6/5/2010: Law School

[I am back working through my prison journal. It is out of order… Well, the order is as I have opened boxes. The date in the title is the date it was written. I hope this is not confusing. Consider this post as more of an aborted memoir. What you are reading is what you get for your tax dollars. sch 8/14/2026] 

 Those looking for prurient information should skip this section. I dated only two women while in law school.

I started Valparaiso University School of Law in August of 1984. 

My first semester was rocky. I had been out of school for two years. I was neither certain if I retained any academic abilities nor that I belonged there socially. 

Second semester became a disaster. I came back knowing my mother's lung cancer had returned to kill her and that TJ no longer wanted me. I teetered on the brink of flunking out. That I might not survive scholastically was a first for me.

 Dad offered to mortgage his house. I turned him down. I spent the summer working for him so I could be close to Mom. I got myself onto law review by way of the law review's case comment writing competition. (By the way, I consider my contest entry better written than my law review note which is stilted, pedantic, and boring.) I reverted to a pre-TJ mentality for survival: the professors, the school, became the enemy, my opponents.

I survived the summer of 1985 and watching the effects of chemo on Mom.  With my attitude towards school, I survived. Even with Mom dying in March 1986 and learning in April that my Great-Aunt Elsie had liver cancer, I made it through.

I stayed with and worked for my father the summer of 1986 so I could spend time with Aunt Elsie. She died a month after I started my Fall semester class. I made it to graduation.

 Survive may be a bit of an understatement, as I increased my grade point average and class ranking every semester. This occurred even though in my last year I was on law review, had a part-time job at the undergraduate library, delivered pizzas for about a month, and was a professor research assistant. I always knew how to work.

 I thought law school was a serious place for serious people. They were not the educated morons I met at college. To the disappointment of at least one professor, we were not interested in the abstract, scholarly aspects of the law but in careers that could put food on the table. Thankfully, I was at Valparaiso instead of Indiana University-Indianapolis. Valparaiso offered none of the distractions of people and places in Indianapolis. 

I think I would have done better for myself had offered the clinical class that it now offers. Anyone actually wanting to practice law needs to take clinicals. They will do themselves great harm by avoiding practical experience.

 I will also say that a law school education is one of the best educations anyone can have and more should be exposed to its rigors. However, not everyone should practice law and no one should feel any shame about graduating law school and then foregoing the practice of law. I could not imagine not practicing law. I think now that I was utterly unprepared for the business side of law.

(How to know if you should go into private practice? If you cannot schmooze, if you cannot network with those your business depends upon, then a solo practice is not for you. Also read Jay Foonberg's How To Start and Build A Law Practice.)

Since becoming a felon, I seriously doubt ever being asked back to my law school (or to any other), but for the last twenty years I have wanted to tell law students two words they need for success. Those two words are: cash flow.

I admit creating a serious problem for myself by financing my law school career with student loans. I lost all control over my student loan payments in 1999. I took this path on the advice of my Aunt Mary Ellen's youngest son. Tax policy then allowed deducting student loans. Tax law changed, but being committed to finishing what I started, I took out more loans. Never base any long-term plans on the federal tax law. Doing so truly is building one's foundation on sand.

(Another interruption: with the Great Recession, the firms shed lawyers and student loan debt requires a steady income for younger lawyers. I predict we will be seeing younger lawyers leaving the profession and fewer wanting to go into the profession; law schools will soon find the environment as competitive as we did in private practice. I worry about the smaller cities in Indiana. I have already seen fewer younger lawyers coming into Anderson as solo practitioners. Operating costs have increased. I expect the Anderson paradigm of solo attorneys sharing office space as being extinct by the time I finish my sentence. Which then raises the question of how many people will go without what variety of legal services.)

I left law school for private practice. I had had no plans for myself past graduation. All the reasons I had for law school and going into the legal profession had departed from my life by May of 1987. I was never good at doing things for myself, such selfishness never felt right to me. I had no idea what to do now that I was on my own. No real goals other than to make money. Inertia saved me a lot of thinking, and I was heading back to Anderson.

[It looks like I was not far off the mark in 2010 about new law school students: Law School Enrollment Trends, 1963-2025 (LawHub ). And I was not wrong about law schools, but did not expect it to get worse:

 As for what I saw for Indiana: ISBA Attorney Shortage Plan (Indiana State Bar Association)

They even have a map where there is a shortage of lawyers. sch 8/14/2026]

 

Recuperating, Not Spry

 Healing but not doing much more.

I made it to group on Friday. My legs got wobbly. I took the bus there and back, as little walking as possible. I stayed put for the rest of the day. Did some reading, watched shows on Netflix. Right now I cannot recall what it was! Thusday Murder Club. 

Got a rejection. 

Thank you for sharing "Pieces About A Small Indiana Factory, 1976 - 1984" with A Public Space. We regret that we are unable to use this piece for the magazine, but appreciate the opportunity to consider it.


All our best,

A Public Space 

I keep having these intense moments of insomnia. Those I have used to work on my research project. 

CC called again on Friday. I spoke with KH, too. Joel C called with compliments for “Ahab in the Moonlight”. That is now published. I need to get a link here to it. 

Saturday, I went to Payless and the convenience store twice. A little more walking, a little more of my research project.

I started watching Orphan Black on Netflix. I like it. Oh, I started Bugonia and just could not take its deepness or weirdness. Looks good, though.

I decided against church. Not enough energy, pain is more a low-level discomfort. 

 One thing decided: a different working schedule. I need to get some books read.

Things read over the past few days that I want to share:

The Eyes of Athena and the Disenchanted World of The Odyssey (Reactor) 

The Fermi Paradox, Percolation, and Inbreeding  (Reactor) 

Zardoz: …What the F*ck Did I Just Watch?  (Reactor) 

You Must Remember This’s Karina Longworth on ‘The Bisexuals’ 

Exclusive: In a Ukrainian bomb shelter, Laura Loomer has some regrets (AP News)

How America’s newspapers lost their voice 

Pennsylvania roads are being coated in radioactive wastewater − here’s why 

From author to anime hero: the unlikely revival of a Japanese literary star | Fiction in translation (The Guardian)

No Longer Human comprises a series of notebooks by a formerly “handsome young man”, who declares his incompatibility with the human race. For him, the world is “a place of bottomless horror”; he concludes that “living itself is the source of sin”. The narrator of the title story of Schoolgirl takes a similar view: “the problem is that I’m corrupt. I’m a bad girl.”

The relentless pessimism in Dazai’s work risks seeming overwhelming or indulgent but, as Barton puts it, Dazai “leans into [the self-loathing] with a kind of exuberance”. Indeed, his appeal in part lies in this “unashamed emotional quality, but also tempered with enormous intelligence”.

Cool Machine by Colson Whitehead review – final part of the Harlem Trilogy is freewheeling fun | Fiction | (The Guardian) 

Whitehead initially envisioned the Harlem Trilogy as a jaunty entertainment, a break from the serious Pulitzer-winning business of The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys. Cool Machine specifically covers the New York of his youth, a scene he experienced first-hand, which only adds to the air of vivid, freewheeling fun. Whitehead maps the streets, labels the landmarks and dips in at intervals with handy background information. He takes a dark and dangerous corner of history and makes it feel illuminated, magnified, even borderline family-friendly.

