January 22nd, 2021

Freedom’s Just Another Word to …?

Down in D.C. at the inaguration, poet Amanda Gorman rocketed to fame with her poem at the close. And deservedly so.

There is poetry, someplace, within all of us. Some just let it out better than others. Much, much better.

Even lawyers. At least those who don’t get stuck in the dreadful legalese that so many are taught.

Back today is our Master of Prose, appellate lawyer Jay Breakstone, with some words on a really important concept after an election, insurrection and inauguration: Freedom.

—————

There is a primal truth to human nature. We do not see danger until we walk to the edge of the cliff. Then, we build a fence, erect a sign, or cordon off that which can harm us. America is that kind of place and, perhaps by design, Americans are those kind of people. We do not have hundreds of years of governments, potentates or tribal chiefs to do our thinking for us. We’re the ones who have to walk to the edge of the cliff and see the danger for ourselves. It’s only then that the lightbulb goes off in the American mind: “Hey, someone can get hurt here.”

The relief we felt on Inauguration Day was that we stepped back from the cliff, identified the danger, and now we’re going to do something about it. Why? Because we got scared. Boy, did we get scared. Constitution burning, Nuremburg Rally, crap-in-your-pants scared; It was dark, going down the cellar stairs with rats scurrying about scared; it was can this be the end of the dream scared.

So we, the wretched refuse, said that we wouldn’t. We wouldn’t fall off the cliff or let anyone else fall off either. We had done that before in our collective, immigrant histories and it wasn’t going to happen again. We wouldn’t let it. Not now. Not here. Not on streets still paved with gold. We didn’t have much choice; we couldn’t go back where we came from. So, as thick-headed, stubborn, clever Americans, we stood our ground at the edge of the cliff. It ends, we said, here. Not one more step.

And the skies cleared; and the sun shined. The miasma which had cloaked our very souls for four years lifted. Like a miracle, we saw the path away from edge of the cliff appear; and we Americans began the long journey together; a journey where we’ll bitch, and moan, and yell at each other, and laugh both at and with our neighbors, and in that wandering that is America, find our way once again. It seems inevitable that this experiment never end, for the result, in heaven’s great plan, is always the same: freedom.

December 5th, 2019

Jury Nullification and the Trump Impeachment

We have criminal trials. We have civil trials. And we have, rarely, impeachment trials.

Today Mark Bower explores the concept of jury nullification in the context of jurors doing whatever they hell they feel like, regardless of the law. I explored jury nullification once before, albeit it briefly, many years ago.

This fuller discussion comes in the wake of news of President Trump wooing Congressmen and Senators with Camp David visits and special lunches.

———————-

A primer on jury nullification:

The United States Constitution guarantees a trial by jury to all persons accused of a crime. That jury is comprised of average citizens from all walks of life with no special training or skills to serve other than being a U.S. citizen who is at least 18 years old, residing in the judicial district for a set period of time (typically one year), being proficient in English, having no disqualifying mental or physical conditions, and (in most states) not having a pending or previous felony conviction. In fact, more than 32 million people are called for jury service every year, according to the National Center for State Courts.

Serving on a jury is a hallmark of our justice system and a cornerstone of democracy. But did you know that, unlike judges, juries historically have been able to ignore the law in order to achieve justice in individual cases that involve unjust rules or their unjust application? This is known as jury nullification. Below, you will find a discussion of jury nullification, including how it’s defined, its legality, examples, and how this applies to the impeachment of Trump.

Jury Nullification Defined:

Jury nullification might sound like a convoluted concept in an already confusing legal system, but the idea is actually quite simple. It happens when a jury returns a verdict of Not Guilty despite its belief that the defendant is guilty of the violation charged. Why would a jury do this? Don’t jurors swear an oath to uphold the law? Yes, but oftentimes it is a tool juries can use to set aside a law they believe is immoral or wrongly applied to the accused.

For example, in the 1800s the government passed stringent fugitive slave laws that compelled citizens of all states to assist law enforcement with the apprehension of suspected runaway slaves. Known as the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, the law included large fines for anyone who aided a slave in an escape, even by simply giving the person food or shelter.

