You remember email, right?  That thing you’ve been using as your main source of written communication since the last decade?  The major form of correspondence that has surpassed old-fashioned snail mail and which is relied upon by everyone from business titans to celebrities, the president, and your aging grandmother (who floods your inbox with those funny grammatically incorrect cat pictures)?  Yeah, that email – it’s no longer protected against searches from the police.

“No, that can’t be right!  Right?  Email?  They are no different than letters you received in the mail; how can they not be afforded the same protection?” Well, apparently if you think like that you’ve been preempted by a federal judge, my friend.

Specifically, this ruling comes down from and Oregon Federal Judge Michael Mosman (I almost typed Michael Madsen; if he gave the ruling I might’ve been less outraged).  Judge Mosman argues that unlike regular snail mail which is handled by postal employees, e-mail should not be afforded the same protection against unlawful searches and seizures under the Fourth Amendment because when an email is sent, it goes through various Internet service providers.  By traveling through these different providers, each email leaves a digital image of itself with each ISP.  And apparently this fact is enough to distinguish email from regular land mail because by leaving a digital copy of itself, emails are in essence open to the ISP to read and monitor and therefore people who send emails cannot expect to have the same level of privacy as when one sends a regular piece of mail through the post office.  Judge Mosman’s full opinion can be read here (please note that the link is to a PDF).

Sound mental?  Yeah, well it should.  Judge Mosman seems to hang his ruling on the notion that because emails aren’t sealed in envelopes like a written letters, people should expect it to be read.  Now to be fair, police would still need a warrant to search through your email.  However, they’ll just need to submit the warrant to an ISP that has your emails to get access to them, thereby completely bypassing you and giving you no notice before invading your private emails.

Now on one hand, Judge Mosman’s argument makes some sense.  Junk mail in the form of post cards and brochures are almost never sealed and the courts have generally viewed these as forms of advertisement and therefore not protected under the Fourth Amendment since it’s argued that junk mail is meant to be seen by as many people as possible.  However, this is also where Judge Mosman’s argument breaks down because private emails aren’t advertisements, but are actual private communications between parties.

“But Andrew, what about the whole issue of emails leaving digital copies of themselves on ISPs and not being sealed like normal letters?”  Well let me answer that question, too, and thank you for asking so kindly.  Though emails are not physical sealed, they are often digitally encrypted to prevent prying eyes from seeing its contents.  Therefore, an analogy can be drawn between sealing and encryption since they both show the sender’s intent to keep their communication private.  Furthermore, like postal workers who we trust not to open our mail, similarly we trust our ISPs not to read our emails.

Anyway, all my ranting is meaningless until someone challenges Judge Mosman’s ruling or the legislature passes a law that gives emails the same protection against unlawful searches and seizures that physical mail enjoys.

So get started people, write your senators and congressmen, just don’t email them – for now.

Email – It’s Fast, Easy, And Now Unprotected From Unlawful Searches is a post from: LegalMatch Law Blog

It seems that our justice system is being run by a bunch of Catholic school nuns hell-bent on tidiness because court cases are being thrown out for completely arbitrary reasons.  How arbitrary you ask?  How about poorly-stapled-document arbitrary?

Yes, that’s right people, if you’re planning on filing a claim in the New York Supreme Court, you better make sure your papers are aligned properly and the sharp points on your staples are filed down because the nuns running that court are also made out of sugar.  According to Justice Charles J. Markey, “[T]he poor stapling of the papers was so negligent as to inflict, and did inflict repeatedly, physical injury to the court personnel handling them.”  That must’ve been one incredibly bad staple job…

I’d hate to be the attorney on that one, what an uncomfortable phone call you’d have to make to the client.

“My motion was denied?  But how, I thought my case had a sound legal basis??  What, a staple??”

Now to be fair, that staple from hell did draw blood, twice.  And at the very least the court gave a reason for denying the motion, as unjustified as it may be, which is much better than what some courts give those trying to shove their cases before an almighty judge.  The court also claims that the reason for the denial stemmed from the lawyer forgetting to include his signature as well as missing affidavits from the plaintiff.  Way to recover…

Seriously though, a staple?  Reading this story, one can’t help but think of the first rule of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure: “all civil actions and proceedings in the United States district courts…should be construed and administered to secure the just…determination of every action and proceeding.”  Which any smart-ass first-year law student can tell you basically means that the court is supposed to look at all claims so as to do justice for all those involved.  Justice.  Denying a plaintiff’s motion because the staple they used to keep their documents from flying apart doesn’t sound very fair to me (and I hope it doesn’t to you either).  Whatever happened to, oh I don’t know, judging claims on their merits?  Call me crazy and old-fashioned, but I’m just one of the nutty guys who still believe that courts were created to judge everything fairly.  They should really start tearing down those blind justice statutes all over the place.

