I should start eating hamburgers

I earlier had written about my my love of Cherry Coke. I knew I was not alone, but I didn't realize I had such esteemed company. Warren Buffett in his annual letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders wrote about a Berkshire Hathaway without him at the helm. However, he wrote that unfortunate occurrence isn't happening anytime soon.

The good news: At 76, I feel terrific and, according to all measurable indicators, am in excellent health. It’s amazing what Cherry Coke and hamburgers will do for a fellow.

Therefore, I feel inspired. Even though I'm a bad capitalist, I greatly admire Warren Buffet, and it's not just because he attended Penn. I would be tempted to argue that Buffet is a bad capitalist too. After all, he's a known philanthropist and doesn't believe in transferring wealth from generation to generation. His children are only going to become modestly wealthy, not fabulously wealthy, when he passes away. That would seem to me against the very best traditions of the Carnegies, the Vanderbilts, the Hiltons, and other tycoon families.

One day, I hope to aspire to own one share of Berkshire Hathaway, which trades upwards of $100,000/share. And when I get that share, I better have a damn certificate that I can frame. Anyways, in order to ever get that wealthy, I better emulate Mr. Buffet, and should add Dairy Queen hamburgers to my diet.

Lawyers as poets

Some people with way too much time debate whether Westlaw or LexisNexis is better. One point in favor of Westlaw is that the attorneys who work for them have a sense of humor. Consider the case of Fisher v. Lowe, 122 Mich. App. 418, 333 N.W.2d 67 (1983). The three-judge panel's opinion is twelve lines of rhyme:

We thought we would never see
A suit to compensate a tree.
A suit whose claim in tort is prest
Upon a mangled tree's behest;
A tree whose battered trunk was prest
Against a Chevy's crumpled crest;
A tree that faces each new day
With bark and limb in disarray;
A tree that may forever bear
A lasting need for tender care
Flora lovers though we three,
We must uphold the court's decree.

The opinion also has a footnote which resembles a normal opinion in discussing the facts, the issues, the applicable law, and the reasons for affirming the trial court.

The attorney for Westlaw must have been inspired by the Court of Appeals of Michigan for he wrote the synopsis of the case as follows:

A wayward Chevy struck a tree
Whose owner sued defendants three.
He sued car's owner, driver too,
And insurer for what was due
For his oak tree that may now bear
A lasting need for tender care.

The Oakland County Circuit Court,
John N. O'Brien, J. set forth
The judgment that defendants sought
And quickly and appeal was brought

Court of Appeals, J.H. Gillis, J.
Gave thought and then had this to say:
1) There is no liability
Since No-Fault grants immunity;
2)No jurisdiction can be found
Where process service is unsound;
And thus the judgment as it's termed,
Is due to be, and is,
Affirmed.

The West headnotes for the case are also in verse. LexisNexis' headnotes and case summary in comparison are relatively mundane.

Judge Becker in Mackensworth v. American Trading Transportation Co., 367 F. Supp. 373 (E.D. Penn. 1973) also wrote his opinion in rhyming verse, though he was doing it because the plaintiff had filed a limerick as a brief, and the defendant replied with a poem, so "Overwhelmed by this outburst of pure creativity, / we determined to show an equal proclivity. / Hence this opinion in the form of verse, / even if not of the calibre of Saint-John Perse." Thus the Westlaw synopsis of the case is:

A seaman, with help of legal sages,
Sued a shipowner for his wages.
The defendant, in New York City
(Where served was process without pity)
Thought the suit should fade away,
Since it was started in Pa.
The District Court there (Eastern District)
Didn't feel itself restricted
And in some verse by Edward R. Becker, J.,
Let the sailor have his day.
The owner, once to earn freight fare,
Sent ship to load on Delaware.
Since it came to reap in port,
T'was turnabout to show in court,
With process so to profit tied.
Motion to dismiss denied.

The headnotes are also in rhyme. Again, LexisNexis does not choose to use rhyme.

