Stephen Hardwick

@nonfinality.bsky.social

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Appellate public defender. Peace Corps Tunisia. Lowest-level zoning chair. Wolverine in Buckeye land. Election worker. Cyclist. Personal account with personal views only. “On the payroll of the rain garden interests.” he/him

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Conservatives: Keep government out of the family! Also Conservatives: Government gets to decide if your marriage is bad enough for a divorce, so judges will force you to give public testimony about the intimate details of your married life.

I know we know about JD Vance, but he's also working to make divorces harder to obtain, and says that people in "violent" marriages should stay married and not get divorced. So.

What's the difference between a "motion" and a "pleading," and how does that make the cop union lose? Find out the nerdy answer from today's Ohio Supreme Court decision in Ohio PBA v. Cleveland, 2024-Ohio-2651). ⚖️ #AppellateSky Docket w/ links to docs & OA: www.supremecourt.ohio.gov/Clerk/ecms/#...

www.supremecourt.ohio.gov

Watching JD Vance from here in Ohio, perhaps his worst trait is to say or do anything to advance himself. He was a moderate when he thought he had to be when Ohio was a swing state. But when the wind started blowing in a different direction, he veered into the bigoted, violent, crazy-pants rightwing

More Violent Rhetoric That Must Stop—if we stop calling the purposeful killing of a person “murder,” all murder will cease.

I hope Bouie’s voice is just on vacation from Bluesky and comes back. (Gift link)

Opinion | John Roberts Makes His Bid for Infamywww.nytimes.com The chief justice and his allies have rewritten the Constitution to make it say what they want it to say.

I have nothing original and thoughtful to add to the Big Discussion, so I’m posting cats, muffins, and sci-fi.

Breakfast.

The cat who won’t let me pet or hold him but loves to get scratched by the long glow-in-the-dark, skeletal-Halloween-hand stick.

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I love that very specific “I am doing complex ballistics calculations” look they get..

Tonight’s “reading” as I scoop litter boxes, take the dog out, and other before-bedtime stuff. I understand it better the second time after I re-read (“re-listened to”) the first two books. share.libbyapp.com/title/9215613

A cat and her newel post. She’s planning a leap to her super-high-I-dominate-the-world place.

I’m going to do my best to close Bluesky and my NYT app, and then to wait for at least an hour before reading more. There’s no reason that I need to ride this information rollercoaster.

Trust the sources that take time to verify facts and that are the most careful about reporting only what they know. Speed isn’t a virtue.

Remember: here's the breaking news handbook. All of these are good rules to stand by at the moment.

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Remember: here's the breaking news handbook. All of these are good rules to stand by at the moment.

A photo of a from when we fostered some kittens during the lockdown. He grew up to become this dude.

The reality that a single anonymous call to the cops could result in a military assault on a private home is a huge 🚩 about the standards police are using.

I have an entire script I give to T&S people for making the "please don't murder me just because the internet says so" call. It *has* gotten better in the last decade or so: more and more police departments in the US are enacting anti-SWAT policies, especially in the larger cities.

A big loss for Bluesky. People, please stop being jerks.

The editors and many of the reporters at the New York Times are often disturbingly unaware of their own biases, and they’re not always fair, but they try to be fair, and they do their best to tell the truth as they perceive it.

One reason government takes property from poor people rather than rich is that rich people can delay valid projects for years with nearly frivolous litigation.

It took two trips to the Ohio Supreme Court to win the argument that turning native burial mounds from a golf course to preserved park was a valid use of takings power.⚖️ www.supremecourt.ohio.gov/rod/docs/pdf... www.supremecourt.ohio.gov/Clerk/ecms/#... www.supremecourt.ohio.gov/Clerk/ecms/#...

www.supremecourt.ohio.gov

Finally! www.dispatch.com/story/news/c...

