Murder is the taking of another’s life with "malice aforethought." This is a crime we are all familiar with. Documentary series such as HBO’s "The Jinx" about Robert Durst are popular and highlight the gruesome details of first-degree murder. However, it’s important to understand the nuances the law takes toward taking the life of another. For example, when is killing someone considered a crime of passion in the eyes of the law?
For a killing to be deemed murder, it needs to meet the legal standard of malice aforethought, meaning the person needs to have the intent to kill or commit serious bodily harm. Put simply, there was planning involved or time to consider what the murderer was going to do. Crimes of passion, on the other hand, are defined as a killing that was done without premeditation in a bout of rage or anger. If a criminal defendant is successful in demonstrating they had no intention of committing murder, but instead responding to an incredibly provoking incident, most states will downgrade a crime of passion to manslaughter, as opposed to murder.
Crimes of passion became a partial defense to murder in the 1940s, when defendants challenged the mens rea element of murder in the hopes that this would result in a lesser offense. "Mens rea" is Latin for "guilty mind." To prove a crime of passion, a defendant must prove that they acted out of emotion in the heat of the moment, like anger or rage, that even a reasonable person would have acted upon. In other words, it isn't enough to show that the criminal defendant became angry or upset, but rather that almost anyone would have become overwhelmingly angry or upset in a similar situation.
We see the interplay of a crime of passion as a defense for murder in a recent case out of Texas. The case revolves around a spurned lover. A jury found the man guilty of murder after the disappearance of his friend, who he was seen with on the night of her disappearance and had an argument with over getting into a romantic relationship. On his appeal, the defendant argued it was a crime of passion, as he was overwhelmed with emotion from being rejected as a romantic partner. However, the court's scrutiny revealed a shortfall in evidence to substantiate this claim.
Texas law defines a crime of passion as an act stemming directly from provocation by the victim, igniting emotions such as anger, rage, or resentment to such an extent that even a reasonable person of average temperament could not contain. Unsurprisingly, the Texas Court of Appeals found that the rejection faced by the defendant from a friend whom he wished to date was insufficient to meet the criteria for a crime of passion.
The difference between crimes of passion and murder are slight nuances in the frame of mind of the murderer. You can be angry and still be convicted of first-degree murder, of course. There are varying charges associated with taking the life of another, however. The rationale is that those who plan to murder someone and know exactly what they are doing should be punished to the highest extent, while people who are overwhelmed, suffering from mental illness, had no plans to murder, or killed someone on accident do not need to be punished as severely. However, as the Texas case illustrates, this can be a difficult bar to meet.
If you need the help of a criminal defense attorney, you can search our attorney directory to find a lawyer near you.
The post When Is Murder a Crime of Passion? appeared first on .
]]>Oregon’s bipartisan Joint Committee on Addiction and Community Safety Response met on the last Tuesday in February to vote on a bill simply known as House Bill 4002. The committee voted 10-2 in favor of the bill, with all of the committee members broadly aligned on the problem HB4002 sought to fix, if not the specifics of the solutions it proposed. It was an unusual display of bipartisan cooperation, made all the more unusual by the purpose of HB4002: to recriminalize hard drugs.
In November 2020, Oregon voters passed referendum Measure 110, also known as the Drug Addiction Treatment and Recovery Act. Its premise was simple: Drug addiction and overdoses are serious problems, and a health-based approach that emphasizes and expands access to treatment is more humane, effective, and cost-effective than criminalizing and incarcerating addicts. Measure 110 sought to adjust the state’s approach to addiction.
Before Measure 110 was codified and put into force, Oregon’s drug laws were similar to the rest of the country’s. Simple possession of hard drugs like cocaine, heroin, or fentanyl was considered either a felony or a Class A misdemeanor punishable by up to one year in prison and fines of up to $6,250. Measure 110 reclassified personal non-commercial possession of controlled substances as a Class E violation, which came with a maximum fine of $100. Violators who received citations for simple possession were also given the opportunity to have the charges dismissed if they obtained a treatment needs screening within 45 days of the citation.
Measure 110 also included provisions requiring the state to establish a series of drug treatment facilities and programs – what the Oregonian Senate Bill 755 called "Behavioral Resource Networks (BHRNs)" – to provide low-barrier substance use disorder treatment for anyone who needed it. Funding would come from a combination of the state’s marijuana tax revenues, state prison savings, and other sources of revenue, as needed.
There was plenty of hope that Measure 110 would have a positive effect on the state and its residents. Decriminalization meant that being caught with a small bag of drugs wouldn’t result in life-ruining charges. Emphasizing treatment would prevent overdoses and give addicts the chance to address their issues and go back to living normal lives. It would be expensive, sure, but the state planned on using at least $125 million annually from its marijuana tax revenues, and the lack of new drug convictions meant the Oregon Department of Corrections wouldn’t need all of its $1 billion annual budget.
