I share at least one similarity with a supreme court justice!

Well, time for my confession…I, too, am a whole-apple eater. This is surprising as I share so few traits with highly successful, smart people! Interesting article follows about Justice Souter. May God bless all moderate justices, especially those who buck the pressures of party affiliation.

Odd Details of Souter’s Life Chronicled, Including Apple Appetite
Posted May 4, 2009, 08:55 am CDT
By Debra Cassens Weiss

Unusual details of Justice David H. Souter’s personal life are beginning to emerge, from the way he eats an apple, core and all, to the way he met New Hampshire’s governor—at his hometown’s town dump, something of a place for socializing.

The Washington Post and the New York Times both published stories focusing on Souter’s personal life after news reports last week that the 69-year-old justice would be retiring and returning to his beloved hometown of Weare, N.H.

The New York Times describes Souter’s farmhouse, with peeling paint and rotting wood, as looking “only slightly more seductive than a mud hut.” The Post, on the other hand, notes five daffodils blooming alongside weeds at the house, a rusty wheelbarrow in the yard and windows “sagging with age.” Souter’s “creaking, unkempt house looks so haunted that some people who passed by said they assumed it had been abandoned,” the Post says.

The Times describes Weare as a town where residents go to a go-kart track for entertainment and socialize at the town dump. Souter is said to have met Gov. John Lynch, who lives in a neighboring town, at the dump.

“Justice Souter’s life here is ascetic but hardly hermitic, people who know him say,” the Times reports. “He visits with his neighbors, goes to church, drops by parties and keeps an office in the federal courthouse in Concord, where friends sometimes join him for lunch.” He also enjoys hiking in the nearby mountains and goes for long walks at night with a flashlight, according to the Post.

He also jogs in Washington, D.C., and got mugged one night in 2004, according to the Post.

Souter never unpacked the belongings he took to his rented apartment in Washington, D.C., 19 years ago when he became a Supreme Court justice, according to the Post. The lifelong bachelor “dislikes schmoozing at cocktail parties” the story says, and jokes about his shyness in public. A disciplined man, he works 12-hour days, and at lunchtime he usually eats only yogurt and an apple, core and all.

Souter may be the court’s most frugal justice, according to the Post. He had only $627,000 in assets when he became a justice, but now is worth between $6 million and $30 million “thanks to a shrewd investment in a New England bank.”

A separate article in the New York Times by former Supreme Court correspondent Linda Greenhouse asserts that it’s wrong to view Souter as a misfit or a loner.

“To focus on his eccentricities—his daily lunch of yogurt and an apple, core and all; the absence of a computer in his personal office—is to miss the essence of a man who in fact is perfectly suited to his job, just not to its trappings,” Greenhouse writes. “His polite but persistent questioning of lawyers who appear before the court displays his meticulous preparation and his mastery of the case at hand and the cases relevant to it. Far from being out of touch with the modern world, he has simply refused to surrender to it control over aspects of his own life that give him deep contentment: hiking, sailing, time with old friends, reading history.”

Facebook and the law

Technology will always present new questions and issues, much like my dream that x-ray goggles really worked. This is an interesting article about the ethics of plumbing the net for information on witnesses

Attorney Can’t Ask 3rd Party to ‘Friend’ Witness on Facebook, Opinion Says
Posted May 5, 2009, 07:38 pm CDT
By Martha Neil

A lawyer who wants to see what a potential witness says to personal contacts on his or her Facebook or MySpace page has one good option, a recent ethics opinion suggests: Ask for access.

Alternative approaches, such as secretly sending a third party to “friend” a Facebook user, are unethical because they are deceptive, says the Philadelphia Bar Association in a March advisory opinion.

Not telling the potential witness of the third party’s affiliation with the lawyer “omits a highly material fact, namely, that the third party who asks to be allowed access to the witness’s pages is doing so only because he or she is intent on obtaining information and sharing it with a lawyer for use in a lawsuit to impeach the testimony of the witness,” the opinion explains.

“The omission would purposefully conceal that fact from the witness for the purpose of inducing the witness to allow access, when she [might] not do so if she knew the third person was associated with the inquirer and the true purpose of the access was to obtain information for the purpose of impeaching her testimony.”

Facebook and MySpace profiles are different from public spaces where one can freely film and record others, the opinion says, because an invitation is required to access them, notes a Social Media Today post on the opinion.

A 1st Person Account of Baltimore’s Central Booking

Frankly, Central Booking (also called CBIF) is a hell hole, but I’ve never had to go through it myself…well, not on the wrong side of the glass. I’ve been there and smelled the awful convergence of bleach and sweaty, unwashed bodies and seen the apathy of guards and the desperate eyes of the inmates, but this gives you a good paper. From the Baltimore City Paper, enjoy the ride.

By Anna Ditkoff | Posted 10/15/2003
It’s 6:30 in the morning, and there is a thump on your door followed by the doorbell chime and then more banging. You peek out the window to see two police officers standing on your porch. You open the door, concerned that something’s happened in your neighborhood. But they are not here to ask you about the kids across the street. They are here for you. You are under arrest.

