Special Counsel Robert Mueller has delivered a report to the Justice Department
This is the report about possible crimes. What we don’t know is whether there will be a second report direct to Congress on the (arguably more important?) counter-intelligence project about foreign attempts to influence the election, and perhaps even more reports.
Maryland has no statute of limitations for attempted rape, according to a web page at RAINN (Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network):
I mention this à propos de rien.
Scene from anti-Airbnb protest in Barcelona.
Source Barcelona-home.com
The Miami Herald’s Kyra Gurney reports Miami Beach could soon arrest people operating Airbnb-like rentals without a license. The city is banning unlicensed apartment rentals with a term of less than six months, which seems like a long time to me. Asheville, NC, for example, requires a minimum of a month’s lease, which seems enough to keep out the riffraff, preserve the character of neighborhoods, or whatever they are doing.
Anyway, Ms. Gurney and I had a nice talk about how you enforce a rule against short-term rentals which are commonly advertised and rented online, and a small fragment of that talk ended up near the end of her article.
“Race-Baiting Strip Club Shooter Regrets Acting as His Own Attorney” — Actual Miami news.
One of the less-minor mysteries of yesterday’s twin courtroom bombshells was the absence of a formal plea deal between Cohen and the government. Fortunately we have expert local lawyer David Oscar Markus to explain it to us:
The parties agreed that no variance arguments can be made, up or down. This is a BIG concession by Cohen’s lawyers and is sometimes seen in the SDNY when there is cooperation credit coming. Without the cooperation credit, it’s a terrible deal for Cohen. He’s basically pleading guilty to all of the offenses and not getting anything in return other than the 3 points. If he pleaded straight up, he would at least be able to argue for a sentence under the guidelines. Even with the potential of a cooperation deal, it seems very harsh.
That’s why it’s obvious that Cohen is cooperating, even though it’s not specifically mentioned in the plea agreement. Otherwise, the deal makes no sense. He said as much during his colloquy today and his lawyer, Lanny Davis, has been all over the news saying the same thing.
If he gets cooperation credit, the defense will be asking for a significant reduction below the guidelines — probably all the way to probation.
Okay. Now I get it. Thank you.
Joseph Goldstein has an interesting NYT article, ‘Testilying’ by Police: A Stubborn Problem, which updates a 1994 article which introduced me to the term.
TL/DR: Lots of NY cops lie in police reports and on the stand even about behavior that was recorded on camera.
The article does, however, leave two big questions unasked and unanswered. Unanswered is why is it (as the article reports) that NY courts routinely seal the evidence of cops lying? I’d like to know, because it could be that either a rule of court or other change might help reduce or eliminate the practice.
Unasked is why doesn’t the DA’s office have a zerohttp://www.nytimes.com/1994/04/22/us/new-york-police-often-lie-under-oath-report-says.html?pagewanted=all-tolerance policy for police making false statements on official documents, not to mention in court? Here, we can guess the likely answers: First, DAs think that because they have to work with police, they dare not anger them. Second, to the (partial) extent that testilying is designed to get around that pesky 4th Amendment, the police perjury is helping put away ‘bad guys’. Even so, the DA should be put to some prevarications.
And think about what terrible reason those two hypothesized justifications are: some of the perjury is about actual elements of the offense. In those cases, by their cowardice, the DA is allowing substantial numbers of innocent people to plead to, or be convicted of, offenses they did not commit.
As to the cases where the police perjury is about probable cause, it may be true that the victims are in some moral sense guilty of the underlying offense but even so the social consequences are not worth the candle: Police perjury breeds contempt for the Constitution and legal rules on behalf of the police (and the state’s lawyers), and fuels the belief of the arrested that the law is a sham, the police a unconstrained army. (And, worse, it’s only a step from planting evidence. Which I remind you could happen to anyone.) All this is very bad for the country at the best of times, and Trump’s America is not currently enjoying the best of times when it comes to lawfulness.
The rotting of the rule of law runs both up and down.
NOTE: Paragraph 2 above lightly edited for clarity
Jotwell Blenderlaw