Coloring books, case law, and the Devil’s Dictionary

In my second book, Tried and Convicted: How Police, Prosecutors, and Judges Destroy Our Constitutional Rights (Rowman & Littlefield), I discussed how the police indoctrinate kids at a young age through “Deputy Friendly.”  The good deputy’s message is clear: the police are your friends and they’re here to help.  Conversely, I lamented, early education excludes anything that runs contrary to that pro-government theme.  If you doubt that, try to imagine anyone teaching young people about how the police are permitted to lie to us, how we have the right to tell them to “pound sand” when they want us to talk, and how we can demand the presence of an attorney to gum-up the government machinery.  (Hard to visualize such an education, isn’t it?)  But as successful as Deputy Friendly has been indoctrinating America’s youth, I think the judiciary has just topped him with the publication of Learning about Judges: A Coloring Book.

Changing Rule 1.9

There's been some progress on our petition to modify Wisconsin's SCR 1.9 (c), the rule that prevents attorneys from talking about even the public aspects of their closed cases.  In a nutshell, Terry Rose and I are trying to restore some sanity to the situation.  We are asking the supreme court to define "generally known" to include information that is publicly available or has been disclosed in a public forum, and further to recognize that, by definition, generally known information has already been "revealed."