A Sudden Flicker of Light by David Thomson review – a brilliantly eccentric history of the movies | Film books (The Guardian)

 Revisionist? Well, it certainly takes us to wintry and sombre ponderings on the movies’ (perennial) tendency to coarsen and to cheapen, to enforce cultural mob-rule. He cites King Vidor’s 1928 film The Crowd, starring James Murray, a former extra plucked from the ranks and groomed for glory but whose awful destiny was to descend into alcoholism and homelessness – back into the crowd. He emphasises movies’ amazing populist-democratic power and reach, their power embodied by the fact that, unlike in the theatre or concert hall, a film’s action could not be stopped or affected by the crowd in front of it. Like a theologian dragged by doubts to the foot of the cross, Thomson wonders if the movies will always lack literature’s way of allowing us to enlarge our imaginations, as opposed to forcing a submission to the screen.

The Rest Is History (Lapham’s Quarterly )

Who Cares? (Sheila Kennedy)

The American Prospect, among others, has reported on the crisis in what we call “Care work.”

As the report notes, immigrants from countries like Haiti, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Uganda, Jamaica, the Philippines, and dozens of others make up the majority of people who serve the aging, frail, sick, disabled and dying. These immigrants “bathe their clients, change adult diapers, supervise medications, and provide companionship in relationships that are intimate as well as professional.” And they are the targets of Donald Trump’s hatred.

How civilisations fall, according to Gibbon (Engelsberg ideas)

5th Circuit ‘answers the call’ from Clarence Thomas on gun law

4 little-known Google Calendar tricks I use to plan my workweek - and save time (ZDNET)

The Problem With Middle-Class Socialism (The New Republic)

Secret Service Agent Put on Leave for Alleged Leaks About JD Vance (The New Republic)

Trump Prepares to Attack Eighth Country of His Second Term (The New Republic)

Trump Invents the Corporate Pardon (The New Republic)

What Do You Have to Hide? - by Jared Henderson

WNAP-FM | Listen Online - myTuner Radio

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Compleat Angler, by Izaak Walton

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Saturday Morning - Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick!

 Up early and questioning what I am about to do now that I've gone through the morning's readings.

Last night, very early this morning, I found accidentally a site having Indiana case law dating back to the 1800s. What I have been trying to get at with my trips to Indianapolis was right there. I got the cases I needed to be downloaded, so not going out of town on Monday. But I am still sleepy.

A classicist’s verdict on Nolan’s Odyssey: a soulful hero flatters our times as women and nuance pushed overboard (The Guardian)

Of course, Nolan isn’t just trying to replicate the Odyssey, and I’m not expecting him to. This is not – OK, not entirely – the chagrin of a Homerist missing her favourite scenes (no matter how I felt when I found out that Homer’s delightfully brash princess, Nausicaa, Odysseus’s key in getting back to Ithaca, had been chopped). What I’m pointing out is what is lost, or changed, in a Nolan–Hollywood–Homer crossover, and why that matters. As Nolan himself has said: “I was intrigued by the idea of a Hollywood studio taking on the biggest of stories.” So this is about uncovering what, in Nolan’s movie, looks like the Odyssey, and what is a product of his own choices. I’m here to think through what an epic hero and his world looks like to Nolan, and to Hollywood. And that is a really telling ride.

***

In the gap between the sung verses of Homer and Matt Damon declaiming to an Imax camera, what this Odyssey offers us, by way of a hero and the grandiloquent experience of epic cinema, is a man who seeks redemption and solidarity among men, recognition from women, and absolution for a civilisation’s fall. Make of that, in the current climate, what you will.

Emily Hauser is an ancient historian, broadcaster and Times bestselling author of Mythica: A New History of Homer’s World, through the Women Written Out of It.

Keith Richards on New Music, Old Friendships & the Future of the Rolling Stones | Billboard Cover

 

Did Homer dream of androids? (Engelsberg ideas)

Another Homeric use of automatos is even more striking. In Iliad 18 we are told that Hephaestus, the god of sweat and technic, made 20 devices which can glide through the halls of Olympus ‘all on their own’. This is the passage that Aristotle cites in his Politics. ‘The tripods of Hephaestus’, he says, ‘see what to do in advance’ and then ‘perform their own work.’ What Aristotle means by this – and Homer, too – is that Hephaestus’ tripods can navigate the whole of Zeus’ palace, bearing to the gods whatever they may happen to desire, wherever they happen to be.

It is not just the gates of heaven, then, which are both sensitive and active. The Olympians’ tripods can drive through the corridors of heaven: Homer tells us that they ‘roll to the halls where the gods convene’ and then return, ‘all on their own’, to Hephaestus’ splendid forge. They certainly would be, as Homer calls them, ‘a marvel to behold’.

In light of all this it is not meaningless to ask: was Homer’s heaven the birthplace of AI? Machines that can drive through a vast mountaintop complex would now be called, if only conversationally, intelligent.

***

Since Descartes, to simplify a long and subtle history, ‘machine’ and ‘intelligence’ have functioned as counter-concepts. In antiquity, on the contrary, the predecessors of our word ‘machine’ and the concept of ‘intelligence’ were very closely linked. There is no machine after all that is not a materialisation of mēchanē, or cunning. The function of any machine is to realise some desire of its originating intelligence.

An unintelligent machine may well function as a mere tool of that intelligence or cunning – roughly, what Hesiod seems to call mēchanē. But if all natural powers are originally purposive, as the ancients felt and believed – then intelligence, too, is purposive. To construct an intelligent machine is therefore to construct a radically purposive machine.

This means that a truly intelligent machine cannot and will not be exhaustively instrumentalised by its creators. If an unintelligent machine can function as a pure tool of its designer, an intelligent machine is, by definition, no longer just a tool. A smart device has device – like the Cyclops. And, for that matter, like Pandora.

An intelligent machine is one that has its own mēchanē, its own cunning. As such, it has its own imperatives and objectives, its own drives. Intelligence possesses some inner purposiveness, some tendency that humans do not fully comprehend in themselves. Did Homer really know why he dreamt of androids in the eighth century BC? And do we really know now?

 

‘A revolutionary act to watch it’: the film India’s censors do not want you to see (The Guardian)

 Trehan describes the ordeal of trying to get Satluj released as “dystopian” and decries “undemocratic censorship” and alleged political interference under the Narendra Modi government re-shaping India’s film industries. He claims Indian cinema has been widely co-opted as a propaganda arm for the government’s rightwing, religious nationalist agenda, where there is “only room for one kind of story to be told”, particularly in mainstream Hindi films.

“It is clear to me that there is no creative freedom in India today,” says Trehan. “When you see the level of censorship happening, films getting blocked by the film board and banned from release, it makes you question: does democracy exist in this country any more?”

Even today, discussions of Punjab’s separatist movement – which raged in the 1980s and 1990s, fighting for an independent Sikh homeland called Khalistan, before it was crushed by the state – remain highly sensitive for the Modi government.

