- "The whole story would be far more humorous were it not from a case in which Perrone represented a woman who claims that she nearly died after being incarcerated and not given proper medical care. Perrone must now refile his complaint in that case—without the cartoon dragon."
That should be more offensive than cartoons. In a just world.
It's not as if the victim had the luxury of many choices of law firms, or any capacity to oversee their work. Their access to legal services is presumably similar to their access to medical care. There's nothing amusing about this outcome. It's seriously depressing that "the coked-up cartoon-dragoon attorney" is the best representation that person, in their helpless situation, was able to navigate to.
To a normal person, sure. But the legal system ruins lives and deals in ruined lives every day. They don't blink twice at that stuff. A cartoon dragon on the other hand...
I remember reading a couple years back, when some judges in Louisiana were exposed systematically discarding legal petitions from incarcerated plaintiffs into trash cans, without reading them. Totally nulled out any access to courts, any possibility of justice, for thousands of people.
Judges in PA were just selling kids to private prisons.
"Ciavarella disposed thousands of children to extended stays in youth centers for offenses as trivial as mocking an assistant principal on Myspace or trespassing in a vacant building.[3] After a judge rejected an initial plea agreement in 2009,[4][5] a federal grand jury returned a 48-count indictment.[6] In 2010, Conahan pleaded guilty to one count of racketeering conspiracy and was sentenced to 17.5 years in federal prison.[7] Ciavarella opted to go to trial the following year. He was convicted on 12 of 39 counts and sentenced to 28 years in federal prison.[8] Conahan, who had been released to home confinement in 2020, had his sentence (due to end in 2026) commuted in 2024 by President Joe Biden."
Thousands of innocent kids in cages, and Mr. Biden actually pardoned that judge as a "nonviolent offender". I think I'll never forget that particular pardon, the obscenity of it. It, just, inverts the ideals behind the reform movements, turns them upside-down in mockery.
His constituents petitioned him about the crooked jails, and... Biden heard them; and freed the jailer.
He was already on house arrest and was going to be free of that by 2026.
The willingness to take the optics hit to allow him a little more freedom, a little earlier makes me question what everyone else is leadership is doing, they must really relate to him.
Pardons like that one really fuel the conspiracy theories about how many executive actions in the Biden admin, particularly toward the end, were really carried out by the former President.
This is really important to understand. Formality isn't an arbitrary concept invented by old fogies, it's a psychological hack we apply to convince people to take things seriously. People really like joking around [citation needed], so that's hard to achieve. A lot of people develop weird complexes about it, because there are big gaps between otherwise close subcultures in what should or shouldn't be taken seriously, but I hope nearly everyone can agree that court proceedings are a serious matter.
The watermark is actively distracting from the enormously important work of reading the complaint in detail. This isn't a question of formality for formality's sake, it's a question of ensuring that the processes run smoothly so that justice can be done.
If he studied enough for law school and was able to work in a court for years before becoming a judge, I would assume his ADHD is under control and he is not that easily distracted.
and since HN is less serious than a court, when I write a comment to you here, surely you agree that there is no justifiable reason the people that run this site should not allow me to purple-dragon-watermark my comments. what's the matter with you paul/dang, don't have your adhd under control?
Consciously, sure, but with some studies saying judges tend to rule differently on similar cases based on whether it's before or after lunchtime, do you really want to introduce more subliminal variables like decorations into the legal process?
The "hungry judge" finding did not replicate [0], and the original paper had serious methodological flaws, namely, that prisoners with parole hearings later in the day were more likely to have either overworked "shared counsel" (the Israeli equivalent of public defenders) or no counsel at all [1]. You should consider the hungry judge effect another debunked victim of the replication crisis.
The influence of cartoon dragons probably don't come close the influence of judges and lawyers talking to each other about what schools they went to, what country clubs they belong to, etc.
The breech of formality isn't being turned into a big deal because it might bias case outcomes; in that regard it's a rounding error washed out by innumerable more substantial sources of bias. It's being made into a big deal because formality is the wall between outcomes of cases and feelings of personal culpability for the people who are involved in that process. All of the formality and decorum make it easier for judges and lawyers to emotionally distance themselves from, very often, ruining peoples' lives.
Too many "rounding errors" adding up seems like a reasonable justification for not allowing even seemingly small sources of additional inconsistency. Slippery slope and all that.
Also, just because the other potential sources of bias you brought up exist doesn't mean new ones should be let into the process. I wouldn't be against solutions to remove the ones you mentioned. But I don't think you'd be entirely convinced that just allowing cartoon dragons would decrease bias by making people more empathetic.
Do you know for a fact that those rounding errors add up, or do they cancel out? I feel like all this bikeshedding is just helping to draw the attention off the more significant and well known biases.
Do you know for a fact that the rounding errors cancel out perfectly? Probably not.
