Limits on recording child cellphone

It used to be that parents had the authority to act on behalf of their underage kids. Now they can be second-guessed by judges who might have other opinions about the child's best interests.

The NY Daily News reports:

Parents can legally eavesdrop on young children if they reasonably believe it would be in the child's best interest, the state's highest court ruled Tuesday, establishing an exception to New York law against wiretaps without the consent of at least one person on a call.

The 4-3 ruling by the Court of Appeals involved a cellphone recording of a man threatening to beat the 5-year-old son of his live-in girlfriend. The boy's father recorded the conversation.

"The father had a good faith, objectively reasonable basis to believe that it was necessary for the welfare of his son to record the violent conversation he found himself listening to," Judge Eugene Fahey wrote for the majority.

He cautioned that the ruling shouldn't be interpreted as a way to avoid criminal liability for wiretaps "when a parent acts in bad faith."

The live-in boyfriend, Anthony Badalamenti, was later convicted of child endangerment, assault and weapon possession. His attorney challenged the tape as inadmissible evidence from illegal eavesdropping.

Fahey cautioned that courts must consider the age and maturity of the child in considering parental eavesdropping. He didn't specify an age.

A key question "is whether the child is capable of formulating well-reasoned judgments of his or her own," he wrote.

So I guess a New Yorker can eavesdrop on a 5-year-old who is being threatened with a beating. In any other case, I have no idea.

I think that it is crazy that a father has to make a legalistic best-interests analysis to record his 5-year-old son in a potentially dangerous situation. But that is the society we now live in, and the dad only won by a 4-3 vote in a NY appeals court.

A big surge in medical child abuse

I have posted about Justina Pelletier, a kid who was seized by Massachusetts after conflicting medical diagnoses. Now there are many other such cases:

The term “medical child abuse” dates from the mid-1990s, as a condition related to Munchausen syndrome by proxy, a mental disturbance in which a parent induces illness in a child to get attention. It has caught on with doctors over the last decade. But what constitutes “unnecessary medical care” — the heart of the test for medical child abuse — is vague and subjective. After all, doctors often disagree with one another when it comes to the diagnosis and treatment of complicated conditions. ...

As I’ve researched medical child abuse over the past year, several advocacy and support groups for patients with rare diseases told me they had seen an alarming rise in medical child abuse charges: MitoAction (which supports patients with mito); the American Partnership for Eosinophilic Disorders (disorders relating to white blood cells); the Ehlers-Danlos National Foundation (a rare disorder of the connective tissues); and Dysautonomia International (autonomic nervous system disorders). Through these groups, I’ve surveyed 95 parents who have been accused, in 30 states.

Dr. Frances D. Kendall, the geneticist in Atlanta who diagnosed my daughter’s mitochondrial disease, told me that she has seen a rising number of cases in which the parents of children with mito had been wrongly charged. Dr. Mark S. Korson, the geneticist who treated Justina Pelletier at Tufts, also said that such charges have snowballed in recent years.

Most states lump “medical child abuse” into general child abuse or neglect statistics, and can’t break out separate numbers. Michigan is an exception. Its figures show that, on average, 51 charges of medical abuse have been made against caretakers each year between 2010 and 2013. Extrapolating this to the national population would mean more than 1,600 charges each year.

Child neglect used to mean not getting the basic necessities of food and clothing. Now it means CPS gets to second-guess expert medical opinion.

As I’ve researched medical child abuse over the past year, several advocacy and support groups for patients with rare diseases told me they had seen an alarming rise in medical child abuse charges: MitoAction (which supports patients with mito); the American Partnership for Eosinophilic Disorders (disorders relating to white blood cells); the Ehlers-Danlos National Foundation (a rare disorder of the connective tissues); and Dysautonomia International (autonomic nervous system disorders). Through these groups, I’ve surveyed 95 parents who have been accused, in 30 states.

Dr. Frances D. Kendall, the geneticist in Atlanta who diagnosed my daughter’s mitochondrial disease, told me that she has seen a rising number of cases in which the parents of children with mito had been wrongly charged. Dr. Mark S. Korson, the geneticist who treated Justina Pelletier at Tufts, also said that such charges have snowballed in recent years.

Most states lump “medical child abuse” into general child abuse or neglect statistics, and can’t break out separate numbers. Michigan is an exception. Its figures show that, on average, 51 charges of medical abuse have been made against caretakers each year between 2010 and 2013. Extrapolating this to the national population would mean more than 1,600 charges each year.

This is a big attack on parental rights. Parents should always have the right to get a second medical opinion, and to choose which medical advice to follow.

OUR legal system protects parents’ rights to make decisions for their kids, even if those decisions are sometimes less than ideal.

Courts have long dealt with cases of neglect, in which parents are charged with denying kids necessary care. In these cases, courts have allowed the state to require care only when doctors agree about the treatment, its medical benefits are clear, and its risks are small. This exception is narrow because courts recognize that parents are usually far better positioned — and motivated — than doctors or the state to know and do what is in their child’s best interests. These protections should apply to medical-abuse charges.

Government should not get involved when doctors disagree about a diagnosis or course of treatment, the doctors have full knowledge of the child’s medical record, and a parent chooses one doctor’s opinion over another’s. It should intervene only when there is evidence that a parent has intentionally provided significant misinformation to physicians, fabricated elements of the medical history or induced medical symptoms. Parents should always be allowed to seek second (and third) opinions.

We must protect children from the rare disturbed parent. But medical child abuse, as it has been understood, is far too big and blunt an instrument to accomplish this purpose. It has harmed too many genuinely sick kids, and made life hell for too many loving parents. It is time to end the medical abuse panic.

Maintaining faulty integrity of court record

People and businesses with real integrity are happy to correct errors when suitable evidence is presented. The family court has a different attitude. If someone keeps presenting proof of mistakes, then ban him from doing that.

National Parents Organization reports:

It seems that family courts there have prohibited the use of cellphones in the courtroom. No, it’s not because people were disrupting the proceedings by talking on phones or the phones’ constantly ringing, chiming, alerting, etc. The judges don’t seem to mind any of that; what’s gotten them to issue their blanket order is that one litigant had the nerve to record the proceedings on his/her phone and use it to claim that the official court reporter’s transcript was inaccurate.