It seems that a misunderstanding over a traffic citation has turned into a bench warrant. The officers are kind. They pet your cat and let you change out of your pajamas into a T-shirt and jeans. They don’t even handcuff you, allowing you to walk out your front door and sit in the front seat of the police car so as not to arouse the suspicion of your neighbors.

On the way downtown, you chat. You discuss your neighborhood and their beat. You are worried about missing work, but they tell you not to worry, that you’ll only be there for a couple of hours. You imagine walking from the jail to your office at lunchtime with an amusing anecdote.

You drive up to Central Booking, a place you have only glimpsed in the past while driving down I-83. They stop the car in the parking lot and handcuff you, sliding what looks like giant plastic twist-ties around your wrists. They actually apologize, telling you that they can’t bring you in any other way. One of the officers accidentally handcuffs you around your seatbelt, so you slide your right hand out of the cuffs, put it under the belt and then slide it back in, offering up your arms so he can tighten your restraints. You are very accommodating.

You’ve been talking to these guys for a while now, making jokes, but as soon as you enter the facility with its cement floors and fluorescent lights, the talking stops. They hand your information to a female guard and sign off on you like a package, without meeting your gaze. No one on this side of the cell barrier will look you in the eye all day. The moment you entered that door you stopped being a person and became a problem to be dealt with. But you don’t know that yet.

The guard cuts off your handcuffs, and as you look up, you realize that the officers are gone. You are momentarily surprised that they didn’t say goodbye, but you are determined to hit it off with your new keeper, too. The guard is pretty, petite, with shoulder length hair streaked with honey-blonde highlights much like your own. But she doesn’t crack a smile as you try to make small talk. She silently replaces your handcuffs with a plastic bracelet that fits snugly on your left wrist. Your name is not on it, just a barcode. You will be scanned.

She pats you down roughly but thoroughly. You are told to remove your jewelry. The items you can’t get off are cut from your body, and it is all shoved into an envelope along with your keys, wallet, and cell phone. You will miss your watch the most.

The guard takes the envelope to the guard station. The only things you’re allowed to keep are the few sheets of paper that you brought to prove that this is all a big misunderstanding. You fold them in fourths and stuff them in your back pocket, waiting for a chance to plead your case.

The guard with the highlights leads you to a long hall lined with cells. They are not what you imagined. There are no bars or cots. Instead they look like aquariums, harshly lit and enclosed in a greenish gray cement with large glass windows. The guard uses what looks like an oversized house key to open the thick metal door and you hesitantly step in. The door is shut behind you, and for a moment you can’t breath.

Standing in this barren room it finally hits you. This is really happening. You try not to cry, reminding yourself that this will all be over in a few hours. Just a funny story to tell your friends over a beer.

There are five other women in the cell. Three women stand against the far wall, some with their heads up, some with their eyes on the floor, none looking at you. A heavy-set bleached blonde sleeps on the floor using her sweatpants as a bed roll, and in the corner by the door, a body is tucked inside a white T-shirt with just a light brown ponytail and a pair of socked feet sticking out. The floor is gray cement, and the cinderblock walls are painted in a similar hue. The room’s only feature beyond its inhabitants is a metal toilet with a short cinderblock wall beside it that does nothing to obscure the toilet or the person using it from view. The cell is silent except for the sound of heavy breathing from the two women who’re asleep. You don’t know what to do, so you sit down on the cold floor and wait for the guard with the highlights to return.

The bleached blonde wakes up, suddenly pulling on her sweatpants and heading over to the toilet. You avert your eyes, but the sound of urine hitting the metal bowl reverberates through the room. The guard returns and hands each of you a brown paper bag. The ball of girl in the corner doesn’t move, and the guard drops the bag by her feet. You look inside more out of curiosity than anything else and find two peeled hard-boiled eggs, four slices of mushy white bread, a small Styrofoam cup of Rice Krispies, and a child-sized carton of milk. There are no utensils, no napkins, no water. Most of the women ignore the bags, but the bleached blonde eats hers ferociously.

You look at her in disdain. You haven’t eaten yet today, but you can’t imagine ever being hungry enough to eat hardboiled eggs on soggy white bread. You will wait until you get out. You’re not going to use that toilet either. You will hold it. It won’t be long now.

There is no clock in the cell, so you don’t know how long it takes for the guard with the highlights to return. It feels like a long time. Finally she calls your name and takes you to a large room with a long row of windows along one wall. People in uniforms sit behind the windows like bank tellers, but the chains on each counter connect to a metal handcuff instead of a pen. The guard takes you to a counter and clamps the accompanying handcuff around your right wrist. The chain is heavy and causes the metal to bite into your skin, leaving little pink and blue half moons.

A woman with short hair slicked against her head sits behind the counter facing a computer screen. She is several feet above you, and you can barely see over her side of the counter. She doesn’t address you, so you stand there listening to janitors with belts full of jangling keys pushing squeaky buckets, the whir of a giant fan trying to dry the freshly mopped floor, and the sound of guards bantering above the din.

“Name?” says the woman behind the counter without even glancing your way. “Address?” “Social Security Number?” The questions come one right after another. She speaks softly, directing her words at her computer screen. You stand on your tiptoes, trying to hear, but twice the roar of the room wins out and you have to ask her what she said. The first time she repeats her question, her voice getting harsher but not louder. The second time she snaps, “Don’t you say ‘What?’ to me again. You can hear me.”

