It is safe to assume that in Newark, NJ, every reasonable man and woman has been told and told again that you should never drink and drive. We are told in our high school drivers education class, we are told by M.A.D.D. commercials and we are told by our family and friends. There is no doubt that drinking and driving is a dreadful mix, too often resulting in irreversible tragedies. There are those who have made an error in judgment and climbed behind the wheel after one too many and those who have an addiction problem; they who cannot help themselves without getting help from others. Such as the example of a New Jersey man arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol not once or twice but three times in a single week. He was arrested the final time after running from police and crashing into a fire hydrant. Thankfully, no one was injured in any of his drunken incidents.

Fortunately, not all of us suffer from such addiction but occasionally we may enjoy a social event, out for a meal with some family or friends, or maybe attending a gathering at a friend or families home. There may be alcohol and if so, what happens if you have had just a little too much, just one little drink too far? Driving under the influence must be avoided but sometimes, we make mistakes. In New Jersey, if you have a blood alcohol concentration of .08% or more, you are driving under the influence (DUI). If you climbed into your car and are now being pulled over, it quickly dawns on you how bad the choice really was. Nevertheless, when a person is pulled over by a law enforcement officer, there are rights and protections that are guaranteed. One of those fundamental rights is the ability to seek counsel from a DUI Lawyer in Newark NJ.

Facing any form of criminal charge, at any level is serious and it requires an intelligent, competent and aggressive defense from an experienced DUI Lawyer in Newark NJ. Because even a misdemeanor could impact your life for years. It is critically essential that your legal issues are resolved quickly and yet more importantly, resolved properly with an attorney who understands the NJ courts. Everyone makes mistakes in life and if you face a DUI, it is important to take action to protect your freedom.

The post Facing DUI Penalties in New Jersey appeared first on Jessabella Reads.

End of the Line: A Parker Noble Mystery

Manno, Mike (2010) End of the Line: A Parker Noble Mystery. Five Star Publishing of Gale, Cengage Learning. ISBN 978-1594148637. Litland recommends of interest to adults, acceptable for older teens.

 Publisher description:  When former banker R. J. Butler is found murdered on a city transit bus, police take little time making a connection with the embezzlement at his former bank. But is that the motive for his murder? State police detective Sergeant Jerome Stankowski and his persnickety “partner,” Parker Noble, are called to investigate and run into a host of possibilities including a trophy wife on drugs and an ex-wife desperately needing a church annulment R. J. was blocking..

 Our thoughts:

 The second installment of the Parker Noble series, End of the Line, is a fun yet engaging, quick-paced detective mystery. Parker Noble may be the genius who solves the crimes, but it is Detective “Stan” Stankowski’s antics both on and off the job that lighten the story. Truly a man’s man, Stankowski enjoys girl watching while being easily manipulated by his somewhat-girlfriend Buffy the reporter.  He  tries to juggle dating 3 girls at the same time, each end up having a role in solving the mystery. Meanwhile, the contrast of Parker’s rigidly-ordered life to Stan’s adds color, and both humor and clues surface throughout the story just often enough to keep the reader alert. My favorite dialogue pertains to Parker’s dog, Buckwheat Bob the basset hound, who listens to talk radio while Parker is at work:

(Stan) “I take it that the human voice is soothing for him?”…(Parker) ”Not really, he likes to listen to the political talk”…”You don’t think he understands all of that, do you?”…”Don’t know, Stanley. All I can tell you is that he’s turned into quite a Republican.” LOL!

 A cozy mystery written for adults, it would probably have a PG rating if a movie: use of the bird finger; one suspect referred to as tramp, hussy, nude model; Buffy pressuring Stan into taking a vacation together. However, Stan remains chaste in his girl-chasing and the story is focused on the relationships between all the characters, which adds depth, interest and a few chuckles along the way. A fun story available in the Litland.com Bookstore.

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Do you need an attorney? Who doesn’t need an attorney for some legal matter? Of course, attorneys charge a lot for their services. Here are ten humorous fortune cookie sayings with lawyers in mind:

1. If the suit fits, sue tomorrow.
2. You are about to come into a tidy fortune. Just ignore the banana peel on the marble floor until it is too late.
3. Would you like some black forest tort cake? I see. You would prefer just the tort.
4. You are about to learn more about cell technology. It is so fascinating that the subject will just imprison you.
5. Divorcing yourself from reality may not lessen your cost from your imminent divorce.
6. Beware of a guy named Mal. This is particularly true if his last name is Practice.
7. People shouldn’t judge you by your appearance unless you are picked out of a lineup.
8. Betty Lou would sure love to court you. However, if you  become unfaithful, she’ll see you in court.
9. You cannot replace your batteries in a case of assault and battery.
10. If you are drunk as a skunk and drive, you just might find yourself making the evening news by five.