This, according to the judges, poses a “security threat” to the courts. Really.

The policy, effective March 9, has been adopted to maintain the security of the courthouse, preserve the integrity of the court record and the trial process and to ensure appropriate courtroom behavior.

"Unfortunately the irresponsible act of one person is causing us to respond at this juncture," said Chief Judge Paul Chamberlain…

"It's a harsh remedy to the problems that are coming to light," he said. "We have recognized for years that this is a security issue and maintaining the integrity of the record issue, but trying to be as open as possible to the public. We cannot allow people to come into the courthouse, make recordings, and then present those recordings as a record of court proceedings. There is an official record, a way to get that record, and it maintains the integrity of the court and individual cases to make sure an accurate and complete record gets out," Chamberlain said.

Eyewitness testimony is often quite wrong

A NY Times story demonstrates how eyewitness testimony can be completely wrong:

Contrary to what Mr. O’Grady said, the man who was shot had not been trying to get away from the officers; he was actually chasing an officer from the sidewalk onto Eighth Avenue, swinging a hammer at her head. Behind both was the officer’s partner, who shot the man, David Baril.

And Ms. Khalsa did not see Mr. Baril being shot while in handcuffs; he is, as the video and still photographs show, freely swinging the hammer, then lying on the ground with his arms at his side. He was handcuffed a few moments later, well after he had been shot.

There is no evidence that the mistaken accounts of either person were malicious or intentionally false. Studies of memories of traumatic events consistently show how common it is for errors to creep into confidently recalled accounts, according to cognitive psychologists.

“It’s pretty normal,” said Deryn Strange, an associate psychology professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “That’s the hard thing to get our heads around. It’s frightening how easy it is to build in a false memory.”

In one study, Dr. Strange showed people a film of a car accident in which five people, including a baby, were killed. The film was edited to remove segments of the accident. Then she tested the subjects 24 hours later on what they recalled. People were able to accurately describe what they had, in fact, seen, Dr. Strange said, but a significant number — 36 percent — also professed to have strong memories of parts of the crash that had actually not been shown to them.

“They are more likely to do that when they are upset about the event — if they are getting intrusive thoughts about it, or talking to other people about it,” she said.

A leading researcher in the field of witness memory, Elizabeth Loftus of the University of California, Irvine, said there was ample evidence that people found ways to plug holes in their recollections.

“If someone has gaps in their narrative, they can fill it in with lots of things,” she said. “Often they fill it with their own expectations, and certainly what they may hear from others.”

These are not the knowingly untrue or devious statements of people who are deliberately lying. False memories can be as persuasive as genuine ones, Dr. Loftus said: “When someone expresses it with detail and confidence and emotion, people are going to believe it.”

Said Dr. Strange, “It is surprising to the average person how quickly memories can be distorted.”

That was certainly Ms. Khalsa’s response.

“I feel totally embarrassed,” she said on Thursday, after having seen the video.

In family court, wives often lie to bring bogus charges. This shows that they can be wrong even when they are trying to tell the truth.

Obama pushes for more LGBT kids

The LGBTQIA attacks on the civil liberties of everyone else continue. Now Pres. Barack Obama wants to censor private counseling sessions.

The NY Times reports:

A 17-year-old transgender youth, Leelah Alcorn, stunned her friends and a vast Internet audience in December when she threw herself in front of a tractor-trailer after writing in an online suicide note that religious therapists had tried to convert her back to being a boy.

In response, President Obama is calling for an end to such therapies aimed at “repairing” gay, lesbian and transgender youth. His decision on the issue is the latest example of his continuing embrace of gay rights.

In a statement that was posted on Wednesday evening alongside a WhiteHouse.gov petition begun in honor of Ms. Alcorn, Mr. Obama condemned the practice, sometimes called “conversion” or “reparative” therapy, which is supported by some socially conservative organizations and religious doctors.

The White House statement says:

When assessing the validity of conversion therapy, or other practices that seek to change an individual’s gender identity or sexual orientation, it is as imperative to seek guidance from certified medical experts. The overwhelming scientific evidence demonstrates that conversion therapy, especially when it is practiced on young people, is neither medically nor ethically appropriate and can cause substantial harm.

No, it is not true that the scientific evidence is against conversion therapy.

A dirty secret of the profession is that psychotherapy hardly ever changes or cures anyone. The success rate on most problems is very low, unless the patient is motivated the change in the first place. Mostly counseling just talk to patients to make them feel better about their problems.

I've looked at the supposedly scientific statements against conversion therapy. They go like this: If you assume that sexual orientation and identity are innate and immutable, and that a determination has been made of a particular orientation and identity, then anecdotes suggest that trying to change either is often harmful or unproductive.

There are also anecdotes claiming conversion therapy can be successful, and no good scientific studies comparing them.

In short, there is no good scientific evidence that conversion therapy is any worse than any other psychotherapy.

As a practical matter, the consequence of a law like what Obama proposes would be that if someone is confused about his sexuality and seeks counseling, the counseling will have to encourage him to be gay or transsexual.

You might say that no one should have to endure psychotherapy to change their fundamental beliefs. I would go further, and say that no one should be forced to endure psychotherapy at all, as I believe the whole field does more harm than good, and that forcing it is an abuse of human rights. But the family (and juvenile) court do it all the time. Judges order parents off to counseling because it is supposed to help everyone, or to change behavior in response to dubious complaints, or as punishment, or as some weird fitness test. That is, if the dad does not do the ordered counseling and get a good report, then the judge has an excuse to cut off child custody and visitation.

If the shrinks had any ethics, they would refuse all court-ordered counseling.

Here is a typical response to Obama:

So, this is where we are now.

A mentally ill person wants to be the opposite sex. A counselor suggests that the person consider accepting the natural sex. Mental patient commits suicide and blames counselor’s suggestion of just going natural.

n=1

Based on this sample size, the President (not a psychiatrist nor a peer committee of such) suggests as a matter of public policy and professional practice that mental patients not be counseled to accept their natural sex rather to embrace their delusions of being the opposite sex.

Are we serious?

This is at least as stupid as any religion.

Is the president now some kind of high priest who advises all people on all matters whatever without regard to being entirely unqualified?

