A Colorado cop gets reinstated with back pay after what his police chief considered an “egregious” incident of excessive force. And once again — I argue in my new post at Cato — we are given reason to rethink the strange phenomenon of public employee tenure.
P.S. Scott Greenfield has more on job security for errant police officers.
Kevin at Lowering the Bar spots a promising new theory in a defense expert’s testimony, though it’s not clear the lawyers actually wound up making use of it. [Vail Daily, same at Denver Post]
The state’s high court “voted to uphold lower-court decisions barring cigarette use in performances. … a coalition of state and national theater groups [had] argued in multiple courts that the ban infringed on free-speech rights and interfered with their abilities to accurately produce plays.” [Denver Post, OnPoint News (outspoken dissent by Justice Gregory Hobbs), Michelle Minton/CEI “Open Market”, Declarations and Exclusions]
Disbarment isn’t always as severe a punishment as it may sound; some states “allow disbarred or suspended attorneys to work as paralegals or law clerks handling legal research or drafting documents under the supervision of an attorney.” One rationale is to ease the path for reinstatement of a lawyer who reforms and lives down past misconduct, but the practice opens the door to evasion, as in a Colorado case in which the disbarred attorney ostensibly turned his law firm over to associates and then was hired by them: “The reality was that the disbarred attorney was still running the firm,” a regulatory official says. [ABA Journal, June 2007 but unnoted here until now]