D: The Person Who Put This Sticker On Their Car

Having heard rumors of these things for weeks, I just saw for the first time the newest version of what has got to be the all time most annoying bumper sticker: “S. The Coach.”

Good heavens, folks, enough is enough already! I’ll grant that the original “W. The President” was a cool idea. But it jumped the shark years ago. Around here we’ve already had “C. The River.”  While in Louisiana over the holidays, I swear to you I saw ”K. The Governor.” Now it’s “S. The Coach.”

The only one of these I ever considered for my car was “F. The President.” I liked that one not so much because I disliked the president, but because I thought it was the perfect rejoinder to the ridiculous pretentiousness of the original. W, the Wife, though - who is usually very tolerant of my potty mouth and general lack of decorum – planted her foot firmly on the ground over that one. But even if she had caved, I think by now I would have taken it off the car. No matter what the initial, every one of those stickers says one thing: The owner of this car is a Dork.

Better Late Than Never, I Guess

Woulda been nice to hear him say this before he lost the last election, but hey:

Former Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Drayton Nabers, who fought to keep his seat in what is considered one of the most expensive judicial campaigns in the country, said Tuesday that he does not favor electing judges.

“There is no perfect system for the selection of judges,” Nabers told the Tuscaloosa Rotary Club at a lunch meeting. “The rule of law is critical, and elections don’t help the public respect of the judges who keep the rule of law.”

I, as regular readers know, agree, even if it does sound like sour grapes from Nabers at this point.

Also, on public service in general, Nabers went on to say:

The lunch speech was his first public statement since leaving office earlier this month. He said retirement takes getting used to.

Nabers, 66, wouldn’t rule out the possibility of working again.

“Hopefully, opportunities to serve will come my way again,” he said after the meeting.

Anyone else out there think “Nabers For Attorney General” is a great idea?

Indigent Defense In Capital Cases

The Tuscaloosa News has had two recent articles (here, and here) discussing Alabama’s death penalty system. They don’t say anything new, really, but are worth emphasizing.

Basically, both articles discuss the inadequate manner in which Alabama provides defense attorneys in capital cases and the ways in which that problem is exasperated by the manner in which Alabama appoints lawyers for appeals.

The first thing to get straight is that if there is a systematic failure to provide adequate attorneys, that would be a major problem. Our legal system is adversarial. We trust that if both sides have an equal opportunity to argue their case that the truth will be the result. But if one side is somehow prevented from adequately presenting its case, then the system won’t work properly. The decision-maker (the jury) will only hear one side of the story. Maybe that side was the right one, maybe not, no-one will ever know because no-one ever heard the other side. The important thing is to make sure that both sides are fully and vigorously presented.

So the question becomes whether or not Alabama has failed to ensure that the defense’s side is adequately presented. That seems to be the common wisdom, and my experience confirms it. We’ve handled several post-conviction cases where trial counsel was obviously unprepared.

That is not to say the attorneys were bad attorneys. They may have been excellent attorneys. But trying a capital case requires an enormous amount of resources. The attorney has to be an obstructionist; she has to raise every possible argument against every move by the state. At the same time, the defense attorney needs to know everything about the client, and also needs to know the significance for trial of everything about the client. That requires investigations and experts. It is very expensive to properly try a capital case.  

Alabama, though, pays defense counsel forty dollars an hour for out of court work and sixty dollars an hour for in court work. As for experts, you’ve got to go beg the judge for extra funds. In order to adequately defend the capital case, the attorney needs to dedicate a huge portion of his time to it, and at those rates, that just is not possible. The result is cut-rate defenses.  

I do not think the solution is better pay. Rather, it would be to establish a centralized group whose only job is defending capital cases. Then the attorneys will not only have the expertise to properly defend, but they will have all the time and resources they need to carry out that defense. They won’t have to worry about bringing in enough money to pay for secretaries, and electricity, and still put food on their tables.

The Tuscaloosa News has another article discussing how this type of program has worked in Georgia:

Firefighters pulled four charred bodies out of the wood clapboard flophouse on Troup Street in/sValdosta, Ga., after a white-hot blaze in October 2005 melted windows up and down the block and left the house a smoldering heap.

Within hours, Cynthia Allen was arrested for setting the fire and thrown in jail.

Georgia prosecutors soon will present a jury with a simple argument: She did it. She must die.

