My fellow PJ Media contributor Christian Adams was recently at Tulane University’s School of Law in New Orleans. He was debating a Tulane law professor about the failure of the Obama Justice Department to enforce the National Voter Registration Act’s requirement that states maintain the accuracy of their voter registration rolls by periodically removing the names of voters who have moved or died. During the question-and-answer period , Christian was confronted by a student who was upset that there had been no meaningful discussion of what he claimed was the biggest group of disenfranchised voters – felons.
It turns out that the upset student, Bruce Reilly, a first-year at Tulane, had a very personal reason for asking the question: he had pled guilty to second-degree murder and robbery and served 12 years in prison. When he was 20 years old, Reilly beat and stabbed to death a 58-year old English professor at Community College of Rhode island, capping off his crime by stealing the professor’s car, wallet, and credit cards. In short, he is a felon (the term ex-felon should be reserved for those with a full pardon, not those who have merely served the prison portion of their sentences).
The fact that Reilly is an admitted student in Tulane’s law school should be at least curious and potentially worrisome to the students, alumni and supporters of that school. The Louisiana Bar, like all other states, requires proof of good moral character and fitness to be admitted to the bar, a requirement that almost always excludes felons – particularly those who have been convicted of a violent crime as heinous as Reilly’s. (The fact that he is out of prison after only 12 years when he murdered and robbed an older college professor doesn’t say a lot for Rhode Island’s criminal justice system, either.) It is next to impossible for him to become a licensed attorney even if he graduates, as Tulane University officials must surely know.
As at least one student complained to The Times-Picayune, Reilly is taking up “another’s space in the law school even though he may never be able to practice as a lawyer because of his conviction.” But it gets worse.
Reilly is attending Tulane on an NAACP scholarship and a Dean’s Merit Scholarship. The NAACP has made it very clear in its public statements and its litigation that it believes that the constitutional right of states under the Fourteenth Amendment to take away the right of felons to vote is “discriminatory” and “undermines the most fundamental aspect of American citizenship” (which the NAACP apparently thinks means being able to murder and vote at the same time).
Now, we know that the NAACP (and apparently the dean of Tulane) thinks it is appropriate to give a scholarship to a convicted killer who was quoted by The Times-Picayune as saying that he thought his biggest problem when he came to Tulane would “be the heat in New Orleans.” Supporters of the NAACP and Tulane University might want to give them some heat over their decisions in this particular case.
When you ask lawyers why their profession is so distrusted and so despised, they usually answer that this is the work of a handful of disreputable lawyers who besmirch the honor of the honest majority. It doesn’t take a lot of skunks to make a whole crowd of people stink.
Yet, if the lawyers cared enough to be known as an honest profession, it shouldn’t be difficult to drive that handful of dishonest lawyers out of their profession since the legal profession is supposed to be self-regulating. That they refuse to do so is a confession of laziness or moral cowardice. If you don’t want to stink, you must hunt down the skunks among you or scare them away. What the organized has chosen to do is hold their noses, because it’s easier, and complain that laymen keep telling them they stink.
The NAACP have outlived their usefulness. They’re merely race baiters and enablers now.
The good news? At least he didn’t use a gun…..
See how effective gun LAWS are at protecting innnocent people from violent attackers? I wonder if the English Professor had a concealed carry permit….
naacp scholarships? wonder what tax payer funded jackpot those come out of?
taking up space others need? yeah, more lawyers. great.
It’s the “Advancement of Colored People.” They don’t even pretend to aspire to colorblind justice but merely advocate by skin.
With a racist hate artist like Melissa Harris-Perry teaching at Tulane, a parent would have to have their head examined to send their kids to such a school.
oddly enough, even though he is on an NAACP scholarship, the guy is white
Just a question for the readers…
OK, it appears the consensus is that an ex-felon like him shouldn’t be an attorney.
What job or profession would you say he *would* be an acceptable worker at?