6 things to know before trial over Moundbuilders Country Club lease of Octagon Earthworkswww.dispatch.com The long-awaited trial over the valuation of Moundbuilders Country Club's lease on the Octagon Earthworks is slated to begin Monday.

www.supremecourt.ohio.gov

In this amicus, the Ohio Chamber of Commerce starts with a story from the original Dickens Christmas Carol, & then moves to the Muppet version to make a point about Ohio's commercial activities tax. A #LegalWriting example of how storytelling can help or hurt a brief. Link to docket & briefs next. ⚖️

Lawyer-posting limitation: My office does the plurality of defense-side work in criminal/delinquency cases in the Ohio Supreme Court, & I can’t post anything on behalf of my office or about an office client/case, so when I want to comment on stuff going on in that court, I have to find a civil case.

Maybe not as boring. One of the appellees is represented by the same three lawyers who made the Ohio Supreme Court so mad it sua sponte declared them (the lawyers!) to be vexatious litigators and ordered attorney fees, the amount of which is still in dispute. #AppellateSky ⚖️ bsky.app/profile/nonf...

When your state supreme court thinks you've engaged in repeated frivolous filings, they might just say "no" when you try to settle the case to avoid a hearing on your sanctions. Here, a firm appealed continuance denials without final orders. #AppellateSky www.supremecourt.ohio.gov/Clerk/ecms/#...

Boring but important to some: The Ohio Supreme Court has agreed to decide whether a trial court can order payment to guardians ad litem after a case is dismissed, and when such an order becomes final and appealable. This seems rather important to both GALs & the people who pay them. ⚖️

Public Docket www.supremecourt.ohio.gov Supreme Court of Ohio Online Docket

Most people don't understand how much behind-the-scenes security there is to prevent non-citizens or "dead" people from voting, as well as to prevent people from voting in two places.

The best evidence on hand contradicts Speaker Johnson’s intuition of widespread voting by noncitizens, as I argued last month. www.cato.org/commentary/r...

www.cato.org

All this talk of voter "fraud" (really "suppression") is based on ignorance/dishonesty about modern election security. Part of what makes elections secure is that electronic tallies & paper ballots can be verified against each other. So paper ballots alone would make elections less secure.

I manage a polling location—no one *ever* gets total control of both the paper ballots & the electronic count. 2 paper final vote tallies are printed before anything is done to the counter. Poll worker sign both. One is left in a polling location window. The other returned to the BOE

This guy may have done scuzzy things, but people charged with crimes should be allowed to withdraw guilty pleas at will, especially before sentence is imposed, especially when they’re taking a huge risk by taking their case to trial. Withdrawing a plea doesn’t mean they walk—it means they get tried.

The U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld former Tennessee Sen. Brian Kelsey's guilty plea for campaign finance violations after his bid to rescind it. @friedmanadam5.bsky.social reports Kelsey will do 21 months in federal prison.

U.S. Appeals Court upholds Tennessee former state Sen. Brian Kelsey's guilty plea • Tennessee Lookouttennesseelookout.com The U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals on Monday upheld former Tennessee Sen. Brian Kelsey's guilty plea for campaign finance violations.

If a school district replaces regular class with study so kids who leave DURING THE SCHOOL DAY for private religious training won’t miss anything, these not-really-non-profits are taking learning time from students who go to school for, you know, school. www.dispatch.com/story/news/c...

Prison rape jokes are still rape jokes. Don't. Just don't.

It is not funny. It is not just. It is not an appropriate part of a carceral sentence. We should not view it as an inevitability and we should not speak of it as "deserved". It is one of the many shames of our carceral system and one of the reasons we need radical prison reform.

Want to know the daily grind of a state supreme court? OK, only a few of you care that much, but those people, the Ohio Supreme Court maintains a list of all filings for the previous 5 days—every single one. A few may be sealed, but you'll get the general description. #AppellateSky #LegalWriting ⚖️

Public Docket www.supremecourt.ohio.gov Supreme Court of Ohio Online Docket