The proponents of Measure 110 also had one big, shining example to point at whenever anyone questioned their logic: Portugal. If it worked in Portugal, of course it would work here, right?
In the late 1990s Portugal experienced a heroin epidemic like nothing it had seen before. Overdose deaths rose from near-zero to levels of national concern. Users sharing dirty needles made HIV/AIDS and other bloodborne illnesses spread like wildfire, sickening and killing people across the country. Attempts to address the crisis were ineffectual, at best, and it was only getting worse. Something had to be done, but what?
The answer came in 2001 when the Portuguese government instituted sweeping reforms that overhauled the way the country dealt with drugs and addiction. Rather than further embrace the American war on drugs-inspired model of zero-tolerance drug enforcement, Portugal opted for a more humane approach.
Under the new system, Portuguese police would put drug users in touch with drug counselors instead of handcuffs. Drug addicts would be given easy access to affordable, sometimes free treatment instead of lengthy sentences. Police would spend their time trying to break up major drug gangs, disrupt open-air markets, and arrest drug users for committing crimes like theft, rather than simple possession.
The Portuguese approach worked. Overdose deaths declined dramatically, as did the incidence of HIV/AIDS and other diseases linked to dirty needles. All the naysayers who predicted a dramatic upsurge in drug use were proven wrong … for a while.
Portugal’s experiment – as it was originally designed – worked like a charm. The fully-funded, fully staffed centralized treatment system was both efficient and effective, often able to place people seeking treatment into facilities within a matter of days. And then 2012 rolled around.
Economic realities and ideological pushes for austerity hit the centralized Portuguese treatment system pretty hard. Funding cuts tore into the system and ate away at everything that made it work as intended. Before long the wait for treatment grew from days to weeks. The quality of care fell along with the number of beds. And, sadly, those numbers that Portugal was so proud of started to rise.
Oregon probably should have paid more attention to the Portuguese experiment. Portugal’s system still beats America’s in terms of statistics, outcomes, efficacy, and efficiency by almost an order of magnitude, but it’s still fallen far from its peak.
It turns out that all the best theory in the world doesn’t mean anything in the face of poor execution.
Oregon’s Measure 110 promised a combination of decriminalization and a greatly expanded network of drug treatment centers all across the state. It worked for Portugal, right? But here’s the difference: Portugal actually built its network.
The expansion of affordable, easily accessible drug treatment as promised by Measure 110 hasn’t materialized. You can blame any number of factors: cost, zoning laws, graft, poor planning, staffing challenges, and construction delays, but the fact remains that Oregon is at least 3,000 beds short of accommodating the number of people who need drug treatment right now.
As if that weren’t enough, the plans made by and for Measure 110 were devised before the fentanyl crisis hit Oregon in earnest. There are now thousands of new users – many of whom are unhoused – who need help that Oregon isn’t prepared to provide. Now, Oregon is facing staggering statistics like a jump of over 40% in overdose deaths from 2022 to 2023, and it seems like there’s little they can do.
Enter HB 4002.
The fact that this bill has such wide bipartisan support says a lot about the conditions on the ground in Oregon. Most Oregonians are united under the idea that decriminalization and treatment are preferable to being jailed and effectively made unemployable, but the state isn’t in a place where they can adequately care for everyone who needs it.
In the current bill, there are multiple opportunities for drug users to dodge criminal consequences and have their records automatically expunged if they opt into treatment. One of the points of contention has been the fact that something like 90% of people who receive drug citations never even bother to show up at court, let alone pursue treatment, so this should theoretically push more users to get the treatment they need.
The bill itself has been pushed as a way to prioritize public health strategies while also giving law enforcement the power to combat public drug use – the latter of which has drawn some scrutiny from local activists who are concerned about the policy’s inevitably outsized impact on Oregonians of color.
One can only hope that Oregon finds the answers to all of these questions.
The post JK LOL: Oregon May Recriminalize Drugs appeared first on .
]]>Laci Peterson was eight months pregnant with her son, Connor, when she disappeared from her home in Modesto, California on December 24, 2002 while her husband Scott was out fishing. The remains of her and her son were discovered on the shore of San Francisco Bay in April 2003, not far from where Scott had been fishing on the day of her disappearance. Scott was arrested and charged with her murder within days of the discovery.
The case drew national attention and inspired a lot of discussion, commentary, and writing, including from some of our fellow writers here at FindLaw. Recounting the details of the trial would be both redundant and time-consuming, but suffice to say it did not go well for Mr. Peterson, who was ultimately sentenced to death.
