Oh man, this reminds me of State of Georgia v. Denver Fenton Allen. Some dude was in a court hearing to see if he could get new counsel for a trial, and he gets into a ten-minute shouting match with a judge who lost his cool. Bonus points for Rick & Morty fans: someone made a fan animation of Justin Roiland re-enacting it (word for word!) with Rick as Allen and Morty as Judge Durham. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rrnp29NeuJ0
I was a juror on a trial where the defendant represented himself. It was a little bit hilarious but mostly horrifying. Hilarious for the moment when he asked if he could get a "black light" used on some of the evidence -- apparently he thought some CSI wizardry would somehow save him. Horrifying because the defendant was accused of attempted murder, torture, kidnapping and a variety of other unpleasant charges against a victim who he then was able to torment some more by directly questioning on the witness stand. I suspect this opportunity to question her was a large part of why he wanted to represent himself at trial.
But his questioning of her didn't really go very well for him. He asked her a question, I don't remember exactly what it was, and her answer was a firm and forceful "You know it happened like that -- you were there." Just a devastating moment for him. The thing is, this guy was a real violent control freak. The things he did were truly disturbing. I don't really hold with trigger warnings much but I feel it would need one if I were to describe some of this shit.
The big twist in the case is that shortly after his examination of the victim he got a lawyer. What I heard later is that his mother, who was watching the trial in the courtroom, was so alarmed by how poorly the trial was going that she begged him to let her hire a lawyer and he finally relented. The judge said he had never encountered anything like this, and apparently he went through a lot of research to see how to handle it, but it was allowed.
The defendant's lawyer was really good. I sometimes wonder how deliberations would have gone if this lawyer had been present from the beginning. I remember that the lawyer was annoyed that he wasn't allowed to give an opening statement, which he obliquely referenced in his closing. As it was there was one juror who was pretty wobbly, but the evidence was so overwhelming that he was convicted of everything but attempted murder in the end. I think if the defendant had represented himself all the way through deliberations would have take an hour or so only.
My sister was interpreting for a federal defendant and his answer to a question was:
There are three things important to every man:
1. Fucking
2. Shitting.
He just stopped after naming two things. The judge apologized to my sister for having to deal with such language while my sister tried to not bust out laughing.
Absolutely classic stuff. As an attorney for a public entity, I see a lot of the civil pro se stuff. The sovereign citizen claims are particularly, err...eye-opening. Did you see much of that on the criminal side?
All the time! Especially for driving offenses at the misdemeanor level. It was always such a timesuck to deal with because "No, you're so wrong" was never sufficient as a rebuttal. They'd want to argue that they had a constitutional right to travel or whatever, and my tactic was usually to tell them just how badly they'll lose in front of a judge that is tired of their shit. I'm fascinated by the psychology at play that made them believe they'd actually win. As if the entire judicial system would crumble into dust at their mention of the fringe on a flag.
They appear to view the law as a form of witchcraft, where the right incantation of spurious legal citations and secret arguments casts a spell that can protect you from arrest, eliminate your debts, or make your enemies indebted to you. It's a form of legal gnosticism, with them as one of the elect holding the special knowledge.
Techies do this all the time (I'm a software developer, and Silicon Valley-adjacent). They like to moot court cases with smug "gotchas". "Well, _Your Honor_, I wasn't _technically_ breaking the law, because <pedantic, bullshit reasons>." No, that's not how it works! I'm not a lawyer, but judges aren't automatons! They're not gonna be like "oh, darn it, you're right! Ya got me, you rascal!" But that's how computers work, and Silicon Valley is kind of up its own ass a lot, so they think that's how law works too. It's like those people who upload copyrighted material to YouTube, and then post a disclaimer that reads: "No copyright infringement intended."
Similarly, I think for a lot of them it's a cargo cult. They're mimicking things they don't understand and expect outcomes because of their performance. But much like a radio made from coconuts won't summon an airplane, invoking the UCC won't register a deed.
One is that the law isn't really all that straightforward, in a human rights sense it probably should be more straightforward, and at times the country really resembles a Goldberg machine(?) with lots of money and effort being turned into...something. I don't blame people for not understanding or trusting 'the system'.
The other is that there are a lot of people who buy into sovereign citizenship, or think that Republicans really do want to put black people back in chains, or even more outlandish nonsense. These people are citizens, too. They are part of the nation. And yet, I am not sure we have a way to deal with, oh, the reality that lots of people just can't be bothered to keep their drivers license and insurance up-to-date, let alone cope with people who think getting an individual number assigned to them means they are on the way to a death camp. (Or that their driver's license number is their personal PowerBall winner.)