 

  The Common-Law mind and the renewal of America (Engelsberg ideas)

The history of the Anglo-American Common Law is a history of renewal, restoration and reinvigoration that is grounded in practicalities and tangibility. It does not try to answer ‘what is Justice?’ deductively. It searches for justice inductively, case by case, precedent by precedent, and roots itself constitutionally in the community’s capacity for self-government. Not without an endearing sense of grandiosity, Winston Churchill was still right when he said in his sweeping history of the English-speaking world that the claims and disputes across its vast stretches obtain according to the Common Law, at least in theory, and not uniformly. Lincoln the lawyer was dealing in the same terms and, naturally, he had a ‘Common-Law mind’. His life on the judicial circuit showed he understood that the real gem of the Common Law was redress and remedy, not revolution. In its deepest working sense, even the most ordinary, granular case could distil the most fundamental political question there is: what sort of government do we want? Better yet, what sort of government does our history of cases and precedents point us toward?

***

It is by asking and answering such questions that America rediscovers and regenerates itself. Lincoln saw and understood this, which lent him both wisdom and his remarkable belief in the American constitution. America at 250 should remind us of its capacity for self-rediscovery and its durability because of the instincts of the Common Law deeply woven into its DNA. It should remind us, as Lincoln the Common Law lawyer understood, that American democracy is a renewable charter.

 Mark Kermode reviews The Odyssey

 Group paddles 50 miles on White River to boost conservation efforts

Indiana Aligns with Illinois, Ohio, Kentucky, Michigan, and Missouri as Indianapolis Revives the White River into America’s Emerging River City, Unlocking Kayaking, Waterfront Tourism, Wildlife Conservation, Cultural Attractions, and New Travel Experiences Across the Midwest (Travel And Tour World )

Burt Reynolds & Tarantino

 Tarantino does more talking:

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Politics - Something I Just Cannot Escape

Times being what they are - Trump raging about pools and interior decorating while Iran plays us like a conman plays a mark (hopefully not like a toreador plays a bull); the clown car of misanthropes, fascists, and syncophants drive us closer to the end of the Republic - I am not sure there is an escape from politics.

The question for us is do we stand with those who want to wreck representative government or with those who think power belongs to the people? 

My notes from the past few days follow. 

 Turkey's Tayyip Erdoğan cashes in on Trump relationship  (The Hill) raises one big question for me, and one not even questioned in the article: did Trump truly think Turkey would side with Iran? It seems to me our President is more of an idiot than we knew.

I watched some of Bill Maher last, but life is too short for listening to J.D. Vance. Here are the highpoints: Bill Maher challenges JD Vance, GOP on 'cheated' election claims. How stupid does Trump think we are? He never found evidence to back up his claims when he had the tools of the government and the Republican Party at hand. Anyone who is not a billionaire would be in a rubber room for talking like this. He does have a problem with reality; lately it even has a name: the Straights of Hormuz.

Complacency will get us in prison or jail. You might think this is not so bad, but sooner or later a political movement that adopts a theological purity test kills its own. Just ask the Old Bolsheviks and Robespierre. 

The Prairieland Sentences Are a National Emergency (The New Republic)

Now, just shy of one year after the demonstration, we are witnessing the part of the government’s narrative in which the administration thinks it has won. Its position is clear, Menchaca said: “Not allowing the government to abuse people will cost you most of your natural life. Not allowing the police to murder an unarmed protester fleeing means your life is now forfeit to the state.”

But since the Prairieland defendants were indicted and as their trials wound on, we’ve seen many of the government’s attempts to charge people for disrupting ICE operations fall apart, some in now high-profile scandals such as that involving the former Broadview Six, a group of demonstrators at an ICE facility near Chicago, who were indicted on charges of conspiracy to impede a federal agent. (The charges were dropped after prosecutorial misconduct came to light.) Still, such failures have not slowed the government down. Last week, 15 people in Minnesota were indicted on federal conspiracy charges related to allegedly impeding federal officers.

The lesson here is not that the Prairieland defendants did something uniquely dangerous, but that they faced the same political repression any number of us could. The government, Menchaca said, is “trying to set the stage to criminalize every person who doesn’t agree to their atrocities. And our loved ones are suffering for their compassion.”

The Supreme Court’s War on Congress (The New Republic): masquerading as conservatives we've got 6 Supreme Justices who are radically altering the government into an authoritarian state.

It would be hard to find a more clear-cut violation of the free exercise clause than Damon Landor’s treatment by Louisiana correctional officials in 2020. Landor, a Rastafarian, grew out his hair into lengthy dreadlocks in keeping with the practices of his faith. Long hair is generally disallowed in prison systems for safety and hygiene reasons, but Landor had previously obtained exemptions on religious grounds.

When he was transferred to a new facility, Landor told the prison personnel that his hair was kept long for religious reasons. He also provided them with a copy of a 2017 ruling by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which has jurisdiction over Louisiana, that held that it would be a RLUIPA violation for state prison officials to cut a Rastafarian’s hair. Nonetheless, prison officials threw the ruling in the trash and shaved Landor’s head.

***

Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing for the court, declined to do so. He framed the dispute not as a question of religious freedom but of Congress’s power to impose conditions on federal funds. The decision is an unusually muddled one for Gorsuch. He insisted that Congress’s choice to provide federal funds to Louisiana so long as the state abides by certain conditions is a contract of sorts. While Congress can impose conditions on those funds for the states, Gorsuch argued, it cannot contractually bind people—in this case, the prison officials—who didn’t consent to the agreement in the first place.

This reasoning is too clever by half. The Louisiana Department of Corrections is not some sort of cosmic entity or demiurge. It does not independently exist in a metaphysical sense, despite its legal personality. It is, at its root, a group of people in buildings who sit behind desks and walk down hallways and occasionally violate people’s constitutional rights. Gorsuch nonetheless hypothesized about ways that Congress could, in theory, rewrite the law to properly bind those employees in a private capacity.

***

For most of the twentieth century, the Supreme Court confined itself to interpreting federal law instead of rewriting it. Thanks to the conservative legal movement, that posture has changed. The court’s Republican appointees have developed a wide array of tools to second-guess Congress, sometimes even under the cynical guise of defending its prerogatives. 

 The Supreme Court’s Era of Meaningless Rights (The Atlantic) comments on the cases discussed above: (The Atlantic has a paywall)

That rule will undermine protections in the many public-benefits programs that are structured as spending-clause statutes, such as Medicaid and the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act. If people can’t sue for damages when officials violate the rules that Congress has established for those programs, then those rules aren’t really rules at all.

Back to  The Supreme Court’s Era of Meaningless Rights (The Atlantic) and two more cases:

Two other decisions—one also issued Tuesday, the other yesterday—transformed a swath of federal immigration protections into unenforceable guidelines that the Trump administration need not comply with.

In Blanche v. Lau, the legal protections at issue were for lawful permanent residents—green-card holders—who are entitled to the greatest legal protections of all noncitizens. The six Republican appointees said those protections were effectively useless and not binding. Although federal law has long said that a legal permanent resident can be denied reentry into the United States if clear and convincing evidence exists that the resident committed a crime of moral turpitude, Lau says that border officials can deny admission even without such evidence. This allows officers to strip green-card holders’ lawful immigration status without the degree of proof required by federal law—and, perhaps, without any meaningful proof at all. The Republican appointees said the legal protections apply only in formal immigration proceedings, and would be too impracticable and burdensome to apply at the border.

We need to impeach a few Supreme Court Justices and remind them who they work for. 

Then let's start picking off the nutjobs the incompetent, weak-willed Senate put in office: 

 Too long for me to have made much headway, but it seems we no longer want a plurlaistic society. What we want is our own little club, sending everyone else to perdition. Faith, Freedom, Family, Place — An Ethnographic Study

Indiana's new prison already equipped for firing squads as death penalty debate continues (Indiana Capital Chronicle) - why the federal government feels the need to meddle in our state law.