Northerners used the jury box to voice their protest by refusing to convict in these cases and thereby “nullifying” the law on moral grounds. A mirror-image may be found in the countless acquittals in the South of whites charged with lynching black men, regardless of clear guilt-in-fact. In other cases, juries nullified prohibition era laws and drug laws that they disagreed with. Put crudely but accurately, the jurors rejected the charges based on personal beliefs that the laws were wrongheaded.

Jury nullification also exists in civil cases but is relatively uncommented-on. Every trial lawyer knows that cases may be won or lost based on intangibles, such as the likeability or unlikeability of the client, that has nothing to do with the merits of the case. A jury nullification advocacy group estimates that 3–4% of all jury trials involve nullification. A recent rise in hung juries is seen by some as being indirect evidence that juries have begun to consider the validity or fairness of the laws themselves.

Legality of Jury Nullification:

Jury nullification is legal according to the U.S. Supreme Court, but whether or not juries may be instructed on this right is a different matter. Although the power of jury nullification exists, lawyers are generally prohibited from urging a jury to disregard the law. Although no precedent revokes the power of nullification, courts have since the 19th century tended to restrain juries from considering it, and to insist on their deference to court-given law.

The 1895 decision in Sparf v. United States written by Justice John Marshall Harlan, held that a trial judge has no responsibility to inform the jury of the right to nullify laws. It was a 5–4 decision. This decision, often cited, has led to a common practice by United States judges to penalize anyone who attempts to present legal argument to jurors and to declare a mistrial if such argument has been presented to them. In some states, jurors are likely to be struck from the panel during voir dire if they will not agree to accept as correct the rulings and instructions of the law as provided by the judge.

A 1969 Fourth Circuit decision, U.S. v. Moylan, affirmed the power of jury nullification, but also upheld the power of the court to refuse to permit an instruction to the jury to this effect:

“We recognize, as appellants urge, the undisputed power of the jury to acquit, even if its verdict is contrary to the law as given by the judge, and contrary to the evidence. This is a power that must exist as long as we adhere to the general verdict in criminal cases, for the courts cannot search the minds of the jurors to find the basis upon which they judge. If the jury feels that the law under which the defendant is accused, is unjust, or that exigent circumstances justified the actions of the accused, or for any reason which appeals to their logic or passion, the jury has the power to acquit, and the courts must abide by that decision.”

Nevertheless, in upholding the refusal to permit the jury to be so instructed, the Court held that:

“…by clearly stating to the jury that they may disregard the law, telling them that they may decide according to their prejudices or consciences (for there is no check to ensure that the judgment is based upon conscience rather than prejudice), we would indeed be negating the rule of law in favor of the rule of lawlessness. This should not be allowed.”

The right to disregard the law if one disagrees with it on moral grounds, also comes from the fact that jurors cannot be punished for the verdict they render, no matter how unpopular it is to the general public or the specific judge presiding over the case. Also, defendants found not guilty, cannot be retried for the same crime, that would violate the double jeopardy concept.

Hence, once a jury finds a defendant not guilty, there is no mechanism for a prosecutor to bring the case against the same defendant again. (See: Bushel’s Case, from the 1670 trial of William Penn.)

Several cases that were speculated to be instances of jury nullification included the prosecution of Washington, D.C.’s former mayor, Marion Barry; the trial of Lorena Bobbitt; the prosecution of the police officers accused of beating Rodney King; the prosecution of two men charged with beating Reginald Denny in the resulting riots; the trial of the surviving Branch Davidian members; the trial of the Menendez brothers for the murder of their parents; and perhaps most famously, the O. J. Simpson murder trial. In the days preceding Jack Kevorkian’s trial for assisted suicide in Michigan, Kevorkian’s lawyer, Geoffrey Fieger, told the press that he would urge the jury to disregard the law. Prosecutors prevailed upon the judge to enter a pretrial order banning any mention of nullification during the trial, but Fieger’s statements had already been extensively reported in the media.

In a 1998 article, Vanderbilt University Law Professor Nancy J. King wrote that “recent Looking to the Clinton impeachment trial for guidance on the Chief Justice’s role has been unsatisfying. C.J. William Rehnquist’s low-key role is remembered mainly for two minor things: (1) His decision to adorn his black robe with glittering gold stripes – an idea lifted from Gilbert & Sullivan’s “Iolanthe;” and (2) his ruling preventing the Senators from being referred to as “jurors”. It is not likely that C.J. John Roberts will get much precedent from Rehnquist’s presiding over the Clinton impeachment.

