Additions To The "Blogroll"

I've added the Colorado Sun and the New York Times, two predominantly paid access news sources to which I have subscribed to the links in the margin that once upon a time used to be called a "blogroll", even though neither of these links (and many of the others) are not blogs.

A subscribe to the Colorado Sun because it is a hopeful project staffed with skilled professional journalists including a lot of alumni of the Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News, that offers one of the best competitors to the Denver Post, which has seen a  steadily decreasing quality product for a steadily increasing price under a successor of short sited owners, most recently, a hedge fund with no journalistic integrity.

A subscribe to the New York Times because the quality of coverage of world and national news by other outlets has steadily declined, while the New York Times remains committed to publishing "All The News That's Fit To Print" and also has excellent commentary and cultural columns.

At Least He's Not Your Town Board Member

In the front range hamlet of Pierce, Colorado (population 900), one of the town board members, D.J. Meyer, was the leader of a small biker gang that regularly beat people up and stole prescription drugs.

Last September, the town board member and the four members of his gang murdered a woman who had been a house guest of the board member, dumped her body in Wyoming, and dumped her dog twenty miles away. On October 29, the town board member and four gang members were arrested for murder based upon multiple confessions, another woman related to the gang was been arrested on lesser charges.  The dog has been recovered, and they are still looking for the body.

More than two weeks later, it ends up in the Denver Post.

The gang leader had run unopposed for the town board position, because it is hard to find anyway willing to serve as elected officials in small town government.  This time, they truly did end up picking from the bottom of the barrel, although apparently local town officials and law enforcement were not aware of the gang or its leader's criminal activities.

Hillary Actually Not Dominating Fundraising

"Report says Hillary Clinton dominating fundraising" blared the Denver Post headline.  But, the story itself tells a different story and shows up the Denver Post for its less than even handed coverage of the Democratic primary race.

Hillary Clinton has brought in more money than any other 2016 Presidential candidate.  But, Bernie Sanders trails by only about 10% if dollars raised in the 3rd quarter and has more donors than she does.

Both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have raised much more money than Ben Carson, who in turn has has raised significantly more than any other Republican candidate.

Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz are on the heels of Carson in the fundraising department, and both share the trait of having some prior political experience and somewhat fewer totally batty conspiracy theories floating around in their heads.

Rubio has raised far less than Bush, and so, surprisingly has Trump, who has self-funded his campaign and is finally almost breaking even between money spent and money raised.

The other three Democrats who appeared at the debate are all raising less than 5% of what Bernie Sanders raised, and Lincoln Chaffee pulled in only $20,000 in the 3rd quarter, about 1000 times less than either Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders.  None of these three Democratic candidates have broken the 2% mark in the opinion polls either.  Lincoln Chaffee was at 0.2% going into the first debate.

Denver Post Death March Continues

Once again, the Denver Post is making big cuts to its reporting staff.  Twenty positions out of the existing staff of 165 are being cut in the third round of staff cuts in the last eight years.

A previous round of cuts occurred in March of 2012.  One of several rounds of comics purges took place in June of 2011.  Minor competitor, the Denver Daily News also closed its doors that month.

The Denver Post's holding company was in bankruptcy in January of 2010.  The major competitor of the Denver Post, the Rocky Mountain News, went out of business in February of 2009.

Denver is typical of a national malaise in the newspaper business.

Mile High Times Have Changed

You know that you have won the cultural battle, if not the entire war on drugs, when a blog promoted by the Denver Post, the leading daily newspaper in Colorado, is offering a video recipe at its website, on how to make marijuana infused pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving.

Some of the families enjoying their Thanksgiving dinners will be same sex couples married this fall, for the first time it has been legally possible to do so, under Colorado law.  Numerous leading politicians in recent Colorado history, including one of our seven sitting Congressmen, are openly gay.

Neither gay rights nor marijuana legalization turned out to be important issues in the 2014 election in the end, and Coloradans once again overwhelmingly defeated an anti-abortion ballot issue, just as it had several times in past elections, despite the fact that they voted a U.S. Senate candidate who had strongly supported similar measures in the past.

Yet, despite these liberal social issues stances that would have been unthinkable when I graduated from high school, it is also worth noting that Colorado, overall, is not a particularly liberal state in terms of partisan politics.  Instead, Colorado is the quintessential purple state right now.

Colorado was the swing state in the 2012 Presidential election that put President Obama in office by a narrow margin.

This year, Colorado simultaneously elected Republicans to statewide office as U.S. Senator, Secretary of State, State Treasurer and Colorado Attorney General, and gave Republicans narrow control of the state senate and state congressional delegation, while re-electing a popular Democratic governor and giving Democrats narrow control of the state house.  Six statewide partisan election measurements went to the GOP, while two went to the Democrats.

All were reasonably close.  Fewer than 900 votes in one Adams County State Senate District decided control of the State Senate in an election where roughly 2,000,000 votes were cast statewide.  With the higher turnout of a Presidential election year, some of those eight statewide partisan tests might have gone the other way.

Lousy Denver Post and Many Affiliated Papers Up For Sale

The Denver Post and a long list of affiliated newspapers are up for sale according to a Colorado Independent Report of September 12th.

Digital First Media is a dominant force in Colorado daily journalism, listing among its “products” The Post as well as Viva Colorado, The Boulder Daily Camera, Canon City Daily Record, Fort Morgan Times, Longmont Times Call, Loveland Reporter Herald, Estes Park Trail Gazette, Broomfield Enterprise, Lamar Ledger, Julesburg Advocate, Brush News Tribune and Burlington-Record. . . .

[Phillip] Anschutz, a Denver-based billionaire with growing media and other assets nationally and internationally, has bought The Colorado Springs Gazette, and sources have said he has been considering buying The Post.

The ailing Digital First Media manages papers in fourteen states altogether. It is particularly dominant in California, where it runs The Oakland Tribune, Los Angeles Daily News, San Jose Mercury News, Santa Cruz Sentinel, Long Beach Press-Telegram, Berkeley Voice, Contra Costa Times, Pasadena Star News, San Bernardino Sun, among many other newspapers.

Friday’s announcement comes as little surprise as the The Denver Post’s circulation, staff size and journalistic quality have dramatically waned. The paper’s newsroom is a skeleton of its former self, and many of its top staffers who have not been laid off in the past several years have jumped a ship they’ve felt is sinking. About 30 percent of The Post’s staff has been reduced since Digital First Media bought the paper, said Tony Mulligan, administrative officer for The Denver Newspaper Guild.

I've seriously thought about dropping the Denver Post, but with only one daily paper in town covering local news, have refrained from doing so, so far.

Pulling Punches

The Denver Post's latest article on the scandal surrounding the withdrawal of the City of Denver's old law firm, in the middle of allegations of impropriety by the City Attorney's office in a civil rights case, and its replacement by two new outside law firms, doesn't mention by name either the departing or incoming law firms, except the name of the new lead counsel.

This is public knowledge, but the Denver Post apparently doesn't want to risk the wrath of any of the law firms involved by providing it to the Denver Post's readers.  I will dig around and disclose this information in due course once I have time to find it.

9News mentions one of the incoming firms, Brownstein, Hyatt, Farber and Shreck, but not the outgoing firm.

The Denver Post has also failed to report on significant layoffs happening in its own organization.

Denver Post Motto: Inferior Product, Superior Profit

The Denver Post, now under new managerial leadership, has continued its policy of reducing product quality in pursuit of higher profits.

For example, today, it consolidated its ever thinner three sections into two sections.  It has shrunk its comics section several times in the last couple of years.  And, in about two weeks it is putting its website behind a pay wall.

Since it put the Rocky Mountain News, its primary competition, out of business, the Denver Post has also increased subscription rates, fired much of its reporting and op-ed staff, deemphasized national and world news, deemphasized out of metro Denver news, and ended the practice of replacing ruined or undelivered papers.

Apparently, someone thinks this is the secret to success, although I can't imagine why.

Norwood, Colorado Is Pro-Rape

In Norwood, Colorado, a small town near Telluride, the locals think that boys who rape other boys are heroes that they buy T-shirts to support, and boys who get raped by the peers and their families who report the incidents to the authorities should be persecuted. 

