grey-at-law

OK, I have been failing at this blog posting thing. Life goes on. Blogging takes discipline.

Good news, however. I passed the July Michigan Bar Exam! I am among the list of Certified Passers on the Board of Law Examiners website. Take my word for it or look it up yourself. Thursday I was sworn in, and my name was enrolled in a large, old ledger book in the Wayne County Courthouse. How cool is that?

People ask me, “What is next?” I am currently gainfully employed in the tooling industry, working on automotive manufacturing equipment design. Who knows how long my employer will have the current amount of work going on? I will wait and see what the future brings, and see what legal work I can do on the side. Meanwhile I have one more option to build on. The wait is over and I did it.

I started this blog this past March and after a handful of posts, stopped posting in early April.  Part of the problem was not thinking through what would be involved in coming up with regular posts that hopefully would interest others.  I am still working on that.

I do have another explanation which should cut me some more slack.  I started preparing for the July Michigan Bar Exam.  I just did not have time to write anything, even if I read about something that I had an opinion on. Read the rest of this entry »

House Bill 4250 has been introduced and referred to the Judiciary Committee for consideration. It is a component of a list of reforms urged by the Innocence Project to address the infrequent, but disastrous problem of conviction and imprisonment of demonstrably innocent individuals. It would allow exonerated individuals to recover compensation for time wrongly imprisoned, economic damages, and physical and mental health care. In short, it would afford wrongfully imprisoned individuals the means to begin to make their lives whole again.

The increasing use of DNA testing to establish identity of criminal suspects has also enabled onclusive exoneration of a significant number of convicted and imprisoned individuals. (However, one exoneration would be a significant number if you were that one individual.) The Innocence Project has been doing a commendable job in bringing attention to this situation and advocating for legislative change. They currently report 215 post-conviction DNA exonerations in the United States. Read the rest of this entry »

is that they are inflexible. A decision released this past week by the Michigan Court of Appeals is an illustration of this feature of the Michigan SOR statute. In the published opinion PEOPLE OF MI V ERIC J HESCH (opinion here) the court followed the letter of the Michigan statute and concluded that Mr. Hesch was properly denied his petition to be removed from the requirement that he continue to register as a sex offender.

Mr. Hesch was age eleven at the time that he committed the acts that led to his guilty plea to second degree criminal sexual conduct.

He sought the removal on the grounds that he was 11 years of age and had a low maturity level at the time of the offense. Defendant, age 19 at the time of his petition, presented evidence that various psychologists and psychiatrists had concluded that he is not a sexual predator and is not likely to commit another sex crime. Defendant did not have any subsequent arrests or convictions for criminal sexual conduct or related offenses.

But by the letter of the law, these mitigating factors are irrelevant. Read the rest of this entry »

This week the media is buzzing about the U.S. Supreme Court hearing oral arguments Tuesday in District of Columbia v. Heller. This is a significant case, asking the court to make a ruling on the meaning and extent of the citizen’s right to bear arms as enshrined in the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution. However, another constitutional right, the Sixth Amendment right to legal counsel and when it attaches was subject to oral argument before the Supreme Court on Monday.

Rothgery v. Gillespie County involves a case where Mr. Rothgery was arrested for being a felon in possession of a firearm, and given a hearing that in Gillespie County, Texas is called a “magistration”. Despite Rothgery’s requests for a lawyer, none was assigned. He spent three weeks in jail before being indicted, at which point he was assigned a lawyer. The lawyer then showed the court that Rothgery was in fact not a felon and the case was dismissed.

Simple Justice covers the case, and the history of the right to defense counsel better than I will attempt to do. I particularly like his characterization of the importance of the case to potential defendants and their attorneys:

The underlying issue in Rothgery really does have meaning for the rest of us as well. For upstate New York practitioners, who appear in local courts where the rules seem to come out of the blue, where there is no law that anyone else would recognize as such, where the judges run the local gas station and don’t know nothing about birthin’ no due process, the absence of an attorney for the defendant can prove critical.

Slavery, human trafficking, and debt bondage are all facets of the same thing. Something that is still around and flourishing despite being against the law around the world. It does get infrequent coverage in the media, when the occasional case comes to light and attracts legal prosecution.

I was reminded again of the issue by a National Public Radio interview with Benjamin Skinner, author of A Crime So Monstrous: Face-to-Face with Modern-Day Slavery. Skinner describes slaves, historical and modern, as “those that are forced to work under threat of violence for no pay beyond sustenance.” Follow the link and read the interview. Read the rest of this entry »

As is typical with political scandals, a lot of talk is flying around concerning the running story of Detroit’s Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick’s latest troubles, dubbed the text message scandal. If you do not know the story, go elsewhere for details.

The mayor added to the talk last night, when in his scheduled annual State of the City address, he deviated from his prepared remarks. The Michigan Public Radio story I heard this morning said that his off-the-cuff remarks generated the largest response of the night from the invitation-only audience. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday I wrote my inaugural post of this blog, a description of the difficulty I seemed to be having while trying to meet with my Michigan legislative representative, Shanelle Jackson. I had no idea if anyone was going to be finding and reading this blog yet. I had a story that amused me, and I thought would be amusing to others, so I told things as they had happened to me. In the title, I gave a nod to a 1985 movie starring Madonna.

I am happy to report that my search is over. I will be meeting with Rep. Jackson next Monday. Before lunch today I got an email that a response to my post was waiting to be approved. Within fifteen minutes, a second response was waiting to be approved. This one was from Shanelle Jackson herself. Read the rest of this entry »

ABC News: Read John Stossel’s Latest Weekly E-Mail

Mar. 6, 2008
This Friday on “20/20″ at 10 p.m. ET, we preview my next special, Age of Consent, airing next Friday, March 14.

Our government wants to protect our children from sexual predators. States have passed laws to try to keep molesters far away. But as so often happens with so many laws, there are unintended consequences. Read the rest of this entry »

My Michigan legislative representative is freshman Shanelle Jackson, District 9. I have a concern that I would like to bring before her, to hopefully get her support of legislation that I favor. I could write a letter, but want more than a form letter response. I thought that seeing her in person at a public meeting in the district would be a good choice, as I can not conveniently visit Lansing.

For some reason this plan has not worked out yet. I have actually gone on four different occasions to a location that her staff (or a newsletter) told me that she would be present at a meeting. There turned out to be no meeting that day at that location. What is going on? Read the rest of this entry »