Law/Crime

MOTHERBOY:

A death, a plagiarism scandal and a quest for revenge: the bizarre tale of Otto Z: After his mother died, Otto became convinced he’d been wronged by the forensic investigators – and that one of them was a fraud. The truth was even stranger (Alessio Perrone, 8 Oct 2026, The Guardian)

On a balmy, quiet evening in June 2020, Otto’s elderly mother, Doria, was fading in her Munich apartment. As she lay with her eyes closed, her pale face, framed by her white hair, was calm.

Otto, masked, gloved and draped in a sterile apron, dozed in a chair beside her. Otto, who sometimes goes by the name Rainer, and whose last name is only known as “Z” because of Germany’s strict privacy laws, was a doctor who had cared for his mother for years, ever since she had suffered a stroke and moved in with him. He described the course of that night to me. He woke to the sound of her short breath and tried to sit her upright. Her eyes were shut, and her lips pursed. She stopped breathing. Otto reached for his phone to call for help, but then Doria opened her eyes and stared into his. She smiled, drew one last deep breath, shut her eyes again, and lay still.

Otto sank into his chair. As a doctor, he had seen death many times, but his own mother’s passing sent him into shock. He felt frozen, watching the windows glisten in the fading light. He was 66, and his brother and father had died years before. He had no friends. He had given all of his time, energy and attention to his mother’s care, and now that his task was suddenly over, he had no one to turn to. He mourned in solitude, with an impromptu ritual. He lit candles and set metal plates at the four corners of her bed. He sat beside her and thought about her soul.

Once the rite was complete, Otto picked up the phone and called a funeral home. He knew the procedure: as a doctor, he could issue his own mother’s death certificate. After he hung up, Otto waited. It was the last calm moment he would experience for many months.

EXTREME, NOT CONSERVATIVE:

Timothy Cruz, the prosecutor, is known for his conservative approach. (Remy Tumin, 9/04/26, NY Times)

Timothy Cruz, the prosecutor who will decide whether to retry Lindsay Clancy in the 2023 killings of her three children, could have chosen a more lenient path.

He brought first-degree murder charges in a trial that ended Friday with a hung jury. Options included lesser charges or accepting an insanity defense.

But Mr. Cruz, the Plymouth County district attorney prosecuting the Clancy case, went with the most conservative choice, according to lawyers and observers, an approach he has taken for more than two decades as the lead prosecutor in a working-class county.

Her suicide attempt showed how disordered she was.

TACO:

Supreme Court Deals Trump Final Humiliation After He Missed Deadline (Erkki Forsterm Aug. 3 2026, Daily Beast)

“I will be asking for a Rehearing by the United States Supreme Court, IMMEDIATELY,” the 80-year-old president declared on Truth Social last month. “This miscarriage of justice will destroy America if they don’t change their absolutely insane decision.”

But that deadline came and went without the Trump administration submitting such a filing.

Now, the Supreme Court has put the final nail in the coffin, issuing a certified judgment and affirming a lower court ruling that had blocked the president’s executive order seeking to ban automatic citizenship to children born on U.S. soil to parents in the country temporarily or illegally.

ALWAYS BET ON THE dEEP sTATE:

David Cole’s Qualified Defense of the Supreme Court (Ilya Somin, 8.1.2026, reason)

Can we rely on the courts, and most importantly the Supreme Court, to resist major assaults on the rule of law by the Trump administration? That question was front and center during the Court’s recently concluded 2025–2026 term. With its six Republican appointees—three nominated by Trump—some feared that, much like the Republican-controlled Congress, the Court would reflexively back the president….

By the end of the term, however, the story was more nuanced. The Court blocked four of Trump’s major initiatives: ending birthright citizenship, imposing worldwide tariffs, firing Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook, and dispatching National Guard troops to Chicago, Portland, and other cities. In other significant cases as well, the Court rejected positions advanced by Trump. In a decision that he called “a tremendous loss,” it held that federal law permits the counting of mail-in ballots posted by election day but received thereafter. And it refuted the Trump administration’s assertion of constitutionally unchecked power to demand that Google turn over the cell phone location histories of unlimited numbers of Americans. The justices may not be, as Trump called them after he lost the tariffs case, “fools and lapdogs for the RINOs and the radical left Democrats,” but this is not Donald Trump’s Court….

These are not the decisions of a Court doing the president’s bidding or voting exclusively along party lines. By contrast, had these issues been put to a vote in Congress, would a single Republican have broken ranks?

The rulings cannot be dismissed as mere token losses for Trump. Each one established important guardrails on the executive branch. The tariffs decision rejected the president’s assertion of emergency powers, a step courts rarely take. Justice Samuel Alito called the birthright citizenship case “one of the most important decisions in the history of the Court.” The decision blocking the firing of Cook protected the independence of the Federal Reserve, the nation’s most powerful financial institution. And the National Guard decision kept troops off our streets, halting Trump’s invocation of a classic authoritarian move.

