#so for this case the attorney had gone to my supervisor and told him that she thinks I’m ineffective at my job and she believes I’m afraid | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

serenasoutherlyns · 3 years

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Not a Summer Crush Part Two

a/n: enjoy part two I hope! any feedback will make me fall in love with you 12 times. this one features much hijinks!!

Part Two

Immediately after you hopped on your bike, you began to regret your most recent conversation, your tendency towards flights of spontaneity. It hit you that you had not only turned down drinks with Cabot and Novak's important friends, you had invited them to watch you get your boogie on with all of your airhead dance friends at a somewhat raggedy club in Brooklyn.

What. Had. You. Done.

With any luck, Alex would not mention anything to Casey and the two of them would go to whatever wine bar the other senior ADAs and fancy defense attorneys hung out at with Gillian Hardwicke and whoever else, tell them how weird you were being, and never look you in the eyes again. You tumbled into your apartment, raining papers, carabiners, chapsticks, and hair ties as you hung up your bag and helmet. You made especially sure to hang up the key to your bike lock because four times in the last month had seen you frantically biking back to your apartment for it and countless more had featured you searching through the jungle of tiny bowls full of coins and wires and keychains before you left. When you made it into your living room, two little hands wrapped around your leg, tripping you. Your fall was cushioned by your fluffy area rug, but you were startled enough to yell "fuck."

Leaving no time to spare, you heard a high-pitched voice behind you yell, "Auntie, that's a bad word!" You got up and scooped the little home invader into your arms.

"Léa," you said, "how did you get into my apartment?" The six-year-old giggled as you tickled her.

"I left Mr. Cuddles on your couch. Papa gave me the key."

"Well, did you find Mr. Cuddles?" You asked, and Léa held the teddy bear out for you.

"Yeah, I did, but then I heard you and I got so happy because Auntie is home!" You melted at that, grateful to have the girls in your life, without having children of your own.

"OK, sweet girl. Thank you for the welcome. Why don't we go surprise Papa?" You picked up the laughing kid and slung her over your shoulder, walking down the stairs to your best friend's apartment.

"Ash," you said as you opened the door. "I think I found an alien in my apartment. I don't know what it is but it's very silly." Léa protested, saying she was a girl and not an alien. You plopped the pile of giggles on the couch and greeted Ashley with a quick kiss on the cheek.

"Are we still going out tonight? The babysitter's still coming?" Ashley was juggling the two-year-old and a pot of spaghetti at once, trying to get the girls fed so he could have a rare fun night out with you and the others.

"Yep, Emma is on her way right now. And we," he said as he took your hand, "are going to dance all night long." He turned you around in the kitchen, causing Yasmin to coo in his arms. "And you, my Meena-Beena, are going to be the best little dance prodigy in the world, aren't you?"

You took her from his arms and spun her around again, saying, "If I have anything to do with it, though, you're still going to college."

"Natch," Ashley agreed with you. The doorbell rang and Ophélie, the 12-year-old, raced to let the high school girl Ashley had hired to watch them in. Ashley explained where everything was to be found, then the two of you practically flew out of the door. You changed into more appropriate clothing at your place, then caught the subway. As you traveled, you broke the news to your best friend.

"Hey. So. I may have invited a couple newbies," you told him.

"Shouldn't be an issue, it's open night and there are going to be like, 20 teachers there."

"Right. Um. Yes. But."

"What, do you have a crush or something?" You hit him.

"No. But they are my supervisors."

"Both of them?" you nodded. "Well, it's a good way for them to get to know you I guess?" You laughed nervously.

"Hopefully, they don't even come," you said wishfully. Ashley changed the topic and the two of you rode the rest of the way without discussing Casey and Alex-- but they stayed in the back of your mind.

---

Casey walked into the darkened room first, holding Alex's pinky with her own, pulling her in behind. Casey had been reluctant at first, but now that the decision was made, she wasn't going to be bashful about the experience. Besides, she had danced before, unlike her wife. Alex's upbringing had been so very proper and protestant, about the only dancing she'd ever experienced was the waltz that she and her fellow wealthy little kids had been taught in cotillion, then told never to do again outside of a ballroom. Casey, on the other hand, had been raised around all types, and had gone to her fair share of swing nights as a kid. Still, nothing like the way everyone was moving in the little club. The band was on a small stage towards the back of the space, and the room was filled bursting with beautiful women wearing flowing sequined dresses and handsome men in crisp button-downs.

Standing just inside the doorway, Alex caught your form first. You were wearing your favorite dance outfit, a simple red crop top with a silver circle skirt. Your hair was secured in a casual bun. Your tall (and, curiously, male) partner's hand sat firmly pressed between your top and your skirt. She watched, transfixed (like many others there tonight, you were often the center of attention), as he lifted and spun you around, quickly and masterfully. What was most beautiful, though, was the unreserved grin that seemed stuck in its place, except when you lifted your head back and laughed after your partner whispered something in your ear. Alex and Casey made their way over to the bar and sat down with two mojitos (neither of their usual drinks, but half the people at the bar had them. It seemed fitting), and watched you whirl around with ease and clear pleasure. Casey thought she'd never seen you look so beautiful than right then, in your element, moving as naturally as anything.

"So," Casey remarked to her wife, "Either Ashley is a man or Haley's dancing with another partner."

"Or I heard it wrong," Alex offered.

"She's stunning, isn't she?" Casey said, a dreamy, captivated tone in her voice. Alex replied with a sigh and a hum.

The two women didn't get all too long to discuss you, though, before you saw them and came bouncing (Rita Calhoun doesn’t lie) to the bar, Ashley following close behind you.

"You two made it! Alex, Casey, meet my partner, Ashley Laurent. Ash, this is Casey Cabot Novak and Alexandra Novak Cabot, my esteemed supervisors from the DA's office." Alex reached out for a handshake, but Ashley made a "tsk" noise and pulled her in for two kisses on the cheek.

"We kiss on the cheek," he said, the smallest hint of his accent (French, Alex thought) showing through, then did the same for Casey. The way Casey comfortably returned it was adorable to you, as was how Alex tried her best despite her stiffness. You saw Casey rub her thumb along the back of Alex's hand in a calming motion, and without meaning to, you traced your left thumb over your right hand. "I've heard so much about you both," Ashley continued.

"All good things," you interjected with urgency, knowing Ashley's talent for embarrassing you in front of important people.

"Pleased to hear it," Casey said. You could tell that Alex was getting nervous, she had the same look on her face as she did before a difficult case. You felt a pang of guilt for having invited them, worried that you'd maybe pressured them into doing something they didn't want to do, or worse, that they'd come out of pity.

Ashley could tell you were overthinking and wanted to make it either worse (for his entertainment) or better (for your benefit). He took Casey's hand and told her, "You know, my partner here is one of the best dancers in the state. I'm sure she'd love to show you some of the ropes."

"Oh, Ash," you said, then turned to Casey, "Only if you want to. And he exaggerates my talents."

Alex spoke up, then, to say, "Not if what we saw earlier was any indication." You couldn't help but scrunch up your eyes and nose, flattered and flustered and a little embarrassed.

"I'd be happy to dance, Caroline, but I don't want to steal your partner, Ashley," said Casey.

"Nonsense," Ashley said, "besides, I need a break, the kids exhausted me today. I'll stay, keep this one company." You couldn't argue with him any longer, and as the band started up the next song, you took Casey's hand and led her onto the outer corner of the floor.

Your heart sped up when you noticed Casey's subtle signs of nervousness. "No need to worry, half the people in here have no idea what they're doing," you said. You placed your hand around her waist and put hers on your shoulder, keeping a friendly distance between the two of you. "The trick is pretending like you're confident, and people will think you are." Casey noticed the way your voice went up as you said it, like you knew how she was feeling quite well. "And I usually follow, not lead. So, I'm out of my comfort zone too."

You had no need to say the last thing, Casey thought, as you showed her the basic steps. "It's also, really, quite simple. When I step forward, you step back." She followed your lead. "Good! Yeah, that's exactly right," you told her. "I wouldn't even believe you were a beginner," you flattered her. It was a little choppy, but that didn't matter. As you felt her get into the groove of the movement, you let go of her waist and spun her under your other arm. She gasped, quietly.

"Now, the real key here is remembering to move your hips," you said, when you took her waist back in your arms. "You gotta let them guide you. You head should barely move up or down."

"I think you lost me there," Casey said.

"Here, feel," you replied, moving her free hand to your own hips. "Notice how I let them swing every time I move my feet?"

That seemed to work (though you saw a quick moment of an emotion you couldn't quite place wash over Casey), and she was soon dancing with relative ease for a newcomer. Of course, she was in good hands with you.

Alex watched the two of you as you led Casey along the floor. From work, Alex knew you were dedicated and thoughtful, but she'd always thought of you as shy and high-strung, despite your unguarded countenance. You had no problems in court, but outside of it, you would trip over your words, avert your glance at praise; you wore your insecurities on your sleeve. You were always vulnerable, too. More than once, she'd seen you get teary in your office or when speaking with a victim. You were never the first person to leave, and you took some of the most detailed (yet nearly illegible) notes she'd ever seen.

There was nothing shy about the way you moved, the way you showed Casey how to move herself. She found herself paying attention to the way your hips rolled to the music, how you never let Casey know when she stepped wrong. It put her at ease, knowing her wife was in good hands. Everything about you looked natural, comfortable, free.

"How long have you two been together?" she asked Ashley, sipping her drink (it was very minty). Part of her didn't want to know, but that part was overpowered by her curiosity.

"Ten years this fall. We met her first year at Stanford, at a ballroom rehearsal. She was so cute," Ashley said.

"Oh yeah?"

Ashley nodded emphatically, a nostalgic look in his eyes. "She grew up in a really intense studio. She was so strict about rules, and like, crazy competitive. I used to wind her up on purpose, messing with my technique to get a rise out of her."

"I really wouldn't've taken her for a big rule follower."

"It doesn't come naturally to her, but she got good at it," Ashley said. Alex thought he sounded proud of you, like something about you had come a long way. "She's so much more chilled out than she was at 17. But aren't we all?"

Alex was amused at the idea that anybody would call you “chill” and attempted to imagine what you would've been like at that age with little success. Then again, you kept surprising her. The way you seemed as you danced was very different to how you were at work.

"Now, tell me, Alex. Does she really have to put in all those hours? You don't seem like the kind of supervisor who completely disregards work-life balance."

She thought of how to reply to that, not wanting to get you in any hot water at home. Ashley was right. Now that she was older, married, and caretaker of a sizeable plant collection, Alex took a healthier approach to hours. She also remembered being your age and working every second that she could, every moment that it took to be as thorough as she could.

"No, she doesn't have to work so much," Alex ventured. "In fact, I'm not even technically in charge of her schedule. Everyone can choose how much they work, as long as they're meeting targets. Which, unfortunately, means that we sometimes get people who just do the bare minimum."

"I'm sure Caroline isn't one of those people," Ashley said.

"She's not. She's one of the most productive and successful in the office. With the younger ones, for the first few years, they either take a while to get acclimated to the work and need babysitting, or they work too hard and need someone there to remind them to breathe." Alex felt bad that Ashley had clearly seen some element of stress in you that she failed to pick up on. She tucked that away as a conversation to have later. "I was like her. So was Casey. We both calmed down a little, but it took some quite, uh, extreme events."

Ashley, for all his disregard for the norms of conversation, knew when not to push people, and could see that Alex was feeling a bit on edge. "Would you like to dance the next one with me?" he asked, but Alex's eyes widened as she adamantly refused.

"I'm happy to just watch, you don't want to see me try."

Ashley wanted to push more, but he didn't want to risk alienating your boss, so he filled the space by telling embarrassing stories about you in college. When the band began winding down for their first break, the bartender played some pop over the stereo as the dancing crowd made their way to the bar to rehydrate. You and Casey returned to the booth where Ashley and Alex were sitting.

Casey slid in beside Alex, giving her a quick kiss. You sat next to Ashley, leaning your head on his shoulder. You let out a sigh.

"It's been a minute since you taught a newbie, Bug," Ashley said to you.

"Hardly," you replied, shooting him a glare for using your nickname from your college team. "Casey's very capable." You couldn't resist complimenting her, the way she smiled at you was too precious. "You were great," you directed at Casey.

"Please," she said, waving a hand at you and taking a sip of her mojito, watered down slightly by the melting ice. The four of you managed a very engaging conversation (thanks to your partner's valiant efforts) for the next couple minutes, until Ashley's phone rang.

"That is the babysitter. I'm so sorry ladies, I gotta take this." Everyone at the table took the opportunity to check their phones.

"Hi, Emma. Is everything ok? What happened? Is she running a fever? The thermometer is in the bathroom cabinet, can you check?"

You pushed your glass away and rubbed Ashley's shoulder, knowing how upset he got when any of his kids were in trouble.

"No, 99 isn't technically a fever, but you said she threw up? On Yasmin? Well, that's certainly gross. Um, no I wouldn't make you deal with that, here," his brow furrowed, and you started to pack up your things and his, surely you, too, would be going home to help. "Emma, I'm coming home now, should be 20 minutes or so. Léa's lovey is on her bed, if you get her that and wrap her up in a blanket on the couch, she should be OK. Ask Ophélie to entertain Yasmin and stay with Léa for me, can you? You're a gem, kid. OK, I'm leaving now, see you in 20." You started to get up with him, Casey and Alex looked concerned.

"Casey, Alex, I am so sorry to leave, but it was great to meet you two," he said.

"Léa was fine two hours ago when she attacked me," you said, addressing Ashley. "Alex, Casey, I'm sorry I got you two out here and have to leave so soon."

"What? No, you stay here, love." You opened your mouth to argue, but he insisted. "You have guests, and I'll be fine alone. Léa's always sick, and Phélie can watch the baby for me." You tried to help him again, but he wouldn't let you. You gave him a hug and kiss on the cheek goodbye, and he waved kindly to Alex and Casey as he hurriedly walked out the door.

When he was gone, you said to the other women, "I think he does too much. I work all the time. I wish I was there more to help." You played around with a straw wrapper as you talked (Alex noted, you seemed to fidget when you felt guilty).

"He seems like he's OK," Alex said, remembering how Ashley had expressed a similar sentiment to her earlier.

"Do you need to work fewer hours?" Casey asked, "because you're doing more than well."

You sighed as you thought of what to say. "Ashley's a wonderful father. No questions there. But I do think he puts too much pressure on himself."

"There's one thing you two have in common," said Alex. You only nodded in response, looking around the room. This was your happy place, and Casey and Alex somehow fit perfectly in it.

---

You all left the club right before the crowd started to die down. You were tired, and you knew Ashley would need a hug once the girls were in bed; plus, you could tell Alex and Casey were wearing out (you couldn't get Alex to dance, but you and Casey were on the floor together about half the night-- an old student of yours pulled you away from your table as the band began again, but you found Casey another partner for a few songs). As you rode home, your nerves were completely calmed. You realized that you had nothing to worry about in the first place and felt pleased at how the evening had turned out.

As soon as they reached their apartment, Alex took Casey's hands and kissed her, lightly at first, deepening when Casey parted her lips. Casey moaned, muffled, as Alex threaded her fingers through her hair and gave it the gentlest of tugs.

"We have a bed, Lex," Casey said, pulling away slightly.

Alex hummed against Casey's jaw. "You just look so beautiful tonight."

"I don't always?"

"Oh, you do. I just kind of can't believe how perfect you looked dancing."

"Well, you really have Caroline to thank for that one."

Alex made a sound that landed somewhere between a whimper and a squeak.

"Am I wrong?"

"No, you're right," Alex said. "That's the thing."

"I know," Casey replied. "Too bad she's apparently both straight and taken."

Alex giggled. "I mean, how would that conversation even go."

Casey nodded in agreement, turned on her heels, and pulled Alex down the hall, pushing her onto their very fluffy bed.

"'Hey, I know I’m 15 years older than you, married to Casey, and we’re kind of your bosses, but do you want to have a threesome?'" Alex continued in a low tone of voice, comically seductive, running her hands under the hem of Casey's tank top, pulling her closer with the fabric.

Casey laughed into her collarbone, welcoming Alex's lips as she kissed down her chest.

---

The next week passed quietly. It was a two-case week for you, one of which ended in a plea bargain, giving you more free time than usual. Alex kept bringing you coffee, and you kept running with Casey, though the weather was beginning to be too hot to do so outside (Casey, who was raised spending summers with her grandmother in Georgia, didn't believe there was such a thing; but your poor bay-area body was not suited to temperatures much above 75°). Wednesday evening around 8:00, when you were working late, tying up the details of a sexual harassment case at Manhattan Arts High School, you knocked on Alex's office door, hoping she was still in and would be willing to give you some feedback.

You heard a noise from inside, an "mm-hmm" that you took to mean "come in." You didn't wait to open the door, thanks, again, to your already limited inhibitions and the focus you had when you got deep into a case like this.

It was slightly too soon.

You quickly turned around and all but ran away, apologizing with what felt like every word in the dictionary. That was it, you decided, you had to quit. It was a good run, you thought, but you now had no choice but to leave, change your identity, and move to Spain.

Or something. Why wasn't the door locked?

You made it back to your office, just down the hall. As you fretfully packed papers into your backpack, you heard the click of high heels approaching you, caught a glimpse of blonde hair through the window. Part of you wanted to hide under your desk, but you stayed standing, hoping that if you didn't move, she wouldn't see you (not unlike a child attempting to avoid a bee sting).

Alex tapped her knuckles on the glass in the door, not waiting for you to respond before she opened it and came in. You started to apologize again, but Alex held her hand (her distractingly pretty hand) up at you.

"I am very sorry," she said, "that you saw that. In our defense, we were only kissing, and you usually keep to yourself after about 6."

You had trouble making words come out of your head.

"Anyway, Casey feels horrible. So, I came to apologize and see what you needed."

You continued petrified, wondering how Alex wasn't livid. You noticed a deep red mark on her neck--You noticed her neck.

"Oh God, did we freak you out that much, Haley? It's ok, you didn't do anything wrong. We were the ones making out at work," she said, trying and failing to resist a smirk.

At that, you were able to break out of your overwhelmed silence.

"Uhm," you began, almost whispering. "It's the Manhattan Arts case."

Alex nodded. "That one's tough. That's why I gave it to you."

You nodded, suppressing a squeak.

"It is. I don't know what to do because the complainant is also a co-conspirator with the perpetrator in another case."

"Right. Why don't you come to my office, and we'll all look over it together?" Alex saw your expression fill with fear again, the same kitten-ish look she'd come to know and love. It was painfully cute. "You don't have to. But we do have leftover pad Thai." That was enough to convince you, though you were still taken aback and shaken up.

You went to Ashley's apartment first when you went home that night. He and Ramin (home from his business trip) were cuddled up together on the couch watching The Bachelor, the girls were long asleep. You greeted the men, slipped your shoes off, and padded into the living room, sliding onto the couch beside them. Ramin turned down the TV and slipped his free arm around your shoulders. Ten years of friendship between you and Ashley had made you more than comfortable with his husband, though you'd only known Ramin for four. You three didn't need words anymore, they could both tell when you were having a hard time. You were glad Ramin hadn't seen everything Ashley had-- while you weren't very skittish about sharing your personal life with the people close to you, you and Ashley had been there for one another's darkest moments.

Ramin patted your head, mussing your frizzy hair. "Wanna talk about it?" Ashley asked you, but you shook your head.

"Tea," you said.

"Fair enough," Ramin replied, amused, rising to put the kettle on. Ashley scooted over to give you a hug.