You strain to get closer and try to read the sliver of her lips you can see. You do not ask “What?” again. When she has finished getting your information, she runs through the list of your belongings. She hands you a piece of paper with a vague list of your effects. You sign by the X. She gives you a copy of the list and your bench warrant, tells you that you will be fingerprinted and photographed, and then stops speaking to you.

So you stand there, resting your arm on the counter to try and keep the cuff from digging into your arm, and think about how unbelievably horrible your mug shot is going to be. You haven’t showered. You didn’t even get to brush your teeth before they took you away. You comb your fingers through your hair in a futile attempt to appease your vanity.

The woman behind the counter asks a passing guard to take you back to your cell. On your way you are given a phone call. You call your lawyer, the one who was supposed to have cleared up your traffic citation. He promises to come down, to get you out of there. You nod despite the fact that you are on the phone and put down the receiver. And once again you are in the frigid gray cell sitting quietly and waiting to see what happens next.

The guard with the highlights returns and calls your name, and the names of two other girls in the cell. One name belongs to the ball of girl on the floor. She doesn’t move, and the guard jabs the girl with her foot until she moans and pops her head out of her T-shirt. You think that they are going to take you to see whomever it is that can release you, but you are simply being herded to another cell, a smaller one. As the guard is about to close the door, you tell her you haven’t been fingerprinted. You impart this information partly because you want to get through the process as quickly as possible and partly because you can’t bear having another door shut on you.

She takes you to the fingerprinting room. Men slouch in chairs along the wall, and a woman in a dark blue uniform mans a large machine. You walk toward her, and without looking up, she tells you to stand on the black square. You scan the room looking for it until one of the slouching men lazily points it out to you. You stand on the square, and the machine takes your picture. The woman behind the machine tells you to turn to the left. You do and see a sign on the wall that says look here and . . . smile! You don’t. You wonder if anyone does.

You are then directed to another machine manned by another woman who does not look you in the eye. This one looks like an oversized copy machine. The woman takes your right hand and pulls your fingers apart, rolling each over a clear panel. She scans each hand several times, and then tells you to go back the way you came. You do, ending up in front of the guard station, but there is no one there to put you back in your cell, so you stand there waiting. You do not consider making a break for it.

The guard with the highlights finds you there and takes you to your cell. As she closes the door, you ask her how you will know when your lawyer has arrived. She says that you can’t see your lawyer until after you see the commissioner so it doesn’t matter, and the door clangs shut.

the ball of girl has retreated back into her T-shirt and is sleeping on a small cement bench. Another girl sits on the cement bench along the opposite wall, her arms wrapped around her body inside her orange tank top, trying to fight off the chill of the blaring air conditioning. Her hair is partially braided with chunks of it sticking out in uneven tufts around her right ear. You sit down beside her, wondering who the commissioner is and when you will see him.

The door to the cell opens, and three more women walk in. A girl in trendy jeans sits down at the far end of the bench across from the toilet. The cell is so narrow that she has to make an effort not to kick the bowl. A girl who looks about 16, with stringy blonde hair haphazardly dyed pink, sits on the floor by your feet. An older woman sits beside the ball of girl and closes her eyes, rocking back and forth with a look of pain stretched across her hard-featured face. Slowly, the ball of girl uncurls herself, jean-clad legs extending from her stretched out T-shirt, and a pretty face marred with scabs emerging from the neck.

She has to pee. There is no toilet paper, so the girl bangs on the window demanding tissue. No one comes. She paces the narrow cell, alternately pleading for toilet paper in a pitiful tone and angrily banging on the door. When there is still no response, she starts kicking the door as hard as her tiny frame will let her. A disembodied voice tells her to stop but brings no toilet paper, so the pacing and yelling continues. She can no longer hold it, and the girl in the trendy jeans has to move so that they don’t bump knees while she uses the toilet. She pees leaning her head against the cinderblock wall for support and then sits back down on the bench. A little while later the guard comes by with a small wad of paper, which she takes all the same. You will learn what this girl already knows: Always take toilet paper when it is offered. There is no guarantee you will get another chance.

After a while, you realize that you have to go. Holding it until you get out of here no longer seems like an option. You try to get it over with as quickly as possible, but the awkwardness of the situation makes your bladder unwilling to cooperate, and you end up squatting there trying not to look at anyone.

The next time the door opens, you are told to line up single file in the hall. You make your way down the line to a box of brown bags. Apparently it is lunch time. Much like the toilet issue, you have lost some of your pride when it comes to the food, and when you open the bag you are willing to consider eating its contents. You are greeted by four more slices of mushy white bread, some waxy cheese, and a piece of luncheon meat that is gray around the edges and iridescent pink in the center. A few rubbery brown carrot sticks, a bag of barbecue chips, a small carton of grape drink, and two lemon cookies round out the meal. You eat the least offensive carrot sticks and other snacks, leaving the indeterminate cold cut in the bag.

The ball of girl has come out of her shell for food and eats eagerly, making everyone laugh with her in-depth descriptions of the gross food. Before long you’re all talking.