It would be an easy case if it weren’t for Boyd Young and his colleagues. They intend to make the jury’s choice — life or death — much more difficult.

As Allen’s lawyers, they’ve spent months combing through the wreckage of her life, trying to follow clues that might demystify her behavior.

What explains the vacant look in Allen’s eyes, and her tendency to answer the simplest questions with rambling incoherence? Is there more to the stories in Valdosta/sthat cast Allen as an aggrieved tenant of the flophouse and a constant target of violent physical and mental abuse?

These hints point toward a dreadful existence for Allen, stretching as far back as her childhood in a dangerous New Orleans housing project.

Chasing down those clues is taking Young and his colleagues on an arduous and emotional journey through a world thick with poverty, dysfunction and tragedy.

They’ve essentially become Allen’s biographers, documenting every important facet of her life and preparing to explain it — and why it matters — to a jury.

This is how they’ll defend her, because it’s the only choice they have.

“Cynthia is just not somebody who belongs on death row, not even close,” Young said. “That’s what we’ve got to prove.”

This is the new face of capital defense in Georgia.

Allen’s lawyers work for the Office of the Georgia Capital Defenders, a state-funded, centralized operation of well-trained lawyers and investigators who were assembled in 2005 to handle nothing but the state’s death penalty cases.

In each case, the office assigns at least two attorneys and a full-time investigator. One attorney is on staff; the other is typically a private practice lawyer from the town where the case is being tried.

They spend what’s necessary. They do what’s necessary. They work every case as if it were their only one. . . .

Their record: 23-0.

Some may object to this because it means fewer executions. There is no point arguing with a person who raises that objection.

Others may question the cost of such an office. To that, I say I do not know. The state would no longer be spending money on individual appointments. It would also save on appellate litigation, as the better representation at trial will make the appeals much less complicated. But I’m sure the expenses would exceed these savings. So the question becomes how much we are willing to spend to make sure the death penalty is fairly administered?

By fairly administered, I don’t mean simply making sure we don’t kill innocent people. I mean making sure we kill only people who are guilty and who truly deserve to die. When Alabama executes someone, that person’s blood is on all of our hands. I, for one, am willing to pay a fairly high price to make sure that blood is justified.

Troy King Does It Again

Displays his amazing ignorance for all to see, that is:

Alabama Attorney General Troy King asked Roy Johnson last year to provide money to a victims’ advocacy group while his office was investigating the state’s two-year college system, headed by Johnson as chancellor.

Miriam Shehane, executive director of Victims of Crime and Leniency, said King accompanied her to a meeting with Johnson to ask the two-year college system to provide grant money for VOCAL.

The meeting, in March 2006, came months after the attorney general’s office and federal prosecutors began investigating the two-year college system. A spokesman for King said the request was not improper because King was not asking for anything for himself.

Really? He’s comletely disinterested in VOCAL? He could not care less whether or not the group received the grant?

Than why did he bother with the request in the first place? Perhaps this statement by King’s spokesman Chris Bence might explain it:

Bence said King was happy to help Shehane because VOCAL had lost some critical funding and it was going to be a crippling [loss].

“Victims are one of his priorities, if not his top priority,” Bence said.

This is not hard: The AG cannot ask for favors from people whom his office is investigating. It reeks of bribery, extortion and just plain ‘ol corruption. Why Troy King can’t understand that is beyond me.

Random Updates

First, I’ve written a lot about the death penalty lately. (E.g., here, and here). I’m pretty wishy washy on capital punishment, but if anyone out there deserves it, it’s folks like this:

Each day, administrative law judge Elving L. Torres decides whether people are disabled enough to receive Social Security benefits.

Sometimes he puts himself in the shoes of people who appear before him: He parks his luxury import car in the handicapped spaces outside the building where he works.

A handicapped parking placard appears on the dashboard of his silver Mercedes-Benz AMG coupe. But it was issued to an 86-year-old woman from Bradenton, according to state motor vehicle records.

At least once this week, by parking in a handicapped spot, Torres, 62, may have denied a woman who uses a wheelchair and works in the same building the ability to park there. She had to park at the far end of the lot and propel herself up an incline to get to her office because there were no empty handicapped spaces.

“Shame on him,” said the woman, Raquel Fruchter, 55, who works as a program coordinator for the Arts Council of Hillsborough County and has polio.

