this is fucking incredible
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

blake kathryn

Janaina Medeiros

Origami Around
Peter Solarz
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her

if i look back, i am lost

❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
One Nice Bug Per Day
AnasAbdin
$LAYYYTER
Three Goblin Art
todays bird
almost home
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titsay

izzy's playlists!
Mike Driver

Andulka

tannertan36

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@flawschool
this is fucking incredible
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Honestly, would anyone say you haaaaave to let a law student observe your client meeting, for their educations?
Sometimes I have law student ducklings following me around. This video actually inspires me to be more careful about asking when it’s okay that they observe; I tend to not have much time on court days so I just set the ducklings to “FOLLOW” and skip past it.
I know it’s caused some discomfort in the past. I guess I tended to think of it as unimportant discomfort? That’s on me; it’s so easy in criminal justice to see that your clients are suffering at every stage of the case and forget that doing something like paying attention to minor discomforts can actually make a difference. And I love having interns to teach.
But I also have blindness in that I’m someone who always lets med students in. I tend to view it as a positive, in that they’re my captive audience and I can do bits on them until someone laughs. They also get to hear about how doctors have disappointed me.
I have always used law students shadowing as a teachable moment. I explain to the interns on the power walk to court that their job for the day is to follow me, keep up, and step back without making a thing of it if I ask them.
Then with every new client, I say "Hi Mx. Name, I've got some students with me today observing, their names are X and Y. Are you comfortable having them here while we talk?"
To date, only one person has said no. And my students, to their credit, stepped out of the room and twiddled their phones until we were done.
Afterwards, we always have a talk about client agency in a system that almost unilaterally denies agency to the people most affected by it. I remind them that in almost every stage of the system our clients are asked to sit down and be quiet while other people talk about them. I let them know that as trial lawyers, there will come a point in their representation where they will have to shepherd their clients through very difficult decisions, and giving clients agency over very little things and respecting their choices early on will cue to clients that they will respect their bigger choices too.
I don't know what effect that has on how they have practiced later on, but I think it's an important tool for everyone in the helping professions to have in their box.
Criminology books will be like "There's a special kind of person called Criminal and their psychology is very interesting because, unlike a human being, a Criminal is capable of doing a crime, such as parking badly or committing a murder. I'm a scientist btw."
Anti public defender sentiment NOW of all times has GOT to be a psyop and I’m not being hyperbolic
‘You’re arguing to give rapists a lighter sentence you’re arguing for clients you know are guilty’ you are arguing for a state that can get away with whatever it wants so long as it calls someone a rapist. You are arguing that the state only needs to meet its burden of proof for innocent clients. You cannot be this stupid, I refuse to believe it.
Okay, tumblr, I'm giving you a tricky one. Let's talk about mandatory arrest laws on domestic violence charges.
Early studies on domestic violence found that abusers who were arrested were less likely to recidivate, or be arrested again for doing the same thing. This resonated with the law enforcement community, who in general assumes that arrests are a good idea and solve problems, so many police departments around the country eventually adopted mandatory arrests on domestic calls: if anyone is visibly injured, the officers must arrest the "primary aggressor."
Let's make this as simple as possible.
Officer arrests "primary aggressor." There are two possibilities here. 1) The "primary aggressor" is the abuser. 2) the "primary aggressor" is the abused person, who has been provoked.
Option 1: Primary Aggressor is Abuser
This is probably the more common scenario. The officer has arrested the abuser, before the victim is ready to leave and become a survivor. The victim has been tormented on a daily basis; they are panicked and terrified at the thought of their only support system and the person their life revolves around going to jail; they often do not want to press charges.
Even if they are later on in the cycle and ready to leave, they know instinctively that this is going to make the abuser furious and also that the abuser has to come out of jail sometime. As a matter of simple survival, they know the justice system cannot protect them (because it has not protected them). So they try to mitigate: get the charges dropped.
Cops say, tough luck, it wasn't up to you, now only the prosecutor can drop the charges. Prosecutor refuses, because they believe this is the only way to fight domestic violence.
The amount of times that a victim of domestic violence comes to me pleading to get their abuser out of jail is... I don't know if I can describe it. It's unreal. It's so common that it's one of those running jokes in the office that's not a joke. (To be clear, that is not a joke that disrespects the [usually] women involved; they are struggling against a system that is causing irreparable damage to them and their lives as well, and we understand that completely.)