The ball of girl is Sammy.* She is just 19, but already has two kids and one on the way. She says she has been here since 1 a.m. Two police officers busted in her door to serve her with a warrant and found her in her living room about to “drop a pill.” Since then she has been trying to stay asleep to keep from getting sick. It takes you a minute to realize that she is talking about drug withdrawal.

The girl with the pink hair is Allison. She’s 21, but her childlike face makes that difficult to believe. She was also found with drugs when the police came to serve her warrant. She asks you if you are sick, and you say no, a bit taken aback. She says you look sick. You are not flattered.

The trendy jeans belong to Malika, who is 20. She and her husband got into a fight. She told him to get out of her face, but he wouldn’t, so she knocked him down the stairs. He called the police, though when they came he begged them not to take her, saying how much he loved her. She tells you that where she comes from, no one would call the police for a little thing like knocking around your husband. Sammy commiserates: “I don’t care if you get shot in the head, you don’t call the cops. You go to the hospital get the hole sewn up and come home.”

You are struck by how young the girls are. You’re not even 30, but you feel like a matron and affectionately call them all babies. Sammy says that with two kids and a divorce under her belt, she hardly feels like one.

You, Malika, and Tanisha–the quiet girl with the partially braided hair–are the only newbies here. Sammy and Allison know the drill. They tell you what they know about the commissioner, which isn’t much. He is the only one who can set you free. He will set your bail, release you on your own recognizance, or send you upstairs to the jail proper. Sammy tells you it is better upstairs. Up there you can take a shower, lie down, go to sleep. She seems anxious to go. You have no intention of going with her. You also have no idea when you will be taken to see this great and powerful commissioner. The guards won’t tell you. The other girls don’t know. But the fact that Sammy has been here since last night hardly bodes well.

There is nothing to read in the cell except the papers in your pocket, which you have already memorized. There is no way to get comfortable on your small slab of hard narrow bench. Sammy is antsy and tries to distract herself from the increasingly fluttery feeling in her stomach by literally climbing the walls in an attempt to escape through a hatch in the ceiling that looks to you like a fuse box. She asks you to keep a look out as she wedges herself up the wall until she is practically in a split. The hatch doesn’t budge.

A little while later, Sammy decides she wants to go to the hospital and bangs on the window to tell the guard. She is pregnant, she says, and feels sick to her stomach. The guard is unimpressed. If you aren’t bleeding, you can’t go to the hospital.

Meanwhile, Estelle, the older woman who has been quietly rocking back and forth and wincing, shows the guard her hand. You hadn’t really noticed it before, but when she holds it up you see that it is badly swollen, so red and puffy it barely looks human. The guard says it was like that when Estelle came in, so it’s not their problem. Estelle sits back down without a word and cradles her hand, her face fixed in a permanent grimace.

Later there is a commotion in the hall, and you all jump up, crowding around the window to see what’s going on. They are pulling people out of their cells and lining them up in the hall. An adorable brown and white dog walks around them, sniffing at them like an eager puppy. When it is your cell’s turn, you’re excited. It’s something to do. The dog weaves his way through you and your cellmates. When he sniffs you, you smile and resist the urge to scratch his head. After he is done, you head back to your cell, but the guard tells you to stop, leading you, Sammy, and Allison down the hall.

The guard opens the door to a small room with two shower stalls in it and orders you to get in. She closes the door and tells you to take off all your clothes. You ask the guard why, and she tells you that you have been doing drugs, that the dog smelled them on your clothes. You protest, you haven’t been doing drugs. “You don’t do drugs?” she asks skeptically. “No,” you answer. She raises an eyebrow and tells you to take off your clothes.

Your hands are shaking as you unclasp your jeans. You pull your T-shirt over your head, unclasp your bra, drop your panties to the ground, and try to hang each item neatly over the side of the stall. Standing in the cold beige room completely naked, you are told to turn around. “Bend over,” the guard says. “Squat and spread your cheeks.” You do it, trying to breathe, trying not to think about it. While you are in this position, the guard opens the door into the hall to chat with a co-worker. You jump up, unable to stifle a yelp. The door is half-open and people are walking by. You try to cover yourself with your hands, but the guard just repeats her command and instructs you to cough. You bend back over, so humiliated your cough is barely audible. She tells you to cough louder. Worried that the guard will stick one of her gloved fingers inside of you if you don’t cooperate, you cough as loud as you can.

When you are put back in your cell, you’re relieved. You feel safe, oddly comfortable in there with the girls you have come to know surrounding you, the only ones who have listened to your story, the only ones who look you in the eye. They even ask you if you’re OK, even though none of you have been OK since you entered this building.

As the day wears on with no sense of time and nothing to do, things begin to fall into a predictable rhythm. Allison sleeps peacefully in positions that you aren’t even capable of assuming. Tanisha stares at the wall, absent-mindedly sliding her flip flops against the floor. Malika mutters under her breath, cursing her husband’s name. Sammy paces saying, “This shit ain’t right, yo” like a mantra, and Estelle continues to moan softly, her ever expanding hand placed gingerly in her lap. And you, sometimes you cry just a little bit, but mostly you wait. When toilet paper is offered, you grab it.

Three more women enter the cell, and what little space you have evaporates. One of the new women squeezes in on the bench and wants everyone to huddle together for warmth. You decline, moving to a small open space on the floor. Allison has stretched out underneath the toilet and is sleeping peacefully. For a moment you are jealous, but as you watch people step over her to pee, you realize your spot isn’t that bad.