That reminds me of when I did volunteer tax preparation work for low to middle income people in college. We had one lady with her own ideas about how taxes work come in to have us prepare her taxes. These weren't common misconceptions or normal misunderstandings, but just completely nonsensical ideas about taxes that happened to result in getting a colossal refund. It was impossible to explain anything. You couldn't point to basic instructions in IRS publications, show how numbers flow on the forms (she had her own ideas about which numbers went where and how things carry), make her see that the IRS was not going to deposit tens of thousands into her bank account, or get her to understand that we would not prepare and file her return that way. She didn't back down from her positions, but eventually she left with plans to fill out the forms herself and file her own return.
In her case, I think there was some sort of mental health issue. She'd formerly been a tenure track professor (She told us this and we later confirmed it by looking her up on ratemyprofessors because it seemed like an implausible claim) and was now drifiting between low-skilled jobs.
When I interned in a federal courthouse, one of my almost-daily tasks was retrieving all of the unsolicited pro se sovereign citizen complaints out of the fax machine in the morning. Truly incredible amounts of effort on display.
I find that these unhinged types are anything but lazy or stupid. Hell, 9/11 truthers can quote chapter-and-verse from this or that report, and they are indefatigable in their adherence to their beliefs. I think they just see the world through a warped lens.
Oh yeah, that’s what makes it fascinating – someone with that level of dedication to plumbing minute details of something that is fundamentally completely wrong.
I don't have as much experience viewing pro se criminal actions, but I have seen a number of pro se civil litigants and Randall reminded me of them. Pro se civil litigants are The Worst. It iss usually someone with no job but enough time and money to be a vexatious litigant. The courts bend over backward for them procedurally in the chance they are someone with a meritorious claim/defense that was unable to find an attorney (at least in my jurisdiction). A lot of these cases get really annoying when it is clear that an attorney is ghost writing a pro se litigant's papers.
This is hilarious but believable. I have a law degree and wouldn't go near making my own defense in a court. (Did Randall want jail just for the toughness points?)
I'm definitely not hiding the ball here, Randall was completely inscrutable to me. I had no idea what exactly was motivating him, aside from pure rage. Even *that* didn't explain much because he was in his 50s and had no criminal history except this one incident. None of his actions made sense, and I was worried he had some cognitive disorder but it wasn't my place to do anything about it.
No one should think that I am a fan or defender of Michael Avenatti. However, he had a very real case against Nike. Nike was hardly innocent. It is also true that Avenatti so screwed up the case against Nike that he ended up in jail for it. If he had done a better (and more legal) job of pursuing his case against Nike he would have made millions quite legally.
His client may have had a real case against Nike, but I'd say that screwed up is a severe understatement. There was nothing wrong with Avenatti going to Nike and conveying a settlement offer of $1.5 million for his client's claims. But Avenatti went further and (without his client's permission) also wanted Nike to "retain" Avenatti and pay him a $15-$25 million fee. Blatant conflict of interest, and just egregious behavior from a lawyer.
If I remember correctly, he threatened to expose Nike's conduct and suggested that Nike's share price would fall as a consequence. That's extortion and he was convicted of it. The sad truth is that the Nike fiasco was not the worst thing he did. Look up the Geoffrey Johnson case. He 'only' stole $300K from Stormy Daniels.
I'm familiar with the Johnson case too. Just awful terrible conduct all around from Avenatti! It's sad too, if not for his terrible behavior, he almost was president 😢
See "Disgraced Trump foe Michael Avenatti weeps as he is sentenced to 2.5 years in prison for Nike extortion scheme" (https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/08/michael-avenatti-sentencing-nike-extortion-case.html). He has other legal problems. He attacked his Estonian girlfriend (Mareli Miniutti), but will almost certainly never be prosecuted for it.
Great payoff. Nicely played.
Oh man, this reminds me of State of Georgia v. Denver Fenton Allen. Some dude was in a court hearing to see if he could get new counsel for a trial, and he gets into a ten-minute shouting match with a judge who lost his cool. Bonus points for Rick & Morty fans: someone made a fan animation of Justin Roiland re-enacting it (word for word!) with Rick as Allen and Morty as Judge Durham. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rrnp29NeuJ0
I may or may not have another story that hits on the same thematic elements
Ooh I would be delighted to read that, if you decide to publish it.
Soon ;)
Really interesting piece. I look forward to more.