Second, the B’ham News today collects random opinions about the elevated 280. Unfortunately, none of them address my questions about the bottleneck at the Red Mountain Expressway.

And finally, Dispatches from the Culture Wars recently directed me to a site I’m sure Roy Moore will want to investigate. You will remember Roy’s New Year’s Resolution:

Each year the American Civil Liberties Union and other liberal organizations continue their efforts to destroy traditional values that we once assumed were self-evident and beyond question. And each year we sit quietly by doing nothing to stop their relentless assault on our culture and our religious heritage. As our resolution for the New Year, let us join together to defeat the ACLU’s anti-Christian agenda and restore our civil and religious freedom.

If you wanna help ‘Ol Roy out, then head on over to The ACLU Fights For Christians:

The ACLU fights just as hard for INDIVIDUAL free exercise of religion as the ACLU fights against GOVERNMENT endorsement, sponsorship, or establishment of religion. Despite this fact, many people spread misinformation about the ACLU around the internet, innocently and maliciously, falsely claiming the ACLU is anti-religion or anti-Christian.

This list of FACTS counteracts that misinformation. These links represent just a few of the many examples of the ACLU defending the free speech and free exercise rights of Christians (for purposes of this list, the word “Christian” means a person who self-identifies as “Christian”).

In every example, the ACLU is defending the right of a Christian to speak as a Christian or to practice Christianity.

Here is the current version of this EVER GROWING list:

That Roy Moore the individual has the right to put a ten commandemnts monument in his front yard, but Roy Moore the judge does not have the right to put a ten commandments monument in his courthouse, is a distinction the ACLU and every reasonable person understands. That Roy continually blurs that distinction means he’s either an idiot or incredibly dishonest.

Coloreds Only?

This is hearsay within hearsay, but I’ve now heard from two sources. First, from a commenter on my blog:

did anyone happen to hear John Rogers on the Matt Murphy radio show this afternoon during the drive time? Rogers was trying to explain why the House Black Caucus won’t allow new Rep. Patricia Todd to join the group, even though she represents a majority black district. When confronted by Murphy that his group was not about black interests or ideas but only about race, Rogers said, “Integration may have been the biggest mistake ever made.” He then went on to say that he never was so down on seperate but equal, just that he wished it could have been equal.

Second, from Flashpoint, in a post entitled “Integration is a Curse:”

Those are not my words. They are the words of Alabama state representative John Rogers, Jr. from the 52nd district – and he wasn’t talking about calculus. He also said that he is “not opposed to separate but equal.” Frankly, I would not believe it if I hadn’t heard him utter those very words with my own two ears this afternoon on the Matt Murphy Radio Program.

I picked up on the conversation with Murphy asking Rogers to explain why it was acceptable to have an exclusively black legislative caucus that refused to admit people based solely on the color of their skin (a topic I blogged just yesterday). Rogers’ only defense was that “those are the rules” – you must be black.

Murphy asked Rogers to explain the purpose of the Alabama Black Legislative Caucus (ABLC), to which Rogers replied that it existed to promote the causes of the black community. If that really is the case, then why wouldn’t Patricia Todd, a white woman who represents Alabama’s heavily black 54th district, be allowed to join the ABLC? Certainly she could better serve her constituents by caucusing with others who share similar legislative agendas. Rogers said no way because she is not black. . . .

That is when Rogers said that “integration” was “a curse.” He went on to say that he was “not opposed to separate but equal” laws and that blacks were (would be?) better off under that system. Murphy paused the conversation out of sheer surprise and asked Rogers to reiterate his assertions, which he did.

If this is accurate, Rogers need look no further than the mirror the next time he wonders why black people have not achieved greater success in this country.

I can understand the argument for a blacks only caucus. Our historical treatment of blacks certainly would help create, and justify, a strong group identity, and there is power in numbers, after all. Not saying I agree with the continued existence of such groups, or that excluding Patricia Todd is a good idea, but I can understand the basic idea.

But to say blacks were better under segregation? Holy historical revisionism batman. That’s just incomprehensibly idiotic. Why don’t we ask Charles Eddie Moore and Henry Hezekiah Dee whether or not blacks have it better now, or under segregation? Oh, wait, they’re dead, having been beaten, chained to an engine block, and tossed alive into the Mississippi river, because that’s what happened to blacks who tried to organize themselves back in what Rogers now calls the good ‘ol days. If John Rogers really thinks blacks had it better during segregation, than John Rogers is a damn fool.

