ABA Journal Highlights #3
For all you legal nerds!
Are lawyers who pointed guns at protesters protected by the castle doctrine?
St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kimberly Gardner said Monday she is investigating after husband and wife lawyers brandished a handgun and a rifle at protesters passing their home on a private street.
Personal injury lawyers Mark and Patricia McCloskey stood outside their St. Louis home while pointing guns and shouting at protesters to leave, report St. Louis Public Radio, KSDK, KMOV4 and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (here and here).
The protesters were on their way to Mayor Lyda Krewson’s home.
The couple said protesters had broken an iron gate to the private street in their neighborhood. They live in a Renaissance palazzo mansion that was featured in St. Louis Magazine several years ago after a renovation.
“It was like the storming of the Bastille, the gate came down and a large crowd of angry, aggressive people poured through,” Mark McCloskey told KMOV4. “I was terrified that we’d be murdered within seconds. Our house would be burned down, our pets would be killed.”
Mark McCloskey told KSDK that the crowd became enraged after he got his gun and told the protesters that they were on private property. “One person pulled out some loaded pistol magazine and clicked them together and said that you were next,” he said.
A lawyer for the McCloskeys, Albert Watkins, said in a statement that his clients acted lawfully out of fear and apprehension, which was not race-related.
“My clients, as melanin-deficient human beings, are completely respectful of the message Black Lives Matter needs to get out, especially to whites,” Watkins said in a statement cited by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Read the rest of the article here.
‘Landmark decision’ backs cheerleader kicked off squad for Snapchat F-word post.
A federal appeals court has ruled that a Pennsylvania school district violated a high school cheerleader’s First Amendment rights when it kicked her off the squad for a Snapchat message.
In a June 30 decision, the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals at Philadelphia ruled for the teen, who attended the Mahanoy Area School District in Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, report the Legal Intelligencer and a press release by the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania.
A federal judge had also ruled last year for the cheerleader, who posted the message on a Saturday off school grounds. The post pictured the teen and her friend holding up their middle fingers with the text, “f- - - school f- - - softball f- - - cheer f- - - everything.”
The teen was angry partly because she had made the junior varsity squad, rather than the varsity cheerleading team.
I suspect that article has been censored … um, I mean edited for … people who don’t know that “f—-” means “fuck”. :)
You can read the whole article here!