ALWAYS BET ON THE dEEP sTATE:

Charges Dropped in Reflecting Pool Case as Prosecutors Say Work Was ‘Botched’ (Madaleine Rubin and David A. Fahrenthold, July 31, 2026, NY Times)

Federal prosecutors on Friday said that contractors hired by the Trump administration had botched the renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, leaving behind “widespread damage” in the pool’s new blue lining, and that the Interior Department had then falsely blamed that damage on vandals.

In an extraordinary motion filed Friday evening, the U.S. attorney in Washington, Jeanine Pirro, said she was seeking to dismiss a felony charge against David Hearn, a former Olympic canoeist who was accused of pulling up a piece of the pool’s lining two feet square.

In doing so, Ms. Pirro — a longtime ally of President Trump’s — directly contradicted the president’s repeated claim that the Reflecting Pool’s peeling liner was caused by people slashing its coating with knives. Instead, she said, “the damage was the result of a botched installation and not vandalism.”

Earlier this month, Ms. Pirro herself had echoed the president’s claims, calling a news conference to announce Mr. Hearn’s indictment on July 2.

DONALD WHO?:

A Conservative Court—Not a Trump Court: The end of another high-profile term makes clear that the justices are far from letting the president do whatever he wants. (Ilya Shapiro, Jul 06 2026, City Journal)

Instead, we have a largely originalist and textualist Court—interpreting constitutional provisions according to their original public meaning, and laws according to the plain meaning of their text—with conservative sensibilities in the institutional sense. That means that it’s trying to rebalance the separation of powers and enforce federalism. It can look like it’s favoring President Trump because a majority believe that the Constitution gives the president control of the executive branch—what’s sometimes called “unitary executive theory”—but that doesn’t mean that it’ll let him do anything he wants. The president remains constrained by statutes, courts, Congress, and the Constitution. That means that the justices won’t let Trump rewrite laws by himself—and his legal positions have run into trouble when they push that envelope. […]

Two weeks ago, seven of nine decisions split 6–3 along ideological lines. But in the seemingly more controversial denouement, only four of seven did. Perhaps more interestingly, in the three final-week decisions that didn’t follow the ideological 6–3 pattern, all three liberal justices were in the majority.

Moreover, of the Court’s 56 signed opinions in argued cases—not including the emergency applications for stay that were decided on the papers—25 were unanimous (44.6 percent) and another six were 8–1 (10.7 percent). That’s over 50 percent and higher than last year. And in another 11 cases, three or four Republican appointees dissented, revealing doctrinal discord among conservatives, not partisan splits.

Fortunately, Mitch and the Federalist Society chose the Justices, not Donald.

CLAUSE AND EFFECT:

The ‘Strange’ Syntax of the Second Amendment ( Kari Sullivan, 7/14/21, Duke Center for Firearms Law)

In order to understand a syntactic construction that we no longer use, we have to look at historical examples of the construction. A good resource for this is a balanced historical corpus, that is, a collection of texts from a particular timespan and region that consists of a balanced mix of personal letters, newspapers, scientific treatises, religious texts and so forth. These corpora are intended to provide an idea of general usage at particular times and places. Relevant balanced corpora for studying the Second Amendment include COHA, mentioned previously, or A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers (ARCHER; 3.3 million words, 1600—1999). These corpora can tell us how being-clauses changed over time. They can also show how being-clauses were used, so that modern readers have a better idea of how this grammatical construction shapes the meaning of the Second Amendment.

For the moment, let us consider only being-clauses with the basic structure of the Second Amendment, in which the being-clause precedes the main clause and has a different subject. (A wider range of being-clauses is examined in my paper “Being-clauses in historical corpora and the U.S. Second Amendment”.) Being-clauses of this type have had four possible meanings, several of which could overlap. First, they could signal that the event in the being-clause happened before the main clause event, as in this example from 1723: The morning being come and breakfast over, Stertorius’s coach was brought. That is, after morning came and breakfast was over, the coach was brought. This is called a temporal usage. It is the earliest kind of being-clause, and gave rise to the second and third types.

The second use of being-clauses, the conditional, has always been rare. Conditional being-clauses were used to make predictions, as in the following example from 1786: These things being granted what is of a like kind will readily be so disposed too. If the ‘things’ (atmospheric conditions) occur, then ‘what is of a like kind’ (condensation) is predicted to behave in a particular way. Temporal and conditional meanings can overlap, as in the last two clauses in this 1833 example: Increase the amount of Bank notes, and, other things being the same, prices will rise. Whenever other things are the same, this statement claims, prices will rise (a temporal meaning); and if things are the same, prices will rise (a conditional meaning). These clauses are related temporally and conditionally, and the temporal and conditional meanings are completely compatible.