Troy King Thinks Roy Moore Is Political Poison

Jeff has already highlighted this story, but I wanted to add some thoughts.

Basically, Troy King’s office is prosecuting a political consultant named Rick Spina because, prior to the last election, Spina allegedly took out an ad in the B’Ham news that included false and damaging information about Jim Carns, a candidate for the JeffCo commission.

Spina is accused of violating Code Section 17-5-6:

It shall be unlawful for any person fraudulently to misrepresent himself or herself, or any other person or organization with which he or she is affiliated, as speaking or writing or otherwise acting for or on behalf of any candidate, principal campaign committee, political action committee, or political party, or agent or employee thereof, in a manner which is damaging or is intended to be damaging to such other candidate, principal campaign committee, political action committee, or political party.

Right. In other words, what the statute is trying to prohibit is person A taking out an ad without authorization from candidate B, but that says something like: “I’m candidate B, and I hump donkeys.”

The paper sums up the charges against Spina as follows:

[Spina allegedly] Intentionally misrepresented that he or an organization with which he was affiliated spoke on behalf of Carns, and did so in a manner that was damaging to the candidate.

Now here is where this story gets really, really funny (unless you are Rick Spina, anyway). What dastardly, disgusting, humiliating, act did the ad accuse Carns of committing? What horrific, unimaginable, donkey-humping individual did the ad associate with Carns?

According to a statement issued by King, investigators found Spina was behind a fraudulent ad linking Jefferson County Commissioner Jim Carns to Roy Moore and several Supreme Court candidates. The ad was published May 31 in The Birmingham News while Carns was a member of the Alabama House but was running for election to the county commission.

Carns defeated his opponent in the November general election. Before election results were tallied, though, Carns said the ad had hurt his campaign. . . .

The May 31 ad copy read, “Vote for our slate,” and included pictures of the former Chief Justice Moore, and several candidates for chief justice, associate justice and lieutenant governor.

Do you get it? Not only is Troy King essentially saying that linking a candidate to Roy Moore is just as bad as saying a candidate humps donkeys, but Troy King is saying it! Roy Moore is anathema even in the eyes of our Attorney General. Wow.

Man I hope this goes to trial. They have to introduce evidence that linking Moore to Carns was damaging. Someone’s got to take the stand and explain that Moore is a joke. The closing argument will have to emphasize that Moore is such a well-recognized idiot that the mere association of his name with a candidate would cause that candidate to lose. This is just too awesome. I promise you I will think of some reason to be at the courthouse that day.

A Question About The Elevated 280

For anyone who does not know, US 280 is the B’ham area’s most congested road. The fault is uncontrolled and unplanned development south of the city.

If you head out of town on 280, you first drive through Homewood, Mountain Brook, and Vestavia Hills. The traffic is not so bad in those areas, largely because they have severely restricted the amount of development on the highway and there are other routes available. Once you get past those areas and into hell Shelby County, though, it is complete insanity; nothing but shopping centers, housing developments, and red lights. Also, in Shelby County280 is one of two North-South thoroughfares. So everyone who has to go to B’ham for work has to take either 280 or the other option, I-65.

So, the folks down South are now clamoring for a solution to the traffic problem. What they want is an elevated expressway built over the current 280. The more responsible communities – Mt. Brook and Homewood – oppose the idea.

As much as I hate to side with the snobs, I’m inclined to agree with Homewood and Mt. Brook. The road would be loud, ugly, and a source of pollution, and I don’t think these towns should suffer because other people were irresponsible. Besides, if you build an expressway, that might solve the traffic problem in the short term, but it will only encourage more people to move south, which will eventually clog the expressway, too. So the end result is the same problem we have now.

My other problem is the reason for this post. I’ve read about several meetings that have discussed this plan. All of them say the elevated expressway will head into downtown by merging with the Red Mountain Expressway. That’s how it works now. 280 merges with 31 about a mile outside downtown, then the combined road – the Red Mountain Expressway - goes through a huge cut in Red Mountain and into downtown B’ham. My question is this, how is the elevated expressway going to avoid what will surely be a miles long bottleneck at this intersection?

