Comments by "SmallSpoonBrigade" (@SmallSpoonBrigade) on "LegalEagle" channel.

  1.  @TetrisChampMan  Says you. John Dean, one of the guys involved in the cover up that wound up doing time over it, says otherwise.
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  2.  @FutureMartian97  And yet, that wasn't the argument they made, it was that the estate had to use arbitration due to a clause in a contract that shouldn't have applied to the interaction in the first place.
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  3.  @officialdcshepard  Please tell me the one asking for the social security number and promising not to misuse it wasn't real.
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  4.  @issen2291  Yes, although considering the comments I've been seeing, I would have been surprised if he hadn't noticed people coming in here and claiming that this is now a politics channel. It's not that the focus has changed so much, it's still about the law, but due to just how much crazy stuff is going on with the government, that's the law that people are curious about.
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  5.  Mauris  Nope, that's not how that works. They initiated it, he was defending himself. The real question is whether they have any legal grounds for a jury to acquit them. But it is factually incorrect to suggest that the victim initiated the violence.
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  6. The sad thing is that this kind of proves a point I've been making for decades. The sort of weapons that are covered under the 2nd amendment, even the greatly expanded interpretation that's become more popular, wouldn't do much of anything in terms of overthrowing the government. A government that has tanks, drones and all sorts of surveillance state stuff. Which, BTW, was largely the doing of the same politicians that the 2nd amendment supporters were in favor of.
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  7. That's a bit different, they were at least trying to prosecute him for actual crimes whereas with Alec Baldwin they couldn't even be bothered to know what laws they thought he had broken before they charged him. Also, I don't know that they ever bothered to figure out where the ammo came from that wound up in the weapon and they had already prosecuted somebody else successfully for being responsible for the accident that led to the death. I'm not sure how the folks responsible for handling the weapons can be responsible, and also the actor that's doing what he was told. But, the biggest issue is simply that they destroyed and hid the evidence that would permit them to establish whether the usual rules surrounding firearms were even relevant.
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  8.  @UniverseUndone7  Normally, it's hard to get contempt charges overturned as the contempt is considered to be witnessed by the judge. However, if it was refusal to turn over the name of the person that informed the attorney that rules were being broken, the appellate judges might well overturn it.
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  9.  @Otis151  It doesn't matter what the reasoning is, the defense attorney had a right to be at the meeting. It is a big no no for the judge and the prosecution to have secret meetings about the case. Any time there is court business involving the case, the parties have the right to be there. This wasn't a simple handing in of some documents for the judge to review, but even there, a copy would go to the defense.
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  10. No, we need to leave the house alone. It's the most democratic part of the federal government right now. There's already so many congressmen that hardly anybody ever gets to talk during sessions as it stands Adding more seats would just mean that problem would get to be even larger. Expanding the size of the house would somewhat reduce the influence of tiny states, but the impact would be pretty small compared with fixing the Senate, Presidency or SCOTUS.
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  11. Arguably the biggest issues are that the parties are allowed to decide which nominees are put up for President and then the electoral college means that people in many states don't even get a say unless enough of the people in that state credibly threaten to throw the election. The state I live in hasn't voted GOP since Reagan and nobody bothers to try to earn our votes when running for President, even though they throw all sorts of money at the swing states trying to win.
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  12. In all fairness, had this continued to deliberation he probably would have been acquitted anyways. The prosecutors really wanted to nail him to the wall over this and going so far as to file charges under a statute that was passed in response to this shooting. They destroyed the gun resulting in the defense not being able to have a crack at disproving the assertion that Alec had pulled the trigger and they buried this evidence and as such prevented the defense from examining the rounds to see if they matched for themselves. I'm not surprised, this was a high profile case and they were more concerned with convicting somebody than whether that made any sense or not.
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  13. Only vote the other bits if you can be bothered to have some sort of informed opinion. You don't have to vote on things you're not comfortable voting on, and voting without having an opinion isn't doing anybody any favors.
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  14. This should guarantee a mistrial at least, if not guarantee that the entire case gets tossed out on appeal if he is convicted.
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  15.  @OTOss8  Yes, since it's being paid to the library that's probably a nonprofit, I don't think it's possible to redirect that to pay off the other suits. And, the $1m goes to the attorneys. The whole result here is that a news channel is now disincentivized to accurately cover any future criminal activity. Most people, do not really understand he precise line between sexual assault and rape and in some jurisdictions, it's not an important legal distinction. If we were talking about something that didn't involve penetration, I think there'd be a more reasonable basis for giving Trump the win, but I don't see how it being rape rather than sexual assault is any better for his reputation.