You were in a far better mood after a few pots of chamomile and a few episodes of The Bachelor when you went to bed that night (well, Thursday morning). You were still confused, though. Something in your core warmed up every time you closed your eyes, the image of Casey sitting in Alex's lap, her hair messy, their lips pressed against one another, was stuck in your head. You were still mortified, that was all.

---

Alex made good on her promise of drinks that Saturday. Things had smoothed over since Wednesday; she'd left a cookie and a note beside your coffee on Thursday morning that read: Consider this biscotti your olive branch, and, well, who could stay uncomfortable after that. As they left their apartment, Alex sent a text to their friends reminding them that they had a guest that night.

Alex: Everyone, Haley's coming out with us tonight.

Casey: That means best behavior. No being cruel.

Sophie: ...Rita.

Sophie: We were all thinking it.

Serena: ^

Rita: I'm a very sweet person!

Pippa: You made Gillian cry last week.

Rita: That sounds like a her problem.

Gillian: It kind of was.

Pippa: 💖

Casey: Just, be nice to her. Please?

Serena: We will!

Rita: Fine.

Satisfied, they walked the short distance to their regular bar. As they approached, they saw you standing outside, looking up the other direction of the sidewalk and fidgeting with your keys. Casey noticed what you were wearing first, a black A-line wrap dress that showed off your shoulders. Alex, on the other hand, noticed you were wearing your hair in its natural loopy curls when you usually straightened it.

The way the setting sunlight hit your face as you turned your head in their direction caused Alex's breath to hitch in her throat. The way you idly brushed your fingers along your neck as you tucked a curl behind your ear made Casey's mouth go dry. They shared a quick glance, their eyes talking for them, saying: we're in deep, aren't we?

The second you saw them coming towards you, you grinned wide and waved both hands, bouncing on your toes.

"Rita was right," Casey whispered to Alex, still out of earshot of you, "she's exactly like a bunny."

Alex squeezed Casey's hand tightly. You greeted them excitedly, resisting the urge to hug them both (where did that come from?) by holding your hands behind your back after you waved. They returned your greetings gracefully and led the way into their haunt, Casey, then Alex, then you.

Everyone else was already there, you were sure they must've gotten there before you. The bar wasn't quite what you expected; it had much more of a homey vibe than you thought it would. A mostly 30-something, professional-looking, crowd populated the place's tables, drinking mostly wine and whisky, talking over candlelit tables. You felt more at ease, now that you knew what you were getting into.

You were even more at ease when you realized that sat around the table you were approaching were all familiar faces. Honestly, if you had to pick which defense attorneys to spend an evening with, you could do much worse than Rita Calhoun and Sophie Devere. You knew Gillian would be there, and you were pleased to see Serena Southerlyn and Pippa Cox as well (you always admired the field of legal advocacy, you might've gone into it if the money wasn't even worse than prosecution. Pippa and Serena both clearly came from some amount of wealth-- you most certainly did not, and student loans called).

Pleasant hugs and hellos were shared around the table. Casey introduced you.

"Gillian, of course, you know ADA Haley, but for you others... Pippa, Serena, Rita, Sophie, this is Caroline Haley." Gillian raised her glass to you; Pippa gave a warm smile and a wave. Serena pulled out a chair for you, and you took it.

"Lovely to meet you, officially," said Sophie.

"We could use someone interesting," Rita added.

You had expected to feel anxious. You always did in social situations, and you had the Zoloft in your cabinet to prove it. And you did feel the familiar buzzing of worry in the back of your head. But something about the way Casey and Alex looked at one another and then at you made you feel safer than usual. It was a cozy, pleasant feeling.

Wait. Is that? Was it? No. Certainly not. Unless?

You let their conversations go on without chiming in much. Like you usually did when you met new people, you just watched and sipped your drink (gin and soda, your go-to. Serena had insisted on buying you a drink, Rita teased you for going with something so cliché but stopped after one jab. You'd seen Pippa give her a warning glare, thought you'd seen her squeeze her thigh as well, though that could just be your somewhat wonky eyesight). Noticing your anxiety, Alex gave you a friendly pat on the shoulder that made your stomach flip.

Eventually, at a lull in the talking, Alex turned her attention to you: "What's Ashley doing tonight, Caroline?"

Your expression lit up; you were always excited to brag about your best friend. "He's at the studio; he runs rehearsal on Saturday nights. His company is one of the best in the city." You could've said more, but you didn't want to ramble like you tended to when you were nervous.

"Oh. When do you teach? You're always at the office late." Alex asked.

You sighed. "I wish I had far more time than I do. I teach mostly workshops right now, one or two weekends a month." You saw everyone around the table react with some surprise.

"And you two didn't scare away the babysitter last week?" Casey added.

You chuckled in response. "I hope we didn't. The girls are usually very well-behaved, but poor Léa's always getting sick."

"How old are they, Caroline?" Pippa asked.

The only thing you loved more than bragging about Ashley was bragging about your nieces.

"Ophélie is 12, Léa is 6, and Yasmin is 2. I'm biased, but they're the brightest children on the planet."

The way you sounded when you spoke about the girls spun Casey's head. Alex had never wanted kids, and Casey had always been on the fence. But your clear pride had her feeling very drawn to you in that moment.

"Forgive me for saying," Sophie began, "But aren't you a little young to have a 12-year-old?"

"Or a 6-year-old, really," Gillian added. Alex wanted to say something, remind her well-meaning friends that, sometimes, people didn't want to discuss every detail of their personal lives with them, but she held back, knowing how composed you could be when you wanted. You paled, knowing where this conversation was headed.

"Oh, um," you said, "They aren't my kids, technically. Ophélie is Ashley's youngest sister, and Léa is Ramin's from his first marriage. Yasmin is Ashley and Ramin's only child together, but they have full custody of all three. But I've been in their lives since Ophélie was 4." You saw the confusion build on Casey's face, her brow furrowing like how it did when she was focused in on her notes.

"Who's Ramin?" She asked you.

"Ashley's husband?" You replied, "he didn't mention him to you? He usually can't wait to talk about him."

The subtle confusion turned to true befuddlement on the part of Alex and Casey, both.

"He didn't mention a husband," Alex said. "I actually assumed you two were together?" Casey nodded.The other attorneys watched with varying degrees of curiosity and chaotic joy. You swore you saw Rita cover a smile with her napkin.

You realized the place where things had gone wrong. "Oh, oh my gosh, I can absolutely see where you would get that impression if he didn't bring up Ramin. He was pretty out of it the other night."

"You said you'd meet him at home when he left, called him your partner, kissed him," Casey listed.

"He told me about your first date," Alex added. Their tones were humorously incredulous, teasing. You could feel your cheeks heating up. This hadn't happened in quite a while.

"Dance partner. We live on the first and second floors of the same building. And well, you know someone ten years, you build up affection?" you paused. "It's an easy mistake to make. Besides, did he tell you how said first date ended?"

"No, actually. You and Casey got back from the dance floor before he finished the story."

You hid your head in your hands for a moment. "Well, I'm glad he didn't, because I'm not sure I could've handled the mortification." Everyone at the table kept looking at you, expectantly. "It ended with me coming out to him, then crying into his shoulder about it. So, no second date."

"It's all good, Caroline," Serena said, helping your nerves. "I'm sure Alex just wasn't paying attention. She's like that."

Alex shot her a playful frown. You felt at ease, more comfortable and wanted to share more with the group.

"When Ophélie was in preschool, I used to take her to music class on the weekends. I was still a junior in college, so I would show up to these fancy Palo Alto mommy and me classes with my backpack full of textbooks," you told, reminiscing on your younger years with your niece. "I swear, every new session, I'd walk in and another one of my professors would be there with their kids, the looks on their faces were just so priceless." Nobody seemed bored of you yet, so you kept going. "That little girl is the reason I became a lawyer," you said, in a more serious tone.

"What do you mean by that?" Pippa asked, her passion for protecting kids showing through.

You took a deep breath, not having meant to get so deep tonight-- but you opened up whenever Casey or Alex was around.

"When Ashley sued for custody, he had just graduated and was working in the ensemble of a dance company. I was a couple years behind him, but we were super close, and I was there for every meeting and hearing." You tested the waters, looking around the table to see if anybody looked bored. Seeing no signs, you continued. "And I remember just thinking the attorney was just the coolest person on earth. She convinced a court that this 22-year-old contemporary dancer was more fit to raise a child than that child's wealthy mother. She would work on everything seemingly tirelessly... she eventually found a way to prove that emotional abuse was occurring in the birth mother's home and that Ophélie would be better off Ashley's. When he got custody of Ophélie, I knew I wanted to be like that attorney, prove the supposedly unprovable."

"Wow," Gillian said when you finished talking.

Rita gave you a raise of her eyebrows, said, "Well, you certainly are interesting."

Everyone looked at you like they were trying to figure you out. Casey seemed to be on the verge of tears, and you were holding back some of your own. You sipped your drink, still thinking about how proud you were of Ophélie and the other girls, how lucky you were to have them in your life. You knew it was time to change the subject.

"So, Serena," you said, "Casey told me you two used to play softball together back in the day?" The whole table erupted in laughter, apparently at Serena for being a terrible pitcher.

---

That night, while Casey and Alex dozed off holding one another, Casey murmured softly to Alex, "Baby, you know you'll always be enough for me, right?

"Of course," Alex replied, her voice sleepier than her wife's. "I love you, Case."

---

#svu fanfic #law and order svu fanfiction #alex cabot x casey novak #calex #calex x reader #alex cabot x casey novak x reader #calex fanfiction

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esotericworld · 5 years

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Holy shit, this is terrifying. An American citizen (who happens to be white) exposes the total abuse of power by the Depatment of Homeland Security’s Customs and Border Protection. LOL at “customs”. The most doublespeak term I can think of after reading this.

Source: https://theintercept.com/2019/06/22/cbp-border-searches-journalists/

“...That was just the beginning. The real abuse of power was a warrantless search of my phone and laptop. This is the part that affects everyone, not just reporters and people who keep journals.

IN GENERAL, LAW enforcement agents have to get a warrant to search your electronic devices. That’s the gist of the 2014 Supreme Court case Riley v. California. But the Riley ruling only applies when the police arrest you. The Supreme Court has not yet decided whether the same protections apply to American citizens reentering the United States from abroad, and federal appeals courts have issued contradictory opinions. In the absence of a controlling legal authority, CBP goes by its own rules, namely CBP Directive No. 3340-049A, pursuant to which CBP can search any person’s device, at any time, for any reason, or for no reason at all. If you refuse to give up your password, CBP’s policy is to seize the device. The agency may use “external equipment” to crack the passcode, “not merely to gain access to the device, but to review, copy, and/or analyze its contents,” according to the directive. CBP can look for any kind of evidence, any kind of information, and can share what it finds with any other federal agency, so long as doing so is “consistent with applicable law and policy.”

Sophia Cope, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has sued CBP over its warrantless device searches, told me that the agency “has for sure said no” as to whether there is a right to counsel during secondary screening. “They’ve been pretty consistent. You don’t get a lawyer. A lot of people have tried to push back, particularly after the Muslim ban. People were like, ‘I have a green card, and you’re putting me back on a plane to Iran. I need a lawyer to come down to the airport.’”

CBP has been doing warrantless device searches since the advent of the modern smartphone, Cope said, but the practice has increased by some 300 percent since Trump took office. In late 2017, EFF teamed up w with the American Civil Liberties Union and filed a case alleging the unconstitutionality of the administration’s blitz of warrantless searches. Anecdotally, CBP appears to be targeting typical Trumpian scapegoats, including Muslims, Latinos, and journalists, but anyone reentering the United States can be subject to these searches. The 11 plaintiffs in the EFF and ACLU case are a computer programmer, a filmmaker, a graduate student, a nursing student, a limousine driver, a businessman, an engineer, a professor, an artist, and two journalists. All are U.S. citizens or legal permanent residents who had experiences similar to mine.

“The secondary inspection environment is inherently coercive,” the complaint says. “Travelers are not free to exit those areas until officers permit them to leave.” Travelers are usually exhausted, sometimes ill, and may be under pressure to catch a connecting flight, anxious to get home to kids, or needed at work. Forcing travelers who are not suspected of any wrongdoing to cough up their passwords, on pain of having their devices seized, violates the Fourth Amendment right to be free of unreasonable searches and seizures, the plaintiffs argue, and also infringes the First Amendment right to free expression and association by means of government intimidation and surveillance. “Regardless of whether you have embarrassing information on your device,” Cope said, “it’s about personal autonomy and living in a free society and not a police state.”

... I DIDN’T KNOW all of this when I was being held by CBP. When the officers told me they only wanted to check my devices for child pornography, links to terrorism, and so forth, I believed them. I was completely unprepared for the digital ransacking that came next.

After I gave him the password to my iPhone, Moncivias spent three hours reviewing hundreds of photos and videos and emails and calls and texts, including encrypted messages on WhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram. It was the digital equivalent of tossing someone’s house: opening cabinets, pulling out drawers, and overturning furniture in hopes of finding something — anything — illegal. He read my communications with friends, family, and loved ones. He went through my correspondence with colleagues, editors, and sources. He asked about the identities of people who have worked with me in war zones. He also went through my personal photos, which I resented. Consider everything on your phone right now. Nothing on mine was spared.

Pomeroy, meanwhile, searched my laptop. He browsed my emails and my internet history. He looked through financial spreadsheets and property records and business correspondence. He was able to see all the same photos and videos as Moncivias and then some, including photos I thought I had deleted.

At one point, Pomeroy was standing over my laptop on the desk. I couldn’t see the screen, and he had such a puzzled expression on his face that I stood up to see what he was looking at. “Get back,” he said, clapping a hand on his sidearm. “I don’t know if you’re going for my gun.”... I thought I heard him call for me to come over, so I did. “Stand back from my gun,” he said... Pomeroy pronounced words to the effect that he was subjectively forming a reasonable belief that I might grab his service weapon.

It was an implicit death threat and a rhetorical move on part of the police that will be familiar to people of color: I’ve got a gun on you, ergo, you’re a threat to me. Speaking of which, I’m certain this whole experience would have been worse had I been black or brown instead of white. And that is to say nothing of migrants and refugees, whose treatment at the hands of CBP on the U.S.-Mexico border is another matter altogether. But it does go to show that you can’t contain a culture of aggression to one part of an armed agency...

It was around 4 p.m. when Moncivias finally finished up and informed me, anticlimactically, that I was free to go. I couldn’t wait to get outside because the detention area was freezing. No wonder Spanish-speaking migrants call CBP detention la hielera — the icebox. I took my phone and laptop and silently packed up my luggage, which still lay disemboweled on the desk, underwear and all. Pomeroy was gone by this time. As I was walking out, I said to Moncivias and Villarreal, “It’s funny, of all the countries I’ve been to, the border guards have never treated me worse than here, in the one country I’m a citizen of, in the town where I was born.”

“Welcome back to the USA,” Moncivias said.

Update: June 24, 2019

After publication, The Intercept learned that a CBP supervisor was incorrect when he told a reporter that a U.S. citizen may be forbidden from entering the country for refusing to answer a CBP officer’s questions. The piece has been updated to clarify that CBP does not have the power to stop American citizens from entering the U.S.

Source: https://theintercept.com/2019/06/22/cbp-border-searches-journalists/

#united states #DHS #CBP #immigration #border patrol #freedom #privacy #government

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bountyofbeads · 4 years

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TRUMP ATTACKS FEDERAL JUDGE, PROSECUTORS IN TWITTER TIRADE DEFENDING ROGER STONE

By Allyson Chiu | Published February 12 at 7:02 AM EST | Washington Post | Posted February 12, 2020 |

As the fallout from the controversy surrounding Roger Stone’s prison term continued Tuesday night, President Trump defended his longtime confidant by firing off a barrage of heated tweets attacking the federal judge and prosecutors involved in the case.

Over the course of roughly two hours, Trump cranked out six blasts about the handling of Stone’s sentencing, including one that targeted U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson, who is presiding over the case.

He implied that Jackson harbored some broad bias, linking the Stone case to her role in the sentencing of his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort and her dismissal of a lawsuit against former secretary of state Hillary Clinton related to Benghazi, Libya.

“Is this the Judge that put Paul Manafort in SOLITARY CONFINEMENT, something that not even mobster Al Capone had to endure?” Trump wrote, sharing another tweet that named Jackson. “How did she treat Crooked Hillary Clinton? Just asking!”

Jackson is scheduled to sentence Stone, who was convicted in November of lying to Congress and witness tampering, on Feb. 20.

The timing of Tuesday’s online attack prompted many to accuse Trump, who has a long history of mounting public crusades against judges and courts over unfavorable rulings, of attempting to intimidate Jackson and secure a more lenient sentence for Stone.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment late Tuesday.

Trump’s fusillade of tweets came shortly after news broke that the Justice Department had overruled the sentencing recommendation for Stone submitted by federal prosecutors, an action that followed Trump blasting it as too harsh.

The prosecutors, citing federal sentencing guidelines, said Stone should serve seven to nine years in federal prison.

In an early-morning tweet Tuesday, Trump lambasted the proposed punishment as “a miscarriage of justice!” Hours later, the Justice Department announced that it would be revising the recommended prison term — a stunning decision that sparked widespread concern about the president undermining the traditional independence of the agency when it comes to individual prosecutions. (The Justice Department said it did not communicate with the White House about Stone’s case this week and Trump told reporters Tuesday that he has “not been involved in it at all,” The Washington Post reported.)

The growing scrutiny of Trump’s perceived effect on the Stone case did little to keep him from weighing in again Tuesday night.

Amid slinging barbs at 2020 Democratic presidential candidates battling it out in the New Hampshire primary, Trump was in full attack mode as he griped about the original sentencing recommendation and demanded to know the identities of the prosecutors behind it. All four prosecutors withdrew from the case, with one quitting his job, following Tuesday’s events.

“Who are the four prosecutors (Mueller people?) who cut and ran after being exposed for recommending a ridiculous 9 year prison sentence to a man that got caught up in an investigation that was illegal, the Mueller Scam, and shouldn’t ever even have started?” Trump tweeted, referencing the Russia investigation overseen by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III that led to Stone’s conviction.

In a later tweet, Trump appeared to suggest that he was considering the possibility of pardons for Stone and former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn, who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI during the Mueller investigation.

Many seemed to be most taken aback by Trump’s tweet about Jackson, including Clinton, his Democratic opponent in 2016.

In the tweet, Trump questioned Jackson’s treatment of Clinton, probably referencing her dismissal in 2017 of a wrongful death claim brought against the former secretary of state in connection with Benghazi. The suit alleged that Clinton’s use of a private email server caused the deaths of two Americans at the U.S. diplomatic compound in the Libyan city.

Stone also tried to bring attention to the lawsuit last year when he shared an inflammatory Instagram post targeting Jackson, which earned him a harsh scolding from the judge.

“Do you realize intimidating judges is the behavior of failed-state fascists?” Clinton tweeted Tuesday in response to Trump.

Trump has repeatedly gone after judges who rule against him and questioned the judiciary’s constitutional authority. The president’s pattern of attacks have been condemned by lawyers and law professors, who have called his rants “worse than wrong” and “dangerous.”

His frequent references to “Obama judges” prompted Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. to issue a rare rebuke of the president in 2018.

On Tuesday, Trump’s swipe at Jackson was similarly received. People rushed to fact-check the tweet and denounced Trump for “siccing his 70 million Twitter followers” on Jackson, as one person put it. Within moments of the tweet getting posted, Trump’s supporters were already chiming in, calling Jackson “truly evil” and slamming her as “a far-left activist Judge.”

