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At various times in their careers, lawyers see motions or other pleadings that, for one reason or another, strike them perhaps beyond unmeritorious. Whether because of boundless judicial restraint or other reasons, even when judges deny those motions they don’t say much. Based on what someone passed along to me today, though, Iowa District Court Judge William Pattinson reached his limit recently.
His ruling last month on a motion for change of venue in a trust action couldn’t have been more explicit. The motion, Pattinson’s order said, “is so incredibly asinine, ill-conceived, unfounded and personally and professionally insulting that it is unworthy of any discussion or consideration.” It doesn’t take a great leap of logic to conclude the motion was denied.
Based on four affidavits submitted in support of the motion, it appears one of the defendants, all of whom live in California, is concerned that the action is venued in the small Iowa town where the plaintiff’s attorney and his law firm are located. In addition to that defendant, three attorneys signed affidavits essentially asserting that judges in smaller communities are unduly influenced by local attorneys and would favor them over an out-of-state resident.
Under this reasoning, rural residents could never bring suit in their home county or cases can only be heard by judges who don’t know any of the attorneys involved. Of course, I’m guessing the defendant now believes Judge Pattinson’s bluntness simply proves how much “undue influence” the plaintiff’s attorney has.
I think perfect objectivity is an unrealistic goal; fairness, however, is not.
Michael Pollan
Bulletin Board
Random Rant
Blog Headlines of the Week
Blog Lines of the Week
Interesting Reading in the Interweb Tubes
Bookish Linkage
Nonbookish Linkage
I’d like to find your inner child and kick its little ass
Eagles, “Get Over It,” Hell Freezes Over
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Scalia: Constitution does not ban “stupid laws.”
Here’s another of those legal ethics matters that would seem to be a no-brainer. A “couch of restitution” is not an acceptable method of collecting fees for legal services.
ATL gives lawyers and legal wannabees a chance to evaluate a job offer to Sarah Palin’s almost-son-in-law, Levi Johnston — to appear in gay porn videos.
If you haven’t heard already, Jesus Christ was excused from jury duty this week for being disruptive. And the story may have produced the news story sentence of the year: “Efforts to reach Christ today were unsuccessful.”
Justice may be blind, but she has very sophisticated listening devices.
Edgar Argo, Funny Times
You know those annoying Alltel “My Circle” ads? Today I’m wondering why the chubby guy who represents Sprint in the ads hasn’t lost a ton of weight. The question arises because evidently he and his friends at Sprint have been pretty busy. “Sprint Nextel provided law enforcement agencies with its customers’ (GPS) location information over 8 million times between September 2008 and October 2009.”
The report comes from data security and privacy expert Christopher Soghoian, who says he learned of it in October at a conference in Washington. What conference? One that bills itself as “the world’s largest gathering of North American, Caribbean and Latin American Law Enforcement, Intelligence and Homeland Security Analysts and Telecom Operators responsible for lawful interception, electronic investigations and network Intelligence gathering.”
Soghoian looks at the background and related electronic surveillance issues in great detail on his blog. Ultimately, it also explains why the chubby guy is still chubby. Seems Sprint created a special web interface for law enforcement agencies that evidently automates the process of them getting customer GPS info. Sprint’s manager of electronic surveillance said this approach makes life much better for Sprint because “there is no way on earth my team could have handled 8 million requests from law enforcement, just for GPS alone.”
Simple math says 8 million requests over the course of 13 months means an average of 20,202 queries a day, or roughly one every four seconds. Not only is that just one cell phone company, it is only GPS data, not text messages, call information or basic customer information.
Even the thought a cell phone company actually has or needs a position called manager of electronic surveillance causes me pause. So it doesn’t help to see that law enforcement agencies “love” the interface and anticipate Sprint “automating other features.” I bet Sprint subscribers can hardly wait.
(H/T to the Electronic Frontier Foundation and its exploration of the ramifications of this news.)
There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment.
George Orwell, 1984
Although I grew up hunting, I don’t own a gun. In fact, unless you count the .22 rifle and 20-gauge shotgun I used as a teenager that were still in my dad’s gun cabinet when he died, I haven’t owned a gun for at least 30 years. That said, the news that a Washington High School student was expelled for a year because a gun was in the trunk of his car brought home how life on the Great Plains has changed in that time.
Even though the state law banning firearms on school property was first enacted in 1961, I don’t recall it being enforced in the dark ages when I was in high school (1970-74). During hunting season, there were a number of pickups in the parking lot with shotguns in gun racks in the rear window. There were probably as many or more in trunks. Some classmates used their senior privilege of leaving school for lunch to run out and hunt a few pheasants over the noon hour. Even more kids would head out after school to do a bit of hunting before the sun went down. As far as I recall, no one was arrested or disciplined, no one’s shotgun was ever stolen and I know no one ever got shot on school grounds.
Today, though, we have a 17-year-old tossed from school for a year because a shotgun was in the trunk of his car, even though it was unloaded and there was no ammunition in the car. While I’ve seen other reports indicating the gun was in the backseat or on the floor by the backseat, this is still a long, long, long way from when I grew up.
You can’t blame the Sioux Falls School District, though. State law requires expulsion for not less than 12 months, subject to a superintendent’s ability to reduce or extend it on case-by-case basis. Federal law also bans firearms in school zones. And it’s hard to blame Congress or the state Legislature when you consider Columbine and the all too many high school shootings in the last decade. While some may question a strict “no tolerance” policy, that may be the only solution given who is to blame for bringing us to this point — modern American society.
We put our kids to fifteen years of quick-cut advertising, passive television watching, and sadistic video games, and we expect to see emerge a new generation of calm, compassionate, and engaged human beings?
Sidney Poitier, The Measure of a Man
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