A doctor and a lawyer are chatting at a party. But every few minutes, someone comes up and pesters the doctor about some ailment and asks for advice. After a couple of hours, the doctor, exasperated, asks the lawyer how it is that no one bothers asking HIM for advice? The lawyer takes a sip of his whiskey and a drag on his cigar before responding that that used to be a problem for him, but now he just bills people who ask him for advice at his hourly rate. Once that happened a couple of times, nobody bothered him again.

Ok so let's talk about mistrials and double jeopardy, since everyone is talking about it in the context of the YSL trial.

If a mistrial occurs, and the defense just DOES NOT OBJECT, the defendant can be retried. If it's defense requested, same deal.

/1 The only time that the defense can request a mistrial AND bar retrial is when they can get a judge to find that the State deliberately provoked the mistrial.

This is hard as hell because no prosecutor is going to admit that and the judge has to work with them every day.

/2

So let's talk for a minute about recusal motions in Georgia, how they work, and what the remedies are.

A valid recusal motion in Georgia must be:

1. Swift
2. Sworn
3. Sufficient

/1 The motion must be swift:

You have to file it within 5 days of learning whatever reason you have for wanting the judge recused.

/2

It appears that Georgia Rule of Professional Responsibility 3.4 (f) actually has a pretty major typo that changes its meaning.

They changed an "and" to an "or" that eviscerates the rule.

Left: Georgia Right: ABA

Under Georgia's rule, you can almost always request secrecy.

It makes total sense to say that you can tell employees not to tell people about things, so long as it's not adverse to their interests.

It makes no sense at all to say you can tell anyone to remain silent, so long as it's not adverse to their interests.

Let's take a breath and summarize.

Kenneth Copeland did not want to testify. His lawyer left town.

The State and a Judge took this opportunity to threaten to hold Copeland in jail for years if he refused to testify, and threatened to charge him with perjury if he deviated. This may surprise you, but it is relevant whether a witness has been threatened with criminal charges unless he testifies as the State insists he does. That is part of his feelings towards the parties. It is Brady evidence.

Let's go through some relevant law. First off, judges are not supposed to talk to parties without opposing counsel present except in a few, limited circumstances. Here's Uniform Superior Court Rule 4.1. I am not aware of any rule that permits a judge to meet ex parte with a witness.

See e.g. Arnau v. Arnau, 207 Ga. App. 696, 697 (Ga. Ct. App. 1993) (judge who met with expert presumptively prejudiced losing party even if testimony was cumulative).

People keep saying these charges never would have been brought against anyone else.

That's dumb.

If you become a national news story over something that is arguably criminal, there is a very good chance you will be charged. No matter who you are.

https://twitter.com/justinamash/status/1796300677993373883

Like, remember that subnormal dude who slapped his kid at a restaurant last week?

Very good odds that he ends up catching a charge or a child services investigation. Not because of his politics but because he is in the public eye.

People often mess up hearsay but the rule is easy.

1. Out of court statement

That means any statement made by someone who is not in the witness chair

It also means statements by the witness that were made before they got to court. 2. For the truth of the matter asserted.

In other words, do you give a shit if the dude is lying?

If I said I am the world's greatest lawyer, you can't bring that in to argue that it's true.

But you can bring it in to show I'm delusional.

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