The three upperclassmen boys who committed the rapes as part of a wrestling team hazing ritual plea bargained down to misdemeanors and were only prosecuted at all because the event took place in Denver rather than on the Western Slope.

No joke.  People in small town America have a lot of really perverse and hateful morals that Norwood, Colorado typifies.  It is hard to express just how evil the people of Norwood are in words.  Jocks who commit crimes are evil squared.  These boys deserved several years in prison each.  I don't want monsters like these boys walking my streets.

Even more disturbing is that the adult coach for the team, Robert Harris, knew that two of his sons were involved and dismissed his sons' acts as acceptable conduct:

Two of the attackers were sons of Robert Harris, the wrestling coach, who was president of the school board. . . .

In February 2012, the boy [who was attacked] rode the bus to Denver as the team manager, in charge of videotaping the older high school students at the meet. After the coaches and wrestlers left the bus to weigh in, three older and bigger boys pinned the younger boy down, bound him with the tape, pulled down his pants and assaulted him, according to the principal. His parents were at a hotel, awaiting the start of the meet. . . .

Just before the meet started, the principal's older son heard the attackers laughing about the assault on his brother and told his father.

"I was shocked beyond belief, and I was mad," the father said. "I do believe I was madder than I have ever been. You're trying to protect your kids, and then something like this happens."

The father sought out his son, who told him what had happened. He then confronted Harris, the head coach, who at first said nothing had occurred, according to the father. In subsequent conversations, Harris said: "This happens 1,000 times a day around the U.S.," the principal recalled.

According to the source story at Bloomberg:

[O]ne of the accused students pleaded guilty to sexual contact without consent; the other two pleaded guilty to third-degree assault. They received varied sentences that included probation, community service and restitution of about $2,500 apiece.

The principal’s contract was up for renewal. After extensive negotiations involving lawyers from both sides, the board renewed his contract and put him on paid leave while it reached a settlement.

The principal was offered another job in a town 200 miles away that pays half his previous salary. The family moved and he enrolled his children in a new school.

Harris was reappointed Norwood’s wrestling coach. He was given a letter of reprimand for leaving students unsupervised on the bus, Crews told police.

Apparently, however, at some point, Bobby Harris was replaced by Dirk Hardman as the head coach for the school's team.

The Daniels Fund awarded a scholarship to Brent Robert Harris in 2012, which was announced the same week that two of his younger brothers were arrested in Denver, charged with multiple serious felonies, and then freed on a $25,000 bond each.  He went on to attend the Colorado School of Mines. 

Earlier this year, Talon Harris, another of the four sons, who was one of the rapists (consistent with the TTH t-shirt language for the shirts made to support the rapists "TTH being the first initials of the three rapists" also here), was back at the state wrestling competition at the scene of the crime from the previous year, near Pepsi Center again and came in third place statewide in division 2A.

A couple of months later his brother Hayden Harris, also one of the rapists, won a third place finish in a different state competition on behalf of the "Norwood Wrestling Club".  Hayden appears to be the one who pleaded guilty to the sex offense as opposed to the third degree assault charge and may have deserved this status, although we may never know if that was what really happened.  He may have claimed the most culpability when it became clear that charges would be pressed, because as the youngest of the three rapists he faced the least serious consequences if convicted of all charges.

Why Harris, Sr. (he goes by "Bobby" rather than Robert; picture on page three) wasn't charged with crimes like failing to report child abuse himself and removed as a coach is a mystery (he resigned from the school board a few days after the charges were filed by the Denver District Attorney's office).  He is a true monster who is just half a step removed from the pedophiles who make child pornography.  In any sane community, he would be utterly disgraced and run out of town with his rapist sons, and Harris Construction, the business of which he is a proprietor, would wither.  But, that isn't what people do in Norwood.  (A report on his race for the school board position in 2007 is reported here and provides some background information on the adults involved in this incident.)

Also high on the list of Norwood monsters is Jessica Bicknase, the mother of the third rapist, who made t-shirts supporting the boys instead of taking her son to the woodshed.  Presumably, Timothy Armintrout, the third rapist (as reported by Grand Junction, Colorado's KREX Channel 5 and by Denver's KDVR Fox 31), is her son.  Mr. Armintrout was also back at the scene of the crime outside the Pepsi Center earlier this year competing in the state finals for division 2A wrestling with Norwood wrestling teammate and fellow rapist Talon Harris.  Their pictures can be found here.

(It probably bears mentioning that I believe that the secrecy imposed on juvenile justice proceedings is a very bad policy that harms the public in multiple ways.  The potential future victims of these three rapists need to know to be afraid of them if they encounter them in the future.  These perpetrators in particular, having escaped a criminal justice punishment commensurate with their very serious forcible rape crimes, also clearly deserve, at the very least, to have their reputations tarnished for the rest of their lives as a result of their actions.  It is appalling that their conditions of probation have not even required each of them to give up wrestling competitions, given the circumstances.  The leniency afforded to these three boys and their father and the school superintendent in this case is stunning.)

David Crews who is the superintendent of schools and imposed a mere one day, in school suspension on the boys that didn't take the conduct seriously, also deserves serious scorn (although the fact that two of the boys were the children of his boss didn't make it easy for him to do the right thing).

Harris, Crews and the school district all ought to be sued for civil rights violations, at the very least.  David Crews is still the superintendent of schools despite committing a serious crime when he failed to report this incident to the police, but Harris is no longer on the board of the Norwood Public Schools whose mission statement, ironically is to "provide a safe learning environment and build respectful individuals", something that the district clearly isn't anywhere near achieving. 

It isn't clear if CHSAA, the governing body of high school sports in the state, took any action in response to this incident.  The incident wasn't mentioned in either of the reports prepared by their wrestling division after the state championship that year, although in fairness, the incident may not yet have been reported to anyone at CHSAA at the time.

This isn't just an anomaly.  It's Western Slope culture.  Consider this story from a year and a half ago from the judicial district that includes Norwood:

The man who was the Republican District Attorney for the 7th Judicial District in Colorado (Delta, Gunnison, Hinsdale, Montrose, Ouray and San Miguel counties, basically the Western Slope to the south of Grand Junction and North of Silverton) when he was arrested in September 2010, Myrl Serra, has pleaded guilty to "criminal extortion and unlawful sexual contact involving three women," felonies punishable by up to twelve years in prison and requiring registration on the sex offender's registry. Sentencing is set for January 19, 2012.

The criminal extortion charges allege that he demanded "sexual favors from women in his office." The sexual contact charges were supported by preliminary hearing testimony in which "one of the women testified that Serra cornered her inside his office in April 2010, grabbed one of her breasts and forced her to touch his genitals." 

These kinds of Western Slope values (and similar ones about mixed race families and children) are the reason that my wife and I moved from Grand Junction to Denver in 1999 after having lived there for three years, and we have never regretted it.

If I had stayed at the firm where I worked at the time in Grand Junction, I probably would have been on the defense team defending these creeps if they had been sued, since we handled Western Slope claims for the governmental equivalent of an insurance defense funds for local governments in that territory.  We were defending litigation involving a similar, but far less egregious case involving conservative, small town Western slope perverts in public office while I was working there.

Incidentally, Telluride's paper reported the story in May of 2012 (via Randy Cassingham's blog).  Some of the details added in his account are that:

Despite legal requirements to report the incident, the school's superintendent admits officials did not do so; the boy's parents called police when he got home and told them what happened. With that, the three boys were suspended from school — for one day. School officials also "discussed" whether the victim should have been suspended too. . . .

In an editorial titled Do the Right Thing, the Telluride Watch newspaper noted that "it is widely acknowledged that similar incidents, clearly crossing any reasonable line, have occurred in Norwood in the recent past, making it impossible to shrug this one off -- extreme as it evidently was -- as an isolated incident."

I call that escalation. When school officials didn't do anything about it, they tacitly agreed with what was going on -- and naturally it got worse.

But here's where it gets really ugly. The CBS station in Denver reported (and the Watch reprinted, here), that the alleged victim's father is a school official. Worse, Norwood School Board President Robert Harris doubles as head wrestling coach at Norwood schools, and has four sons on the team!