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Do you need an attorney? Who doesn’t need an attorney for some legal matter? Of course, attorneys charge a lot for their services. Here are ten humorous fortune cookie sayings with lawyers in mind:

1. If the suit fits, sue tomorrow.
2. You are about to come into a tidy fortune. Just ignore the banana peel on the marble floor until it is too late.
3. Would you like some black forest tort cake? I see. You would prefer just the tort.
4. You are about to learn more about cell technology. It is so fascinating that the subject will just imprison you.
5. Divorcing yourself from reality may not lessen your cost from your imminent divorce.
6. Beware of a guy named Mal. This is particularly true if his last name is Practice.
7. People shouldn’t judge you by your appearance unless you are picked out of a lineup.
8. Betty Lou would sure love to court you. However, if you  become unfaithful, she’ll see you in court.
9. You cannot replace your batteries in a case of assault and battery.
10. If you are drunk as a skunk and drive, you just might find yourself making the evening news by five.

Lawrence J. Fox practices law as a long-time partner at Drinker Biddle & Reath as well as being the I. Grant Irey Adjunct Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania and a Lecturer on Law at the Harvard Law School.  Susan R. Martyn has taught law for nearly thirty years, first at Wayne State University in Detroit, and currently as Stoepler Professor of Law and Values at the University of Toledo College of Law.  Together they wrote, How To Deal With Your Lawyer: Answers To Commonly Asked Questions.  Below is an excerpt about a very sticky topic, lawyer’s fees.

Your Lawyers’ Fees Must Be Fully Explained

Q: My sense is lawyers love to charge big bucks, but don’t like talking about it much.

A: You are right there.  But even before you become a client, you are entitled to a number of protections regarding fees. Your lawyer must discuss the available methods of billing - hourly fee, fixed fee, contingent fee - and the benefits and drawback of each.

Q: Tell me more about hourly billing.

A: This is the most common way lawyers charge.  Each lawyer and paralegal has a billing rate.  They are supposed to keep accurate track of their time, usually in fractions of an hour, and describe what they do during that time.  Then, at the end of the month, the lawyer will send you a bill containing the descriptions and the important mathematical result.

Q: What’s that?

A: The number of hours time the billable rate for each individual who dedicated time to the matter all neatly added up.

Q: Couldn’t this be a great deal for the lawyer?  She works real slow and I pay for every hour.

A: That’s where reasonableness comes in - and a lawyer’s fiduciary duty. Your lawyer is required to proceed efficiently and pursue only those objectives you have agreed to, following the strategic plan you two have discussed.

Q: How will I ever know?

A: You are right to ask.  This system is built on trust and documentation.  You are not sitting around watching your lawyer’s every move, stopwatch in hand.  But if you don’t trust your lawyer, billing is only part of the problem, and you would be well served to keep searching until you find one you do trust.

Q: What’s this about fixed fees?

A: Sometimes lawyer and client can agree that the lawyer will provide all services required for a fixed fee, if the service is routine, or the lawyer and client have a large client database of experience with this type of matter.

Q: Sounds like this could be an incentive for slipshod work.

A: With any fixed fee, we’re back to trust again - and the recognition by the lawyer that a malpractice action might loom is she does not deliver quality work.

Q: And if it takes longer, the lawyer might lose interest?

A: That’s certainly possible.  You’ve now identified the problems with fixed fees. But they have their place and they permit the client the benefit of budgeting for the cost of these services, which can be quite reassuring in the right circumstances.  So the ethics rules generally permit them, except in one instance.

Q: What’s that?

A: May jurisdictions prohibit fixed fees in situations in which the lawyer is hired by an insurance company to represent an insured who is the real client. The worry is that the lawyer’s professional independence will be compromised by the arrangement, so rather than worry about it, fixed fees are just prohibited.

Q: I’ve also heard about contingent fees. How do they work?

A: These are arrangements that we say hold the keys to the courthouse door for so many who could not otherwise afford lawyers.

Q: How’s that?

A: Under a contingent fee arrangement, the lawyer collects a fee only if the client has a recovery.  And the fee is directly tied to the amount of the recovery.  The more the client gets, the more the lawyer gets.  Those interests are perfectly aligned.

Q: That sounds great.  Why doesn’t everyone hire a lawyer on a contingent fee?

A: Well, first of all, even in cases that are appropriate for contingent fees, lawyers are required to explain the alternatives to the client since some clients would prefer to pay a lawyer on some other basis.  Then there are some matters where the law prohibits contingent fees, primarily divorces and criminal matters; the former because we always hope a lawyer’s fee arrangement would not discourage reconciliation and the latter because we don’t the fee agreement to interfere with the client’s ability to accept a plea bargain.

