mark Bennett) was interesting:

And then there was the ham-handed attempt to bully me out of filing the Judicial Misconduct Complaint against Campbell… I was having an innocuous back hall conversation with Judge George Godwin, the former presiding judge of the 174^th Criminal District Court. I always liked George Godwin.  We were having a friendly chat when Judge Godwin, suddenly brought up the topic of judges sticking together. In the middle of a friendly conversation, without any segue, Judge Godwin  said to me, that any attack by the defense bar on his brethren or “sistren” of the judiciary, would be viewed as an attack  on all of them. As there was no segue, I was admittedly caught of guard by Judge Godwin’s comment. The  conversation came to a screeching halt and  I left… After hearing Godwin’s “Judicial Nato Speech”, I thought, if the judges think that I will be bullied out of filling a legitimate Judicial Misconduct Complaint, they do not know me and they do not know HCCLA.  If anything, Godwin’s comments confirmed my deeply felt belief, that as lawyers we must be willing to stand up to judge’s who engage in unethical or illegal actions. So, as was my duty as then President of HCCLA, I filed the Judicial  Misconduct Complaint against Campbell.

 

Of course the Judicial Misconduct Complaint went nowhere.  You see, the “Judicial NATO” is bound to include those who decide Judicial Misconduct Complaints.

What this illustrates is that the judicial powers-that-be feel they can walk all over the criminal defense bar and suffer no consequences whatever.  And they’re quite right about that, and indeed it isn’t just the criminal defense bar, it’s independent lawyers generally.  The power differential has become so lopsided that judges will not only behave this way, they will openly threaten to behave this way.  It was better when at least they would be ashamed of it.

And this explains a lot.  Represent an individual litigant against an influential or institutional one, and what do you find?  Probably more than half the time you will never get the case to a jury.  When you do, the judge will try to undermine you from winning the trial at all, but certainly from winning convincingly, the result being that half of the remaining cases that actually make it to a jury will wind up losers.  And even if you beat the odds and win “too much” – in the sole opinion of the judge, of course – it can all be taken away.

Put the shoe on the other foot, where the institutional litigant is bringing a criminal case, and what do you see?  90% plus resulting convictions.

The civil plaintiff and criminal defendant are flip sides of the same individual litigant coin.  It’s not the facts and it’s certainly not “the law” determining outcomes; it is who has power over whom.

Since this is not a question of better arguments or innovative programs, then, but rather the far more primitive issue of raw power – like war, really – you have to think in terms of what damage you can inflict on your adversary from the relatively powerless position you occupy.

This blog came up with an idea at its inception:  strikes by independent lawyers.  These would work better than anything else I have seen suggested to shake up our increasingly corrupted profession, because it attacks the Achilles heel at the foundation of the “adversarial” system:  its pretense of a fair fight.  It can’t be a fair fight if the little guys call foul by not showing up in the first place.  It’s really as simple as that.

With a more level playing field, there is room for more lawyers, at a time when – and to be sure this goes against conventional wisdom but it couldn’t be more true – more lawyers are desperately needed.  Independent lawyers.  Real lawyers, in other words.

By and by, with a more level playing field and the system behaving more like it is supposed to, the money will follow because it always does, flowing from the biglaw firms and government agencies to the individual litigants and their independent lawyers.  And this addresses a lot of problems at once – law school expenses, serving needy clients, preventing wrongful convictions.  Money can do that.  Money is a form of justice, or at least a measure of it.  Sometimes.  When things are working more or less correctly.

Alas the whole strike idea, while it has a lot of merit, not to mention precedent in other places, and there don’t seem to be any good arguments against it, was not well received by Greenfield, who has yet to offer any solutions of his own other than to carp at young lawyers, or often even mock them.

I wish he’d cut that out.  It’s a bore, but more than that it’s myopic, and to the extent he has any influence in framing this debate he’s not doing anyone – or the profession – any favors.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lawyer Hating

It’s not rational.  I guess no “hate” really is, but it’s especially discouraging to see it in this context.

You can complain all you want, you can sue all you want, you can put the perps in jail all you want but the little guy on the street that did everything correctly and honestly is still going to take it in the shorts for a long time to come. The only POS that will benefit from all this are the blood sucking lawyers. The honest hard working guy that palyed by the rules will still be out tens of thousands of dollars in lost equity on their homes that are now worth nothing and yet they continue to make their mortagage payments becasue they pledged their honor to faithfully repay the the loan they took out to finance the American Dream! Hey RS why don’t you do a story on the ambulance chasing scum bag lawyers that will be racking in the TENS of  MILLIONS of dollars from all the law suits generated by this fiasco and how NONE of it will make it down to the people who actually lost something.

