Shot in the Dark

For All The Amateur Legal Scholars

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

We’ve heard a lot of legal expertise tossed around lately.  Let’s see how easily our resident legal scholars handle a first-year law school exam question.:

Criminal Procedure quiz, essay portion:

A man is accused of committing a crime in Minneapolis.  The prosecuting attorney spends a year tainting the jury pool with pretrial publicity.  Defendant moves for a change of venue citing his Constitutional right to a fair trial but the judge concludes the State’s actions have been so widespread, so pervasive, so completely corrupting, that the Defendant cannot get a fair trial anywhere in the state.

The judge’s choices are:

A.  Hold the trial in Minneapolis since that’s where the alleged crime occurred, even as the mob outside the courthouse threatens to burn the city if the man isn’t convicted;

B.  Dismiss the charges on the grounds of prosecutorial misconduct in violation of the Defendant’s Constitutional rights.

If the judge chooses A, he opens the door for the State to violate future defendants’ Constitutional rights in a similar manner.  If the judge chooses B, the mob burns down the city. What should the judge do?   Explain your answer in 100 words or less giving citations to relevant statutory, case-law, and rule authority.

You have one hour.  Begin.

Joe Doakes

Er..Racism and White Privilege and the Patriarchy?

Those seem to be the answers for everyone question one can’t answer these days.

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31 responses to “For All The Amateur Legal Scholars”

  1. Dr. Pete Strunk Avatar
    Dr. Pete Strunk

    Any jurist worthy of his robes wouldn’t see any choice to be made. His job is to uphold the law and ensure justice is done.

    Safeguarding the city is someone else’s job. The city may burn, but if it does, so be it. The country can withstand the destruction of one city, or all cities. They can be rebuilt if the people wish it.

    But if the people believe there is no honest justice, if the laws are enforced capriciously and arbitrarily by craven agents for political or personal profit, there is no country.

  2. Dr. Pete Strunk Avatar
    Dr. Pete Strunk

    I do think Chauvin’s judge tried to hold a fair trial, but I also believe he knows he failed. During his remarks regarding the foul reprobate Representative from California who came to sow the seeds of insurrection, you could hear the disgust in his voice.

    You could also hear it when he read the verdicts.

    If he had the courage of his conviction, he’d quit the bench. I don’t know how he could possibly ever preside again in that tainted courtroom.

  3. Greg Avatar
    Greg

    C: Charge Keith Ellison with jury tampering and send him to the prison he should have been sent to years ago.

  4. Dr. Pete Strunk Avatar
    Dr. Pete Strunk

    Ellison didn’t tamper, but Waters did, and so did Biden. They are enemies of Democracy.

  5. golfdoc50 Avatar
    golfdoc50

    Everything changed on January 6th.

  6. SmithStCrx Avatar
    SmithStCrx

    B.
    “It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.”
    William Blackstone

  7. Dr. Pete Strunk Avatar
    Dr. Pete Strunk

    doc, the reprobates have wrapped Jan 6th in terms of insurrection. Fair enough.

    But I submit suborning a failure of the US justice system is a far more heinious example, and does a far more lasting harm to the country.

    We live in a country led by Potato Head’s, for the benefit of slimy, degenerate oligarchs.

  8. Dr. Pete Strunk Avatar
    Dr. Pete Strunk

    Excellent example, Smith. Blackstone would not have let Chauvin’s trial be conducted the way it was.

  9. Maximum Overlord Avatar
    Maximum Overlord

    The people of Minneapolis are getting the government that they voted for. Seriously. Read the bio’s of the current council members, Frey is probably the best of the lot. The rest seem to be campus activists who aew trying to make a living doing city politics.
    The council members are paid $106,000/year.

  10. Dr. Pete Strunk Avatar
    Dr. Pete Strunk

    Do you think the reprobates want to go through another National Guard and concertina wire shitshow for the remaining 4 sacrificial lambs?

    I don’t.

    I suspect plea deals are being worked out furiously, right now. But if I was in their shoes, I’d force them to either drop the charges, or start stringing wire again.

  11. MacArthur Wheeler Avatar
    MacArthur Wheeler

    DR Pete
    Drive the Fortune 500s out of the city, their money and executive courtiers are the flora and fauna that feeds these reprobates. Convince General Mills, Best Buy, Target, UHG, Supervalue, Ecolab, and 3M to relocate their HQs taking their middle management subculture with them and the politics of the TC would change drastically in 2 election cycles – until then the MN govt will be run by people who operate as adjuncts to these corporate HR departments.