Will the Trump Impeachment Call for Nullification?

As of this writing, the Trump defense strategy has essentially been to contend that Trump’s pressuring Ukraine to “dig up dirt” on the Bidens, while perhaps unappealing, is too minor a transgression to rise to the “high crimes and misdemeanors” standard for impeachment. So far as I know, no legal commentator has yet called this “jury nullification.”

But conceptually, this is every bit as much “jury nullification” as northern jurors refusing to convict those who helped slaves escape bondage because of their revulsion to slavery, or Southern jurors refusing to convict lynchers. And so, without say so explicitly, the G.O.P. defense strategy is to appeal to the public and Senators to embrace jury nullification and prevent impeachment and conviction.

As the Supreme Court has never rejected jury nullification but won’t allow defense attorneys to explicitly advocate that jurors substitute their personal beliefs for following the law, I expect Chief Justice Roberts will follow that path, not explicitly allowing the Senate to disregard the law while simultaneously allowing them to “vote their consciences.” That will allow the jury nullification strategy that is currently playing out in the media, to play out in the Senate without ever saying so outright.

Will the jury nullification strategy succeed? I can tell you the answer with complete certainty: Maybe. Ask me again in a year, and I will give you an even more certain answer.

* – Mark R. Bower is a former Court TV Commentator and is a board-certified medical malpractice lawyer in NYC. .

September 19th, 2019

NY Bar Associations Failing To Lobby for Solos and Small Firms

Eleven years ago I described in this space how one Brooklyn courtroom alone was likely wasting $10,000,000 in legal time, each year. Yeah, I know what you’re thinking. But I’ve actually been blogging longer than that.

Our courts are chock full of inefficiency, and the worst hit in this morass may well be the small and solo firms in the day-to-day matter of trying to get routine tasks done. Our bar associations have this odd habit of catering to the Big Law. Small Law, it seems, doesn’t really matter.

And so, on Tuesday when I saw this letter to the editor of the New York Law Journa, which touched on some of the points I made a decade ago, I reached out to its author for permission to re-publish it here, to widen, ever so slightly, the audience.

For the non-lawyers who may be reading there’s a bit of inside baseball going on in this letter. But this gives you the gist of how sexy our practice really is on some days.

Without further ado, I bring you Sid Baumgarten, who has been around the block a few times as a general practitioner with over 40 years of experience: ——-

Regarding your story about “Millenials Skipping Bar Meetings,” I believe the “syndrome” is not limited to a certain age group. The bar associations here in NYC are becoming irrelevant. (Note that the NY County Lawyers Association has sold its building on Vesey Street.)

I am an octogenarian and I serve as vice-chair of the NYCLA committee on Law-Related Education. Our usual attendance at this important committee headed by retired Justice Price is about 6-10 members. Other than those meetings I rarely attend bar association events.

I attribute the decline in attendance to a variety of reasons:

First, I expected these associations to seriously lobby for needed reforms in the judicial system, but they have rarely done so. On those occasions, it is usually when the fortunes of the “white-shoe law firms” are at stake. There are few, if any, efforts to solve problems for the small firms or solo practitioners. I have importuned them on a number of occasions to speak out on issues that affect the small firms and solos, to no avail.

In early 2018, federal Judge Jed Rakoff spoke about the high cost of legal services and I wrote to the NY Law Journal that “Judge Rakoff did not mention that the judges themselves, as well as the court rules have made the legal process into a nightmare for lawyers, with particular impact on the small firm or solo.” I addressed a few of those problems.

A) The Preliminary, Status and Compliance Conferences where hours are spent just to fill out a form which then gets rubber-stamped by the judge or court attorney. Or the judge or court attorney spends a half-hour with one case discussing discovery issues while another 50 lawyers are forced to sit around and wait. An entire morning spent—and billed to the client—for matters that didn’t need to be before the court in the first place.When I started to practice law most of these issues were resolved by the attorneys themselves. The lawyers ‘charted the course of litigation.’ In a current case I am handling, there are at least 14 lawyers involved in a personal injury case, most of them representing various defendants. Compliance conferences were really a waste. Not once have all the attorneys been able to attend each scheduled date, so it keeps getting adjourned. Mornings wasted and billed to the client.