In the same story, the paper notes that at a meeting to discuss the case, 70 people showed up, and "The crowd seemed to be separated by an unseen cultural divide wider than Gurley Gulch, which separates the Hitchin’ Post from Two Candles, Norwood eating and drinking establishments patronized by conservative and liberal members of the community, respectively." . . .

The newspaper reports (here) that "A receptionist for Norwood School District attorney Darryl Farrington was instructed to not put a reporter's message through to his voicemail," and that "In addition to Norwood, Farrington lists Telluride, Ridgway and Ouray districts among his clients." 

At the time, the CBS news report noted that this was considered normal in Norwood's sports programs (something also confirmed by the Telluride newspaper):

“After the incident at State Wrestling, we are now hearing about a number of other “taping incidents” from past years- a possible culture of hazing. The district is now investigation the new claims that have bubbled up,” said Dave Crews in a statement.

A Western Slope NBC affiliate reported on the surreal parents meeting held at the school on the day that the DA charged the Norwood rapists.  It's hard to believe how many really bad parents can be concentrated into a town that has a population of under five hundred.  Denver Post affiliate 9News also reported on the story.

Prior to this incident, the Norwood Public Schools were mostly known for another act of small minded and backward small town ignorance in a 2005 book banning incident by previous superintendent Bob Conder (confirmed here by a TV news station)

But, the Denver Post didn't think it was newsworthy until Bloomberg picked it up and never did any reporting of their own, even though the Denver police prosecuted the case in the Denver courts, and the story was covered by more than one Denver TV station.  As the Bloomberg story illustrates, it is amazing how much of a story can be developed from a little headline if you make the effort to sleuth out enough of the facts.

Marriage, Murder, Videophone and Television

* Early Wednesday morning, Colorado will have its first civil unions.  Polling showed that this measure providing for marriage in all but name under state law, had 70% public support.  May 1st will likely be one of the biggest days for weddings in state history.  It is a step that makes the entire gay rights movement more secure because any effort to repeal the law will have to confront the vested interests of those already married. 

Those planning outdoor weddings should plan on relocating to indoor venues.  There is wet snow in the forecast.

* Rhode Island has adopted a gay marriage bill, becoming the last of the New England states to permit gay marriage.  Pennsylvania is the last holdouts in the Northeast without either gay marriage or civil unions.  Alaska is the last Pacific State holdout.  Nevada, Colorado, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Illinois are states in the nation's interior with gay marriage or civil unions and President Obama has largely tipped the balance at the federal level in favor of gay rights, although there are some loose ends to resolve there.

I have little doubt that Colorado will amend its state constitution to allow for same sex marriage sometime in the next few years, probably via a citizen initiative as too many Republicans in the Colorado General Assembly oppose it for the change to be introduced via the legislature at this point.

No state that was formerly a part of the Confederacy has civil unions or gay marriage.



Laws regarding same-sex partnerships in the United States

Same-sex marriage¹

Unions granting rights similar to marriage^1,2

Legislation granting limited/enumerated rights¹

Same-sex marriages performed elsewhere recognized¹

No specific prohibition or recognition of same-sex marriages or unions

State statute bans same-sex marriage

State constitution bans same-sex marriage²

State constitution bans same-sex marriage and some or all other kinds of same-sex unions

¹May include recent laws or court decisions which have created legal recognition of same-sex relationships, but which have yet to enter effect.
²See the article on same-sex marriage in California for the status in California. [A lower court invalidated a measure overturning California's stance permitting gay marrriage.  It was appealed and the U.S. Supreme Court recently heard oral arguments in the relevant case and have not decided it on the merits at this point.  The outcome is quite uncertain.]

From here.

* Chris Haney, 26, a bartender at the Gothic Theater was shot and killed at about 3 a.m. on Saturday at the Denny's at Sante Fe Boulevard and Alameda in Denver.  Two suspects, Robert Bernal, a twenty-five year old man and a juvenile, have been arrested.  It isn't clear if the man was a bystander caught in the cross-fire or the intended victim.  (I was unable to find the story, which appeared prominently on the first page of the Denver and West Section of today's Denver Post on the newspaper's website even using its search function.)

He is survived by a wife and a five year old daughter.  He lived nearby.  Until recently, so did I.  The story strikes me as notable because I go to that Denny's now and then.  In particular, in the two or three rare occasions that I needed to get out of the house to blow off steam and keep myself from saying something rash after an argument with my wife, that was where I would go.

* I had a second successful Skype-Facetime communication from my home with the assistance of my children.  Even though this technology has been anticipated as a logical outgrowth of prior technologies for eighty years or so, actually having home videophone technology is still pretty cool.  It works well enough that I suspect that it is only a matter of time before it replaces in person depositions and hearings for many purposes in the court system, and in meetings with rural or homebound clients.

* Echoing a previous post about how far forgotten broadcast TV is, a company that sells digital antennas has run a full page age proclaiming how amazing it is that "federal law" allows you to get "Free TV channels with no cable, satellite or internet connection and no monthly bills" simply by buying their $49 antenna.  The silly ad lists every ZIP code in Denver as a place you can get it if you "immediately call" their 1-888 number.  Broadcast television has definitely jumped the shark.

Priorities?

Several stories below the almost top of the page headline at the Denver Post this afternoon, "Jax Fish House to close for renovations for a week," our esteemed newspaper of record deigns to tell us that:

[A] deal to avert the "fiscal cliff" was in sight but not yet finalized. The emerging deal would raise tax rates on family income over $450,000 and individual income over $400,000 a year, increase the estate tax rate and extend unemployment benefits for one year.

Other details of the proposed deal are available via the link above. Sometimes life seems more like the Onion and less like reality.

Unfortunately, there is no indication concerning how the potential deal would impact capital gains and dividend tax rates.

Friday Rants

* Internet Security.  There are too many usernames and passwords and account numbers to remember in life.  My main list, which is incomplete, fills all of the space on a single sheet of paper, typed.  If it was complete, it would take at least another half of a typed page or more.  Moreover, so called security protocols make it impermissible to use passwords that you could actually remember.  Humans do just fine in generating very large number of character passwords that would be hard to crack, but do very poorly at remembering irregular capitalization, punctuation codes and numbers.  We want passwords that are human friendly and unfriendly to computerized systems that use automated means to hack passwords.

* Colorado's E-Filing System.  While there are wonders associated with mandatory electronic filing of documents in the court system in Colorado, there are also many annoyances.

Multiple Systems.  At the moment there are two parallel systems in federal court, and two parallel systems in state court, one of which recently changed ownership. 

Legally Allowed Or Required Filings That Are Impossible To Do.  Moreover, even though e-filing is mandatory, there are many things (e.g. intervening on behalf of a new party in an existing action, or giving notice by mail to a non-party in probate action) which are required but not possible to do in the system. 

Probate Cases.  The flaws in the e-filing system in probate cases are particularly problematic.  The system doesn't acknowledge that a case exists, unless you are currently counsel of record for an existing party in a probate case, despite the fact that a great many people who are beneficiaries of an estate or creditors or contestants to a will or have interests in a guardianship are supposed to participate in probate proceedings which are a matter of public record.  The mandatory e-filing system also has no means of accepting jury demands in probate cases despite the fact that there are certain types of probate cases where there is a right to a jury trial.  A number of probate filings can't be e-filed (e.g. wills and trust registration statements), but the list of what can and cannot be filed is less than clear.

Other annoyances are minor, but irritating. 

Filing Exhibits.  For example, probably something like 50%-70% of all court filings include exhibits, and in many case there are several exhibits that support a single affidavit, motion, complaint or petition.  Yet, rather than having a filing category for "Exhibits", they are classified as "Filing Other" as if it was something that no one in the Court system had ever heard of before.

Warnings About Failing To Serve Parties That Haven't Appeared.  As another example, Rule 5 of the rules of civil procedure requires that court filings be served upon parties who have entered appearances in a case, but no a parties who have not made any filings in a case, subject to very rare exceptions.  Yet, the e-filing system sends grave warning messages every time a filing is not served on a party that has not yet entered an appearance in an action, which a filer must click to override.

Bugs In Noting Which Attorneys Have Appeared.  As a third, under the Rules of Civil Procedure, every attorney listed on any pleading filed in the case is an attorney of record in the case, but the e-filing system only includes attorneys who have actually personally filed something in the case and then when an attorney withdraws from representing people in a case often continues to send that attorney filings.