The whole endeavor becomes a desperate quest to get the charges undone. Then, when she's ready to leave (I know abuse happens to more people than women), and she does want to press charges, she has already probably dropped them multiple times. She is "unreliable." She has a "reputation."
Option 2: The "Primary Aggressor" is the Victim
I similarly can't describe how often this happens. I'm always giving people the link to Lundy Bancroft's book Why Does He Do That. The stories they tell are heartbreaking: abusive men trying to take away their children, trying to trap them inside the house, cheating right in front of them, chipping away at all their self-esteem until they crack and crack and crack.
When this kind of scenario happens, police show up. Police are often men, who like guns, who are drawn to positions of authority. They encounter, in a "typical" scenario, a man who is now cool as a cucumber and manipulative as a snake, telling the officer that she's bipolar or borderline (a common misdiagnosis for people who have complex PTSD) and she's off her meds, she's on drugs, she was a danger to herself. She came at him for no reason. She's crazy, I'm telling you, officer. These men as are accomplished at grooming witnesses as they are at grooming victims.
And then the officer encounters a woman (last week one officer literally described a victim as "hysterical" in a police report), who is freaking out with the aftermath of a traumatic violent attack, who may have behaved in a way she thought she would never behave, who is crying and asking for her child and maybe not cooperating (bad) or maybe telling the police the truth (more common, even worse).
Because the women that these men target have only one trait in common: kindness. The ability to take responsibility for their actions and give grace to another. That's the only thing these men need to take advantage of them.
Calm man with reasonable explanation with whom the police officer has much in common... "hysterical" woman. Obviously she was the primary aggressor, because now we know that men can be abused too.
Now she's got assault charges. Maybe they'll even stick. Because assault and battery is not the concerning part of abusive behavior. Committing assault and battery is also a symptom of being abused. This conviction will deny her access to the paltry, bullshit, meager domestic violence services we have on offer, and might cause her to be evicted from housing or fired from her job. She could lose custody of the children to her attacker, and he most certainly will file for custody, because that's part of coercive control.
In Summary:
Mandatory arrest laws for domestic violence are garbage. They produce garbage. They perpetuate the cycle because they buy into the myths that abusers, men in particular, have perpetuated about themselves for much longer than those laws have existed.
And, as a final note, regarding abuse of men and abuse in same-sex relationships: while I have seen the results of this kind of abuse as well, the violence of abuse of men is nearly always confined to humiliations, slaps and shoves (NOT OKAY, to be clear, and this is not an absolute rule, my god the very few exceptions in my career have been horrific) and the violence of the abuse of women is strangulation, broken bones, stab wounds, and much much worse constant sexual violence. Male violence against women is unrelenting. It's not a problem of reporting. Space for survivors MUST include men, MUST include the lgbtq+ community, MUST include women, in order for us all to be safe, but any discussion of abuse is simply incomplete without acknowledging this reality.
I swear, wear a suit and a lanyard and they’ll let you in anywhere.
Anywhere except the jail that houses people the fucking Constitution says you need to have access to, apparently
being against punitive justice doesn't mean just being against systemic cruelty it means being against the idea that punishment = justice and that for justice to be done, someone must be made to suffer. it's not just "well hurting bad people is justice, but when the government does it it could accidentally hurt some good people!" that is not anti-punitive. you are still viewing justice as requiring someone's punishment.
You opened the door. REVENANT (2023)
Me when the evidence is otherwise inadmissible but then the witness lies about it on the stand
The headline: UK Drug Dealer Feeling Bleu After Cheese Photo Leads To Arrest
The article: Police cracked encryption on a privacy-focused phone service provider and ran fingerprint analysis on photos posted by users.
Like I get that law enforcement does things like this, that’s literally what it exists for, I’m just really upset by the cutesy framing.
Also. Like. Don’t organize shit online or over the phone. Law enforcement has been pressuring tech companies to put backdoors into encrypted services for years, this whole crackdown happened because of a device-level attack, and you never know who’s listening.
And yeah. If you’re setting up an anonymous ID online for any reason do not, under any circumstances, post or share any identifying information under that ID or with devices associated with that account.
Just don’t break the law.
The Criminalization of Private Debt.
The Human Toll of Criminalizing Drug Use in the US.
How Every Part of American Life Became a Police Matter.
No Right to Rest: Police Enforcement Patterns and Quality of Life Consequences of the Criminalization of Homelessness.
The Criminalization of Poverty.
The Criminalization of Immigration in the United States.
From “brute” to “thug:” the demonization and criminalization of unarmed Black male victims in America.
