::taps mic:: “Is this thing on?”

If any of my older readers are still checking this blog occasionally, (1) I love you but (2) you probably need to seek therapy 😉

It’s been over a year since I wrote anything here at law:/dev/null. Officially the longest hiatus from blogging I’d had since I started way back in the halcyon days of my 1L year.

A metric f*ckload of life has happened since then. I ran for office (and got blown out).1 One of my criminal defense cases went viral. And then it went viral again, and again, and again, and again.2

My Twitter followers over time, a 1,599% increase since my last post

So basically Twitter became my home instead of the blogging world 😂

We also did a lot of philanthropy work, raising money for the American Heart Association, SHIFT NC, Crayons2Calculators, and two separate “foodraisers” for the kids at a local elementary school (that looks like it will be an annual thing!).

The intern I hired as my paralegal back in March 2015 passed the July 2015 bar exam and started working for me as an attorney in October 2015, so she’s now been with the firm for more than a year. The attorney in Charlotte I brought on board back in August 2015 still works with us too.

Not everything has been lollipops and rainbows, of course. The catch to being a candidate is that running the campaign nearly bankrupted the law firm.3 😞 You might remember from this old post that we opened a Charlotte office in September 2015; well we decided to close it in August 2016 due to the costs, and in the months since I’ve been scrambling to get the law firm back on the upward trajectory it was on before I foolishly opted to jump into the ring.

Oh and I nearly died of pneumonia back in December 2015. But I’m still here!

Getting back into blogging was one of my 3 New Year’s Resolutions this year,4 so I figured it was time to log back in to the WordPress Dashboard and see how many e-cobwebs had built up in my absence. I’ll clean out the blogroll some time soon, and may or may not change the theme to something more modern — we’ll see.

Until then, thanks for checking in!

1. Upside: I picked up more votes than any Republican to run for the seat, along with endorsements from the conservative gun rights org GrassRoots NC, plus the moderate NC Voters for Animal Welfare, plus the progressive Independent Weekly (who even had my smiling face on their cover for this profile story, the entire week leading up to the election 😮). Oh, and Montel Williams (seriously). Not bad for a first-time Republican candidate in blue territory during the Trump era, right? [↩]
2. I’d include all the links to it, but there are a lot of them. It was terrifying. [↩]
3. Running for office and running a business are not compatible. I don’t care what anyone tells you. [↩]
4. The other two? Take home at least $50K, and get below 200lbs. I’m not yet making much progress on either of them. [↩]

Tags: Damned Lies and Statistics, Money Money Money, Post-L, Resolutions, Solo Practice, Warrior Cops Gone Wild

Warrior Cops Gone Wild

One of the things I’ve been dabbling with during my most-recent extended absence from law:/dev/null has been the near-daily stream of news stories about police going totally bonkers while carrying out their once-upon-a-time mission to “serve and protect.”

It started out with a one-off rant on Facebook two Septembers ago, about Jonathan Farrell getting gunned down by Charlotte Police while going to them for help after a car accident.

Then, before the day was even out, there was a different news story about the NYPD shooting innocent bystanders while trying to take down a mentally ill man. I added as a joke (because a number of my FB friends are flaming liberals) that we needed cop control more than gun control.

That was it. Two news stories that happened to be on the same day, followed by some banter about whether or not I should be allowed to own my Smith & Wesson M&P9 with three fully loaded 17-round clips.

But then there was a toddler in Georgia.

And a professor in Arizona.

And a photographer in Texas.

Before I really noticed it I’d posted 72 of these stories, adopting a “Warrior Cops Gone Wild!” motif similar to the late-night ads for the college girl videos. Somehow on top of those 72 posts I’d still amassed a queue of 69 unposted entries, and kept getting new material all. the. time.

(See, e.g., the non-indictment of Mike Brown’s killer in Missouri, the non-indictment of Eric Garner’s killer in New York, or the LAPD gunning down a man last night amid dozens of tourists just two days after their own police chief admitted they like to use excessive force.)

It’s some disturbing sh*t that just gets more disturbing as time goes on.

And I’m not really sure what to do about it. I’m certainly not the first person to document that police brutality exists. I don’t have any special influence with any decision-makers who could change anything. I’m also not really the protest type.1

But I am an attorney, and a constitutionalist, and a small government conservative who isn’t that big a fan of the police state we’re becoming — and damn sure not a fan of a police state freed of the shackles of due process.2

I feel like I need to do something.

I’m open to suggestions. Because something has to change.

1. I think I’ve attended maybe three protests in my life just to see what the fuss was about, and engineered one to cause trouble for a certain Student Body President. [↩]
2. I’m sorry, selling untaxed cigarettes is not a crime that should ever be punishable by the death penalty. No matter what I may think about it. [↩]

Tags: "Real" world rants..., CrimLaw, CrimPro, Post-L, Warrior Cops Gone Wild

Are all California police just nuts?

I surfaced briefly from under the pile of end-of-semester homework to catch up on the news, and just now stumbled upon this whole UC Davis pepper spraying incident via a friend posting this YouTube video on Facebook:

Now I’m no fan of the Occupy movement and Occupiers’ tendency to willfully violate the private property rights of others to try and make a point.1 Even so, this is downright insane

The university’s claim that the pepper spraying was prompted by a “hostile” situation is thoroughly debunked by the video. There’s nothing here but a bunch of wannabe hippies sitting there linking arms thinking it’ll make a difference in tuition increases.2

They weren’t preventing the ingress or egress of vehicular traffic, presenting a safety hazard, or causing any other public disturbance to a level that demanded the use of force. Totally, shamelessly, incontrovertibly outrageous — what seems to be a recurring theme among California law enforcement agencies.

Remind me not to visit California again any time soon…

1. I’ll concede I wholeheartedly agree with the Occupy folks with respect to crony capitalism bearing some responsibility for the economic mess we’re in — but they don’t seem to grasp that the reason crony capitalism persists is because it’s incredibly lucrative when the federal government has its tentacles in every cookie jar available. A regulation costing you or I a nickel apiece might cost a given industry millions of dollars, which prompts companies to buy legions of lobbyists to push for special favors from the government. That’s why things turn into a mess. End crony capitalism, but also end the government overreach that promotes crony capitalism. [↩]
2. Though I suspect most of them aren’t registered to vote, and I doubt they’ve tried any of the tactics we successfully deployed in UNCASG. [↩]

Tags: "Real" world rants..., Tuition & Fees, UNCASG, Warrior Cops Gone Wild