This is one of the sickest opinions to come out of the White House. Here is what former VP Dick Cheney says, about other policies:

I vacillate between the various theories I’ve heard, but you know, if you had somebody as president who wanted to take America down, who wanted to fundamentally weaken our position in the world and reduce our capacity to influence events, turn our back on our allies and encourage our adversaries, it would look exactly like what Barack Obama’s doing. I think his actions are constituted in my mind those of the worst president we’ve ever had.

I do not agree with anything Obama has done.

Wisdom of Rush

I occasionally listen to Rush Limbaugh on the radio defending right-wing views. He has many views on Republican politics, most of which are off-topic for this blog. But he has a coherent ideological basis.

To him, the Right wing believes in individual and family autonomy, while the Left wing believes in dependency. The Right focuses on facts and results, and the Left on feelings and intents. He sides with the Right.

If you think this is unfair, just listen to him. He elaborates on this with examples nearly everyday.

People who praise Pres. Obama, for his handling of health care, or Ferguson cops, or Syria, or almost anything else, do so primarily for his intent, not his results. Rush demands to look at results.

This is also a difference between male and female thinking. Men look at facts and results, while women look at feelings and intents. Yesterday Rush was illustrating this with political campaign statements by Ted Cruz and Hillary Clinton.

Your typical leftist Obama supporter can listen to Rush and not understand a word he is saying. They simply do not understand his worldview. I have seen it myself in people I know. Leftists rarely think for themselves; they just get connected to like-minded allies, and parrot what they say.

Likewise, I doubt that this blog persuades any of the supporters of the family court or CPS systems. They do not understand male thinking. Yes, I know some of them are men, but they are probably Obama supporters with low testosterone and low critical thinking skills.

A consistent theme of this blog is that the family court should not have the authority to micro-manage peoples' personal lives. You can be prosecuted for crimes that written in the statutes, if properly noticed and proved, but no judge or psychologist should be able to tell you to do something based on his own personal prejudices about the Best Interest Of The Child (BIOTCh). I guess that is a right-wing or libertarian view. Several years ago I would have said that it was an American view that is broadly held. Apparently not.

Update: I just heard Rush calling BS on this:

While the case involving a student the magazine identified as "Jackie" has been suspended for lack of evidence, "that doesn’t mean that something terrible did not happen" to her that night in September 2012, Timothy J. Longo, chief of police in Charlottesville, Va., said during a news conference.

"We are just not able to gather sufficient facts to conclude what that something may have been."

Rush is correct that the Jackie UVa story waa conclusively proved false, and the Left's preoccupation with this story shows that they disregard the facts.

President prosecutes those who call him a chimp

After 6 months of Pres. Barack Obama telling us that the Ferguson MO shooting was racist and encouraging rioters, his DoJ now admits that the shooting was 100% justified. But they are going to punish Ferguson anyway because the blacks there commit more crimes than whites!

USA Today reports:

When it comes to racially lopsided arrests, the most remarkable thing about Ferguson, Mo., might be just how ordinary it is.

Police in Ferguson — which erupted into days of racially charged unrest after a white officer killed an unarmed black teen — arrest black people at a rate nearly three times higher than people of other races.

It goes on to explain that blacks commit crimes at that rate, and that Ferguson arrests are similar to the rest of the country.

The smoking gun that the report uses to prove that Ferguson cops are racist is that there were 7 racist cop-to-cop emails over 6 years, including:

An April 2011 email depicted President Barack Obama as a chimpanzee.

Really? We had 8 years of the mainstream media portraying G.W. Bush as a chimp or monkey, as pictured above. I got that from a simple Google search. Doesn't anyone remember that? My local newspaper had an editorial cartoon on Friday attacking him, even tho he has been out of public life for 6 years.

I saw many more personal attacks on Bush than Obama. But of course Bush never tried to prosecute those who made fun of him. Just Obama and Third World dictators do that.

This shows just how far gone our ruling leftoid elites are. No free speech, even in private email. Everyone is guilty until proven innocent. They will start race riots if it suits their partisan political objectives. When they attack, they assume the worst motives.

That point about motives is important. The leftoid thought police act as if they have mind-reading powers. They do not judge you for what you do. They judge you for what they say is your motive for whatever you are doing.

They will cherry-pick facts in order to prove that you are a bad person, without comparing those facts to the population at large. The family court and CPS do this all the time. They will focus on some accident, or fight, or alleged inattentiveness, or whatever they can find to make you look bad, even if the facts are completely normal behavior for 50 million other parents.

Is anyone standing up to this nonsense? I no longer get Fox News TV, but I doubt that it even has the nerve to stand up to what Obama is doing. Anyone who does will be called a racist, and lacking empathy for the poor black people in Ferguson.

The population of Ferguson was 99% white in 1970, and 85% white in 1980. Now it is 67% black. Obviously black people are not treated that badly, because they keep moving there. Maybe they like the way that the white cops keep order there.

This is the same Obama administration that blocks the Keystone pipeline because of possible environmental problems, and not for anything that has been identified. It just adopted FCC regulations to regulate the internet, not because of what service providers are doing, but because of what they might do in the future. Ferguson is guilty without evidence. See a pattern here? These are the same kinds of people who consider fathers guilty until proven innocent.

Update: Now Obama says:

We’re the immigrants who stowed away on ships to reach these shores, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free –- Holocaust survivors, Soviet defectors, the Lost Boys of Sudan. We’re the hopeful strivers who cross the Rio Grande because we want our kids to know a better life. That’s how we came to be. (Applause.)

We’re the slaves who built the White House and the economy of the South. (Applause.) We’re the ranch hands and cowboys who opened up the West, and countless laborers who laid rail, and raised skyscrapers, and organized for workers’ rights.

We’re the fresh-faced GIs who fought to liberate a continent. And we’re the Tuskeegee Airmen, and the Navajo code-talkers, and the Japanese Americans who fought for this country even as their own liberty had been denied.

We’re the firefighters who rushed into those buildings on 9/11, the volunteers who signed up to fight in Afghanistan and Iraq. We’re the gay Americans whose blood ran in the streets of San Francisco and New York, just as blood ran down this bridge. (Applause.)

