Yeah, you’ve heard about the Supreme Court ruling and its fallout. It’s been blogged, re-blogged, hashed and rehashed.

So what do folks on the street think of it all? Watch the video and find out.

A brief perusal of Roget’s suggests a galaxy of promising adjectives for describing one’s reaction to a troubling Supreme Court decision.

For one, there is “troubled.” “Shocked,” “outraged,” and “concerned” come to mind. Further options include “chagrined,” “mortified,” “aggrieved,” “offended,” “incensed,” “riled up,” and “scared shitless.”

In their press releases, however, District politicos have been sticking to one word with alarming regularity:

Disappointed.

First, there is Ward 5 Councilmember Harry “Tommy” Thomas, Jr., who “expressed his extreme disappointment with the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the District gun ban, and indicated that the Council must now establish strict standards to regulate the sale of handguns in the District of Columbia.”

Then we have Fenty, Nickles, and Lanier, who weigh in as follows:

Mayor Adrian M. Fenty, Interim Attorney General Peter Nickles, and Metropolitan Police Chief Cathy Lanier announced their disappointment in today’s ruling of the United States Supreme Court in District of Columbia v. Heller…. “I’m disappointed in the Court’s ruling and believe introducing more handguns into the District will mean more handgun violence,” said Mayor Fenty.*

Council Chairman Vincent C. Gray includes the following in his statement:

Although I am disappointed by the court’s decision, working collectively with the Mayor, the Metropolitan Police, legal authorities, and residents, the Council will do all it can to prevent violence from escalating further as a result of today’s un-welcome weakening of our gun laws.

Ward 4 Councilmember Muriel Bowser:

I am disappointed in today’s Supreme Court action which ruled that the DC law banning private handgun possession at home violates the Second Amendment.

At-Large Councilmember Kwame Brown:

My disappointment in the Supreme Courts ruling cannot be merely expressed by words. Every time I hear of another youth, another mother or child gunned down in our communities is yet another reminder of why we need these protective measures in place.

[Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton issued a statement in which the d-word was conspicuously absent, as did Adam Clampitt, Independent Candidate for DC Council At-Large.]

Come on, folks! Disappointed is when your team loses in spring training. Disappointed is when your kid doesn’t crack a B in algebra. Disappointed is when your dog relieves himself under the dining room table.

Whatever happened to “I’m mad as hell and I’m not gonna take it anymore!”

*The Post imputes “dismay” to Fenty. Over-editorialize much lately?

Now that the gun ban’s been overturned, stay tuned for the live news conference on NBC4.com at noon.

File your celebration / complaint in the comments.

Photo by rrafa.

A few weeks ago, D.C. Superior Court and the D.C. Department of Corrections announced that they would be implementing a courthouse release program for defendants ordered released in misdemeanor and traffic cases. This is a huge deal especially considering the controversies over the jail’s inability to release people on time. The over-detentions have cost the city millions of dollars from one class-action lawsuit. Another class-action lawsuit is pending in District Court.

The Court’s press release states:

The Superior Court of the District of Columbia (“the Court”) and D.C. Department of Corrections (DOC) today announced the upcoming implementation of a pilot ‘courthouse release’ program to begin this summer. The new program will reduce the number of defendants who must return to the D.C. Jail at the end of each court day, solely to be processed out. This, in turn, will allow the DOC to focus on processing other defendants more promptly and releasing them earlier in the day.

The pilot project, designed and implemented with the participation of the D.C. Criminal Justice Coordinating Council (CJCC), will involve the release at the courthouse of those accused of misdemeanors and traffic offenses who are ordered released by a judge.

The problem of over-detentions has been an issue that never seems to go away. It has been a problem for more than a decade. Numerous studies have been done. But this seems like a real solution. No one knows more about this issue than William Claiborne, the attorney who has spent years investigating and litigating over-detention cases. He has lead on this issue, filing both class-action cases.