“Forced into Breaking the Law”The Criminalization of Homelessness in Connecticut.
American Cities and the Creeping Criminalization of Walking.
The Unfair Criminalization of Gay and Transgender Youth.
Mass criminalization is a root cause of racial inequality within the U.S.
Illegality of Unions.
“Just don’t break the law.”
He’s a fucking piece of shit drug dealer. He’s not a victim of racial inequality, or being in a union or being homeless..
Fucking anti cop assholes will read about a baby rapist and be like “omg they used a online post and facial recognition to catch this poor victim who raped 2 year old cops are so horrible! Justice for him!
HOW ABOUT DONT FUCKING COMMIT CRIMES!?
The cops who use facial recognition and an online post to catch a baby rapist are the same cops who will use facial recognition and an online post to track down asylum seekers to send them to concentration camps.
You and the baby rapist have the same rights. An infringement on the baby rapist’s right to privacy is an infringement on your right to privacy. You should be able to use encrypted communication networks, this is true whether you are committing no crimes, whether you are a ‘fucking piece of shit drug dealer,’ or whether you are seeking an abortion in Texas. Cops compromising encrypted communication is a threat to you the same way it is a threat to drug dealers.
“DON’T FUCKING COMMIT CRIMES?!” Is not a useful or actionable admonition because “crime” is a constructed category that makes “forgetting to fill out a form 10 years ago” “assisting your child in seeking an abortion” “having the wrong tattoos” “having a blanket” all equally good reasons to unperson you.
“DON’T FUCKING COMMIT CRIMES?!” and “Just don’t break the law.” are things that are said by people who are entirely too comfortable with the idea that they are never going to be targeted by law enforcement considering that we live in a society in which so much is criminalized.
The fact that he is “a fucking piece of shit drug dealer” is why the original article is comfortable making a joke of his arrest. The contemptible nature of his crime means that it’s okay to pair his face with cheese puns, and it’s why that article was widely circulated - as opposed to this article by an investigative journalist and encrochat user whose home was raided as part of the same nationwide sting.
The reason that you (and everyone else who makes this argument) reach for “baby rapist” as your criminal of choice when making your criticisms is because it doesn’t sound as righteous when you say “she’s a piece of shit abortionist, DON’T COMMIT CRIMES” or “that fucking piece of shit was sleeping on a cardboard box, it’s not hard to keep away from the cops if you just don’t break the law.”
You are attempting to frame the conversation as though the only people subject to this kind of surveillance are people who are easy to hate - drug dealers, rapists, murderers, etc.
The rate of violent crime has been falling for decades. People are less likely to harm one another now than they were at any point since we started tracking those numbers. In spite of that, our population is more criminalized than ever.
In the four years since I made this original post we have seen these types of surveillance being used to track protesters and asylum seekers. The murder/rape case clearance rate isn’t up since these types of stings started becoming more common, but it is now illegal to fall asleep with a blanket on a bench in Oregon and to provide a D&C to a person having a miscarriage in Texas.
“Crime” has expanded in the the last four years, and none of that expansion has done anything to make you safer.
So, completely aside from the fact that I don’t think it should be illegal to sell drugs, the point of this post isn’t that this poor woobie drug dealer got caught, it is that:
We are all subject to a horrifying level of surveillance and
We can all be dehumanized by the state at an time because “crime” is malleable and there are very likely things you have done in your life that could make you subject to the same kind of state violence that a “fucking piece of shit drug dealer” is - and you can be subject to that same level of state violence even if you haven’t done anything to “provoke” it.
Tl;dr how you can personally make Neil Gaiman lose money (and not be a jerk to others.)
I see a lot of folks upset that NG will financially benefit from residuals and other compensation surrounding his involvement in the adaptation of Sandman and Good Omens (and he will.) But the answer isn’t “rage at the fans who are so emotionally attached to their blorbos because they grieve differently, and then somehow NG will be financially punished.” That’s lower-class/middle-class thinking. NG is too rich and financially diversified to really be hurt by little boycott or a couple of show cancellations (though said cancellations can cause life-changing poverty to the little guys who signed contracts and turned down other opportunities before all of this came out. Boy does NG love women in poverty 🤮)
So if you want to substantially reduce the wealth of someone at NG’s financial level—you need to do it with professional services fees.
Details below the cut:
I've reblogged this like 20 times but knowing he's suing one of his victims has made me come back to do it some more because fuck him. How very fucking dare he.
Let's hit him in his fucking pocket.
Sometimes I think being a public defender is like standing on the bank of a river and the river is full of a constant stream of plastic bottles and you have one pool net, like the kind that scoops leaves out of a swimming pool