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  16. It's likely that the state supreme court will ultimately throw out the contempt charges, so the judge will get his more recent precedence to use next time he illegally finds somebody in contempt of court. It's also likely to be a bit of a moot point as this should be grounds for his removal from the bench and disbarrment.
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  17. Somehow I don't think JFK would endorse this methodology.
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  18. Honestly, it's probably nothing of the sort, but it certainly does look bad. When I was on jury duty, nobody in the pool was willing to talk about the process we used to get the resulting judgment. I don't know about the other jurors, but having spent nearly a month of my life dealing with the case, I wasn't about to say anything that could be used to overturn things. Both parties were pretty much hated by the whole jury by the end of the trial and I have great confidence that the resulting judgments were fair by way of both parties being hated equally by us. If I had been able to do it legally, I would have taken all the money from both of them and given it to somebody else entirely. I suspect that kind of thinking happens more than one might expect due to the time that the attorneys spend trying to tar each other within the boundaries set up in the appropirate civil procedures and courtroom rules.
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  19.  @thepudgyninja  People forget, or don't know, that being a producer can mean a lot of things. It can mean being somebody that does get to make those sorts of decisions, it can also mean that they did some sort of significant favor and were paid with a credit and a bunch of stuff in the middle. I've heard folks make a lot out of him being a producer, but I'm guessing that if the judge disallowed that from the trial that he didn't exercise any control over that aspect of production.
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  20.  @epitaphzz  $10k is like nothing, it's not even a rounding error on his net worlh. The penalty should have been some percentage of his net worth, they do that in some other parts of the world when it comes to speeding tickets, that's how you get those $100k+ tickets.
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  21. What gets me is that the parties get to decide whom to nominate and the states have the power to decide what the rules are for appearing on the ballot. So, the states already had the right to make decisions that impacted the rest of the country in terms of what candidates would appear on the ballots. It's one of the reasons why it's so hard for 3rd party candidates to earn recognition from the federal government. Without being on the ballot, it can be tough to have the necessary support for federal election benefits.
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  22. Pretty much. We all know that he's guilty, his people already admitted in on TV and they've failed to provide any exculpatory evidence when requested to do so. The real question is whether or not there's enough GOP Senators with ethics to have him removed for it.
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  23. The issue is that there are so many people doing it that even with restraining orders you'd still have issues.
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  24. TBH, after like the 3rd time, the judge should have had his but detained as punishment as the money doesn't seem to have been doing any good.
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  25.  @huma474  Doesn't matter, as explained in the video, one side does not get to meet with the judge in private except under some pretty specific circumstances and the other party has the right to know what happened and object if need be.
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  26. Keep in mind that even if they are dissolved, the 2nd Amendment Foundation will be engaged in the same extremist rhetoric and lobbying that the NRA was. Those two are pretty much always the two sources for quotes about how we can't have any limits placed on the sale or purchase of firearms because freedom to slaughter entire office buildings of people is more important than the right to not be slaughtered in a mass shooting.
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  27. Probably because most of them start by taking a little and keep going while rationalizing it as if everybody else is doing even mroe of it.
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  28. There's no need for a disclaimer, he is, as a matter of law, a convicted felon. So, he is a criminal, there's no legal requirement for a disclaimer as he's already been convicted.
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  29. People are impatient and sometimes what they see isn't what you see. And sometimes they're crazy jerks.
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  30. It's worth noting that if every NRA member that disapproved of the NRA's positions would have simply moved their contribution to a different organization, it would have folded years ago. The NRA's positions are not popular, even amongst members, its' just that so many people equate them with gun rights that other, more responsible, organizations don't get that money. For those that support reasonable gun restrictions, want hunting rights preserved, for gun safety classes to be free or affordable, there are plenty of organizations that do that, just without the extremist ideology.
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  31.  youcometome9  Not really, one of the biggest mistakes the news media has made is behaving as if both sides have valid positions. In many cases, especially most hot button issues, that's simply not true.
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  32.  @huma474  This is no different from being in the military and being order to commit a war crime. In both cases you're allowed to say no. Although there can be consequences in both cases.
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  33. From what I understand, that's the day she found out about the violations. She was absolutely right to quit at that point even though she probably already knew that the case was going to be dismissed outright whether or not she quit. Waiting to see what the reaction was would have just served to increase the likelihood of sanctions for her while doing nothing useful for the rule of law.
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  34.  @HunterAnsorge-ok9jk  Um, she definitely is. That's one of the responsibilities of the armorer. Anytime there's a gap in filming the armorer is supposed to take possession of the firearm and either unload it and store it or put it in their holster until it's needed again. I don't know that it's been established how the round got into the firearm, if that has been established I haven't heard about it.
