#not legal advice

[birf]

did you know if a street light is too bright near your window you can just shoot it

[sweetfirebird]

Americans, I know these assholes have everyone scrambling to change jobs or save money or move internet browsers and so on and so on. But when you have a second, and particularly if you are already vulnerable, I need you to make a Will, set up an Advanced Health Care Directive, put a beneficiary on your bank account/s if you don't have one.

Your rights are already in question, but frankly every adult should have this done anyway. Because if you die or are hospitalized, your immediate family are the ones who will be contacted and have the right to make decisions about you/your health/your money. And if you do not like your family or they do not respect your identity or your choices, this is obviously a problem. So if you want be as protected as possible, set up these things.

It actually is not as onerous as it sounds. Look up the Will requirements for your state. Some are simple and do not require a lawyer or even a Notary Public (just a witness or two). Some only require that the Will be typewritten as well as witnessed etc. See what the minimum requirements for your state are, but if you can, go above and beyond the minimum.

-if you have a good bank or use a credit union or are in a union, they might offer Will services for free as a benefit. If your state requires a notarization, know that most states have very low notarization fees (excluding California and NY lol)

-If you are writing it yourself, there are templates online.

Advanced Health Care Directives--you are appointing someone to make medical decisions for you if you can't. Your health care provider has forms for this. Some require notarization, some don't.

Bank account beneficiaries--literally go into your bank and say you want to add a beneficiary to your account/s. That's it.

--This does not make it a joint account. (I typed 'accunt' you are welcome). This means that if something happens to you, your chosen beneficiary can go into the bank and access your money. You will have to provide the bank with some information about this person/people (it can be more than one), like name, address, phone number. Maybe date of birth. Maybe their social. That kind of info.

Okay? It's adulting stuff but it's generally pretty straightforward if you are an adult. You can make appointments for the bank stuff but I walked right in. And my credit union that I still have for an old thing didn't even make me go in--I just mailed in a form.

I am not a lawyer obv. I am just a regular person but I used to be a Notary Public and let me tell you, the things relatives will try to pull when someone gets sick or dies.... shameful. So take care of yourself and those you care about. Consult a lawyer if need be, or use a service like Legal Zoom if that is more your speed/budget. Just protect yourselves.

[blatentmisinformation]

Jury nullification is a fun pair of words that have no significant meaning. Make sure to let people know about it if they are going to be in court anytime soon.

[kittyoverlord]

Criminal Law Basics incoming:

This is why the standard for proving guilt in a criminal court is Beyond a Reasonable Doubt. There is a ton of discussion regarding what Reasonable Doubt is*, but in general it is the highest burdan of proof that exists in the US Justice system. When creating this standard of proof, the idea was that circumstantial evidence and/or a lack of evidence can be twisted to imply guilt, which would lead to more innocent people being unfairly prosecuted. In theory, the prosecutor has the burden of proof because we should be absolutely certain the the person that we're sending to jail/prison/death is actually guilty. Defense attorneys spend a lot of time working on the best ways to describe reasonable doubt to a jury to help increase the chances of a not guilty verdict.

In this instance, it would be up to the prosecutor to show evidence that the Loam's received this money, it is not the Loam's responsibility (via their attorney**) to provide evidence that they did not receive the money. Sklonda's argument would be likely focus on the prosecutors and cops failing to meet this standard by not providing this key piece of evidence.

Also, I know this is done for story purposes, but this is all flagrant disregard for attorney client privilege, which doesn't go away just because the client died.

*We actually just got a ton of cases back from an appeal decision that determined that judges in our state were using an incorrect analogy to describe reasonable doubt to jurors. On that basis a lot of cases have to be re-tried because the jury wasn't applying the correct standard. That's how important this is.

**Another interesting legal fact, if both of the Loams were being charged with the same crime, they would not both get the same attorney. They would be what is known as co-defendents, and at least where I work, one of them would wind up with a private attorney who is paid for by the state due to the public defender's office having a conflict of interest. This is basically because in theory the best defense for either one of them may be to blame the other one, and so one attorney cannot act in the best interest for both of them. If they both got their own attorney and decided to work together to prove both of their innocence, that's totally fine, but there would be more of a process to ensure that no impropriety was going on. Again, I know this is for story purposes, but just a little fun fact from your local public defender - admin assistant.

