Big Wednesday 2013
Yesterday, I finally had a spare moment to set up for today’s cases. And I threw in my predictions just to go on the record. No, I don’t know why the Court is taking three days to do what I… Continue Reading
Crime and Punishment
For The Cold Case Files
Does the Fourth Amendment allow law enforcement to gather an arrestee’s genetic sequence and compare it with a large FBI database of genetic material gathered from old, unsolved crimes? A reader asked me to do an analysis of Maryland v. King, a… Continue Reading
Serious Literary Content
Oh my not-God. I love this recent judicial opinion so much it’s difficult to even describe. An excerpt, describing the subject of the case, a fine piece of modern literature entitled The Silver Crown (content below the jump debatably NSFW but mainly… Continue Reading
How Metadata Could Have Squelched The Civil Rights Movement
Perhaps it would be of interest to the ongoing discussion about NSA accumulation of phone use metadata to see how some math gets mixed with metadata in a relatively simple universe. Professor Kieran Healy does just that (found via memeorandum) using… Continue Reading
The Text Is All We Have
Today’s story about the Justice Department obtaining two months’ worth of telephone records from the Associated Press, apparently without a warrant and without any sort of prior notice to the people or entity thus searched, gives me a good platform… Continue Reading
Gun Printing: A Call To Inaction
Once something is published on the Internet, it’s too late to take it back. Ask Anthony Weiner. Pictured to the left is a 3D printer. As predicted here more than half a year ago, it is now a demonstrated reality… Continue Reading
A Lemon Of An Idea In Alabama
If you are convicted of a misdemeanor in Baldwin County, Alabama (that’s on the east side of Mobile Bay, bordering Florida, with a county seat in the I’m-sure-it’s-lovely city of Bay Minette), the judges will give you a choice — serve… Continue Reading
Condemnation
Right around the holidays, American Atheists, Inc. used some of its money to rent space on a billboard near the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel connecting Weehawken, New Jersey to Manhattan. They put up this image for one month: A… Continue Reading
I Have A Soft Spot For Elephants
Let’s play a game, albeit a morbid one. I’ve found a crime from a real case, and I’ve created a hypothetical circumstance. Consider two crimes, both setting in motion chains of events which result in the death of a human… Continue Reading
Car Cameras Coming To California
This Saturday, it became legal to operate a vehicle equipped with a “video event recorder.” These have already been in use in some police vehicles, and are expected to be adopted first by public transportation agencies, and then gradually by… Continue Reading