But, the tweet misrepresented Jackson’s involvement in the Manafort case since the judge only sentenced Trump’s former campaign manager to 7½ years and was not responsible for the conditions of his confinement while awaiting trial.

Meanwhile, Trump resumed tweeting early Wednesday morning about the case, praising Attorney General William P. Barr and railing against “Rogue prosecutors.”

*********

THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT CONFIRMS THINGS ARE EVEN WORSE THAN WE FEARED

By Randall D. Eliason | Published Feb 12 at 4:09 PM EST | Washington Post | Posted February 12, 2020 |

THIS STARTED OUT AS A DIFFERENT COLUMN.

Tuesday morning, I began to write about how things seemed to be okay at my old workplace, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia. True, Attorney General William P. Barr had recently installed his close aide, Timothy Shea, as the new U.S. attorney. And there had been rumblings that the office might soften its position on the sentencing of convicted former national security adviser Michael Flynn. But the government’s tough sentencing memorandum concerning Roger Stone seemed to be a good sign. I wrote that, at least when it comes to interfering in the cases of those convicted during the investigation conducted by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, maybe my worst fears about Barr’s Justice Department were not going to be realized.

By midday, that draft column was in the trash. It didn’t take long for the Justice Department to demonstrate that, on the contrary, things are even worse than many have feared.

Political operative and Trump ally Roger Stone was convicted in November on seven felony counts of obstruction of justice, lying to Congress and witness tampering. A jury found that he repeatedly lied to a congressional committee about his role as an intermediary between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks concerning stolen Democratic emails and that he threatened another witness, Randy Credico.

Federal sentencing guidelines, as calculated by the U.S. probation office, call for a sentence of about seven to nine years in prison. That’s a hefty penalty for this type of crime, but it was boosted by Stone’s threats to Credico and by the duration and breadth of Stone’s misconduct. In a memorandum filed on Monday, federal prosecutors strongly condemned Stone’s actions and recommended a sentence in line with the guidelines.

Then, on Tuesday, a senior Justice Department official said the department’s leadership believed the recommended sentence was “extreme, excessive, and grossly disproportionate.” Later that day, Shea filed a memorandum urging a lower sentence and arguing that the sentence his prosecutors had endorsed a day earlier — in a pleading bearing his name — would be “excessive and unwarranted.” All four of the Stone prosecutors promptly withdrew from the case in protest.

So what changed in the less than 24 hours since the initial sentencing memorandum was filed? Nothing — except President Trump tweeting that he thought Stone’s situation was “horrible and very unfair.”

Anyone who hasn’t been a prosecutor may not fully appreciate what a wildly inappropriate and unprecedented punch to the gut this was. Those lawyers had appeared before U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson for more than a year on this case. When they filed papers or stood up in court, they were understood to be speaking for the Justice Department. This move cut their legs out from under them and destroyed their credibility. Withdrawing was their only honorable option, and they should be commended for exercising it.

Of course, supervisors have the right to review subordinates’ work and to correct perceived errors. But the Justice Department’s pearl-clutching — suggesting that the sentencing recommendation was so out of bounds it required this extraordinary public rebuke of the prosecutors — is not remotely credible. The prosecutors’ position was not outrageous; they simply endorsed the sentence recommended by the probation office. That’s standard operating procedure. One thing is clear: If Stone were not a Trump crony, no one at the Justice Department would have batted an eye about his proposed sentence.

It has long been evident that Trump does not appreciate the norms that historically have shielded criminal prosecutions from political influence. But for the first years of his presidency, at least there were some guardrails. When Trump tried to get then-White House Counsel Donald McGahn to fire Mueller, McGahn refused and was ready to resign in protest. Trump’s first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, properly recused himself from the Russia investigation and then refused Trump’s entreaties to unrecuse so he could end the investigation.

But now, with Barr at the helm, it appears there is no one at the Justice Department to stand in Trump’s way. On Twitter on Wednesday, the president congratulated Barr for “taking charge” of the Stone case, which he claimed was “totally out of control.” Trump plainly believes he can do whatever he wants as president, including meddling in criminal prosecutions of his associates. The politicization of the Justice Department appears complete. Trump tweets, and the DOJ jumps.

The norms concerning the Justice Department’s independence have been built up over generations. They are fundamental to the rule of law and have distinguished the United States from authoritarian regimes whose despots use criminal prosecution as a political weapon. Trump has repeatedly tested those norms, but this blatant political interference in the Stone sentencing represents a new low. That’s why so many former Justice officials are sounding the alarm.

One day, Trump will leave office. But the damage he has done to the Justice Department will endure — and may be irreparable. For those of us who cherish the department and the ideals for which it stands, this is heartbreaking. For the country, it’s extremely dangerous.

*********

TRUMP JUST MADE THE DOJ’s ROGER STONE INTERVENTION LOOK EVEN WORSE

By Aaron Blake | Published February 12 at 11:10 AM EST | Washington Post | Posted February 12, 2020 |

Amid a growing storm Tuesday within the Justice Department over its unorthodox intervention in the sentencing recommendation for Roger Stone, a longtime ally of President Trump, officials maintained that there was nothing untoward about what happened. They said the decision was made independent of Trump’s very public gripes about the matter. They said it was the result of a “breakdown” in communication.

THEN TRUMP TWEETED.

The president took to Twitter on Wednesday morning to congratulate Attorney General William P. Barr for “taking charge of a case that was totally out of control and perhaps should not have even been brought.”

The president’s implication: This was his own, appointed attorney general — whose repeated interventions in Trump’s favor have caused almost constant controversy — getting involved to lighten the sentencing recommendation for Trump’s own ally.

The tweet may not directly contradict the Justice Department’s version of events Tuesday, but it sure colors it in a different way. In one tweet, Trump appeared to confirm reports that Barr has taken an interest in matters that involve the president personally. And there are growing questions about whether that’s just on the Stone matter.

The Justice Department also recently scaled back its language in recommending a sentence for former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn. It was initially zero to six months, and in that early January filing, prosecutors referred to Flynn’s offense in stark terms. But later that month, a filing added that probation was a “reasonable” sentence and more effusively referred to Flynn’s long service in government. It was a pretty noted change in tone that turned heads at the time. And it came despite Flynn now attempting to withdraw his guilty plea for lying to investigators.

That shift takes on new significance with Trump’s Wednesday tweet. It’s difficult not to read it as him linking Barr directly to these kinds of decisions, whether that’s actually the case.

The latest intervention has triggered a mass protest from the prosecutors who handled the Stone case. All four withdrew from the case, and two of them resigned positions in the Justice Department. The exodus appeared to confirm that there was dissension among the prosecutors over more senior Justice Department officials intervening to call for a lesser sentence. Former Justice Department officials cried foul over alleged political influence in what is supposed to be an independent prosecution.

The initial recommended sentence of seven to nine years was harsh, but it was within the guidelines for the seven counts on which Stone was convicted — a situation in which prosecutors are generally given discretion to make a recommendation. An anonymous senior Justice Department official said Tuesday that the recommendation was considered “extreme and excessive” and that the prosecutors hadn’t accurately communicated what it would be up the chain of command.

Even if that’s what happened, this was still senior Justice Department officials intervening in an unusual way — and in a case of distinct personal interest to the president. Even if Trump hadn’t directly lobbied for the decision, it would be problematic, because it suggests that his political appointees are riding to the aid of his allies, over the judgments of prosecutors handling the cases. A Justice Department official on Tuesday couldn’t name another instance in which a sentencing recommendation had been overturned so quickly. And now Trump is linking this personally to Barr — the man whose conduct on the Russia investigation has erred repeatedly in Trump’s favor.

Trump has essentially argued that there is nothing wrong with such an intervention, even if he had directly ordered Barr to take such actions (which Trump denies having done in this case). Speaking to reporters Tuesday, Trump said that he “would be able to do it if I wanted” and that “I have the absolute right to do it.” Trump routinely claims such broad authority, but generally the Justice Department guards against perceptions of political influence in investigations — and that’s particularly important in cases involving the president and his allies.

We’ll surely learn more about how all that went down in the days to come. But Trump’s tweet sure didn’t diminish the idea that his Justice Department is doing his political bidding — starting at the top.

*********

THIS IS ONE OF THE MOST ODIOUS ACHIEVEMENTS OF TRUMP’S PRESIDENCY

By Harry Littman | Published February 11 at 7:52 PM EST | Washington Post | Posted February 12, 2020 |

The withdrawal of all four career prosecutors handling the case against Roger Stone, in the wake of the Justice Department’s sentencing shift, underscores that Attorney General William P. Barr’s department has effectively gone rogue.

Prosecutors Aaron Zelinsky, Adam Jed and Michael Marando all sought permission Tuesday to leave the case. A fourth, Jonathan Kravis, has fully resigned his job as an assistant U.S. attorney. These actions threaten to throw the Justice Department into existential crisis.

None of the prosecutors gave a reason for their actions, but their exits followed the announcement Tuesday morning that the department would reduce its sentencing recommendation for Stone, a confidant of President Trump. That news itself came hours after Trump tweeted that Stone’s sentence was “horrible and very unfair.”

Resignation is the strongest possible protest that prosecutors can employ, within professional bounds, against improper conduct by their leadership. The president’s tweet and the department’s reduction of Stone’s sentencing were utterly rank and improper. The action runs counter not only to standard practice but also to the standard that the Justice Department is supposed to embody: the administration of justice without fear or favor.

It is hard to overstate the irregularity and impropriety of the department’s rollback of Stone’s sentence.

Stone was convicted of serious crimes: lying to Congress and witness tampering. His recommended sentence was by the book — literally. Federal prosecutors go by a manual from the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines Commission that lays out appropriate sentences for specific offenses. The seven- to nine-year sentence that prosecutors had sought was precisely what equal justice mandated. That’s far from the “miscarriage of justice” that Trump called it in a tweet.

The Justice Department updated its sentencing recommendation Tuesday in a filing that said the initial guidance “could be considered excessive and unwarranted under the circumstances.” The department’s leadership had been “shocked” at the initial recommendation, an official reportedly told The Post.

Keep in mind, however, that Stone chose to go to trial. He also sought to vilify the prosecution and engage in circus maneuvers designed to suggest his prosecution was a joke. Federal defendants who engage in such tactics virtually never receive sentences lighter than the guidelines stipulate. The system would break down were it otherwise.

But that anomaly is the least of the outrages in this situation. More worrisome is the naked countermand of the recommendation of career prosecutors in favor of a sweetheart recommendation for a political ally of the president. This is indefensible in the U.S. justice system for any reason, least of all raw political favoritism.

I have never experienced or even heard of a situation in which a career prosecutor had been ordered to withdraw a sentencing memorandum within the guidelines’ range. The original filing in the Stone case came from two career federal prosecutors and two special assistant U.S. attorneys. This rebuke has to be maddening for them.

As a general matter, the Justice Department and the White House are supposed to communicate only in rare, well-defined instances and almost never about the results of individual cases. Such contact is a third rail. For those of us committed to the normal course of legal justice, it cuts into bone for the department to do the White House’s bidding in a case in which the president has a strong personal stake.

A Justice Department spokeswoman said that the sentencing decision was made before the president’s tweet and that the White House did not communicate with the department on Monday or Tuesday. If that’s true, that would in some ways be worse: It would mean that the department has become so attentive to the president’s political preferences that it is willing to cross the political divide uninstructed.

The Stone rollback is particularly disturbing amid a flurry of crass political maneuvers undertaken since the impeachment trial ended. These include the similar reversal in the case of former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn, who, like Stone, has made it a point of his defense to belittle the department; the recent memorandum ordering that the attorney general must sign off on any politically oriented prosecution and even on the FBI opening a criminal investigation; the institution of a process within the department to consider the opposition research that Trump lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani has gathered in Ukraine; and the sudden ouster of U.S. Attorney Jessie K. Liu, in favor of a Barr acolyte, from the office that is prosecuting Flynn and Stone. (Liu’s December exit from the U.S. attorney’s office came with the promise of a nomination to a Treasury post — a nomination that Trump is withdrawing, Axios reported Tuesday evening.)

Amid this troubling trend, the prosecutors’ departures will ring the loudest alarm in the Justice Department and in Washington generally. The department’s reputation for doing the right thing, already eroded by the abuses that have piled up since Barr became attorney general, is on life support. That is among the most odious achievements of the Trump presidency.

*********

HOUSE DEMOCRATS ASK SECRET SERVICE FOR DETAILS ABOUT ITS PAYMENTS TO TRUMP’S COMPANY

By David A. Fahrenthold and Jonathan O'Connell | Published February 12 at 12:06 PM EST | Washington Post | Posted February 12, 2020 |

The House Oversight Committee on Wednesday asked the Secret Service to provide a full accounting of its payments to President Trump’s private company — after The Washington Post revealed that the Secret Service had been charged up to $650 per night for rooms at Trump clubs.

In a letter to the Secret Service, signed by chair Carolyn B. Maloney (D-N.Y.) and member Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.), the committee asks for any records of payments to Trump properties, and copies of any contracts between the Secret Service and Trump clubs.

Last week, The Post reported that the Secret Service had been charged up to $650 per night for rooms at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Florida, and charged $17,000 a month for a cottage that agents used at Trump National Golf Club Bedminster, N.J. President Trump still owns his companies. These payments show he has an unprecedented — and largely hidden — business relationship with his own government.

[Read the House Democrats’ letter on website]

The letter said those charges stand “in stark contrast” to the Trump Organization’s public statements. Trump’s son Eric, who runs the company day-to-day, had previously said that the company charged government employees at a steep discount.

“They stay at our properties for free — meaning, like, cost for housekeeping,” Eric Trump said last year in an interview with Yahoo Finance. Eric Trump estimated the charge per room was “like 50 bucks.”

The actual charges revealed by The Post “raise serious concerns about the use of taxpayer dollars and raise questions about government spending at other Trump properties,” the letter said. Maloney took over the committee in November, following the death of former chairman Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.).

The Secret Service did not respond to questions about the letter Wednesday morning.

The Trump Organization has continued to say it charges the government “at cost,” but it has not responded to questions asking how it calculates those costs — or why the actual rates are so much higher than the $50 figure Eric Trump cited.

The Post identified $471,000 worth of payments from the Secret Service to Trump’s company, but — because so little data is available — the actual number is probably higher. The payments are not listed in a public spending database, as is usually required for payments above $10,000. Instead, The Post pieced them together using documents from public records requests — but most of the available documents date back to 2017 or 2018.

In its letter, the committee said that the “Secret Service has not disclosed the full scope of its payments to the President’s businesses or its expenses for presidential travel to [Trump’s] own properties.”

The Secret Service is legally required to send Congress a report every six months on its spending to protect presidential residences. But since the start of Trump’s term, the letter said, the Secret Service has provided only three of the required six reports.

And, even in those three, the lines for spending at Trump’s Bedminster and Mar-a-Lago clubs are both blank, the committee said. The letter asks the Secret Service to explain why.

The committee set a deadline of Feb. 25.

*********

Barr pledged that investigations would be ‘sacrosanct from political influence.’ THAT’S IN REAL DOUBT NOW.

By Aaron Blake | Published February 12 at 3:47 PM EST | Washington Post | Posted February 12, 2020 |

Attorney General William P. Barr faced big questions during his confirmation last year about whether he would maintain independence from President Trump when it came to the Russia investigation. To combat them, he assured senators — repeatedly — that he viewed his job as conducting investigations irrespective of the president’s political wishes.

That’s increasingly in doubt.

On Tuesday, all four prosecutors on the Roger Stone case moved to withdraw after senior Justice Department officials overrode their recommended sentence for Stone. The unorthodox move was announced shortly after Trump decried the proposed sentence of seven to nine years. The Justice Department said Trump’s comments played no role and came after the decision was made.

Even if that’s true, this is still higher-ups in the Justice Department intervening on behalf of perhaps the president’s oldest political ally to reduce his recommended sentence. And Trump on Wednesday implicated Barr directly in that effort, tweeting his congratulations to him for the decision to overrule the prosecutors.

It’s the kind of situation that Barr indicated during his confirmation that he would guard against.

At the time, such questions pertained mostly to his impending oversight of the Russia investigation. But lawmakers also asked him more broadly about whether he would do Trump’s bidding. The president, after all, had repeatedly expressed frustration that his first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, had not taken the investigatory actions Trump desired.

Barr had said it’s not always out-of-bounds for presidents to request specific investigations, and he has long had an extremely broad view of presidential power. But when it came to letting presidential politics seep into investigations, he said he drew a line.

At one point, he was asked about electoral advice he’d given the man who previously appointed him as attorney general, George H.W. Bush. Barr said such advice is part of an attorney general’s job, but investigations are different.

“There are sort of three roles the attorney general plays,” Barr said. “One is the enforcer of the law. In that, the role of the attorney general is to keep the enforcement process sacrosanct from political influence.”

Later, he expanded upon that answer, saying, “I think on the enforcement side, especially where matters are of either personal or political interest to people at the White House, then there would be — there has to be an arm’s length relationship.”

Barr also was asked what would be the breaking point at which he would resign rather than carry out the directive — his “Jim Mattis moment,” in the words of Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.).

Barr assured the lawmakers: “I will not be bullied into doing anything I think is wrong by anybody, whether it be editorial boards or Congress or the president. I am going to do what I think is right.”

Barr also repeatedly pitched himself as someone uniquely able to exercise such independence. He noted he was in the twilight of his career and didn’t need to worry about the fallout of a clash with a president.

“I feel that I’m in a position in life where I can provide the leadership necessary to protect the independence and the reputation of the department,” he said.

He added: “I feel I’m in a position in life where I can do the right thing and not really care about the consequences — in the sense that I can be truly independent.”

People can judge for themselves whether those quotes contradict what we are seeing today. We will almost certainly see more evidence about how all of this went down.

But what we know today is that senior officials at Barr’s Justice Department — and perhaps Barr himself, as Trump has indicated — have overridden the decision of career prosecutors and asked for a lighter sentence for a presidential ally. And even if that initially requested sentence was on the harsh side, that’s still a highly unusual intervention.

Has this kind of thing happened with anyone else whose case didn’t involve Trump or an ally? A Justice Department official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity and who explained the situation to The Washington Post on Tuesday, couldn’t point to one. What are the odds that the lone or one of relatively few situations in which this action would be taken just happens to be in a case involving Trump? As the now-withdrawn prosecutors argued during the case, Stone lied to investigators and tampered with a witness because the truth “looked terrible” for Trump and his campaign. So Trump has an obvious interest here.

There are also real questions about whether it’s the first time such an action has been undertaken in the case of a Trump ally. Back in January, the Justice Department requested a sentence of zero to six months in prison for former national security adviser Michael Flynn and criticized him in stark terms. A few weeks later, though, it filed something else indicating a sentence of probation would be “reasonable” and speaking in much more admiring tones about Flynn’s service to the country.

The Stone reversal is much more apparently problematic, but both of these cases warrant probing. And if this isn’t unusual, it would behoove the Justice Department to point to other similar instances that don’t involve Trump in some way.

Barr has long found ways to justify controversial decisions that benefit Trump, up to and including his decision not to accuse Trump of obstruction of justice following the report by then-special prosecutor Robert S. Mueller III. Oftentimes, the justifications stem from his belief in the power of the presidency.

In these cases, it seems eminently possible that Trump never personally leaned on Barr to take such actions and that Barr made the decisions on his own. But it’s also true that Trump has made little secret of how he’d like them handled, via his public comments.

