Monthly Archives: July 2016

Not like any other election year

donaldtrumpThere is a disconnect on a rational and emotional level with this last Republican Convention as compared to past Republican Conventions.

I’m not talking about the “not ready for prime time” gaffes, nor Melania’s plagiarism on opening night, nor the misty “Apollo Creed” convention entrance of nominee Trump, the arm-twisting rules decisions “to move things along,” nor Senator Ted Cruz’ thinly veiled pitch to the delegates to turn to Cruz himself as the Republican’s nominee in 2020 after “the Donald” crashes and burns this November.

In my life, when the Republicans chose past candidates, every one of them, even President Richard Nixon, I could see it, understand it, the Republican choice, that is, even as I disagreed with their party’s standards for choosing the nominees.

I was a kid when Dwight Eisenhower was the Republican presidential nominee. True, he hadn’t ever run for elected office, like Mr. Trump, but, besides heading up Columbia University as President, where I served time undergrad and at the law school (long after “Ike” had moved on), President Eisenhower had been a five star general in the Army and was the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, heading up invasions into North Africa, France and Germany. Both parties had sought to have Eisenhower head up their ticket. Donald Trump is no Dwight Eisenhower.

Ronald Reagan may have been the consummate show man but he had to be more than that to position himself for a presidential nomination. He had been the head of the Screen Actors Guild, the voice of GE, the Governor of California, and ran for President in ’68 and ’76 before sealing the deal, and winning the presidential nomination and election in 1980.

Blemishes and past disagreements aside, I have never seen a worse nominee than Donald Trump so ill-prepared to lead this nation. Continue reading

Justice in Virginia – worse than imperfect!

loudouncourtThere is this wrong-headed notion in Virginia that, if we could just get better paid criminal defense lawyers with more administrative and investigative resources, that we would have criminal justice in Virginia.

That’s just not the case.

Assuring the Accused of a decent defense in Virginia is but a small part of the failure of our so-called criminal justice system.

We are convicting innocent people in Virginia because of false eye-witness testimony, false confessions, over-eager snitches, faulty forensics, true, some bad defense lawyers, but also, and this is the worst of all, because of prosecutorial misconduct and police misconduct.

In this last category, what we often mean by misconduct is that the government is concealing or destroying evidence that is exclusively within its possession that demonstrates, or tends to demonstrate, that the Accused is innocent, or his accusers are not reliable, or the sentence excessive. Continue reading

Now Dallas

In protest of the Minnesota shooting of Philando Castile

In protest of the Minnesota shooting of Philando Castile

The rule of law is ignored.

Cops kill with impunity based seemingly, given the stats, on the race of the victim.

The system shuffles the shooting cop off stage, hides his identity, misplaces the dash board camera footage, gives us a bs song and dance that doesn’t fly, for, after all, to give one recent example, how can you justify killing a black man, Philando Castile, in Minnesota for having a busted tail light?

If Castile had been arrested for anything, had he not been killed, or if any one of us were arrested, the police would circulate a sorrowful mug shot, showing us off to severe disadvantage, and whisper “on background” to some journalist or other a brief slanderous history.

But the Castile cop is on administrative leave, traveling under the radar.

What we can expect, following Castile’s death, is that they’ll clear the officer 6 or more months later – after a “full and fair” investigation – behind closed doors – and announce the results when most have moved on to another tragic public incident.

The law fails when it lacks force and suffers from favor. Continue reading