So you’re constantly fishing for bottles and flinging them onto the bank and you missed six while you got that one snagged in the weeds, too bad, there are 17 more coming, and then you look up
And upriver you can see a plastic bottle plant with a chute that dumps at least half its bottles into the river. Constantly.
and you’ve got a prosecutor next to you saying “it’s a shame these bottles are just useless, throwing their lives away,” and the chute is Right There and they look straight at it and say “look, some of those bottles managed to land right, good for them”
And you’re trying to think about how to explain the laws of physics to the prosecutor but your latest bottle is full of bees and the bees have filed a bar complaint.
Sometimes being a public defender is like you have your ankle chained to the floor by a very short chain and also you have a grenade in your hand.
You can’t move. You can’t leave. And if you set it off it might hit you more badly than it hits anyone else. But it will hit them.
So everyone is allowed to beat up on your (your clients) but at any moment you can pull that pin and make things Real Interesting.
If this post breaks containment, being a public defender pretty soon is gonna be like walking into the ocean with rocks in my pockets
It's okay public defenders don't have followers
ngl i think its 50/50 on if the state just summarily executes him
"suicide via 2 shots to the back of the head" deal
Fellow public defenders,
Starting to feel it too, right? Feels like we might be targets this time.
Yep.
Beware of those wearing anime shirts, because they stopped caring what others think of them a long time ago.
OH FFS 🤦♀️
FRIENDS, ROMANS, BESTIES: If they were at the stage of filling out jury questionnaires, that means the people involved were most likely only potential jurors, being polled to see if they were qualified to serve on the actual jury. So sure, maybe it seemed like a ballsy move to stand up and condemn the system, but odds are that trial is still going full speed ahead, anyway—except now it’s a dead cert that anime guy absolutely won’t be selected for its jury, because announcing your lack of impartiality to the court tends to get you automatically dismissed.
And, y’know, not to rain on anybody’s feel good parade, but if you want to effect real change for the people targeted by an unjust legal system, the best thing you can do is tuck away your freaking soap box, shut the hell up, get yourself on an actual goddamn jury, and then NULLIFY. THAT. SHIT. Seriously. I’m sure (if this really happened) that a bit of performative grandstanding in front of the judge gave anime guy a nice dopamine hit, but it’s ultimately an empty gesture. If you want to actually influence trial outcomes in a situation like this, then your priority should always be getting selected with an eye towards jury nullification. You help nobody by giving up your possible spot on a jury to some milquetoast white lady who “isn’t that political.”
I'm unsure the power one juror would actually have
If they're able to sway the others, you're absolutely correct, but if they're not? Then you've got a hung jury
In the US that means a mistrial and the whole thing happens again, in the UK the judge would probably rule to accept a majority verdict. Either way, the outcome's the same (the people deciding are all the milquetoast white people who "aren't that political"), but the objections are sealed within the jury room rather than aired before the lawyers and judge to be entered into the record
I don't know what I'd do in this situation, but I don't think it's quite as clear cut as either side of this debate makes out
So a few things:
I wouldn't underestimate the influence even just one informed juror can have on the outcome of a case. Maybe you won't convince everybody—true. But as a juror, you never know who else is on the fence until you voice your doubts and opinions. Some people are reluctant to speak out or deviate from the group, but will respond if somebody else is there to take the lead. Some people might even change a vote just to speed things along because they don't actually care about the outcome. You don't know what power you have until you try, and It's always worth trying.
According to FIJA (the Fully Informed Jury Association, which is a good resource for jury nullification information and support), a hung jury is functionally "far better for the defendant than a conviction. Undoing a conviction is very difficult. An appeal is not guaranteed in the first place. It may not be legally permitted, the defendant may no longer have the financial resources to mount an appeal, etc. Even when a defendant is able to appeal a conviction, that individual no longer enjoys the presumption of innocence." So if you can't nullify, hanging the jury is better than nothing!
Mistrials only mean the whole thing CAN happen again—not that it WILL. If a trial ends in a hung jury, the prosecution will usually review the strength of their case and weigh that against their existing caseload, budget, staffing, etc. to decide if it's in the state's best interest to call for a retrial (there may be some exceptions, but this is generally the case in both the USA and the United Kingdom). Sure, plenty of cases get retried. But in some instances, a mistrial from a hung jury can lead to the prosecution either offering up a more lenient plea deal, or—if they decide pursuing things is ultimately a waste of their time and resources—simply dropping the charges altogether (this is sadly common with sexual assault cases; they're more difficult to prove in a court of law, and while I'm obviously wary of false convictions overall, I do have tremendous sympathy for victims who end up with no recourse for justice once the state drops all charges). In short, you never know what the outcome of a hung jury will have on a case until it actually happens.