It seems to me that “Slim’s” vitriol would be better directed at bankers and regulators and politicians.  Worse, a re-invigorated and independent legal profession and lawsuits – lots and lots of lawsuits – are probably the only real solution to this whole financial crisis thing, which is of course in reality a rule of law crisis.  But the prevalence of undifferentiated hatred for lawyers typified by Slim’s comment bespeaks the unlikelihood of anything like that coming to pass:  after all, people like Slim sit on juries.

The need for independent lawyering has never been greater, and much of it could be directed at Wall Street.  There’s irony aplenty in that, of course, since we have a lot of unemployed or underemployed lawyers looking for something to do.  Matching needs with providers is supposed to be a strength of the “free market”, so it appears ours must be faltering.  At least when it comes to the legal profession.

It’s a chicken and egg problem too, to some extent:  it’s not as if you can just file pleadings and then argue before a judge who is even handed.  Decades of unapologetic favoritism toward government, bank and insurance company have taken their toll.  Complaints of the have-nots against the haves are at this point not simply dismissed but greeted with derision and scorn.

Slim could be a Manhattan federal judge for all I know.  I wouldn’t be shocked if that were true.

Livingston County DA Race And Political Hackery

It’s nauseating, of course, but not surprising in the least.  The Republican “Committee” reaffirmed its “support” of Eric Schiener.

“I’m humbled by your show of support,” said Schiener to the committee in a speech following the vote. “You voted tonight for a clean, honest campaign. You voted for professionalism over politics.”

Please.

Schiener can’t even maintain this facade long enough to avoid contradicting it multiple times in the same news article.  For one thing, having just mouthed the most pedestrian of political platitudes he goes on:

“I’m not telling the voters about platitudes and high ideals

 

Of course not.  He’s feeding them platitudes, not “telling about them”.  And “high ideals”?  He’s from Tom Moran’s DA’s office.  What are those?

Then comes the inadvertently revealing admission.  Whereas Schiener regards “high ideals” as just so much bullshit, the real question that animates him and his candidacy is:  who has the power?

Schiener dismissed the thought that a tied primary should have resulted in a closer committee vote.

“The Republican committee members don’t just represent the people who came out Sept. 13. There are 12,000 Republicans who did not go to the polls in the primary, and the committee represents all of them,” he said. “It’s hard for a committee member who’s been told all summer by the other camp that they don’t mean anything, that they don’t matter — I think you saw that sentiment tonight in the overwhelming margin.”

In other words, it’s a power struggle first, last and always and that’s all that matters.  (This, by the way, is the single worst quality of mind that a prosecutor can have.  I often wonder, do people like this tell their children that, say, virtue is bullshit?)  What Schiener is saying is that by the very fact of challenging the committee’s selection in a primary election contest the challenger alienates the committee members.  They respond to the perceived insult with a vote against the challenger.  The committee vote has nothing to do with “professionalism”, or “public service”.  It certainly has nothing to do with “humility”.

Just what is this “committee” and who are its members?  It’s almost too depressing to think about, but maybe this will help so I’ll suffer through it.

Especially in places like Livingston County where government is the only game in town worth playing, the members of political party committees are drawn from the lowest of the low.  As detestable as the “public officials” almost invariably are inasmuch as they are grotesque political hacks, the committee members are lower than that:  political hack wannabes.

How do I know this?  Personal experience.  I was a Republican Committee member in Livingston County myself at one time.  I can relate an anecdote for you.  Hold onto your hats.

Pretty much the main function of a Republican committeeman is to get signatures on nominating petitions to put candidates on the November general election ballot on the party line in compliance with the New York Election “Law”, which I put in quotes because it’s essentially a labyrinthine trap for the unwary designed to ensure advantage to the insiders – like “committee” members – who deal in politics regularly.  (You can see an example of a commonly litigated-over statute from the NY Election Law here.)

So, you know, during my brief time on the Republican Committee I carried these petitions around and got signatures from registered Republicans going door to door, which is how it’s done.  And you meet a lot of people and that’s swell.

One guy I met lived outside the village on a farm.  We exchanged pleasantries and he advised that he used to be a Republican Committee member himself.  I asked him why he quit.  He advised that the reason he got on the committee was that he wanted to sell part of his land and needed a zoning change, the Town Board wouldn’t give it to him, so he got on the committee, got himself elected to the Board and rammed through the zoning change he wanted.