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  35.  @Baddaby  You're both sort of right, but I think you're more right. There is so many politicians that are there year after year and so much incentive to inflate their own salaries that it's a moot point. It's sort of like how executive pay at corporations has gotten out of hand because nobody wants to admit that they've got a subpar CxO so they continually pay more than what was the mean previously.
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  36. The vast majority would. Why would you assume that just because the right has no ethics, morals or any identifiable form of integrity that the left must also be so bereft of it? Yes, there's a few holdouts on the right that do have ethics and integrity, but at this point they're mostly corporatist Democrats.
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  37.  @RK-cj4oc  There are limits, they are supposed to do that within the construct of the constitution, laws and precedence. They're not supposed to ignore those things completely and rule something else. That bit about the President being completely immune to prosecution for official acts, and sometimes immune to unofficial acts is definitely not something you see in the constitution and they failed to indicate how we'd know whether or not something is prosecutable.
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  38.  @--enyo--  The GOP seems fine with it, and the Democrats are fine with it as it gives them something to run on without the danger of actually being expected to do anything about it. Barring some significant change, I don't see that changing anytime soon.
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  39. There isn't technically, but due to the fact that the President can nominate whomever he likes and the Senate doesn't even have to have confirmation hearings, it leads to a situation where the party that gets justices on the court can select ones that they expect to rule the way that they like on at least the important issues.
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  40.  @darstar217  Yes, and it's probably going to take a lot of research as well as it being a rapidly evolving story.
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  41. The unemployment scheme that's being alleged reminds me a lot of Trump University where an actual billionaire is unlikely to bother considering such a scheme.
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  42. This is true. Even amongst their membership their hardline stance against even the most basic of restrictions on buying, like background checks, aren't popular. Most members realize that the kind of unlimited access isn't good for anybody except the manufacturers of the weapons. Most of the members want their hunting rights preserved, access to firearms preserved and for people to have access to high quality gun safety resources. To that end, there are plenty of organizations that advocate for those issues without also advocating for allowing access to firearms for domestic terrorists and those with known mental health issues. There's a special place in hell for them as well as for the leadership of the 2nd amendment foundation.
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  43. It's not even that. As the video pointed out, there's likely selection bias there so the people signing that pledge are more likely to vote for Trump than Harris or whatever 3rd party options are on the ballot. And he's doing this only in states where the outcome isn't more or less set already. It's bad enough that between gerrymandering of the house districts, the small state bonus that applies to Electoral College where they get an additional 2 electors for having Senators and the all states get the same number of Senators, but to now be allowing candidates to direct incentives to people most likely to tip things in favor of their candidate should cause people to question whether this country still has a democracy at all.
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  44. Considering how tightly these corporations have become tied with Web 2.0, it would likely destroy that as they need crooked algorithms steering people towards specific content because of money. I'm not sure if that would help push us back to Web 1.0, or a new Web 3.0 that's difficult to envision in any specificity.
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  45.  @Mrich775  You do realize that there are literally dozens of other nonprofits that support reasonable restrictions on firearms and fight against government over-regulation, right? It's not like the NRA is the only organization that's fighting to defend the 2nd amendment against undue restriction. That's the part that's always puzzled me, most NRA members do not agree with the extremist views of the organization, but they continue to support the organization with financial contributions even though there are other nonprofits that more closely align with the NRA's stated goals.
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  46.  @bgriffininsd  Yep, and assuming that Trump cares, and could find an attorney, Devon would just point to the fact that Trump was a convicted felon when the statement was made and as such, isn't liable for anything. That would likely apply even if, for some reason, the conviction got overturned later, so long as no statements were made after that happened.
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  47.  @GorgeDawes  TBF, the focus of the channel really hasn't changed that much, it's still focused on the law. It's just that the law that everybody is wondering about is tied up in all the illegal and unconstitutional things that a political figure and his political appointees are doing.
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  48.  @jp__878  My in-laws come from a formerly rich and powerful family, he's not a patsy, he's just that level of arrogant about his abilities.
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  49.  @DBurns2007  This has happened a few times with Lucas connected franchises. Star Wars A New Hope was originally just Star Wars, it didn't get a name change until later.
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  50.  @jeff86ing  Most likely, it's going to be the 2nd Amendment Foundation, they're usually the only other clowns that they can find to quote when they need somebody to be against gun regulations. That being said there are tons of other organizations that advocate for reasonable restrictions on firearms and the other things that the NRA claimed to support.
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