New Years - Office Closed

The office will be closed on December 31, 2012 and January 1, 2013.

Happy New Year to everyone!  May the coming year be a season of embracing peace when we can, fighting for justice when we can not, and being wise enough to recognize the difference.*

--Stephen Karpf

* My apologies to Reinhold Niebuhr, the original author of the Serenity Prayer, which was later adopted by AA.  It's not just for alcoholics!

Thanksgiving Holidays

Photo by Stephen Karpf.
All rights reserved.

The Thanksgiving holidays are frequently a difficult time.  On a personal level, family members come together from both a place of love and of obligation.  For separated and divorced families, the incorporation of Thanksgiving into a parenting schedule can be a particularly complicated issue.  On a political level, the American principles of immigration and assimilation crash directly into the historical origins of the holiday in European colonization and cultural violence.  It can be a very rough time, indeed.

Personally, I like to hang up my thinking cap for the weekend and eat some spectacularly good food.  The office will be closed for Thursday and Friday - Thursday for dinner, Friday for digestion - but I will be checking email and texts (which can be sent to the office phone number, 617-564-3823) on Friday and over the weekend in case any emergencies arise.  I hope that my readers can be push aside their stressors emphasize the enjoyment of the positive aspects of your lives.  Happy Thanksgiving!

Power went out yesterday, after Hurricane Sandy, and we closed.  The phones to the building are still down, so we are also closed today.  However, I can still be reached at our office number of (617) 564-3823 because it is not tied to the landline at the office.

I continue to receive faxes and emails, as those are also not tied to the landlines.  Let's have a round of applause for modern technology!

Hurricane Sandy: Vadimus Law office is open!

I hope everyone fared well over the course of the storm so far.  It continues for a lot of people, either directly as it tracks northwesterly or indirectly from lost power and/or flooding.  Southeastern Massachusetts is doing fairly well, all considered.

The power is on at our office in Newton and our doors are open.

As you assess damage from the storm, be sure to take lots of video and pictures documenting the extent of the damage for any insurance which may cover it - automobile insurance, home insurance, renter's insurance, even credit card insurance.  Submit your claims promptly and according the terms of your insurance agreements.  If you can't find your home insurance information, you can ask your mortgage provider for the information, if you pay through funds held in escrow.

Please avoid power lines, driving through deep water caused by flooding, and other obvious hazards caused by the storm.  Stay safe!

If you have legal questions arising from Hurricane Sandy, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Hurricane Sandy: Vadimus Law office is closed.

Due to the inclement weather from Hurricane Sandy, our office is closing today at noon. We have not yet decided if we are opening tomorrow. If you have deliveries to make, please check first to see if the office is open.

Be safe!

Hurricane Sandy: Courts open until noon.

State courts and administrative offices are open until noon today, Monday, October 29th, and will open tomorrow at noon, Tuesday, October 30th.

In fact, I am off to a Court in SE Massachusetts.  Gusting around 20 mph, some rain, but traffic and driving are fine.

Be safe!

Hurricane Sandy: Landfall & Court closures

     With the upcoming landfall of Hurricane Sandy, and the issuance of high wind warnings through 6 a.m. Tuesday in the Taunton area,  the question of whether or not Court closures will occur on Monday and Tuesday are now an issue.  

     "A high wind warning is issued when sustained winds of 40 mph or higher are expected for at least an hour...with gusts of 58 mph or greater at any time."  See http://forecast.weather.gov/showsigwx.php?warnzone=MAZ017&warncounty=MAC005&firewxzone=MAZ017&local_place1=&product1=High+Wind+Warning.  They are predicting gusts "...up to 70 mph" as of this writing.  Id.  This makes travel very dangerous.

    Monday through Tuesday morning is currently the peak of the storm in our area. Your primary concern can and should be your safety and the safety of your family.  If you need emergency protection, such as an abuse prevention order, call your local police department.  If the Courts have not been closed, and travel is dangerous, you should not travel.  However, your assessment of the danger of travel may or may not be an adequate reason to not appear in Court if Courts are still open.

    

      You can monitor whether the Courts have been closed in the following ways:

• Check www.mass.gov/courts for announcements of closures.

• Check www.mass.gov for announcements.  Please note that a state of emergency, or the announcement that nonessential state employees should not come to work, does not mean that the Courts are closed.  Court personnel are considered essential employees.

• Download the smartphone app Ping4Alerts! at http://www.mass.gov/eopss/agencies/mema/ping4/get-emergency-information-on-your-smartphone.html for iPhone or Android. This will provide weather alerts, and may or may not have information about court closures.  I have downloaded it, and it appears to get its weather news feed from my favorite source: the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

• Local radio and television may announce court closures.

