A New Jersey lawyer has been censured for telling a nonpaying client he wouldn’t prepare for his impending trial if he didn’t pay his legal bills and he should “have fun in prison.”

The New Jersey Supreme Court censured lawyer Logan Terry in a Nov. 1 order, the Legal Profession Blog reports. The court accepted the recommendation of the Disciplinary Review Board, which described the case in a June 8 decision.

Terry had twice asked a judge to allow him to withdraw from the representation and was turned down both times.

Terry’s client was accused of sexual assaults on four minors under age 13. He faced a potential sentence of more than 200 years in prison. Just days before the scheduled trial date in June 2016, Terry told the client that he couldn’t prepare an adequate defense unless his legal fees were paid.

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The New York Times, the Washington Post, Slate, Fox News, TechCrunch, and many more are all going forward today with their “can you legally take a selfie with your ballot?” stories.

The long and the short of it is… probably. It’s already legal in at least 23 states and the rest almost assuredly can’t be bothered to care. Amazingly, if you read those stories above, you’ll find some disagreement but it’s safe to say that close to half of the states are cool with it. In a world where Republicans are constantly ginning up fear of rampant voter fraud, a number of solidly red states are cool with selfies even though this is exactly how voter fraud would actually happen — with someone taking a picture to prove they voted the way they were extorted to vote. Not that anyone really needed evidence that “voter fraud” concerns are more about disenfranchising minorities than “stopping fraud” that probably doesn’t exist anyway.

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Most Florida felons who have finished their sentences will be able to vote again in future elections. Voters on Tuesday approved Amendment 4, which says that most felons will automatically have their voting rights restored when they complete their sentences or go on probation. The amendment exempts…
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Police officers standing outside the Federal Courthouse in downtown Brooklyn on a rainy Tuesday described the scene as “totally normal.” Normal, perhaps, if you consider that behind the closed doors of that courthouse, the trial of a reputed major international drug kingpin was underway. 

There were two officers outside, and a few more down the street. The main road was blocked off. A secret service agent hid in his car on the adjacent street. A bomb dog waited inside…

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As recently as Monday, computer servers that powered Kentucky’s online voter registration and Wisconsin’s reporting of election results ran software that could potentially expose information to hackers or enable access to sensitive files without a password. The insecure service run by Wisconsin could be reached from Internet addresses based in Russia, which has become notorious for seeking to influence US elections. Kentucky’s was accessible from other Eastern European countries. The service, known as FTP, provides public access to files—sometimes anonymously and without encryption. As a result, security experts say, it could act as a gateway for hackers to acquire key details of a server’s operating system and exploit its vulnerabilities. Some corporations and other institutions have dropped FTP in favor of more secure alternatives.
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In the run-up to nationwide elections set for Tuesday, the Secretary of State of Georgia has made explosive and seemingly unsubstantiated allegations that the Democratic Party of Georgia is somehow implicated in a “failed cyberattack” of the state’s online voter registration system. However, neither Brian Kemp—who is also running as a Republican candidate for governor—nor anyone from his office has provided any evidence that there was indeed a cyberattack. There is also no evidence that the state’s Democrats were involved. Kemp is running against Democrat Stacey Abrams in a tight race. The allegation was first reported on Sunday by the website WhoWhatWhy, which described a vulnerability that would have allowed an automated script to grab numerous pieces of personal information, including mailing address, partial Social Security number, and more. In June 2018, Ars reported on a similar weakness in digital security in a California election. 
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The scourge of mass incarceration is at last getting the attention it deserves from reform-minded district attorneys around the country. Many of them are running for election or re-election today. The data bears out the extent to which elected prosecutors have contributed to the unconscionable number of people in American prisons, the tragically disparate racial impact, and underscores the fact that the exercise of prosecutorial discretion could significantly reduce those numbers.

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The Fourth Amendment’s prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures could prevent law enforcement from applying increasingly sophisticated surveillance and predictive policing technology, including “superhuman” methods employing artificial intelligence, according to a professor at the University of California-Davis School of Law. In an essay published in the Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law, Elizabeth E. Joh argues that the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision in Carpenter v United States established a precedent for using the Fourth Amendment to limit the use of emerging technology, ranging from drones that help patrol borders to predictive-analytic software that can determine when and where the next crime will occur. In that landmark case, decided this summer, the Court ruled law enforcement cannot access citizens’ cellphone location records without a search warrant. Although the decision focused on whether…

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Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

The special counsel’s office has referred to the FBI allegations that women were offered money to falsely accuse Robert Mueller of sexual harassment.

A spokesman said the office learned of the allegations last week and immediately referred the matter to the FBI for investigation, report the New York Times, the Atlantic, Fortune, NBC, the Daily Beast and the Hill Reporter.

A law professor and another person—whose identity has not been confirmed—have said the offer was made by a firm called Surefire Intelligence, which was incorporated less than three weeks ago in Delaware. Its domain records list an email for a Trump conspiracy theorist named Jacob Wohl, who began promising to reveal a “scandalous” Mueller story on Tuesday. A phone number on the Surefire website refers callers to a number for Wohl’s mother, according to NBC.

All the LinkedIn pictures of people who claim to work for Surefire are actually photos of other people, including an Israeli supermodel, Sigourney Weaver’s husband and an Austrian actor, according to the open source site Belllingcat.

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A Border Patrol agent gets in trouble, and so do a crooked trio of Miami cops. Let’s get to it: 

In Miami, three Miami police officers were arrested last Tuesday on an array of federal drug and corruption charges from distributing dozens of kilos of cocaine to protecting drug dealers. Veteran officers Schonton Harris and Kevin Harris and new recruit James Archibald. Among other charges, the trio are accused of collecting a total of $33,500 in cash from sales of opioids like Percocet, selling and transporting dozens of kilos of cocaine, selling a police uniform and a badge to an undercover detective who claimed to be a cartel assassin wanting to use it in a hit. After being alerted to questionable activities in April, the FBI set up a sting operation that has now apparently thoroughly ensnared the trio. 

In Tucson, Arizona, a Border Patrol agent was indicted Monday for allegedly conspiring to smuggle cocaine into the country. Agent Ramon Antonio Monreal Rodriguez, 32, is accused of exchanging $334,000 in cash for 41 kilograms of cocaine near the San Miguel border crossing and a few days later transferring $317,000 in cash to a smuggler at the border. Authorities said Rodriguez received $66,000 and six pounds of cocaine for his efforts. They have seized the cash and the drugs. He is charged in federal court with conspiracy to distribute more than five kilos of cocaine.
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