So what’s the moral of this story?  Evidently, it’s that when you hire a lawyer make sure you insist that they include their kindergarten teacher on their list of references.

Justice is Blind, But Apparently Not Immune to Jagged Staples is a post from: LegalMatch Law Blog

Well actually, not the smelly people. You can go home, according to courts in Massachusetts.

During a murder trial, a judge in Massachusetts dismissed a juror because, in her words:

[The juror], for whatever reason, had some very bad, I guess to be blunt again, body odor, which was extremely strong, and I was able to detect in my lobby, as was the clerk…

The judge went on to say she was concerned that the other jurors could not actually concentrate on the trial due to the offensive smell emanating from their fellow juror. I guess if it is stinking up the lobby behind the court room, then it must have been pretty bad.

This case comes on the heels of another recent controversial juror dismissal, this time out of Florida. In a drug, weapon, and assault trial, the prosecutor struck the only African American on the jury pool. The defendant immediately challenged the prosecutor’s decision. The prosecutor stated that in his experience, overweight jurors were sympathetic to defendants. The prosecutor’s conclusory reasoning, coupled with their failure to strike other overweight defendant’s from the jury pool, did not sit well with the Florida Appeals Court and the decision was reversed.

How are these different? Issues of fairness to the defendant were not the main concern with the dismissal of the smelly juror. Instead, it was more an issue of fairness to the court. Can you conduct trial, (or do anything, for that matter) while being distracted by an offensive odor? Probably not, according to the judge.

So next time you get your jury summons, note the date you are supposed to report. Usually it is a good month away. If a deferment is not in the cards, don’t cancel those holiday plans! Just neglect your personal hygiene in the meantime, and you’ll be home free.

Avoid Jury Duty by Not Taking a Shower is a post from: LegalMatch Law Blog

While certainly creative, Sacco is not alone in his tactics.  Judges across the country are increasingly using alternative methods to enforce their messages.  San Francisco’s U.S. District Court Judge Vaughn R. Walker, for example, sentenced a San Francisco teen who stole letters from mailboxes to stand outside a post office wearing a sign that read:  “I stole mail.  This is my punishment.” 

The constitutionality of alternative punishments has been questioned by individual lawyers, as well as civil rights groups such as the ACLU and The Sentencing Project.  The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit upheld Judge Walker’s sign-bearing punishment as unusual, but not cruel.  It’s less clear, however, whether other practices, such as displaying shoplifters’ mug shots on electronic displays around malls will be upheld as well.  The efficacy of alternative punishments has also been questioned by a number of groups who criticize these methods as unfairly targeting youth offenders. 

It wouldn’t hurt to provide some oversight of these maverick judges to ensure that alternative sentences remain within constitutional bounds.  However, given the dismal success rates of traditional punishments, overflowing prisons, and corrections budget shortfalls, judges should be granted some leeway in crafting more effective brands of justice.

Hit It, Judge! Colorado Judge Turns Up The Volume On Repeat Offenders is a post from: LegalMatch Law Blog

Back in 2007, local Washington D.C. laundromat Custom Cleaners made the unfortunate mistake of losing D.C. administrative Judge Roy Pearson’s pants. After some particularly vicious back and forth, Custom Cleaners made the unheard of offer of $12,000 to cover Mr. Pearson for his lost gray trousers with red and blue stripes. Outraged at being offered a measly $12,000, the judge decided a more fitting avenue of attack would be suing the owners of Custom Cleaners for $64 million dollars. (A truly hilarious transcript of some of the court proceedings can be found here, courtesy of ABC news. Included is the dramatic moment when the defendant tries to tell Mr. Pearson they found his pants, but he tearfully denies they are his because he would “never wear pants with cuffs.”)

Mr. Pearson arrived at this outrageous sum (later reduced to $54 million) thusly: He multiplied the daily statutory damages limit of $1,500 by the number of days his pants were missing. He then multiplied this number by three, because there are three owners of Custom Cleaners (a husband, a wife, and a son), and threw in $500,000 in emotional distress damages due to the “mental anguish” he suffered by not being able to wear his special trousers to his first day of work as an administrative law judge.

Thankfully his job didn’t last long, and it wasn’t because his pants were not nice enough. Mr. Pearson lost his job after losing the case and being thoroughly denounced by the legal community for his mockery of the civil court system. Now, however, a three judge panel in D.C. resurrected the issue by awarding Mr. Pearson’s appeal.

The D.C. appellate court apparently wants to assist Mr. Pearson in further embarrassing himself and the courts. Already, conservative commentators and tort reform advocates are crying foul and running wild with charges that the case is indicative of all that is un-holy in the American legal system.

The case is being reviewed today, and hopefully the judges settle it once and for all. I wonder though—what kind of pants will Mr. Pearson be wearing for the hearing?

The Brotherhood of the Traveling $54 Million Pants is a post from: LegalMatch Law Blog