Lowering the Bar

Letters of Note: To My Old Master

Here's a remarkable letter that was posted yesterday at the very interesting blog Letters of Note.

The letter was written in August of 1865 to Col. P.H. Anderson of Big Spring, Tennessee, by Jourdon Anderson, one of his former slaves. At the time, Jourdon was living in Ohio, where he had gone after gaining his freedom in 1864. Based on the letter, it's pretty clear he was not freed by Col. Anderson, but rather by Union forces, which controlled most of Tennessee by that time. (There are towns called "Big Spring" or "Big Springs" all over Tennessee, so it's hard to say where exactly this was.) Anyway, Col. Anderson had apparently written Jourdon to ask him to come back to work for him on his farm.

That may seem remarkable, but it was not too uncommon for freed slaves to do this, or at least to stay where they were after being freed. Although they were free, many of them unfortunately had no better options. But many went north, including Jourdon. His response to Col. Anderson's letter, according to the 1865 newspaper in which it appeared, was dictated by him but "contains his ideas and forms of expression."

If that's true, he was quite a guy.

The letter starts like this:

Dayton, Ohio

August 7, 1865

To My Old Master, Colonel P.H. Anderson, Big Spring, Tennessee

Sir: I got your letter, and was glad to find that you had not forgotten Jourdon, and that you wanted me to come back and live with you again, promising to do better for me than anybody else can. I have often felt uneasy about you. I thought the Yankees would have hung you long before this, for harboring Rebs they found at your house. I suppose they never heard about your going to Colonel Martin's to kill the Union soldier that was left by his company in their stable. Although you shot at me twice before I left you, I did not want to hear of your being hurt, and am glad you are still living.

This is already a great piece of work. You aren't quite sure at this point how Jourdon feels. He does drop in the comment about Anderson going out of his way to kill a presumably wounded prisoner, and notes that Anderson took two shots at him personally, and yet he still says he's glad Anderson survived. That must be sincere, because he really has no other motive to say it, and that says something about his ability to forgive (at least a little).

The letter (I won't quote more of it, because it's very much worth reading the whole thing) goes on to ask what sort of deal Anderson is offering, and especially what wages he'd be willing to pay. (Funny, Anderson must have left that out of the letter.) Is he serious about going back? Probably not, based on the next paragraph, in which he says he and his family "have concluded to test your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served you." Thirty-two years of back pay, he calculates (plus 20 for his wife), would come to $11,680. That's actually more than reasonable -- it comes out to just under $170,000 in today's dollars. Anderson would have to add interest, of course, but could deduct what he had paid for their clothing and his three doctor's visits (in 32 years). Again, very reasonable.

Again, the whole letter is definitely worth reading, and has a fantastic closing line that I won't give away.

Letters of Note currently has 661 items posted, including some that are law-related (in case the legal content of the above was not sufficient for you). There's one from the makers of South Park to the MPAA, explaining what they had and had not agreed to cut from the first movie ... well, I guess that's not really law-related either, but it is hilarious (but also filthy, be warned).

Okay, how about this one - it's the rejection letter that Harvey Wax got after applying to Princeton Law School in 1957:

Dear Mr. Wax:

In reply to your recent letter, I regret that we must inform you that Princeton University has no Law School.

     Sincerely yours,

     Joseph L. Bolster, Jr.

Despite this apparent evidence that he did not always do his homework, Mr. Wax did later manage to get into Harvard (which does have a law school). He even graduated (in 1967, with distinction) and is still practicing law today.

I will now deliberately avoid any attempt to tie things up here by making some analogy between the practice of law and slavery, which would be ridiculous, and will instead just stop.

Florida Man Calls for Backup in TV Gunfight

A man in Pasco County, Florida, called 911 at about 1 a.m. on January 24 after he heard a commotion and then gunshots in his living room. Hiding behind his bed after grabbing his own gun, Alan Benz told dispatchers he could hear men shouting "Trash the place!" during the gun battle. Luckily, deputies arrived quickly, surrounded the house, and then bravely rushed into the living room.