Failure To Indicate When Certain Court Actions Are Taken.  More seriously, attorneys who are of record in cases are not automatically notified of entries made by the clerk of the court in a case, such as docketing notes, and sometimes even actual court orders, even though these are public records that are part of the record on appeal in a case.
'
Research Fees.  The fees in the file and serve system in the state courts for research court filings that are a matter of public record, which is a zero added cost service from the provider's perspective, are almost 100 times as expensive as they are in the federal court system's PACER system.

* Colorado's Outdated Pleading Format Rules.  In a related rant, every single court pleading in Colorado must have several formalities that are outdated in the era of mandatory e-filing.

Court Address and Contact Information For The Filing Party.  Each pleading must be accompanied by a full recitation of contact information for the filing party and the address of the court with which the case is filed.  Yet, in the e-filing system, the full contact information of the filing party is retained in the system and a click away in general case information, and you aren't allowed to mail anything to the Court in any case. 

Certificates of Service.  Every Court filing must have a certificate of service establishing that copies have been provided to all parties appearing in the action.  But, a transaction receipt retained by the third party e-fililng system in the cloud provides an authoritative, automatically generated, and almost always more accurate in the event of a dispute record of who was and was not served with a e-filing document.

Proposed Orders.  Every motion that is filed in a Colorado court must be accompanied by a proposed order, no matter how straight forward the request (e.g. a request for an extension of time).  Often, a single word order: "Granted" or "Denied" is appropriate.  And, something like 90% of the time, judges use a feature of the e-filing system that allows a judge to enter his order directly on the computer from a template that is a modified version of the motion being ruled upon, rather than using the proposed orders that are submitted by the parties which would have to be printed out, manually signed and then scanned back into the system. 

Dispensing with these requirements would reduce the length of almost every court filing by a page, significantly reduce the need for paralegal support in law offices, and eliminate several meaningless formalities that exist merely as as opportunities for people drafting court documents to make minor clerical errors that lead to confusion, for example, by inadvertently including an inaccuracy in a certificate of service.

* Currency.  Nobody takes pennies!  Also, coin and currency designs seem to be changed faster than teen fashions these days.  It is hard to know if your money is even real any more.  While I'm at it, I will go on record urging the abolition of the $2, $10 and $50 dollar bills that no one ever uses.

* Parking Meters.  Parking meters in Denver no longer accept my old meter key that was preloaded with funds to pay parking meters.  The amount of residual money that I have on mine is miniscule, but it is still a pain.

* Downtown Parking.  I buy monthly parking in a local surface lot downtown that also allows for per day parking purchases at a kiosk on the lot. About 95% of the time this works perfectly, I don't have to worry about getting a ticket if I stay at work past 6:00 p.m. if I only bought parking until then like I did when I paid by the day, and I get the perk of free parking for events like the Parade of Lights downtown. But, about once or twice a month, without any warning whatsoever, everybody decides to show up for work downtown, nobody takes sick days or vacations, everybody schedules meeting with people downtown, and all of the travelling salesmen show up to the office. On those rare days, every spot in my lot, and for that matter every other lot in a three or four block radius and all street parking is completely full. This sucks.

As pleased as I am that the Denver Public Schools are selling their headquarters at 900 Grant Street and moving to a thirteen story building that is half a block from my office at 1860 Lincoln Street, and will also be home to a new (long overdue) downtown elementary school and a relocated vocational school (Emily Griffith), I fear that the parking situation will only get worse once they make their move.

* Notarizations.  In New York State, at least in some towns, requests for death certificates must be notarized.  For that matter, bloody everything you do in New York State must be notarized.  WTF!

Utah, in contrast, allows the vast majority of matters that have to be notarized even in less draconian Colorado, to be signed outside the presence of a notary on a document that says that it is signed under penalties of perjury.  Given the context that makes confirmation of the identity of the signing party less problematic in court cases than in real estate transactions, dispensing with most notarizations in Court filings would make all sorts of sense, particularly in an era where more communications are conducted electronically from places where notaries are difficult to locate, rather than in person in law offices where notaries are omnipresent.

* Loan Servicer Seterus.  At loan serving company Seterus, you aren't allowed to speak on the telephone with anyone in the department that processes the handling of processing of deceased borrowers accounts, because "they aren't trained in customer service." 

In one dealing I had with them, it took about two months and multiple attempts to get them to send mail to me as attorney for the estate of a decedent, and two and a half more months after that for them to acknowledge that the decedent was dead - which happened only after multiple communications including one that contained almost every single thesaurus equivalent to the word "dead". 

Seterus has a practice of forcing the loans of deceased borrowers into foreclosure by refusing to accept payments from anyone else, even the new owner of the property.  Yet another proof of the Dilbert principle: businesses aren't any more rational than government.

Seterus also has the annoying practice of sending you letters that say nothing exept that they received your letter and will reply to it later (which they don't always do), and of sending the same mail over and over again, apparently without realizing it.  More paper does not mean better communication.

* The Denver Post.  I still greatly dislike the fact that the Denver Post has banished national and world news to a dramatically slimmed down scope of coverage in a second part of the news section.  The quality of the product just gets worse and worse and worse even though the price continues to increase.  I haven't readed the point of dropping my subscription yet, but I'm getting close.

* Twinkies.  I miss Twinkies and other Hostess deserts.  I didn't have them often, but every once and I while, I do crave one.  I understand that the formulas, trademarks and production plants have many bidders.  With any luck, the new owner will adopt one of my pet ideas: Caffinated Twinkies.  Wouldn't that be glorious?

* E-Book Page Numbering.  Probably one in every three or four books that I read, I read in the form of downloaded e-books, either from the library or from a commercial source.  E-books have page numbers, just like the hard copy originals.  But, the page numbers aren't the same.  For example, I recently read an e-book that had about 250 pages in E-Book form.  But, exactly the same book in hard copy form had about 400 pages.  Why?

It costs nothing to have consistent page numbering practice, which is what is done in the downloadable versions of reported court decisions, of academic papers in law and physics and anthropology, and in a variety of other contexts.  The discrepency makes citations to e-books by page number inconsistent and differing numbers of pages offer no important added value to the e-book.

* Discover Magazine had a number of excellent blogs on science topics, including Gene Expression and Cosmic Variance each of which had vibrant communities of readers who commented on and discussed the posts made there.  Recently, an overhaul of the formats of this group of blogs destroyed almost entirely the online community of readers and commenters and contributed to the departure of the lead author of the Cosmic Variance blog.  Why did they have to mess with a good thing that was working well?

* The Fiscal Cliff Process.  The fiscal cliff presents one of the most important decision points in recent U.S. history on federal taxing and spending policy.  It is a discussion that is welcome and needs to be conducted.  But, why is it that Congress, in its wisdom, decided that the best way to have that discussion was to play chicken a couple of days before the effective dates of the fiscal cliff tax and spending provisions in the Christmas and New Year's sessions of a lame duck Congress? 

The expiration date of many of these tax provisions have been on the book for almost a decade.  The people who will cast the votes have been in office for more than twenty-three months already.  The deal that provides for automatic cuts in federal spending if no agreement is reached has been on the books for many, many months.  This is not being done at the last minute because it was a surprise, or because the decision has been reserved for incoming members of Congress.

Is it so impossible for members of Congress to have the courtesy to set a deadline for themselves at some more convenient time, perhaps one or two business days before Thanksgiving, so that the underappreciated bureaucrats who have to write tax forms and prepare agency budgets based upon their decisions could have several weeks to digest whatever decision was made and impliment it, and so that everyone in the political process involved in making the decision could enjoy the holiday season instead of focusing on an entirely foreseeable chore?

Better yet, why not require all legislation to be completed before Halloween, and then swear in their successors by late November?

Also, couldn't we design a legislative process that doesn't routine rely on games of chicken between people who have absolute vetos over each other's decisions to make policy?  What ever happened to unhurried deliberation and resolution of issues through votes cast by elected officials according to a consensus set of rules of parliamentary procedure.  I want a government where it at least looks like decisions are being made by civilized grown ups.  Is that really too much to ask?