  12. MacArthur Wheeler Avatar
    MacArthur Wheeler

    ^^moderation, really?

  13. Dr. Pete Strunk Avatar
    Dr. Pete Strunk

    I’ve got one in mod too, Mac.

    There’s no rhyme or reason to it.

  14. John Kraephammer Avatar
    John Kraephammer

    Alright, you’re trolling for my participation here in the comments Joe (and Mitch).  Funny that.

    I would say it’s a true statement that the intensity of the politics precluded a venue change where you’d think one might have otherwise been considered.  

    Re the BS Joe law exam question, do note that Cahill did not conclude “the State’s actions have been so widespread, so pervasive, so completely corrupting, that the Defendant cannot get a fair trial anywhere in the state.”  He concluded there wasn’t a place in the state that hadn’t been meaningfully sheltered from news coverage, to paraphrase.  These are not the same things.

    I wouldn’t guess any of you SiTDers looked away from Gateway Pundit, or Instapundit or Steve Sailer during the 3 weeks to watch a couple hours of the trial.  But there were some Back the Blue types that were voir dired.  They were challenged out.  The other superseding fact of the trial is the defense put up a very weak counter argument.  Very weak in content, by about 3:1, and very weak in persuasiveness.  I would still guess there might have been at least one strong contrarian personality among the jury, who could hang the jury if there was a good enough reason.  There wasn’t a good enough reason, there wasn’t a great argument offered to make a stand for a not guilty vote.

  15. bikebubba Avatar
    bikebubba

    JK, you’re confusing “judge did not rule that way” with “judge did not see some big issues with how the case was prosecuted and observed.” The original post by our host admits this consternation.

  16. John Kraephammer Avatar
    John Kraephammer

    BB: Joe’s scenario states “the judge concludes the State’s actions have been so widespread, so pervasive, so completely corrupting, that the Defendant cannot get a fair trial anywhere in the state.”

    That’s not how Cahill ruled against the change of venue.

  17. Dr. Pete Strunk Avatar
    Dr. Pete Strunk

    Kraphammer mewled: “I would say it’s a true statement that the intensity of the politics precluded a venue change where you’d think one might have otherwise been considered.”

    So, our resident towering intellect has concluded Politics > Justice. Plato would have disagreed. In fact, that’s what we’d expect from any run-of-the-mill 90 IQ reprobate Potato Head…

    Funny that.

  18. Joe Doakes Avatar
    Joe Doakes

    Point of clarification: this is not the Kobayashi Maru exercise. You are not allowed to change the question to one that you wish I had asked. You are stuck with the question that I did ask. Answer the question or fail.

  19. justplainangry Avatar
    justplainangry

    Building on doc’s comment

    Er..Racism and White Privilege and the Patriarchy and January 6?

    There, fixed it for you Mitch.

  20. SmithStCrx Avatar
    SmithStCrx

    JK,
    While there may not be anywhere in the State that is unaware of this case, there are definitely areas of the State where the jurors wouldn’t face the overwhelming pressure to convict or else their own home and city of residence would be vandalized and torched.
    Before you respond that jurors’ identities have been kept secret, I’ll immediately point out that the NY Times did and expose trying to preemptively Doxx the jurors.

  21. Bill C Avatar
    Bill C

    Either way, Ellison wins.

    A) 3 guilty verdicts in the (so far) Trial Of The Century is a nice CV bullet point.

    B) Had the judge declared a mistrial, and Mpls (and St Paul, and Brooklyn Center) had burned, that would have given him even more “WHYT SUPERMACISSSSSSS” ammo to deflect/misdirect blame for his kinsmen rioting. Antifa from all over the region would have torched thousands of buildings after vibrant yutes were done looting them, all under the guise of R@CISSSSSS WHYT SUPREMERACY!

  22. Dr. Pete Strunk Avatar
    Dr. Pete Strunk

    Mac, I’m all for running reprobate corporations out of town. Problem is, they will most likely relocate to a decent, civilized state and bring all their scummy employees with them.

    Best solution is to de-fund them. Don’t buy their products. If you take a moment to consider it, most of it is crap that you don’t need and isn’t good for you.

    Since we’ve started denying leftist led corps our business, our diet has improved 100%, we don’t have any degeneracy disgusting us from our teevee and we have a lot less clutter around.