• For employees of the courts, recorded messages may be left at 1-800-222-5178 or 617-742-8383 and messages will also be recorded on the following telephone numbers: Brooke Courthouse - 617-788-5399; Fall River Courthouse - 508-491-2899; Worcester Courthouse - 508-831-2499.  However, I am not aware of any reason not to try those numbers ourselves; try to not call frequently, however, so that the phone lines are not clogged.

• Check here for informal updates. News may be unreliable due to power outages in my area.

• Check your cellphone.  If you have a court date on Monday or Tuesday, I will attempt to text any news or updates concerning Court closures.  News may be unreliable due to power and/or cellphone network outages in my area.

Batten down your hatches and be safe!  If you are not in danger, try to enjoy this exhibition of the natural world's sheer power.

Vadimuslaw.com is now up!

The firm web site was down for a few days of changes and maintenance.  Thank you for your patience in the interim.

I apologize for the inconvenience, but the process of transferring our cellular telephone service is interfering with our playback of voicemails.  If you called us within the last 72 hours and have not been called back, please be patient.  The voicemails have been received and will be review and responded-to as soon as the problem is resolved.

We appreciate your patience.  The mobility provided by advanced technology sometimes results in these problems.

Blood Drive Post-Mortem

A hearty thank you those of you, clients or otherwise, who donated blood at our office complex today.   The staff was professional, swift, and helpful.

If you were not able to donate today, but wish to do so, you can find a blood drive or collection center near you at redcrossblood.org.

Riverside Center Blood Drive - March 1, 2012 9am - 2pm

The American Red Cross is holding a blood drive in our office complex on Thursday, March 1, 2012 between 9 a.m. and 2 p.m.  You can schedule an appointment at redcrossblood.org and entering the code riverside120, but you can probably walk in as well.  Please note that while my office is in Building 2, Suite 400, the blood drive will take place in Building 1 in Suite 120A.

Just one person's donation of whole blood will save lives.  The process of blood donation is safe.  For more information about blood donation, you can go to the web site of the American Red Cross.

I am not only donating my own blood on March 1st, but I will also discount an hour of my billable time from the  bill of any client who donates on March 1st.  I also understand that the Red Cross is also giving out free lunch from Cumberland Farms.  Altruism may open your mind; a little incentive may help get you over here.  I hope to run into you on March 1st.

A thrilled lawyer on jury duty.

     After eleven years of litigation and three more directly in politics, and being called for jury duty four times, I was finally seated on a jury.  It was a fascinating and exhilarating exercise in direct democracy - so much so that despite the typical somber atmosphere of the courtroom and years of my own practiced courtroom demeanor, I had difficulty suppressing a grin for much of the trial.  I frequently resorted to chomping on the inside of my lower lip. (Who knows how counsel read that expression!)


     Jury duty is one of the ultimate expressions of direct democracy - all the more so today because individual votes are often submerged beneath SuperPACs, the personal wealth of elected officials, and voter disenfranchisement and the apathy which results from it (infographic here).  Being able to exercise my citizenship so directly actually left me giddy at the end of the day.


      It was a straightforward criminal case - a young man fell asleep at 3:00 a.m. on a February night and stopped his car (brakes only, he kept it in gear) in the middle of his traffic lane. He was charged with driving under the influence of alcohol and driving negligently to endanger.  "Driving negligently so as to endanger" was open-and-shut - defense counsel barely defended it and ignored it his closing statement.  He (the defendant) was obviously exhausted, for whatever reason, and should not have gotten behind the wheel.  We concurred and in deliberations commented that if he had pulled over to the side of the road or demonstrated at all that he recognized and remedied his own condition, maybe we would have decided differently.  But as it was, there as no dispute.  
      The Commonwealth failed to make its case on the alcohol charge.  There was no breathalyzer at all, no blood test, and no behaviors which could be attributed specifically to alcohol.  The officer who failed him on the field sobriety tests had not followed his training procedure, the officer had imposed more rigorous standards than the manual provided in failing the defendant, and all of the signals of failure could be attributed to the cold, fatigue, and nervousness of the defendant.  I credited the officer with not manufacturing the usual observation-only classic signs of intoxication: 'stumbling', 'bleary/bloodshot eyes', etc..  His lack of testimony of such signs allowed me trust more what the officer did observe.
    The defendant had been respectful, answered 50 or so questions without a problem when being booked at the police station, and probably would have passed the field tests if the manual's procedures had been followed.  The only alcohol-specific fact was the officer's observation that the defendant had smelled of alcohol.  
     All in all, we had a reasonable doubt that the defendant's fatigue was resulting from the alcohol - enough doubt to find him not guilty of that charge.