1. politician
2. Obama cabinet member
3. televangilist
4. tax collector
5. occupyoaklander
6. euthanasianist
7. islamic jihadist
8. new york times editorialist
Maybe they’re setting up a test case for a legal challenge?
I think the NAACP used to do that kind of thing. Haven’t seen much of it lately, though.
I don’t think people hate lawyers because of a small portion of shysters, though I suppose that is a factor.
When do you need a lawyer? When stuff sucks, that’s when. Divorces, lawsuits, bankruptcy, when your facing jail time.
A lot of people in jail end up blaming their lawyers for being in jail because they have highly unrealistic ideas about their case. They aren’t going to jail because they DID it, or that they confessed, or that there’s 13 witnesses who will testify to seeing what they did, or that there’s video of them doing it— it’s because their lawyer didn’t care about them and was too lazy or incompetent to fight for them.
When you only see a lawyer when your life sucks, it’s not surprising that lawyers are unpopular. Having one in your life is a guarantee that your life is sucking. And even if you like your lawyer, there’s always that other son of a bitch to hate. It’s not surprising that people often blame lawyers for their problems. People often have rather… unique ideas of what the law is, and become very upset when reality doesn’t mesh with their fantasies.
There’s also the issue of legal ethics and personal ethics. Lawyers defend people and institutions that do horrible things. Their goal is to serve their client, regardless of the truth of the matter. While this evens out over the court system, resulting in a working system of justice, it still seems bizarre from outside the profession. It’s like having a doctor trying to make you sicker along with the doctor trying to heal you, or a church with an anti-religious minister along with the normal minister, or having pyromaniacs showing up at your burning house with gasoline alongside the firemen.
Lot of truth to this. I am a business lawyer and routinely have people come to me and say “we have a deal for “X”, please draft me a contract.” I then place a contract in front of the parties, and after reading the detailed terms and conditions, I hear “Oh no, I never agreed to THAT”. I then get blamed for “killing the deal” when all I did was point out that they never actually had an agreement in the first place. Too many people believe what they see in movies about legal matters.
Vote: no; lawyers: yes.
It would make law school much more interesting to have students in class 1who have killed their professors.
John Wesley Hardin, who (in)famously killed 27 men (though he claimed many more in his autobiography), studied for the bar while serving 16 years in the penitentiary and opened a practice in El Paso. After a lawman arrested his girlfriend, Hardin threatened to kill him (hardly an idle threat coming from Hardin). The lawman’s father shot Hardin dead in the streets in 1895.
Probably a good example of why murderers should not be admitted to the bar.
Jack Olson and Lawyer are probably partly right, but IMO there’s another factor (at least) – what lawyers call “ethics” (and, in fact, are required to by every state bar) have, at best, a nodding relationship with what everyone else call ethics, and this discontinuity leaves most people with the impression that there really IS no such thing as “Legal ethics.”
For instance, while the average person would find helping someone stay out of jail (or minimize the time s/he spends in jail) when they know that person is guilty, legal ethics are no bar – in fact, legal ethics explicitly require the lawyer to use all o fhis skills to “zealously defend the rights of his clients” (if the lawyer actually knows the client is guilty, he is restricted from actually suborning perjury by helping the client testify and lie under oath, but there’s not a lot more to hold him back). And while a normal person would immediately tell the police if someone (at least someone not related to them) told them he had committed a crime, a lawyer not only would probably get disbarred for telling someone that his client had committed a crime (and his testimony could not be used in court), but in most jurisdictions, the lawyer himself could be charged with a crime.
Our society is double minded about such issues. We punish certain types of perpetrators, and then, only those from certain levels of society. We tell ourselves that once those offenders have been punished that their debt to society has been paid…but we also steal their Constitutional rights forever. WWe thus prove that we their debt to last for the rest of their lives. For the rest of their lives, they will always be second class citizens, in a society which claims that no one is a second class citizen. That’s not justice. Whatever we tell ourselves and one another, whatever little lies we choose to support and believe, that’s vengence and tyranny. Vengence and tyranny have nothing to do with freedom and liberty. They are, indeed, opposites.
– 12?