A relevant anecdote comes from the new book by The Post’s Carol D. Leonnig and Philip Rucker, “A Very Stable Genius.” They reported that, after the Mueller report was sent to the Justice Department, Trump didn’t reach out to Barr to suggest what he might do with it. So when Barr issued a misleading summary of it, echoed Trump’s political talking points about it and also cleared him of obstruction, he wasn’t directly acting on Trump’s orders. But he still erred decidedly in Trump’s direction.

It seems possible that that’s what happened with him or other senior officials in this case — they’ve done these things without directly taking orders from Trump and can justify them as the right things to do, free of political influence. Perhaps, in this case, they believe that’s the case because the recommended sentence for Stone was indeed harsh.

But just because Trump may not have picked up the phone and asked doesn’t mean the decision isn’t tinged by presidential politics. They had to know when they did this that it would, at the very least, look bad — as if the Justice Department might be intervening in an independent investigation in a way the president would prefer. And they did it anyway.

It’s not exactly the image of an independent Justice Department that Barr said he was uniquely able to provide.

*********

Trump’s retweets range far and wide, but how did a sex therapist become a three-time presidential favorite?

By Anne Gearan and Josh Dawsey | Published February 12 at 2:51 PM ET | Washington Post | Posted Feb 12, 2020

President Trump apparently has a thing for @SexCounseling.

Trump has recently retweeted posts from a California sex therapist, Dawn Michael, whose professional Twitter home is a mix of pro-Trump material and, well, other things.

The three retweets since January are emblematic of the president’s habit of amplifying online praise from random or troublesome corners of the Internet. He has been widely criticized for retweeting racially insensitive or allegedly anti-Semitic material — he denies any such intent. But his willingness to cast the presidential gaze and Twitter finger upon oddball figures and little-known commentators has attracted less notice.

And it also appears to be on the rise. So far in February, Trump’s retweets are outpacing his original tweets by about 2 to 1, topping 265 on Wednesday and including commentary from the likes of @HiredGun37 and @heelerhoney alongside Republican lawmakers, right-wing media figures, journalists, his sons and his campaign manager.

In the same period a year ago, Trump appears to have included only 21 retweets among 92 Twitter postings, and only one appears to be akin to the puzzling choices or otherwise obscure boosters he now promotes. On Feb. 12 last year, among a string of retweets sent from his iPhone near 10 p.m., Trump retweeted a video of jaguars lying in the sun, from the account @planetepics.

On Monday, he blasted out an assessment from @SexCounseling — “The people are happy with President Trump and they see how poorly he is being treated” — to @realDonaldTrump’s 72.4 million Twitter followers. By Tuesday afternoon, his retweet had itself been retweeted nearly 6,000 times.

It is not clear what attracted Trump to Michael’s posts, but she appears among a circle of conservative pro-Trump Twitter users who regularly retweet one another. It is also not clear whether the name of her Twitter account had any bearing on Trump’s decision to retweet her.

Michael’s account links to her YouTube channel and a video about “Couples Sensual Touching” that might be best described as R-rated.

On her website, at thehappyspouse.com, Michael calls herself “a nationally recognized relationship expert and certified clinical sexologist.”

“My mission is to help you resolve problems with your intimate life,” Michael says. “With 20 years of counseling experience, I have helped thousands of people improve their quality of life and marriage.”

She claims advanced degrees or certifications from the Institute for Advanced Studies in Human Sexuality and the American College of Sexologists. Neither are accredited by the American Psychological Association, spokeswoman Kim Mills said. The APA does not police who calls themselves a sex therapist or a “Certified Sexologist” as Michael’s LinkedIn profile identifies her.

Michael did not respond to requests for comment by phone and email.

Early in his presidency, Trump would post tweets but rarely responded or looked to Twitter for information. His staff would periodically bring him reports on how well tweets had done and would show him particularly friendly things to re-post, according to a senior administration official who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the president’s Twitter use.

But it became “both an entrance and an exit” in 2018 as he would, on his own, dive through his replies to see who was praising him.

An aide said Trump has sometimes been taken aback by backlash to his retweets. Often, a string of retweets is not some grand statement — it’s just Trump scrolling and clicking, people close to the president said.

“If he sees it and it’s positive about him, he just posts it,” the administration official said. “It would never dawn on him to check and see who the person is.”

He also likes to use retweets to force journalists and critics to reckon with the size of his Twitter following, current and former officials said. For example, after a firefighters union endorsed Joe Biden last year, Trump went on a barrage of early-morning posts, amplifying firefighters who praised him instead.

Trump has mused to aides that he can mix it up on Twitter more than in real life — and “kind of just see how it goes,” a former senior administration official said. And there are accounts he somewhat regularly looks at for retweet potential, aides say.

But Trump has conceded in the past that he was a little too quick to hit the retweet button.

“A lot of the times, the bigger problem is the retweets,” he said last year to C-SPAN political editor Steve Scully. “You know, you retweet something that sounds good, but it turns out to be from a player that’s not the best player in the world. And that sort of causes a problem.”

Trump’s taste in retweets is varied. A recent selection of retweets includes the conservative legal group Judicial Watch and ABC News journalist Jonathan Karl. He has retweeted official Republican accounts alongside @RedPillReport, which posts pro-Trump material and conservative views that are sometimes racially tinged or sexually suggestive.

“Red-pilling” is a term that comes from the movie “The Matrix” and refers to a choice between a red pill that opens one’s eyes to an ugly reality and a blue pill that does not.

@RedPillReport returned the favor Tuesday, retweeting and commenting on a Trump insult directed at Democratic presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg.

“When a President can make you laugh . . . and fatten your 401K . . . you know you’ve got the right man!” the post said.

Trump has sometimes retweeted posts from accounts that were later suspended, or accounts that said they were associated with the Q-Anon conspiracy group.

Michael is not among the 47 people Trump himself follows on Twitter. Nor are any of the other otherwise little-known people he has retweeted recently. The common denominator is always expressions of support for Trump or criticism of his adversaries.

Late Tuesday, Trump retweeted and commented upon a post by @IsraelUSAforevr, an account that proudly notes its four presidential retweets at the top of its Twitter biography.

The original tweet endorsed the idea of pardons for convicted Trump associates Michael Flynn and Roger Stone.

“Prosecutorial misconduct?” Trump wrote in response, alongside other tweets complaining that Stone has been unfairly targeted.

Prasad Vana, an assistant professor at Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business, has studied online marketing techniques and said that retweeting is marketing of a sort.

“In general the idea is to show that there is some consensus developing around an idea,” he said, “and so it’s a way of saying: ‘See? It’s not just me. It’s others who think like that.’ That is primarily the intention.”

Often, content that shocks or outrages is the most popular online, Vana said. That is not necessarily Trump’s intent, but a president retweeting an account called @SexCounseling might raise eyebrows, he said.

“We probably are biased more toward content that agrees with our own opinions, but when you’re on a big stage it is rather wise to vet some information before you put it out there,” Vana said.

_______

Alice Crites contributed to this report.

*********

WHY BILL BARR’S DOJ REPLACED CATHOLIC CHARITIES WITH HOOKERS FOR JESUS

By Dana Milbank | Published February 11 at 7:12 PM EST | Washington Post | Posted February 12, 2020 |

There has never been a better time to be a Hooker for Jesus.

Under Attorney General Bill Barr’s management, it appears no corner of the Justice Department can escape perversion — even the annual grants the Justice Department gives to nonprofits and local governments to help victims of human trafficking.

In a new grant award, senior Justice officials rejected the recommendations of career officials and decided to deny grants to highly rated Catholic Charities in Palm Beach, Fla., and Chicanos Por La Causa in Phoenix. Instead, Reuters reported, they gave more than $1 million combined to lower-rated groups called the Lincoln Tubman Foundation and Hookers for Jesus.

Why? Well, it turns out the head of the Catholic Charities affiliate had been active with Democrats and the Phoenix group had opposed President Trump’s immigration policies. By contrast, Hookers for Jesus is run by a Christian conservative and the Lincoln Tubman group was launched by a relative of a Trump delegate to the 2016 convention.

That Catholic Charities has been replaced by Hookers for Jesus says much about Barr’s Justice Department. Friends of Trump are rewarded. Opponents of Trump are punished. And the nation’s law enforcement apparatus becomes Trump’s personal plaything.

Federal prosecutors Monday recommended that Trump associate Roger Stone serve seven to nine years in prison for obstruction of justice, lying to Congress, witness tampering and other crimes.

Then Trump tweeted that the proposed sentence was “horrible and very unfair” and “the real crimes were on the other side.” And by midday Tuesday, Barr’s Justice Department announced that it would reduce Stone’s sentence recommendation. All four prosecutors, protesting the politicization, asked to withdraw from the case.

But politicization is now the norm. Last week, Barr assigned himself the sole authority to decide which presidential candidates — Democrats and Republicans — should be investigated by the FBI.

Also last week, the Department of Homeland Security, working with the Justice Department, announced that New York state residents can no longer enroll in certain Trusted Traveler programs such as Global Entry — apparent punishment for the strongly Democratic state’s policies on illegal immigrants.

On Monday, Barr declared that the Justice Department had created an “intake process” to receive Rudy Giuliani’s dirt from Ukraine on Joe Biden and Hunter Biden — dirt dug in a boondoggle that left two Giuliani associates under indictment and Trump impeached.

The same day, Barr’s agency announced lawsuits against California, New Jersey and King County (Seattle), Washington — politically “blue” jurisdictions all — as part of what he called a “significant escalation” against sanctuary cities.

On Tuesday, to get a better sense of the man who has turned the Justice Department into Trump’s toy, I watched Barr speak to the Major County Sheriffs of America, a friendly audience, at the Willard Hotel in Washington.

Even by Trumpian standards, the jowly Barr, in his large round glasses, pinstripe suit and Trump-red tie, was strikingly sycophantic. “In his State of the Union, President Trump delivered a message of genuine optimism filled with an unapologetic faith in God and in American greatness and in the common virtues of the American people: altruism, industriousness, self-reliance and generosity,” he read, deadpan.

Trump, he went on, “loves this country,” and “he especially loves you.” The boot-licking performance continued, about Trump’s wise leadership, his unbroken promises and even the just-impeached president’s passionate belief in the “rule of law.”

Then Barr turned to the enemy. He attacked “rogue DA’s” and “so-called social-justice reformers,” who are responsible for “historic levels of homicide and other violent crime” in Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle, St. Louis, Chicago and Baltimore. Politicians in sanctuary jurisdictions, he said, prefer “to help criminal aliens evade the law.” Barr vowed to fight these foes with “all lawful means” — federal subpoenas to force them to turn over “information about criminal aliens,” dozens of lawsuits to invalidate statutes and attempts to deny them both competitive and automatic grants.

In response to a question, Barr railed against tech companies’ use of encryption: “They’re designing these devices so you can be impervious to any government scrutiny,” he protested.

Maybe people wouldn’t be so sensitive about government scrutiny if the top law enforcement official weren’t using his position to punish political opponents and reward political allies.

Instead, with Barr’s acquiescence, we live in a moment in which: Trump’s Treasury Department immediately releases sensitive financial information about Hunter Biden, while refusing to release similar information about Trump; Trump ousts officials who testified in the impeachment inquiry and even ousts the blameless twin brother of one of the witnesses; and Trump’s FBI decides to monitor violent “people on either side” of the abortion debate — although the FBI couldn’t point to a single instance of violence by abortion-rights supporters.

This week, the Pentagon released a new color scheme for Air Force One, replacing the 60-year-old design with one that looks suspiciously like the old Trump Shuttle. Surprised? Don’t be. Soon the entire administration will be able to apply for a Justice Department grant as a newly formed nonprofit: Hookers for Trump.

*********

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phroyd · 6 years

Link

Police Misconduct Has A Whole Different Level in California! - Phroyd

They were at the tail end of their overnight shift when they spotted Gerald Simmons near a vacant lot in Inglewood.

The two Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies said they saw the 43-year-old toss a plastic baggie of rock cocaine to the ground.

Their testimony would become the backbone of the 2009 criminal case against Simmons.

After a six-day trial, the verdict was swift. Guilty.

But jurors made their decision without knowing a crucial detail.

Jose Ovalle, one of the deputies who also booked the evidence, had been suspended five years earlier for pouring taco sauce on a shirt to mimic blood in a criminal case. He nearly lost his job.

Ovalle’s past was kept secret for years from prosecutors, judges, defendants and jurors, even though he was a potential witness in hundreds of criminal cases that relied on his credibility, according to a Times investigation.

The deputy took the stand in 31 cases before the district attorney’s office found out about his misconduct. Once his credibility came into question, prosecutors offered some career criminals generous plea deals in pending cases or dropped charges altogether. Some went on to commit serious crimes.

Ovalle is not an isolated example. Misconduct by law enforcement officers who testify in court is routinely kept hidden by California’s police privacy laws.

The U.S. Supreme Court requires prosecutors to inform criminal defendants about an officer’s wrongdoing — but the state’s laws are so strict that prosecutors cannot directly access the personnel files of their own police witnesses. Instead, California puts the burden on defendants to prove to a judge that an officer’s record is relevant.

Times reporters reviewed documents from hundreds of criminal cases in which the district attorney’s office identified Ovalle as a potential witness after he was caught faking the bloody evidence in 2003.

Few defendants tried to obtain information about Ovalle’s past. A handful of those who did weren’t given information about the deputy’s discipline. Judges never gave them a public explanation for why it wouldn’t have been relevant.

By the time the district attorney’s office learned about Ovalle’s misconduct, he had been a potential witness against 312 defendants. More than 230 were convicted.

A Times investigation last year identified Ovalle and others on a secret Sheriff’s Department list of deputies whose misconduct included falsely testifying in court, pulling over a motorist and receiving oral sex from her while on patrol, and tipping off a drug dealer’s girlfriend about a narcotics bust.

Los Angeles County Sheriff Jim McDonnell wanted to disclose the so-called Brady list of about 300 officers to prosecutors, but the deputies union went to court to stop him.

The state’s Supreme Court will soon decide whether McDonnell and other law enforcement agencies can tell prosecutors if a police witness has a record of serious discipline. An appellate court has ruled they cannot.

Ovalle now works as a sergeant in the Sheriff’s Department’s Century station in Lynwood. Last year, he was paid $240,000 in salary, overtime and other earnings.

When reached by The Times for comment, Ovalle said: “I don’t understand why the L.A. Times is so interested about me.” He declined to comment further and asked not to be contacted again.

‘It was stupidity’

Ovalle’s troubles began in August 2003.

Several gang members at the Pitchess Detention Center in Castaic had slashed an inmate’s neck and head with razor blades.

A 26-year-old deputy with just three years on the job, Ovalle was responsible for collecting the evidence and writing the incident report.

When he realized a bloody shirt from one of the suspects had gone missing, Ovalle took a clean one from the jail laundry, topped it with taco sauce and took a photo, according to court and law enforcement records.

A custody assistant watching Ovalle warned him not to do it, but the deputy went ahead and booked the photograph into evidence. The custody assistant reported him to a supervisor, according to court records.

Confronted by sheriff’s investigators, Ovalle confessed.

“It was stupidity now that I look back on it,” he told the investigators, according to a transcript of his interviewobtained by The Times. “This uniform means everything to me, this badge and gun, it’s my life. … I’m embarrassed.”

Sheriff’s Department officials told Ovalle he would be fired but then relented, noting that he had cooperated with investigators and accepted responsibility, according to internal documents. Ovalle was instead handed a 30-day suspension. He was ordered to serve 10 of those days and the remainder only if he committed a similar offense within the next five years.

In testimony he gave years later, Ovalle blamed poor training for his conduct and downplayed the significance of what he had done, insisting he hadn’t fabricated evidence because the bloody shirt had once existed.

“I don’t consider myself a liar,” he said.

The Sheriff’s Department never notified the district attorney’s office about Ovalle’s actions to see if he should be charged with a crime, according to law enforcement records. As a result, prosecutors handling cases in which Ovalle was involved had no way of knowing about his past actions.

‘Trying to hide misconduct’

Two years after his suspension, Ovalle was transferred to the Sheriff’s Department’s Lennox station in South Los Angeles, where he made arrests for drug possession, theft and assault and later testified in court.

Defendants who faced him had only one method of possibly learning about his misconduct, a procedure that is itself cloaked in secrecy.

Under California’s so-called Pitchess laws, defendants can ask a judge to examine an officer’s personnel records for allegations of excessive force, dishonesty, theft or other acts of “moral turpitude.” Few go through the trouble.

By the spring of 2008, Ovalle had been listed by prosecutors as a potential witness against 125 defendants. Only five tried to delve into Ovalle’s background, according to a review of court records.

If a defendant’s Pitchess motion is granted, a representative from the officer’s law enforcement agency meets with the judge in private to go over relevant complaints. Neither the prosecutor nor the defense attorney is allowed in the room.

If a judge decides to turn over anything, it is usually only the name and contact information of someone who made a complaint against the officer within the last five years.

You’ve been arrested by a dishonest cop. Can you win in a system set up to protect officers? »

It is then up to the defense attorney to figure out what happened.

Supporters say the Pitchess laws prevent accused criminals from fishing for information about police witnesses that is irrelevant in their cases.

David E. Mastagni, a Sacramento-based attorney who represents police unions, said most defendants don’t file Pitchess motions because “in the vast majority of cases, the officer’s credibility is not an issue.” If an officer has a history of dishonesty, he said, a judge will almost always disclose it through Pitchess.

“It’s a pretty perfect balancing,” he said.

But defense lawyers complain that the laws make it difficult for people facing criminal charges to ask for the information. Many of their jailed clients, they say, don’t want to spend weeks or months trying to find out whether a law enforcement witness has a history of complaints, especially if they could accept a plea deal that would speed up their release.

“It isn’t a defeatist attitude as much as it is a realistic understanding of your client’s life,” said David Kanuth, a former L.A. County deputy public defender who is sharply critical of the state’s police privacy laws. “They are trying to hide misconduct, and everyone should be against it.”

Inside a secret 2014 list of hundreds of L.A. deputies with histories of misconduct »

One of the defendants who tried to dig into Ovalle’s background was Lamar Dotson. He had been returning to the Acacia Inn in Inglewood from his job as a security officer when Ovalle and his partner ordered him out of his car with guns drawn.

The deputies said they smelled marijuana and found two baggies with the drug. When they discovered a stolen gun in the trunk, Dotson explained he had confiscated it from someone at one of the clubs where he worked.

In court records and an interview with The Times, Dotson insisted the deputies lied about him having marijuana in the car to justify the search. He said he had kept the gun because he had been worried about getting into trouble if he turned the weapon into authorities.

“I was 29 years old, never been in handcuffs, never been to jail,” Dotson told The Times.

Dotson’s attorney filed a Pitchess motion asking for the deputies’ history of misconduct, including fabricating evidence. The judge denied the motion. The case file and related transcripts have since been destroyed.

Dotson, who had no criminal history, ended up agreeing to a deal in which he pleaded no contest to carrying a loaded firearm and was placed on summary probation for three years. The misdemeanor conviction, he said, prevented him from obtaining a firearm permit for 10 years, hurting his efforts to find work as a security officer and bodyguard.

If he had known about Ovalle’s past misconduct, Dotson said, he would have fought harder for his case to be dismissed. But as months slipped by, his family members urged him to acquiesce.