The junction can get backed up now, even with all the red lights that break up the traffic on the roads as they head toward the merger. So when the expressway eliminates the breaks and instead delivers a steady stream of traffic into the junction, I don’t think the results will be pretty. Think of it like watering a plant. If you pore in a bit at a time, the dirt has time to absorb the water between pours, but if you run a hose at full blast, the water quickly backs up and flows over the edges of the pot. Right now, the lights make the junction like the first situation, with an expressway it would be like the water hose. I’m sure whatever time you saved in Shelby County would be lost in this bottleneck, maybe even more.

So how to prevent it? The Red Mountain Expressway can’t be widened without blowing up more of the mountain and the surrounding very expensive neighborhoods. The junction itself is also hemmed in by high value developments. I guess we could add an elevated lane over the RME. I really have no idea, and would like to know if this issue has been addressed at any of the planning meetings.

Wherein I Blog About Abortion

In response to Jeff’s question:

Kathy and Dan have both stated that they are Pro Choice and while I consider these great bloggers my friends, I have to completely disagree with them. Instead of boring you with my reasons why they are wrong and I am right I am just going to ask a simple question to you.

When Does Life Start?

Answer this question for me, and we will start the debate of why abortion should be outlawed. As I receive comments answering this question I will update the post for all to see the answers we get, and my responses.

Dan’s post is here; Kathy’s here. I am responding to Jeff’s question because I think he has inadvertently cut to the heart of the policy issue and given us a clue about why the abortion debate will never end.

One of the things that irritates me about most abortion “debates” is the terminology: You’re either a baby killer or a misogynist. But, and this where Jeff’s question comes into play, I think folks who talk like that are speaking over each other’s heads. Consider the arguments about abortion as syllogisms.

First, against:

Killing human beings is almost always wrong.

An unborn child is a human being.

Therefore, it is almost always wrong to kill an unborn child.

Second, for:

A woman has the right to do whatever she wants to do with her own body.

An unborn child is part of a woman’s body.

Therefore, that woman has the right to do whatever she wants with the unborn child.

So what is the disagreement? If it was really between misogynists and baby killers than the disagreement would be over the major premises. But no-one arguing for abortion would dispute that killing human beings is generally wrong. And no (sane) person arguing against abortion would dispute that women ought to control their own bodies. The crux of the argument is, to rephrase Jeff’s question, whether or not the unborn child is a human being.

To that, I say, I do not know. Rather, I have an idea, but that idea is not the type of idea I can lord over another. If you deny the Earth is round, or the sky blue, I call you an idiot because the answer to those questions is outside both of us. We can both look and see the correct answer. If you fail to see it, the fault is yours. If you deny that killing people is almost always wrong, again, I point you to the visible, tangible harms of killing. But if you hold a position contrary to me about abortion? My only plea is the authority of my own beliefs. I hold them, so obviously I find them persuasive, but I cannot point to anything outside my head (or the collective heads of like-minded people and organizations) to contradict you. I may ultimately be right, and my idea may actually have an existence outside my own head. But right now? It is absolutely subjective.

That it why the debate will never end. There is no conclusive evidence that a fetus is or is not a human being. It’s a matter of individual beliefs.

I’m not saying anything new. This was more or less the basis of Roe. Roe did not decide whether or not a fetus is a baby. All that case really did was re-direct the decision making power from the state to the individual. The Court’s words:

Texas urges that, apart from the Fourteenth Amendment, life begins at conception and is present throughout pregnancy, and that, therefore, the State has a compelling interest in protecting that life from and after conception. We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins. When those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary, at this point in the development of man’s knowledge, is not in a position to speculate as to the answer.

It should be sufficient to note briefly the wide divergence of thinking on this most sensitive and difficult question. There has always been strong support for the view that life does not begin until live’ birth. This was the belief of the Stoics. It appears to be the predominant, though not the unanimous, attitude of the Jewish faith. It may be taken to represent also the position of a large segment of the Protestant community, insofar as that can be ascertained; organized groups that have taken a formal position on the abortion issue have generally regarded abortion as a matter for the conscience of the individual and her family. As we have noted, the common law found greater significance in quickening. Physician and their scientific colleagues have regarded that event with less interest and have tended to focus either upon conception, upon live birth, or upon the interim point at which the fetus becomes “viable,” that is, potentially able to live outside the mother’s womb, albeit with artificial aid. Viability is usually placed at about seven months (28 weeks) but may occur earlier, even at 24 weeks. The Aristotelian theory of “mediate animation,” that held sway throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance in Europe, continued to be official Roman Catholic dogma until the 19th century, despite opposition to this “ensoulment” theory from those in the Church who would recognize the existence of life from the moment of conception. The latter is now, of course, the official belief of the Catholic Church. As one brief amicus discloses, this is a view strongly held by many non-Catholics as well, and by many physicians. Substantial problems for precise definition of this view are posed, however, by new embryological data that purport to indicate that conception is a “process” over time, rather than an event, and by new medical techniques such as menstrual extraction, the “morning-after” pill, implantation of embryos, artificial insemination, and even artificial wombs. ^{. . .}