Q: How much is the lawyer’s percentage?

A: Again, we are back to reasonable.  Typically, lawyers will charge anywhere from 25 to 40%.  But in cases where recovery is more certain, such a high percentage might be unreasonable.  And the percentage does not have to be fixed across all recoveries.  Some states have legislated what the percentages shall be in certain cases, and those percentages may go down as recoveries go up.  For example, the lawyer gets one-third of the first $100,000, 25% on the next $100,000, 10% on anything over $200,000.  Others have endorsed contingent fee arrangements where the percentage rises as the recovery increases on the theory that the last dollar recovered is a much better accomplishment that recovering the first.

Q: So under a contingent fee, I get my lawyer for free?

A: Well, the legal services are free, if you should lose.  But we haven’t discussed expenses, which includes everything from court filing fees and expert witness charges to costs for disbursements, such as phone calls and photocopy expenses.

Q: There’s always a catch.

A: That’s because the amount a client pays for every matter has two components: the professional fee and the expenses. Lawyers are allowed to include expenses in the contingent fee, which means that you don’t pay them anything - fee or expenses - unless you win.  Lawyers also are allowed to charge you for these expenses separately.  Either way, you have a right to bargain for and know up front what to expect…

Q: What happens if, after my lawyer and I agree on a fee, my lawyer then decides the deal still isn’t to her liking?

A: Great question.  While clients can terminate lawyers at any time for any reason, a lawyer may not change a fee agreement previously entered into because “the deal” doesn’t look as good as it once did.  The courts look at any fee modification with signifigant disfavor.  Unless the lawyer can demonstrate that the scope of the engagement materially changed or that it was otherwise in the client’s best interest to change the arrangement, the lawyer must fulfill the terms of the original retainer.

All week on the OUPblog we will be celebrating the Lincoln Bicentennial.  Be sure to read Jennifer Weber’s post on how Lincoln almost failed, the excerpt from James M. McPherson’s Abraham Lincoln, and Craig L. Symonds post on how Lincoln and his leadership are reflected in our current President. In the original piece below Allen Guelzo, author of Lincoln: A Very Short Introduction, answers some FAQs about Lincoln.  You can read part one here and part two here.

OUPblog: More than one observer has noted that the Emancipation Proclamation didn’t free any enslaved people in the very territory controlled by Lincoln’s government. What then is its lasting importance?

Allen Guelzo: This is probably the most-frequently-repeated howler in American history, and no one who thinks twice about will ever believe they said it.

The question refers to an apparent oddity in the Emancipation Proclamation – Lincoln freed the slaves in the Confederate States, but did not free the slaves of the four border states which remained loyal to the Union or the slaves in the Southern areas which had been re-occupied by federal forces. So, Lincoln frees slaves where he can’t control them, and neglects to free them where he can. Right? Wrong.

We live under a Constitution which does not give Presidents plenary powers to do anything they like. Only in time of war or rebellion does the Constitution even surrender control of the armed forces to the President, and the “war powers” which the Constitution confers on the President are almost the only discretionary powers he has.

It was under the rubric of those “war powers” that Lincoln issued, and could only have issued, an Emancipation Proclamation. And since those four border states, and the occupied districts of the South, were not at war with the United States, or in rebellion against it any more, Lincoln had no “war power” authority to free any slaves there. If he had tried, slaveowners would have made a bee-line for the federal courts. And at the top of the federal judiciary, itching for a chance to strike down emancipation for good, sat Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney, the author of the infamous Dred Scott decision. Lincoln might have had the military power to free slaves in those places, but not the legal authority.

By the same token, Lincoln declares the slaves of the Confederacy free because, even though he lacks the military power at that moment to enforce his proclamation, he retained the legal authority to do so. Lincoln had never recognized the Confederacy as a valid government. In his eyes, it was an insurrection against the existing forms of constitutional government, and as such, it came directly under the weight of his “war powers.” He might not have been able to enforce the Proclamation at once, but that’s very different from saying he had no authority to free the slaves there. Having the authority, it was only a matter of time and events before the enforcement, in the form of the Union Army, caught up with the authority and liberated the ex-slaves from their masters. Many of those slaves saw the distinction clearly enough that they began running away in droves to the Union lines, where they knew that the Army would at once recognize their freedom. Together, Lincoln and the slaves made the Proclamation in reality what it already was in law. But the reality would never have happened without the law.