They then turned off the TV.

The report says that Benz had watched a documentary earlier that evening and "had left the television and surround sound on when he went to sleep." Apparently, a drama of some kind came on later and Benz was awakened in his bedroom by the sounds of gunfire. I can see how that would be frightening and disorienting at first, maybe even for long enough to make the 911 call. More baffling is how you could fail to distinguish between a TV gunfight (even one rendered in surround sound) and one that was actually taking place in your living room, during the 5 to 10 minutes (minimum) it must have taken for the cavalry to arrive. The all-too-brief report does not attempt to explain. 

"I don't know why they would be arguing about badges -I'm just telling you what I heard. Also, I'm pretty sure one is a Mexican."

According to the report, "Benz felt bad about the false alarm. He also complimented the deputies on being professionals during the situation." I'm guessing that means (1) they didn't shoot the TV and/or (2) they didn't make fun of him until after they left the house.

Quail Murderer Encourages Feeding Human Fetuses to Livestock

"You buried the lead" in last week's post about Sen. Ralph Shortey, a reader pointed out to me, and he was right. Given that Shortey's proposed ban on the use of "aborted human fetuses" in food or food research is specifically limited to products "intended for human consumption," it would appear that the senator does not have a problem with turning the miracle of birth into animal chow, and I, for one, am outraged.

Mostly at myself for not noticing this first, but also partly because of the fetus thing.

The Los Angeles Times managed to get an interview with Shortey last week, one of the few he seems to have given. According to its report, the bill was one of 70 filed on Shortey's behalf on the previous Thursday, which was the deadline for introducing legislation in that session. (The bill was actually filed by an assistant, who also drafted it for the senator's review, although unlike the subject matter this is pretty common.) Shortey then apparently left town, speaking to the Times on Monday "after returning from tending to family matters and a weekend quail hunt" to find his phone ringing off the hook and about 400 emails in his inbox, much of it not too friendly.

He stuck by his story, though, such as it is. "Are fetuses being chopped up and put in our Doritos? No," he said. (Last week he was using "burritos" in that line -- the Times might have misheard him or maybe they focus-grouped it over the weekend.) But, he said, he does think somebody may be using human embryonic stem cells in some sort of food research. And if that somebody is doing something with something like that in some sort of research somewhere, whatever that is better not be going on anywhere in Oklahoma.

And again, it isn't, as far as anybody knows. The FDA told the Associated Press it had "never gotten any reports of fetuses being used in food production," although that could just be part of the coverup. Shortey claimed he had "done some digging" on this before deciding to ban it, and since he didn't explain further, that probably means the Internet. No, wait: "Asked if he believes everything he reads on the Internet," the Times reported, Shortey replied, "Absolutely not."

Two of the innocent lives Ralph Shortey could care less about

That's good, because despite my headline I don't actually think he intended to encourage feeding human fetuses to livestock. That would run contrary to the deep respect he shows for tiny, innocent living things, which he demonstrated by blasting a bunch of them into oblivion over the weekend. But that inference could be drawn from the language of his bill. If a law prohibited the use of human fetuses only in products "intended for human consumption," then one could argue that the legislature must not have intended to prohibit tossing a few into animal feed, or using them in any non-edible product, for that matter. That would be a logically valid though entirely stupid argument. In fact, one could argue that the sloppy language might unintentionally "encourage" some unscrupulous fetus-wrangler to go down this horrifying path. Only two ways to deal with that, it seems to me -- either withdraw the bill altogether, or amend it to make the ban even broader. I wonder which he will do.

He is apparently not to be deterred by the past week's mockery, even appearing to suggest it was partly motivated by political opposition. "The first attack," he said, "is to make that issue or person look ridiculous." (Check.) But "I've got thick skin," he continued. "I don't care what people think about me." That's also good. Still, he did seem a little miffed that people are talking about it. "This was an invitation to my colleagues to have this discussion," he told the Times. "This wasn't an open invitation for the country to chime in." How dare you discuss proposed legislation, America?