    Interestingly, after we reached our decision, we discussed the fact that we all could have 'trigger' cases in which we individually could not be impartial.  Sexual assault and OUI resulting in a personal injury were prominent in the jury members' comments.  More interestingly, the people who spoke about their trigger cases had mentioned it in their juror questionnaires and had been queried by the judge and attorneys.


   At the end of the day, and I can not emphasize how happy I was to see this, the system worked.  Juries (from a litigator's perspective) are notoriously fickle, thick-headed, and unpredictable.  In my jury, the defendant had a fair trial, neither the Commonwealth nor the defense acted unreasonably, the facts appeared to be appropriately winnowed by the judge (based on my limited observations of objections and the Court's decisions on them), and the jury discussed the elements of the charges logically and reasonably.  We rationally discussed our disagreements over the DUI charges and nevertheless reached a unanimous conclusion which was based on the appropriate burden of proof.            
     We even discovered, afterward, that the defendant had no prior record, so we could feel pleased that our lack of knowledge of the defendant's history made for a decision that showed fairness as well as justice. While a jury should never hear about prior history, I think we would have been less happy about our decision if this was the defendant's 4th or 5th OUI conviction.


   There's a political meme which has been bouncing around since at least the mid-nineteenth century: that liberty is protected by three boxes - the ballot, the jury, and the cartridge.  Sometimes a fourth or even fifth box is added: lunch (as in a social safety net), soap (for political speech), the bandbox.(n.1) etc.  The emphasis changes on the speaker - gun-rights activists focus on the cartridge as the last defense for liberty and the women's suffrage and early African-American civil rights movements focused on the ballot.  
      But the jury box, while rarely emphasized, is included in every known statement of the meme.  This is for good reason.  The right to a trial by jury of one's peers is one of the foundations for freedom in the United States; and such a right, without citizen participation in juries, would be completely toothless. 
     In more recent history, the jury box has come under direct threat.  The National Defense Authorization Act ("NDAA") in its current incarnation and interpretation can deny the right to a jury trial to a citizen, arrested within or outside the U.S., who is accused of  having "part of or substantially supported al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners".(n.2)  


    Thomas Jefferson said “I consider trial by jury as the only anchor yet imagined by man by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution.”  Dave Barry commented "We operate under a jury system in this country, and as much as we complain about it, we have to admit that we know of no better system, except possibly flipping a coin."
     When you next receive a summons for jury duty, as invasive and impractical as jury participation can be, consider this - that summons is an invitation to the most direct democratic activity you will ever have.  The value of jury duty should respect and outweigh virtually all the real and legitimate reservations which you may have walking into that courthouse.   Jury duty is your best opportunity to make the most impact as an individual free citizen.  Do not hesitate to exercise that opportunity when it comes knocking on your door.

    I encourage anyone interested in reading further about jury duty and its links to democracy to browse the "Jury and Democracy Blog".


(n.1)  The "bandbox" may refer to the box in which elaborate women's hats were carried, and was a reference in the nineteenth century to the power which women could wield within the family - a proposition which was both anti-women's rights and of extremely dubious accuracy.  On the other hand, my source for this information is suspect.


(n.2)  I will note that the NDAA states that it does not change existing law.  Whether or not existing law permits such detention is still being debated politically and resolved judicially - different judicial districts have reached different decisions.  President Obama stated after signing the bill that his administration would not take the position that a citizen arrested domestically would be denied the right to a jury trial.  Unfortunately, that would not be binding on later administrations, and the Bush administrations did exercise that power.

Jury duty as the ultimate direct democracy

After eleven years of litigation and three more in politics, and being called for jury duty four times, I was finally seated on a jury.  It was a fascinating and exhilarating exercise in direct democracy - so much so that despite the typical somber atmosphere of the courtroom and years of practiced courtroom demeanor, I had difficulty suppressing a grin for much of the trial. (Who knows how counsel read that expression!)

Jury duty is one of the ultimate expressions of direct democracy - all the more so today as individual voices are submerged beneath SuperPACs, personal wealth of elected officials, and disenfranchisement and the apathy which results (infographic here).

Technical issues

All of the technical issues with the maintenance of this blog, the web site, and our telephone provider have been corrected.  I appreciate the patience of clients and fellow counsel during this frustrating January.

If I have not yet responded to an email, web site contact, or telephone call made between the dates of January 3 through January 27, please feel free to call, email, or otherwise re-contact me.

My apologies and thank you again for your patience.