“I was trying to get out of the situation as opposed to making it worse,” Dotson said. “It really upset me, to tell you the truth, but what can you do about it at that point? I did what I had to do to keep going forward.”

Word about Ovalle’s misconduct began to spread after he arrested 18-year-old Sergio Martinez on suspicion of possessing methamphetamine in May 2008.

Martinez challenged Ovalle’s account of his arrest. His lawyer filed a Pitchess motion seeking any complaints accusing the deputy of fabricating or planting evidence.

Superior Court Judge Hector M. Guzman reviewed Ovalle’s personnel records and saw the Sheriff’s Department’s internal report about the taco sauce incident.

In an unusual move, the judge gave the records to the prosecutor and suggested the district attorney’s office decide whether Ovalle should be added to the agency’s database of problem officers to alert future defendants.

But that didn’t happen.

The prosecutor in the case, William Frank, told The Times he informed a supervisor about Ovalle’s misconduct soon after the hearing — just before he started a new job with the state attorney general’s office.

“I understood the seriousness of the material even though I was a relatively new lawyer. I knew what it meant for the case,” Frank said. “I felt I had done what I was supposed to do.”

A district attorney’s spokeswoman blamed “a miscommunication among prosecutors.”

The charges against Martinez were thrown out.

There’s More ...

Phroyd

#assault #theft #drug trafficking #law enforcement #drunk driving

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dysfunctionalmasonshasmoved · 5 years

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Kimberly’s Connections (NPCs)

(excluding family)

Peter Morgan: Kimberly’s first partner and mentor in the police department. Peter Morgan was assigned as Kimberly’s supervisor when she first became a cop and later became her partner when she was promoted to detective. Peter was a close friend of the family, he knew her father from work but was a friend of her mother’s through Peter’s wife. Peter and Kimberly were close; he was her mentor and teacher, and she looked up to him, admiring him very much. Peter was killed in the line of duty on May 11, 2009, protecting Kim during a gang shooting. To this day, Kimberly blames herself for his death, but his wife Natalie continually tells her not to - that Peter would have done the same for anyone, though especially her. Peter survives through his wife and two daughters, Jane and Cheyenne, who are both in their teenage years now and are friends with Kim’s son Jack. (FC: Thomas Gibson)

Brady Rhodes: Kimberly’s second and current partner. Very shortly after the death of her partner, the department assigned Kimberly a new one. Brady is the middle child of three brothers working for law enforcement, their father being a retired lieutenant. When Kimberly first met Brady, they did not get along at all; Kimberly was because she was still mourning the loss of her partner and close friend and was pissed off that the department replaced Peter so quickly. But she could do nothing about it as it was already done, so the brunette had to live with it. For the longest time, Brady and Kim bickered and argued back and forth, Kimberly couldn’t stand his brash arrogance and cockiness and Brady wasn’t taking any of her shit. But after the both of them saved each other’s ass on separate occasions, they put their pettiness aside and grew to become good friends and even better partners. Though they still bicker often, Kimberly has Brady’s back 100 % and the feeling is mutual. Although, Kimberly is oblivious to that fact that Brady is actually in love with her. And despite getting married (to Kimberly’s best friend Roxanne) and having two children with his wife, he still feels that way about her. Kimberly is the godmother of his daughter Hope. (FC: Kirk Acevedo)

Daniel Rhodes: Danny is the youngest of the Rhodes brothers and is a computer geek / genius, who works as the technical analyst for the Boston PD. He is always the person Kim goes to when she needs information - and not just for cases. Some say that the detective uses the techie for her own personal vendettas, but even if that were true Danny has no problems with it. Since his brother Brady became Kim’s partner, the two have become great friends and Dan has proven that he would do anything for Kimberly. He also knows that Brady is in love with his partner, despite being married, but keeps his mouth shut…sometimes. He may not be able to hack into computer systems of higher companies (like the FBI or CIA), but he’s not totally useless in that department, having connections who do that for him. (FC: Christopher Gorham).

Patrick Rhodes: An FBI agent with a bad attitude, he is the older brother of Brady and Danny Rhodes, but is the black sheep of the family. Not only do his brothers dislike him, but his own mother has a problem with the man he turned out to be. Patrick used to have (and most likely still has) a thing for Kimberly when working as a detective before joining the FBI. After being rejected many times, then humiliated in front of the entire department, Patrick developed jealousy and hatred for the woman. Now a higher rank in law enforcement than her, Patrick does everything he can to make Kim’s life hell for humiliating him. He is also having an affair with Sheila Rogers - a district attorney who also strongly dislikes Kimberly - which was exposed by the detective and once got him demoted. He is still having the affair but is taking extra precautions not to get caught. He’s pretty much the equivalent to being Kim’s “arch-rival”. (FC: Eddie Cibrian)

Roxanne Hartman-Rhodes: Roxanne ‘Roxie’ Hartman-Rhodes has been Kimberly’s best friend since elementary school. She’s actually one of the few female friends the detective has, thus Roxie is trusted with some of Kim’s more feminine secrets. Roxie married Kimberly’s partner, Brady Rhodes, in 2014 and gave birth to their daughter Hope (also Kimberly’s goddaughter) in 2015. The two have another child - son Oliver Rhodes - born 2017. Roxie is aware of Brady’s feelings for Kim, she does know that he is in love with her but also knows that it is unrequited. Roxie has not told Kimberly of this nor has she confronted her husband, in fear that their friendships will be broken and she may lose Brady. Despite this, she is Kimberly’s best friend and is always there for her if and when she needs it - though, admittedly, Kimberly still doesn’t like to be a bother to her. (FC: Nicole Tubiola)

David Rockwell: Chief of the Boston PD’s Homicide division, David Rockwell has known Kimberly since she was very young. He was once partners with Kimberly’s father, Nicolas, before becoming the Head of Homicide (or HOH as it is called within the department). Not only is he Kimberly’s boss, but he’s also been a mentor and adviser, as well as a shoulder to cry on, to the detective. Rockwell is one of the few people that is aware of everything Kimberly has gone through and one of the few that Kimberly has complete trust and faith in Some people believe that Rockwell favors Kimberly over his other employees and always goes out of his way to protect her and her reputation when clearly (in the opinion of those some) she is not fit to still be a detective - let alone carry a gun. Rockwell has only ever commented on this accusation with, “No matter what she’s been through, she’s still a good cop and I need her on my team”. Though even Kimberly herself doesn’t often agree with him on that matter. (FC: Tom Selleck)

#headcanons: kimberly #important to their story (npcs)#{if i can't write drafts then im gonna write scratchoutuselessscratchout headcanons}#long post tw #ish

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canaryatlaw · 7 years

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Today was......I don't know. It was emotional. Which I guess shouldn't be surprising given its events, but it's never been like this on this case before, at the other hearings. It was just all so real today. But, I'll start from the beginning. I fucked up walking up somehow, I don't even remember how because I was still half asleep, but I got a text off to my supervisor saying I'd be in at 11 and that was fine since we didn't have any morning obligations. I'm never happy when I do things like that because it makes me feel lazy and unmotivated, but oh well. I got to work at 11 and did some more prison call listening (and candy crush playing) which didn't reveal anything all that rich. Idk if I told you, there was one call from the other day that was like the motherlode, they were insulting everyone in the courtroom and saying they should be prosecuted for what they've done and how the GAL has it out for the caseworker and just all of these absolutely ridiculous statements that I couldn't even write down fast enough, so I think that'll be plenty. We were scheduled for 1:30 for our case to come back up but their courtroom was running late so I kept popping into my former boss' office to see if he was up here yet haha, around 12:45 he arrived and not too long the foster parents were there and we were ready to go. The proceedings were.....interesting. So it's the second phase of the termination trial, where the subject is only the best interest of the children, not the parents constitutional right to parent or whatever. The state and GAL (us) had already rested, so it was just time for the 3 defense attorneys to put up their cases, which of course got hectic. Dad #1, who wasn't involved in "the incident" but is just a gang member who deals drugs, went first, so he testified about loving his kids and such and then they had his mother and his sister testify as to how they had rented a house where they could all live if they let the kids return home to them, but like, the dad was already found depraved because of his felony convictions, plus he's done zero services, so that's going be a stretch. I do genuinely have empathy for the family members because they haven't done anything wrong here, but again, this is about the best interest of the children, not the family members. So then dad #2 went, which was probably the most interesting point. First she had the dad's grandma testify with a Spanish interpreter, I guess just about how she wanted her great grandkids in her life and how close their family is and all that. There was a great moment on cross when she said something about telling the dad they didn't like his "girlfriend" and the ASA was like REALLY LETS EXPLORE THIS and I had to cover my smirk, which is really something I need to get better at because I get far too amused during court proceedings. The real show through was with the letter dad #2 wanted admitted to the judge but we wouldn't stipulate to foundation, so the dad (when I'm talking about this dad, remember he's actually a 17/18 year old) had to get on the stand to establish he wrote the letter and such, and then of course it was time for cross and we wanted to get into the contents of the letter, but the judge kept the scope pretty limited, but that's TBC....I don't think moms attorney actually called any witnesses, she just admitted some certificates of classes mom had completed is jail. I mean, there's really no valid argument she could've made there given the circumstances. Anyone they put on the stand could be massively screwed on cross. So then she rested and there gets to be "rebuttal" and we were kind of colluding with the ASA and we decided to call dad 2 as our witness and ask about the letter which were are allowed to do, though his lawyer objected since the GAL doesn't have the burden of proof they shouldn't be able to do rebuttal, but the judge overruled that. So they got into the letter and really grilled him on it, a lot of it was argumentative by nature cuz he's like "I'm a changed man since I've seen my children born" so the question is "so before this you didn't know it was wrong to starve a 4 year old to death?" Part of the reason we called him though instead of the state is because then technically the state gets to cross and has a better scope. I was watching his attorney while the questioning was happening and it started to look like she was maybe giving him cues for answers??? Like I couldn't tell if she was just kind of nodding along in solidarity or cueing him when to say yes, so I motion for the ASA and tell him and we both just end up looking at her for the rest of the questioning. It was probably nothing, or if anything harmless, but I felt kind of proud of myself for noticing it and bringing attention t it, lol. The letter started with him saying "first I just wanted to say I'm sorry for everything" and the ASA just stood up and was like "so what are you sorry for?" And he goes to answer but then his lawyer jumps up and is like MY CLIENT IS ASSERTING HIS FIFTH AMENDMENT RIGHT AGAINST SELF INCRIMINATION AND REFUSES TO ANSWER so the judge just asked him are you going to take your attorneys advice? And he said yes and didn't answer and it was epic because that was EXACTLY what we wanted to happen because it makes him look guilty as sin, and it's something the finder of fact is allowed to draw negative inferences from. So that was great. Then it was just closing arguments, and things got heavy. State went first of course, and laid out the trauma these kids have experienced and how they now have permanency in each of their foster homes and it was in their best interest to have their parental rights terminated. So then we went. Since our clients are the kids of course we talked more about them, and my former boss was talking about what the siblings said in the VSI's about how they lived in the home with the corpse of their dead sibling for days while having to listen to the mom and boyfriend talk about ways to dispose of the body, including, which I hadn't heard up until this point, knocking his teeth out with a baseball bat so they couldn't identify him by dental records. And for whatever reason, that fact was my tipping point. I could feel my heart just sinking in my chest and I closed my eyes for a few seconds to try and compose myself. And I managed to do so for when I had to. The defense closing arguments were like- dad #1- well he wasn't involved in killing the kid and he has good family support, dad #2 cited some specific passages of the juvenile court act about culture and tradition and then just said to consider the age of her client and how is rehabilitatable. I think moms attorney just adopted their argument about culture and stuff and that was pretty much it. At the start the judge told us he wasn't gonna give a ruling today, he'd take it under advisement and return for a ruling on another date. So we got another date, June 22nd (of course over a month away). I can't blame him though, because this is such a high profile case he has to make sure he gets everything right because no matter what this case will be appealed and he has to do everything he possibly can to make sure that doesn't happen. We might actually get a written opinion out of it, which I'd be super interested to read (we almost never get written opinions out of trial courts). But yeah, that about ended the day. Bus home, made dinner quickly and accidentally melted part of the plastic handle of the rubber spatula by leaving it in the pan and having it rest on the side....oops. At least it was minor. And then it was time to watch the flash. Spoilers ahead, obviously. I think I had actually managed to not get myself too worked up about Snart returning and was going into it with the mindset that I may not get what I want here, so I think that made the overall actions, although still disappointing, at least more bearable. But yes, I'm disappointed that they didn't take this as an opportunity to bring him back to life when they could've easily worked it into the storyline. There was a moment, when Len was trapped in with King shark and Barry was on the other side of the door I was like OH SHIT because the timeline damage if Len got killed right there instead of the oculus.....??????? Like holy fuck, that could've gone in so many directions. But that was quickly handled so crisis averted. I did very much enjoy captain cold in the episode, he was at top snark level and pretty much everything he did was fantastic. On the rest of the episode, well it felt extremely weak to me for Lyla to be like "no" upfront and then after Barry fucking breaks into ARGUS and like potentially compromised national security she was like "oh take it because it's true love!"......I was just like, really? That was the best you could do? Just...ugh. Return Len to Siberia, as has been noted is not a location that we know of the legends visiting yet, was interesting, but I feel like this is more them retconning and being lazy in not exactly wanting to establish when during season 1 of LOT did they grab him from rather than we're going to go to Siberia in 1892 with Len on the waverider in the future. I would love to be proven wrong there, though. The ending...I wasn't expecting them to go as far as they did because they still need a fucking season finale, but they did go there and I'm sorry, I don't believe for two seconds that Iris is actually "dead" and the fucking season finale is just them mourning. Like, no. I've never for a second believed they were actually going to kill off Iris, and that's only gotten stronger as the season goes on. That being said I have no idea how they're gonna fix this next episode, but they've come up with enough creative/ridiculous solutions to seemingly impossible problems before so I'm sure they'll figure something out. I could probably keep going but for times sake I'll move on because PRISON BREAK. Just yes, all the Wentworth Miller on my tv screen <3 and Michael and Sara reunited and it was the most precious thing ever and everything I could've dreamed of and then FUCKING HANK HAS TO SHOW UP AND RUIN EVERYTHING WHEN I TOLD YOU ALL HE WAS A BAD EGG TO BEGIN WITH. FUCKING HANK. (If you're really confused right now, just know that I refuse to refer to Jacob by his actual character name because I hate him too much). It was a good twist though, but now I'm like ahhhh for Michael Jr and Sara's safety as this fucking nut job is running around and of course Linc and Michael and crew have to find their way back into the US, so that'll bring all sorts of new adventures. So that was good. I didn't do much of substance after that, so I think I'm gonna call it here and go to bed because it's really late and I have to actually force my ass out of bed at 7 am. So goodnight babes. Stay sweet.

#daily journal #May 2017 #Rachel watches the flash #Rachel watches prison break

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gyrlversion · 5 years

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Fired for being transgender: The fight for LGBTQ workers rights

She agonized over what to say in the letter, wrote several drafts and sought input from her therapist. Finally satisfied, she handed the letter to her boss in the summer of 2013.

“He read it, he folded it up and put it in his pocket,” Stephens recalled in an interview with CNN. “And basically stood up and walked away.”

She was fired two weeks later.

Stephens filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which then sued the funeral home claiming that firing Stephens for being transgender was unlawful sex discrimination based on her employer’s sex- or gender-based expectations.

“I was proposing to go from being a man in a suit to a woman in a dress and they couldn’t handle that part,” Stephens said.

Her boss stated that he fired Stephens because she “was no longer going to represent himself as a man” and “wanted to dress as a woman,” court papers show.

The funeral home had a dress code that required male funeral directors to wear pant suits and women to wear skirt suits.

According to court documents, her boss believed that authorizing Stephens to wear the uniform for female funeral directors would make him complicit “in supporting the idea that sex is a changeable social construct rather than an immutable God-given gift.”

“The goal is to help family and friends of deceased to get through the grieving process,” said John Bursch, senior counsel and vice president of Appellate Advocacy at the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative religious group representing the funeral home.

The company also worried Stephens’ transition would distract customers. “If a funeral home employee looks one way one day and a different way another day, when the family comes in later, that is taking the focus off the grief and onto the funeral home,” said Bursch.

The Sixth Circuit Court ruled in favor of Stephens in March 2018, saying that the funeral home engaged in unlawful discrimination against her on the basis of her sex in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The funeral home has since appealed the ruling and the Supreme Court is set to hear the case later this year.

The funeral home said it appealed the decision because it claims it is being punished for a change in federal law that it could not have anticipated. “Businesses should be able to rely on the meaning of laws as they are written, not subjected to the whims of a court imposing its policy preferences after the fact,” said Bursch.

LGBTQ workers in limbo

By agreeing to hear Stephens’ case, in addition to two others this fall, the Supreme Court is set to determine whether sexual orientation and gender identification are considered protected classes under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

That law prohibits employers from discriminating against employees on the basis of race, color, sex, religion and national origin.

But lower courts have been split on whether the law bans discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identification.

Under the Obama Administration, Attorney General Eric Holder interpreted that Title VII prohibited employment discrimination based on an individual’s gender identity, including transgender status.  

In 2017, Jeff Sessions, the Trump Administration’s former Attorney General, upended that guidance and said the act doesn’t protect transgender workers from employment discrimination.

The EEOC is the government agency in charge of enforcing federal workplace discrimination laws. Its website currently states that it: “interprets and enforces Title VII’s prohibition of sex discrimination as forbidding any employment discrimination based on gender identity or sexual orientation. These protections apply regardless of any contrary state or local laws.”

The president appoints the members of the EEOC, which currently has three openings, including the general counsel position.

Currently, 21 states and the District of Columbia prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, according to the Human Rights Campaign. Companies have also stepped up protections: 85% of the Fortune 500 have gender identity included in their nondiscrimination policies. In 2002, that number was just 3%, the HRC found.

The patchwork of legal protections can leave some workers feeling like they’re in limbo and sometimes fearful of representing their true selves in the workplace.

A 2018 HRC report found that nearly half of LGBTQ workers aren’t out at work.

“People are at real risk of employment discrimination when there aren’t clear laws in place,” said Sarah Warbelow, legal director at the HRC in Washington, DC.

Having to hide who you are can take a major psychological toll, she added.

For Stephens, it was nearly fatal. One fall night in 2012 she says she walked outside her home and put a gun to her chest. “I stood there with it pressed into my chest for nearly an hour,” she tearfully recalled. “But I couldn’t bring myself to pull the trigger. I realized I liked me too much.”

That’s when she decided to write the letter.

‘They make somebody’s life absolutely miserable’

Fear of being discriminated against or being treated unequally prevents many LGBTQ people from coming out at work, according to Warbelow. The HRC report also found that 53% of LGBTQ workers have heard jokes about gay or lesbian people at least once in a while at work.

“You can imagine that just drives people to be more closeted,” said Warbelow.

Workplace harassment and discrimination can come in many forms. Sometimes it comes in the form of blatantly offensive comments, but more subtle actions by managers and coworkers can also stall career growth.

“When it comes to those bad apples, unfortunately they can be very creative in how they make somebody’s life absolutely miserable in the workplace,” said Warbelow.

Workplace harassment and discrimination for being gay is a scenario Scott Phillips-Gartner says he experienced firsthand.

He’d served in the Norfolk, Virginia, fire department for nearly three decades. After starting as a 911 dispatcher, he worked his way up to become an assistant fire marshal and a senior member of the city’s bomb squad.

“I love my job. Up to the end. I loved it. I’ve loved going to work. I was always excited and there was always something there for me,” Gartner told CNN.