Trying to make this about "more significant and well known biases" when all I'm arguing for is not introducing additional biases is a logical fallacy. And allowing cartoon watermarks in court documents would not help with the "more significant and well known biases" that you're more concerned about, anyway, so I have to wonder why you feel strongly enough that this should be allowed that you'd write off opposition as "bikeshedding."
Formality is about preserving objectivity. You don't submit papers to a peer-reviewed journal watermarked with a purple dinosaur in a suit for the same reason you don't submit a complaint to a court watermarked with a purple dinosaur in a suit. Scientific publication (despite its many flaws) is about the content of the publication. Everything else - tone, style, grammatical nuance - is prescribed by a style guide because it is otherwise irrelevant.
There are certainly bad judges that hide behind "the authority vested in them by the court," but reductively asserting that formality is about maintaining authority misses the point (and the operating philosophy behind creating a fair and impartial court) by a country mile.
> That should be more offensive than cartoons. In a just world.
If the complaint is true, then yes it is offensive and the results will be more serious than being required to refile the complaint without the watermark. The process of determining if the complaint is true or not is the justice system.
Yes. Now probably a couple dozen people are going to collectively spend thousands of hours going over the complaint. The watermark issue is indeed just a sideshow by comparison.
The posts on this HN story demonstrate exactly the point the judge is trying to make. This sort of optics issue looms so large in human brains that it is indeed generating accusations that the court case is not being taken seriously because the court must obviously be spending all of its attention on this visually appealing story, even though in the grand scheme of things it is a tiny fraction of just the effort that will be spent on this case overall. Justice must not just be just, it must be seen to be just, and this sort of behavior is an impossibly attractive nuisance for people. Even those defending the picture are still being sucked into a sideshow.
The court does not deal in "truth." It deals in civil cases with "more likely than not" or in criminal cases "beyond a reasonable doubt."
It's also why the court prefers that people settle with each other outside of court processes. The court is a brutal cudgel. It has exceptional power to change outcomes but this use is almost never the ideal outcome for anyone involved.
The "outcome" is simply that the judge simply directed the attorney to stop using the dragon watermark. Whats the problem?
And, by the way, I'd recommend a bit less credulity about this kind of lawsuit. While there is no doubt that a lot of terrible things happen in America's prisons, it is also extremely common for inmates and former inmates to file exaggerated or even frivolous claims about the conditions of their confinement. It's understandable. Prisoners have a lot of time on their hands and being incarcerated sucks even if your rights are not actually being violated. Not saying which this is -- I have no way of knowing. I'm just pointing out that it's a mistake to take the allegations in a legal complaint at face value.
> it is also extremely common for inmates and former inmates to file exaggerated or even frivolous claims about the conditions of their confinement.
It seems pernicious to suggest distrust of claims. Like Blackstone's ratio[1], presuming good faith and investigating, then addressing abuses of the system, seems like the ideal process. The ideal likely ending up unsustainable due to staffing constraints.
[1] "It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer."
If a prisoner in America says they are being deprived of adaquate medical care, it's safe (for people generally, not the legal system) to assume it's true until proven otherwise.
Maybe they're healthy and are complaining about nothing, but if they aren't healthy then it is almost certainly the case that their medical care is substandard if it exists at all.
It's crazy that people treat prisoner complaints from the American gulag as if everyone is just whining. We have some of the worst conditions in the developed world.
You do come off as very dismissive. It's kind of like JAQing off. You're not "just asking questions" you're "just offering suggestions." The suggestion here being that everyone take these kind of allegations with a grain of salt. I guess it's not necessity that those views conflict with each other, but they definitely do not seem congruous.
Well, then let me clarify: I know that there are a lot of abuses in the U.S. prison system. It's a national embarrassment, and I would be in no way surprised if these or virtually any other allegations a person might make turned out to be true. It is also true, however, that there is a huge number of meritless suits regarding prison conditions.
I used to work in the federal court system so I've seen both sides of this close up. I've worked on cases (many of them) where prisoners' allegations of hideous abuse were extremely credible including cases where the plaintiffs went on to win at trial, get sizable settlements, etc. At the same time, our courthouse had an entire office dedicated to triaging the enormous number of suits filed by prisoners, only a small percentage of which had any merit. (And this office is, by and large, staffed with very compassionate attorneys who do that job because they're interested in helping prisoners--these are not, on average, people who want, or have any incentive, to just sweep things under the rug.)
That's why I believe both that our prison system is rife with abuse and that the average prisoner complaint has a good chance of being bogus.
> I would be in no way surprised if these or virtually any other allegations a person might make turned out to be true
Sure. That does seemingly contradict the notion that I should take the filings with a grain of salt, though. I shouldn't be surprised if it's true, but I shouldn't think it's likely to be true? I think you need to pick one.
What is your experience with these that is the basis of you sharing these opinions?