In view of all this, we do not agree that, by adopting one theory of life, Texas may override the rights of the pregnant woman that are at stake.

As a policy matter, that makes sense to me. The question is unanswerable, so leave it to the most directly affected individual to make up their own mind.

At this point, someone will say “The most directly affected individual is the child.” My initial reaction is to dismiss that as question begging. The issue is whether or not the thing is a child, so the assertion that it is a child cannot be part of the argument one way or the other.

Faulty logic it may be, however it does raise another important point, one sort of like Pascal’s wager. Granted that we cannot know whether or not the thing is a child, but whose guess, if wrong, would cause more harm? And would the results of the wrong guess be harmful enough to justify prohibiting the guess? In other words, what is worse, to support abortion if the fetus is a child? Or to oppose abortion if the fetus is simply part of the woman’s body? Then when that question is answered, is the resulting hypothetical harm so bad that no-one ought to be allowed to act in a way that would cause it, even though it is hypothetical? Should we, for example, refuse to allow anyone to decide for themselves that a six week old fetus is nothing but a body part because, if that person has decided incorrectly, that person has killed another human?

I’m not about to try to answer those questions. But I raise them for the same reason I wrote this post: To highlight the hazy nature of this whole problem.

 

 

Update: “No Child Left In Handcuffs”

Back in August, I posted about a lawsuit in which an elementary school student was suing the school resource officer because the sro, in response to the student’s smarting off to a teacher, cuffed the student and threatened to throw her in jail.

A reader sent me a link to the results of the lawsuit:

An Alabama police officer did minimal harm to a nine-year-old girl by handcuffing her after she threatened a teacher, a jury has ruled, awarding the student only $1 in damages.

Laquarius Gray prevailed in the liability portion of a one-day trial on her civil rights claim as U.S. District Judge U.W. Clemon found that, as a matter of law, the officer illegally detained her during a physical education class at a Tuscaloosa elementary school.

Sheriff’s Deputy Antonio Bostic, who worked as a resource officer at several schools, claimed he heard Gray threaten to punch a coach who was trying to get her to do jumping jacks exercises. “[T]his is how it feels to be in jail,” he told her while she was in handcuffs for at least five minutes.

But on the issue of damages, the jury apparently agreed with the defense, which argued in a briefthat “the Defendant did not cause anything more than de minimis physical injury to the Plaintiff.” Gray’s lawyers presented no expert testimony on damages.

The nominal compensatory award amounts to less than a slap on the wrist for Bostic. Last year, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said Gray had suffered “an obvious violation” of her Fourth Amendment rights in denying summary dismissal of the case.

“[T]he handcuffing was excessively intrusive given Gray’s young age and the fact that it was not done to protect anyone’s safety,” the opinion said, concluding that, “Every reasonable officer would have known that handcuffing a compliant nine-year-old child for purely punitive purposes is unreasonable.”

This does not mean Bostic escapes all responsibility for his unlawful actions.

Congress long ago realized that 1) every violation of a constitutional right is a serious matter, but 2) those violations sometimes don’t result in monetary harm, and 3) going to court is an expensive process. So, to encourage the vindication of rights, Congress provided (at 42 USC 1988) that prevailing parties in civil rights cases can recover their attorney’s fees from the losing side. And, as this case illustrates, that is perfectly fair. Someone has to bear the costs of vindicating the victim’s rights, the question is who: The victim of the unlawful activity? The attorney who spent his time and effort arguing the victim’s case? Or the bad guy? Surely it ought to be the bad guy. After all, the whole situation is his fault.

Anyway, given that in this case the liability was clear and that it has involved all the time and energy of an appeal to the Eleventh Circuit, those fees ought to be fairly substantial.