President Trump's First Official Act Advice...

" The criminal power of Federal law, and the resources devoted to its enforcement,  should be reserved for those acts we as a people agree harm us all.

It is clear to me that the people of the United States no longer wish the possession and use of Marijuana to be a Federal crime. I hereby exercise this office's powers under Article II of the Constitution to pardon every Federal conviction for marijuana crimes, whenever committed. I intend to issue a similar pardon to each person so charged as long as I am President, and to instruct my Attorney General and U. S. Attoneys to cease enforcing this unwanted prohibition until Congress votes to repeal it, which act I would sign immediately. I except from this pardon and instruction crimes of importing Marijuana into the United States. "

Just an idea.

The Parable of Twister

      Often I see people in my profession who become upset about what they see as the failure of other people in the system. It's easy to do this, and it's only a short step to trying to control outside actors, and then only a shorter step to blaming ourselves for failing in that impossible task.

     I use the Parable of Twister.

     You know the game, Twister. Not Mazola Twister or Strip Twister, but regular old wholesome Twister.

     What's the objective? To not fall down.

     Why do you fall down? Because you try to cover too many spots too far apart. Left hand blue, left foot red, can't quite reach green, boom. On the floor.

     What if you could just start on the blue spot and stay there, all your weight centered?

     You'd never fall down.

     The Courthouse is like a giant  Twister board.  As soon as you try to cover a second spot- the Judge, the Police,  witnesses, defence lawyers, Jurors- you're at risk. The more spots you try to cover, the more people you don't control, the tippier you are and the less weight you put on your own spot.

     Stand on your spot. Be the prosecutor (or cop, or probation officer, whatever you are) and if other people don't do what you think they ought, that's their line to hunt. You hunt yours.

     Cover your spot.

     It's a nice way to reaffirm the serenity prayer. Forgetting the difference between what we can change and what we can't makes us crazy sometimes.

More of our Cold Hearted Staff...

So we have someone new in the office. She came back from her D. A. R. luncheon, and asked if we had received the video of a jail riotette which we are prosecuting. Staghounds: "Not here yet." New Employee: "I want to see it." Sh: "You certainly are bloodthirsty." N.E.: "Yes, I am." She will work out fine...

Our Illiterate Journalists...

Gell- Mann effect in effect... "Each side has 10 preemptory challenges..." No, it's PEREMPTORY, expert with layers of oversight.

Jay Hileman Coward,I Am Embarrassed For My Profession...

So the news tells us that coward Jay Hileman has been frightened away from prosecuting a case.

SHAMEFUL.

Every day we ask victims and ordinary citizens to come to court and testify. The criminals know who the witnesses against them are and where they live. They don't have special protection. Many live in violent slums, gang ridden housing projects or out in the country far from help.

We expect out Police Officers to go out day after day on predictable patrol routes, wearing uniforms.

For a prosecutor to give in to the fear from which victims, witnesses, and Police Officers CANNOT "withdraw"  is shameful.

" Security concerns"? Every old lady in every bad neighbourhood in the country has "security concerns" you cannot imagine, Mr. $100, 000 man in a suit.

This is almost worse than Nifong.

The Bizarre Public Statuary of Jersey…

The Bizarre Public Statuary of Jersey…

It is the law in this place that whenever a new building is put up, the builders must also erect a piece of art outside the building. Or, as one lovely resident has it, “Something that is art to them”.

All my reader knows that I enjoy some statuary- although I have yet to post my survey of the naked equestriennes of Denmark. One day, really.

But for the time being, here is the




naked flying girl of Jersey.

Life size. A day will come when that cable breaks, and the lawyers will have a field day.

Nearby, we have



Toad on a pole.

Pretty good giant bronze toad, as they go. For some obscure reason his/her column is inscribed with the punishments for crime as they were a hundred and fifty years ago.


Which brings a question to my mind. When criminals and their allies/minions/parasites go on and on about the savage punishments of the past. Why are they stuck on England in the time of Walpole?

I mean, I know why. Because they are ethnocentric and have a propaganda goal. They hate to recognize that before then punishments were worse, and that pre colonial punishments outside Europe were far more horrid.

The ones on the post don’t seem bad. Petty theft first time stocks, second time stocks and a beating, third time an ear.

Rape and incest, the rope.

Imprisonment is for weak, rich cultures.

And the requirement that the punishments be carri
ed out in public, and all schools required to take their pupils to watch, an excellent one.

We act like we feel guilty when we lock criminals up.

The Japanese Way of Capital Punishment...

This BBC article about the recent execution of two murderers gave me a few thoughts.

"Ms Chiba (the Justice Minister and an opponent of the death penalty) said that as justice minister she believed it was her duty to witness the executions in person."