This was the top front page story in my local newspaper, possibly in response to this letter:

As an African American living in this community and a subscriber to this paper, I found it despicably disturbing that nothing had been mentioned in your March 4 paper about the Department of Justice findings concerning racial bias by Ferguson police. This report could be found on the front page of every national newspaper, showing that African-Americans in Ferguson, who make up 67 percent of the population, are subjected to 85 percent of vehicular stops, receive 90 percent of citations and make up 93 percent of those arrested.

The feds also found that African-Americans committed 95% of the crimes. The newspaper was doing African-Americans a favor by not mentioning the crime rates.

NJ family court gag order

Here is a NJ free speech case in family court:

Plaintiff Paul Nichols is a reporter for the Bergen County Dispatch who brings a First Amendment challenge to a gag order … issued by Judge Nancy Sivilli in Myronova v. Malhan, a divorce and custody suit pending in the family division of the Essex County Superior Court. Nichols wishes to interview one of the parties in Myronova v. Malhan, but is unable to because the Gag Order restrains all parties to the litigation from discussing any aspect of the divorce proceedings.

It is pending, but UCLA expert E. Volokh says:

I sympathize with the desire to shield children from hearing their parents publicly criticize each other, and more broadly from hearing public discussion of what to them is often a serious tragedy. But I don’t think that this is reason enough to suppress litigants’ speech about what they see as the injustices in the process. If citizens are to evaluate government officials’ performance — here, the performance of judges — as well as the performance of the family court system as a whole, they need to be able to hear specific details about alleged abuses. And litigants are often the only ones who are in a position to convey such details.

Someone might say that this blog should be shut down, because my kids would be better off not hearing about a parental dispute.

I agree with Professor Volokh, but I would go further. My personal opinion is that most of the embarrassing family court stuff should never be admitted into evidence in the first place.

If parents had a right to the joint custody of their kids, then judges would always decide in favor of equally shared child custody unless a parent were proved unfit. That rarely happens in family court. Instead the judge decides based on the Best Interest Of The Child (BIOTCh), and that means that any character assassination, gossip, innuendo, or bogus scare story can be used to influence the judge. He is allowed to apply whatever personal prejudices he has. That is what fills the court with embarrassing nonsense that sometimes leaves a parent begging for a gag order.

In my case, I did not put any personal info online that the court did not already put on the public record. The court file does have 100s of pages of just that should never have been relevant to our case. But I did not put it there, and I cannot effectively respond to the public accusations against me unless I say what the accusations are.

UVa rape story is a hoax

I posted yesterday:

The Rolling Stone and Washington Post are going down as using hoax newspapers to promote a political ideology. The National Enquirer has higher standards.

Now these publications are half-way backing down.

Wash. Post:

Several key aspects of the account of a gang rape offered by a University of Virginia student in Rolling Stone magazine have been cast into doubt, including the date of the alleged attack and details about an alleged attacker, according to interviews and a statement from the magazine backing away from the article.

The U-Va. fraternity chapter where the alleged attack on a student named Jackie was said to have occurred in September 2012 released a statement Friday afternoon denying that such an assault took place in its house. Phi Kappa Psi said it has been working with police to determine whether the account of a brutal rape at a party there was true. The fraternity members say that several important elements of the allegations were false.

A group of Jackie’s close friends, who are sex assault awareness advocates at U-Va., said they believe something traumatic happened to her, but they also have come to doubt her account. They said details have changed over time, and they have not been able to verify key points of the story in recent days. A name of an alleged attacker that Jackie provided to them for the first time this week, for example, turned out to be similar to the name of a student who belongs to a different fraternity, and no one by that name has been a member of Phi Kappa Psi.

Rolling Stone:

In the face of new information, there now appear to be discrepancies in Jackie's account, and we have come to the conclusion that our trust in her was misplaced. We were trying to be sensitive to the unfair shame and humiliation many women feel after a sexual assault and now regret the decision to not contact the alleged assaulters to get their account. We are taking this seriously and apologize to anyone who was affected by the story.

This is not quite a retraction or an apology, but a good start. Maybe now they should print Jackie's full name and picture.

Or maybe Jackie is just some pitiful immature lunatic who took one Women's Studies class too many. The real culprits are the leftist news media, Democrat politicians, and Obama administration who perpetrated the idea of a college rape culture.

I notice that none of the article on this UVa rape hoax, such as in the NY Times, give any credit to people like Steve Sailer who helped expose it. You get the impression that Rolling Stone and Wash. Post decided on their own to correct errors. Not much chance of that.

HBO TV girls star Lena Dunham is perpetrating her own rape hoax:

A media investigation into the allegations of rape featured in Lena Dunham's recently-released memoir has refuted the claims of sexual assault made by the Girls creator.

The writer, actor and director dedicates a chapter of her book, Not That Kind Of Girl - for which she received a reported $3.7 million advance - to a boy she met at Oberlin College in Ohio identified as 'Barry', who she alleges raped her one night after a party. ...

Dunham's description of Barry is similarly explicit, explaining him as a 'mustachioed campus Republican' with a 'mustache that rode the line between ironic Williamsburg fashion and big buck hunter', who hosted a radio show called Real Talk With Jimbo, worked in the library stacking shelves and 'wore purple cowboy boots'.

She also said that he once punched a girl 'in the boob' at a party and, following a consensual sexual encounter, another girl woke to find blood spattered all over the wall 'like a crime scene'.

Furthermore Dunham does not state that 'Barry' is a pseudonym, as she does with other names that appear in her book.

An investigation by John Nolte from Breitbart News undertaken at the Oberlin campus, which was published Thursday, concluded that the 'Barry' Dunham describes is a 'ghost', and that no such person appeared to exist at the college during the years she studied there.

The author of the Rolling Stone rape hoax story is a A Left-Wing Jew With A History Of Christian-Bashing. Ditto for Lena Dunham.

There is an obvious ideological component to these hoaxes, along with Ferguson Missouri police, Duke Lacrosse, etc.

Even leftist feminist Jezebel admits:

This is really, really bad. It means, of course, that when I dismissed Richard Bradley and Robby Soave's doubts about the story and called them "idiots" for picking apart Jackie's account, I was dead fucking wrong, and for that I sincerely apologize. It means that my conviction that Sabrina Rubin Erdely had fact-checked her story in ways that were not visible to the public was also wrong. It's bad, bad, bad all around.