B) I have questioned also the matrimonial practice of requiring the parties to be present for each and every court date. Why? Is it necessary for the client to take a day off from work to just stand there while the lawyers consult with the court on routine preliminary matters? Also, when was it divined that when a matrimonial settlement is reached and the parties have all signed written, notarized agreements, there must now be an allocution—as if they were entering a plea to a felony?

C) Among the many mysteries of our system here in NYC is the time it takes to get a judgment entered. Where are the bar associations lobbying to give the county clerks sufficient resources to move matters more quickly? An uncontested matrimonial judgment can take months to be “entered.” I had one in Dutchess County and I had the final judgment in hand the same day it was finalized and signed by the judge!In one of my cases where summary judgment was granted and I submitted a $200,000 Judgment to the county clerk it took more than three months be get it “entered.” A civil court judgment for less than $4,000 also took three months to be entered. In July 2016, I wrote to the president of the New York County Lawyers Association regarding each of the matters set forth above. No reply.

Second, the bar associations, in addition to taking up the foregoing issues, should be focusing on some other interesting anomalies. For example, I have volunteered to arbitrate fee disputes pursuant to the court rules and most have involved from a few hours to an entire day. No pay expected! But why are we not at least offered CLE credits? When I volunteer for the Empire State Moot Court trials as a judge or scorer, I get a few CLE credits for just a half-day. Those are student competitions; the fee arbitration involves real clients and real lawyers and oft-times substantial sums involved—and the arbitrator gets nothing.

Third, the bar associations should be furious with the current state of the IAS system which now requires the practitioner to know or read the individual rules of over 200 judges. There should be uniform rules—-period.

More than 40 years ago I served as law secretary (now “court attorney”) to the administrative judge in Queens Supreme Court. At that time, before the IAS system was instituted, we had special term part 1 for contested motions and special term part 2 for ex parte matters. Most of the motions in special 1 were involved with pre-trial matters, discovery, compliance, etc. and a small number of dispositive motions. Most were decided in a few days, some in a few weeks and rarely more than that, except for highly technical cases requiring input from the law department.

At that time we saw no need for the “vertical” IAS system, which in retrospect has not improved efficiency or expediency. I now have dispositive motions pending for as long as 13 months in Supreme Court. Moreover, the IAS judges routinely refer settlement conferences to another judge or referee and also often send the case to another judge for trial. So much for the “vertical” IAS system!

Finally, I lament the loss of the collegiality among lawyers and judges. Everyone is so uptight about political correctness and/or being viewed as not “tough enough” by their clients, it has produced an iciness where if you even say hello to your adversary it is viewed as inappropriate. We used to have lunch with our adversaries and enjoyed each others company and anecdotes without being accused of weakness or worse. That atmosphere has, no doubt, made it less enjoyable to attend bar association functions or to participate in their committees.

There is no time to explore other impacts on attorneys who practice in the state courts, not just the millennials. In my view, litigating in the New York courts has become so frustrating that I know many young attorneys who have given up litigation totally. These are what I think the bar associations should be dealing with every day!

My colleagues, of all ages, often wonder why they keep paying dues to the bar associations.

Sidney Baumgarten is a litigator in New York City and a member of several bar associations.

August 17th, 2018

Dear Aretha… (A Letter from a Vietnam Veteran)

While biography forms the backbone of any obituary, it is the stories about a life that serve to illuminate it and give meaning.

The letter to Aretha Franklin below was originally written and mailed a few years ago by Earle L. Jackson Sr. — a medic for the 173rd Airborne. I publish it today (in slightly modified form by its author), with the thought that, perhaps, the story will help to illuminate the biography of her life that has been written and celebrated elsewhere

For context, the Vietnam combat below is the Battle of Dak To (Hill 875), some of the bloodiest fighting of that long ago, godforsaken but not forgotten, conflict.

The letter below is from a soldier surrounded by death, to an artist that helped keep his spirit alive.