I was a juror on a trial where the defendant represented himself. It was a little bit hilarious but mostly horrifying. Hilarious for the moment when he asked if he could get a "black light" used on some of the evidence -- apparently he thought some CSI wizardry would somehow save him. Horrifying because the defendant was accused of attempted murder, torture, kidnapping and a variety of other unpleasant charges against a victim who he then was able to torment some more by directly questioning on the witness stand. I suspect this opportunity to question her was a large part of why he wanted to represent himself at trial.
But his questioning of her didn't really go very well for him. He asked her a question, I don't remember exactly what it was, and her answer was a firm and forceful "You know it happened like that -- you were there." Just a devastating moment for him. The thing is, this guy was a real violent control freak. The things he did were truly disturbing. I don't really hold with trigger warnings much but I feel it would need one if I were to describe some of this shit.
The big twist in the case is that shortly after his examination of the victim he got a lawyer. What I heard later is that his mother, who was watching the trial in the courtroom, was so alarmed by how poorly the trial was going that she begged him to let her hire a lawyer and he finally relented. The judge said he had never encountered anything like this, and apparently he went through a lot of research to see how to handle it, but it was allowed.
The defendant's lawyer was really good. I sometimes wonder how deliberations would have gone if this lawyer had been present from the beginning. I remember that the lawyer was annoyed that he wasn't allowed to give an opening statement, which he obliquely referenced in his closing. As it was there was one juror who was pretty wobbly, but the evidence was so overwhelming that he was convicted of everything but attempted murder in the end. I think if the defendant had represented himself all the way through deliberations would have take an hour or so only.
My sister was interpreting for a federal defendant and his answer to a question was:
There are three things important to every man:
1. Fucking
2. Shitting.
He just stopped after naming two things. The judge apologized to my sister for having to deal with such language while my sister tried to not bust out laughing.
If I was the judge, I would have had to call a recess to laugh in chambers. Was it an older judge?
Yes- my sister tells me that the Federal courtrooms are a lot more formal. I would have laughed my ass off!
And I wonder what the third thing was?
In the guy's defense, the first two things ARE pretty important, objectively speaking. Not sure the relevance to his case, though. :-)
Well, yeah, he was clearly on to something there! But what it had to do with drug trafficking I do not know.
Unless the drugs were ducolax and viagra.
And Scuba Cat for the win!
Absolutely classic stuff. As an attorney for a public entity, I see a lot of the civil pro se stuff. The sovereign citizen claims are particularly, err...eye-opening. Did you see much of that on the criminal side?
All the time! Especially for driving offenses at the misdemeanor level. It was always such a timesuck to deal with because "No, you're so wrong" was never sufficient as a rebuttal. They'd want to argue that they had a constitutional right to travel or whatever, and my tactic was usually to tell them just how badly they'll lose in front of a judge that is tired of their shit. I'm fascinated by the psychology at play that made them believe they'd actually win. As if the entire judicial system would crumble into dust at their mention of the fringe on a flag.
They appear to view the law as a form of witchcraft, where the right incantation of spurious legal citations and secret arguments casts a spell that can protect you from arrest, eliminate your debts, or make your enemies indebted to you. It's a form of legal gnosticism, with them as one of the elect holding the special knowledge.
Right, almost as if you could conjure up Eleven Magic Words and make a difference or something.
Techies do this all the time (I'm a software developer, and Silicon Valley-adjacent). They like to moot court cases with smug "gotchas". "Well, _Your Honor_, I wasn't _technically_ breaking the law, because <pedantic, bullshit reasons>." No, that's not how it works! I'm not a lawyer, but judges aren't automatons! They're not gonna be like "oh, darn it, you're right! Ya got me, you rascal!" But that's how computers work, and Silicon Valley is kind of up its own ass a lot, so they think that's how law works too. It's like those people who upload copyrighted material to YouTube, and then post a disclaimer that reads: "No copyright infringement intended."
Similarly, I think for a lot of them it's a cargo cult. They're mimicking things they don't understand and expect outcomes because of their performance. But much like a radio made from coconuts won't summon an airplane, invoking the UCC won't register a deed.
So, two thoughts here.
One is that the law isn't really all that straightforward, in a human rights sense it probably should be more straightforward, and at times the country really resembles a Goldberg machine(?) with lots of money and effort being turned into...something. I don't blame people for not understanding or trusting 'the system'.
The other is that there are a lot of people who buy into sovereign citizenship, or think that Republicans really do want to put black people back in chains, or even more outlandish nonsense. These people are citizens, too. They are part of the nation. And yet, I am not sure we have a way to deal with, oh, the reality that lots of people just can't be bothered to keep their drivers license and insurance up-to-date, let alone cope with people who think getting an individual number assigned to them means they are on the way to a death camp. (Or that their driver's license number is their personal PowerBall winner.)