The problem here is not just bad journalism. We have social justice warriors who are out to change the culture:

she'd initially been intimidated by UVA's aura of preppy success, where throngs of toned, tanned and overwhelmingly blond students fanned across a landscape of neoclassical brick buildings, hurrying to classes, clubs, sports, internships, part-time jobs, volunteer work and parties; Jackie's orientation leader had warned her that UVA students' schedules were so packed that "no one has time to date – people just hook up."

To them, fraternities represent a white Christian sexist establishment culture that they hate. There is also a guilty-until-proven-innocent attitude among the SJWs.

Consider the Rolling Stone excuse that they could not contact the alleged perps because it would annoy them or spur retaliation. What did they think that publishing the article would do? The excuse makes no sense, unless you adopt some sort of victim mentality that says that the woman's story must always be believed.

This should have been fishy:

Magazine writer Sabrina Rubin Erdely knew she wanted to write about sexual assaults at an elite university. What she didn’t know was which university.

So, for six weeks starting in June, Erdely interviewed students from across the country. She talked to people at Harvard, Yale, Princeton and her alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania. None of those schools felt quite right. But one did: the University of Virginia, a public school, Southern and genteel, brimming with what Erdely calls “super-smart kids” and steeped in the legacy of its founder, Thomas Jefferson.

. In other words, she wanted to target a stereotype with her accusations.

California protects seductive trannies

California passes goofy laws all the time, and Gov. Brown just signed this one:

AB 2501, Bonilla. Voluntary manslaughter.

Existing law defines voluntary manslaughter as the unlawful killing of a human being without malice upon a sudden quarrel or heat of passion. The crime of voluntary manslaughter is punishable by imprisonment in the state prison for 3, 6, or 11 years.

This bill would state that for purposes of determining sudden quarrel or heat of passion, the provocation was not objectively reasonable if it resulted from the discovery of, knowledge about, or potential disclosure of the victim’s actual or perceived gender, gender identity, gender expression, or sexual orientation, including under circumstances in which the victim made an unwanted nonforcible romantic or sexual advance towards the defendant, or if the defendant and victim dated or had a romantic or sexual relationship. By changing the definition of a crime, the bill would impose a state-mandated local program.

How often does this happen? You meet what you think is a woman in a bar, take her home, begin sexual relations, and then discover she is really a man? And then you are so traumatized that you can never have a satisfactory sexual experience again? Or you fly into a rage and kill him/her?

I am guessing that this law might affect one case every ten years. It was passed just to show some symbolic respect for the LGBTQIA lobby.

Okay, fine, maybe trannies should have the sexual freedom to trick someone on a one-night stand. I don't care. I am wondering this obscure and outcast special interest group gets a law like this passed, and a million noncustodial dads cannot get a law giving them the right to see their kids.

Judge issued bogus warrants for 17 years

Law professor Orin Kerr writes:

Here’s a remarkable case from the Ohio Supreme Court, State v. Hoffman, involving an unconstitutional arrest warrant. The defendant was arrested for a misdemeanor based on a defective arrest warrant, leading to the discovery of evidence of murder. The remarkable part is why the arrest warrant was defective. For at least 17 years, magistrates in Toledo, Ohio were instructed to issue arrest warrants without ever actually making a probable cause determination. Officers would just say that the suspect had committed an offense, and the magistrates would issue the warrant without ever hearing the factual basis for that conclusion. Here’s the testimony of the magistrate who issued the arrest warrant in this case:

Q. And during your 17 years of swearing in criminal complaints with requests for arrest warrants, did you know what probable cause was?
A. No.
Q. Had you ever made a probable cause determination?
A. No.
* * *
Q. Did any of [your] training include making a probable cause determination?
A. No, it did not.

Pretty astonishing, given that the text of the Fourth Amendment says, “no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause.”

I am wondering how they ever got to cross-examine the magistrate. If family court judges had to testify about their procedures and competence, a lot of people would be shocked at how bad they are.

Courts do not follow rules for experts

I have complained that the family court experts do not follow the rules of evidence at all, and most of their testimony would not be admissible if proper procedures were followed. But the family court does not follow a lot of other rules either.

And even real courts get confused about the admissibility of expert testimony. See this 2013 paper and recent followup for how the federal judges and appeals courts have refused to follow the rules of evidence for expert scientific testimony.

You would think that judges would be educated on something so basic as to when some supposedly expert witness can give an opinion on a case. I guess not.

N. Dakota fight over shared parenting

I previously mentioned a N. Dakota shared parenting initiative, which seems like good common sense to me, but here is a politician opposing it:

In 90 percent of divorces, parents peacefully agree to a division of parenting time. Mothers usually end up with the major responsibility for primary residential parenting.

Measure No. 6 has been proposed by folks who are unhappy with the apportionment of parenting time refereed by the impartial judiciary.

So they are proposing a new rule — equal parental rights and responsibilities, equal parenting time, equal primary residency and equal decision-making, unless the non-custodial parent can be proved unfit beyond a reasonable doubt.

Equality sounds good, but Measure 6 would change the impartial system now in place. And because over 80 percent of parents with primary residential care are women, the burden imposed by this measure would fall primarily on them.

The burden? I think he means that the child care burden is already on women.

To fight an unfit parent, women would have to pay for the lawyers and investigators to prove the unfitness of a hostile parent. Unless they can come up with the money, they will have to live with the constant harassment of a disgruntled ex-spouse.

We don’t know what would constitute”unfit” under the standard of “clear and convincing evidence.” Would abuse make a parent unfit? Would an alcohol or drug addict be unfit? How about a convicted sex offender? Or a parent who terrorizes spouse and/or children?

All unfitness, such as mental cruelty or spouse abuse, can be proved beyond a reasonable doubt.

Under the present system, the impartial judiciary takes into account the degree of fitness, meaning that parents already get the opportunity to demonstrate their fitness for equal involvement.

Actually the term "unfit" has a well-understood legal meaning, as courts have been finding parents unfit for centuries.

His main point here is that the moms should not have to prove their accusations against the dads, in order to win child custody in family court.

I post this as yet another example of people being against basic principles, like innocence until proven guilty.

