June 16 roundup

  • Educator acquitted on charges of roughness toward special ed student sues Teacher Smackdown website over anonymous comments criticizing her [NW Arkansas Morning News, Citizen Media Law Project, House of Eratosthenes]
  • Lorain County, Ohio judge who struck down state’s death penalty has Che Guevara poster in his office, though Guevara wasn’t exactly an opponent of killing [USA Today]
  • Privatization of U.S. Senate food service is a parable for wider issues [Tabarrok]
  • Low-end strategies for acquiring criminal-law clients include trolling the attorney visiting area at the federal lockup, paying the hot dog guy in front of the courthouse [Greenfield]
  • A Canadian Senator on why his country’s medical malpractice law works better than you-know-whose [Val Jones MD leads to audio]
  • U.K.: convicted rapist sexually assaults and murders teenage girl after housing authority is told evicting him would breach his human rights [Telegraph]
  • No word of legal action (yet, at least) in Salina, Kansas car crash that driver blames on “brain freeze” from Sonic restaurant frozen drink [AP/K.C. Star]
  • In Michigan, some mysterious entity is trying to drop an electoral anvil on two of our favorite jurists [PoL]

6 Comments

  • The UK story is truly abominable but it seems a he said/she said sort of thing. It isn’t clear whether the local council is trying to deflect blame for their own error or not.

  • The real issue in the UK story is why Clark was walking around a free man at the age of 40 after four convictions for fairly egregious felonies.

  • Because it’s Europe, and they don’t take crime remotely seriously? Even murder convictions don’t really result in much punishment, really.

  • There’s no contradiction between having a Che Guevara poster and striking down part of a death penalty statute. To begin with, people often admire someone without agreeing with his or her stance on every issue. In any case, the judge did not strike down the death penalty in Ohio. What he actually did is strike down the three-drug protocol. He explicitly permitted the state to continue to use the death penalty so long as it used a massive dose of a single drug. I think that people are making the false assumption that everyone who opposes the three-drug protocol does so as a ploy to end the death penalty entirely. That isn’t true. I for one consider the three-drug protocol unconstitutionally cruel but do not oppose the death penalty in principle.

  • And anyway, ol’ Ernesto didn’t approve of State killings.

    He liked to do the job himself. Bullet behind the ear.

    Maybe the Judge would approve that method, it’s painless (they say)…

  • I think the Che poster story is more about irony than contradiction.