A woman with short brown hair and the calm composure of a cattle rancher sits down beside Estelle, whose hand is now so swollen the skin has begun to crack and bleed. Sammy asks the woman what she is in for and she hands the younger girl a thick pile of warrants. Sammy looks them over and her eyes widen. “You did all this yourself?” she asks, and the woman nods, leaning in close to Sammy so that their faces are just a few inches apart. “She said she recognized me, but all she saw were my eyes,” the woman says. Sammy shivers, and says, “If you looked at me like that I’d recognize you too.”

There is a shift change, and the guard with the honey-blonde highlights so much like your own is replaced by a woman with jet-black hair. The new guard rescans you all. Dinnertime comes, and this time when you open the bag you are actually eager. It isn’t so much your hunger, but the fact that for the next 10 minutes, you will have something to do. The mushy white bread is now accompanied by bologna that is more or less bologna colored and the same array of snacks you sampled at lunch.

You eat it all, and one of the new girls, pretty in designer jeans with her hair and make up done, looks at you in disgust. She can’t believe you are actually eating it and tells you as much. She would never eat that crap or use that gross toilet. This is all a big mistake. She won’t be here long. You can’t help but smile to yourself.

Sammy’s withdrawal is getting worse. She can’t stay still, and there is no longer enough room to pace. So she sits for a minute and then gets up, stands, shifting her weight, and then lies down, only to get up again a few minutes later. She says she feels like her stomach is full of butterflies, and she’s only comfortable when she’s moving. The woman with the pile of warrants tells her to stop fidgeting. They are all going through it, she says, and talking about it only makes it worse. There is something about this woman, maybe it’s her calm country voice or the air she gives off of someone who has seen it all before, but she is actually able to calm Sammy down for a moment. The young girl curls up in a ball beside you and asks if she can put her head in your lap. You don’t even hesitate. Of course.

A sort of slumber party vibe gradually takes over the cell, and the girls start chatting about boyfriends and girlfriends. An in-depth discussion of J. Lo and Ben Affleck’s relationship leads to the conclusion that she can do better. A calm has come over you. You can do this. The word is that they can only hold you for 24 hours; you don’t know what time it is, but you guess that you have been here for about half that. You can do 12 more hours, and somehow the idea of a fixed end point, however distant, is comforting.

And then something happens, something that you had ceased to dream was possible. You hear someone call “Man on the floor,” and a man walks down the hall with a list of people to see the commissioner, and he calls your name. You are so shocked you don’t say anything for a moment, but the other girls bang on the glass and yell, “She’s over here.” And you are not the only one. Sammy, Malika, Allison, Tanisha, Estelle, and the woman with the long rap sheet are coming too. When the guard opens the door of the cell, bags of uncollected lunch and dinner trash spill out into the hall. She kicks them back into the cell, but you don’t care, because you are going to see the commissioner.

The guard leads you down the hall and into another cell. This one is a single. There are 10 of you. You are packed in so tight, people have to stand on the bench and sit on the toilet. At least you aren’t cold anymore. A previous inhabitant covered the air-conditioning vent with spitballs, and with all those bodies in that tiny space, you are actually pretty warm. Sammy goes first, then Estelle. One by one the names are called. No one comes back.

When it is your turn, you are taken to another small room. A bald man with glasses wearing a shirt and tie sits behind a pane of glass. He is the commissioner, or one of them at least. There is a metal stool bolted to the floor on your side of the glass partition. He says your name without looking up and tells you to sit down.

He asks familiar questions: address, Social Security number, date of birth. You can hear him perfectly and respond like a good little teacher’s pet. The time has come, you think. You will finally be able to explain to someone what happened. You start, but he interrupts you. “I don’t care,” he says. He passes a series of papers to you through a slit beneath the glass. It is late, and you are more tired than you can ever remember being. You look over the papers, but with all the legal jargon you can’t make any sense of them.

The commissioner tells you to sign the papers. You ask him what they mean, telling him you don’t understand. “Sign them, then I’ll tell you,” he snaps. You sign them. What else can you do? He gives you copies of the papers and a booklet explaining what happens when you are arrested, which seems a bit after-the-fact at this point. And then he says the words you have been waiting all day to hear: “You are being released on your own recognizance.” You thank him profusely, though he doesn’t respond, and expel a little sob of relief as you step out of the room.

A short heavyset guard with glasses tells you to walk straight ahead down the hall to a door. It is the door. The door out of the cell block. You want to run, but feel that that would be frowned upon, so you try to keep your gait even, a smile spreading across your face as you get within arm’s reach, but the guard tells you to stop just short of the door. She does not open it. Instead, she opens up a cell right beside the door and tells you to get in.

You have just been released on your own recognizance, and you have papers saying so clutched in your hand. How can they lock you up again? You take a breath, and ask the guard in your most subordinate, ingratiating tone why you are being put in another cell. “They are processing your property,” she says, “and the more questions you ask the longer it will take, so sit down and shut up.” Across the hall, a sign on the door reads release area and shows a little stick figure jumping in the air and clicking its heels.