FYI, the country (or certain members of it) have signed up to receive email alerts to track the future progress of the bill, if any, and may have plans to chime in again.

Inmate Sues Himself for Violating His Civil Rights

Here's another example of autolitigation, which like the story in yesterday's post is not new but is worth adding to the archive.

Unlike the story in yesterday's post, however, in which it was not inconceivable that there might have been some reason the plaintiff thought he had to sue himself in another legal capacity, this guy was just being stupid.

In 1995, Robert Lee Brock, then (and most likely still) a guest at the Indian Creek Correctional Center in Chesapeake, Virginia, sued himself in federal court for violating his own civil rights. Brock argued that his religion (whatever it was) forbids him to drink alcohol, and so when he "partook of alcoholic beverages in 1993" and then went out and got arrested for breaking and entering and grand larceny, "I caused myself to violate my religious beliefs."

He demanded $5 million from himself for this outrage, he said, but argued that the state should have to "pay it in my behalf since I can't work and am a ward of the state."

Unsurprisingly, Brock turns out to be one of those inmates who files frivolous lawsuits repeatedly until a court finally tells him to cut it out, but normally those lawsuits are aimed at a laundry list of (sometimes) celebrity defendants. That's probably why the judge who dismissed this case noted that he had "presented an innovative approach to civil rights litigation," the one drawback being that it was "totally ludicrous."

Attorney Sues Himself

This one isn't new -- in fact, it happened in 1936 -- but I wanted to add it to my archive of such things.

 

Appeared in, e.g., the New York Times and the Evening Independent on Aug. 9, 1936

Granted, Winslow was acting in different legal capacities here (at least three of them), and my knowledge of the legal, ethical, and/or probate rules that applied in Massachusetts in the 1930s is a little spotty. But typically, if one feels the need to hire attorneys to represent oneself both as plaintiff and as defendant in the same case, there's something that needs to get untangled. I'm thinking probably someone else should have been appointed as administrator of the father's estate.

That last sentence isn't clear as to whether he hired one group of attorneys to represent him in both capacities, or had one of his legal selves retain separate counsel. But it seems like either way, he'd have been adverse to himself in this matter and so all his attorneys would have had to be disqualified because of the conflict of interest.

Whether he could then have represented himselves in that situation, I have no idea.

Bill Would Ban Using Human Fetuses in Food, Just in Case Anybody's Thinking of Doing That

Oklahoma state senator Ralph Shortey is concerned about the possibility that some nefarious person or entity is using aborted human fetuses in food, and has introduced legislation to put a stop to this. Or, to keep it from starting, because he isn't exactly sure that anybody's really doing this, or how or where they'd be doing it if they were. Still, can't be too careful. 

SB 1418 is, at least for the moment, just this one sentence:

No person or entity shall manufacture or knowingly sell food or any other product intended for human consumption which contains aborted human fetuses in the ingredients or which used aborted human fetuses in the research or development of any of the ingredients. 

Fetuses in the ingredients?! Good God, what's that about? Is Soylent Green already people? Well, maybe not, or at least Shortey seemed to back off this first clause of his bill. "People are thinking that this has to do with fetuses being chopped up and put in our burritos," Shortey said, something no one had been thinking until he said it. "That's not the case," he went on. "It's beyond that." That's right -- they are also in our chalupas.

Or not. If Shortey doesn't believe fetuses are actually being used as taco filling, then the first clause of his bill isn't necessary, but there it is. He would only talk about the second clause, on research and development, which really seems to be about stem cells. According to Shortey, there are companies out there "using embryonic stem cells to research and basically cause a chemical reaction to determine whether or not something tastes good or not." He said he read last year that a pro-life group was boycotting an unnamed company for this, and I guess if you've read someplace that somebody is upset about something that might be happening somewhere in the world, that's really all you need to know before writing a law banning what you believe that thing to be.