Today is one of those days I post something that has nothing whatsoever to do with law. I publish simply because its one of these things that should not remain hidden.

——————–

Dear Ms. Franklin,

Please accept my apology for this letter being some 50 plus years over due. In 1967, I was a 22 year-old combat medic with the 173d Airborne Brigade, the most decorated army brigade in Vietnam. We were dug-in in a river valley next to the Dak Po river in Kontum Province, Republic of South Vietnam. The valley was named Dakto which was about 50 miles by dirt road from the closest mountain village, in the rain-soaked jungles of the Central Highlands.

At any time during the day or night, from the surrounding hills and mountains, the North Vietnamese Army would rain down mortars and rockets killing and wounding scores of paratroopers and destroying critical supplies. Dakto was an extremely dangerous place in 1967, over a four month period we had hundreds of troopers killed and another thousand or so men wounded.

We could never let our guard down in Dakto because the Cambodian border was just a few miles away where some 20,000 highly trained, battle-tested North Vietnamese soldiers were camped, poised to attack our position in the valley at any given moment. If we did come under a full attack and had to defend this valley, we would do so with a little better than 1,200 men. I don’t mind admitting, and I’m not embarrassed to say that for this 22 year-old kid from Plainville, Connecticut it was a very stressful time and place to say the least.

Every day as dusk settled into night over the valley, you could hear the hum of generators being started that provided the only electricity for 50 miles around. The intermittent firing of our artillery into the surrounding hills and valleys kept the enemy off balance during the night and less likely to attack us.

It’s Saturday night in death valley, the enemy is taking a break from shelling us and the boredom is almost thick enough to cut with a knife, when through the crisp Dakto night air, as the moon rose above the dark peaks of the mountains, there came the sweet sound of a familiar voice belting out the soulful words “R-E-S-P-E-C-T find out what it means to me.”

Man, I say to myself, I’m missing home too much, could that be my girl way out here in this dusty hell-hole? I want to get closer to what I’m hearing so I follow the sound and it leads me to a rain poncho being used as a door to cover an under-ground bunker.

In the bunker there are a dozen grubby, tired and home-sick paratroopers and they were partying in this hole in the ground like there will be no tomorrow. On one side of the bunker, several paratroopers are harmonizing the background lyrics, and rocking to the beat of the music on the other side of the bunker are several other soldiers making up their own choreographed steps as they move to the rhythm of the music.

It’s a scene now etched into my heart and mind that will never be erased. This will be the start of a night in my life that I will never forget and its not over yet.

About 2:00 am in the morning I needed some fresh air so I stepped outside of that bunker. It wasn’t long before my ears caught another familiar sound coming from the next bunker about 30 yards down the line of bunkers. “You make me feel like a natural woman”, man, oh man, there is another party going on in the next under-ground bunker too. In this bunker there are another dozen or so paratroopers partying in the candle light, dancing by themselves while singing along at the top of their lungs with our “Queen of Soul”, Ms. Aretha Franklin.

There may be a war going on outside of the bunker, but inside the safety of this bunker there is a party going on and performing for us tonight is Ms. Aretha Franklin, no charge. In 1967 we spent many nights in some of the world’s most dangerous places on earth and you Ms. Franklin were always right there with us, helping us get through another tough night or giving us comfort on a bad day. Even today when I hear your music I smile, a warm feeling comes over me, and I get carried back to those spirit lifting parties in that infamous river valley of death in the Central Highlands of Vietnam, in 1967.

Ms. Franklin you may never know the depth of the love we old veterans have for you and your music, or the impact that they had on us combat troops dug-in in the remote mountains and jungles of South Vietnam. When we were down and needed a double dose of love, you gave it to us in your music; through your music we were able to get through the hard times and terrifying moments that lay ahead of us.

Well Ms. Franklin, I’m 74 years old now and I don’t think that I will ever get the chance to hug you and thank you personally for all that you did for me and the tens of thousands of other soldiers some 50 plus years ago, but please consider this, when you settle down to sleep and close your eyes please let your last thoughts for the night be about the tens of thousands of veterans who love you beyond words of expression and cherish those brief, precious moments when you single-handedly stopped the war and took us all home . God Bless you for that, and rest easy Ms Franklin, long live the Queen of Soul….

