Crablaw Update Click HERE to Bring Up Full Post

Crablaw has made new updates to our format, particularly to the sidebar links.

-- Bruce Godfrey

Split Decision Click HERE to Bring Up Full Post

A Baltimore County jury convicted Javon Clark today of attempted robbery but acquitted him of first degree murder of noted St. Pauls school teacher William Bassett. No doubt existed that Clark was the "wheel man"; the only factual issue was whether he was coerced into doing so by the actual shooter.

Clark did not mention to police during an interview that he had been coerced, but claimed later that the shooter had put a shotgun to his ribs to make him drive. As the prosecution noted, the length of a (non-sawed-off) shotgun would have made the butt of the gun stick outside of the car, yielding an awkward grip.

The traditional "felony murder" rule basically states that if someone gets killed in the commission of another felony, it is murder. The accessory rule states basically that those who knowingly aid materially a criminal act before or during that are guilty of that act; in a bank robbery, for example, the wheel man, bag man and gun man are all bank robbers. Conspiracy is sometimes confused with accessory; conspiracy means a criminal plot.

Under the felony murder rule, the jury should have convicted Clark of murder if it convicted him of attempted robbery. But juries are funny; being people, they think like people and not like law professors. They did not think that the 18 year-old should get life imprisonment. So they did not convict him of murder.

Article 23 of Maryland's Declaration of Rights states that juries have the right to be the judges of the law as well as of the facts. While I doubt that attorney Lawrence Rosenberg argued that point to the jury on behalf of Mr. Clark or included article 23 in his proposed jury instructions to the bench, Maryland law actually permits a jury, in a sense, to ignore the law or to conform the law in a criminal case to its fairest judgment.

-- Bruce Godfrey

Simplicity Click HERE to Bring Up Full Post

We are a fortunate people, probably the wealthiest large country in the world. Even the wealthier European countries do not live as well as we do materially, although there are some intangibles in Europe such as effective public transit that may compensate. Is a car an asset or an expense after 5 years? If it is an avoidable expense in Europe, one should consider the economic and non-economic value of living without a car, particularly at current gasoline prices. But I digress; we have enough cash to keep Las Vegas lit brightly 24 hours a day.

Yet I wonder: do we clutter our lives with junkm both literally and figuratively? Look at all the storage companies that keep creeping up everywhere. What goes in there? Stuff, the excess stuff of an affluent society. We do not need more stuff; we need more wisdom and more decency, more courage and character.

-- Bruce Godfrey

Personal Update on the Crab Click HERE to Bring Up Full Post

The disastrous events of the last week make the details of my personal life ridiculously trivial by comparison. After all, I have a house, a car, a refrigerator full of essentially safe food, a street that drains down into the world's largest estuary. Thank G-d for the Maryland piedmont, the undulating hills that curtail visibility in central Maryland, barring both the Kansas "long, flat miles ahead" effect and the "purple mountains' majesty" effect of the Rockies. The same hills that make it hard to find a decent soccer field in the Land of Pleasant Living provide the blessings of gravity upon millions of cubic yards of water with every rainstorm, dumping them safely into rain gutters, downspouts, gullies, streams, rivers (such as we have them) and finally the great Chesapeake Bay. My children have water, food, my wife is safe, my house is dry and cool.

I resigned my position this week at the law firm at which I have worked for the majority of my career since taking the Maryland Lawyers' Oath. I interviewed with my employer in January 1999, and began work there two weeks after our wedding. After our son Sam was born, I resigned to take a position at a small firm in Columbia. When I decided that that firm was not for me, I returned to the first firm and did an additional two years. My reasons were a combination of things - exhaustion with the negative aspects of litigation, strain on my family life, and a general perception that it was simply time to move to the next opportunity.

I am now looking for the next good thing and am taking the broadest approach possible. A million possibilities lay before me for consideration; I am lucky to be alive in a free nation, although I have not felt so free in a long time. That said, I have a lot to do. Part of me wants to start my own practice again, as I once did in the mid-nineties, this time wiser, better funded, better connected and with a much broader skill set, and with most of my equipment capital needs already in place such as a laptop, printer, business software, access to office suites and a bare-bones law library. Part of me wants practice semi-independently as an of counsel attorney of some sort where I can get semi-affordable health insurance. Part of me wants to leave the law and follow my love of public transit, which may be a pretty good career move if gas stays at $3.00 a gallon or so. Part of me wants to take a "left turn" and find a way to help the millions of poor folks in Louisiana, though doing that from Reisterstown really would not work. Part of me wants to find a union job cutting deli meat as I once did in college or slinging lattes, some honest clock punch with a minimum of the mental nastiness and paranoia of law practice.

I am glad that I do not have a large house, a large car, large things. I am so lucky that I can travel light. Some attorneys feel tied to their jobs, unfree, enslaved by the lifestyles of their colleagues. Maybe my friend Joe Gusmano is right; maybe I am half a socialist somehow, my basic libertarian worldview notwithstanding. Maybe I have been carrying water too long not as an ideological conservative or "capitalist tool" out of some Marxist caricature, but as someone who just did not take very good care of himself, who traded time for dollars poorly.

Money is an excellent tool for solving money problems; it solves few other problems and often creates many others. The Portuguese are not as wealthy as Marylanders; Maryland's economy is about the same size as Portugals, but with half of the population. Yet are Marylanders on net twice as happy? Is wealthy Montgomery County, Maryland a beacon of the good, happy life? Really? Are you bloody sure? Is Bethesda happier than a suburb of Athens or Lisbon or Seoul? Are your rich friends truly happy or are they a better funded version of desperate or bored?

More on this theme to come.

-- Bruce Godfrey