Says Claiborne of the courthouse release program: “It’s something we’ve been working for for a long time. We believe it should result in fewer over detentions and most importantly it obviates the need for people who’ve already been ordered released by a judge to have to go back to the jail and get strip searched.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Mark Leventhal started a weight loss service for lawyers (WARNING: mildly intoxicating/annoying music plays when you open this link).

Why, I wondered after reading a press release about said service, do lawyers need their own weight loss service? This deserved a phone call.

It takes a lawyer to understand lawyers, Leventhal said—to know how to harness and work with the being that is Lawyer and make that Lawyer lose weight. For example, a lot of weight loss plans involve group meetings. But lawyers, it seems, don’t like to admit to weakness in public, so this program has no group meetings—instead, lawyers check in with Leventhal every day to talk one-on-one. But lawyers are also very rules oriented—more so than regular people. Leventhal can tell lawyers they have to keep detailed food diaries, and unlike regular people who say OK and then don’t, the lawyers will actually do it.

Plus, there’s the lifestyle stuff—like that lawyers go to lots of dinner meetings—and Leventhal’s program takes these lifestyle things into account. So when a lawyer is going to a dinner meeting, Leventhal calls the restaurant ahead of time to find out from the chef what on the menu isn’t too fatty. That way the lawyer knows what to order, and won’t be embarrassed in public by having to ask the waiter for low cal recommendations—but also won’t sabotage his (Leventhal’s lawyers are mostly men) weight loss goals.

As soon I was starting to come around—maybe lawyers really do need their own weight loss programs?—Leventhal let slip the most delightful thing that has set my mind a-reeling for the last few hours.

Read the rest of this entry »

I gotta admit, I agreed with folks who said George W. Bush was only pandering in his first post-9/11 address to Congress. That was the speech where he said that we were attacked only because “they hate our freedoms” and originally declared America’s “war on terror.”

It wasn’t until yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling on voter IDs that I realized that this decision and all others like it from the past six years and change are part of a plan—a brilliant plan—put together by the administration and its robed friends to foil our haters and win this war the only way possible: By taking away our freedoms!

How you hate us now, Osama?

And if I can’t find my passport, birth certificate, driver’s license and Food Lion MVP Card by Nov. 4, well, I can only imagine how American I’ll feel sitting out the election…

Rev. Lennox Yearwood thinks the D.C. Attorney General has it out for him. It all began last year, when Yearwood was charged with assaulting a police officer and disorderly conduct after trying to get into a September 2007 hearing featuring testimony from General David Petraeus. The assault charge was soon dropped and, according to a release from Yearwood’s attorneys, the AG’s office dumped the disorderly conduct charge this February, when Yearwood showed up in court, fully prepared to do battle. The AG promised then and there, Yearwood’s lawyers contend, to seek charges against the minister for his participation in an October 2007 protest against the war and global warming. They made good on their word. Yearwood’s next court date is May 27.

I’m still waiting to here back from both sides in this case. The AG’s office did send me a copy of the most recent charges against Yearwood–for disorderly conduct and unlawful assembly. And indeed, the document was signed March 15, just a few weeks after the minister appeared in court for the previous case and about five months after the incident in question.

Peter Nickles has now been interim attorney general for nearly three months. The controversial consigliere has yet to indicate definitively whether he plans to ditch the interim tag and submit his name for the permanent job, which would entail Nickles’ moving to the District and submitting to a bruising confirmation battle, or stand down for a yet-to-be-named new guy.

LL caught up with the man today in the general counsel’s office, fresh off a Hawaiian vacation, and asked him what the plan is.

“Whatever job search is being done is being done by the city administrator,” he says. “Whether I seek to stay or not hasn’t been decided.”

Then he threw out this out there: “I think we’re doing very important work,” he said, referring to a pair of “very serious lawsuits” recently filed against managed-care organizations Chartered Health Plan and Amerigroup and an upcoming campaign against slum landlords.

LL’s read: Not the talk of a man who sounds like he’s out the door anytime soon.