* Construction.  Road construction is a never ending process.  It bogs up traffic.  But, would it be so much to ask to at least be told, as we sit in gridlock for yet another day as cars merge into one or two fewer lane as we have for months on end in some particular spot, when we can reasonably hope to see the project completed?

* TV News "Expert" Discussions.  Somebody who produces TV news discussion spots on policy issues and current affairs thinks that having grown men and women with all sorts of advanced credentials talk over each other and yell and interrupt each other makes good dramatic television.  I hate it.  I work hard not to have that kind of discussion climate in my home and workplace and really don't appreciate some television news show putting that kind of atmosphere back in my living room. 

I don't like watching people with PhD's act like toddlers on television any more than I like it when politicians act like toddlers on television.

Call me old fashioned, but I honestly believe that it is possible to have an informative and persuasive conservation about an emotional policy issue in a civilized manner.  The hormone fueled trashy conflict adds nothing to the discussion and makes me want to turn off the discussion even if the people involved really did have something worthwhile to say.

 * Charity Junk Calls.  The "no call list" has done an admirable job of shutting down telephone solicitations for goods and services that I don't want.  But, it doesn't apply to charity calls, and those are relentless.  Caller ID allows you to screen them, but I am still sick and tired of the never ending calls from the Fraternal Order of Police and three or four different organizations that my discarded clothes and household goods.  Add cold call charitable solicitations to the "no call list" now.

* Voice Mail.  It may be a necessary evil, but I absolutely hate voice mail.  It takes a long time to retrieve and listen to, while you can quickly scan and assess texts and e-mails, and don't have to decipher sometimes difficult to hear accents when writing down numbers and names left on voice mails.  A world without voice mail would be a better world.

Notably, one study by a telephone company concluded that people responded to texts about ten or twenty times as quickly as they do to voice mails.  So, while others may not be as vocal as I am, many people, deep down, share the sentiment.

* Microsoft Word Outlining and Autonumbering Functions.  Most of the time, I manage to disable the outlining and autonumbering functions of Microsoft Word, but when I don't, these features are among the most vexing things I encounter in a day.  What you type should be what you get.  But, it is quite tricky to disable the feature in a document that has it.

* Other Unwanted Microsoft Word Features.  As a matter of personal and office style, there are only three or four fonts and only about six different font sizes that I use when I word process documents.  There are also only three colors that I ever use (black, red and blue), and there are a whole host of formatting options that I never use.  Yet, there is no easy way to suppress the formatting options that I never use to simplify the interface.  It might be possible, but it is very time consuming and difficult and threatens to screw up compatability with other documents.

On the other hand, there are a number of legal and scientific words that don't appear in the spell checking dictionary that are correctly spelled but are flagged as misspelled that it is annoying to have flagged, but it is a pain to train the dictionary otherwise.

I use this computer program for many hours a day every work day and for many hours a week outside of work responsibilities.  I would happily pay something like $100-$150 to get an "upgrade" to Microsoft Word that would suppress all of the features that I don't use and add the words that I do use to its dictionary.  I have to think that there are millions of people who share my sentiment.  Why hasn't the market responded to our needs?  It would seem like a very simple think to do technologically and implement well and generate new revenue.  What do all the thousands of geeks at Microsoft do instead?  Create new inferior versions of Windows?

* Blogger HTML mode page breaks.  In the blogger software, you can write posts either in "Compose Mode" which is more WYSIWYG, with lots of hidden and awkward complexities in the code, or in "HTML" mode where you put in all the formatting yourself.  The one bad thing about HTML mode, however, is that the paragraph breaks that show on the display don't show up when you post it unless you add a code in the form <br /> to it (twice if you want a space between paragraphs).  If this were automatically entered every time you pressed return in that part of the editor, it would be much better.

Denver Post Misleading On Child Abuse Sentencing

A Denver Post story today on the sentences and prosecution practices found in child abuse and neglect cases notes that, on average, the sentences for these offenses and treatment of offenders in these cases is more lenient than it is for other felonies of the same grade (class 2 and class 3 felonies respectively).

The story fails to see the forest for the trees in this area of Colorado's criminal justice system, and gets the bottom line on this important issue in Colorado almost completely backward.

The Denver Post Is Not Making Apples To Apples Comparisons.

What the story completely neglects to mention, is that the sentences in child abuse and neglect cases in Colorado are more severe than they would have been if the same offense had been committed against anyone other than a dependent child.

* The class 2 felony "Child abuse resulting in death", CRS 18-6-401(7)(I), is the same crime as the class 4 felony of manslaughter, CRS 18-3-104, had it been committed against anyone other than a child (and generally speaking the offense is only applied to children who are in the care of the offender).

For example, if your reckless conduct causes the death of a child in your care, you are guilty of a class 2 child abuse felony (for which the average sentence is 29.9 years in Coloraod according to the Denver Post). If your reckless conduct caused the death of anyone else, you would be guilty of a class 4 manslaughter felony with an enhahnced sentence punishable by four to twelve years in prison.

The sentence actually imposed is about four times longer (about 22 years longer) than it would be for a case not involving a child.

* The class 3 felony "Child abuse negligently causing death", CRS 18-6-401(7)(a)(II), is the same crime as the class 5 felony of negligent homicide, CRS 18-3-105, had it been committed against anyone other than a child (and generally speaking the offense is only applied to children who are in the care of the offender).

For example, if you drive a car in a criminally negligent manner causing the death of your child who is a passenger, and also an adult stranger in another car, you are guilty of a class 3 child abuse felony (for which the average sentence is 13.6 years in Colorado according to the Denver Post), and you are also guilty of a class 5 negligent homicide felony with an enhanced sentence, which is punishable by eighteen months to six years years in prison.

The sentence actually imposed is about four times longer (about ten years longer) than it would be for a case not involving a child.

Even if you accept the legislature's judgment that a death from child abuse should be punished more severely than the homicide of a stranger involving comparable levels of intent, it does not follow that the additional punishment should be four times as long.

By way of comparison, in Colorado, a similar sentencing enhancement (three time the maximum sentence for the offense of conviction) is applied to offenders with two separate prior felony convictions within the last ten years. CRS 18-1.3-801(1.5). A four fold maximum sentence requires four prior felony convictions (but without within the last ten years limitation). CRS 18-1.3-801(2).

Is it really appropriate to enhance the sentence of a first time child abuse causing death offender by the same amount by which we enhance the sentence of someone with three or four prior felony convictions who has been convicted of a new felony?

The fact that judges and prosecutors exercise some very modest leniency in these cases, as demonstrated by the Denver Post's analysis, is entirely appropriate and reflects the widespread understanding of those who are involved in Colorado's criminal justice system, that Colorado's statutes punish child abuse much more severely than other crimes of comparable culpability in the state.

It is also important to recognize that a significant subset of child abuse causing death cases in the state involve prosecutions of seriously troubled young women who give birth alone, for example, in public bathroooms at a prom, who caused the death of their just born infant (often premature) while in the throes of having just given birth after having struggled with even acknowledging that they were pregnant.  Our society in not better off when these women are locked away in prison for fourteen to thirty years.  Leniency in cases like these alone is enough to reduce the average punishments metted out for child abuse offenses.

Losing A Child (And Other Children) Is A Punishment For Most Child Abuse Offenders

When you recklessly or negligently kill a stranger, the stranger's death, per se, usually isn't something that personally causes the offender to suffer (other than facing criminal punmishments and some generalized guilt).

Most child abuse causing death offenders are parents or guardians of a child who due to reckless or negligent conduct cause the death of their own child.

While there are some offenders who intentionally cause the death of their own child and don't regret having done so (who could have been punished for first or second degree murder in any case), the vast majority of child abuse offenders did care about and love their child, even though they did something seriously wrong that caused that child's death.

Losing a beloved child, even if it is a result of your own personal failings and is your fault, is a devistating loss to most child abuse causing death offenders. So, considering that point, some leniency relevant to someone who committed the same offense towards a stranger is justified.

Also, a conviction for child abuse causing death almost always results in the parent or guardian losing not only the child killed, but also having the parent-child relationship with any other children they have terminated.  This is another severe punishment for most child abuse offenders in addition to any criminal sentence imposed.