But he says things started to change when he got married in 2014 and added his husband’s name to his personnel records.

After filling out the paperwork and providing a marriage certificate, Gartner alleges his supervisors at the fire department started to treat him differently.

Up until then, only a few close coworkers knew Gartner was gay. In a lawsuit filed against the city of Norfolk in 2018, Gartner claims that throughout 2015 he was routinely subjected to verbal attacks, citing one example of a supervisor asking, “Where is Ms. Gartner?” in a staff meeting. The city denied these claims, according to court documents.

He is suing the city for creating a hostile work environment, gender discrimination and retaliation.

“The offensive conduct of Norfolk was severe and pervasive enough to cause Gartner to suffer humiliation and stress at work, as well as psychological harm that interfered with his job performance,” according to the lawsuit.

Gartner filed complaints about the alleged discrimination to the city and the EEOC. Then, he said, the harassment, discrimination and retaliatory conduct got worse.

According to the lawsuit, he was denied training and the ability to maintain work certifications that caused him to lose pay and benefits after he filed the EEOC complaint. The city denied these allegations, court documents show.

After Gartner filed the complaints, the city’s human resources department investigated, but found insufficient evidence of violations to the city’s anti-discrimination, retaliation or harassment policies. Gartner received a letter dated March 6, 2017 saying his claims were found to be unsubstantiated.

He then received a notice from the fire chief dated the same day. It stated that Gartner was under investigation and being removed from serving as a law enforcement officer for Norfolk Fire-Rescue and reassigned to a temporary facility miles from his usual office.

“There was nothing for me to do. So, I paced the floors.”

According to Barry Montgomery, Gartner’s attorney, the fire department claims the investigation was prompted by the improper acquisition of a service dog. As part of his duties, Gartner was a bomb dog handler and trainer.

Gartner denies any wrongdoing.

An attorney for the city of Norfolk declined to comment about ongoing litigation. The city’s spokesperson declined to comment citing the pending lawsuit.

Toward the end of 2017, Gartner said he was given a heads up that he was going to be fired, so he decided to retire early.

“He was basically forced out,” said Montgomery.

Leaving the department earlier than Gartner had expected had financial consequences.

“He was with the city for a long time. If he would have gone ahead and worked…until he was 63, his retirement would have been a lot higher,” said Montgomery.

After leaving the fire department, Gartner was able to find work as a fire consultant in the private sector.

‘An equal playing field for everyone’

Some lawmakers have been trying for years to pass the Equality Act, which would expand federal discrimination protections for LGBTQ workers.

The bill would prohibit discrimination based on sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity in a variety of areas, including education, federal funding, employment, housing and other public facilities.

The Democrat-controlled House of Representatives passed the legislation in May, largely across party lines. The bill is unlikely to get passed through the Republican-controlled Senate.

For now, the existing patchwork of state laws has forced some LGBTQ workers to leave states and cities that don’t have clear discrimination protections, according to Warbelow.

“Nobody should be forced to move from the place that they love just to make sure that they have the opportunity to work,” said HRC’s Warbelow.

“The Equality Act is about creating an equal playing field for everyone, no matter who you are, you should have the ability to earn a living and put a roof over your family’s head.”

Editor’s Note: If you or someone you know might be at risk of suicide, here are ways to help.

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zipperdry57-blog · 5 years

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Murder of Gambino boss sparks mafia rumor mill

March 16, 2019 Dapper_Don

Mobsters and ex-mobsters — even those who have been exiled to the Witness Protection Program — gossip like schoolgirls. So when Gambino crime family boss Frank Cali was shot dead Wednesday night in front of his Staten Island home, the stunning break in decades of relative mob peace set phones of members and alumni of La Cosa Nostra alight with speculation as to the actors and motive behind his murder.

“Is it buzzing?” former Gambino captain Michael “Mikey Scars” DiLeonardo asked rhetorically about the current state of the mobster rumor mill. “It’s on fire!”

DiLeonardo, 63, was a powerful figure in the crime family who lived in a Staten Island manse of his own before he testified against former associates, including John A. "Junior" Gotti, and temporarily entered government protection. DiLeonardo says he knew Cali when the future crime boss was only the broke young son of a Brooklyn storeowner and “a kid who hung around the Gambinos.”

“I used to shylock him every week,” DiLeonardo said fondly, meaning he gave him high-interest loans. He also took credit for Cali getting “straightened out” — or “made” — and elevated to captain status on his way to the crime family’s highest rungs.

Michael DiLeonardo, right, accused of being a member of the Gambino crime family, right, followed by his attorney Craig Gillen, left, leave the federal building in Atlanta, Wednesday, Aug. 1, 2001. With no explanation from defense attorneys and prosecutors, testimony in the Gold Club trial was abruptly canceled Wednesday, and the proceedings were put on hold.

DiLeonardo, confessed former Gambino hitman John Alite and convicted Genovese killer Anthony Arillotta, all mobsters-turned-informants, in interviews with USA TODAY expressed shock over Cali's murder considering he was known as a nonviolent mob boss who ran his crime family like a corporation.

The ex-gangsters, each of whom have firsthand experience in responding to mob crises, said that while authorities attempt to solve the murder, wise guys associated with Cali are likely conducting their own investigation. The result could be a lasting return to the violence of a flashier, more trigger-happy era of organized crime.

“If this is still the Mafia, that guy’s got to get killed that did the shooting,” mused Alite, 56, who has confessed to involvement in several murders and has since authored books including Darkest Hour II, his second mob tell-all. “And anybody that helped them. Anybody who was associated with this murder, whether it was mob related or not, a couple of guys got to get killed now.”

Arillotta — a Massachusetts gangster who confessed to two murders, testified in New York City mob trials and spent eight years in prison — echoed Alite’s assessment.

“It could be a freak thing, wrong place, wrong house, wrong time,” Arillotta said. “They'll kill that guy. Either way there’s going to be more violence.”

Retired FBI supervisor Bruce Mouw said that rampant speculation among mobsters follows every hit and was likely even stronger this time because Cali’s murder was the first rubout of a Gambino made man in decades.

Mouw called mob-related murders “the hardest cases to investigate,” and cautioned that the public might never learn who was behind Cali’s death, or only after a cooperating witness comes clean about it years from now.

“I can’t really remember one that they solved in a traditional way in twenty years, because nobody sees nothing, especially in Staten Island,” Mouw said.

He downplayed the idea that revenge was imminent and recalled advice he used to give: “I always told my agents, don’t speculate — find out.”

The ex-mobsters USA TODAY spoke with didn’t follow that discipline. Drawing from spare details released in early news reports and the grist of fellow chattering gangsters, they discussed the possibilities that the hit was a sanctioned killing, a “personal matter” gone wrong (like an illicit affair) or even a road rage incident completely unrelated to Cali’s organized crime status. They also said there were rumors that Cali was involved in the drug trade.

But they acknowledged that each of these motives are unsatisfying in that they clash with Cali’s reputation as a buttoned-up gangster who tried to move the crime family away from the attention-grabbing violence of its former patriarch, the elder John Gotti.

Cali was reportedly shot six times, and neighbors saw a pickup truck fleeing the scene. The ex-mobsters leaned on their expertise to deduce that the number of vehicles involved could reveal whether this was a true gangland hit.

“Until I find out how many cars there were, I won’t know,” said DiLeonardo, speculating that a true mafia murder plot would involve hitmen in multiple vehicles.

Alite used the same logic: “When you hit a boss there are three cars — two on each corner and one in front,” said the former Gambino gunman. “He’s not getting away.”

Alite said that the fact that Cali was apparently alone and unguarded outside of his Staten Island home was an indication of how much the mob had changed. Gone are the days when regular violence necessitated fortified compounds and armed entourages for its bosses.

DiLeonardo partly credited Cali’s own management style for the recent peace. He said Cali took a foothold in the family in the 1990s due to a power vacuum created when its top figureheads, including Gotti, were imprisoned or dead. Following Gotti’s murder conviction in 1992, DiLeonardo said, “we didn’t have one sanctioned hit,” though “there was a couple of sneak things” resulting in murders without official permission.

FBI supervisor Mouw, who said he first met Cali when the future top mobster was a young grifter involved in an alleged calling card scheme, took issue with the post-mortem chorus declaring him the Steve Jobs of crime.

“He was a mobster, pure and pure,” Mouw said. “He was Sicilian, very smooth, a moneymaker and a good businessman, so he’s smarter than your average mobster. But you can dress him up, buy him a nice house in Staten Island, he’s still a mobster.”

Mouw credited the long lull in violence not to Cali but to tougher organized crime statutes with devastating sentences for those convicted of mob-related murder. Mouw also stated that though multiple news outlets have referred to Cali as the reputed boss of the family, his information is that Cali was underboss, and the top job belongs to another Gambino, Domenico Cefalu.

DiLeonardo suggested that jostling at the top of the crime family could determine the response to Cali’s killing. He said that Cali’s close confidant, Lorenzo Mannino, will likely be handling the de facto sleuthing of what happened to Cali. Mannino, who could not be reached for comment, was previously sentenced to fifteen years in federal prison for racketeering and a mob rubout that occurred in the late 1980s.

“Lorenzo’s in the Frank Cali mold,” DiLeonardo said. “Very smart, low key. But Lorenzo’s a killer. Where Frank wasn’t a killer, Lorenzo is a killer."

https://news.yahoo.com/apos-couple-guys-got-killed-100007168.html

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Source: http://www.fivefamiliesnyc.com/2019/03/murder-of-gambino-boss-sparks-mafia.html

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oysterchalk72-blog · 5 years

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Krasner: “We’d Like to Get to the Truth” About Cop at Center of Meek Mill Case

City

In a new interview, Philly’s DA says that his office hasn’t “rendered a judgment” on whether retired narcotics officer Reggie Graham is actually guilty of corruption allegations that were cited in Mill’s bid for a new trial.

Left: Meek Mill (Matt Rourke/AP). Right: DA Larry Krasner.

The Year of Meek Mill was packed with drama, featuring a rapper wronged by the criminal justice system and a gripping tale of dirty cops faking evidence, beating suspects, and lying on the witness stand. But the cop at the center of the drama, Reginald Graham — a retired narcotics officer accused of corruption — might yet emerge with his reputation intact.

“I never lied, I never stole, and I never said I did,” said Graham last June, in his only interview on the subject thus far. That interview sparked an investigation and the uncovering of multiple documents suggesting Graham was the furthest thing from a corrupt cop: He was, instead, a whistleblower.

Today, even Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner declares himself unconvinced that Graham was a bad guy. “We’ve never charged Reggie Graham with a criminal act,” says Krasner, in a new interview with Philadelphia magazine, “and we never rendered a judgment that he was unquestionably unethical.”

The situation surrounding Graham, says Krasner, is murky, and “we’d like to get to the truth.”

The DA’s words add yet another twist to a story loaded with fateful turns. In November 2017, Mill was sentenced to jail by Judge Genece E. Brinkley for technical violations of his probation, sparking a massive public outcry for justice reform. Come April 2018, however, he was free on bail after private investigators working on his behalf uncovered damaging information about Graham, the lead officer who arrested Mill on gun- and drug-related charges.

Krasner’s predecessor in the DA’s office, they discovered, had placed Graham on a list of witnesses who could not be called to testify without the permission of a supervisor — his credibility undermined by earlier accusations, in 2013, of theft and lying to federal investigators. Though Graham was never charged with a crime, the Philadelphia Police Department of Internal Affairs hit him with disciplinary charges of theft and conduct unbecoming an officer, and a police board found him guilty. Graham had even supposedly admitted he’d lied, making it easy for heavyweight media outlets like Rolling Stone and Dateline NBC to depict him in villainous terms. Still-new DA Larry Krasner had even seemed to sign off on Graham’s guilt, supporting Meek Mill’s bid for a new trial — and it is this appearance against which Krasner is offering some pushback now.

“Our position was that Mill deserved a new trial based on the information about Graham,” says Krasner. “As a legal issue, this information should have been passed on to the defense by the prior administration, but … it was not a judgment of Graham.”

As victories go, this one is highly qualified. Krasner is not exonerating the ex-cop at this point. But it is another big step toward understanding the cop’s story — and the role he might actually play in the narrative of the Philadelphia police narcotics department, which public defender Brad Bridge describes, artfully and accurately, as offering up some “new scandal every five years … so regularly you can set your watch by them.”

The chief reason for this slow shift in Graham’s fortunes is that the paperwork appears to back him up. Law enforcement documents, including interview notes discovered from FBI and Internal Affairs investigations, reveal that Graham never did admit to lying or stealing. In fact, he’d acted as a whistleblower, even a would-be hero, who provided information to various members of law enforcement about corruption in his squad and faced retribution as a result.

That version of events is further bolstered by retired federal prosecutor Curtis Douglas, who said Graham had told him of corruption in his squad all the way back in 2003; and by Mill’s judge, Brinkley, who wrote last summer in a legal opinion denying the rapper’s bid for a new trial that the evidence points to Graham’s “truthfulness in dealing with a difficult atmosphere of corruption in his immediate work environment.”

In that June filing, Brinkley also went after the DA’s office — hard. The DA’s office agreed with Mill’s attorneys that the rapper deserved a new trial, she concluded, without conducting any investigation of the allegations against Graham. She even quoted her own exchange with assistant district attorney Liam Riley, who admitted to her that the commonwealth hadn’t reached out to any sources who might credibly speak to Graham’s guilt or innocence. These omissions included Douglas, the federal prosecutor, and police officer Alphonso Jett, who’d given a statement to federal investigators that exonerated Graham of the chief allegation of theft he faced. For a new DA whose entire career and political platform rested on the belief that his predecessors and the police require reform, his sudden willingness to accept the findings of these offices without further scrutiny appears particularly off-brand.

Today, Krasner declines to talk about “any investigation we might have done” since, but it isn’t hard to find a key political supporter of his who also believes in Graham. Rochelle Bilal is president of the Guardian Civic League, which represents 2,000 police officers and endorsed Krasner last June in his run for district attorney. Bilal says she spoke to Krasner directly about Graham. “When a cop has gone bad,” she told me in an interview this summer, “other police hear about them for years before anything happens to them, before they get arrested or get in trouble,” she says. “And in my position, I hear these things. But I had never heard a bad word about Reggie Graham, so these accusations about him never really made any sense to me.”

Krasner acknowledges that the Philadelphia Police Department sometimes punishes whistleblowers. That history, in fact, runs deep: Norman A. Carter Jr., Philadelphia police sergeant Tyrone Cook, and, pointedly, Guardian Civic League members in the narcotics department have all come forward with stories of retaliation for their attempts to address corruption in the department.

Now it appears to be Graham’s turn — and his accusers do boast dubious records. Police officer Jerold Gibson, who offered an affidavit contradicting Graham’s account of Mill’s arrest, was himself arrested, jailed and dismissed from the force over a theft charge. And Jeffrey Walker, Graham’s central accuser, who claimed Graham engaged in theft, has admitted to engaging in systemic and long-term corruption in the narcotics department. In fact, it was Walker himself, among other cops, that Graham had been blowing the whistle about years earlier. And so Krasner appears wise to adopt this careful public stance.

“I think it is obvious that there are people in the past who’ve said, ‘Hey, look at these guys, they’re corrupt’ to set up a means of defending himself later in case the shit ever hit the fan,” he says. But he also allows that the affidavits filed about Graham by Gibson and Walker are “of uncertain truthfulness.”

Where this leaves us is still fixed in story’s middle and not its end.

Mill remains free on bail while his attempts to win a new trial wind through the courts. He appears to have warmed to his role as a spokesman for criminal justice reform quite nicely, turning up every month or so with a new single or statement designed to get America woke. But the fact is, if his bid for a new trial fails, he could yet be sent back to prison.

Graham, on the other hand, has been hit with two federal suits in the wake of his public downfall, both curiously absent of detail. “I had a hard time,” says Carlton Johnson, the attorney defending Graham against the suits, “discerning what, if anything, my client is accused of doing.”

The suits look, to Johnson, like a “transparent money grab,” designed to eke some settlement out of the city. The result is that Graham, though beaten up for months in the media, appears to be notching some small but meaningful wins. And as the months pass, he looms as a potentially big figure in the Philadelphia police department — a whistleblower who might yet get brought into court to tell his story. And if that ever happens, Larry Krasner would like to hear him out. “We’d love to talk,” says Krasner, “… if he or his attorney ever wants to get in touch.”

On its face, that sounds good. But there are people they could contact on their own, including a former narcotics supervisor who worked with Graham and Walker.

“There were just none of the red flags with Reggie that there were with Walker” and other corrupt cops, the former supervisor says.

Corrupt narcotics cops brought far more cases and at a hyper-fast pace, suggesting to this supervisor, who requested anonymity because interviews must be cleared with the department, that they were “just making stuff up … because that doesn’t take any time.”

Graham, by contrast, brought fewer cases because he was methodical and actually taking the time to gather real information “on real cases.”

Further, corrupt cops often use the same confidential informants to an extreme degree, but Graham’s roster of informants didn’t appear, Zelig-like, in case after case. And finally, he never faced a high volume of civilian complaints. “I do take a high number of complaints as a red flag,” says this former supervisor.

There’s more, too, but it all points in the same direction: “When his name emerged,” says the supervisor, “everyone who worked with him was just stunned because these kinds of allegations don’t come out of the blue. But we had never heard a bad word when it came to Reggie.”

Source: https://www.phillymag.com/news/2018/12/20/krasner-meek-mill-reggie-graham/

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douglasacogan · 6 years

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Notable protests and legal appeals as rapper Meek Mill's harsh sentence for probation violation shines light on back-end of justice system

Because I do not know Pennsylvania's procedures, I have been a bit unsure how best to cover controversy over the 2-4 year prison sentence given to rapper Meek Mill for violating his probation from a 2008 gun and drug case. This new CNN article, headlined "Outrage mounts over Meek Mill's prison sentence," provides some useful background on the case while reporting on the protest that took place at Philadelphia's Criminal Justice Center on Monday and highlighting that the "case has sparked outrage not just from the hip-hop community but from activists for criminal justice reform around the nation."

Now this lengthy new Philadelphia Inquirer article, headlined "Meek Mill appeals sentence, asks city judge Brinkley to step down," provides a useful accounting of legal issues and related stories swirling around this case. Here are excerpts:

Lawyers for imprisoned Philadelphia-born rapper Meek Mill have launched what one lawyer called a “flurry of legal filings” to try to get the 30-year-old hip-hop star released from his 2- to 4-year prison term for violating the terms of his 10-year-old probation.

The first filing Tuesday — a day after hundreds of supporters met outside the city Criminal Justice Center demanding Mill’s release — asked Philadelphia Common Pleas Court Judge Genece E. Brinkley to disqualify herself from further involvement his case and allow a new judge to reconsider Mill’s prison sentence. The 14-page motion, buttressed by 143 pages of court transcripts, maintains that Brinkley, 61, a judge since 1993, had “assumed a non-judicial, essentially prosecutorial role in the revocation process,” and ignored the recommendations of the probation officer and prosecutor, neither of whom sought imprisonment.

The motion contends that Brinkley has gone beyond “the proper bounds of the judicial role, even as supervisor of a probationary sentence. Judge Brinkley has repeatedly offered inappropriate personal and professional advice to the defendant, who had become a successful professional entertainer during the pendency of this case. On some occasions, Judge Brinkley has done so off the record, or on the record while attempting inappropriately to keep that record secret from the defendant and his counsel.”