We gotta share the country with a lot of people.
That reminds me of when I did volunteer tax preparation work for low to middle income people in college. We had one lady with her own ideas about how taxes work come in to have us prepare her taxes. These weren't common misconceptions or normal misunderstandings, but just completely nonsensical ideas about taxes that happened to result in getting a colossal refund. It was impossible to explain anything. You couldn't point to basic instructions in IRS publications, show how numbers flow on the forms (she had her own ideas about which numbers went where and how things carry), make her see that the IRS was not going to deposit tens of thousands into her bank account, or get her to understand that we would not prepare and file her return that way. She didn't back down from her positions, but eventually she left with plans to fill out the forms herself and file her own return.
In her case, I think there was some sort of mental health issue. She'd formerly been a tenure track professor (She told us this and we later confirmed it by looking her up on ratemyprofessors because it seemed like an implausible claim) and was now drifiting between low-skilled jobs.
When I interned in a federal courthouse, one of my almost-daily tasks was retrieving all of the unsolicited pro se sovereign citizen complaints out of the fax machine in the morning. Truly incredible amounts of effort on display.
I find that these unhinged types are anything but lazy or stupid. Hell, 9/11 truthers can quote chapter-and-verse from this or that report, and they are indefatigable in their adherence to their beliefs. I think they just see the world through a warped lens.
Oh yeah, that’s what makes it fascinating – someone with that level of dedication to plumbing minute details of something that is fundamentally completely wrong.
That was so much fun to read, dude I love your writing style.
As for Randall, I wanna party with that guy!
Do you, though?
Do you think he could be a bit annoying?
Just don't try to prevent him from getting a DUI and you should be ok
This honestly made my day.
I laughed really hard reading this.
This was a blast and informative in equal measure. Thank you, Yassine.
This was a great read!
I don't have as much experience viewing pro se criminal actions, but I have seen a number of pro se civil litigants and Randall reminded me of them. Pro se civil litigants are The Worst. It iss usually someone with no job but enough time and money to be a vexatious litigant. The courts bend over backward for them procedurally in the chance they are someone with a meritorious claim/defense that was unable to find an attorney (at least in my jurisdiction). A lot of these cases get really annoying when it is clear that an attorney is ghost writing a pro se litigant's papers.
Couldn't stop laughing at "JUDGE, JUROR AND EXECUTIONER"
This is hilarious but believable. I have a law degree and wouldn't go near making my own defense in a court. (Did Randall want jail just for the toughness points?)
I'm definitely not hiding the ball here, Randall was completely inscrutable to me. I had no idea what exactly was motivating him, aside from pure rage. Even *that* didn't explain much because he was in his 50s and had no criminal history except this one incident. None of his actions made sense, and I was worried he had some cognitive disorder but it wasn't my place to do anything about it.
No one should think that I am a fan or defender of Michael Avenatti. However, he had a very real case against Nike. Nike was hardly innocent. It is also true that Avenatti so screwed up the case against Nike that he ended up in jail for it. If he had done a better (and more legal) job of pursuing his case against Nike he would have made millions quite legally.
His client may have had a real case against Nike, but I'd say that screwed up is a severe understatement. There was nothing wrong with Avenatti going to Nike and conveying a settlement offer of $1.5 million for his client's claims. But Avenatti went further and (without his client's permission) also wanted Nike to "retain" Avenatti and pay him a $15-$25 million fee. Blatant conflict of interest, and just egregious behavior from a lawyer.
If I remember correctly, he threatened to expose Nike's conduct and suggested that Nike's share price would fall as a consequence. That's extortion and he was convicted of it. The sad truth is that the Nike fiasco was not the worst thing he did. Look up the Geoffrey Johnson case. He 'only' stole $300K from Stormy Daniels.
I'm familiar with the Johnson case too. Just awful terrible conduct all around from Avenatti! It's sad too, if not for his terrible behavior, he almost was president 😢
How long was his sentence?
See "Disgraced Trump foe Michael Avenatti weeps as he is sentenced to 2.5 years in prison for Nike extortion scheme" (https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/08/michael-avenatti-sentencing-nike-extortion-case.html). He has other legal problems. He attacked his Estonian girlfriend (Mareli Miniutti), but will almost certainly never be prosecuted for it.
Wow it is amazing what you can do to someone else and with our legal system basically get away with it in the end.
LOL!!!!!!!