Four years ago, Ward 2 Councilmember Jack Evans narrowly missed getting a trip to the Democratic National Convention as a delegate for Howard Dean. This time around, the rules changed and, since the primary, everyone thought Evans was in like Flynn.

Well, not so fast.

Two delegate spots are reserved for what are called PLEOs—party leaders and elected officials. This year, those spots are slotted according to a hierarchy; Council chairman gets first dibs, followed by chairman pro tempore, followed by at-large councilmembers, and so on. But you also have to be supporting the right candidate; the PLEO slots are allocated based on the results of the District’s primary. Council Chairman Vincent C. Gray is a Barack Obama guy; Evans, the chair pro tempore, is a longtime Hillary Clinton guy.

Originally, the D.C. Democratic State Committee held that Obama and Clinton were entitled to one PLEO spot apiece. Well, a group of Obama activists—including D.C. for Obama’s Howard Park, Jordan Usdan of Young Lawyers for Obama, and D.C. for Democracy’s Keith Ivey—researched the rules and held that Obama supporters were entitled to both PLEO seats. Their interpretation, sources say, was upheld earlier this week through an appeal to the Democratic National Committee.

“It was a matter of math, not politics,” says Park.

LL is not going to get into the uber-complicated calculations here. (If you want a rundown, check the comments section of this blog post; “KCinDC” is Ivey.) Long story short: Jack Evans isn’t guaranteed a trip to Denver anymore.

That’s not to say it might not happen some other way. Evans could run for one of two unpledged add-on spots at the D.C. Democratic State Committee meeting tonight. No guarantees there: About two dozen party activists have already put their names forward for slots, and with a majority of committee members supporting Obama, getting a Clinton supporter elected is unlikely barring some odd vote-splitting.

Another scenario: Clinton is guaranteed one pledged at-large delegate, which is to be chosen by the state committee on May 3; Evans could still be named to that slot. The complicating factor is that those at-large spots are generally used for concerns of racial or gender balance—white males typically don’t rate.

Evans didn’t respond to a request for comment yesterday.

Photo by Darrow Montgomery

Kojo had a pretty interesting discussion today about the plan to let people sign away their rights and let police come search their homes for guns. The deal offers amnesty for the guns — ostensibly belonging to rascally grandsons — but not for anything else. And if the gun’s connected to crime, well, that’s that. I was pretty horrified to hear callers spouting nonsense about ‘if you’ve got something to hide, you deserve to get caught,’ and ‘crime’s so bad, we have no other choice.’ The dude from the ACLU tried to point out the problems with the plan but I don’t think it gets through to people. The whole “fear of crime” thing (what a weird, wiggly concept) seems to have finally trumped actual crime trends in determining appropriate sacrifices of our civil liberties. Most people actually believe the police have every right to enter your home, voluntary waiver or not. D.C. already wants to throw out the Second Amendment, maybe we’ll toss out the Fourth too.

At-Large council candidate Dee Hunter took a step toward putting an embarrassing episode behind him today, when a Superior Court judge denied a petition for a stay-away order filed against him in January.

WRC-TV’s Tom Sherwood broke the news of the petition earlier this year. On Jan. 2, the document alleges, Hunter pushed the petitioner—a woman he had dated three times before—out of his car, then later pushed her again at a restaurant when she approached him about getting some personal items out of his home, and then, later when she went to his home to get those items, that he pushed her to the ground, cutting her lip.

Today, in front of Judge Lee Satterfield, the two hashed out each one’s version of events. Hunter arrived at court with counsel, Michael Starr of Schertler & Onorato, and three witnesses to support his version of events. The woman who filed the petition represented herself in the hearing and brought no witnesses.

The situation took place after the two had attended a Wizards game that night. On the way from Verizon Center to Alero restaurant on U Street NW, Hunter says he stopped to pick up some wine and other items and the woman accused him of smoking while out of the car, leading to a verbal altercation. Hunter stopped a second time, leading to a second verbal exchange and the woman leaving the car. The woman alleged physical contact; Hunter denied it.