Federal executions are carried out at the U.S. Penitentiary in Terre Haute, and federal law generally ties execution methods to those authorized by the state where a death sentence is imposed or carried out.

Five states — Idaho, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Utah and South Carolina — currently authorize the use of firing squads. Florida, North Carolina and Tennessee additionally have laws allowing firing squads if other methods are found unconstitutional.

“In a state like Indiana … the federal government is more limited because of this state’s statute on allowed methods of the death penalty,” said Zachary Cormier, an assistant professor at Indiana University’s Robert H. McKinney School of Law. “But even if Indiana would authorize the execution by firing squad … I don’t think it’s going anywhere fast because there are so many procedural hiccups yet that I think court questions would tie this up.”

Mixed reaction to Supreme Court ruling impacting thousands of Haitians living in Indiana (Indiana Capital Chronicle ) disappointed by quoting Indiana politicians and when is Todd Rokita anything but disappointing? Well, when he is embarrassing.

Trump Blurts Out Plot to Rig Midterms So Vile It Even Shocks GOPers 

Allow Me To Repeat Myself (Sheila Kennedy)

You would think Republicans– who fancy themselves protectors of private property and capital– would understand that the rule of law protects private property from seizure or infringement, and that investors–foreign or domestic– are highly unlikely to put money into an economy where assets can be seized or destroyed without due process.

When the GOP was a party, and not a cult, it understood that.

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Saving The United States Supreme Court

 This one I cannot agree with.

How to make the Supreme Court fear being overturned  by Paul M. Collins, Jr. (The Hill) starts off fine with its diagnosis.

For decades, the court operated under a healthy, if unspoken, anxiety: the fear of reversal. This fear once acted as a structural brake, reminding the justices that if they strayed too far from the constitutional mainstream, the system would push back.

For instance, the 11th, 13th, 14th, 16th and 26th Amendments to the Constitution were passed to overturn Supreme Court decisions. Congress has reversed several decisions by passing statutes as well, as exemplified in the passage of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act in 2009. And the Supreme Court occasionally overrules itself, including overturning Bowers v. Hardwick, which allowed states to criminalize same-sex sexual relations, in 2003.

 But the constitutional changes came at a time of crisis; the 13th and 14th came after the Civil War (and with the Union controlling enough states to pass them). The others were tune-ups to the constitution, mechanical upgrades to keep the government functioning.

 What has become our de facto method of amending the Constitution is Supreme Court decisions. 

The statutory revision process - Court striking down then Congress reworking - is the reason FDR floated a plan to pack the court. 

That same process has a flip-side: Congress passing to the Court the job of completing legislation. I first noticed this in the snail darter case.

We have a dysfunctional Congress, so his solution feels impractical:

 The most effective way to achieve this is a two-pronged structural reset. First, Congress should exercise its clear constitutional authority to expand the size of the court. Second, and more crucially, the justices should no longer sit as a permanent, monolithic body of nine. Instead, they should be required to hear cases in randomly assigned three-judge panels with final decision-making authority.

Okay, I agree with expanding the Court. There are nine Justices and around 13 federal circuits, so on a workload rationale there is a need for an expansion. 

Not that expansion by itself is enough to curb the Court from becoming a branch as a partisan extension of the elected branches. It only ups the partisanship to four more nominees.

 What Mr. Collins has done is apply the operations of the federal Circuit Courts of Appeal to the Supreme Court. It is clever, it may even improve its operation. I suppose there might be the right to an en banc hearing. It may be the only way to keep a 13 member court from becoming unweidly. What it does not do is prevent ideologues intent on forcing their ideology on all of America. It does not look upon the Senate milking partisan issues for their campaign funds as an issue underlying a court intent of ideologues. Not even his staggered appointments seem fitted to this problem.

Coupled with a larger pool of justices appointed across multiple presidential administrations, this system would dilute the winner-take-all stakes of judicial appointments. It transforms the court from a partisan prize into a functional institution where the law is shaped by a diversity of perspectives, rather than the iron grip of a permanent majority. 

 There is another power Congress has over the Supreme Court and that is impeachment. It seems Justices Thomas and  Alito have given Congress non-partisan grounds for their ethics. Others may have provided other grounds. That might give the court an incentive to impose on itself truly effective ethical rules.

Expansion, term limits, impeachments, and staggered terms are all good ideas and are necessary. However, there is one greater remedy: reinstating the amendment process, perhaps even making it easier. Until the federal government understands it does not run in a closed loop, there will always be a risk of ideologues intent on working their will on the people.

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Readings 6/8

Reading Petrarch on Cities, Time, and Heraclitus by Iván Parga Ornelas Antigone made me think of Thoreau. There is a difference between being alone and solitude. The former can be imposed and resented; the other is a peace and a joy.

The idea of a solitary life in some field or forest has probably appealed to many of us. But Petrarch’s solitudo is demanding. One must not only abandon the city, but everything it represents: ambitions, desires and appetites, and the wish for recognition and personal gain through others. Petrarch, in other words, would not approve of the digital nomad, nor of your plan to retire into a cabin in the woods and spend the day reading and writing for Antigone, if your motivation was to gain recognition and applause. 

RESTORING “LIFE, LIBERTY, AND THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS” 

Recognizing a Damage Remedy to Enforce Indiana's Bill of Rights 

Commentaries on the Laws of England in Four Books, vol. 1 

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Things I Do Not Like

 Hiding history, putting people down to make one's self look bigger rather than rising to compete, people taking credit for the work of their betters.

The Side That Won the Civil War is Now Banning Books About Why the Civil War Was Fought (Literary Hub)

In the days before the Civil War, the South worked hard to censor any literature that cast slavery in a negative light. Officials in Charleston, S.C. went through mailbags for abolitionist newspapers. Legislatures passed laws banning any publication that may show “a tendency to make our slaves discontented.” In Maryland, the Rev. Jacob Gruber was prosecuted for daring to preach a sermon that hinted that slavery might be sinful. Anyone found with a copy of the explosive novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin was subject to arrest.

***

The order to whitewash America’s historic sites of anything less than rosy about the nation’s past has led to some predictable embarrassments. Visitors to Independence Hall in Philadelphia won’t learn much about the enslaved people owned by the founding fathers. The internment camp at Manzanar won’t have anything “negative” about the detention of 120,000 Japanese Americans in World War II. Fort Moultrie National Monument  no longer has information related to rising sea levels that threaten Charleston Harbor. The order extends to books and materials on sale at the gift stores. Books related to Malcolm X and other Black leaders have been reportedly removed.

My own book details the consequential events at a place called Fort Monroe in Virginia that led directly to Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and the end of American slavery. Yet it is not for sale in the bookstore of the Fort Monroe National Monument. Because the book tells a hopeful story about how enslaved people ran toward the American flag during the Civil War, sought their own freedom and helped tip the military balance against the Confederacy, I would have thought it would have been in alignment with even the narrowest conservative definition of patriotic content. But the cover depicts seven members of the U.S. Colored Troops standing at attention. The jacket copy makes it clear that it is about slavery. It is not hard to imagine it setting off minor alarms on the part of the National Park Service or Eastern National, the concessionaire with the exclusive contract to supply the bookstore.