Poetry is not solely the realm of citation service attorneys. Some 1L was apparently bored in Contract class and wrote limerick briefs of cases. The limericks are published in Douglas G. Boshkoff, Selected Poems on the Law of Contracts: Raintree County Memorial Library Occasional Paper No. 1, 66 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 1533 (1991). I wish I knew about this article before I took Contracts, because I definitely would have recited one if called by the professor. For the classic "hairy hand" case of Hawkins v. McGee:

A terrible need for a fee

Brought great grief to Doctor McGee
And his promises airy
Led a patient unwary

To a hand that no mortal should see.

You can't take the sky from me

Another long pedantic techy posts. Go ahead and ignore.

I wrote in an earlier post that I can't easily get television into my multi-dwelling unit (MDU). MDU is broadcast industry jargon for apartments, hotels, and condominiums. The airport is nearby so any over-the-air signal is out. Darn airport took the sky away from me. I actually bought some pretty good UHF-only antennas and tested them out. For San Diego-based stations, I only got snow. I actually could pick up Los Angeles-based stations better, though I would get a headache from watching them. My balcony faces the wrong way for a satellite dish, since DirecTV and DishNetwork's satellites sit over the equator, and I am very much north of the equator. I can't get cable because AT&T has an exclusive agreement with the building to provide telephone, internet, and television service. That means going through AT&T Home Entertainment is the only option to get television. Well, I finally broke down and ordered it.

AT&T Home Entertainment works a bit strangely. There is a single DirecTV dish on the top of the building, which feeds into the cable television wires into the building. So there's traditional television cable jacks in all of my rooms. I plug the satellite receiver into the jack. OK, it's not that strange. It just means I have a really really really long cable between the receiver and the satellite dish, and everyone else is connected to the satellite dish too. Even though it's DirecTV, it's through AT&T, so I don't get any of the DirecTV promotions, so no free receiver or discount on channel packages. AT&T also won't provide any digital video recorders (DVRs). I have to get one on my own.

There's a few additional hoops to jump through if you want an integrated receiver/DVR. DirecTV and Dishnetwork transmit their channels in MPEG-2 or MPEG-4. That means it's a digital stream. It's also why you see blockiness when you watch the channels. The receiver takes the digital signal and converts it to analog for your ordinary television. I have a separate standalone DVR, a TiVo Series 2. The TiVo takes the analog and converts it into digital MPEG-2 for storage on its hard drive. Then it converts the digital to analog for my television. So that means to get from the satellite through my TiVo to my satellite is digital to analog to digital to analog. Every time a conversion is made, there is a possible decrease in quality. It doesn't bother me because the output from the receiver looks crappy to my eyes. However, some people don't like it so they get a in integrated receiver/DVR. That means the same box is both a satellite receiver and a DVR. The DVR directly records the MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 that the satellite dish receives and then converts it to analog for the television, so that means it's only digital to analog. Also, there is no delay in channel changing. Changing the channel on my TiVo remote tells the TiVo to transmit an infrared change channel signal to the receiver, which actually adds a noticeable delay. Obviously, an integrated receiver/DVR doesn't have this delay. However, I can't just hook one up to the cable jack in my room. A traditional satellite-receiver hookup is actually multiple cables, because it's receiving multiple satellites. A satellite can only broadcast so much, so to get the 10,000 channels, multiple satellites are needed. One cable per satellite. That would get complicated quickly, so the signal is "stacked", meaning a single cable can carry two signals. The receiver then "de-stacks" it into two signals. Well, most satellite receivers have destackers. Most integrated receiver/DVRs don't. That means you have to buy a destacker, which is another $150, and it's something you can't buy at a local Fry's. Just easier just to buy a standalone DVR and deal with the minor degradation in quality and the delay in channel changing. TiVo is supposed to decrease my channel surfing anyways.

The stacking of cable also prevents any HD into my building. DirecTV offers HD service, though it requires an elliptical 18-inch by 24-inch dish instead of the ordinary 18-inch round dish, because it requires more satellites. HD signals suck up a lot of bandwidth. DirecTV HD service requires four satellites, which means four cables. That's two more than I can get. When the tech installed my receiver, he told me how AT&T offers DirecTV HD for other buildings. They still have the single cable but the signal is converted to QAM. QAM is a fancy-shmancy way that normal cable companies use to distribute bandwidth-hungry HD signals over a single cable. Obviously, a good thing, though it requires new tuners or set-top boxes. TiVo Series 3 and most currently sold HDTVs have a QAM tuner. If it has a CableCARD slot, it has a QAM tuner. CableCARD was a cable-industry solution to a FCC mandate. The FCC wanted people to get digital signals without having an extra set-top box. When the satellite or cable company broadcast channels, they broadcast every channel. Obviously, this doesn't work if you want different pricing packages for different sets of channels, so the channels are all encrypted. The set-top box or receiver is setup by the company to know which channels you receive and then decrypts the selected channels. The CableCard replaces the set-top box by also knowing which channels to decrypt.