He told me this without the slightest trace of recognition that this had been wrongful, indeed criminal conduct.  Actually he was notably proud of it, thinking himself to have been quite the clever boy.

This is the political culture of Livingston County in a nutshell, especially among the perennially dominant Republican Party whose leader, Lowell Conrad, has been in that position probably 50 years.   The mindset has ossified over decades at an extremely low level of moral functioning, the degradation from which is now reflected in the larger community.  A few years ago, the County was all atwitter with anticipation that a new “business” was coming to town:  a call center for a debt collection agency.  And even that embarrassment of a project collapsed in a hail of scandal, corruption and bribery.

The decay proceeds apace but it’s still hard to notice when you’re in the middle of it.  Except among the young.  They overwhelmingly leave.  Those that stay are either agreeable to embark upon the political hack track; or they are fodder for the largest Livingston County industry:  state prisons.

There has been a great deal of destruction in that time, not just to infrastructure but to the vitality and integrity of the individual inhabitants, the very character of the place and the people.  The road to recovery is difficult and slow, and frankly unlikely to be taken in my lifetime at all. Or even thought about, at least among the kind of people who make up political committees.

And yet there has been this effort by Steve Sessler.  A glimmer.  A subatomic particle of hope.  He’ll have to do it on his own, with a few good people.  Or perhaps I should say a few good men, since Steve is, after all, a Marine.

Semper Fi and all that, Steve.  I hope you make it.  There are people in Livingston County who deserve you, or at least a change in the status quo.

You honor them and yourself.  Thanks for running a great campaign, and a great effort.

 

Sessler-Schiener DA Race (Updated)

So Steve Sessler, exceeding any reasonable expectation, battled Tom Moran’s heir apparent, Eric Schiener, to a draw.  A literal draw at 1881 votes apiece.

I don’t live in Livingston County, but I did at one time.  My family roots there run very deep.  My mother is buried at St. Rose cemetery in Lima.  Her maiden name was Hogan.  Her father was a lawyer in Livingston County for many years.

So, you know, I’m not indifferent to the outcome here, even aside from the grotesque misconduct of the largely interloping public officials there that I unfortunately experienced first hand in the first decade of the 21st century.

Livingston County in the 21st century, it turns out, is a political cesspool.  The administration of criminal justice there has been an especially despicable area of governmental endeavor, and not just on my watch.  Of course, the primary responsibility for that resides with the long time District Attorney of the County – Tom Moran.

At least since 2004 Eric Schiener had been aware of widespread and serious – and indeed criminal – problems in the District Attorney’s office where he worked.  He told me so himself.  His response, unfortunately, was to do….nothing, other than look the other way or worse – to go along.

It should go without saying that this disqualifies him from becoming the elected District Attorney of Livingston County, but among the Livingston County Committee Republicans it apparently doesn’t.  They backed Schiener reflexively and in lockstep in endorsing him over Sessler to begin with; and in all likelihood they will back him again tonight, breaking the tie in his favor.

There are times, though, that party fealty becomes slavish devotion to political power and muscle at the expense of the public good.  This is one of those times.  If the political leaders of Livingston County – and that’s what party committee members are – prefer police who are cynical, rapacious (literally) and self serving armed thugs on the prowl for the largest piece of the pie their superior influence and firepower can bring them; along with opportunistic and authority abusing lawyer-prosecutors whose only real purpose is to feather their own nest at the expense of everyone else, then Schiener’s their man.

It’s a sad fact that in Livingston County this represents continuity of political leadership, calamitous though that might be.  If you doubt this take a drive around the County anytime.  All the signs are there.  Other than the County seat of Geneseo which is perennially flush with government money the area is a hollowed out backwater.  The charm and former prosperity have been sucked out of every other village.  Young people with any character or prospects flee at their earliest opportunity and never return.

But if, on the other hand, the committee members have the slightest inclination to put their less politically aware neighbors’ welfare, and that of their disintegrating community – not to mention such considerations as rewarding virtue and not vice – ahed for a change, then they will make a break with recent history and go with Sessler.

One problem with the obscene corruption of the Livingston County law enforcement establishment the committee members might ponder as they weigh their options is this:  you never know if or when a spotlight will hit.  And if it does it’s a terribly shameful event, the culprits scattering like roaches in a filthy, darkened kitchen when the lights are suddenly turned on.

Don’t cast your lot with the roaches.

Update:  What a remarkable job the Sessler campaign is doing.  They might even get Justice Ark to do the right thing.  It wouldn’t be the first time, and it seems the Livingston County political establishment might have pissed him off.