***

The irony was that the South’s preferred message about “happy and contented slaves” was all a lie. Instead of being proved on the ground of open debate and inquiry, it had to be proved in the Civil War when the enslaved people bolted toward the Union Army at the first possible opportunity, to the astonishment of the slaveholding class which had believed its own cheerful propaganda

How easily scared and manipulated are Americans! Has it always been this way? I never read Richard Hofstadter's book on American paranoia, so all I can see is from my own perspective. There was the Red Scare after WWI, and that continued through HUAC and then started rising under Nixon and Dies until the fever of McCarthyism broke out. Has the time come for America to go under? That Lincoln's last best hope was all just an illusion?

 How doubt became a weapon against constitutional rights 

 But this obscures the asymmetry doing the real work. To approve access to medication abortion the FDA required drug companies to meet normal evidentiary standards demonstrating that the potential harm to patients taking mifepristone is marginal. The court, however, intervened, stating that this normal process was insufficient. Why? Because there could be some uncertainty about the applicability of these findings, given there was no longer an in-person requirement.

Doubt, in other words, undermined the conclusions of the FDA’s own rulemaking processes. In contrast, doubt played no role in undercutting Louisiana’s unfounded claims of risk and potential for “sovereign injury” — that is, the potential the state itself would suffer a kind of harm to its power as a state.

Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Nothing scares those unworthy of power like its loss.  

 The sheer depravity of spoiled boys injuring others without concern for the damage done: Online Trolls Harassed Her Six-Year-Old. That Was Only the Beginning.

People who blame others for their failings, the kind of men who suck their thumbs and whine until they get attention. The traditional family, what they call the nuclear family, is a fiction, These kinds of people needing to put down others only show off their inadequacies.

The Men Who Want Women to Be Quiet 

Douglas Wilson has a modest proposal to improve American life: He wants to repeal the Nineteenth Amendment, which gave women the vote. In his ideal system, “we would do it in our politics the same way we do it in our church structure,” he told me recently. “And that is, we vote by household.”

Wilson is a co-founder of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, based in Moscow, Idaho. Over the past five decades, he has built a small empire there, dedicated to disseminating his theocratic vision for the United States: a publishing house, a school, a liberal-arts college, and a video-streaming service. His denomination, which has about 170 affiliated churches, counts Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth as a member, and Wilson was invited to lead a prayer service at the Pentagon in February. So when the pastor casually suggests disenfranchising half of America, people listen.

 ***

The MAGA movement is often framed as a reaction to the first Black president, and to a growing Latino population. But the multiracial appeal of the manosphere and Trump’s 2024 inroads with young minority men point in a different direction. “People ask me what the New Right is furious about,” the author Laura Field, whose book, Furious Minds, describes the intellectual underpinnings of Trumpism, told me. “And I think a good shorthand for that is they’re furious about their own loss of status in society over the last few years and the elites who made that happen, and I think that the pithiest short version of that is that it’s the women. It’s the women who took their status.”

Maybe I have spent too much time reading from 1850 with no little disgust at the racism of our ancestors.

So much for improving the species.

sch 6/8 

 

 

 

 

State Constitutional Law (Indiana, Mostly): A Reading List (5/28-6/3/2026)

 I got the idea this morning to make a list of what I have been reading since I started on my latest research project. The hope is that it will give me time to get my eyes to focus.

State Constitutions (Indiana Historical Bureau)

Originalism and Natural Law by Brian T. Fitzpatrick

Beyond Standard Legal Positivism and "Aggressive" Natural Law: Some Thoughts on Judge O'Scannlain's "Third Way" by Michael Baur

Has the Indiana Constitution Found Its Epic by P Baude 

The Natural Law in the American Tradition  by Hon. Diarmuid F. O'Scannlain

Matter of Lawrance 

Morrison v. Sadler 

Sir William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England in Four Books, vol. 1 [1753] 

SELF-DEFENSE, DEFENSE OF OTHERS, AND THE STATE, DARRELL A. H. MILLER

Wrigley v. Romanick 

INTERPRETATION AND AUTHORITY IN STATE CONSTITUTIONALISM , Paul W. Kahn

Interstate Dialogue in State Constitutional Law, Patrick L. Baude 

INDIANA'S CENTURY OLD CONSTITUTION by JOHN D. BARNHART and DONALD F. CARMONY

Kiste v. Red Cab, Inc., 106 NE 2d 395 

Matis v. Yelasich, 132 NE 2d 728 

MEDICAL LICENSING BD. v. Planned Parenthood, 211 NE 3d 957 

Meredith v. Pence, 984 NE 2d 1213 

Okla. Call for Reprod. Justice v. Drummond, 526 P. 3d 1123  

PEACHEY ET AL. v. BOSWELL, MAYOR, ET AL., 167 NE 2d 48 

John Pettit 

Price v. State, 622 NE 2d 954 

Pritchard v. State, 230 NE 2d 416 

Ratliff v. Cohn, 693 NE 2d 530 - 

Report of the Debates  

Richardson v. State, 717 NE 2d 32 

Schuchman v. State, 236 NE 2d 830 

Sidle v. Majors, 341 NE 2d 763 

Solomon v. State, 119 NE 3d 173 

Specht v. State, 163 NE 2d 581 

The Maturing Nature of State Constitution Jurisprudence Randall T. Shepard 

sch 

5/18-5/19/2026: Muncie to Indy to Muncie to Anderson

 I spent yesterday's morning in Indianapolis. First, still trying to find the computer K wanted. No such luck. What I did learn was not to trust Staples' inventorying software. Online, Plainfield was shown as having the computer. Plainfield said that their computer showed North Keystone had three. I went to North Keystone, they had none. When I called Plainfield, the fellow who went to see their actual stock could not find one. I gave up. K was going to work off money lent her by typing up the “Chasing Ashes” manuscript. Someone else will do it for me.

Then I spent hours at the McKinney Law School law library. Too fat, too hot, it was a struggle that it ought not have been. Memory kept losing instructions on how to use their scanner. It was also not helpful in finding the Indiana Reports. I did not finish the job, either. Which worked out to my benefit. There was a massive thunderstorm that hit as I was leaving and accompanied me all the way home. Indianapolis streets were flooding. When I got back here, I found out the biggest selection did not get sent from the scanner.

 I thought I would go back today, but I was too tired at 5 AM. I stayed that way for most of the day. I did manage a quit trip to Anderson and having two Spanish dogs from Gene's Root Beer. They were delicious.

I got the car back to Enterprise on time - 1 PM. Then I made my way back here. A siesta seemed like a good idea. Not ready for the heat; I need to get my inhalers. Two more hard rains came in the afternoon.

I think I heard frogs croaking this morning after the rains, and then again a little while ago. It might be something else. Not any bird song I recognized, so frogs seem likely, if bizarre. 

Indiana abortion ban law stands as state Supreme Court rejects challenge means I need to get the law research done and the article written. Finally.

The Future Fire got Unintended Consequences 

A rejection for “Agnes”:

Thank you for sending us your work. This particular submission wasn't chosen for publication, but we are grateful for your interest in our journal. We wouldn't be able to continue without writers like you.


Great luck with your writing, among all other things.


Sincerely,

The Editors

New Ohio Review

Warren Zevon's Warren Zevon; The Eagles' “Hotel California” tried but never hit the mark set by Zevon.