Afterward, the woman came to Alero, where Hunter met some friends as previously planned. There, the woman asked him to let her in to the house so she could get her things and leave. Hunter and friends tried to convince her to stay for a drink and appetizers, but she insisted on returning to the house immediately. At this point, the woman alleged Hunter shoved her and her arm got caught up in his cost. Hunter says she struck him in the face and shoulders with her gloves while he was seated and he immediately rose to leave, at which point she grabbed on to his coat.

At that point, one of Hunter’s friends intervened to break up the altercation. The friend, Gregory Campbell, testified that he offered to get the woman’s things for her, but that she insisted on going to Hunter’s house. The woman said that he never offered to go himself. Before coming to Alero, Hunter alleges that the woman went to his nearby house, on the 2100 block of 12th Place NW, and tried to get in to retrieve her belongings, cutting a window screen and damaging a window frame.

When the woman and Campbell arrived at the house, the woman said Hunter rushed to the door and starting shaking her bag out, then shoved her to the ground when she tried to grab the bag. Hunter says he stayed in the doorway and held on to the bag because he wasn’t sure if she was going to use it to hit him. She fell, he says, when he let go of the bag after Campbell told him to while she was still pulling.

“At no time did I touch her in any way,” Hunter testified.

The testimony came down to essentially he-said, she-said. Satterfield, in his bench ruling, called the encounter a “one-time incident in which a lot of bad judgment was exercised,” but determined that no “good cause” could be found that an offense had taken place. He referred to “bad judgment on the part of Mr. Hunter not to just give her the items and be done with it.”

“I think the petitioner did not exercise particularly good judgment either,” he said.

Starr said after the hearing: “The allegations were totally false and the evidence presented in court proved that. The only crimes committed that night took place when Ms. Alexander assaulted Mr. Hunter after having tried, earlier in the evening, to break into his house.”

UPDATE, 3:45 P.M.: The woman issued the following statement:

It is unfortunate that after assaulting me three times in one night and misleading the court this morning, Mr. Hunter has chosen to demean my character and integrity. Today, I simply asked that Mr. Hunter stay away from me and asked for the court’s assistance in keeping me safe. It is sad that, instead of accepting responsibility for his actions, he has chosen a path of slander and deceit. The judge said quite clearly that Mr. Hunter used very poor judgment that night and that there was no reason not to believe the chain of events unfolded as I testified, namely that Mr. Hunter pursued a course of unprovoked violence and mistreatment.

Though I understand now why many women have no faith in the criminal justice system to protect them, my solace is that other women now know the kind of ma Hunter is and are warned to stay away from him. I can only thank God that this occurred after only a few outings. As I am a very private person, I hope that these can be my final comments on this matter, but I would encourage all women who have been mistreated by violent men to stand up for themselves as I did.

This morning, Mayor Adrian M. Fenty held a press conference to announce the filing of the District’s final brief [PDF] in the Supreme Court gun case, D.C. v. Heller. Oral arguments are scheduled for March 18. Interim Attoney General Peter Nickles declared the brief, written by the city in conjunction with lawyers from three private firms working pro bono, to be the “gold standard” in its quality and thoroughness. “I’m feeling very good about the current situation,” he said.

What’s new in this thing? Nothing major, Nickles said, though he did say that he and his colleagues were “quite surprised” by the brief filed by federal Solicitor General Paul D. Clement that argued that some gun regulation was appropriate even under an individual-rights reading of the Second Amendment. Nickles said the revised brief pursues that line of argument more thoroughly.

So did Fenty, for that matter, in his opening statement, where he compared the District’s handgun ban to a familiar con-law conceit: Just as the first amendment doesn’t protect your right to shout “Fire!” in a crowded theater, so is the second amendment subject to reasonable restraint, he argued.

However, Walter Dellinger (pictured), the big-time Supreme Court lawyer who will argue the case before the court, emphasized in his remarks the primary argument that the District’s been pursuing all along—that the Second Amendment does not preserve an individual right to bear arms, but rather was meant by the founders to apply to state militias narrowly defined. “To the extent that states choose not to have a militia,” Dellinger said, “to that extent states don’t have Second Amendment rights.”

