I Am Not a Lawyer

If you have 30 minutes to spare today and are interested in the interaction of criminal defense with weird domestic conspiracy-theory stuff, I recommend this article: “Too Weird for The Wire: How black Baltimore drug dealers are using white supremacist legal theories to confound the Feds.” Two friends of mine pointed it out, and they both used this quote to sum it up, which is insufficient to encapsulate it but by far the best excerpt available:

In the previous year, nearly twenty defendants in other Baltimore cases had begun adopting what lawyers in the federal courthouse came to call “the flesh-and-blood defense.” The defense, such as it is, boils down to this: As officers of the court, all defense lawyers are really on the government’s side, having sworn an oath to uphold a vast, century-old conspiracy to conceal the fact that most aspects of the federal government are illegitimate, including the courts, which have no constitutional authority to bring people to trial. The defendants also believed that a legal distinction could be drawn between their name as written on their indictment and their true identity as a “flesh and blood man.”

If that makes no sense, that’s okay; the point seems to be that these African-American guys are using a more or less totally fictional defense made up by white supremacist crazies, which is highly ironic. It’s also highly disruptive; they “succeeded” in getting the prosecution to drop its death-penalty request, although I’m not sure if the defendants intended to do this by making asses of themselves or were just lucky. Something else I noticed is that the prosecution seemed to be stretching RICO pretty thin in that case.

I also wanted to link to this post at The UCL Practitioner, Kimberly Kralowec’s blog about California’s Unfair Competition Law, good ol’ sec. 17200. She is interested in the Fourth District Court of Appeal’s assumption that the UCL’s prohibition against unfair conduct applies to conduct that’s against public policy. That is certainly the interesting legal issue about it, but as a driver, I’m also interested in the underlying case, which is about a red-light camera provider’s contract with municipalities. This contract, as I understand it from the post, entitled the provider to contingency fees from its cameras — the more money the cities made, the more money the provider got. Since this gives the provider an incentive to ensnare people who aren’t really running red lights, which does happen, it does indeed sound on first blush like a provision contrary to public policy. I’m disappointed not to have learned more about this issue directly from the mainstream media.