Peterson appealed his death sentence to the Supreme Court of California in July 2012, alleging a whole array of problems with the prosecution’s case, their handling of evidence, the way the jury was selected and treated, and 423 other pages’ worth of objections from every angle. The appeal languished for a full eight years before the Supreme Court of California heard Peterson’s case.
The Supreme Court of California ruled unanimously to overturn Peterson’s death sentence on August 24, 2020, though they declined to overturn his conviction. A California Superior Court Judge re-sentenced Peterson to life in prison without the possibility of parole a year later. Obviously, Mr. Peterson wasn’t a big fan of this decision (he would prefer to not be in prison) but the court’s hands were essentially tied given its understanding of the case and the jury’s ruling.
Peterson was moved off of San Quentin’s death row and transferred to Mule Creek State Prison in October 2022, where he would stay for the rest of his life.
And then the LA Innocence Project got involved.
The LA Innocence Project is a nonprofit organization whose stated mission is to: "…exonerate the wrongly convicted; free the wrongfully incarcerated; uncover and remedy past misuse of forensic and other scientific evidence in the courtroom; improve standards for the use of forensic and other scientific evidence in the courtroom; and improve the dialogue between scientists and stakeholders in the criminal legal system and reform the criminal legal system to prevent future injustice."
The organization’s mission is noble (ridiculous misuse of semicolons notwithstanding), and the work the LAIP has done led to the exoneration of at least one man who served 38 years in prison for crimes he did not commit. Unfortunately, the statement on the LAIP’s website doesn’t provide much information about why they took up Peterson’s case or what new angle they’re taking in his defense.
Thankfully the 436-page court filing that the LAIP submitted on Peterson’s behalf is a lot more detailed.
The LAIP has made a series of requests for 15 categories of evidence for their investigation. Some are focused on revisiting parts of the case that Peterson, his attorneys, and the LAIP believe have been mishandled. Others are aimed at supporting the case they are building around four key pieces of new, previously ignored, or mishandled evidence that they believe may exonerate Peterson.
First: Witnesses may have seen Laci Peterson walking their dog around the neighborhood after Scott left to go fishing, which would decimate the timeline that police and prosecutors constructed. It’s kind of hard to make someone disappear when you aren’t physically present, after all, and no one has suggested Scott having any kind of accomplices.
Second: The house across the street was burglarized around the same time Laci disappeared. It is theoretically possible that the burglars, not Scott, kidnapped and killed Laci, then dumped her body in the bay. Police caught and questioned two of the burglars, neither of whom admitted having anything to do with Laci’s disappearance and death – which is exactly what a burglar-turned-murderer would say in that situation.
Third: Someone set a very creepy van on fire in an alley less than a mile from the Peterson’s house on the same day that Laci was reported missing. That’s weird enough (not to mention a waste of a perfectly good van) but what really gave LAIP and Peterson pause was the revelation that a bloodstained mattress was discovered in the back of the van. It’s unclear whether the blood was Laci’s. That said, omitting it from the evidence in the case seems like an oversight, at best.
Fourth: Laci’s Croton watch was sold at two separate pawn shops while she was still missing. The LAIP is asking for all of the records associated with the investigation into the watch that was pawned on December 31, 2002, a week after her disappearance, and then again on February 14, 2003. Of note is the original person who pawned the watch gave the name "Deanna R," suggesting someone female-presenting did the pawning.
It’s anyone’s guess what will happen next. Peterson’s case was already one full of twists, turns, revelations, errors, and assumptions, so it’s fair to expect more of the same shortly. One almost hopes that Peterson’s guilt is upheld due to overwhelming evidence – otherwise, the courts gave an innocent man the death penalty and held him in prison for over two decades.
The post The LA Innocence Project Takes Scott Peterson's Case appeared first on .
]]>The "eggshell plaintiff rule" is a case every American law student studies in the course of learning about liability in battery.
For those of you who didn’t have the misfortune of sitting through a semester of tort law, you may happen to encounter this phrase if you have the different misfortune of being in an accident that results in a civil lawsuit. Worry not, we’ve got you covered with a quick digest of the old but still relevant legal doctrine.
The eggshell plaintiff doctrine is also called by a variety of other colorful names, like the thin skull rule, the papier-mâché-plaintiff rule, or the talem qualem rule. But what do all these cryptic phrases mean? Well, imagine a fragile eggshell and a normal skull. If someone negligently bumps into the eggshell and it cracks, they are still liable for breaking the eggshell even though a normal skull wouldn't have been damaged.