LL asked Dellinger the obvious question: With four votes likely to be predisposed against any sort of state-militia argument, how confident are you that there’s five votes on the court that will buy it? Dellinger gave a somewhat contradictory response: “I never speculate about individual justices,” he said, adding, “I don’t put any member [of the court] off the table.” The District’s argument, he said, would be rooted in “first principles” rather than any tactical considerations to capture individual votes. At the same time, Dellinger said the ultimate goal is to preserve the District handgun ban, not to win any sweeping constitutional victories. “We are looking for the argument on the basis of which the law can be sustained by the Supreme Court,” he said.

Nickles was asked if there was a “Plan B” if the court affirms the appeals court’s ruling. Said Nickles, “If the case is affirmed, then the city council and the mayor will have to sit down and determine what kind of regulations would be appropriate…already starting to think about that.”

If you thought the stakes in District of Columbia v. Heller couldn’t be higher than a last-stand defense of cities and states to keep dangerous weapons off the streets/last-stand defense of the rights of American individuals to keep and bear arms, you’re missing the potential impact on the D.C. taxpayer.

Deep in Tony Mauro’s rundown of the legal machinations behind the Heller case in this week’s Legal Times is this tidbit:

…[Chief pro-gun-rights lawyer Alan] Gura estimates his billable hours at more than $1 million, which he hopes to extract from the D.C. government if he wins.

The rest of the article’s sure worth a read—Mauro’s the best reporter in town no one’s ever heard of. Good stuff in there about controversy in the federal Solicitor General’s Office and exactly how Dick Cheney’s wrapped up in all this. And there’s plenty of controversy in Gura’s camp about who will get to argue how much of the 30-minute oral argument scheduled for March 18.

Only problem: Legal Times has a Web firewall. So either register, try bugmenot.com, or high-tail it to the waiting room of the law firm of your choice.

Obama is great for just being Obama, says Marc Fisher. “Win or lose,” the senator from Illinois has changed the way Americans view race, he writes in his most recent column. “It’s one thing to believe in a picture we’d like to be true — a society moving toward a colorblind ideal — and something entirely different to live each day with a personification of that ideal.” And which generation has advanced this new way of thinking? Not today’s youth, but the youth of yesteryear. That’s right: Boomers! They always get credit for everything.

While the District hopes to stop handguns from coming in, Mayor Ray Nagin from New Orleans is …

Logic schmogic. Maybe Roger Clemens and his former trainer are both telling the truth (check out the second photo), even though they are saying diametrically opposite things.

Do not slip while running in Adams Morgan. In some places, it’s a long way down.

This week’s Loose Lips concerns the fate of litigation that the District’s attorney general threatened against the paint industry last summer. Such a lawsuit would have been aimed at getting the industry to clean up properties contaminated with lead paint.

An interesting detail that came to LL’s attention after his deadline:

After Linda Singer quit as attorney general in December, her nemesis-of-sorts—mayoral counsel Peter Nickles—fired her top aide, Special Counsel Alan Morrison, who was best known for being the guy in charge of pressing the Heller gun case before the Supreme Court. Besides being the point man on Heller, though, Morrison had been involved in various initiatives in Singer’s office, including the possible lead-paint lawsuit

Anyway, after Nickles sent Morrison packing, he announced that the Heller case would be argued by Walter Dellinger (pictured), another constitutional-law giant already working on the case.

Fun fact: Dellinger, according to press reports, has argued on behalf of the National Paint and Coatings Association on lead-paint matters. Back in 2000, states including Rhode Island and Maryland attempted to pass laws that would make it easier to proceed with lawsuits against lead-paint manufacturers. Dellinger testified before legislatures that such laws would be unconstitutional (which, in all fairness, they probably were).

LL doesn’t mean to imply foul play here. He will call it, say, an evocative coincidence.