Even if the prosecutors do decide to bring a retrial, according to professional jury consultant Alan Turkheimer, "acquittal rates in criminal trials are significantly higher after hung juries than during original trials." So even if you can't nullify a jury, you might nudge things in the right direction overall.
So yeah, I would still argue that actually being on a jury is a thousand times more useful in the fight against wrongful prosecution than getting yourself immediately dismissed by soap-boxing during jury selection. We need more justice-minded people to be jurors (and/or magistrates)!
Adding these tags from @takiki16 who happens to be a public defender!
#are ya KIDDIN me we celebrate hangs back at the office like the victories they are#a hung jury is a WIN. a hung jury means that the DA FAILED. it is a BIG BLARING SIGN to the DA#that hey...you SHOT YOUR SHOT....AND YOU MISSED.#think twice if you REEEEEALLLY want to try again!#if you reeeeeeally with all of our overwhelming caseloads want to spend your attorney's time and your office's budget#on RE-TRYING this case that wasn't good enough the first time around#and YEAH. YEAH. a potential juror walks in and starts giving Progressive Politics Seminars (TM) and i inwardly groan#bc that is the first juror that the DA is going to kick out of the pool - bye bye helpful progressive!#all the blue lives matter assholes somehow manage to keep their mouths shut and parrot 'i can be fair'#long enough to get a seat on the jury and convict our clients#WE DON'T WANT THE GOOD ONES TO SPEAK UP. WE WANT THE BAD ONES TO SPEAK UP#it isn't jury SELECTION it's jury DE-SELECTION
Play your cards right and get on those juries, kids!
I also want to say that one person can absolutely turn a jury.
The one and only time I was on a jury, they selected 13 people (in case one had to drop), and at the start they gave us pads of papers to take notes. And I took fucking NOTES man I wrote down everything I could. I listened. I was there to do my level best to be a good citizen, because I feel very strongly that being a juror is a civic duty everyone should be absolutely thrilled to partake in.
The case wasn't huge. Assault was the charge. At the start of everything, the judge/lawyers explained our duty was NOT to decide if someone had done or not done the thing, but rather to assess and decide if the prosecutor had proved they did do the thing. Because that's the whole entire fucking thing- the person on trial IS INNOCENT. Until PROVEN guilty. It is not supposed to MATTER if you think they did it or not- did the prosecution prove it they did it, beyond the shadow of a doubt?
If they didn't do that, if they didn't prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that so and do so did it, then they failed, the person is innocent, and you get to point that out. You can use that to flip a jury, if there hasn't been proof enough.
Which is what I did. Across the top of my notes in bold all caps I wrote "MUST PROVE GUILT BEYOND A SHADOW OF A DOUBT" and everything else went below that.
Well, I got booted from the jury (rude) because it can only have 12 decide at the end and the lawyers did not like me taking notes. Neither one of them! Fuck em. But!!!
The entire rest of the jury - literally the ENTIRE jury not even "except one," all 12 of them - had decided in their heads the guy was guilty. They all thought he did it and looking back I'll be honest he probably did (based on other stuff the guy ended up on trial for later, which we couldn't possibly have known at the time). But no one in that court had proved it and THAT is what we were there to assess (and if you need to, you can absolutely remind everyone of this!!). When they booted me, I handed my notepad to my friend I'd made, told her to use it if they needed anything, and that I would be outside waiting, and then I went and sat on the courthouse steps.
Around an hour later, she came out and found me to tell me they had found the guy Not Guilty. They all thought he was, they all thought he did it, but they looked at the "beyond a shadow of a doubt" scrawled across the notepad of a juror that wasn't even there anymore, and decided nah actually they didn't prove that and it's innocent until PROVEN guilty, and every single one of them flipped their decision. I turned an entire jury and I wasn't even in the room!! Because I made sure to keep my mouth shut and look like a good jury candidate in the first place, and get on the team, and take notes like the big nerd I am.
So yeah, grandstanding is cool and all and maybe that guy convinced some other people in the room that did become jurors but if you want to be useful, get on the fucking jury and THEN flex. The legal system may be unjust but you have the power to be really annoying to cops and lawyers by participating in it and making it as just as possible.
But you gotta get in the door first.
“how do you get stuff done?” with tears in my eyes.
begging people to start paying attention to prison organizing and listening directly to incarcerated activists who are talking about these things instead of just basing your knowledge of the US prison system off of true crime podcasts or brooklyn 99 or whatever.
Marshall Project, Prison Journalism Project, and Scalawag Magazine all have a lot of really good coverage of US prison news and share a lot of writing from incarcerated journalists. Prison Radio has a bunch of important commentaries from incarcerated journalists.
there are a ton of books to prisoners programs and inside/outside organizing collectives and just so much out there if you look for it.