What's really going on? NPR noted that Shortey may have heard of a company that has a patent for what is "essentially an automated taste test," a patent that does mention a widely used stem-cell line originally cultured from human embryonic kidney cells. The company has denied it's using these cells, but let's assume it is. Based on the patent, it looks like the plan is to extract proteins from the cells and put them in some sort of testing array to see if the proteins react to various flavor compounds. It would not be putting any of the cells into food. Hence, no fetal burritos. And since the cell line has been around for 40 years, research using it does not seem to pose a threat to the fetuses of today. So that second clause only seems to make sense if you oppose any stem cell research of any kind under any circumstances. Which, coincidentally, Shortey does.

By the way, Taco Bell won a lawsuit earlier this year in which plaintiffs alleged its food contained less than 100% USDA-inspected premium beef. So it may comfort you to know that its burritos have been inspected fairly recently.

Penguin Defecates in Kentucky Legislature

I don't know about you, but I for one am sick and tired of these penguins befouling our nation's halls of government. Seems like everytime you turn around, there's another penguin pooping in a legislature.

Can the candidates take this up at the next debate? Surely they're running out of subjects by now anyway.

The Disrespectful Blackfooted Penguin

The target yesterday was the Kentucky Senate, to which a penguin had been invited because the body was taking up Senate Resolution 92, honoring the Newport Aquarium for its contributions to the "aquatic world in general" and specifically "its stewardship of sea life and penguins." The aquarium was represented by Paula, an African blackfooted penguin, who was in the chamber as Sen. Katie Stine presented the resolution.

But Stine's presentation was interrupted by Senate President David Williams, who noted that their guest had "just defecated on the floor."

The resolution went forward despite the breach of protocol, and apparently even passed with no dissenting votes. This shows great confidence in the aquarium's continuing stewardship, I think, as does the fact that Paula observed the rest of the proceedings from atop Williams' desk. Presumably most of the risk had passed at that point, but still.

Balloon Stolen

Have you no sense of decency, Minnesota balloon thieves? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?

A smiley-face balloon, no less.

Not since someone stole two bags of juggling equipment and a unicycle during the 2006 Flatland Juggling Festival has the Midwest been rocked by a senseless crime of such minitude.

Link: Albert Lea (Minn.) Tribune (via Dave Barry)

Further Pain on Appeal for Gun-Safety Instructor Who Shot Himself

The Legal Times reports that on January 17, the D.C. Circuit affirmed the dismissal of Lee Paige's lawsuit against his employer, the Drug Enforcement Administration, likely bringing this saga to a close.

As you may recall, Mr. Paige shot himself in the leg in 2004, approximately three seconds after telling a roomful of people that he was the only person in the room "professional enough" to handle a gun. Painful in a different way was the fact that an audience member had been recording the gun-safety presentation, a video that later reached the Internet. Paige sued the DEA in 2006, claiming someone there had leaked the video, causing him embarrassment and further injury. For example, he alleged, "[a]s a result of the notoriety arising from the disclosure of the videotape, Mr. Paige is no longer permitted or able to give educational motivational speeches and presentations." As I suggested before, that may not be a result of the notoriety per se, but rather the strange aversion people have developed to being in the same room with him when he's armed.

Paige's claims were based on federal and Florida state privacy laws, which (generally speaking) prohibit the intentional or willful disclosure of private facts under certain circumstances. But like the district judge, the D.C. Circuit ruled that Paige could not prove these claims. An internal DEA investigation had (maybe unsurprisingly) failed to determine who released the video, and although the court had some harsh words for the DEA's data-handling procedures, it found there was no proof of intentional or willful disclosure.