OK, that's enough geeky information for now. I'm going to watch some C-SPAN. Yes, I really do watch C-SPAN.

The day after the day after

I keep singing "Happy days are here again," which by the way, happened to be Franklin D. Roosevelt's 1932 campaign song. Democrats have 51 seats in the Senate, the narrowest possible margin with the current Vice-President. Well, actually 49 seats, but Senators Lieberman and Sanders will caucus with the Democrats, giving them 51 votes. It's not much, but I'll take it particularly with controversial issues like the Terrorist Surveillance Act at stake. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act currently prohibits warrantless electronic surveillance where foreign surveillance is a substantial purpose of the surveillance. I don't think I could add surveillance one more time to that sentence. The Terrorist Surveillance Act would allow it, so if I make a phone call to Taiwan, I should speak slowly and clearly for the NSA transcribers. Either that or use Skype, which the NSA can't easily wiretap. Of course, a terrorist would never be that clever or computer-literate or use code, so electronic surveillance would let us know all their secret plans when they talk to each other.

Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld is not the only one out of a job, because of the midterm election results. John Bolton is Ambassador to the UN on a recess appointment, meaning he's never been confirmed by the Senate. There are 10 Republicans and 8 Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in the outgoing Senate. However, the votes aren't breaking that way, so the Committee has not recommended Bolton for a floor vote. First it was Senator Voinovich, then Senator Chafee who broke ranks. So Bolton got a recess appointment, meaning he only got the job until a new Congress. It's time for a new Congress, a new Congress that is even less likely to confirm Bolton. So Bush wants a lame duck session of the Senate to confirm Bolton, even though they weren't doing it before. Well, a lame duck session won't. Senator Chafee who was always a bit shakey on Bolton, has now said he won't vote for Bolton. He issued a statement that included, "On Tuesday, the American people sent a clear message of dissatisfaction with the foreign policy approach of the Bush administration . . . . To confirm Mr. Bolton to the position of U.N. ambassador would fly in the face of the clear consensus of the country that a new direction is called for."

This actually was a plot in The West Wing second season episode "The Lame Duck Congress," where the President ponders calling a lame duck session of the Senate to ratify a nuclear test ban treaty, because the 107th Congress would be far less amenable to it. However, the President's staff learns that one of the Senators who would voted for it would now vote against it in a lame duck session. He won't vote for it, because he was voted out of office, probably because his constituents were opposed to the test ban treaty. I can't imagine voters getting that worked up over a nuclear test ban treaty. The Kyoto Protocol, maybe, but a nuclear test ban treaty?

I used to be a faithful viewer of Law & Order, back before it had spun-off into any other series, and long before it was on TNT. Each day, I watched all four times it would air on A&E, which meant I was watching two episodes twice. I used to be able to identify any episode if given five seconds. So Law & Order was pretty ingrained into my brain. Yet for some reason, I don't connect Law & Order episodes to anything I read or watch. Now I don't watch any Law & Order, or Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, or Law & Order: Criminal Intent, or Law & Order: Crime & Punishment, or Law & Order: Trial by Jury, or Conviction. Well, I would watch Law & Order: Trial by Jury if it was still on. Hm... Bebe Neuwirth....

The Day After

I'm as giddy as a schoolgirl that Democrats won the House, though I'm not surprised. It was the second midterm election. The party in power always loses seats, because they've been in power, so people agitate about the things they did do and didn't do, and then toss them out in hopes of someone better, who will get tossed out too after they've been in power too long.