[chiefmuffin]

Be happy

Be gay

Do crime

[alexandramrobertson]

"Isn't that entrapment?"

Why Fraser is jumping to conclusions

It’s me, your friendly neighbourhood legally trained Canadian. Here to tell you law stuff that is just for fun and definitely not legal advice.

The Due South fandom remember the moment in the pilot movie, when Fraser meets Ray and calls him out for trying to entrap a garment buyer into buying stolen merchandise.

The problem is, while he could be right, Fraser didn't have enough information to make that call.

What is entrapment?

Let’s look at Canadian law, because it’s what I know and what Fraser would know (unless he studied Illinois law on the plane).

In Canada, entrapment occurs when:

(a) the authorities provide an opportunity to persons to commit an offence without reasonable suspicion or acting mala fides, or, (b) having a reasonable suspicion or acting in the course of a bona fide inquiry, they go beyond providing an opportunity and induce the commission of an offence.  R. v. Mack, [1988] 2 SCR 903

Let's call these "Category A" and "Category B" entrapment.

Fraser didn't know enough

Fraser can't know whether Ray's operation is Category A entrapment because he doesn't know whether Ray has reasonable suspicion or what his motives are. He may have guessed that Ray doesn't have reasonable suspicion based on his inference that the prisoner is not really a garment buyer, but he hasn't said that yet.

Fraser may have assumed Ray had reasonable suspicion but crossed the line into Category B entrapment (inducing the offence). But Fraser probably didn't see enough of the conversation to make that call.

He's just jumping to conclusions and being condescending about it. In another country where he doesn’t know the law. No wonder Ray is annoyed.

[verygoodlawyer]

That mutant hate group is back. Makes me neevous. So like I have to ask. How do you stop a hate group that is very vocal about their hatred?

⠦⠠⠺⠑⠇⠇⠂ ⠞⠓⠑ ⠃⠑⠎⠞ ⠞⠓⠊⠝⠛ ⠞⠕ ⠙⠕ ⠺⠕⠥⠇⠙ ⠃⠑ ⠞⠕ ⠛⠑⠞ ⠞⠕ ⠞⠓⠑ ⠗⠕⠕⠞ ⠉⠁⠥⠎⠑ ⠕⠋ ⠞⠓⠑⠊⠗ ⠓⠁⠞⠗⠑⠙⠂ ⠺⠓⠊⠉⠓ ⠊⠝ ⠞⠓⠊⠎ ⠉⠁⠎⠑ ⠺⠕⠥⠇⠙ ⠃⠑ ⠞⠓⠑⠊⠗ ⠍⠕⠥⠞⠓⠂ ⠁⠝⠙ ⠏⠥⠝⠉⠓ ⠞⠓⠑⠍ ⠎⠕ ⠓⠁⠗⠙ ⠞⠓⠑⠽ ⠓⠁⠧⠑ ⠞⠕ ⠛⠑⠞ ⠞⠓⠑⠊⠗ ⠍⠕⠥⠞⠓ ⠺⠊⠗⠑⠙ ⠎⠓⠥⠞⠲ ⠠⠞⠓⠁⠞ ⠺⠊⠇⠇ ⠛⠑⠞ ⠞⠓⠑⠍ ⠞⠕ ⠎⠓⠥⠞ ⠥⠏⠲⠴

"Well, the best thing to do would be to get to the root cause of their hatred, which in this case would be their mouth, and punch them so hard they have to get their mouth wired shut. That will get them to shut up."