Even if there had been, Paige's bigger problem was that he was making a privacy claim about something he did in public, and which was being recorded with his knowledge. Paige was giving a gun-safety demonstration (or maybe "gun-danger demonstration" is more appropriate) to the public in a public place, and this did not involve any private facts, even if the results were embarrassing. In fact, the court held that the incident was a "matter of public concern," another reason that Paige had no right to keep it private. For example, the court noted, the public "has a legitimate interest in the manner in which law enforcement officers perform their duties," an interest that in my opinion is especially strong as to officers who, after inadvertently shooting themselves during a demonstration, then ask an assistant to bring them a second gun so the show can go on. Despite his bravery, the audience decided not to stick around, and this seems like information that future audiences might like to have as well.

It doesn't look like there are any potential issues here for the U.S. Supreme Court, which is bad for Paige's case but probably best for whatever reputation he may have left.

If Pajamas Are Outlawed, Only Outlaws Will Wear Pajamas

I guess that slogan does work better for guns, probably because that's something people might conceivably care about.

At least, until recently it honestly hadn't occurred to me that the wearing of pajamas, even in public, could cause any controversy. Maybe it should have, given the number of words I have directed at the nation's War on Sagging. See, e.g., "Georgia Town Enters Fight Against Sagging Pants," Lowering the Bar (Sept. 14, 2010) (noting that, at the time, at least a dozen state and local legislatures had taken up this critical issue). At least three Louisiana towns banned sagging, including Shreveport (a state ban failed in the Senate). As we can now see, failing to stand up for saggy pants has put our pajama bottoms at risk.

Michael Williams, a commissioner for Caddo Parish (which includes Shreveport), says he was horrified when he visited a local Walmart and espied a group of young miscreants "wearing pajama pants and house shoes." He was extra-horrified when he glanced at one of the young men and noticed that "at the part where there should have been underwear" - you know the part - one of his parts in particular was allegedly "showing through the fabric." Seems like existing law on indecent exposure should cover that, if it was really that bad, but Williams concluded further legislation was necessary.

"Pajamas are designed to be worn in the bedroom at night," said Williams, likely after extensive research on the history and design of pajamas. "If you can't [wear them to the] courthouse, why are you going to do it in a restaurant or in public?" (Um, because those aren't courthouses?) Williams also invoked the "slippery-slope" argument, of course. "Today it's pajamas," he said, "tomorrow it's underwear. Where does it stop?" Seems to me there's only one further step once you get to underwear. This guy is really not that imaginative. 

Which raises the question of what such an ordinance might look like. It would have to define "pajamas," for one thing, which could be tricky. Williams has suggested the term could be defined as "a garment sold in the sleepwear section of department stores." But that puts our pajama rights in the hands of department-store managers, though it could also provide an easy way around the ban by just shelving pajamas differently. Maybe partly for this reason, the parish sheriff does not seem sold on the idea. "It's going to be very difficult to enforce the way it's described," he said. Doesn't mean they won't try; Shreveport has been enforcing its saggy-pants ban, reporting 31 "incidents" during 2010, one every 12 days or so, involving the "wearing of pants below the waist in public." Presumably no other crimes were committed in the city that year.

The Shreveport Times was able to locate two citizens who could be affected by the ban. Neither seemed too happy about it. "We all wear our pajamas out," said Tracy Carter. By "we," she meant herself and her three children, one of whom was wearing dinosaur pajamas at the time in flagrant violation of community standards. "They're covering everything," she said of her PJs. (Thankfully, they were.) Another pajama bandit was more outspoken. "I'm an American," said Khiry Tisdem, "and I can wear my [pajamas] anywhere I want." There is a First Amendment issue here, it's true, although some will ask what the Founders thought about this. "I'm a grown man," Tisdem continued, wearing pants with pictures of Stewie from Family Guy on them. "I can wear my clothes the way I want." We'll see about that.

Williams said he plans to "poll his fellow commissioners" on the topic in February, and presumably will then draft an ordinance to address the pajama crisis if a majority of them don't think this is stupid.