Reserving the harshest punishments for people who knowingly cause the deaths of their children (rather than merely recklessly do so), whom we may presume really haven't suffered as much from the death of their child, just as we do in the case of people who kill strangers (this is second degree murder, a class two felony) would be more appropriate.

Children Are Fragile

Many inexperienced, overwhelmed, low income parents (and this group of parents makes up a disproportionate share of child abuse causing death defendants), have not yet learned that children are more fragile than adults, and learn the hard way from the incident that caused the death.

While a child abuse causing death offender's conduct may have been reckless or negligent, it was also conduct that would often not have been fatal to an adult and that they didn't fully comprehend would be more harmful to a child. Thus, while it is often culpable and deserving of criminal punishment, on average, child abuse causing death cases often involve conduct that is less extreme and less culpable than manslaughter or negligent homicide cases.

Equally important, a far larger share of cases of child abuse causing death are cases where the question, "did the offenders conduct cause the death of the child?" is more seriously in doubt than it is in ordinary homicide cases. Given the inevitable reality that juries will sometimes make mistakes on the issue of causation, a less extreme sentence than one used in situations where the cause of death is not in the least in doubt in the typical case, is appropriate.  It is not uncommon for new medical analysis years later to determine that the death of a child for which a parent was sentenced to a long sentence of incarceration was not in fact caused by abuse as a jury concluded based on often sincere by inaccurate in hindsight expert testimony at trial.

Most Child Abuse Offenders Are Not A Great Threat To The General Public

The empirical research on criminal sentencing laws also demonstrate that even very harsh sentences for convicted offenders have minimal marginal impact in discouraging people from committing offenses in the first place. Almost all of the crime reduction benefits associated with long criminal sentences comes from immobilizing people who are at high risk of committing future crimes. Swift and reliable punishments of modest severity are far more effective at discouraging people from committing future crimes than delayed and uncertain punishments of much greater severity.

The main purpose of long sentences of imprisonment is not so much to punish the offender as it is to protect the general public from keeping the individual from horrifically reoffending and thus causing further harm.

Someone who recklessly causes the death of their own child is very often not nearly so great a threat to members of the general public as someone who knowingly kills a stranger, yet in Colorado, both offenses are class 2 felonies.

Likewise, someone who negligently causes the death of their own child is very often not nearly so great a threat to members of the general public as someone who knowningly causes seriously bodily injury to another or carries out an aggravated rape, which are also class 3 felonies.

These offenders may pose an extraordinary risk to other children in their care, if they are released.  But, there are far less costly ways of addressing this, such as a lifetime parole requirement barring child abuse causing death offenders from having children in their care that is regularly audited by state officials.

The Cost Of Incarceration Is Better Spent Elsewhere

An extra ten years in prison for a negligent child abuse causing death offender relative to a negligent homicide offender, costs the State of Colorado something on the order of $300,000. It also deprives that person and their family (quite possibly siblings or a parent of the child who died) of ten years of financial support from that person's earnings and deprives the government of ten years of taxes that the offender would have paid.

In the case of a child abuse causing death case where the offender is reckless rather than merely criminally negligent, the additional cost to the state is twice as great.

As other stories in the Denver Post series have made clear, many of the overlooked cases of child abuse that are reported and ultimately cause death in Colorado arise from a lack of funding for child protective services resources. Diverting money from longer sentences for convicted child abuse causing death offenders to child protective services funding would make a difference.

The amount of money saved by having sentencing in child abuse cases comparable to the sentences that would apply in the absence of Colorado's child abuse statute, could easily prevent at least one and often more than one additional child abuse death if spent on prevention rather than punishment. The incredible waste arising from Colorado's harsh statute makes children less safe, not more safe.

Bottom Line: Colorado's Child Abuse Sentences Are A Case Of Legislative Hysteria

In short, Colorado's legislators, seeking to look like they were taking tough action on an important and emotional social issue, child abuse, enacted laws that impose grossly disproportionate sentences for child abuse offenses relative to comparably culpable crimes committed against strangers.

The Denver Post article, by screaming out a headline that makes it look like Colorado is punishing these offenders leniently, when in fact, it is punishing them extremely harshly, irresponsibly undermines efforts to make rational reforms of these laws that currently wreck lives and fail to take the kind of constuctive actions that could really help address this serious social problem.

Denver Post Getting Eager On Amendment 64

Have the Denver Post's political reporters been smoking weed in anticipation of marijuana legalization now that polls favor the passage of Amendment 64 in Colorado?

Otherwise, it is hard to explain the following statement on the front page of the paper's "Nation & World" section (Page 17A) today in a story attributed to David Lightman of the McClatchy Newspapers:

Conventional wisdom says Democrats tend to dominate early voting, while Republicans do better on Election Day, so a big turnout could mean a big day for Romney.

Hello! On what bizzaro world was this written? First of all, as Colorado returns have shown this year and every year, Republicans lead in early voting.

More importantly, a big turnout almost always favors Democrats whose voters are less reliable. This is why Republican operatives consistently work hard to suppress voter turnout, while Democrats consistently cry foul over these practices. The higher the voter turnout is today (which is election day), the more likely it is that Romney will do poorly.

How can anyone who regularly follows and reports on politics be so wrong?  And people say blogs are unreliable.

Stop Thinking About Zombies

National zombie awareness month is over folks.  Get with the program.  Stop thinking about zombies already.  Perhaps not coincidentally, National Drug Court Month is also over. 

Tomorrow is the 68th anniversary of D-Day.

June is LGBT Pride Month (i.e. Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transexual Pride Month), a designation that commemorates the Stonewall Riots.  Bill Clinton made the proclamation in 2000, and President Obama has done so again in 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012.  Denver always makes a good showing with Pridefest which is June 16-17, this year.

Also surely not coincidentally, it is also now, Fae Awareness Month (i.e. Fairy Awareness Month), which also ties to Fae Centric the Shakespeare Play, a Midsummer's Night Dream (I once played the father of one of the heroines in it), even though June is host to the first day of summer and not Midsummer.  This year in Colorado, the summer solstice, which marks the beginning of summer, is at approximately 5:09 p.m. on June 20, 2012.  Notwithstanding this discrepency, however, Swedes and Finns celebrate the civil holiday of Midsummer's Day on the third Friday in June.

American's observe Father's Day, the poor and insignificant counterpart to Mother's Day, for which the traditional present is a neck tie (despite their declining popularity), on June 17, 2012.

Today is also street cleaning day on my side of the street.  Alas, our block failed to have perfect performance today in removing cars from that side of the street, as my next door neighbor (whom I dutifully tried to alert by knocking on her door before she got a ticket) had left her car parked on the street but was not home.  It is the first street cleaning day since she moved in, and nobody actually reads the fine print on the street signs and put it on the calendar, so she is not really morally blameworthy for her err and I really should have left her a note in advance as a warning.  I've been caught out myself several times in twelve years living in my beloved neighborhood, including the first time.

Finally, I'd like to take a moment to observe the passing of Ed Quillen, a Denver Post columnist noted for his insights about current events informed by Colorado history.  He also brought to my attention such useful concepts as the "Stupid Zone."  He passed too early at the age of sixty-one and will be missed.  By all accounts, he has not become a zombie at this point.

Denver City Council To Criminalize Homelessness

The Denver City Council supported a measure, called a "camping ban," a euphemism for the criminalization of the fact that someone is homeless and living on the streets (i.e. a vagrant) by a 9-4 margin in a preliminary vote a couple of weeks ago. I am deeply disgusted (but not tremendously surprised) to learn today (the efforts of the Denver Post to prominently make clear who is and isn't supporting the measure on the non-partisan city council has not been impressive) that my city council representative, Chris Nevitt, backed the measure.

The ordinance marks a stark departure from the more positive and constructive approach to dealing with the homeless that Mr. Hickenlooper had advanced when he was the Mayor of Denver.

The measure is expected to receive final approval this evening.

I have no idea why Mayor Hancock and more than two-thirds of the current city council think that this approach is wise. Yes, vagrants have never been known to wield much political power, and they are an annoyance to much more powerful business interests. But, how does this in any way address the underlying problem or make it possible for the people criminalized here to comply with the law? It is abundantly clear that the City of Denver simply does not have anywhere near the resources it needs to provide every vagrant on its streets with a place to stay right now, using the city jail to serve that purpose is an absurdly expensive and wasteful way to bridge that gap, and the Council has shown no signs of eliminating the need that has put so many people out on the street as it is today. The measure smells like something out of "The Little Prince" or fable, "The Emperor Has No Clothes," where a narcisstic leader imagines that by decreeing that unpleasant things are forbidden that they will magically stop happening.