You sit down, completely defeated, and start to cry. Not the silent tears trickling down your face of earlier crying jags, but rather the body-shaking, gut wrenching, face-contorting heaves of a teenager whose first love has just crashed and burned. Malika, who is also waiting for her property, tries to calm you down, but you can no longer put on a brave face.

An hour and a half later, you finally walk through that door. Your barcode is cut off and your belongings returned. You walk out into the darkness of Eager Street to wait for your ride. The sense of exaltation you were expecting isn’t there. You’re too tired, too dirty, too small. It’s 1:30 a.m. , 19 hours after the knock on your door. Nineteen hours of being ignored, of not knowing what is happening to you, of never having anyone, except the handful of girls in your cell, look you in the eye.

* The names of all the women in the cells have been changed.
Email Anna Ditkoff

Is somebody watchin’ me!?

Scary story from (where else?) Wisconsin. Their highest state court upheld the warrantless use of GPS, which was installed on a suspect’s car and which they used to track his movement. One interesting thing is that the Court seems to base its decision on the idea that the GPS information is no more intrusive than what they could establish “in plain view” presumably by visual surveillance. What do you think!?

Wisconsin court upholds GPS tracking by police
By RYAN J. FOLEY | Associated Press Writer
2:42 PM CDT, May 7, 2009
MADISON, Wis. – Wisconsin police can attach GPS to cars to secretly track anybody’s movements without obtaining search warrants, an appeals court ruled Thursday.

However, the District 4 Court of Appeals said it was “more than a little troubled” by that conclusion and asked Wisconsin lawmakers to regulate GPS use to protect against abuse by police and private individuals.

As the law currently stands, the court said police can mount GPS on cars to track people without violating their constitutional rights — even if the drivers aren’t suspects.

Officers do not need to get warrants beforehand because GPS tracking does not involve a search or a seizure, Judge Paul Lundsten wrote for the unanimous three-judge panel based in Madison.

That means “police are seemingly free to secretly track anyone’s public movements with a GPS device,” he wrote.

One privacy advocate said the decision opened the door for greater government surveillance of citizens. Meanwhile, law enforcement officials called the decision a victory for public safety because tracking devices are an increasingly important tool in investigating criminal behavior.

The ruling came in a 2003 case involving Michael Sveum, a Madison man who was under investigation for stalking. Police got a warrant to put a GPS on his car and secretly attached it while the vehicle was parked in Sveum’s driveway. The device recorded his car’s movements for five weeks before police retrieved it and downloaded the information.

The information suggested Sveum was stalking the woman, who had gone to police earlier with suspicions. Police got a second warrant to search his car and home, found more evidence and arrested him. He was convicted of stalking and sentenced to prison.

Sveum, 41, argued the tracking violated his Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure. He argued the device followed him into areas out of public view, such as his garage.

The court disagreed. The tracking did not violate constitutional protections because the device only gave police information that could have been obtained through visual surveillance, Lundsten wrote.

Even though the device followed Sveum’s car to private places, an officer tracking Sveum could have seen when his car entered or exited a garage, Lundsten reasoned. Attaching the device was not a violation, he wrote, because Sveum’s driveway is a public place.

“We discern no privacy interest protected by the Fourth Amendment that is invaded when police attach a device to the outside of a vehicle, as long as the information obtained is the same as could be gained by the use of other techniques that do not require a warrant,” he wrote.

Although police obtained a warrant in this case, it wasn’t needed, he added.

Larry Dupuis, legal director of the ACLU of Wisconsin, said using GPS to track someone’s car goes beyond observing them in public and should require a warrant.

“The idea that you can go and attach anything you want to somebody else’s property without any court supervision, that’s wrong,” he said. “Without a warrant, they can do this on anybody they want.”

Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen’s office, which argued in favor of the warrantless GPS tracking, praised the ruling but would not elaborate on its use in Wisconsin.

David Banaszynski, president of the Wisconsin Chiefs of Police Association, said his department in the Milwaukee suburb of Shorewood does not use GPS. But other departments might use it to track drug dealers, burglars and stalkers, he said.

A state law already requires the Department of Corrections to track the state’s most dangerous sex offenders using GPS. The author of that law, Rep. Scott Suder, R-Abbotsford, said the decision shows “GPS tracking is an effective means of protecting public safety.”

In Memormiam – A True Hero

This story really struck me when I read it. A lawyer whose practice was devoted to personal injury and, generally, helping the little, less fortunate guys, lost his life while saving two young boys from drowning. In days far removed from today, such acts would be revered. I stop to do so, and hope that you’ll name a constellation remembering men like Charles Schulze, who did the brave thing in spite of the fact that he had so much to lose.

D.C. Lawyer Dies Saving Drowning Boys
Posted Apr 29, 2009, 06:18 am CDT
By Debra Cassens Weiss

A Washington, D.C., personal injury lawyer died last weekend after he jumped into the ocean at Pompano Beach, Fla., to save two drowning boys.

Charles Schulze, 73, was a name partner with Schulze & Pederson, the firm he co-founded in 1972, according to The BLT: The Blog of Legal Times. He collapsed and died after rescuing the boys, ages 9 and 12, according to the blog and the South Florida Sun Sentinel.

