I Write the Words . . .

This post is a bit off-topic, but as somebody who, for better or worse, writes his own blog posts, I thought the issue interesting.

Today in Real Lawyers Have Blogs, Kevin O'Keefe discusses the growing consensus that it is unethical for lawyers to use ghost writers to do their blogging for them. I'm not sold on the argument but I firmly agree that you shouldn't hire somebody else to think up your thoughts and write down your professional opinions. Call it pride, call it ego, but I can't fathom having a blog where somebody else selects an issue, decides what I ought to be saying, writes a post about it, and then publishes under my name. This is not to say that it wouldn't be a better written blog, but it certainly wouldn't be mine.

Supreme Court: Warrant Needed to Search Cell Phone

The Supreme Court today ruled that police officers need a warrant to search the data on your cell phone, even if you are lawfully under arrest. The ruling in Riley v. California, a surprising 9-0 decision, while a bit out of character for this Court, is a welcome reaffirmation of our basic privacy rights under the Fourth Amendment.

The underlying facts in Riley do not paint a sympathetic picture. Riley was initially stopped by police for driving with expired registration tags. The officers then determined that his license was suspended, leading to his arrest and an inventory search of the car. That search turned up two illegal handguns. A subsequent search of Riley uncovered evidence that he was a member of the Bloods street gang. A detective looked through Riley's smart phone and found, among other things, photographs of him by a car that the police knew had been used in the course of a recent shooting. In other words, Riley was a bad apple.

Selective Justice and the Central Park Five

While running for Mayor, Bill de Blasio promised to settle the Central Park Five's civil case; a long running civil action that flowed from the infamous arrest and prosecution of five teenagers for the brutal rape and assault of a young woman jogging in Central Park. As discussed in this space last week, the attack and the subsequent prosecution exposed deep racial divides in New York. In 2002, twelve years later, then Manhattan D.A. Robert Morgenthau moved to set aside the five convictions, citing compelling evidence that the rape was carried out by another man altogether. The Central Park Five, who had spent years in prison, sued, claiming that the police knowingly elicited false confessions, which were then used to convict them. The litigation ran for more than 10 years, before ending in a $40 million settlement last week.

It was a tremendous victory for the five men, representing a payout (about $1 million/year) that was significantly higher than the City ordinarily agrees to in wrongful prosecution cases. For instance, just a few months ago, the City agreed to pay David Ranta $6.2 million as compensation for his 22 years if imprisonment. To be fair, once de Blasio announced that he would not try the case and stripped the City's lawyers of the leverage of forcing a trial (at which they had meaningful defenses), the outcome was inevitable.