As the names suggest, the rule encapsulates the idea that if someone is particularly delicate (has a skull as thin as an eggshell, say), then someone who injures them is still responsible for the extent of the damage, even if it’s unforeseeable because a non-delicate person wouldn’t have suffered the same damage. In other words, the principle states that a defendant takes their victim as they find them. This means that a defendant is liable for all the injuries they cause to a plaintiff, even if the plaintiff's pre-existing condition or susceptibility made the injuries worse than what a typical person would suffer.
The real kicker in the rule is that it doesn’t matter if you knew ahead of time about their condition. The defendant is held responsible even if they didn’t know or couldn’t have known about the plaintiff’s condition. It is enough that the defendant's actions were the proximate cause of the injury, even if they couldn't have foreseen the full extent of the harm.
What are some examples of the rule playing out? It often happens with car accident cases. Ever heard of osteogenesis imperfecta, or its street name, “brittle bone disease”? This is a genetic condition where someone fractures their bones super easily with very little cause. Imagine someone with this condition getting into a car accident; needless to say, it’s going to be a lot worse for them than the average person. If the accident isn’t that bad but they break their bones partly due to the brittle bone disease, the defendant would be liable for the full cost of medical treatment, even though a healthy person might not have been injured at all.
Something similar would happen if someone had hemophilia, which is a condition in which someone’s blood doesn’t clot properly, and as a result, they keep bleeding much more than the average person. Imagine someone is in a car accident that would have drawn blood from the average person, but a non-lethal amount. The average person would bleed, but would be able to stay mostly functional without major medical treatment. But it may be that a hemophiliac in the same situation loses so much blood that they need a transfusion or organ transplant. The defendant would be responsible for covering that.
What about pre-existing conditions that are more along the lines of “sensitivities,” such as allergies? These would be covered by the rule in theory, but not in some situations that you might think. Let’s take peanut allergies, for example. This type of allergy isn’t uncommon, and it can range in severity. If a restaurant negligently served someone with a severe peanut allergy food with peanuts and they had to be hospitalized, the restaurant would be just as liable as if they had served it to someone with only a mild allergy that broke out in a rash and nothing more.
But the allergy liability doesn’t always apply, especially in cases where the allergy is extremely rare. Recent courts in New York and California have not found liability for defendant manufacturers when their products did not have warnings about a particular ingredient when that ingredient was generally not an allergen to the vast majority of the population.
For example, in an old, well-known case in New York, the plaintiff bought spray-on deodorant which was labeled as containing aluminum sulphate (which most deodorant on the market contains). The plaintiff developed a very severe reaction to it and sued the manufacturer for failing to warn on the label that the aluminum sulphate may be an allergen. But when the company’s expert witness showed that the ingredient was safe for most people, the court did not hold them responsible for failing to warn about the possibility of it being an allergen. As they put it: “The law requires a person to exercise reasonable care to guard against probabilities, not mere remote possibilities.”
Even with these limits, the eggshell rule can seem like a huge windfall to plaintiffs. But keep in mind that it’s not as easy as it looks for plaintiffs to win, even with the rule in place. This is because there are other elements that the plaintiff must establish to show negligence or liability for the defendant — including causation. The burden of proof is on the plaintiff to show that the defendant's actions were the cause of the injury. This can be challenging, especially if the plaintiff has a rare or complex condition.
If the eggshell plaintiff doctrine seems complicated, what we’ve covered is just the tip of the iceberg. The application of the doctrine will vary depending on the specific facts of each case and the jurisdiction involved.
Every U.S. jurisdiction follows the eggshell plaintiff rule to some extent or another. How they apply the rule will change based on both the state you’re in and the individual facts of the case. If you have any questions about how it might apply to your situation, you should consult with a personal injury lawyer to discuss how courts apply it in your jurisdiction.
The post The 'Eggshell Plaintiff' Rule appeared first on .
]]>Last week at Everbank Stadium in Jacksonville, while the hometown Jaguars were trouncing the visiting Carolina Panthers, an unhappy Panthers fan was filmed throwing a drink at fans of the home team. The incident is noteworthy because the drink-tosser was none other than David Tepper, the owner of the visiting Panthers. The viral moment left many calling for justice, noting that ordinary fans would be subject to removal from the stadium or even arrest for such an action.
Unruly fans at sporting events are not a new problem in professional sports. Not so long ago, the Philadelphia Eagles' stadium even included a jail to deal with unlawful attendees who needed a different sort of “time out." The Philadelphia arena even included a working courtroom to provide due process to those who faced criminal charges for their game-day antics. Fortunately for Tepper, Jacksonville's arena lacked such facilities, but that does not extinguish the possibility of criminal liability.