The third use of being-clauses also evolved from temporals, and could likewise overlap with them. These being-clauses signalled real-world causation, as in this sentence from 1780: The usual passages for the waters below being obstructed, they flooded the low grounds. That is, flooding occurred because the passages were obstructed. This is an external causal because it refers to a cause and a consequence in the real world. It’s important to note that an external causal relation frequently assumes a temporal one. In the above example, the flooding happens because of the obstruction (a causal relation) but also happens at the time of the obstruction (a temporal relation), so both causal and temporal relations are present, and are compatible with each other.

The fourth type of meaning is an internal causal, where the being-clause provides the logical basis, not the real-world cause, for the main clause, as in this example from 1702: The words in the will being to Richard and the heirs of his body, the heirs were in that will only words of limitation, and not of purchase. Here, the being-clause gives the reason for concluding the status of the heirs stated in the main clause. The main clause could be paraphrased by it was concluded that the heirs were in that will only words of limitation, and not of purchase. An external causal can never be paraphrased this way, and it was concluded that the waters flooded the low grounds would make no sense in the external causal above.

If we assume that the Second Amendment was grammatical, then its being-clause belonged to one of these four types or a documented area of overlap between them. The temporal reading would indicate that whenever “A well regulated Militia” is “necessary to the security of a free State”, then “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” A conditional interpretation would entail that if “A well regulated Militia” is ever “necessary to the security of a free State”, then “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” The external causal interpretation would mean that “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed” for the purpose of “A well regulated Militia … necessary to the security of a free State”. The internal causal would indicate that because it is known that “A well regulated Militia” is “necessary to the security of a free State”, it is concluded that “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed”.

The temporal, external causal, and internal causal readings are not equally likely. The ARCHER corpus, for example, contains 37 being-clauses of the relevant type from the second half of the 18th century. Of these, 18 have purely temporal meanings without conditional or causal inferences; 1 is a conditional; 19 have external causal meanings; and there are no internal causals. Statistically, then, the temporal and external causal interpretations of the Second Amendment are the most probable.

In the context of the Second Amendment, these two interpretations are not incompatible. We have seen that external causal meanings often assume temporal ones, since effects usually happen along with their causes. Both a temporal and a causal reading would assert that “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed” whenever a militia was “necessary to the security of a free State”. The causal reading would additionally assert that the “right” was for the purpose of the necessary militia, and therefore applied whenever the militia was necessary.

A temporal or causal relation between the clauses would mean that the main-clause content was temporally or causally contingent on the being-clause content, and “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed” would only be asserted when, or for the purpose of, “A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State”. Interpreting the main clause while ignoring the being-clause would be nonsensical, and certainly contrary to the original intent or understanding of the two clauses.

PEACEKEEPER IN THE VALLEY:

Big Game: Colorado’s San Luis Valley was a wildlife poacher’s paradise: Then an undercover federal agent arrived. (Nick Davidson, May 2026, The Atavist)

Morrison had worked in wildlife law enforcement for a decade, beginning as a state game warden in Ohio, where he grew up. From March to December, he checked anglers’ licenses and chased night hunters jacklighting deer—an illegal tactic that blinds animals for easier killing. When the Ohio Division of Wildlife required a covert operator to infiltrate a poaching ring in the Appalachian Mountains, Morrison jumped at the opportunity. He found that he had a knack for going undercover, and in 1984, the Fish and Wildlife Service hired him as a federal investigator. He spent the next nine months on Long Island, New York, casing duck hunters, scallop boats, and taxidermists who illegally stuffed migratory birds.

Then he got a call from Terry Grosz, who offered him a position in the Rocky Mountains. Grosz was a burly, no-nonsense special agent who oversaw a network of two dozen operatives covering eight states. Morrison had long dreamed of living in rugged country. He packed his pickup and drove west.

Not long into the job, Grosz called Morrison into his office at Fish and Wildlife’s Denver headquarters. Morrison was in his early thirties at the time, with tousled blond hair, dark blue eyes, and a Sam Elliott voice. (Grosz later described him in a book as a “tall, muscular drink of water with not more than four percent body fat on his lean six-foot, five-inch frame,” who moved “with the deliberate energy and practiced smoothness of an anaconda.”) Morrison had already initiated three covert investigations in the Rockies. In one he posed as a woodcutter working for an outfitter who poached bighorn sheep at a remote hunting camp in Wyoming’s Wind River Range. In another he made backroom deals with a Korean sex trafficker peddling black market bear parts in Colorado. These were worthy projects, and Grosz was pleased with their progress. But he had called Morrison with a special assignment in mind.

A swaggering lawman with a cowboy sensibility and a soft spot for what he called “the poor critters,” Grosz took personal offense at the illegal slaughter of animals in his domain. He was especially peeved about the situation in the San Luis Valley, some two hundred miles south of Denver.