UPDATE: As expected, Denver's City Council has criminalized homelessness in the city by the same 9-4 margin as in its original vote. Maybe its time to haul out the recall rules and see what we need to do to throw the bums out. If signed tomorrow by the Mayor, as expected, the ordinance will take effect on May 30, 2012.

Random Monday Thoughts

* Just two weeks and a couple of days are left for the Colorado General Assembly. Still in play: Civil unions, undocumented immigrant tuition, making it easier to hold back kids who aren't performing academically to grade level.

* Maternity dresses are a lot less dumpy than they used to be.

* Proof that we live in a civilized society: Coffee shops that serve mimosas on weekends. Here's a shout out to the great Daz Bog at 17th Avenue and Park Avenue in Denver.

* Boulder, Colorado author Carrie Vaughn's 2011 novel "After the Golden Age", about a forensic accountant without superpowers who is estranged from who superhero parents is definitely screen play worthy. The well balanced plot and carefully timed character development shows her writing maturing from her somewhat raw "Kitty" series, while continuing to include some of the spunkiest female characters in fiction today.

* Sunday's Denver Post featured a front page story claiming that Generation Y is starting to put distance between evangelical religion and conservative politics. It's a very hopeful possibility, but I'm not sure that I'm ready to believe it yet.

* Congratulations to my cousin's three children in Columbus. One has earned his degree and actually found a job in one of the toughest job markets for new college graduates in years, and the twins both have respectable college admissions lined up - separated for the first substantial period of time in their lives. Good going guys. My cousin and her husband have done a great job raising such solid kids. I hope I'll be as successful in that department.

* Of course, my brother and I and those of my cousins who do have kids have to make up for the six of my cousins who have ended up by choice and by chance not having kids. You'd think we grew up in a deep depression instead of a very prosperous several decades.

* In my lifetime, kids have gone from being an inferior good to a normal good (in the language of economics, an inferior good is something you buy more of when you are poor and a normal good is something you buy more of when you are better off).

* While newspapers all across the country, including the Denver Post, are cutting back on content, Dayton's paper is actually beefing up its offerings.

* All across the state and the nation, psych wards, and especially juvenile psych wards are closing. But, Denver Health is bucking the trend, offering the only new juvenile psych ward in the nation this year. Good work guys.

* Middle schools start way too f--ing early in the morning. On this, my daughter and I agree.

* SCOTUS is taking up the constitutionality of Arizona's immigration laws on federalism grounds. The case against is that immigration is vested solely in the federal government and can't be addressed by states without express delegation. The case for is that absent a specific reason, state laws are constitutional. While I had some intuition on how lower courts would rule on this case based on the state of federal law prior to a SCOTUS rulling, all bets are off in the U.S. Supreme Court.

* It's hard to tell is CU-Boulder's draconian crackdown on 4-20 events by banning vistors from campus that day achieved its ends of curtailing those events (it seemed to) or if it accomplished anything worthwhile. The cost of a year at CU-Boulder before the state "scholarship" for in state students and after fees is now $13,000 a year for arts and sciences undergrauates. This is an increase, but not a huge one.

* CU-Boulder tuition is up again, but just 5%. It is about $13,000 for one year's tuition and fees for an arts and sciences undergraduate before the state "scholarship" for in state students, for a net of a bit more than $10,000 a year before room and board and books. A four year degree, including those things is $80,000-$100,000 for an in state arts and science undergraduate (in addition, of course, to opportunity costs). Still a decent value, but also one that excludes a lot of people even with significant financial aid packages available in many cases.

Wrong The First Time

Vincent Carroll, writing an opinion piece for the Denver Post, on a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision starts out his discussion as follows (part of a photo caption is also included to frame the question):

In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court ruled against [Albert] Florence, who faced strip searches in two county jails following his arrest on a warrant for an unpaid fine that he had, in reality, paid. . . .

In the space of 11 years, the Supreme Court has gone from allowing police to make a warrantless arrest of someone for a minor offense in which the worst penalty is a fine to approving a strip search of that person. Somehow that doesn't sound like progress.

The first decision was debatable, but at least you could see the logic. By contrast, the latest opinion is a gross intrusion into personal privacy and the Fourth Amendment's ban on "unreasonable searches and seizures."

Backward Logic

Actually, Carroll has it backward.

Allowing a warrantless arrest of someone in which the worst penalty is a fine, which guarantees that the process will inflict upon the person arrested a punishment more serious than a conviction for the crime itself would have produced is not in any way logical. Even one day incarcerated for a crime in which incarceration is a sentence not authorized by law is an unreasonable seizure, because incarceration before conviction in a general population jail is every bit as much of a punishment as incarceration after a conviction. The legal principles that require that people who have been held in jail prior to trial be given credit for time serviced if they are convicted, is a frank acknowledgment of that reality.

If the U.S. Supreme Court had held that offenses punishable only by fines were not a valid basis for an arrest under the U.S. Constitution, this would not have unduly interfered with federalism concerns or the ability of law enforcement to do their jobs. If states that felt, in reaction to a U.S. Supreme Court decision eleven years ago, that they needed to give their law enforcement officials greater latitude to incarcerate people for certain offenses that were currently punishable only by fines, states could have changed their criminal laws to permit short sentences of incarceration for the offenses where that latitude was required.

This year's decision is far more understandable. If you take it as a given that arresting someone for what the arresting officer was told by a court database was an outstanding warrant, in a locality where the government has not decided to expend the funds necessary to have a jail with separate parts for people awaiting transfer to felony sentences, people convicted of misdemeanors and serving their sentences, people awaiting trial for crimes, and people picked up on warrants for trivial offenses (and the vast majority of people in U.S. federal court circuits that have permitted it do mix all four of these categories of prisoners more or less indiscriminately), then it makes sense that some sort of uniform screening search for people entering that population should be required and that the search ought to involve a strip search. A general population prison is only secure as the least carefully searched inmate.

The four liberal judges on the U.S. Supreme Court pushed for, but did not obtain, a broader rule (adopted by some U.S. federal court circuits before the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled) that would have held that a jail that treats people in all of these categories the same is unacceptable. Their rule would have constitutionally required that people picked up on warrants in quasi-civil matters may not be treated in the same way as people who are awaiting trial for an ordinary crime, or people who have been convicted of crimes.

Instead, the U.S. Supreme Court merely strongly implied that if a government has a jail will one area of criminals and another for people arrested for quasi-civil matter, that strip searches are not justified for the latter segregated population. So, governments that do the right thing may actually have more exposure to civil rights liability than those do don't.

The Problem With An Intent Based Civil Rights System

Under our current civil rights and governmental liability laws, you generally cannot bring a lawsuit for money damages arising from unintentional negligent conduct by a law enforcement official or court official resulting in you being incarcerated for a crime of which you are not guilty and for which there was never actually any probable cause to arrest you.

Albert Florence spent six days in jail for allegedly having an outstanding warrant for failure to appear in a case where he had not paid a fine, even though the warrant was actually vacated long before when he paid the fine and was only still in the system do to a record keeping glitch.

Many Denver residents over the last few years have spent days in jail on warrants for people whom the government's files make clear don't fit the physical description of the person eligible for arrest under the warrant, and more have been arrested on warrants for someone who looks like them and perhaps even has the same name but is really somebody else.

Some people who aren't guilty of any crime are incarcerated pending trial and found not guilty. Our system is set up in such a manner that a not guilty verdict doesn't necessarily mean that a jury found that you were innocent, but no one disputes that some significant share of people who are acquitted at jury trials are indeed innocent.

In all of these cases, the result is the same. An innocent person was arrested, has been strip searched upon entering a jail, has spent some period of time (often many days and sometimes months) in jail together with criminal and subject to strict discipline designed for convicts and to exposure to many people who are dangerous to their fellow inmates, and often incurred attorneys' fees fighting the charges. If the reason that the innocent person endured this was negligence or administrative error or a policy that has not been clearly determined in a previous reported case to be unconstitutional, then this is just your tough luck.