Rumsfeld resigning as Secretary of Defense, however, was quite a surprise to me. Rumsfeld has supposedly asked to resign many many times and President Bush has refused to accept. There was the Military Times editoral calling on him to resign, but the Army, Navy, and Air Forces Times are published by a private company, Gannett Corporation, the same one that owns USA Today. They publish newspapers centered around the military, but they aren't the military, so I didn't much faith in it. So I thought Rumsfeld would stick around until 2008 as part of "stay the course." I don't know if the resignation was a reaction to the election results or it was planned beforehand, but delayed until afterwards so as not to affect the election results. I think his resignation is a positive thing for the war in Iraq. Rumsfeld always felt like the reincarnation of Robert McNamara to me, which is not a good thing in my opinion. McNamara's tenure as Secretary of Defense was disastrous. Rumsfeld is another corporate executive who wants to run the military like a corporation. While retired military are often quite successful as corporate executives, I'm not so sure about corporates executives running the military. Yes, Rumsfeld has military experience. So did McNamara for all the good that it did him. A "smaller, better, faster" mantra doesn't translate well, particularly when it comes to fighting a shooting war. Rumsfeld directly confronted with generals and admirals and went over their heads in forming doctrine. He slashed much needed programs in pursuit of a cheaper less-equipped military that supposedly was more "nimble". He trusted studies made stateside more than actual reports coming from the theater. All of these things McNamara did as well. As much as I'm denigrating McNamara for his performance as Secretary of Defense, I respect much of what he has done afterwards. Rumsfeld's successor as Secretary of Defense will be Robert Gates, yes, the same CIA head Robert Gates associated with Iran-Contra. He was offered Director of National Intelligence, but declined. I wonder why he would take up Secretary of Defense. At least, he doesn't remind me of McNamara.

BTW, I don't compare Rumsfeld to McNamara to make more Iraq War-Vietnam War parallels. A Vietnam-Iraq analogy breaks down easily. There is no regular organized army, like the Vietnam's People Army, aka NVA. There is no populist Ho Chi Minh-type leader. Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army are definitely no Ho Chi Minh or VPA. BTW to the BTW, that they make a reference to the Mahdi scares the shit out of me. In Islam, the Mahdi is the prophet who arrives before the end times. It's like a Christian referring to the Second Coming. Religious fanatics who think the apocalypse is nigh, well, let's just say nothing good comes of that. Iraq hasn't been under the thumb of foreign colonialism for decades. Vietnam didn't have the deep tribal and religious divides of Iraq. Iraq is a different situation from Vietnam, which is a good thing, because I hope that means the United States does a better job in Iraq than in Vietnam.

Someone wrote to Andrew Sullivan an interesting scenario that Rumsfeld resigns, Lieberman is appointed as Secretary of Defense, and the Republican Conncticut governor appoints a Republican senator. And now that Santorum is out of a job, what are his opportunities? Secretary of Defense? Associate Justice of the Supreme Court?

I have a healthy disgust for single-issue people, people who are wholly consumed by only one ideal. These people seem as if they would explode if they had to allow room for anything more. I went to a Catholic high school. One of my math teachers said the sole factor in determining for who to vote was whether the candidate was pro-life or pro-choice. Making abortion illegal was all that mattered to him.

David Kopel is a single-issue person. Every single thing he writes is about holding the wall against the "gun-grabbers", as if he is a Spartan at Thermopylae. I don't know why gun control opponents use the euphemism "gun grabber". Thermopylae is a famous battle in Ancient Greece when 300 Spartans and 700 other Greeks held a narrow mountain pass against anywhere from a million to five million Persians, depending on whose account you believe. The Greeks fought to the last man's death. But they had killed tens of thousands Persians. More importantly, they held the pass, delaying Xeres' invasion of Greece. That is how Kopel writes, as if he is the sole person that is preventing an onslaught of attack on God-given natural Constitutional people-granted and whatever-other-source-exists rights to own firearms. I don't think a single candidate made gun control an issue or there was a single ballot measure in this November election. OK, there was Harold Ford who portrayed himself as a God-loving gun-toting Southern Democrat, but it wasn't like Bob Corker, his Republican opponent, was going to seize everyone's firearms. Yet it's the day after the election and what does David Kopel
write about? How the election has affected the gun control debate.