For something lighter: How a shifting Nile landscape shaped the rise of the ancient empire of Kush in Sudan 

New editions of Georges Simenon's non-Maigret novels are coming out: The Crimes Georges Simenon Declined to Investigate. I admire the Maigret stories but find his non-Maigret novels fascinating. I did not even know of them until I was in my fifties. Do not wait so long to read them.

 Cradle to Career Muncie Lifted as National Example

At the center of the recognition is Muncie Community Schools’ dramatic improvement in early grade reading. During the 2024-2025 school year, districtwide reading proficiency climbed from 69.8 percent to 79.2 percent, a 9.4-percentage-point increase that outpaced statewide gains. Grissom Elementary posted one of the most significant improvements in Indiana, increasing its third-grade reading proficiency rate from 46.6 percent to 79 percent in a single year.

StriveTogether leaders described Muncie as an example of how place-based partnerships can drive long-term systems change when communities align around shared data, coordinated strategies and collective accountability. The national organization’s annual report noted that more than 70 organizations and 200 individuals participate in Cradle to Career Muncie’s work through The Opportunity Blueprint: 2030, a strategic plan shaped by more than 150 local voices.

Local leaders say the progress reflects years of intentional collaboration.

Massie lost in Kentucky. Trump now owns the Republicans. Considering what happens when Trump[ owns anything, this should be the end of the Republican Party. 

What is INvestEd? Indiana’s own student loan provider could see a surge in demand 

A little-known nonprofit created by Indiana lawmakers more than four decades ago could become a major lender for student loan borrowers.

The Indiana Secondary Market for Education Loans — which operates under the name INvestEd — issues private student loans at interest rates starting at 4.26% to 8.51% — far below the maximum 17.99% interest rate charged by some of its for-profit competitors.

The nonprofit’s motto is simple: The best student loan is no loan at all.

But leaders at INvestEd anticipate a surge in demand for private loans once tighter federal student loan restrictions and borrowing limits take effect July 1.

I never heard of this, but then after 1987 I had no interest in the subject.

 Still, very long energy.

 

sch 

 

 

American History: Ideology

 With the law, I have no use for originalism. Not in law school and certainly not now has it made sense: the past informs, it is not a prison.

Considering the rampant ignorance of historical knowledge in Americans, it is dangerous. I have a sister who believes this country was set up as a Christian nation. She sent me this link: https://www.facebook.com/share/16XTpKuTji/. I sent her this response:

I sent you the piece about the applicability of Sahria law - this is some BS dreamt up to scare people. But what most people don't understand is that if you weren't from England proper you came here under a different law. Scotland, Germany, France, Switzerland all had a different system of law. The Irish had the Brehon law but I think the English took that from them. Louisiana operates under a different legal system than Indiana. Are we to get to get rid of that state?

People who come here are not slaves anymore. Slaves have to accept what their masters tell them. Free people can say whatever they like. The real question is if their complaints are justified or not? We are not getting Danes and their like here because we do not have a real national health care system. I suppose this fellow would tell anyone complaining about no national health care should be sent back to Denmark.

He repeats that nonsense about this being a Christian country. It was not. We were set up as a country without a national church. Our ancestors knew how vile that institution could be. Especially the Scots who weave in and out of the Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention.I was going to suggest googling conventeer but just go here: https://scotland-history.com/the-rise-of-the-covenanters-and-religious-conflict/. I suspect the Livingstons came over here to get away from that. But you can google Thirty Years War.

How does one baptize a nation? Without baptism, there is no remission of sins.  What soul does a nation have? A nation has no more soul than a rock. We are a nation of Christians - and Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, and Muslims. We always have been.

But then the question comes down to what kind of Christian. If only Protestants, then kiss colonial Maryland away. And if you will allow Roman Catholics, why are you a Protestant? Better check out the Northern Ireland Troubles if you want to see what "Christians" can do - in our own time.

Tell this fellow to read Jefferson's letter to the Danbury Baptists. He should also read the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, and his state's Bill of Rights. 

But, assuming this was a Christian country, it is not now. Christians do not turn away the stranger; Christians do not applaud torture and governmental murder; Christians favor feeding the poor. This was the Gospel reading for today:

    MATTHEW 25:31-46

    The Lord said, “When the Son of man comes in his glory and all the holy angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne. Before him will be gathered all the nations, and he will separate them one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, and he will place the sheep at his right hand, but the goats at the left. Then the king will say to those at his right hand, ‘Come, O blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.’ Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink? And when did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you? And when did we see you sick or in prison and visit you?’ And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.’ Then he will say to those at his left hand, ‘Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels; for I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not clothe me, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.’ Then they also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to you?’ Then he will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it not to one of the least of these, you did it not to me.’ And they will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”

I do not know why people keep repeating this nonsense. I suppose it's not having stayed awake in their history classes. Or they are too weak-minded to double check what they are being told. I notice he gives nothing to support his blather. That should have told you something right there.

She has not responded.

I want to add Joseph Ellis's  Leadership of the Founder from American Heritage. Ellis is not some wild-eyed fanatic, nor is American Heritage a publisher of flaky ideas.

 Second, they created the first wholly secular state. Before the American founding, it was assumed that state support for an established religion was a mandatory feature of all viable governments, because it enforced a consensus on the common values that made a collective sense of purpose possible. While many of the states retained various Protestant establishments well into the nineteenth century, the founders insisted on a complete separation of church and state at the national level, thereby overturning the long-standing presumption that only shared religious convictions could hold a nation together.

Third, they rejected the conventional wisdom, agreed upon since Aristotle, that political sovereignty was by definition singular and indivisible and must reside in one agreed-upon location. The Constitution defied this assumption by creating multiple and overlapping sources of authority in which the blurring of jurisdiction between federal and state levels, as well as between and among branches of government, became an asset rather than a liability. The very idea of sovereignty became problematic, and its rhetorical depository, “the people,” an inherently elusive location.

Ellis points out the Founders failures and their particular successes—they were human beings who met their moment in history as best they could. It was a white country; their imaginations and nerves failed them to abolish slavery and integrate the former slaves into the citizenry. But they knew their hypocrisy on this point; they knew what they created was not limited to whites.

Peter Cozzens's book review, Being Thomas Jefferson (American Heritage) makes a relevant point:

Any discussion of Jefferson and slavery must consider his relationship with his teenaged slave Sally Hemings, his late wife’s half-sister. Because Jefferson never wrote of her, Burstein is unable to provide any significant insights into what attracted Jefferson to the girl. But he was an ardent pursuer of beauty, so Burstein suggests she was beautiful. He assumes Jefferson felt tenderness toward Hemings but no inclination to elevate her from her subordinate position in the Monticello orbit. Burstein posits that the loss of his wife so devastated Jefferson that he was unwilling to expose himself again to such pain. Rather than remarry, as was customary in Southern society, he took a concubine with whom he could maintain a sexually active life without deep emotional involvement. Burstein summarizes the relationship in the context of Jefferson’s nature thusly:

“I am suggesting that we should reckon with the ‘Saly Hemings story’ as we do with evidence of Jefferson’s personal anxieties as these emerge in all he wrote over the years. He rationalized almost effortlessly. On the basis of his extensive reading and thinking, he was convinced that he knew what was best. He felt morally secure. He doled out advice. He willfully shaped his legacy (or at least tried to), and he managed his little mountain [Monticello] as he saw fit.”