The ND politician is also criticized by Robert Franklin.

The Intellectual Conservative blog argues:

In one of my blog posts on Measure 6, the North Dakota initiative that would establish a presumption of equal parenting in the state, I pointed out that any monetary support given to the opposition (or proponents) by the State Bar Association of North Dakota (SBAND) would violate the holding of the United States Supreme Court in Keller vs. State Bar of California. Keller holds that a mandatory state bar association’s activities are limited to those directly related to the regulation of the legal profession in the state. To do otherwise would be to violate the free speech rights of members who are required to pay dues, but disagree with the position taken by the state bar. Justice Rehnquist outlined to what expenditures mandatory bar associations (like that of North Dakota) were limited:

Thus, the guiding standard must be whether the challenged expenditures are necessarily or reasonably incurred for the purpose of regulating the legal profession or “improving the quality of the legal service available to the people of the State.”

Needless to say, equally shared parenting by divorced parents in North Dakota has nothing whatever to do with regulating the behavior and education of attorneys in the state. About that there can be no serious dispute.

Custody trials over the BIOTCh make a lot of business for lawyers. A presumption of joint custody would simplify a lot of legal disputes.

The author of that seems to be Rachel Alexander, who also wrote Guide: How Fathers Can Win Child Custody. It has many useful tips. She is also part of Leading Women For Shared Parenting. I think that she is someone's second wife, and thus understands the male view in this.

Teenage sexting illegal

Hanna Rosin has been writing about the end of men, and now she takes on teenage sexting:

In her report on the Louisa County scandal for The Atlantic, Rosin set out to address the question, why are so many teenagers sending each other nude photos? How much does teen sexting have to do with actual sex? How should parents, and communities, respond? And how do child pornography laws apply?

We do have the peculiar situation of extremely harsh child porn laws, and yet millions of teenagers violate them every day, and do not see anything wrong with it.

Rosin says that all attempts to bring the law into line with common practice have failed, as prosecutors and others want to be able to impose severe punishments for the slightest offenses.

Here is a recent jury conviction:

A 56-year-old man with a history of child molestation, convicted last month of viewing child pornography at the Santa Cruz Public Library, was sentenced Thursday to 14 years in prison.

The ruling by Santa Cruz County Superior Court Judge Timothy Volkmann was not popular with the about 26 people gathered in the court, many associating themselves with the community group Take Back Santa Cruz.

In order to reach the 14-year sentence, Volkmann set aside consideration of seven out the previous eight sex molestation-related convictions of Matthew Graham.

Apparently the public wanted a stiffer sentence. 14 years in prison for some naughty web browsing on a library computer seems extreme to me. (This guy did other bad things in the past, but presumably he was already punished for those.)

It is hard to explain to kids:

Santa Cruz police officer Brent Northrup has been trying to make kids aware of the dangers inherent in social media for years.

Sometimes, Northrup said, kids can be the victim and the perpetrator of crime.

"Kids generally do not think that the activity they're doing is a crime, so I built an awareness campaign for kids," Northrup said during a presentation Wednesday. "I found that kids didn't care, in one ear and out the other, until it directly affected them."

Wednesday, Northrup found a much more receptive group in his 60-plus member adult audience gathered in the Santa Cruz Police Department's Community Room.

Sure, the retired folks can see that sending naked pictures is a bad idea.

Here is another opinion that laws are extreme (in the UK):

'We've gone nuts locking up sex offenders': Celebrated author John Grisham, 59, has claimed that some men who viewed child porn online are 'not real pedophiles' and 'would never harm anybody', but are still called sex offenders and sent to prison

Rosin tells the story of a small time cop that investigated some school sexting, and then discovered that following the law would put every kid in town on a sex offender list for the rest of his or her life.

Most criminal law is based on mens rea, the concept hat the criminal has a guilty mind and knows that he is doing something wrong. We should either convince teenagers that this is wrong, or change the law to only criminalize the really perverted child porn.

Update: Grisham forced to apologize. You just cannot say that we have gone too far, I guess.

Study shows memories can be false

Domestic disputes often involve dubious recollections of long past events. This science study shows that such recollections are dubious, and can be manipulated:

As you might already know, it’s pretty easy to give people false memories. It’s why “past life regression” sometimes seems to work, and why even eyewitness testimony can be called into question in court. Here, a group of scientists attempted to introduce false beliefs to make college students wary of the Disney character Pluto. To do so, they used survey results to make some of the subjects think they were likely to have had a creepy encounter with someone dressed up as Pluto: “For Bad Pluto subjects, the profile first described a number of likely childhood fears (loud noises, receiving public displays of affection, and getting into trouble) and then informed subjects that on the basis of their profile, the following excerpt might be relevant to them. The excerpt was in the form of a newspaper article that told of a Pluto character who abused hallucinogenic drugs and ‘developed a habit of inappropriately licking the ears of many young visitors with his large fabric tongue’ in the 1980s and 1990s.” They found that the people who thought that Pluto had ‘violated’ them were less willing to pay for a Pluto souvenir, while those who were made to think that the ear-licking incident was positive were willing to pay more. That’s okay, Pluto — just like Mickey, I can’t be mad at ya!

Pluto behaving badly: false beliefs and their consequences.

“We exposed college students to suggestive materials in order to lead them to believe that, as children, they had a negative experience at Disneyland involving the Pluto character. A sizable minority of subjects developed a false belief or memory that Pluto had uncomfortably licked their ear. Suggestions about a positive experience with Pluto led to even greater acceptance of a lovable ear-licking episode. False beliefs and memories had repercussions; those seduced by the bad suggestions were not willing to pay as much for a Pluto souvenir. These findings are among the first to demonstrate that false beliefs can have repercussions for people, meaning that they can influence their later thoughts, beliefs, and behaviors.”

Here is a recent recovered memory prosecution in Iowa:

A Bettendorf woman accused of molesting a 5-year-old boy at least 10 times a decade ago is being held in the Scott County Jail on a $500,000 bond.

Chesna Lipkowitz, 36, was arrested Thursday night and appeared Friday in Scott County District Court. She is charged with two counts of second-degree sexual abuse and one count of lascivious acts with a child.