“Last week’s hearing was a farce,” said defense attorney Brian J. McMonagle. “It was a miscarriage of justice that lacked even the semblance of fairness. Today, we have asked this Judge to step aside so that a fair minded jurist can right this terrible wrong.”

McMonagle said he would file a motion seeking bail for Mill, who was taken into custody following the Nov. 6 hearing before Brinkley for violating his probation from a 2008 drug and gun case. McMonagle said Brinkley has 30 days to respond to the motions filed Tuesday. If she does not respond, Mill’s lawyers can take the case to Superior Court. For Mill, the problem with a Superior Court appeal is that, unless he is allowed bail pending appeal, he could serve his minimum sentence before a decision.

Nor does the Superior Court have a reputation for disturbing lower court sentences in such cases. An article in Sunday’s Inquirer reviewed seven Superior Court appeals of probation violation sentences imposed by Brinkley over the last four years. All were affirmed.

Mill, born Robert Williams, is now in the state prison at Camp Hill near Harrisburg undergoing evaluation before his permanent prison assignment. “He’s holding up OK,” said McMonagle, adding that Mill is in “protective custody” – in a single cell for 23 hours a day with one hour out for exercise.

A motion to reconsider the sentence is the first step in any criminal appeal to the state Superior Court, the intermediate appeals court between the trial courts and the state Supreme Court. Unless she modifies or vacates Mill’s sentence, Brinkley will be required to write an opinion for the appeals court explaining her reasons for sending him to prison.

At the Nov. 6 hearing during which Brinkley sentenced Mill, the veteran judge recounted almost 10 years of court proceedings in which he had violated his probation, and she had sentenced him to short periods in jail and then had extended his probation.

Mill’s most recent “technical violations” were testing positive for the prescription narcotic Percocet earlier this year and two misdemeanor arrests, for an altercation at the St. Louis airport and a traffic violation in Manhattan involving a motorbike.

Brinkley also reminded Mill of the night she actually tried to verify that he was feeding the homeless, part of the community service she ordered. She went to a Center City soup kitchen run by the Broad Street Ministry – and found him instead sorting clothes. “It was only when you realized that I came there to check on you that you decided to serve meals,” Brinkley told the rapper.

Mill’s lawyers contend the judge’s surreptitious visit was also questionable: “Judge Brinkley thereby made herself a fact witness on the question of whether Mr. Williams was in compliance on that occasion, as well as to any statements he may have made. Judge Brinkley then relied on her own version of this incident … among the reasons for imposing a state prison sentence.”

Mill’s lawyers contend that Brinkley also demonstrated a personal bias involving Mill in a private in-chambers meeting during a Feb. 5, 2016, probation-violation hearing. At that hearing, Mill’s then-attorney Frank DeSimone told Brinkley that Mill wanted to discuss his experiences performing community service but “would feel more comfortable relaying some of his thoughts and experiences” to the judge in private....

Joe Tacopina, a lawyer for Mill based in New York City – who was not in the private meeting – has said Brinkley asked Mill last year to record a version of a Boyz II Men ballad, “On Bended Knee,” and to mention the judge in it. Tacopina said Mill laughed off the request and told Brinkley: “I can’t do that. It’s not my music. I don’t sing that stuff. And I don’t do, like, you know, shout-outs to people in my songs.” Brinkley replied, “’OK, suit yourself,’” according to Tacopina.

Tacopina also alleged that Brinkley asked Mill to drop his current management, Jay-Z’s Roc Nation, and to return to Philadelphia-based Charles “Charlie Mack” Alston, who worked with Mill early in his career....

In a related development Tuesday, authorities dismissed a New York Post internet report that the FBI was investigating Brinkley’s role in recommending Mill return to Mack’s management. An FBI spokeswoman in Philadelphia said that, per Justice Department policies, her office could not confirm nor deny the existence of any investigation. However, a federal law enforcement official in the city said that he was not aware of any active probe into the matter.

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8247011 http://sentencing.typepad.com/sentencing_law_and_policy/2017/11/notable-protests-and-legal-appeals-as-rapper-meek-mills-harsh-sentence-for-probation-violation-shine.html via http://www.rssmix.com/

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benrleeusa · 6 years

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Notable protests and legal appeals as rapper Meek Mill's harsh sentence for probation violation shines light on back-end of justice system

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movietvtechgeeks · 7 years

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Latest story from https://movietvtechgeeks.com/chloe-grace-moretz-finds-kim-kardashian-sad-plus-taylor-swifts-example/

Chloe Grace Moretz finds Kim Kardashian 'sad' plus Taylor Swift's example

Taylor Swift isn’t the only celebrity who has been in a highly publicized feud with reality star Kim Kardashian. You may remember, Kim also had a social media spat with young actress Chloe Grace Moretz Quite a few months back, Chloe slammed Kim for posting a nude selfie on Instagram. Inevitably, Kim (as well as a couple of her family members) clapped back at Chloe for seemingly throwing shade at a fellow female star. In the most recent issue of Variety magazine, Chloe opened up about her short-lived feud with Kim Kardashian. In her interview with the publication, Chloe noted that she felt Kim did not handle the situation well. The Kickass actress said, “It’s sad for [Kim] to reach out like that to a young woman. There’s a lot of woman-on-woman hate.” Chloe went on to address the hateful side of the Internet, saying, “A lot of mean photos have been made of me with Photoshop, and people have done really nasty memes about me, and just so you know, I’ve seen them all and I don’t find them funny and I don’t find them cute. That’s not cool. It’s bullying. And it hurts. I’m not going to deny that.” You can read more of what Chloe had to say to Variety magazine in her exclusive interview, which is featured in the publication’s “Power of Young Hollywood” edition. Taylor Swift's attorneys told jurors they aren't trying to bankrupt a former Colorado DJ accused of groping the pop superstar before a concert, but they do want others to know "that you can always say no." Swift's attorney, Douglas Baldridge, attacked the credibility of former Denver DJ David Mueller on Tuesday, asking jurors, "What's wrong with this picture? A woman gets assaulted, a woman reports it, and she gets sued." Wednesday's testimony was delayed while the judge held a closed hearing with both sides to discuss unspecified evidence. Jurors, spectators, and the news media were told to leave the courtroom. Mueller sued Swift after her team told his bosses at a country music station that he had reached under her dress and touched her backside during a meet-and-greet before a 2013 concert in Denver. He is seeking at least $3 million, saying the allegation cost him his job and reputation. Swift countersued Mueller, claiming sexual assault. She is seeking a symbolic $1, saying she wants to serve as an example to other women who have been assaulted. As Swift's attorneys tried to take the higher ground in the case, Mueller's attorneys tried to paint their client as someone who just wants to clear his name and recover his lost earnings. "Let's be clear about something from the onset - inappropriate touching is offensive, it's wrong and should never be tolerated," Mueller's attorney, Gabriel McFarland told jurors. "Let's also be clear that falsely accusing someone of inappropriate touching is equally offensive, it's wrong and should not be tolerated." Mueller testified Tuesday that he may have touched the pop superstar's ribs with a closed hand as he tried to jump into a photo with her but insisted he did not touch her backside as she claims. He said he and Swift were trying to reach around one another and "our hands touched and our arms touched" during a photo opportunity he estimated lasted no more than 40 seconds. The photo seen by jurors shows Mueller with his hand behind Swift, just below her waist. Both are smiling. "If you look at that photograph, his hand is not underneath Miss Swift's skirt, and her skirt is not rumpled in any fashion," McFarland said, noting that no one on Swift's concert team saw anything amiss. Mueller also testified that one of his station bosses, Hershel Coomer, who is expected to testify, told him that he had met Swift earlier before the show and that "he told me that he had his hands on her butt." Mueller said, "I thought he was just telling me one of his stories." But in his opening statement, Baldridge told jurors that Swift is "absolutely certain" she was sexually assaulted by Mueller, and the photo is "damning" proof of it. Baldridge repeatedly interrupted Mueller during an aggressive cross-examination and noted that Mueller has said he lost an audio recording of a meeting he had with his bosses before they fired him. "We'll never know what's on it, will we?" Baldridge asked. "No, we won't," Mueller responded. "They're gone." Baldridge also repeatedly asked Mueller if he could grasp "any reason, incentive or motive" for Swift to make up the allegation or be involved in two years of litigation. "I cannot," Mueller replied. Baldridge did get Mueller to concede that various supervisors with KYGO and its parent firm had discussed the possibility of letting him go even before the encounter with Swift. Swift is expected to testify, along with members of her entourage. Once again, Real Housewives of Orange County star Tamra Judge’s very own daughter is putting her on blast. For the past couple of years, Tamra’s daughter Sidney Barney has kept her distance from the star. The two’s relationship began to disintegrate after Tamra divorced Sidney’s father, Simon. In addition, Sidney has repeatedly asked her mother to stop talking about her on her reality show - a request that Tamra has continued to disobey. On the most recent episode of Real Housewives of Orange County, Tamra was seen speaking at an event, which was thrown in support of estranged family members. During the event, Tamra claimed that she and Sidney were talking again and were slowly making amends with one another. In contrast, on Monday, Sidney took to her Facebook page to reprimand her mother’s behavior, as well as address some of the reasons she decided to distance herself from her reality star mom. In a lengthy post, Sidney explained, “"I want to start by clearing some things up as my mother continues to talk about me despite me requesting her to stop speaking of me publically [sic] as I don't want to be associated with her or the show. For starters, I did not move out when my parents got a divorce nor did I chose my father's side in the divorce. My parents separated in 2010; I moved out of my mother's house in 2013. Me leaving has nothing to do with the divorce, it has to do with the living conditions at my mother's house and the way she treated me and still treats me today.” She went on to add, "The reasons I left my mothers house are that she was neglectful (leaving us at home with no food or simply ignoring us entirely), she constantly put herself first, and the biggest reason was that she was mentally and emotionally abusive. She was no mother to me. This was an unhealthy environment for all of us kids, and unfortunately, I was the only one to recognize this and take steps to get out of that toxic environment." Tamra Judge, Twitter post: https://twitter.com/TamraBarney/status/894746415838052353 Inevitably, Tamra was quick to defend herself. The blonde reality star wrote on her Twitter page, “Not surprised #brainwashed. Ask her paid for her very expensive college. I’m good when it works for her and her dad.” Halle Berry, despite her fame and fortune, once had nothing to her name – including a place to call home. “That was rough,” the Oscar winner, 50, told People about briefly being homeless as a young actress and living in a shelter in the Big Apple. “I called my mother and asked her to send me some money, and she said no, and that subsequently led to a year of not speaking to her, but that’s probably one of the best things she did for me.” Berry remembers calling her mom: “She said, ‘If you want to be there, then you work it out.’ Giving up was never an option.” The Cleveland native adds those stressful days early on in her career brought her back to her high school days when she had an “insatiable desire to win.” And she still carries that same spirit to persevere today, despite three failed marriages. She divorced husband No. 3, Olivier Martinez, in 2016. The mother of two is learning to be alone. “I’m learning that I’m fearless,” she added. “I had some many fears as I went through my third divorce. I was afraid to do that, but I was more afraid of living unhappy. It’s teaching me: Don’t be afraid of what people will think about the choices you make. We have to live for ourselves.” The Gallagher brothers’ hatred for one another is the stuff of rock and roll legend, but in a new interview Liam opened up about exactly why Noel irks him so. “Oh f–kin’ hell. He’s like a f–kin’ stalker him, man. ‘Quick! Grab me a famous person!’ F–kin’ cringe, man. Bradley f–kin’ Cooper and s–t like that? F–kin’ sit down, mate,” Liam told Noisey. “Working class traitor.” But its not just Noel’s alleged obsession with the glitz and glamour that comes with being a rockstar that bothers the 44-year-old Liam. Liam also felt that his brother – who he’s taken to calling “Potato” on Twitter – laid too much of the blame for Oasis’ 2009 breakup at his feet. “He stitched me up with Oasis,” he explained. “I was the one left to carry the f–kin’ blame, and that’s it. He went, ‘F–k this, I want a solo career.’ He f–kin’ set a few booby traps and I got f–kin’ collared with it. So as far as I’m concerned, you can f–k off. He didn’t just end it because we were in Paris and we had a ding-dong. You stitched me up and you can f–k off, you c–t. I’m your f–kin’ brother. People go, ‘Oh you’re jealous.’ I’m not. I’m living in the f–kin’ real world. I’ve got my kids, I’ve got my rock’n’roll, I’ve got my vibe. You’ve got Bradley Cooper, you c–t.” Liam and Noel, 50, are said not to have talked since the band’s breakup, something which appears to actually bother Liam some. But, as he made abundantly clear, what really irks him is how much he says his brother has changed since Oasis’ breakthrough album, 1994’s “Definitely Maybe.” “I miss the one that I was in a band with, but the one that I see now? Getting selfies with this one and that one? He doesn’t know whether he’s coming or going,” he said. “For a geezer who bangs on about how his favorite band is U2? I was in a band with that kid for 20 f–kin’ years. And in those 20 years we had a party every f–kin’ night after pretty much every gig and we had tunes on. I never heard him play one f–kin’ U2 song.” He added, “He’s full of f–kin’ shit, mate. I’m just here to f–kin’ shine a light on the f–kin’ fakes, man. And he’s one of them.” While having two of your children publically make clear how much they loathe eachother might bother some mothers, Liam says his and Noel’s isn’t particularly put out by it. “She’s gone past that now,” he said. “She’s like, ‘F–k the pair of ya.’ Just cause we’re brothers, people say: blood’s thicker than water. But it takes more than f–kin’ blood to be my brother. You have to be sound; d'you know what I mean?” Liam’s venom isn’t just reserved for Noel. He also let loose when it came to talking about … the sea. “And f–k the sea,” he said when asked if it was true he can’t swim. “I ain’t going in that. F–k that, mate. That ain’t meant for us. That’s meant for the sharks, and the jellyfish, tadpoles and stuff. But a hottub? I’m alright in a hottub. Can hang about in there for a bit.” The only thing we love more than a “power list” is a “powerless list” — in the case of this crew, VIP stands for “verifiably impotent.” Website 24/7 Wall St. published a tongue-in-cheek answer to the Forbes list — their perspective on the 50 least powerful people. They named disposable White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci as their wunderkind of weakness, followed by beached New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and reluctantly retired FBI Director James Comey. In the No. 5 spot is Tiger Woods or, as they describe him, the 899th-ranking men’s pro golfer. At No. 6 is Kendall Jenner, thanks to her pallid Pepsi ad. Jennifer Lawrence and boyfriend Darren Aronofsky don’t always see eye to eye. Lawrence, 26, revealed when Aronofsky, 48, directed her in fall’s upcoming “Mother!,” she hyperventilated and dislocated one of her ribs from the stress and intensity of filming. “I ended up getting on oxygen,” the Oscar winner revealed in Vogue’s September issue. “I have oxygen tubes in my nostrils, and Darren’s like, ‘It was out of focus; we’ve got to do it again.’ And I was just like, ‘Go f—k yourself.’” Lawrence confessed she had to construct a tent full of guilty pleasures on the set to keep her in her “happy place,” complete with “pictures of the Kardashians and ‘Keeping Up with the Kardashians‘ playing on a loop — and gumballs.” Aronofsky isn’t thrilled with her reality TV obsession, she admitted with a chuckle. “He just finds it so vastly disappointing.” Still, she adores her beau, with whom she’s been linked since last fall. “We had energy … I had energy for him,” she said. “I don’t know how he felt about me.” “When I saw the movie, I was reminded all over again how brilliant he is,” said the actress, who previously dated Coldplay frontman Chris Martin and her “X-Men” co-star Nicholas Hoult. “For the past year, I’ve been dealing with him as just a human … I’ve been in relationships before where I am just confused. And I’m never confused with him.” She added, “I normally don’t like Harvard people, because they can’t go two minutes without mentioning that they went to Harvard. He’s not like that.” While Lawrence is happy in her relationship and with her career, she’s not too thrilled with the constant publicity that follows her every move — especially her moves on the pole, which went viral in May when a video of her letting loose at a strip club for a friend’s birthday hit the web. “My biggest fear from that whole thing was that people were going to think that I was trying to be sexy,” she griped. “Also, it looked like I had taken my shirt off. I was in a crop top. I did not take off my shirt. I’m on the phone with my lawyers, and everybody’s like, ‘Is there anything we need to know before it comes out?’ And I’m like, ‘No, it’s all there.’” “It’s scary when you feel the whole world judges you,” Lawrence lamented. “I think people saw [the hacking] for what it was, which was a sex crime, but that feeling, I haven’t been able to get rid of it. Having your privacy violated constantly isn’t a problem if you’re perfect. But if you’re human, it’s terrifying. When my publicist calls me, I’m like, ‘Oh, my God, what is it?’ Even when it’s nothing. I’m always waiting to get blindsided again.” She explained that the press has left her somewhat guarded with fans as well, for which she feels some guilt. “I’m happy to meet people, give autographs, shake hands, and say ‘Thank you,’” she said. “I wouldn’t have a job if people weren’t going to see my movies. It’s just … if I’m on an airplane and I have no makeup on, I don’t want to take a selfie that’s going to end up on E!” Unfortunately, Lawrence can’t seek refuge from the craziness at home, for reasons hilarious enough to only apply to her. “When I first moved in, the house was crystalled out — crystals everywhere, and geodes, and I was like, ‘Please get rid of these; I don’t want people to come over here and think I’m a crystal person,’” she explained. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that! But everyone told me, ‘You can’t do that. You can’t move them. You have to have the crystal lady who put them in move them,'” she said. “I just had all the crystals yanked out. Sold them. And then my f—king house flooded.” “I hate crystals.” Kris Jenner gave a glimpse into her business savvy mind in the latest Lenny Letter. The famous momager, 61, shared how she took a broke Bruce Jenner and turned him into a lucrative motivational speaker in the ‘90s. “I told my assistant, Lisa, ‘OK, listen. We have the greatest guy here. He really knows his craft. He is really good at what he does, but he doesn’t have anybody doing anything for him,” Kris recalled. “He doesn’t have a lot going on. He has $200 in the bank. What are we going to do?’ Because the kids have to eat. We have to get it together.” Kris admits she does not have any formal business training, but learned invaluable skills from watching her first husband, Robert Kardashian, and their top-tier friends conduct business. So she forged a plan to make him successful by first assembling press kits with her own money. “He didn’t have a business card. He didn’t have a bio. He didn’t have press, nothing,” Kris said. From there, Kris sprang into action getting friends to do photo shoots of Bruce and hiring another friend to make a reel that would be used as an intro for his speeches. “I think I spent my last dime, I’m not even kidding, making these beautiful, glossy press-kit folders and took every great article that had ever been in Sports Illustrated and any really beautiful magazine and I started making copies,” she said. “We put together 7,000 press kits, and we mailed them to every speakers’ bureau in the United States. Then we sat back, and we waited for the phone to ring.” Then the calls started to roll in from Visa, Coca-Cola, and more big-name companies. Kris and Bruce were married for 23 years before calling it quits in 2013 and officially divorced in 2014. Bruce transitioned into Caitlyn in 2015. Add lying to the ever-growing list of Kendall Jenner’s alleged sins. Baby’s All Right, the Brooklyn bar that called out the reality star-turned-model for failing to tip her bartender last week, now claims she’s lying about having left a cash tip instead — and did so by quoting the German philosopher Nietzsche. “‘I’m not upset that you lied to me, I’m upset that from now on I can’t believe you.’ – Nietzsche #nocashtip,” the bar wrote in a since-deleted Instagram post on Tuesday. The caption accompanied a screenshot of a tweet in which Jenner claimed to have left a cash tip, writing, “damn, I guess next time we won’t tip in cash.” Last Friday, the bar called the 21-year-old out for her failure to tip, posting a photo to Instagram of her $24 tab with the caption, “Don’t forget to tip your bartender :).” That post, like Tuesday’s Nietzsche-quoting missive, has since been deleted. Your move, Kendall.

