Archive for October 19th, 2011

Academic update: Fall 2011, part 1.

Wednesday, October 19th, 2011

The final grades have been posted in my “Constitutional Criminal Procedure” class.

And?

Or, to put it another way, I have done made the Fourth Amendment my…well, you know what I mean. The streak is still going.

(I’m also running out of awesome, though I do have one more “Star Trek” reference in the pipeline. I may have to resort to posting Plastic Bertrand videos.)

(“20% cooler in 10 seconds flat” explained here. Sort of.)

A handful of randomness.

Wednesday, October 19th, 2011

Headline: “Texas Equusearch wants Casey Anthony to answer questions under oath”.

That’s nice. I want a pony.

From the linked article: “Texas Equusearch is suing Casey to recover the more than $100,000 it says it spent on searches for Caylee Anthony in 2008.”

On what basis? Texas Equusearch is a non-profit organization that volunteered their services. They had no contractual agreement with Casey Anthony, to the best of my knowledge, so what basis do they have for filing a suit to recover costs?

She may be guilty as all get out. But the courts disagreed: only God knows, and he will pass judgment at the appropriate time. Let it go, people.

He plays that Choctaw stickball every Friday night.

Ask not for whom the bells toll at Notre-Dame: Angélique-Françoise, Antoinette-Charlotte, Hyacinthe-Jeanne and Denise-David are going to be melted down and replaced next year.

The other day, I mentioned the California rogue PI setting up ex-husbands for DWI (plus running a brothel for the cops and selling drugs for cops) case. Balko covered this as well, prompting a lively discussion in the comments.

One of the commentators posted a link to a longer article from Diablo Magazine about PI Chris Butler, which I think makes for interesting reading. The writer apparently started out expecting a standard human-interest story about PI moms; it’s fascinating to watch his skepticism develop as things start not adding up.

The website also said that Glock Firearms is the official firearms sponsor of Butler and Associates investigations, and that all of Butler’s investigators and investigative interns are trained exclusively on the Glock model G19, 9mm compact semiautomatic.

The first part of that statement would have raised red flags with me: I’m not aware that Glock officially sponsors private detectives (though they do sponsor competitive shooters). It seems like something that would have been easy to check with a call to Glock’s PR department; curiously, there’s no indication that the author ever did make that call.

Triton followup.

Wednesday, October 19th, 2011

A long, long time ago, in the before time, back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, we noted that it was a bad idea to walk into someone’s office with a bottle of wine in one hand and an unloaded gun in the other.

That case took some strange turns. Ultimately, it seems to have marked the beginning of the end for Triton Financial, which turned out to be a huge Ponzi scheme.

But what of the gun-wielding woman?

Last week, the Travis County district attorney’s office dismissed the felony charge, which carried a maximum 20-year prison sentence.

The felony charge was for aggravated assault. She still faces a misdemeanor charge of “unlawful carrying of a weapon”.