You have no entitlement to any monetary compensation for the deprivation of liberty you experienced, the searches you endured in connection with that incarceration, or your economic losses of wages or income as a result of your incarceration.

You have no entitlement to any compensation for the attorneys' fees that you incurred, no matter how correct you were that you were innocent, unless the individual law enforcement officer who arrested you sincerely believed that you were innocent and arrested you anyway out of intentional malice or spite.

You have no entitlement to any compensation for any loss of dignity or emotional harm that you suffered as a result of being subjected to the conditions inherent in incarceration.

You have no entitlement to any compensation for any physical harm you suffered while incarcerated what was not due to the intentional constitutional violation of the guards, except in narrow circumstances where state law expressly afford you a right to compensation not required by the U.S. Constitution, typically involving negligence on the part of the guards, for example, in the sort of slip and fall, or failure to comply with building code, or medical malpractice sorts of situations where any building owner would have legal liability.

Footnotes On The Florence Case

In the Florence case, Florence claimed that his arrest resulted from a racially discriminatory stop, and that he let the officer and subsequent jail officials know that there was an administrative mistake and that the warrant for his arrest had been vacated. But, it is very hard to make a case that an arrest is discriminatory when there is indeed a valid basis for arresting you pursuant to a warrant, as the data base consulted by the law enforcement officer stated.

It is also hard to make a hard and fast constitutional rule that a law enforcement officer or jail administrator has to take seriously your claim that a warrant that appears clearly in a court data base is an administrative mistake. This is the kind of issue we usually leave to the judicial branch rather than the executive branch, although arguably one ought to imply a duty to more promptly look into the matter, if a credible claim of a mistake is raised with an arresting officer or jail administrator.

The fact that Florence was incarcerated for six days, when there is what I understood to be a constitutional duty to bring someone before a judge, where mistakes can be cleared up, much sooner than that is also something of a mystery to me. But since that part of the case wasn't the basis for the Supreme Court's decision, that aspect of the case may be best left for another day. Perhaps that constitutional violation was contrary to the policy of the government in question, and perhaps this violation was also due to negligence, in which case there would be no civil liability.

The Case For A Takings Jurisprudence For Liberty, Not Just Property

In my view, this state of the law, while clearly supported by court precedent, is ill designed.

Most of the problems with the current system could be corrected in a quite simple way, either through laws affording more protections to innocent individuals than required by the constitution by statute, or through a reinterpretation of the takings clause of the 5th Amendment.

How?

When the government seizes the property of an innocent person, that government must pay them the an amount adequate to compensate that person for the taking of the property. When the government takes that property without following the property due process steps in advance, the suit is called an “inverse condemnation suit.” All that must be shown in that suit is that the person suing owned the property, that it was taken by the government and its value.

There should be a parallel right to bring an "inverse condemnation action" not just for property taken without fair compensation from an innocent person, but for liberty taken from an innocent person, as a matter of strict liability, from the governmental entity which deprived you of liberty (or from the person acting under color of law if they weren't actually associated with a governmental entity).

In such a lawsuit, the process that produced the deprivation of liberty of an innocent person would be nearly irrelevant in cases where someone was not convicted at trial. One would merely have to show that (1) you were incarcerated, and (2) the length of your incarceration exceed that was actually authorized by law after ignoring the legal justifications given for your incarceration if you were innocent of those charges. In cases where someone has been convicted at trial of a crime, one would first have to establish that the conviction has been set aside before the separate claim for money damages on a takings theory would be ripe, in order to avoid inconsistent verdicts, and then also have to establish your innocence.

Innocence claims would often be difficult to establish in cases where their were acquittals at trial or on appeal which could have been granted simply because proof beyond a reasonable doubt was not established or evidence was suppressed. But, innocence claims could be quite easy to establish in cases of mistaken identity, administrative error, or DNA evidence based post-trial acquittals. These are all cases that the current civil rights law regime handles very poorly and only at great litigation expense to all involved.

As in the case of inverse condemnation lawsuits involving property, the actual law enforcement officer or jail guard or court administrator whose mere negligence or even non-negligent mistake caused an innocent person to be deprived of liberty wouldn't have personal liability, except under the conditions that give a person grounds a civil rights lawsuit against that person under existing law.

But, the government that arrested and detained that person would have a duty to pay, on a strict liability basis, compensatory tort damages (both economic and non-economic) and attorneys' fees to that actually innocent person, whether he was detained for one day or twenty years, whether the people involved in the process were acting in good faith or were crooked, whether it was authorized by a court or was done without a warrant or contrary to a court order.

If a civil rights violating employee was at fault, the government could bring a subrogation suit against that employee for the damages that it was obligated to pay, and the innocent victim wouldn't be entitled to a double recovery, but recovering those damages from the employee would be the governmental entity's problem, not the innocent victim's problem.

The Benefits Of A Takings Of Liberty Jurisprudence

Unlike the morass of procedural complications the overwhelm civil rights claims and habeas corpus petitions, the takings jurisprudence would be simple and focus on the morally important issue: Was an innocent person deprived of their liberty by the government without receiving fair compensation?

Often, the facts necessary to establish this cause of action are clear, even if the existence of a civil rights violation is not. In a civil rights action, there may be questions of intent, questions of which particular government official committed the violation even when it is clear that some government official employed by a governmental entity did, and questions about whether the constitutional right violated was clearly established at the time. These considerations may make sense as limitations on the personal liability of government officials, but does not make sense as a limitation on the liability of a governmental entity.

Also, in takings jurisprudence, it is much easier for the government and the victim of its actions to simply acknowledge "mistakes were made" and reach a settlement without either the government or the party or the individuals seriously losing face.

Yes, this would cost governments a little money, but only by compensating someone who suffered a serious personal harm at the hands of the government through no fault of their own. This is precisely the kind of situation that tort litigation can work well to address. It creates a good and proportionate incentive for the government to take care not to abridge the liberties of innocent people, while in no significant way discouraging law enforcement action against people who are actually guilty.

Also, since the litigation costs in this kind of suit would be so much lower than in conventional civil rights lawsuits, the savings in litigation costs might actually make up a significant portion of the increased cost of compensation for victims under this regime.

Denver Post Continues Long Painful Newspaper Death March

The Denver Post has cut $500,000 from newsroom and editorial staff in yet another round of layoffs, this time including two of its star columnists, Mike Littwin and Penny Parker. The layoffs notice started going out yesterday and are continuing today.

A few years ago, Denver had two ordinary daily newspapers, the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News, and a free dail as well, the Denver Daily News. The Post and the Rocky first formed a joint operating agreement allowing for two separate papers with consolidated business operations. Then, the Rocky Mountain News died. Then the Denver Daily News died.

The Denver Post, over time, has reduced materially what it offers readers in content as advertising revenues has dried up and circulations have been stagnant or falling. There are fewer news sections (sometimes shorter ones consolidated where once there was a section for each part), there is less content, there is less original reporting, there are fewer comics, and the ads have become more obnoxious (like sticky notes on the front page and wrap around half pages). Subscription rates have gone up in the absence of competition. Behind there scenes, there have been bankrupticies, conslidation in the industry, and debt reorganizations.

The cuts haven't solved the problem, and so there are more cuts. Even some of the nation's most esteemed and widest circulation newspapers are only marginally profitable or incur losses. The Denver Post and its parent company are feeling it along with the rest of the industry.

In the immediate term, there are complaints that the Denver Post could have handled its layoffs in a more graceful way, rather than the usual heartless corporate mindless indifference, but it didn't.

The longer term issue is that nobody has a viable business model for running a major metropolitan daily newspaper even though many people enjoy the service and are willing to pay something for it. The traditional system, in which distribution is sold at distribution cost, and funds to cover operations and profits are derived from advertising revenue seems to be dying a slow and painful death.

Technological changes like the Internet are no doubt a big drive of the change. But, it makes no sense to abolish the Internet to save the pre-Internet newspaper business model.

Honestly, I doubt that a "for profit" model for gathering and distributing news has much of a future in any case. Without people who pay premium prices for the same services and grants, like most arts and cultural non-profits, I don't see much of a future for newspapers.