A little over a month ago, a blog post by a law student got a lot of attention on some of the criminal defense blogs that I read. Mostly it was because he was describing, with great pride, an interaction with the police where his superior knowledge of the law stymied the officer’s efforts to […]
Back a hundred and fifty years ago, when I was in the midst of a totally different career as a touring performance poet, I had a show in Portland, Oregon at a collectively-run coffee shop called the Red And Black Cafe. It was probably the best night I had on the west coast on that tour, and so I’ve remembered the place (and the vegan carrot cake they served) fondly. So I was surprised, a few days ago, to see a Facebook group pop up called “Boycott the Red And Black Cafe”. Who’s got a problem with a bunch of Portland coffee anarchists?
It turns out that the place had actually been making national news for an incident in which they exercised their right to refuse service to a uniformed police officer who’d stopped by for a cup. The Internet, of course, got all huffy about it. That’s what the Internet is for, after all. And I’ll admit that it looks kind of petty – the cop is probably a pretty nice guy, all things considered (most people are, in my experience), and he probably just thought the place looked interesting and was in the mood for a cup of coffee. It is a neat-looking coffee shop. N0 one’s account of the incident had the officer bothering customers or behaving in any capacity other than as a guy who wanted a cup of coffee. So on the surface, yeah, it’s pretty easy to side with the cop and the Internet. The anarchist coffee shop was rude!
There’ve been a lot of good blog posts this week about the Berghuis v. Thompkins Supreme Court decision that (as Justice Sotomayor succinctly put it in her dissenting opinion) presumes that a person facing police interrogation has waived his or her fifth and sixth amendment rights unless that person explicitly informs the police (in language […]
I was out watching a Cubs game the other night, and made insta-friends with some other guys at the bar. (Chicago sports fans tend to bond quickly over shared heartbreak.) During a commercial, one of them started playing with his coaster, which was placed there by a DWI attorney and advised strongly the basic things […]