Matthew Segal

@segalmr.bsky.social

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Civil Rights Lawyer | Personal Views | Not Legal Advice | https://law.yale.edu/matthew-r-segal

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In January, my colleagues and I won a case at the MA Supreme Judicial Court taking a DA to task for withholding police misconduct evidence. Yet, in the Karen Read case, this happened: www.bostonglobe.com/2024/07/07/m...

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NEW: In a government transparency lawsuit brought by the ACLU of Massachusetts, the Court ruled that the Office of the State Auditor unlawfully withheld the results of two audits from the public:

Court orders DiZoglio to remove audit redactionscommonwealthbeacon.org A judge ordered state Auditor Diana DiZoglio to release unredacted reprots on two Massachusetts sheriffs' departments, ruling that public disclosure of the information that had been blocked would not ...

There's a saying in appellate practice that if someone claims to have, like, 7 appellate issues then they actually have none. Well, I think we found the guy who actually might have 7 issues.

Legal system falsely accuses innocent person, then convicts her — not itself — of supposedly making a false accusation. www.bostonglobe.com/2024/06/05/w...

Amanda Knox reconvicted of slander in Italy for accusing innocent man in roommate’s 2007 murder - The Boston Globewww.bostonglobe.com The court found that Knox had wrongly accused an innocent man, the Congolese owner of the bar where she worked part time, of the killing. But she will not serve any more jail time.

"In the past thirteen months, the [ACLU's State Supreme Court Initiative] has filed amicus briefs or served as co-counsel in twenty-five cases in eighteen states, on issues ranging from abortion to election reform." www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

Can State Supreme Courts Preserve—or Expand—Rights?www.newyorker.com With a lopsided conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court, progressive activists are seeking legal opportunities in state constitutions.

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Trump’s attorney sent @propublica.bsky.social a cease-and-desist letter demanding this article not be published. The letter warned that if the outlet and its reporters “continue their reckless campaign of defamation, President Trump will evaluate all legal remedies.”

Multiple Trump Witnesses Have Received Significant Financial Benefits From His Businesses, Campaignwww.propublica.org Witnesses in the various criminal cases against the former president have gotten pay raises, new jobs and more. If any benefits were intended to influence testimony, that could be a crime.

Even if Trump wins his appeal, this case would not place in the top 1 million injustices our legal system has committed. For example, I have litigated 1000s of wrongful convictions involving greater injustice.

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Reply to

Popehat

/2 Put another way the “reasonable person” in the test is a “reasonable career lawyer who is firmly ensconced in judicial culture and shares a common set of assumptions and beliefs with the judiciary.” What’s reasonable to you may vary. You may not like it but that’s the law.

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Just a reminder: the “would a reasonable person question their impartiality” test is not an actual normal reasonable person test, to the extent there is such a thing. It is a stylized, history-encrusted, precedent-confined test based on what octogenarian white judges thought was reasonable. /1

FULL ALITO LETTER c/o @lawdorknews.bsky.social: www.documentcloud.org/documents/24...

DocumentCloudwww.documentcloud.org

PEOPLE OF EARTH: Do you like civil rights & civil liberties? Do you like courts... where it's possible to advance those things? Apply to be a staff attorney in the ACLU's State Supreme Court Initiative! DC➡️ www.aclu.org/careers/appl... NYC➡️ www.aclu.org/careers/appl...

Careers at ACLUwww.aclu.org Join our team! We’re looking for committed, passionate people for open roles at the ACLU.

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If a law firm has a sound basis to move to recuse a judge, but declines to do so due to fear of negative repercussions, that is not a sign of a system that is functioning well.

This is fine. Classic case of a judge and their spouse having his and hers flagpoles.

If a Yankees flag had been flown outside an umpire's home, even briefly, I'd expect that umpire to refrain from working Yankees games.

Committing or sanctioning certain crimes — e.g., pardoning someone convicted of murdering a protester — is how people are going to apply for jobs in a second Trump administration.

True, the legal system is struggling mightily to apply the law to Trump now, when he's merely a private citizen who does not control the executive branch, but things will surely go better once he's President again.

what a way to spend your time as a lawyer www.texastribune.org/2024/05/10/t...

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Everything that Paul Butler writes is drop-everything-and-read material, and this is no exception. balkin.blogspot.com/2024/05/the-...

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The best time of the year: at least once a week and maybe twice per week through June, we get to learn which new people are losing their civil rights

If, hypothetically, it were hard to convict a former president in a timely fashion, that would be all the more reason to avoid writing judge-made exceptions into the plain text of the 14th Amendment's disqualification clause.

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Together with my ACLU colleague Bridget Lavender, I wrote for @brennancenter.bsky.social's #StateCourtReport about the use of rap lyrics against criminal defendants: statecourtreport.org/our-work/ana...

Rap on Trialstatecourtreport.org Courts should be wary of allowing prosecutors to introduce rap lyrics as evidence.

Texas Court of Criminal Appeals: Admitting rap music or videos in criminal trials is highly prejudicial, especially bc "by no means is rap the exclusive genre for glorification of criminal activity." Some examples from the Court: search.txcourts.gov/Case.aspx?cn...

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People are still not paying close enough attention to the solar+storage energy revolution that's happening right now. Absolutely seismic shifts that are still *accelerating* every year

Continuing my series “what’s something good that happened on climate during and because of the Biden Administration”: the absolute exponential growth of grid scale battery storage. Barely existed before 2021. Now playing a big role soaking up solar & balancing grid. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Giant Batteries Are Transforming the Way the U.S. Uses Electricitywww.nytimes.com They’re delivering solar power after dark in California and helping to stabilize grids in other states. And the technology is expanding rapidly.

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"...a NYT/Siena poll conducted earlier this month found an astonishing divergence between how men and women view the gravity of the hush-money charges. Women were twice as likely as men to consider the case “very serious,” while men were twice as likely to consider it “not at all serious.”"

I will say that if you are following Daniels's testimony right now, it is genuinely upsetting and not funny at all www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc...

Trump’s Misogyny Is on Trial in New Yorkwww.theatlantic.com To read through the court filings is to be plunged back anew into the dizzying chaos of those last few weeks before the 2016 election.

Schools that wish to mitigate the risk of being protested by federal judges should encourage their students to work for state judges.

My field is law not music, but if I'm understanding things correctly one side filed its brief and then Kendrick Lamar immediately e-filed his reply brief?!?!

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Quite the five-justice (of seven) concurrence in today's California Supreme Court opinion about whether police had reasonable suspicion to detain an individual who refused to interact with police (as was his constitutional right).

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Oklahoma just adopted a law that bans the use of ranked-choice voting by local governments. It also adopted a law that will make homeless encampments on public property a misdemeanor. www.newsfromthestates.com/article/gov-...

Sorry if this sounds alarmist but this week at SCOTUS was alarming. People should be alarmed.