Good. I wonder if she considers it her duty to go to homicide scenes, autopsies, and notification of families of murder victims?

"Prisoners are not told when they will be executed and their relatives are told only after the sentence has been carried out."

Exactly like the people they killed. Seems fair.

(Sorry, up all night on a murder.)

Attorney General Holder: Idiot...

"Attorney General Eric Holder said this past week that the Justice Department had not seen a case of piracy against a U.S. ship in hundreds of years."

Let's see.

First, we'll take Piracy to mean the old fashioned maritime kind, not the RIAA nonsense, or Aircraft Piracy, which the DOJ has prosecuted vigorously MUCH more recently than that, as even General Holder knows.

Let’s see, “Hundreds” would be 1809 at the latest.

The DOJ prosecuted Shi Lei, who was convicted of piracy in 2005.

People were being convicted, and hanged, by US District Courts in the 1830s. The last Federal execution for piracy was in 1862 for engaging in the slave trade, a thing forbidden by the US piracy act of 1820 as amended.

And since the Department of Justice was founded in 1870, it’s only 139 and has yet to do anything “hundreds of years” ago.

(Took me 7 minutes to find all that on the web.)

I HATE sloppy talk, it is a symptom of sloppy thinking.

I’d fire a lawyer who was that careless if he worked in my office, and this eejit represents ME in court!!

My Day Wife is COLD...

I had a telephone call from a woman who had her car stolen. It was recovered yesterday. Since she couldn't be reached, the police had it towed to an impound lot, as is the usual procedure.

There's a $150 charge for the owner to get the car back in these cases. (Seems wrong to me, but the City won't pay the private tow truck drivers and after all, it is the owner's car that's being protected, not mine.) The owner wanted to have the defendant pay the fee, but it's a little early in the process for that. Of course if he had $150 he'd be out on bail, he wouldn't waste it on restitution.

I explained all that, and she hung up.

A few minutes later I came back into the office and I heard my day wife on the telephone half way through the same explanation, obviously to the same upset citizen. As I had done, I told her that it seemed unfair to me, and that if convicted the thief would be ordered to pay the fee as restitution.

She then explained, as I had not, that an order and actual payment were two different things, and that more often than not restitution was never paid.

Then she was silent, as the owner spoke for a minute. And then my day wife said.

"Well, I guess that's why they call it victim."

I thought I was the cold one!


I remarked on it later, and she said, "I said with a smile!"

"It wasn't a web cam, she can't see through the wire."

"You know what I meant. If bad things didn't happen to victims, they wouldn't come to court."

Cold.

A truly wonderful piece about policing...

Just read it. Not a lot of laughs.


Oddly enough, this happened to be playing when I read the piece above. Pretty good soundtrack:

Busted!

So on the way back from hunting a couple of months ago, and earned a speeding citation. So yesterday I went to court. The fine was less than the cost of the gas to get there...

Interesting to watch the procedure in a different place. This particular court had four separate dockets at once- jail overnights, on bail criminal, traffic citation, and review. The Judge started with the standard lawyer speech, got lawyer request affidavits to the people who asked for them, called the on bail criminal docket and set the DA to work there, and then did the traffic citations.

I found it refreshing that the court ran its docket to get things done, rather than to make sure the lawyers were served first.

The Judge also told us traffic citation defendants what the result of a guilty plea would be, and so it was easy for us to decide to take our medicine.

Ben Stein is very wrong about the Eliot Spitzer case...

Mr. Stein, who is usually dead on and about whom I've often raved, is very wrong here about both his points.

First, he seems bothered that investigators looking for evidence of one crime, finding evidence of a different "minor" crime, investigated that offense and eventually brought charges based on what they found.

Doe Mr. Stein seriously want the reverse to happen? "Yes, we've found evidence that a man is committing a crime. But he's the Governor, so we'll just not notice". That's not the Ben Stein I have heard before.

(There are really two things here. One's easily disposed of, and that's following the investigation where it leads. It happens all the time- police stop someone who runs a red light and find the driver is drunk. Or the police ticket a car and discover a multiple murderer's identity. I'm sure Mr. Stein doesn't oppose that sort of thing, and if the $4,000 had gone to a hit man or a legislator he'd have no complaint with a murder or bribery charge.)

The real problem seems to be that the investigators dared to charge someone Mr. Stein considers important with an offense he doesn't.

I suppose if it's just a plumber with a wife and family, it's alright to wreck his life with the truth about prostitution. Or an actor- I don't recall Mr. Stein being upset when Hugh Grant's picture was all over the news. Or is it just elections, rather than families or careers, that are sacred-ish? How about a Mayor smoking crack, am I supposed to give him a pass? A Congressman's roommate who is running a prostitution ring?