BTW, I'm fucking sick and tired of being called anti-American because I'm a proud liberal. A post on Redstate.com said, "I think the Democrats are set to kick America’s ass again." Yeah. I'm a registered Democrat. That means I hate America. I hate it so much I live here and I vote. I hate American soldiers so much that I've donated time, money, and my own gear. I hate Christians so much that I pray regularly and read my Bible. I hate President Bush so much that I always refer to him by his title and name because I acknowledge him as the Chief Executive of my nation. I like taxes so much that I voted against every bond measure in this election. This is my nation too and I will not let you determine what is American and Un-American.

More Things You Should Have Learned in Law School

I actually do recall a lecture in my Legal Research and Writing class about writing letters. I do wish I recall more of the class, because letters do seem to get lawyers in trouble. In the age of the Internet, to become a laughingstock in the world only requires a simple click on the forward button. There has been a series of stories of lawyers writing e-mail and the communications biting them in the ass. And yes, I'm aware of the irony of warning about writing things down that will get you in trouble, while writing all of this on a blog, that could possibly get myself in trouble.

I've read stories of law clerks hooking up with associates. Particularly notorious are stories of young female law clerks working over the summer seducing senior partners, or is that the other way around? I usually consider such stories as reliable as locker-room talk since they mainly come from message boards such as Greedy Associates. However, a New Zealand law clerk removed all doubt when he e-mailed an associate at another firm with "At the end of the day we are both really busy and don't have time for anything else but a bit of good-hearted action . . . I thought you were hot and was sure you'd be a rocket in the sack, which I think you would be . . .." Do men honestly think that propositioning women in such a forward and vulgar manner would cause them to respond in the affirmative? Maybe that's what I'm doing wrong with women; I haven't made clear my desire to make the beast with two backs. William Shakespeare, Othello act 1, sc. 1.

For something stateside but still an example of how not to write e-mail, there was the infamous case of the exchange between two lawyers over a declining of a hiring offer. Diana Abdala took a year off after she graduated from Suffolk University Law in 2004. Then she started looking for a job and answered a Craigslist advertisement by William Korman for a new associate. Korman was going to hire two associates instead of one, so he had to lower his offer to her by $5,000. Korman said Abdala agreed to work for him despite the lower amount of money. Abdala said she made no agreement and was still pondering the offer. Anyways, Abdala sends an e-mail declining the offer because it won't support her and the lifestyle to which she is accustomed. Korman replies by e-mail that he had already created computer accounts and business cards for her and finds her behavior unprofessional. Rather than leave it at that, Abdala trots out a 1L answer that a contract should be in writing and that a real lawyer would not have acted in reliance until he had an written agreement. I guess she missed that part in Contracts about promissory estoppel and detrimental reliance, and what contracts the Statute of Frauds actually requires to be in writing. Korman, who has been a member of the bar for over a decade and is a former prosecutor was insulted at being called not a real lawyer, wrote back an e-mail chiding her for the law school answer and informs her that pissing off lawyers is not a good idea, particularly when she might be encountering those lawyers on a regular basis. Abdala's answer would make William Strunk proud, except for the misspelling: "Bla bla bla." Korman decides to forward this e-mail exchange and it gets forwarded and forwarded, so it spreads and makes the front page of the Boston Globe, and even Nightline. Sacha Pfeiffer, 2 E-mailers get testy, and hundreds read every word, BOSTON GLOBE, Feb. 16, 2006, at A1 available at 2006 WLNR 2693026; Nightline (ABC television broadcast Feb. 17, 2006). The Wall Street Journal Law Blog has the actual text of the e-mail exchange for the curious. She filed a complaint with the Massachusetts bar claiming that Korman forwarded their communication and was threatening her. To the Boston Globe, Abdala described herself as a "trust fund baby", and she certainly sounds like one. On the other hand, Korman was similarly immature by snidely responding back and forwarding their conversation to third parties. Any publicity is good publicity, but I think both parties are for the worse by having the e-mail exchange published.