    Roku TV is great….and very wholesome, for now. Highly recommended.

  23. Maximum Overlord Avatar
    Maximum Overlord

    Mineapolis city budget is about $500,000,000/year. 2020 revenues were down between 5% and 10%. Minneapolis gets about 45% of its revenue from property taxes, the remainder is event fees, license fees, and state aid. Plus they got about 30 million in fed covid aid in 2020.
    Police and fire (mostly police) eat up half of Minneapolis’s revenue.
    Needles to say, city resilience and sustainibility offices were heavily invested in fighting global climate change when they should have been concerned about race riots and a pandemic.
    The city’s 2040 vision plan sees a future of high density housing and mass transit.
    Good luck with that.

  24. MacArthur Wheeler Avatar
    MacArthur Wheeler

    Dr Pete
    I was thinking of enticing them to states like DE, MD, MA, CA, CT, and NY where they wouldn’t be able to do any additional harm.

    I agree about defunding them; its been over a decade since I bought anything from most of them. 3M is hard to avoid when you’re looking for abrasives.

  25. Dr. Pete Strunk Avatar
    Dr. Pete Strunk

    MO, according the the Star&Sickle, the housing market in the TC is red hot. People are crawling over each other to buy houses. The new lux $2.5 mil condos downtown Mpls are sold out.

    It’s the Strib, so take that for what it’s worth, but if true, who are these people? Who is so anxious to plunk down a big wad of cash to live in a city with burned out business areas? Where there is a decent chance you’ll get dragged from your car by armed 15 year old blax every time you drive to the store? Where elderly people take their lives in their hands just going for a walk? Where hundreds of restaurants have closed permanently, and where you will be forced to wear a ridiculous diaper on your face for the foreseeable future?

    Who are these mystery nitwits?

  26. Scott Hughes Avatar
    Scott Hughes

    Dr. Pete Strunk on April 26, 2021 at 7:25 am said: “Ellison didn’t tamper, but Waters did, and so did Biden. They are enemies of Democracy.”

    The sleazebag Walz and many other in politics and media proclaimed the Floyd death as murder long before any trial or convictions.

  27. MacArthur Wheeler Avatar
    MacArthur Wheeler

    “Who are these mystery nitwits?”

    Fortune 500 middle management, hedge fund sponsored start ups, and their counterparts in state and local government(see MO’s remark above on the salary of Mpls City Clowncil members).

  28. Dr. Pete Strunk Avatar
    Dr. Pete Strunk

    “The sleazebag Walz and many other in politics and media proclaimed the Floyd death as murder long before any trial or convictions.”

    That is true, Scott. They’re fucking idiots.

    I’m sure that will be added to the pile of evidence that gets this conviction tossed, *if* an honest judge can be found.

  29. Dr. Pete Strunk Avatar
    Dr. Pete Strunk

    Well, Mac, whoever they are, I’ll have zero f*cks to give when they get beaten to bloody pulps, or worse.

  30. Dr. Pete Strunk Avatar
    Dr. Pete Strunk

    Pew research has released that 68% of self identified White liberals have had a mental illness diagnosis.

    I think 32% were lying.

  31. Bill C Avatar
    Bill C

    “Who are these mystery nitwits?”

    Fortune 500 middle management, hedge fund sponsored start ups, and their counterparts in state and local government(see MO’s remark above on the salary of Mpls City Clowncil members).

    As someone who works in IT with one of the above mentioned MN based corps, and every day sees a good number of employee shipping addresses around the city, state, and country, I can say that it’s not just middle management living in Mpls. There are C level execs and SVPs who live in Minneapolis, as well as well-to-do suburbs. There are also lots of lower level employees who live in Minneapolis as well as suburbs all over the cities. I had an email exchange with one guy in Mpls who didn’t want a replacement computer shipped to his apartment, because packages had a habit of walking away. Let me show you my shocked face: 😯 When I told him he could request to have it held at the NE Minneapolis UPS branch to go pick up, his response was “Ok, I’ll have to try to figure out a way to get there”. Guess the idiot is wholly dependent on mass transit.

    And at least in my company, there are lots and lots of “diverse” hires for low end call taker positions. If the company moved its entire TC workforce to another state, likely very few people below the VP/SVP level would follow it. And now that remote work is the norm, that won’t ever happen anymore.

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