Everyone stayed quiet when another Governor ordered State Policemen on duty to fetch a state employee to an hotel room for an attempt at sex. Is that the way it's supposed to work?

Mr. Stein is frightened that "a few career civil servants" did exactly what they are sworn to do- investigate and charge a crime. Even though the criminal is powerful.

But he is not scared by the idea that the same "few career civil servants" decide whether to do their duty based on their personal judgment matrices of the criminal's importance and severity of the offense?

We have people to do that, and they do it in the open, not in the DA's office in secret.

As a prosecutor, I rightly have a very limited responsibility. When investigators bring me credible evidence of a crime, I present it to the courts. That's what the people chose me (through my boss) to do, and I won't deny them that election. It's not my place.

The legislature decides what crimes are. If the people think patronizing prostitution shouldn't be a crime, they can elect legislators who agree. It isn't up to a f.c.c.s. to deny the people their laws.

Courts decide whether a particular defendant committed a crime. Judges apply the defendant/offense balance in sentencing. It isn't up to a f.c.c.s. to deny the people their due constitutional process.

Mr. Stein's second point confuses me. He says that Gov. Spitzer was "kicked out of office". He wasn't, he quit. The public knowledge of the fact that he was a patron of prostitutes had no legal effect on his position, any more that the public knowledge that President Clinton was a perjurer.

The investigators didn't nullify Governor Spitzer's election, Governor Spitzer did. He could have hung on, but unlike President Clinton he had enough sense of shame, honor, fitness, respect for the citizens, or whatever to quit.

The Aspen Daily News' motto is, "If you don't want it printed, don't let it happen".

If you don't want to be caught, don't do it. And if your man gets caught, don't blame the catchers.

Getting into the war...

"This is where the real war is, a war worth fighting. I've never been to Afghanistan and I'm not going to Iraq. But they don't seem to be places that matter, not to me. Maybe, just possibly, we can win a war in Iraq, but sure as hell we're losing the war at our doorstep. You go up to the top of the block and look around. From that roof, you can see power and Parliament, you'll see where all the big people make their money... But if you look down by your feet, you'll see where the war is."

I've given some thought to trying to get directly into the Moslem war. I don't think I'd be much use, but there could be some way that I'd free up a real Marine to fight. But 37 is the sign up cutoff, and that's history for me.

But I've been realising that there are lots of wars going on, and that the one I'm in is still important. More important than the Moslem war, and essential to it. The greatest danger to any people is still tyranny. The Moslems can't conquer us. But our own domestic enemies can. I directly fight, or at least irritate, a major domestic enemy, crime. Crime is an insurgency, too. As criminals control more and more people's lives, all our liberties decrease. And crime will be a basis for our domestic enemies to impose more and more direct limits on us.

Moslems aren't killing, raping, robbing, and oppressing tens of thousands of us every year. Americans are doing that. I cannot imagine the level of peace and freedom and security we could have built at home for a tenth of the trouble and money we've spent on foreigners who hate us already, and who always will.

Just to start with, we could have built and staffed enough prisons so that we could honestly say, "If you kill, rape, rob, or burgle an American, we have a place for you."

Aaaanyway, what got me thinking about this again was the above quoted passage in a book, "Rat Run", a novel by Gerald Seymour, who is a marvellous observer. He has a social worker in a housing project say that, and it's true.

Now THIS is a case report...

My new colleague is the BEST. I asked how a case went, and I got this report.

Wee Willie Something
Went for a ride.
As it turned out,he
should have stayed inside.

It was Wee Willie's cousin
who led him astray,
He said, " I will steal me
a nice car today."

And wouldn't you know it
there sat the Crown Vic,
keys in it, still running,
just ripe to be picked.

So in it they jumped
and took off down the screet.
If the man hadn't seen them
it would have been sweet.

Then Wee Willie's cousin
let Wee Willie out.
And there stood the owner,
who said with a shout,

"Who is that sitting
behind my Vic's wheel?"
But loyal Wee Willie
wouldn't dare squeal.

That's how Willie wound up
under arrest.
He'd have been better off
If he had just confessed.

When the police came to get him
they sure didn't smile.
Wee Willie's seventeen,
a mere juvenile.

Will dealt with his charge
in the very worst way.
He said,
"I just won't go to court today!"

Wee Willie's eighteen now-
when they see him around
the cops will arrest him
and take him DOWNTOWN.

With Wee Willie's luck
they will add to the docket
a charge for the drugs
that he'll have in his pocket.

Watch out, Judge Kosinski!