By the way, the online commentary over the Abdala-Korman exchange again brings up the ugly head of law school ranking elitism. Harriet Miers went to SMU for law school, so she must have been too stupid to go a top tier law school, even if Chief Justice Warren Burger went to St. Paul College of Law, now William Mitchell College of Law, and Associate Justice Thurgood Marshall went to Howard University. Both of those are fourth-tier law schools. Suffolk is a fourth-tier law school, so obviously Abdala can not be brilliant though she she finished high school in three years and Boston University in another three years. The law school a person went to isn't the sole determination of his or her legal abilities. It doesn't even determine if he or she will pass a state bar. Margret O'Shea went to Stanford University and Penn Law. She worked for the Department of Justice and for the Monterey County Public Defender, and had clerked for a US Court of Appeals judge. The big problem is that she wasn't licensed to be an attorney. She failed the California bar three times. How the hell could a Penn graduate who had the resume to get a Court of Appeals clerkship and a job at the DOJ not pass the California bar? Didn't she think she was going to get caught? Her state bar number should have been on any number of documents she submitted to a court. Did she make up one? You can look up attorneys by their state bar number on the California Bar Association website. Penn Law is a law school for which I would have killed babies, puppies, and old ladies, or sacrificed my own testicles, or listened to three hours a day, every day, of Sean Hannity, to be admitted. O'Shea was accepted there, got her JD, and really thought she could practice law without anyone noticing she had not passed the bar? Well, I guess she was right since the Department of Justice didn't notice and the Monterey County Public Defender hired her without noticing.

Not every embarrassing letter is by e-mail. A former Army Captain and Iraq and Afghanistan veteran applies to New York University School of Law. He is denied admission, probably due to his low undergraduate GPA and LSAT scores. So what's one to do? Retain counsel, of course! So Captain Nussbaum has his attorney send a letter to NYU, as well as carbon copying it to President Bush and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, that he should be accepted because of his military experience, and that NYU might even have rejected him because of it. After all, those ivory towers of academia must hate the military, particularly if they don't let military recruiters on campus. Since minorities and women have been admitted to law school through affirmative action, why not do the same for veterans? Well, I will say that Captain Nussbaum certainly is thinking like a lawyer, though I don't know if that is grounds for admission to a top-tier law school. I also don't know about veterans being afforded the same protected class status as minorities or women.

Another thing you should have learned in law school is "Not cool" is not a legal argument. Kolve v. Cook, No. 2006AP1356, 2006 WL 3069538 n.4 (Wis. Ct. App. Oct. 31, 2006). I read about this footnote from both the Wall Street Journal Law Blog and Howard Bashman's How Appealing.

I guess all of this is a strong argument for those MCLE classes. One really never stops learning.

A little post about prosecutors, but not about sex. I lied. There is sex too.

The Kern County District Attorney, Ed Jagels, has fame far in excess of what befits a prosecutor for a little inland county. But then again, he has the highest prison commitment rate of any county in California. He's been the critical subject of a Rolling Stone cover story, a bestselling book, and a a New York Times Magazine article. There also was the lengthy multi-day story in the local newspaper about a secret cabal of homosexual city leaders who cover up the murders of their drugged boy lovers. I'm not being facetious about that. However, most of the stories are about child molestation prosecutions in the 1980s where the DAs and investigators coerced children into false testimony. Many of those wrongful convictions have been overturned, with the help of the California Innocence Project and Northern California Innocence Project.

Jagels has also had some recent debacles such as the Sons retrial, retrial, and retrial. In 1994, CHP officer Richard Allen Maxwell pulled over Bruce Sons in his El Camino (a favorite car in Bakersfield) on suspicion of auto theft. The facts are muddy, but Maxwell fired on Sons and Sons fired back. Sons lived, but Maxwell died. The following year, Sons was convicted of first-degree murder. However, ten years later, on a habeas corpus petition, a federal district court overturned the conviction because the prosecutor had withheld exculpatory evidence, specifically that Maxwell was a hothead who would often draw his weapon in situations in which his safety was not threatened. The prosecutor who had withheld evidence, Stephen Tauzer, was Jagel's right hand man. Tauzer was killed in 2002, by District Attorney Investigator Chris Hillis. Chris Hillis' son, Lance, was Tauzer's lover-cum-prostitute, and the elder Hillis blamed Tauzer for his son's drug problems. Lance had died in a car accident, which precipitated Hillis's murder of Tauzer. That Bakersfield Californian conspiracy article about Bakersfield's civic leaders resembling a chapter of NAMBLA doesn't sound so crazy now, does it? Hillis is in prison for twelve years. Incidentally, Chris Hillis' attorney was Kyle Humphrey, a former Kern County Assistant District Attorney. He must be some sort of character since his business card has a graphic of a shark with handcuffs in its mouth. Kyle Humphrey's wife, Colette, is a Kern County Superior Court Judge and another former Kern County Assistant District Attorney. I wish either of them would run for Kern County District Attorney, since Ed Jagels has almost always been unopposed for re-election.