Under the laws of most states, causing intentional and offensive physical contact with another person can be punished as a form of assault or battery. These offensive contact crimes do not require any showing that the victim was injured in any way, and they are typically categorized as the lowest level of criminal assaults. These charges encompass actions like spitting, shoving, and yes – throwing drinks.
In Florida, where the incident occurred, the criminal statutes provide for such an offense category. Florida's battery law punishes a person who “actually and intentionally touches another person" against their will. This definition would exclude an accidental drink-spilling or the consensual splashing that might occur when a triumphant team sprays champagne to celebrate clenching a championship.
Also, the charge of battery would require the victim to actually be struck by the beverage. Should an intentionally tossed beverage miss the mark, the errant toss could still be charged as an attempted battery, which could lead to up to 60 days of jail time and a fine of up to $500.
Details from the Tepper incident are not entirely clear. Although the video was shared widely on social media, local law enforcement and prosecutors would be understandably reluctant to get involved without the insistence of a cooperative victim who would be willing to submit a sworn statement and agree to testify should the case go to trial.
Although criminal charges are unlikely to be filed against Tepper, the NFL did take notice of the incident. After issuing a statement that condemned the conduct, the league issued a $300,000 fine to the owner. Tepper also issued a statement in which he did not apologize for the incident but indicated that he was willing to “accept the League's discipline" for his behavior. The fine represents approximately 600 times the maximum fine he could have faced from a criminal court.
To add to Tepper's misery, the woeful Panthers finished their season with the worst record in the league and failed to score a single point against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in the season finale. Afterward, Tepper fired the team's general manager. There will be no cause for any champagne celebrations in the Panthers locker room, but it seems like a good stiff drink might just be appropriate.
The post Could an NFL Owner Face Criminal Charges for Throwing a Drink? appeared first on .
]]>Gun violence in the U.S. is a serious problem. One of the most tragic manifestations of this societal scourge is the increasing number of school shootings taking place across the country. The devastating effects of this are far-reaching — the loss of innocent young lives and potential, indelible trauma on the victims' families and friends, and a pervasive sense of fear and insecurity throughout the community.
2023 saw more than 500 mass shootings in America. At least 80 were school shootings, 51 of which horrifically occurred on K-12 school premises. This is the highest figure since 2008. The U.S. Government has taken note of this threat, recently establishing the Office of Gun Violence Prevention - the first-ever such federal initiative, to tackle this national epidemic.
On December 8, 2023, Judge Kwame Rowe at Michigan's Oakland County Circuit Court sentenced teenager Ethan Crumbley to life imprisonment without parole. He was 15 years old when he killed four fellow students and wounded six other students and a teacher at Oxford High School on November 30, 2021.
In October 2022, the underage gunman pleaded guilty to terrorism causing death, four counts of 1st degree murder, as well as 19 other charges. A charge of terrorism is rare in the context of a school shooting. The Michigan Penal Code defines terrorism as including: "An act that is intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population or influence or affect the conduct of government or a unit of government through intimidation or coercion." The prosecution had contended that Crumbley's protracted campaign of terror, during which he murdered four children and injured many others, but also "victimized" over 1,000 members of the Oxford High School community amounted to terrorism under state law.
Crumbley is the first minor to be given a sentence of life imprisonment without parole, after the 2012 U.S. Supreme Court rulings in Jackson v Hobbs and Miller v Alabama, which found the imposition of mandatory life sentences without the prospect of parole on juveniles convicted of murder to be a violation of the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (SCOTUS declined to adopt a blanket ban altogether). Michigan's Supreme Court also held in 2022 that life sentences without parole would violate the state's prohibition against "cruel or unusual punishment" in the case of offenders under the age of 18.
Crumbley's sentencing followed a Miller hearing conducted in July 2023, during which prosecutors presented evidence as to why a life sentence without parole was appropriate in the case of this particular minor defendant.
The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution provides the "hotly debated" right to keep and bear arms. Unchecked, this can lead to a slew of tragedies, such as in the Crumbley family's case. Ethan's parents had given him the semi-automatic handgun, that he subsequently used in Michigan's worst state shooting to date, as an early Christmas present a few days prior. Given his young age and documented troubled history at school, prosecutors have also charged his father and mother, James and Jennifer Crumbley, with involuntary manslaughter, to which they plead not guilty. Two separate trials have been listed for them in 2024. Experts informed the BBC that this is the first time parents have been charged with manslaughter, carrying a potential 15 years' imprisonment, as a result of their gross negligence and therefore responsibility for the mass shooting at their child's school.
