Black attorney gets detained because sheriff thinks he's just pretending to be a lawyer

Meh. Sounds about white to me.

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“look…he didn’t get shot. What more do you want?!” - the Sheriff

(/s for those who’s sarcastimeter has low batteries)

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I feel like there should be some proverb written about giving a man a badge and a gun. “Something, something, racist fish for a lifetime.” I don’t know how it should go, I just feel it should exist.

That said…

ARRRRRGH!

Fucking fuck, is there ever going to be a rational, civil end to this bullshit?! (looks around) NOPE! I guess not.

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Low fucking bar is LOW.

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There is “attorney at law” and “attorney in fact”. If you hire/ask someone to represent you, that “attorney in fact” and why it’s called a “power of attorney” and that person could be anyone.

Attorney at law is a licensed profession. Without excusing Officer Dingbat in the slightest, I wonder why the attorney didn’t have his association card. In my working days (NOT an attorney), I never was out and about without my credentials relating to my particular brand of work and my official capacity.

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I am currently a licensed professional (also NOT an attorney), and I’ve never taken my credentials off of my desk. So I guess there are all kinds.

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My sarcastimeter is powered by outrage. It’ll never run out of power.

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yeah, well some fuck-nuts around here don’t have their’s turned on whatsoever and end up showing themselves to be total fucking assholes. I have zero inclination to deal those turds.

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Really? Because I think it implies you shouldn’t judge people by the color of their skin. There, but for the lack of grace from “haters gonna hate,” goes Clara.

Have you noticed there seems to be nothing like impersonating a public figure? In either direction? I guess it’s federal.

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Black man Rashad James, who happens to be a Maryland attorney…

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Yeah, that was my first thought. There’s no possibility of ambiguity here; he wasn’t detaining the guy because of an innocent “misunderstanding.” He needs to be outed.

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It’s like that classic movie “In The Heat of the Night.”

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Thank god times have… wait.

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I’m licensed to practice law in Colorado (inactive) and D.C. Colorado has a nice wallet-sized card that they reissue every year (and that I have nevertheless never once carried with me), but if DC ever issued one I’ve never carried it. Maybe I should be carrying one, but really the only time I could imagine it coming up would be if I were going into a court where the court security officers at the door didn’t recognize me. A lot of courts (at least the ones I’ve been to) make you check your cell phone at the door unless you’re a lawyer, and the court security officers sometimes (but by no means always) require you to show them a bar card to prove that you are one.

And maybe it’s just that I haven’t spent any time in state trial courts, but I would absolutely never expect to be questioned about my bar credentials after making an argument, and certainly not by anybody other than the judge. (The only time I could really imagine it coming up would be if I were admitted pro hac vice and the court didn’t have an immediate recollection of granting the pro hac motion.) This officer was pretty clearly just feeling his racist oats.

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Well, at least he didn’t get shot for being uppity. Is that a step forward? For this sort of backward area it might well be.

Here’s hopin’! :+1:

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The deputy then called his supervisor.

Good line for a song.

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So if DC doesn’t issue you are card, how is one supposed to know if you’re a lawyer or not for the check in? Especially if you can’t bring cell phones in otherwise.

So not allowing cell phones is the norm in DC? See I have been to several court houses to pay fines, get paper work sorted out, or coughactually show up in a court roomcough and just one place didn’t let me in with a cell phone. Small podunk county house. Sheriff guy on duty was kinda a dick about it. I was there just to pay a fine, not go into the actual court room.

I think it was so I couldn’t take a pic of the most inane anti-crime posters ever made with some guy in a mascot type costume as a skunk and a tag line with a horribly mismatched font that said something like, “Petey the Skunk says crime stinks!” Had to be a late 80s/early 90s gem.

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Depends where you are probably. I happened to be looking at Ontario’s Law Society Act (because of another BB thread, actually) last week and it’s a violation of that Act to hold yourself out as a lawyer if you aren’t one. That wouldn’t be technically be a “crime”, but you can be subject to fines. But in other jurisdictions, things could be different.

Edited to fix name of legislation.