In Jefferson’s feud with Alexander Hamilton over the future of the federal government, which Burstein explores in depth, he delves into the darker side of Jefferson’s psyche. Toward this political rival who orchestrated his removal from the Washington administration, Jefferson felt the deepest “contempt and disgust.” He was unable to recognize any good in an enemy, whom he could only traduce, and against whom he maintained smoldering revulsion. In the political arena, Hamilton “didn’t just frustrate Jefferson. He was the better Machiavellian.”

 If you want originalism, then you need to acknowledge what the Founders knew where they were acting wrongfully.

By stoppering up American life and thought into a sterile past, we ignore how we have risen above our limitations. Therein is the true greatness of America,

 sch 2/21

Get Rid Of The Criminal Jury - From England By Way of Australia

 Good thing that Indiana's Constitution protects the right to a jury trial, particularly since the United States Supreme Court seems to be giving up on the Constitution and the law.

Constitution of the State of Indiana, Art. 1, § 13 

Section 13. (a) In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall have the right to a public trial, by an impartial jury, in the county in which the offense shall have been committed; to be heard by himself and counsel; to demand the nature and cause of the accusation against him, and to have a copy thereof; to meet the witnesses face to face, and to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor.

(b) Victims of crime, as defined by law, shall have the right to be treated with fairness, dignity, and respect throughout the criminal justice process; and, as defined by law, to be informed of and present during public hearings and to confer with the prosecution, to the extent that exercising these rights does not infringe upon the constitutional rights of the accused.

 Constitution of the State of Indiana, Art. 1, § 19 

In all criminal cases whatever, the jury shall have the right to determine the law and the facts.

 § 19 has confused judges, lawyers, and legal writers for over a century, if not longer. Some things I have read in the distant past seemed to indicate the writer taking offense that mere citizens have such power.

Jury's Role Under the Indiana Constitution 

 Abstract

Despite existence of a provision which constitutionally mandates jury determination of the law as well as the facts since 1851, no definitive explanation exists of what a jury should do when it 'determines law.' Further, only minimal attention has been directed toward the role counsel can play in the constitutional scheme. Avoidance of these issues by the appellate courts of Indiana only detracts from the effectiveness of trial judges, juries, and counsel. To incorporate the positive implementation it has effected and to reconcile or eliminate the contradictions and inconsistencies which have appeared in the case law, the State supreme court should develop an operation model on the basis of theoretical placement of the jury in the judge's role, with modifications to accommodate the jury's collegial nature. The jury's attention could routinely be directed to legislative intent and be instructed to apply canons of construction. Such commonsense rules of interpretation would provide useful guidelines to the jury which until now has been forced to operate in a vacuum. In addition, the suggested model would provide a useful analogy in impressing jurors with the seriousness of their responsibility. However, some findings of law or fact, are not delegated to the jury under the model. Footnotes are included.

That full article is here: The Jury's Role Under the Indiana Constitution, Carolyn White Spengler (Indiana University School of Law).

But of England, Ralph Leonard's article The Strange Death of English Justice  (Quillette) describes what is going on there:

 This has been coming for some time. In July, the government commissioned an Independent Review of the Criminal Courts. The review, chaired by Brian Leveson, made some recommendations as to how to deal with the ever-growing backlog of cases in the Crown Court. These proposals include reclassifying some “either way” offences as “summary only” offences, meaning they will be heard in a magistrates’ court with no jury present. For other either way offences, where defendants previously had the option of choosing trial by jury, all juries will be replaced by a judge and two magistrates. Serious and complex fraud cases will also be assigned to judges only.

There is a contradiction at the heart of the revised justice system that is about to come into being. If trial by jury remains our method of trying the most serious crimes, this implies that it is the best way of litigating criminal cases. If so, then we are accepting that “non-serious” cases are going to be tried using an inferior form of litigation. That will create a two-tier legal system.

The irony is that, over the past year, public discourse has been obsessed with what some are calling a crisis of national identity. Does “Englishness” exist? If so, is it good? What are its ethnic boundaries?. Yet, jury trial, something that is very important to English history, identity, and our understanding of ourselves—something that has been an ancient, even ancestral, English right, is facing a wrecking ball. People outside the Anglosphere may not understand why this is such a big deal. But you cannot understand the English psyche without understanding the symbolic value of this practice, which has deep roots in English history.

 We should expect the same wreckage here, if anyone were foolish enough to make such a proposal.

As the American conservative thinker Russell Kirk observed when examining the “British roots” of American order: “The English people looked upon common law as their law, the product of their historical experience; it was not something imposed upon them from above.” He further speculated that “representative government” arose in England first because juries taught “free men to assert a share in public concerns.” 

The English Marxist E.P Thompson put it differently. Trial by jury, he explained, “rests upon a total view of the relation between the legislature, judiciary and the people; upon a notion of justice in which the law must be made to seem rational and even humane to lay jurors... and upon a particular national history of contests between ‘the people’ and the Crown or state.” 

Whether you accept Kirk’s Burkean organicism or Thompson’s Muggletonian Marxism, both were right to stress that civil liberty depends on involving the people in the judicial process. Juries are a popular restraint on arbitrary power. The legitimacy of the law comes from its embeddedness in our social relations, and the rule of law is the institutionalisation of the general will of civil society. 

And so in 1851, the Indiana Constitutional Convention made jurors judges of law and fact to keep the government honest.

sch 12/25 

 

 

My Sentencing Hearing 1-1-2011

 [Since I am publishing my prison journal out of order, I decided to release this from my drafts folder, a journal entry belonging to my pretrial detention journal. I have mislaid those notes, this was found out of place in the pretrial detention notes that I have already published. If you want to read the other pretrial detention journal, just click on the link at the right of your screen for "Pretrial Detention". This has been here since 7/23/23, so I might as well get out to the public.What you are reading is what you get for your tax dollars. sch 6/18/2025.]

On October 29, 2010, I was sentenced to 151 months in the federal Bureau of Prisons. District Judge McKinney agreed with the Assistant United States Attorney that the federal Sentencing Guidelines applied to me. The judge stated that 151 months would deter me and others from similar crimes. He came to this conclusion without asking me any questions.

I was deterred before I ever got into a courtroom. I would have told the judge exactly that. Of what I saw, I would like to have never seen.

My sisters reported that the law-enforcement people (one from I.C.E., and one from Hamilton County) smirked as the sentence was handed down. I did not see this. 

For some reason, I inspired a great deal of fear amongst law enforcement. The Assistant U.S. Attorney became a forensic psychologist to refute the IU psychologist's diagnosis of me being only depressive rather than anything more pathological. 

My guess is that law enforcement did not want to question their paradigm about my crimes. I think they are wrong, that maintaining their paradigm perpetrates fraud on the public.

As for deterring other, others need to know what happened to me, so they can think it will happen to them. Without publicity, there can be no deterrence.

The Indiana Lawyer published an article on my sentencing shortly after that event, but that newspaper is not read even by all of Indiana's lawyers. 

I was told The Anderson Herald-Bulletin published a piece about 41 days after my sentencing, buried on the third page, and riddled with errors. I had to explain I was not going to state prison to the person who told me of the article.

The Indianapolis Star published nothing.