Over 359,000 American students have had an experience of firearm violence at school since the Columbine High School massacre in 1999. The safety of our children and the sanctity of places of learning are of the utmost importance. The great American author James Baldwin beautifully wrote "these are all our children, we will all profit by or pay for what they become."
The post Michigan Teenager Sentenced to Life Imprisonment Without Parole for 2021 High School Shooting appeared first on .
]]>We're all in favor of a delicious burrito bowl. But watching the video of an Ohio woman hurling her freshly made Chipotle bowl into a restaurant employee's face is enough to put anyone off their lunch.
Earlier this month, the 39-year-old Chipotle chucker was found guilty of assault and received a unique punishment: One month in jail and two months of work in a fast-food restaurant.
The sentence seemed to strike a chord with many who have worked in food service or retail jobs and dealt with outrageous customer behavior (this writer included). It's also a good example of the leeway judges often have to choose a punishment that fits a given crime.
State and federal courts can't create a criminal sentence out of thin air. Criminal statutes provide sentencing guidelines to serve as a baseline. These statutes will usually classify different criminal offenses and include scales of severity, along with suggested punishments.
Sometimes, the statute defining a given crime also provides a required minimum sentence. This is often the case for crimes committed against certain people, such as police officers.
In Ohio, simple assault is a first-degree misdemeanor. The state's sentencing guidelines provide that unless the criminal statute imposes a specific punishment, a judge has the discretion to determine the most appropriate sentence. This means they have room to get creative as long as they stay within a few general parameters.
State law requires judges to consider the following in sentencing:
Judges can tailor the conditions of someone's sentence or probation to the crime itself. For example, someone convicted of cyberbullying might be ordered to suspend or delete their social media accounts. As long as the judge stays away from things deemed cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment, many conditions are fair game.
Judges can (and often do) order an alternative sentence instead of jail time. They might require community service, a fine, or some combination. They can also issue a suspended sentence, where the judge orders jail time but allows the offender to serve it on probation. This is common in cases where they don't view the offender as a threat to the community.
A sentence can also be partially suspended — in the Chipotle assault case, the full sentence was 180 days in jail, but the judge suspended half of that time. However, if the defendant does not comply with the terms of her sentence, she could end up behind bars for the full 180 days.
Criminal cases have a separate hearing for sentencing, where the defendant (or their attorney) can make their case to the judge for a certain sentence. The judge might ask questions to gauge whether the offender understands the impact their actions had on the victim or the community.
In the case of the flying Chipotle bowl, Judge Timothy Galligan seemed skeptical that the defendant felt much remorse about her antics at the restaurant.
"You didn't get your burrito bowl the way you like it, and this is how you respond?" he asked. The defendant responded that the food she'd been handed looked "disgusting."
"I'll bet you're not gonna be happy with the food you're about to get in jail," Judge Gilligan said.
In the end, Judge Gilligan gave the defendant a choice: Serve 90 days in jail, or work in fast food 20 hours a week for 60 days and endure only one month in jail.
"I'd like to walk in her shoes," she said. Let's hope she learns a thing or two.
The post How Creative Can Judges Be With Sentencing? appeared first on .
]]>If you want to collect money from your ex, don't try to murder them.
You'd think this would go without saying, but apparently it doesn't.
At least this life lesson wasn't obvious to one Julie Rabinowitz, who recently received the benefit of instruction from the Massachusetts Appeals Court. For those of you who may have wished ill on an ex, Ms. Rabinowitz's case will give you just another reason — if you needed one — why you should think twice before trying to hurry along your ex's demise.
The facts of the case are pretty straightforward. We will refer to the parties here, as the court does, as “husband" and “wife."
Husband, a dentist, and Wife divorced after a 15-year marriage. By agreement, Husband was given sole custody of their four minor children. Again by agreement, Husband was to buy out her share of his dental practice in monthly installments. He made all required payments.
Until, that is, Wife tried to kill him. She attacked him and their nine-year-old son with a hatchet outside of Husband's dental practice. Her rationale, voiced amid the chaos, was that he had interfered with her reunification plans that were in the works. In any case, Husband stopped making the installment payments.
Meanwhile, Wife pleaded guilty to a bunch of charges, including armed assault with intent to murder. She was sentenced to two and a half years, one year to serve, and the balance suspended for 10 years of probation. Not a bad plea deal.
A few years later, Wife had the audacity to sue Husband. She alleged that he was in breach of their separation agreement because he failed to make the installment payments.
Following a trial without a jury, the judge found that Wife's attempt to kill Husband was part of a “woefully misguided" plan to get custody of the kids and that it interfered with his buyout of her share of the dental practice. The judge concluded that he did not have to pay her anymore because she had violated “the covenant of good faith and fair dealing" implicit in the separation agreement.