[yournewfriendshouse]

it’s funny how you can be having a contained meltdown about the post office and their phone trees and not being able to pick up your parcels at the place they sent them to

and then a family member will bring up the small claims court reddit style, and suddenly you’re thinking of all the options available to you because your rational mind is returned to your body through sheer surprise at the level of unhelpful aggression they are coming in with

[chantylay]

Oh hey, I actually work in landlord tenant law. Absolutely do contact the city for an inspection if you have an issue like this and keep meticulous copies of your conversations with your landlord (get things in writing). Landlords must keep your apartment in good condition (including things like the plumbing) and if they do not fix it you can take legal action (and potentially withhold rent but you should talk to a lawyer if you are gonna do that. How to go about that without getting dragged to court for non-payment of rent is a complicated subject).

This AI knows what’s up

[alexandramrobertson]

Governments litigating badly

I just rewatched the Due South season 2 episode “We Are the Eggmen”. While this episode is a lot of fun, it's legally absurd. The Canadian government wouldn't respond to a lawsuit by immediately handing over millions of dollars when their employee claimed it was fraudulent. Instead, they would:

Retain local counsel. Cloutier probably isn’t a personal injury defence lawyer and even if he is, he’s not called to the bar in Illinois. He would be instructing local lawyers from behind a desk in Ottawa.

Deny responsibility for Fraser's actions. He wasn't on duty, so he's not our problem.

Dispute jurisdiction. We have diplomatic immunity. If you want to sue us, you'd better do it in Canada, where we appoint the judges, the damages awards are peanuts, and you'll owe us big if you lose.

Hire a private investigator to investigate Fraser's fraud theory.

Demand a mountain of documents. You're asking for ten milion dollars? We'll need twenty years of financials and medical records for every sniffle and scraped knee you've had in your entire life. If any pre-existing condition might have caused your current condition, they'll argue it did.

Claim the driver caused the accident. Actually, sir, you were the one who was drunk, weren't you?

Drag their heels and delay, delay, delay.

Realism sure is less fun, isn’t it?

I'd also forgotten that Fraser pretends to electrocute himself while unlocking the door. It's a big step for him and Thatcher since until this point the only person we’ve seen him joking around with is Ray. And of course this is after lying (badly) to help her earlier in the episode.

Your mask is slipping, Fraser. You’re smitten.

[whathehe11]

Just a reminder to people that are thinking of using AI if they ever have to go to court or write legal letters, don’t.

The ai isn’t able to access the court cases or the websites they’re on so they make up the cases, and they don’t cite real law articles.

On top of all that, it’ll sometimes say the opposite of the actual law because it’s not able to interpret anything, it’s just a mush mash of words statistically likely to be next to one another.

[annionebutme]

I todays episode of "I have found out something that's been confusing me"

Academy can mean school and also academy can mean like "institution of special smart people gather to promote their feild" because why the fuck not. It comes from the name for platos garden so it sounds smart and every smart person wants to use it regardless of how confusing it can be. School came first though (16th c vs 17th c) so fuck you, united learned persons of the world if i want to start a fan fiction writing school and call it the academy of literature then you can't stop me.

[new-nintendo-2ds-xl]

despite the fact that this post has spiraled way out of my control, I want to try to clear up a misconception. The Skeleton Dance and Spooky Scary Skeletons are separate things, and only the former is in the public domain.

I really don’t want to be responsible for spreading misinformation that could get people sued. That being said, all the skeleton footage in Spooky Scary Skeletons is from The Skeleton Dance, so it’s only the music that really matters for that.

happy new year! reminder that as of January 1st, 2025, the 1929 animated Disney short "The Skeleton Dance" is now public domain!

[explodingice]

Guys, gals, and nonbinary pals

Lend me your ear-ussy

If you feel like the next four years your life may be in danger might I recommend

Buying a gun

With this quick and easy lifehack you can turn any would be "your body my choice" motherfuckers into fertalizer

*legal disclaimer I'm not advocating for murder,just proactive self defense. Stay safe cuties ;3*

[necarion]

My client: "Anyway, Judge, that's why I think you should go suck a dick."

Judge: "Did you just tell me to -"

Me, going into desperate damage control: "Objection, your honor, hearsay!"

[aridotdash]

Legal hack: donate blood before your hearing so the judge has to be nice to you