The victim, now 15 years old, recently reported the alleged abuse to authorities. He said he was about 5 or 6 years old when the incidents occurred.

In this case, the woman admitted it. Otherwise, I would not know what to believe.

Prosecuting the innocent

I used to think that everyone believed that citizens are innocent until proven guilty. Now I am worried that I am the only one.

Wash. Post columnist Dana Milbank writes:

McCulloch’s office has declined so far to recommend any charges to the grand jury. Instead, McCulloch’s prosecutors handling the case are taking the highly unusual course of dumping all evidence on the jurors and leaving them to make sense of it. ...

Proving a case of excessive force against a police officer is difficult, and I’m not in any position to determine Wilson’s guilt. But that doesn’t justify declining to prosecute such cases. ...

And McCulloch won’t have his prosecutors recommend even involuntary manslaughter? If he persists and if the governor won’t intervene, their behavior will confirm suspicions that justice is rigged.

This was the rational for prosecuting George Zimmerman -- pacify the angry black mob by bringing charges that you know to be probably false.

Feminists and liberal race-baiters are ganging up on the NFL with cases like this:

McDonald is out on bail while the case is under investigation by the district attorney's office. He is due in court on September 15 and has yet to be charged.

But none of this stopped McDonald from playing on Sunday in the 49ers season opener, a decision the San Francisco Board of Supervisors just denounced. They've called for McDonald to be sidelined (with pay) pending the outcome of the September 15 court appearance.

And this:

Peterson was held out of the Vikings' game on Sunday, a 30-7 loss to the New England Patriots, following his indictment last week in Texas for negligent injury to his 4-year-old son, the latest domestic violence case to rock the NFL.

What do all these cases have in common -- no one has been convicted or proved guilty.

Right to record cops

More and more, courts and others are affirming a citizen's right to video-record police officers doing their jobs. Here is the latest:

In a statement of findings and recommendations filed last week, a US Magistrate Judge for the Eastern District of California affirmed that a woman on searchable probation had the right to videotape three officers who came to her home to search it.

From the court opinion:

The complaint alleges that defendant violated plaintiff’s rights under the First Amendment when he took her laptop away after she informed him that she was recording the search of her residence. As early as 1995, the Ninth Circuit has recognized a “First Amendment right to film matters of public interest.” Fordyce v. City of Seattle, 55 F.3d 436, 439 (9th Cir.1995). Other circuits have similarly held that the First Amendment protects an individual’s right to record police officers in the course of carrying out their duties. See Glik v. Cunniffe, 655 F.3d 78, 82 (1st Cir.2001) (“The filming of government officials engaged in their duties in a public place, including police officers performing their responsibilities, fits comfortably within [the First Amendment].”); Gilles v. Davis, 427 F.3d 197, 212 n.14 (3rd Cir.2005) (“[V]ideotaping or photographing the police in the performance of their duties on public property may be protected activit[ies]”); Smith v. City of Cumming, 212 F.3d 1332, 1333 (11th Cir.2000) (“The First Amendment protects the right to gather information about what public officials do on public property,” including the right “to photograph or videotape police conduct.”). ...

There simply is no principled bases upon which to find that although the right to record officers conducting their official duties only extends to duties performed in public, the right does not extend to those performed in a private residence. The public’s interest in ensuring that police officers properly carry out their duties and do not abuse the authority bestowed on them by society does not cease once they enter the private residence of a citizen.

To the contrary, there appears to be an even greater interest for such recordings when a police officer’s actions are shielded from the public’s view. Further, there is no reason to believe that plaintiff’s status as a probationer would diminish the public’s interest in how police exercise their authority in a private citizen’s homes….

Similar reasoning should apply to other govt officials, such as judges, CPS, forensic psychologists, etc.

The criminalization of parenthood

The nanny state has reached S. Carolina:

A North Augusta mother is in jail after witnesses say she left her nine-year-old daughter at a nearby park, for hours at a time, more than once.

The mother, Debra Harrell has been booked for unlawful conduct towards a child.

The incident report goes into great detail, even saying the mother confessed to leaving her nine-year-old daughter at a park while she went to work.

The little girl is fine, but some say an area the mother thought was safe could have turned dangerous. ...

Cullum works at Sara's Childcare and Preschool. ...

Cullum said, "what if a man would have came and just snatched her because you have all kinds of trucks that come up in here so you really don't know."

Lamback said, "you cannot just leave your child alone at a public place, especially. This day and time, you never know who's around. Good, bad, it's just not safe."

The girl is in the custody of the Department of Social Services.

The main hazard here is that CPS (Dept. of SS) will come up there and snatch the kid. Not truck drivers.

The mom is black and there is no dad in sight.

This summary of state laws on latchkey kids says this about S. Carolina:

There actually isn’t any state law regarding when a child can be left alone. However, there are “regulations,” which say no child under the age of nine should be left alone. The regulations boil down to what Jennifer said, “A parent knows if their child is responsible.”

Lenore Skenazy is quoted in the Wash. Post:

Here are the facts: Debra Harrell works at McDonald’s in North Augusta, South Carolina. For most of the summer, her daughter had stayed there with her, playing on a laptop that Harrell had scrounged up the money to purchase. (McDonald’s has free WiFi.) Sadly, the Harrell home was robbed and the laptop stolen, so the girl asked her mother if she could be dropped off at the park to play instead.

Harrell said yes. She gave her daughter a cell phone. The girl went to the park—a place so popular that at any given time there are about 40 kids frolicking—two days in a row. There were swings, a “splash pad,” and shade. On her third day at the park, an adult asked the girl where her mother was. At work, the daughter replied.

The shocked adult called the cops. Authorities declared the girl “abandoned” and proceeded to arrest the mother.

It appears that the mom was actually doing something that was extremely safe.

To prosecutor this mom, the authorities should have to prove a quantitative estimate of the risk that a truck driver would kidnap the kid from the park, of whatever bad they think is going to happen.

CPS is not just picking on single black moms, as they also got a dad in Ohio:

What started out as a normal Sunday morning for Jeffrey Williamson of Blanchester, Ohio, turned into a nightmare when police officers showed up to his front door and arrested him in front of his family. His crime? Child endangerment—as the authorities described it—because his son skipped church to go play with friends. He now faces up to six months in jail.

