Looks as if Bill O’Reilly is not the only prominent television pundit who is a tad wacky.
This NY Observor article (hat tip to Walter Olson) reveals that CNN personality Nancy Grace is playing fast and loose with background facts that bear on the motivation for her crime-busting agenda.
Beward of the demagogues.
The Latin phrase sua sponte is often used in legal pleadings to refer to actions that the court takes in a case on its accord or motion. But this Law.com article ($) indicates that Santa Cruz, CA lawyer Arthur Dudley’s use of that phrase will never quite be the same:
In an opening brief to San Francisco’s 1st District Court of Appeal, a search-and-replace command by Dudley inexplicably inserted the words “sea sponge” instead of the legal term “sua sponte,” . . .
“Spell check did not have sua sponte in it,” said Dudley, who, not noticing the error, shipped the brief to court.
That left the justices reading — and probably laughing at — such classic statements as: “An appropriate instruction limiting the judge’s criminal liability in such a prosecution must be given sea sponge explaining that certain acts or omissions by themselves are not sufficient to support a conviction.”
And: “It is well settled that a trial court must instruct sea sponge on any defense, including a mistake of fact defense.”
The sneaky “sea sponge” popped up at least five times.
At least grizzled courthouse veterans are honoring Dudley with a new characterization of the legal duty involved in his case:
The faux pas has made Dudley the butt of some mild ribbing around Santa Cruz. Local attorneys, he said, have started calling his unique defense the “sea sponge duty to instruct.”
The increasing criminalization of business took an interesting turn earlier this week when the Securities and Exchange Commission’s San Francisco office subpoenaed email and other documents from several journalists, including one who works at Dow Jones Newswires, another at MarketWatch.com, and even TheStreet.com and its co-founder, “Mad Money”‘s James Cramer, who, ironically, is a buddy of that subpoena-issuing machine, New York AG Eliot Spitzer. My younger son — a big fan of Cramer’s off-the-wall show — got a big kick out of Cramer rebelliously throwing the subpoena on the floor during his television show.
The subpoenas started flying after the online retailer Overstock.com accused a hedge fund and a stock-research firm of manipulating the media to drive down the price of its stock for the purpose of profiting through shorting Overstock.com stock (this tactic is described earlier here and here). It apparently meant little to the SEC Enforcement Division that the reporters were simply doing their job of tapping sources for information and then reporting that information to investors who make informed judgments in buying and selling stocks. Some of those sources may have even profited from shorting Overstock.com stock. Who knows and, frankly, who cares? So long as reporters are reporting what they learn and are not bribed to do so, they are simply doing their jobs and fulfilling their role in the complicated workings of efficient financial markets.
Then, in an extraordinary development, SEC Chairman Christopher Cox called off the SEC Enforcement Division dogs and issued a public rebuke of the division for failing to obtain his approval for issuing the subpoenas in the first place. Although I am occasionally critical of the media’s reporting on the increasing criminalization of business by various governmental entites, I viewed Cox’s action as a good thing and an indication that he was intent upon implementing responsible oversight of dubious regulatory initiatives that has been sadly lacking in the SEC and the Department of Justice in the post-Enron era.