Let's not waste effort debating what it means to be "surprised," which is beside the point. All I mean is that there are a lot of meritorious claims, because there genuinely is a lot of abuse. But as a fraction of the claims filed, this remains relatively small because of the extremely large number of unmeritorious claims that are actually filed.
As for my experience: I'm not sure what more information you want beyond what I have already given, except to add: my job in the federal courts included reviewing and advising judges on the small fraction of claims that made it through the triage stage I described earlier and might have had a decent chance of success, as well as occasionally reviewing claims that would otherwise have been filtered out at the triage stage to provide a second opinion.
Do you have any insight into why the less meritorious claims were being filed? I can imagine that given the amount of entirely legal abuse, prisoners attempt to fight back with a swing and a miss. Ofc, some people are just assholes and given they're in prison, they have nothing better to do, but it's pretty annoying to file a suit so I imagine many of them are motivated by something.
I'm not sure I can offer much more than educated speculation, but here it is: I think that prison (especially in America) sucks, even when your legal rights aren't being violated. It's full of indignities and unpleasant conditions. A lot of what makes prison unpleasant may genuinely feel like violations of your rights, even if the law would disagree. As a result, many prisoner suits are about conditions and situations that really are unpleasant, but not illegal. (Some suits also have to do with conditions that are illegal, but which the law requires prisoners to try to get addressed through the prison's own internal grievance system, before resorting to a lawsuit.)
Then mix in the fact that, as a prisoner, you have a lot of time on your hands and one of the few things you can spend your time doing is visiting the prison law library. Even better, if your lawsuit actually goes somewhere, you might have the hope that prison officials will have to take you to court appearances. This stuff would indeed be pretty annoying for most people, but less so for some prisoners (especially compared with their limited alternatives).
Prisoner lawsuits are so plentiful that there is actually a federal law that specifically restricts them, called the Prison Litigation Reform Act[1]. It doesn't block suits altogether, but it limits the situations where a plaintiff can file a suit without paying the filing fees. I have, at best, mixed feelings about it (which parallel my complicated feelings towards prisoner suits generally). But the law's existence helps to illustrate the scale of the problem.
The corollary is also true: it's extremely common for courts to be prejudiced against inmate lawsuits. In extreme cases they don't even read their filings,
Why would they spend money on a frivolous case they have no chance of winning? Lawyers, dragon or no, are expensive, and people in prison don't exactly make money. Conversely, abuse of prisoners is endemic in America. I find this all extremely plausible.
> Why would they spend money on a frivolous case they have no chance of winning?
We’re assuming the defendant is without means. If I were in jail, I’d probably spend a decent amount of my spare time filing this sort of thing. If it were hopeless, I could also see myself just trolling. What else will I spend my money on?
Agreed...and if they think there is a chance of winning they are going to work on the case. That seems obvious? I think you always need to convince a judge your case has merit, right? Or else they just 12b6 you or whatever the equivalent is...
>The "outcome" is simply that the judge simply directed the attorney to stop using the dragon watermark. Whats the problem?
I think the poster was trying to make the point that in a "just" society, the story would be about how this individual is in this position and only has the choice of this attorney, and not instead about the purple dragon.
Absolutely. Federal courts are filled with nonsense habeas petitions by pro se plaintiffs claiming this exact kind of stuff. The fact that this person managed to get representation adds some credibility, but then we’re also here discussing how ridiculous that particular representation has behaved.
His website, which also features the purple dragon and a bunch of busted links in the footer, says that the firm "integrates AI to lower the cost of legal services."
Heh, optics have been important since the dawn of man, and probably even before. Ziggurats are all about optics, and so are mating displays. A cynic might say "more important", but that's hard to ascertain.
The legal system, for millienia, has always been a hodgepodge of very peculiar and esoteric rules about both substance and optics.
That's why lawyers exist, by the way. Outside of small claims court, laymen aren't equipped to navigate it without stepping on every possible rake imaginable.
the victim did have a choice of lawyers, far beyond a "luxury." Don't know if you live in the US or not, but it's hard to avoid personal injury attorney advertising in virtually every forum. More specifically, there are 426 PI lawyers listed in the Superlawyers directory for the Detroit area, and they claim to only list the top 5% of practicing attorneys. The plaintiff here could easily dump this guy and get someone else, for free, especially this early in the lawsuit when the complaint has just been filed.
This isn't a PI case and she couldn't "easily" get someone else for free. Maybe you're thinking she could get an attorney to take the case on a contingency basis, but that's not "free."
That should be more offensive than cartoons. In a just world.
It's not as if the victim had the luxury of many choices of law firms, or any capacity to oversee their work. Their access to legal services is presumably similar to their access to medical care. There's nothing amusing about this outcome. It's seriously depressing that "the coked-up cartoon-dragoon attorney" is the best representation that person, in their helpless situation, was able to navigate to.