Thrilled to report that my client, Meagan Dwyer, prevailed in her anti-SLAPP motion today against Stephanie Britt, a Savannah cheerleading fixture who claimed that Dwyer had gotten her kicked out of a cheerleading association (the USASF) by reporting misconduct around children. There were many problems with Britt's lawsuit, starting with the fact that it did not specify what Dwyer had said, explain how it was untrue, or establish that it led to Britt being kicked out of the USASF.

/2

If you are ever arrested, the two biggest things you can do to help yourself:

1. Be polite and reasonable with the officer. If he responds by acting like a jerk, that just helps you more when a jury looks at the video.

2. Politely decline to answer questions. I have seen so many cases where a cop has a borderline arrest, and a judge takes his demeanor into account. A super nice officer who chit chats with the defendant while he waits for backup wins suppression motions.

A guy who enjoys being a jerk often doesn't.

District Attorney Fani Willis has opened up a website to sell merch, particularly on "Fani Friday." You too can have your very own Fani T. Willis fan club t-shirt.

the-official-fani-store.printify.me/product/672427…


The perfect shirt for people with a bench warrant

Georgia has passed a law forbidding bail funds from contributing to people's bonds.

It is worth noting that when MLK was bailed out of Birminghan jail, he didn't fund his own bond. The United Auto Workers, and others, pooled tens of thousands of dollars to liberate him. This law is squarely aimed at punishing people accused of relatively minor crimes of civil disobedience, like blocking a street, or trespassing at a department store lunch counter.

Punishing people before trial is an effective way to avoid having to give them a trial.

Summary: Willis may have had a net financial benefit from hiring Wade, but it was small. Her repeated efforts to bring the case to trial quickly suggest no improper motive to delay. Thus, despite a "tremendous lapse in judgment" and "unprofessional" demeanor, no actual conflict.

https://twitter.com/AnnaBower/status/1768623425323458725

But, there is an appearance of impropriety, because there is evidence of financial benefit and romantic relationship with a subordinate.

I think a jury could find beyond a reasonable doubt that Fani Willis and Nathan Wade committed perjury at this hearing.

I think it is more likely than not that the judge finds there is an appearance of impropriety here without making explicit credibility findings.

https://twitter.com/AnthonyMKreis/status/1758603168177352875

You want to prosecute the former President of the United States. There are credit card statements showing you financially benefitted from your romantic relationship. Your only defense is completely untraceable cash reimbursements.

Georgia used to have a child abuse registry. You got notice that you had been placed on it, then you got a hearing in front of an ALJ. It was probably unconstitutional. The Georgia General Assembly passed a law to eliminate it.

DFCS is STILL putting people on the registry. /1 Except now, you no longer get to appear in front of a judge, or have counsel. You are required to speak, by yourself, to the DFCS worker, and explain why you think you should not be on the registry. /2

I am prepared to say that there's nothing wrong with celebrating the end of slavery in fact.

Slavery was in the Constitution. It was a core part of the lives of millions of people. And we amended the Constitution to eliminate it.

That's progress.

https://twitter.com/JimSwiftDC/status/1670839184657989651

I don't see how we could discuss the end of slavery without talking about the "agony of the civil war" or how we "struggled to achieve our national creed."

washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/op-eds…

https://twitter.com/lheal/status/1669689864155955202

People who support racial profiling always claim to be hardened realists addressing racial disparities in crime.

But they never get around to showing that racial profiling actually makes places safer.

And they tend to dismiss rights as academic.

https://twitter.com/jeremykauffman/status/1669821120222994433

If, on a daily or weekly basis, police officers stopped you, put you up against a wall, patted down your pockets, maybe said something casually cruel, do you suppose you'd want to help them do their job?

Georgia lawmakers: if you are frustrated that Daniel Penny has been charged with manslaughter in New York, please consider that in Georgia, the charge would be felony murder and the minimum penalty would be life in prison without parole for 30 years. We don't have meaningful degrees of murder for imperfect self-defense, and the result is that we have thousands of people serving life sentences who are not, in any conventional sense, murderers.

Jordan Neely's killing was almost certainly unlawful, but I feel like a lot of people are getting distracted by side issues.

First, was Penny justified restraining him?

Only if he believed Neely was about to hurt someone. Abusive language isn't enough. Here's the instruction Also important, from the statute. The threat of harm must be "imminent." Imminent means right that second. The immediacy is so important that New York courts have suggested pulling out a gun, without pointing it at someone, might be insufficient for imminence.

New York juries are so biased they will find a dude liable based on nothing more than eyewitness testimony, contemporaneous accounts of that testimony, other victims, failure to testify, a disastrous deposition, and a taped admission to doing the thing he's accused of. a neutral jury would believe a man when he says he was not attracted to a woman he had mistaken for his wife

This Daniel Neely case reminds me so much of Ahmaud Arbery. The law is pretty clear. The central facts aren't in much dispute. But a lot of people argue that the killing is justified because the victim had done bad things in his life. Like, a lot of people experience distress watching someone they find suspicious in their neighborhood. Or have been bothered or reasonably scared by people on a train. And they wish someone would do something.

But this wasn't justified.

Purple is traditionally the color of royalty. Unlike red and yellow, which you can get from a bunch of natural sources, tyrian purple had to be harvested from snails. Like a specific tiny-ass vein they have. And it takes like 10,000 snails to harvest a reasonable amount. It was such a pain in the ass to harvest that the Romans specified that only emperors could wear it and that lasted for basically a thousand years.

So Georgia has a constitutional prohibition on regulating the "social status" of citizens. A lawyer raised an argument I proposed that this bars sex offender registries, because the amendment can't be solely racist.

Nope, SCOG says. It's just racist.

gasupreme.us/wp-content/upl… During Reconstruction, a bunch of folks took this law to mean you couldn't legally require segregation. And Georgia courts held it to mean the exact OPPOSITE. You couldn't require INTEGRATION.

In the past year we have seen laws passed restricting access to information on abortion. Teaching the civil rights movement to college students. Punishing companies for criticizing the government.

What's the most censorious democratic law that's passed?

https://twitter.com/jackhunter74/status/1651641547463467014

Probably new York's social media law, which is like a pale imitation of what Florida and Texas did.

Here are the longest pretrial delays I could find in Georgia history.

Lisa Johnson. Didn't show up for court and fled jurisdiction. 7 years. Case dismissed.

casetext.com/case/state-v-j…

https://twitter.com/ASFleischman/status/1651353930469720064

Shaquan Lattimore. 5 year delay. Released from custody after a month. Late assertion of the right.

Case dismissed.

casetext.com/case/state-v-l…

A Georgia man has been in jail without trial for ten years. He was 22 when he was arrested. He is 32 now. His codefendants have been acquitted.

And the GPDC has not given him a new lawyer nearly a year after his contract attorney withdrew.

atlantanewsfirst.com/2023/04/26/geo… @AndyPierrotti has been doing some great work on the serious problems with the GPDC system but this is the most fucked up thing I've ever seen.

Some circuits have created new plea forms requiring criminal defendants to waive their right to withdraw their pleas, to have habeas proceedings, or ask for termination of probation, even if their probation office requests it.

Graciously it tells you to sue your lawyer instead Georgia recently passed a law making it easier to terminate probation if a defendant is in compliance for a few years, and this is a straightforward attempt to nullify that law.

Big pharma can't be allowed to keep getting away with it They've gotta be stopped