First Schulze grabbed the younger boy, who was closer to shore, then swam out to rescue the 12-year-old, according to the newspaper account. He began to falter as he swam to shore, prompting other bystanders to jump in to help, according to Helen Smith, Schulze’s companion of 20 years.

Schulze was in Pompano Beach for a brief vacation at his condo there.

Co-worker Sherri Lahay Lasover told The BLT that Schulze was the kind of man who always wanted to help others. He regularly stopped to help stranded motorists and had worked for the Bethesda-Chevy Chase Rescue Squad.

Contempt By Texting Nets You 30 Days In Great State Of Utah!

Utah Woman Sentenced to 30 Days in Jail for Texting in Court
Posted Apr 29, 2009, 06:42 am CDT
By Debra Cassens Weiss

A Utah woman who sent two text messages to her husband from a court hearing about his debt collection case has been sentenced to 30 days in jail.

Susan Henwood, a mother of four, started serving the sentence in the Tooele County Jail on Monday, according to KSL.com. Henwood’s husband, Joshua Henwood, told KSL that his wife went to court to ask for a continuance in his case because he was sick and couldn’t attend. He also asked her to keep him updated.

Susan Henwood sent two messages from the courtroom, according to the story. The first read, “It doesn’t look good for you.” The second said, “They’re coming for the Polaris Ranger.”

Judge Stephen Henroid sentenced Susan Henwood after holding her in contempt of court. A court spokeswoman told KSL the problem was the content of the messages rather than the act of texting.

Joshua Henwood told KSL his wife doesn’t deserve to be in jail. “I think this was an unfit punishment for the crime,” he said.

No expectation of privacy…Not even for judge?

Fordham Law Class Collects Personal Info About Scalia; Supreme Ct. Justice Is Steamed
Posted Apr 29, 2009, 01:58 pm CDT
By Martha Neil

Last year, when law professor Joel Reidenberg wanted to show his Fordham University class how readily private information is available on the Internet, he assigned a group project. It was collecting personal information from the Web about himself.

This year, after U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia made public comments that seemingly may have questioned the need for more protection of private information, Reidenberg assigned the same project. Except this time Scalia was the subject, the prof explains to the ABA Journal in a telephone interview.

His class turned in a 15-page dossier that included not only Scalia’s home address, home phone number and home value, but his food and movie preferences, his wife’s personal e-mail address and photos of his grandchildren, reports Above the Law.

And, as Scalia himself made clear in a statement to Above the Law, he isn’t happy about the invasion of his privacy:

“Professor Reidenberg’s exercise is an example of perfectly legal, abominably poor judgment. Since he was not teaching a course in judgment, I presume he felt no responsibility to display any,” the justice says, among other comments.

A Supreme Court spokeswoman confirmed to the ABA Journal in an e-mail that the Scalia blast to ATL “is accurately attributed to Justice Scalia.”

In response, Reidenberg tells the ABA Journal that the information gathered by his class about Scalia was all “publicly available, for free,” and wasn’t posted on the Internet by the class or otherwise further publicized. He views the dossier-gathering about a public figure as a legitimate classroom exercise intended to spark discussion about privacy law, and says he and the class didn’t intend to offend Scalia.

The availability of such information on the Web makes it possible for the government to conduct surveillance that otherwise would be much more difficult or even impossible to pursue through court orders and other official mechanisms, Reidenberg contends. And aggregation of various bits of information also can lead to more troubling use of the compiled information, he says.

“When there are so few privacy protections for secondary use of personal information, that information can be used in many troubling ways,” he writes in an e-mail to the ABA Journal. “A class assignment that illustrates this point is not one of them. Indeed, the very fact that Justice Scalia found it objectionable and felt compelled to comment underscores the value and legitimacy of the exercise.”

An ABA Journal request for comment from Scalia, routed through the court’s media information office, has not been returned.

It’s a mad, mad, mad, mad mad legal economy.

Sad stuff, folks. Good luck to one and all, but I’d be worried if I were thinking about going into law school (or in it) right now.

Broaden Job Search, Maybe Go Solo, Officials Tell Worried Law Students
Posted Mar 11, 2009, 03:49 pm CDT
By Martha Neil

As a growing number of major law firms delay start dates for incoming associates and make record-breaking layoffs (some 2,700 have been announced since Feb. 27), it’s obvious that worried law students have good reason to be concerned about finding work.

For the first time, there wasn’t enough employer interest this year to permit Texas Tech University School of Law in Lubbock to host the usual spring off-campus recruiting sessions in Dallas, Houston and Austin, reports Texas Lawyer. “It was a shock,” says Julie Coffman Doss, the 420-student law school’s assistant dean for career services.

She and other law school career-placement officials are urging students to stay positive and broaden their search, concerning both summer jobs and career positions. At Texas Tech, for instance, the career services office has arranged a new series of seminars about setting up a solo practice after graduation, the legal publication writes in a lengthy article about the situation in Texas.

Looking for work at smaller firms, outside major cities and in positions related to prior work experience may also be productive, Doss and others advise.

“The key for us is to simply leave no stone unturned,” says Reginald Green, assistant dean for career services at South Texas College of Law in Houston. “Law students now are looking at the law degree . . . much broader than simply the practice of law.”

Students scrambling to find work right now, though, shouldn’t lose sight of the future, says Karen Sargent. She is assistant dean and director of career services at Southern Methodist University Dedman School of Law in Dallas.