According to Williamson, the local Woodville Baptist Church sends a van to his neighborhood twice a week to offer free transportation to those interested in attending services. Williamson’s children ride the van regularly on Wednesdays and Sundays. This morning was no different, as his eight-year-old son Justin and siblings said goodbye to their father and left their house to board the van.

One problem: Justin skipped church and went to play instead.

The young boy stayed in the neighborhood to play with friends and then later ended up at the local Family Dollar store down the road. After police officers were called to the store by a customer who recognized Justin, they took him back to his neighborhood where they proceeded to arrest his father for child endangerment.

Perhaps the police force in Blanchester, Ohio, should have a “come to Jesus” moment, too, and acknowledge that sometimes kids will be kids.

Williamson recounted his interaction with the police officer, stating, “The next thing you know, he comes up to me and he says, ‘You’re under arrest.’ My kids start crying their eyes out wondering why I’m getting arrested.”

To make matters worse, as a result of local news coverage of the event,Williamson was fired from his job and remained unemployed for a period of time. ...

Child endangerment is prohibited in Ohio under R.C. 2919.22(A), which states: “No person, who is the parent of a child under eighteen years of age, shall create a substantial risk to the health or safety of thechild, by violating a duty of care, protection, or support.” This means that if Williamson created or ignored a situation where a substantial risk of danger existed for his son, he would be liable under the code provision.

However, Ohio case law specifically requires the element of mens rea (guilty mind) in order to convict a defendant for endangering a child. Significantly, in 1997, the Ohio Supreme Court held in State v. McGee that the existence of a culpable mental state of recklessness is an essential element of the crime of endangering children under the statute. Thus, only if prosecutors can prove that Williamson acted recklessly due to his son’s behavior could a conviction be possible.

Update: Amy Graff side with the S. Carolina mom in the San Fran paper:

I’m also angry. Putting a mother behind bars and taking away her child is far worse than allowing a child to play alone at a park. Harrell’s daughter was in very little danger at the park. Gosh, she could have broken an arm, and if she did Harrell says this was a busy park with at least 40 or more children and parents present at all times. I’m sure someone would have helped her. The absolute worst thing that could have happened is a kidnapping and the possibility of that occurring was next to none. I always love quoting the statistics gathered by Free-Range Kids author Lenore Skenazy who advocates for parents letting their kids do confidence-building activities like go to the park alone and says there’s a 1 in 1.5 million chance of a child being abducted. A family has been completely torn apart here on the off chance that this girl might have been abducted — that’s criminal.

The comments are overwhelmingly in favor of the mom, and against CPS. Except one who said that the kid should be reading books instead of playing at the park, and another saying:

What nonsense. How would the writer know if Harrell made the best possible decision for her daughter?

Is that the standard for criminal behavior? All parents occasionally make decisions that are not the best possible. If that were the legal standard, then this mom and millions of others would have lost their kids a long time ago, and our foster care system would be overwhelmed.

Several comments described the positive value of unsupervised play in their childhood, with one getting this response:

This was prior to the third world colonization of the USA.

Penn State report was seriously flawed

I criticized the rush to judgment against Jerry Sandusky and Penn State officials, in part because much of the supposed evidence was in a dubious lawyer-written Freeh report. Now I see errors revealed:

Critique of the Freeh Report

On September 13, 2012, a group of alumni and supporters, under the name of Penn Staters for Responsible Stewardship, released a review of the Freeh Report that was critical of the Freeh Group's investigation and conclusions.[203] On February 10, 2013 a report commissioned by the Paterno family was released by Dick Thornburgh, former United States Attorney General and former Governor of Pennsylvania, maintaining that the Freeh report was "seriously flawed, both with respect to the process of [its] investigation and its findings related to Mr. Paterno".[204] In response, Freeh called the Paterno family's report "self-serving" and said that it did not change the facts and findings of his initial investigation.[205] On June 23, 2014, at Jerry Sandusky's pension forfeiture appeal, hearing arbiter Michael Bangs ruled Sandusky's pension should be reinstated and criticized the Freeh Report stating it "was based on significant hearsay and was mostly ruled inadmissible (for the proceedings), (but) was admitted in part to show it had found Sandusky had received 71 separate payments from Penn State between 2000 and 2008”. Later in a footnote Bangs states “The terrifically significant disparity between the finding in the Freeh report and the actual truth is disturbing. While the Freeh report found that Penn State had made 71 separate payments to (Sandusky) between 2000-2008, they were off by almost 85 percent, as the correct number was six separate payments”. Bangs goes on to say that the error “calls into question the accuracy and veracity of the entire report”.[206]

I do think that Joe Paterno was framed, like other witchhunts. Even a former FBI director can be bought, if there is enough money to be had by suing the deep pockets. The evidence against Sandusky was entirely the testimony of people who changed their stories years later when they sued Penn State for millions of dollars.

Court breaks confessional confidentiality

The nanny state meets the lawyer state. More and more, laws and policies are requiring people to snitch on others. This time it is just so some lawyer can sue for the emotional distress of being kissed.

ABC News reports:

Catholics are decrying a recent Louisiana Supreme Court decision that reaches into the most sanctified of church places, the confessional booth.

The ruling revives a lawsuit that contends a priest should have reported allegations of sexual abuse disclosed to him during private confessions and opens the door for a judge to call the priest to testify about what he was told. The lawsuit was filed by parents of a teen who says she told the priest about being kissed and fondled by an adult church parishioner.

If the priest were called to testify, Catholic groups say it could leave him choosing between prison and excommunication.

"Confession is one of the most sacred rites in the Church. The Sacrament is based on a belief that the seal of the confessional is absolute and inviolable. A priest is never permitted to disclose the contents of any Confession," Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, said in a statement this week blasting the ruling. ...

The lawsuit alleges that in the summer of 2008, a 64-year-old parishioner at Our Lady of the Assumption Catholic Church in East Feliciana Parish kissed and fondled the 14-year-old girl and continued to pursue her with emails and phone calls.

I assume that the priest will refuse to testify, the lawyer will win, and the Catholic parishioners will have to pay a huge sum for the alleged misbehavior of some old coot. If the man committed a crime, then charge him, but there is no reason to attack a core Catholic belief that has been recognized for a millennium.