What does that mean? In contract law, the implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing is based on the notion that the parties to a contract will deal with each other honestly and fairly. Even if it's not written in, courts generally read this covenant into most contracts. If you do something dishonest or unfair that interferes with the ability of the other party to enjoy the benefits of the contract, then a judge will find that you violated the implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing.
There are a number of possible remedies for breaching this implied covenant, but the one the trial judge focused on was excuse of performance. This refers to a situation in which one party to a contract is no longer bound to fulfill their obligations under the contract. Wife's breach of the implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing “excused" Husband's performance of making future installment payments. The trial court so ruled and entered judgment on behalf of Husband.
Probably the best part of this case is that Wife had the moxie to appeal the decision. She tried to persuade the Massachusetts Appellate Court that the trial judge made a mistake and that Husband still had to pay her.
At the risk of oversimplifying, she had two main arguments. Her first was that the implied covenant of good faith did not apply in a marital separation agreement. The court gave this short shrift. It ruled that, in fact, parties to a marital separation agreement stand as “fiduciaries" to each other, which means they are actually held to a higher standard of conduct than parties to many other contracts.
The second argument may make you shake your head. Wife said that because she didn't actually kill Husband, nothing prevented him from paying her under the contract.
In not so many words, the appellate court found that this was off-point. There is a doctrine in contract law called impossibility of performance. Under that doctrine, you don't have to perform a contract if something unforeseen and outside of your control makes it objectively impossible for you to perform your obligations. In fairness to Wife, nothing objectively prevented Husband, who was still alive, from actually paying her.
But the appellate court didn't base its ruling on this doctrine. Instead, it rested its decision on the implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing. And trying to murder your ex isn't, in the court's view, dealing with them with the degree of honesty, fairness, and integrity that the covenant requires. This excused Husband's performance. No more installment payments for Wife.
You may not be a lawyer, but the result in this case probably feels right. You shouldn't have to pay your ex if they try to kill you. This just happens to be one of those situations in which the law and common sense produce the same result.
So, if you want your ex to pay what they owe you, don't try to murder them. Deal?
The post If You Want to Collect Money From Your Ex, Don’t Try to Murder Them appeared first on .
]]>Two men and a woman were arrested in early November for allegedly owning, operating, and coordinating a series of high-end brothels in the greater Boston area and eastern Virginia. That alone isn't all that newsworthy – people have been running illegal brothels and prostitution rings since prostitution was first made illegal – but that isn't the most noteworthy part of the story.
What makes this story notable has less to do with the what (prostitution) than the where, the who, and the how.
The establishments allegedly owned and operated by the suspects in the case weren't your average brothels. They weren't located in some back-alley flophouses or condemned motels, they allegedly operated out of high-end apartments located in the suburbs of big cities like Washington, D.C., and Boston. They didn't employ the proverbial women waiting for clients on street corners, they allegedly enticed and imported a steady stream of Asian women whose situations came right up to the edge of being considered victims of sex trafficking.
It gets even stranger when you look at the details of the case. Instead of relying on word of mouth to find clients, the brothels allegedly advertised their services on at least two different websites. The alleged advertisements listed the height, weight, and bust size of the women the clients could visit, including a variety of nude and non-nude images, as well as coded messages about their availability.
If that weren't enough, clients allegedly had to go through a somewhat extensive vetting process before they were allowed to make appointments with the women. Potential clients seeking verification allegedly had to provide their full names, email addresses, phone numbers, employers, and even references if they had any. The court filings even allege that the brothels maintained a TSA Pre-Check-like monthly subscription service that lets clients access the brothels' services without having to verify their identity each time.
These details alone should tell you that the defendants in the case allegedly ran a fairly impressive operation. They allegedly charged between $350 to $600 per hour (in cash) and laundered the proceeds of the operation by depositing hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash to their personal bank accounts and peer-to-peer transfers. They even allegedly purchased hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of money orders (in values under the threshold that would trigger reporting and identification requirements) and used them to pay themselves and to pay for the rent and bills for the apartments they rented.
If you thought this was a lot already, wait until you hear about the most startling and newsworthy part of this story: the clientele they allegedly catered to.
According to a press release by the US Attorney's Office in the District of Massachusetts, the brothels' alleged clientele weren't your typical Johns. The investigation turned up a list of alleged clients including, but not limited to, "politicians, high tech and pharmaceutical executives, doctors, military officers, government contractors that possess security clearances, professors, lawyers, scientists, and accountants. The investigation into the involvement of sex buyers is active and ongoing." It's unclear whether any of the men who allegedly patronized the brothels had been arrested or charged.