While reassessing and repositioning themselves for a job search in the midst of an economic crisis, she advises, students should also think about how to keep progressing toward long-term goals.

Earlier coverage:

ABAJournal.com.com: “Brave New World for Graduating 3Ls: Fewer Jobs, Less Pay”

ABAJournal.com: “Law Firm Layoffs Make Job Search Harder for Law Students”

ABAJournal.com: “As Laid-Off Lawyers Look for Work, How to Find It Isn’t Clear”

ABAJournal.com: “As Layoffs Surge, Long-Ago Grads Turn to Law Schools for Help”

I See A Bad Moon Risin’

More bad news, folks, the economy (as we all know) is in the tank, and it’s gotten here to stay in the legal economy. See below:

February Free Fall: Major Law Firms Lay Off Another 2,000-Plus Attorneys and Staff
Posted Feb 26, 2009, 03:25 pm CST
By Martha Neil

As the dismal economy has continued on a downward spiral this month, so has the legal industry, with February layoffs exceeding January’s by a considerable margin. January’s carnage, in which renowned law firms laid off more than 1,500 attorneys and staff at last count, has been followed by further freefall in February in which more than 2,000 attorneys and staff lost their jobs.

On a single “Bloody Thursday,” Feb. 12, law firms announced plans to ax some 800 attorneys and staff, at last report, and at least one has also imposed a pay freeze. And, in another major milestone, a top London-based international law firm, Allen & Overy, announced Feb. 19 that it would be cutting up to 450 attorneys and staff, spinning off part of its practice, imposing a pay freeze and asking remaining partners for an average of about $50,000 each in additional capital.

And today Latham & Watkins announced internally that it is laying off 190 associates and 250 staff members–more than double the number that Above the Law tipsters had warned of earlier this week.

An ongoing stream of law firm layoff news throughout the month has contributed further to the total:

Yesterday, New Jersey-based Lowenstein Sandler has just announced today that it is dismissing 53 attorneys and staff and shifting three of the 18 incoming third-year law students who had been scheduled to start work there this fall (as well as up to three of the dismissed lawyers) to lower-paid one-year public-interest jobs, according to Above the Law.

Layoffs have also been confirmed this month by, among others, Miami-based Bilzin Sumberg Baena Price & Axelrod (a “small number,” which tipsters describe as two lawyers and two staff); Dechert (10 staff attorneys, in the most recent round, following 19 lawyers earlier this month); Luce Forward Hamilton & Scripps (12 lawyers and 15 staff); McDermott Will & Emery (60 lawyers and 89 staff); Neal Gerber & Eisenberg (19 lawyers and 32 staff); Nixon Peabody (20 lawyers and 36 staff); Sheppard Mullin (a total of 25 attorney layoffs, in January and February, were announced this month); and United Kingdom-based Simmons & Simmons (up to 20 associates and 49 staff).

Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney reportedly laid off between 25 and 30 staffers last week, in its second round of staff layoffs since November. It was among six firms announcing layoffs within a few days of each other; the largest number was at Day Pitney, which let 66 staff members go.

The Law Shucks layoff tracker lists more than 25 law firms in the United States and United Kingdom that have announced layoffs this month, tallying the total number of jobs lost at nearly 2,200 even before news of the Latham and Lowenstein layoffs.

Meanwhile, Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman inadvertently announced attorney layoffs last week, when a senior partner apparently discussed the firm’s situation on his cell phone in a crowded train car. Full details, however, have not yet been provided, and the firm reportedly may not actually make these layoffs until March.

A Fee, By Any Other Number, Wouldn’t Be As Reasonable

I recently refinanced my mortgage and, as a no-nothing consumer of those services, was amazed about how mortgage brokers made their money. Then I thought about the legal industry and the really inexplicable way that we as profession charge for our time. Now, don’t get me wrong, we have to make a living and are entitled to charge a reasonable fee, but $1,000 an hour? You’d better be pretty darn good for that kind of scratch. Of course, if you break down how much the mortgage broker is making per hour based on the the ACTUAL time he/she is working on your loan, maybe it’s comparable!

Kirkland & Ellis Seeks Fee of $18.50 a Minute for Bankruptcy Work
Posted Jan 28, 2009, 08:09 am CST

By Debra Cassens Weiss

Kirkland & Ellis has requested a fee of $1,110 an hour in a corporate bankruptcy, a possible record amount, according to one expert.

The hourly rate breaks down to $18.50 a minute, Bloomberg reports. The law firm is seeking the fee for its representation of titanium dioxide-maker Tronox Inc.

Two other law firms are seeking nearly as much, requesting hourly rates in excess of $1,000, according to the story. They are Sidley Austin, in the restructuring of the Tribune Co., and Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, representing Circuit City.

Bankruptcy law professor Lynn LoPucki of the University of California at Los Angeles told the wire service that fees for lawyers and other professionals in bankruptcy cases are growing at four times the rate of inflation.

“As the economy gets worse, the bankruptcy lawyers are charging more,” LoPucki told Bloomberg. “It seems that each month one sets a new record for hourly billing rates. $1,110 is, to my knowledge, a record for the debtor’s bankruptcy counsel.”