Aaron Carter says attempting to explain his bisexuality to his ex-girlfriend Madison Parker didn’t go over so well.

“I had to discuss it with my ex-girlfriend, and she didn’t really understand it and she didn’t want [to],” Carter shared in a new interview with “The Bert Show” on Wednesday. “And that was it. So we left it mutual and parted ways … It was something that I felt was important and that I needed to say.”

The former couple, who were arrested together in July, called it quits last week before Carter publicly disclosed his sexuality.

“To be honest, I’ve been thinking about it for many years,” he shared. “I just felt like it was something I needed to do. It was something that I just felt like was important, and I needed to say. It was a part of a new chapter of turning 30.”

Carter remains optimistic, saying he’s “really looking forward to the future … be it with a man or a woman.”

One day after her estranged daughter blasted her in a scathing Facebook message, Tamra Judge renewed her wedding vows. “Celebrating love with all the hate that’s going on. May God bless your life because it’s not always easy,” the “Real Housewives of Orange County” fixture wrote Tuesday on Instagram. “But God has a plan.. a big plan.” The 49-year-old went on to thank fellow “Housewives” Shannon Beador, Lydia McLaughlin and Kelly Dodd for their help as she and her spouse of four years celebrated their special union. Before Tamra married third husband Eddie Judge in 2013, the Bravo personality documented her wedding planning with the spinoff, “Tamra’s OC Wedding.” Her troubled relationship with eldest daughter Sidney Barney has been a storyline on this season of the Bravo franchise. On Monday, Sidney, 18, slammed Tamra for dragging her into the spotlight, particular her recent high school graduation. “The one thing I asked and have been asking for 4 years now has been to not talk about me because I don’t want to be in the spotlight. But again breaking her promises as per usual, she puts herself, her fame, her reputation, and her bank account before me,” she wrote. Tamra shared a photo from Sidney’s graduation on Instagram in June, where she reunited with ex-husband Simon Barney and their two other children, son Spencer, 17, and daughter Sophia, 11. She split from Simon in 2010, though their divorce wasn’t finalized until the following year.

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#Aaron Carter #Chloe Grace Moretz #Featured #Halle Berry #Jennifer Lawrence #Kendall Jenner #Kim Kardashian #Taylor Swift

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613526362 · 7 years

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Banbiba Aldidans

Sitting there on the bench, no one knew who I was. I was just looking at my phone. Then the defendant came out with his girlfriend. They held hands, and kissed. They both seemed like nice people. I kind of liked them. And she was pretty. They had no idea I was about to put him in prison for a long time. If they had known, or their attorneys had known, they would have done something, anything. If they had known I had a flight in a few hours and I would be on that flight whether I testified or not, they would have taken desperate action. They really would have. But no one knew who I was, or what I knew. I was just sitting there, outside the courtroom, some guy on his phone. Redacted A couple hours earlier, they had asked me if I wanted to eat lunch with them. They also said I could just walk down the parking lot to the square if I wanted to instead. I didn't know what to say. I considered the square. Instead I decided to go up with them, but to just to eat a Cliff bar in an office alone. When I pulled out the bar, a police officer saw me and said, "Why don't you come get some pizza? We have a bunch!" He waved me towards him with his hand. Whatever. Everyone sat at the table, but I sat behind, in a row of chairs up against the windows. I was sitting alone, eating pizza, when a man came and sat next to me. He was kind of husky. He had dark glasses. Just like all the other attorneys in the room, he was wearing a suit. He might have been 35. And to complete his description, he, sat next to me. And he started talking to me with, "I don't think I've met you. What was your name?" I was honestly surprised anyone wanted to talk to me. Few of them really knew who I was. We talked for about an hour, mostly about medicine. He had wanted to go to medical school as an undergrad, but decided to go to law school. I had wanted to go to law school as an undergrad, but had gone to med school. We found each other interesting. I made one comment about him being smarter than me because he remembered to grab a napkin for the pizza, and I saw in his face he didn't like that comment. Otherwise our conversation was great. Really, the only two people I've ever met who went to Barvarx - this fellow and one from six years ago - was that they both were friendly, really open, and above all, super eager to listen and learn. Oh wait, Pris Pratrool from high school went there too. And he's an ass. Okay, two out of three. Anyways, let's just say we talked much about nothing for an hour. I learned he was the (redacted) attorney for the county, and he kind of buzzed around to a lot of different cases. He wasn't involved in my case. He was in mid sentence, and I didn't want to be rude, but I had been looking at the time and I realized we were only 30 minutes from when court was to resume. I hated to stop him, but "Speaking of the AD, I really should go review my notes before I testify." And so we parted........or so I thought so we parted.... 10 minutes later, I overheard his voice. I was in a room with the door open, reviewing (redacted) protocols so I would know for sure what to say when cross examined by the defense. The defense had brought in a hot shot attorney from DomeVille who specialized in (redacted), and I was told that he would try to discredit me. Despite that, the AD had not spent any time preparing me to testify. She was knew, and she was flustered. Real flustered. You know, hot mess and all. So I had taken measures into my own hands that morning. I went over to the jail and talked with my old supervisors, I asked them for paperwork and reviewed it, I performed copious online research. I had an idea of what kinds of things he might ask, but I wasn't sure exactly where he was going. That is, until I overheard napkin guy talking a couple rooms over. This is when the tables turned. And oh did they turn drastically. Redacted So, I have to be very careful how I describe what I'm about to describe. It is a murder case - not was, is. It's ongoing, and it will be. And I just fucked up the case a lot. I have to be careful, not only because of that, but also because, the nature of the information I'm about to delve into is very valuable, at least it could potentially be valuable for other cases. If I'm not careful about how I write all this, this shit WILL be in Google, and people will be using it. So here it goes. Redacted He squinted his eyes, and hit me with a stare, before he suddenly said, "You know, there are lots of types of banbiba." Looking up at him from the witness box as the jury looked on, I replied with emphasis, "Yes, but *none* of them grow on the skin." I think that's the moment when he gave up inside. He had been trying for the better part of half an hour to make an argument that a rare type of bungu could actually increase the level of (redacted) in the blood, giving a false result. He was failing in his argument so badly, the entire courtroom was laughing out loud at him. The judge was laughing, the jury was laughing, even the AD and Assistant AD were in shambles. I was not laughing though. A baby died. And this mother fucker specializes in letting baby killers walk away Scott free. More still, he was trying to use me to accomplish that. Oops. You fucked up buddy He tried to make his argument from multiple angles. The first angle was the cleanliness of the environment. Two pivotal moments arose during that direction of argument: 1) So how long ago was the chair cleaned? I don't know. How many people do you do (redacted) tests on? On average, 5-15 a night. So that's a lot of people sitting on that chair! What do you mean? Oh no sir, I'm sorry, I think you're confused. We don't do (redacted) tests on the same chair where our (redacted) patients sit. That room is only for blood draws. Okay, so it looks to me like the prior blood draw you did was 22 hours prior. So had the chair gotten dirty for 22 hours? No sir, because that room isn't used otherwise. So when did you last clean it? It was cleaned after the last patient. How long ago was that? 22 hours? I don't know. Other people worked during the day. They could have used the chair. Just answer the question. When was it last cleaned. After. The Last. Patient. 2) So what do you guys use to clean? Wipes Okay, so your typical disinfectant wipes... No sir, not your typical disinfectant wipes. These are medical-grade wipes designed with multiple chemicals to kill organisms that exist in a medical environment. Okay, so, just tell me this, if someone brought a Subway sandwich and plopped it down on the arm of the chair where you put the defendant's arm to draw blood, would you eat that sandwich? Absolutely. [the jury started laughing very loudly at this point, but as soon as I was able to, I clarified] ......but only because of my time in medical school, and because I understand that the antiseptic wipes work and I don't have to be afraid of things that aren't really there like untrained people are. Redacted Things got much worse than that though. He had drawn a diagram of (redacted) tubes and was trying to talk about the substances in them and how they related to the growth of balberad-fermoantine (redacted) in the tube, but I had made it so clear that such a situation would not result, he kind of imploded his own argument and gave up. But rather than show that to the jury, he jumped to a different topic - cyleaybsurs. Ohhhhhh, but I knew all about cyleaybsurs Redacted So, since you use Barbie, you know that it bubbles. No, I don't agree with that. It doesn't bubble. Of course it does. I've seen it bubble, and everyone in the jury here has seen it bubble. Well, I've actually used Barbie more than you and everyone in the jury here in exactly the manner we're describing, and it doesn't bubble up. So, I've seen it, and the jury all know that when you out Barbie on the skin, it bubbles up. It bubbles up, pushing all the (redacted) and dirt up, and then all that dirt falls down right back where it was, right where you're about to (redacted). He was looking at me. I was looking back. There was a bit of silence. But finally, while staring at him, while he waited for me to say "yes," nod, or really do anything to assist him to his next point along an extremely dubious train of argument, I just said, "That's......... completely incorrect." Redacted It was all pretty unbelievable. I mean, I was thinking I might get in a jab or two, but I didn't expect to shut this dude down on every. single. point. He's supposed to be the best. He is literally the highest paid (redacted) attorney around. You pay him what he asks, and he gets you off. That's how it's supposed to work. But when he walked over to his luggage and pulled out a binder so huge, it must have been 2,000 pages, and opened to the first page (Jesus man, if you had opened to a middle page, I might have bought that. But the first fucking page?), and read off the names of the authors, and asked me if I was familiar with the authors and the article, and asked me if I have read the article and understood what it said about how systemic blood borne Banbiba infections and how Banbiba can increase blood (redacted)... I don't need that article sir. I understand the difference between systemic and localized Banbiba infections. Banbiba grows in the throat, the vagina, and the GI tract. For it to become a systemic infection, he would have needed to be immunocompromised with AIDS that had developed for many years. He'd be dead by now if that was the case. At that point, he was over by his chair, over by the defense's table. He must have seen his chair, and seen how inviting it looked. So he sat down. And then he said, "No further your honor." Out on his desk he had a plepltomu manual, next to his gigantic binders of "medical research." All those papers and books, I bet when he looked at them they didn't seem so cool anymore. I bet he realized, he actually, well, didn't really understand a damn thing in them. Redacted Oh yeah I forgot about how he tried to say that I was (redacted) with a two-day course as my qualification. My training was just so, inadequate. Except that I had gone to EMT school and learned aseptic technique there and Paramedic school and learned aseptic technique there and five different EMS agencies and hospitals, all of which had taught me aseptic technique. "But you don't do blood draws as a paramedic. That's not accurate. I did do blood draws as a paramedic. When I worked for Britt and Brice, I drew tubes on almost every patient." My training was more than adequate, but therein lies the problem. Most of the people he cross-examines in situations like these have "adequate" training. Even if they were "well trained," with good qualifications, they still would have been caught off guard by his arguments. He would have won the case off their inability to show that his arguments were completely medically unfactual. It was only because I was, and am, extremely overqualified that (redacted) (redacted) is going to prison. Redacted An hour earlier, my ears perked up as I heard him talk. The man who had sat next to me at lunch, just a couple rooms over, talking. He was talking about some things I recognized. I heard him say, "Banbiba proteryan." I drew closer to the hall. He was telling some of the police officers exactly what arguments the hot-shot defense attorney was about to make. Back in the day - when he was still in private law - he had gone to a seminar this guy put on about how to beat (redacted) cases. And, well, he remembered a lot from the seminar. I had 15 minutes before I was supposed to testify. But that's all I needed. I pulled up one browser on my phone with Google. I pulled up another with pubmed. I had enough background knowledge on medicine. It was just time to fill in the blanks Redacted I'm told the defense will try to do a mistrial by claiming that I was an expert witness when I was supposed to be normal witness. I have a feeling I won't testify again though. And I have a feeling he will ultimately lose. I understand his crime gets a sentence of between 2 and 20 years. If he gets the higher end of the spectrum, I wonder if his girlfriend will wait for him. I guess if she loves him, she will. Someday maybe I'll see Pandemos again. But before I do, I have a lot more of this to do. I have a lot of good left to do

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canaryatlaw · 7 years

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Well, I can't really give today an overall grade because it was kind of all over the place, good and bad in just different ways. Woke up, 10:50, and didn't want to get out of bed, and may have drifted back to sleep for just a few minutes but I opened my eyes again and it was 10:50 so I said okay I better get up so I did. Got to the DV courthouse and waiting till around 2 o clock to get a case, and while I was waiting I was just you know staring at my appellate brief and trying to fix minor things. My plan right now is to finish my final final sweep through tomorrow then send it to kinkos to get it print and bound because they're making us do that for some reason (because all law students just have all that extra money lying around, you know 🙄) but anyway my spring break friend and I get put on the case together again because of the timing and we didn't know if we'd get another, but if we did he'd pull one of us off (nobody else came in so we did the whole thing). Pretty typical case, asshole abusive boyfriend doing typical abusive asshole things, no kids in common, no real physical abuse up until this morning when he was kind of grabbing and shoving her and physically blocking her from leaving her apartment like back and forth between different doors for a fairly significant amount of time. It was the strongest case because the prior incidents were kind of weak, mostly just him yelling in her face and that kind of thing, but I thought we had a decent chance at least depending on what judge we'd get. We were super quick with the paperwork and were up in court by like 3:15, so I was like oh sweet we're gonna get out so early!! WELL. Little did I know I was entering the most frustrating courtroom I've ever been in. I've been before this judge only once before I think and it was while she was training, and I remember her striking me as a little awkward with litigants but she was still getting used to it and plus she's gotta be like, 30 max, because she looks sooooooo young (I mean, she's probably more like 35, because nobody ascends to the bench in 5 years, but you would never guess that as her age looking at her). So that tends to play into the whole insecurity thing which leads to overposturing, and she was just so fucking infuriating because she was incredibly condescending to every single person on such an unnecessary level and wanted to control everything, and would only let people answer yes or no and cut them off whenever they tried to expound on something and be condescending to them and I'm like.....what the heck, lady??? These are like, the simplest legal proceedings ever, you ask them who the person is to them, when the last incident happened, and what happened. That's literally all you have to do. But it was so fucking infuriating to watch I wanted to bang my head against the wall repeatedly. But OH, we're just getting to the good part now. So a solid hour later our petition finally gets called, and within 30 seconds of her being up there the judge is saying some shit about an address being in the wrong place on the petition for where the guy had last lived because he hadn't "lived" there he was just "staying over" so she's like yeah you have to go back down to the clerk's office and amend your petition. So both me and my friend are like 😡😡😡😡😡 ready to like kill someone. So we run back downstairs, it's like 4:30 at this point which is when our shift is supposed to end so there's barely anyone left, but we found our supervisor and the other lawyer he works with and they took one look at our faces and were just like "okay what happened" and when we told them they were like "are you fucking serious" (like I mean those exact words exited both of their mouths). So we had to go drag a clerk over and fucking scratch off the address with a pen and write unknown to satisfy this damn judge then go back up. We were debating asking out supervisor to go back up with us since he's an attorney and can actually step up, but he said he felt like the situation was handled from there but we could come get him if we had any more issues. He also said we could swap out at that point if we wanted since our shifts were supposed to be over and he knows we had class, but we decided we wanted to see it through (and emailed our prof that we might be a bit late). So we went back up, and I was like praying that because it was a recalled case they would just stick it on top of the like to be called next like I've seen done before, but NOPE we got sent back to the bottom of the stack, and spent another entire hour being fucking infuriated with this judge acting like a complete asshole to everyone. There was this whole big thing, and I feel weird saying this because the guy was like 6'2" and significantly bigger than me but like that poor guy haha I felt so bad for him, the judge was like fixated on whether his roommate kicked his door all the way in and off the hinges and then he went into the living room or if she partially kicked it in and then he opened it and went into the living room and I was like......WHAT THE HELL COULD IT POSSIBLY MATTER like that holds zero legal significance whatsoever??? The guy ended up storming out in what I thought was completely justifiable frustration but I think he was gonna be able to get his case recalled sometime after us. So finally they get around to us, she asks her basic questions, takes one look at the affidavit I wrote and granted the order immediately, because it was THAT EASY. Like, look how overcomplicated you made this and you just wasted like 2 and 1/2 hours of my life. So I was at least glad we got it granted because if it didn't get granted I probably would've gone ballistic on that courtroom, lol. So we end up leaving the courthouse at like 5:50 which is right when class starts, so we jump on the train and then make a quick stop at the jimmy johns that's right by school because we were both starving and it's literally the fasted option, lol. I think we made it to class by 6:10, so not bad at all. Our prof was understanding, my email said something like "we're stuck in an ongoing situation with a judge and we don't know how much longer it's gonna take" so then on break he was like "so judges, huh?" and we were just like "oh you don't even want to know" lol. The class was fine, as usual I somewhat paid attention and did other things. The big take away from the class was that instead of having to make my presentation for the class that I haven't started at all next week, I get to do it the week after because of how the scheduling worked out (he said he was doing it by last name and it wouldn't take up two class periods, and my last name starts with M which is right in the middle so I thought I'd be on the first day, but apparently the roster is early in the alphabet heavy so I majorly lucked out there, and that actually makes everything so much better, because this week into weekend (and it's Easter weekend ffs) was gonna be hell working on the presentation and the trial on back to back days. So now I can just focus on the trial for the next week which makes me feel soooooo much better. I messaged my trial ad partner and asked what he needed me to get done for our Pretrial conference tomorrow and he was like "oh you're good I got it all covered" and I was like dude you're actually the best haha because that helps so much. In addition to a few other things I accomplished during class, I reviewed the trial brief of one of my mentees that she asked me to take a look out since we had the same LARC prof. It was interesting, looking at how she was like structuring things and I'm thinking "did I used to write like that?" And I find myself leaving comments that kind of sound like what the prof would say to me last year and I'm just like shit man, maybe I did actually get better at this stuff over the years, even if I still get incredibly frustrated with it. She had a lot of good stuff in there, it just needed to be reorganized and such and built into a more cohesive argument (which like, continues to be one of my biggest issues because I think the way they want me to organize it makes no sense and I much prefer my way, as does my REAL boss in REAL court, but I digress) so hopefully I was able to give her some good feedback. We ended a little after 8 which was nice, and I made it home a little after 9. No shows recorded, so I watched crazy ex-girlfriend for a bit and relaxed and laughed over the whole starbursts thing that came to fruition today which I have to say put me in a significantly better mood than my just being done with the day. I did realize though I had to get some forms and shit done for trial ad and field placement, so I had to run around and fill those out then like, extract multiple pages from several pdf documents and then combine those into own pdf document because whoever wanted us to submit these online clearly had no idea what they were doing. But yeah, that was my crazy day. Overall the good probably outweighed the bad, but I was just like, so absolutely done with everything about that hell in court. Big girl job tomorrow and doing a big girl permanency hearing, so that should be good, I'll get to meet the client beforehand and talk to her about anything she wants to be brought up so I'm looking forward to that. And yeah, damn it's late and I now have somewhat less than 6 hours of sleep I can potentially get, so I think that's strong enough incentive to end here. Goodnight my loves. Stay strong.

#daily journal #April 2017 #Rachel's evil plan

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