In other words, the three defendants allegedly set up an elaborate, multistate prostitution ring designed and priced for use by some of the most powerful men in and around Washington D.C., and Boston. These aren't guys you'd see driving down seedy streets and waving for women standing on corners. They're not exactly "fly the girls in on a private jet to party on Jeffrey's island" rich, but they're not exactly down on their luck, either.
Visiting illegal prostitutes is not considered good behavior in most circles, and the fact that some of the women may have been victims of sex trafficking doesn't exactly help matters. The lack of announced arrests is also concerning, as you'd think the authorities would go after the men who allegedly kept the brothels in business. A lot of the Johns may get off without much more than a warning. The defendants, however, are in a very different situation.
The affidavit filed by a Special Agent with the Department of Homeland Security lays out the potential charges facing the three suspects in the case.
Even the charge of conspiracy to coerce and entice to travel to engage in illegal sexual activity can carry up to five years in prison, three years of supervised release, and a fine of up to $250,000 per charge. So unless the defendants' lawyers can cast enough doubt on the charges to convince a jury, all three will likely be going away for a long, long time.
The post Prostitution at a Premium appeared first on .
]]>It looks like the chickens are coming home to roost. The House Committee on Ethics released its report on its investigation into New York Republican Representative and serial liar George Santos. And it's a doozy. Name a crime you think a politician might be accused of and, lo and behold, it's in the committee's report. Violations of house ethics rules, fraudulent campaign finance disclosures, misuse and outright theft of campaign funds — the list goes on.
Republicans currently hold the House by a razor-thin majority. Most haven't said much about the Santos controversy, generally towing the party line with a “let's wait and see what the investigation reveals" approach. But now, following the public disclosure of the damning report, a growing number are publicly condemning him and calling for his resignation. To hustle him out the door, House Chair of the Committee on Ethics Michael Guest has introduced a resolution to expel Santos from Congress.
Let's go over the ethics committee report and discuss where things go from here.
In February 2023, following a flurry of reports in the media accusing Santos of all sorts of misconduct, the ethics committee empaneled an investigative subcommittee (ISC) to look into whether he had:
In May, the ISC expanded its investigation after the Department of Justice indicted Santos in federal court in New York, and expanded it once again after the DOJ filed a superseding indictment (he's up to 23 criminal counts for now).
What the ISC found was both unprecedented and breathtaking. According to the ISC, the investigation “revealed a complex web of unlawful activity involving Representative Santos' campaign, personal, and business finances" that showed his intent “to fraudulently exploit every aspect of his House candidacy for his own personal financial profit." Finding “overwhelming evidence" of guilt, the ISC set out a litany of his offenses:
That's a lot of bad behavior to digest. But call me old-fashioned, this writer thinks the lowest of Santos' lows was his trying to pin the blame for all of this on his former campaign treasurer. Truly slimy by most anyone's standards.
The ISC gave Santos every opportunity to defend himself. He could have submitted a signed statement responding to the ethics complaint against him. He could have provided a written response to the ISC's request for information. The ISC asked him to voluntarily testify. He was invited to submit a written statement under oath.
Santos turned down all of these opportunities. In the meantime, he publicly assured reporters that he was fully cooperating with the investigation. Liar, Liar, pants on fire, indeed.
The ISC recommended that additional charges against Santos be referred to the DOJ for prosecution. The ethics committee accepted the recommendation. In addition to the committee's DOJ referral, the committee publicly condemned Santos for bringing shame upon the House.
And, as noted, the committee chair has introduced a resolution for expulsion. The House is expected to take it up after Thanksgiving.
In a seemingly uncharacteristic moment of moral clarity, Santos announced that he wouldn't seek reelection. But he has refused calls for him to resign.
Why go through the shame and humiliation of being expelled? Only five members in the history of the House have been removed from office. Three were kicked out for supporting the Confederacy during the Civil War. Two others were expelled following criminal convictions. Why would Santos risk joining this infamous rogues' gallery?
Two reasons, most likely. First, he's rolling the dice, hoping that when all is said and done, Republicans won't risk their slim House majority by throwing him out. Second, Santos needs the money. He is deep in debt and is racking up some major legal bills. If he steps down, he loses his annual salary of $174,000 and his chance at a congressional pension.
If Santos were to resign or be removed from office, New York Governor Kathy Hochul would then schedule a special election for his seat. The local political parties would put up the candidates. It's hard to say how the special election would turn out; while President Biden won the district in 2020 by eight points, since then Republicans have dominated the district.
Whoever the winner turns out to be, folks in Santos' district will probably be happy if their next representative stays out of the limelight for a while.
The post George Santos Gets Ripped By House Ethics Committee appeared first on .
]]>