If I am going to be used as a deterrent, I want to be used properly. I told the judge I held no brief for the creators of what was being trafficked in. He did even glance at me during sentencing. Since he did not even glance my way, I do not know if my statement registered with him.  People ought to know that what they are doing has serious consequences. They may be even obscuring more dangerous actors. Until they know that, there is no deterrence. 

Here is what people should know:

1. The federal government shall send them to prison.
2. The prison sentences shall be long.
3. You will be thought a monster.
4. You will spend the remainder of your life under the supervision of the federal government.

The government will not reach these people through the newspapers. The message has to be taken right into the chat rooms. Of that, it will take more work than releasing press releases touting themselves as effective crime fighters.

I think my sentencing Order and a transcript of my sentencing hearing should be online. Put links to it into the chat rooms.

Deterrence has to scare. It is very much of the legal/judicial mindset that what happens in a courtroom is known to the general public. The public has no idea what happens in 99% of criminal cases. The legal system likes to say ignorance of the law is no excuse without remembering that is a rule of evidence, wholly irrelevant to the topic of deterrence.

When I am released, I will be on lifetime supervision by the federal courts. That leaves me thinking the government really does not have any faith in the deterrent qualities of its prison system. Which then begs the question of why 151 months should deter me any more than 60 months. But those, like my other questions raised here, need to be put to the judge and the U.S. Attorney in charge of my case.

sch

[Originally published 6/18/2025, but moved to today so to fall in line with My Sentencing 10/30/2010 (Part One) and My Sentencing 10/30/2010 (Part Two). sch 11/10/2025.]

What Is Going On With Federal Prisons? Nothing To Prevent Crime

The politicians whip us citizens up about crime - the blacks are coming for you, or the Latin American gangs have control of your city - and that they can save you. All that needs to be done is to get tougher on crime. And tougher and tougher. We've been getting tougher on crime my whole life, but still we have crime. We had Donald J. Trump talking about carnage in our cities during his First Inaugural. He is now sending ICE gangsters into cities because they are rampant with crime, decent people cannot leave their homes, and the local governments are under siege. Why anyone thinks he is now suffering from dementia is beyond me - there was no more carnage in our major cities during his first term than there is now.

But if the politicians were truly interested in making Americans safe, they would take care that when inmates return to their homes, they have the means to a different future.

That is, if the crime issue is not used to gin up campaign contributions and edge us closer to a police state. Power and money - the addictions of politicians.

Read Canceled DOJ Grants Threaten Bipartisan Work to Support People Released from Prison (Brennan Center for Justice) and decide for yourself what the politicians mean by getting tough on crime.

Republicans and Democrats have long agreed on the need to help people leaving incarceration find work and stable housing so they can contribute to their communities and avoid returning to crime. But in April, the Trump administration terminated grants initially valued at $40 million aimed at implementing the bipartisan Second Chance Act — a law first championed by President George W. Bush — which seeks to improve outcomes for people returning from prison and jail. 

Every year, more than 450,000 people leave prison and return to their communities, and millions more pass through local jails, typically staying for just over a month. The Justice Department’s cuts affect not just these people but their families and communities as well.

While some key federal support for reentry remains, it rests on shakier ground — both politically, as cross-partisan support seems suddenly more tenuous, and programmatically, with money and talent leaving the field.

I suppose this is why I will be spending my own money on the irrelevant polygraph examinations.  

Now, consider Legalizing Cocaine Is the Only Way to End the Drug War (The Intercept) 

After all, U.S.-led authorities around the world have tried everything else, and to great human cost. Coca fields across the Andes, where cocaine’s main ingredient grows, have been sprayed with harmful herbicides like glyphosate, harming the local Indigenous people for whom coca holds unique spiritual and nutritional value, and killing anything that tries to grow in the contaminated soil. Consumers and traffickers of cocaine have been imprisoned en masse, helping to create a prison–industrial complex which serves as a university of crime for its incarcerated and a fertile recruitment ground for armed drug gangs.

The war on drugs is not just a political metaphor — in many places, it’s a full-blown, militarized conflict with vast numbers of casualties. It has fueled unparalleled bloodbaths in which hundreds of thousands of people have been killed across the world, notably in Colombia, Mexico, and most recently Brazil, where a police raid on a cartel-controlled favela in Rio led to more than 130 deaths in one night in late October. “This was a slaughter, not an operation,” one bereaved mother told The Guardian. “They came here to kill.”

***

Today, cocaine is one of the world’s most reliable commodities. It’s a multibillion-dollar market serving around 50 million global consumers. Production in the Andes is at a record high. Purity is the highest it’s ever been. Cocaine is cheaper, stronger, and more accessible than at any point in history. From bankers to bricklayers, everyone is at it — and the interests of cartels all over the world are enmeshed with the legal economies.

This state of affairs represents a totemic, catastrophic policy failure. It’s high time for a grown-up conversation which acknowledges that the drug laws — by funneling untold riches to violent criminals — are more harmful than the drugs themselves, as research increasingly shows. 

Yeah, I find it hard to see our Drug War as making money for drug dealers, politicians, and bureaucrats, including the police. I see no benefit for anyone else. 

Outrage Coda by Decarceration hits on the complicity of American citizens in the dehumanizing treatment of the incarcerated.

In prison, you don’t see a lot of rich people. There are some white collar guys, but many of them have already blown through their money. Most people come from hard times, and they’re going back to hard times. Much of this stems from the resources the government places towards arresting and prosecuting people in low-income environments and economies. But it also comes from a natural social slant the public has towards the upper class. The idea is that the unhoused deserve to be reprimanded for their social status, but when we talk about the wealthy, it’s considered a dirty word. “Socialism”. “Class warfare”. The idea that the rich can buy their way out of an indictment has gone from a cynical take to accepted fact.

When asked, the public won’t have the same knee-jerk reaction towards the unhoused as they would towards those convicted of a crime. But they have the same desires, which are that they want them out of sight, out of mind. In fact, the roots of treatment are similar for both. No one wants to address the cause of criminality, just as no one wants to observe why people might end up without a roof. They just wish to sweep streets clean. This is not about quality of life. This is about treating people, and a problem, like trash that has to be brushed to the side. I say this as, yes, part of the trash swept to the side. There will be more. Notable is that this is an excellent opportunity for a company to pursue profits. Never let a crisis go to waste.

A little off the track, but another news item from my BOP alma mater is hard to resist. Inmate dies at Fort Dix prison (The Philadelphia Inquirer) surprises me not by someone dying at Fort Dix FCI, but that the Bureau of Prisons admits someone died there. When I was there, it was commonly thought by us inmates that the BOP escaped scrutiny by having inmate deaths occurring at the closest hospital. Coverups are either not working, or BOP no longer cares about scrutiny about its operations.

A 25-year-old man died on Saturday at the federal prison at Fort Dix in New Jersey, prompting prison officials to notify the FBI, officials said in a statement.

Jarrette Morales was found unresponsive at 2:15 a.m. at the Federal Correctional Institution Fort Dix at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst in Burlington County, according to the statement. He was pronounced dead by EMS officials.

Prisons are human warehouses. They are not designed to change anyone's behavior - unless the inmate wants to change and has the means spiritual and intellectual. This blog is a record of what I have done to atone for my criminal acts. Nowhere has the federal government aided or encouraged my efforts. I was lucky because I did have a reason and the means to change. What is to become of those wishing to change without any idea of how to accomplish their goals?

sch 12/4