Sincerely and with much love , Airborne All the Way

Earle L. Jackson Sr.

Florida

(This publication is with the permission of its veteran-author, who maintains a copyright over the letter, so please do not re-publish without permission from his friend and lawyer, Ken Laska).

March 28th, 2018

In Defense of the Unicorn: Baseball, Peace and a Better Day

An old baseball of mine that I had stitched back together as a kid to keep the leather on. You didn’t buy them by the dozen back then. Every baseball was precious.

It’s in the air. I can smell it. And so can Jay Breakstone, appellate lawyer and wordsmith extraordinaire who, in 2014, penned Baseball, Poetry and Crocuses (Pitchers and Catchers Report Next Week!) for this space.

No stranger to conflict (of which he writes today), Breakstone grew up in East Flatbush, the product of a tumultuous mixed marriage: His mom was a Brooklyn-born die hard Dodger fan and his Dad a Bronx-born Yankee fan.

He survived that experience to emerge as a die hard Mets fan.

Perhaps, if the union of Dodger and Yankee fans can mint something like Jay, there is hope yet for the country:

—————————–By Jay Breakstone———-

America has become such an uncomfortable place to live nowadays. When I say “uncomfortable,” I thoroughly understand that such terms are relative. But being an American has meant that we worry about a lot less than those in other countries and I understand that.

Yet, to wake up every morning to the headache of political soap opera is taking its toll on me. I am more irascible than usual; quicker to yell at the morning news and yell at my family from dawn until dusk. This is not good, for there is a thin line between being a lovable curmudgeon and a raging lunatic. What to do?

And there it is. Shining through the gloom like a landing beacon on a dark runway; like Lady Liberty in the harbor; like Mom’s chicken soup, a Nathan’s hot dog or pastrami on rye from Katz’s Delicatessen. Goodness knows, its done it before; brought hope where there was none and salvation to the depths of hell. Opening Day.

Yes, Virginia, there is a new tomorrow, and sacrilegious as it may be, God lives only 60 feet, 6 inches from home plate. In fact, whether you believe in God or not, you can still believe in baseball.

You can be a Democrat and believe in baseball. You can be a Republican and believe in baseball. You can be a Democrat or a Republican, sit side by side in the same temple, and believe in baseball together. You can speak English, Spanish, Greek, Serbo-Croat, even Pig Latin, and believe in baseball.

You can belong to the N.R.A., the A.C.L.U., the National White People’s Party, the N.A.A.C.P. or the Mickey Mouse Club and believe in baseball. Because, as it says in an oft-forgotten footnote in Genesis: “And G-d saw baseball, and it was good.”

Have you ever noticed those old pictures of men in suits and hats, sitting in ball parks during the business day? Why weren’t they at work? One of them, a young attorney in New York City, nearly lost his job because he kept sneaking out to Giants games at the Polo Grounds.

Nonetheless, the kid made good, but never forgot the magic of baseball. So, when he worked his way up to being President of the United States and the country he led was in the depths of soul-shattering gloom following Pearl Harbor, Franklin Roosevelt knew one thing that would cut through the fog: baseball. He declared that the Axis could do many bad things, but it could never stop baseball, which continued throughout the war.

Time and time again, baseball has been that never changing point in an ever-changing American universe. To those of us who were at Shea Stadium on September 22, 2001, it was much the same thing. Roosevelt’s words to Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, baseball’s Commissioner in 1942, still rang true: “I honestly feel that it would be best for the country to keep baseball going[.]”

I suggest that we need baseball now more than ever (as if there was ever a time we didn’t.) I think everyone should stay home from work on Opening Day and head to the ballpark instead.

If need be, dig up that old note from your mother, the one that says “Arthur could not be in school today. He has Dengue Fever.” If you can’t find it, I’m sure you can still forge her signature the way you did on the original. Eat a hot dog. Have a beer. Most important, let it go.

Nothing is so bad if it’s Opening Day, where all the past is prologue. Sure, it could turn out lousy, like the 1942 Brooklyn Dodgers, who had a phenomenal season, were in first place until September, only to lose the pennant to St. Louis. But on Opening Day, the Boys from Brooklyn took the opener, 7-5.

Opening Day is all about tomorrow. It always has been.