So Tauzer is dead and Sons is out of prison. Well, a copkiller can't be let out, so Sons was tried again for Maxwell's murder. Sons claimed double jeopardy but the California Court of Appeal didn't buy it, so he got tried in Kern County Superior Court again. Hung jury. Tried again. Hung jury. The case was then moved to Santa Barbara County Superior Court and Sons was found guilty of voluntary manslaughter. He was sentenced to time already served, and was released.

So District Attorney Jagels has been the subject of ridicule and scrutiny for the past quarter-century. However, I'm wondering if Jagels has snapped, or if some staffer at the Kern County District Attorney's Office is performing a good joke that will get him or her fired. On the News and Announcements section of the DA's website is a new feature: Every Lie They Print. Since the Bakersfield Californian, the local paper, "has raised journalistic lying to an art form," the prosecutors of Kern County will "bring you an analysis of a different aspect of the Californian's crime reporting, exposing its false claims, distortions, and shoddy journalism." It asks forgiveness, "if our coverage of the Californian's antics is sometimes a little sardonic, tongue-in-cheek, and playful." The first edition is signed, "Ed Jagels, Your Warm and Fuzzy Editor." I'm going to assume that Jagels has snapped, since he's appeared on local radio and television explaining his columns and its purpose to correct the Bakersfield Californian's lies.

It might be in good humor, but it comes off as a crazed obsession with the Bakersfield Californian's portrayal of him and his office. It resembles LA County Deputy District Attorney Patrick Frey's constant attacks on the Los Angeles Times, which he calls the LA Dog Trainer, implying that the paper should be used to papertrain a dog. In the second week's column, Jagel even writes an article extolling the District Attorney's successes in misdemeanor prosecutions, for the Bakersfield Californian to use, complete with Jessica Logan's byline. Jessica Logan is the legal reporter for the Bakersfield Californian, though I think journalistic ethics prevents her from having her name on an article that someone else wrote in entirety.

As an aside, the Jagels-penned article states, "Most cases are resolved by plea of guilty. Usually, only cases with relatively weak prosecution evidence go to trial." It is true that in most cases are resolved by guilty pleas and do not go to trial. However, in my experience, it's the defendant's choice to plead guilty or to plead not guilty and to go to trial. The decision may or may not be based on the evidence. I've seen quite a few cases where the accused has all but been captured on videotape and will insist on his "day in court". Prosecutors may offer plea bargains if the evidence is weak, so they get a sure conviction even if it might be on a lesser charge. Prosecutors who feel their case is so weak that will they lose in an actual trial may also choose to make a Penal Code 1385 motion to dismiss the case "in furtherance of justice". So I wouldn't be so sure that why a trial occurs is because the evidence is weak.

Jagels and his Every Lie They Print columns reminds me of the famous defamation case of New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, The New York Times printed a full-page ad claiming that Montgomery police were using intimidation and violence to shut down civil rights protests. Commission of Public Affairs Sullivan was the head of the police. The specific allegations on the paper were false, so Sullivan sued for libel. In general, public officials can not sue for libel if the defamation concerns their public conduct. Obviously, if public officials are not discharging their duties adequately, they should be criticized. Public officials may sue for libel if there is actual malice. Actual malice is a legal standard meaning the publisher knew the information was false or published the information with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not. Ed Jagels is a public official and he is obviously upset at the Bakersfield Californian's treatment of him. He can't sue for libel; the articles are about his official role as District Attorney, and it would be difficult to prove that the Bakersfield Californian is publishing with actual malice. However, he can use his public position and speak out against the Bakersfield Californian. It is his right to sound like a deranged loon.

Honestly, I still don't know if Every Lie They Print is supposed to be brilliant satire or paranoid delusions. I probably don't want to know.