At Gettysburg, Lincoln called on the nation to remember the war dead by a re-dedication to “unfinished work.” What is unfinished today? The unfinished work he was talking about at Gettysburg was the war itself, which he realized had to be won if the principle of government of the people was to be vindicated. If there was a sense in which he looked beyond that, it was to the larger goal of bringing opportunity for self-advancement and self-improvement to as many as possible. For Lincoln, the promise of the Declaration (that “proposition” that all men are created equal) was realized best when an open and democratic society gave to everyone the freedom to climb as far as talent and ambition could take them – as he himself had. Frederick Douglass, the black abolitionist, once wrote that Lincoln “was the first great man that I talked with in the United States freely, who in no single instance reminded me of the difference between himself and myself, of the difference of color.” Douglass attributed Lincoln’s lack of racial bias to Lincoln’s sympathy with Douglass’s struggle and the “similarity with which I had fought my way up, we both starting at the lowest round of the ladder.” I confess, having also started on that “lowest round,” that this is what fascinates me most about Lincoln, too.

In the Eden Dance Palace trial of 1931, in which four Nazi storm troopers stood accused of criminal assault and attempted murder, a lawyer for the prosecution requested the presence of Adolf Hitler as a witness.  Who was this fearless lawyer?  Hans Litten.  In Crossing Hitler: The Man Who Put the Nazis on the Witness Stand, Benjamin Carter Hett an Associate Professor of History at Hunter college and a former trial lawyer, tells the story of this historic confrontation, as well as the man who for a brief moment posed a serious threat to the Nazis rise to power.  In the excerpt below we learn a little about who Hans Litten was.

Who was Hans Litten?  Years later his closest friend, Max Fürst, remembered him as “more than a brother…’a part of myself,’” but also as a fanatical warrior who fought with the desperation of “one who fights the last battle.”  Countess Marion Donhoff, editor in chief of the Die Zeit (Time), believed that Litten was “one of those righteous men for whose sake the Lord did not allow the city-the country, the nation-to be entirely ruined.”  Kurt Hiller, a friend from Berlin political circles and later a cellmate in a concentration camp, called him “a true Christian by nature, and also by conviction.”  Another fellow prisoner was more sardonic: “A definite genius, but not easy to live with.”

Photographs show a serious, bespectacled young man, already growing portly and inclined to a double chin, with thinning hair combed back from a widow’s peak and worn unusually long for the time (”Only soldiers and slaves get their hair shorn,” he liked to say).  He was tall: his closest friends’ small daughter remembered him as “the big man with glasses,” and a youth movement friend described him as a “tall, pale young man.”  Beyond his height, the photos do not suggest a man who would be striking or memorable.  Yet people meeting Litten for the first time invariably gained a strong impression.  Rudolf Olden, a distinguished lawyer and journalist, remembered the first time he saw Litten.  It was in 1928 at a meeting of the League for Human Rights (Lifa für Menschenrechte), a very modern kind of political lobby group that had grown out of a left-leaning association called New Fatherland founded during the First World War by Albert Einstein and the future mayor of West Berlin, Ernst Reuter.  Litten asked a question during the discussion.  “The speaker had a striking head, a smooth face, rimless glasses over round bright eyes.  He work his shirt open at the throat, and short pants, below which the knees were bare.”  Olden took the young man for a schoolboy.  After the debate, one of Olden’s friends, smiling, told him that the “boy” was in fact the Assessor, or newly qualified lawyer, Hans Litten.  The next time Olden saw Litten was in a courtroom.  Olden was struck by the contrast between the “childlike face” with the eyes that “gazed pure and clear through the glasses,” and the calm expertise of the lawyer who refused to let anyone intimidate him…

…In her later years his still-grieving mother would remind anyone who listened that “Hitler’s first victims were Germans,” and there were many reasons why, almost from the beginning, the Nazis condemned Litten to imprisonment in a concentration camp, hard labor, prolonged interrogations, beatings, and torture.  To the Nazis Litten was half-Jewish, as he was the product of what Germans in the early twentieth century called a mixed marriage.  In politics he stood far to the left.  And he was a lawyer, a profession for which the Nazis had scant regard.

But above all it was Hitler’s personal fear and hatred that landed Litten in the concentration camps, and this fear and hatred stemmed from the handwritten summons of April 1931.  For when Hitler appeared in court in May 8, Litten subjected him to a withering cross-examination, laying bare the violence at the heart of the Nazi movement.  The Eden Dance Palace trial exposed Hitler to multiple dangers: criminal prosecution, the disintegration of his party, public exposure of the contradictions on which the Nazis’ appeal was based.  It was only through luck that Hitler survived with his political career intact..

…Litten’s resistance to the Nazis went on after the “seizure of power” of January 30, 1933.  Although he was one of the first to be arrested after Hitler was made chancellor, Litten fought back even from the concentration camps.

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Well Folks, it's only May 7th, but it feels like a fiery red day in August. I woke up feeling uplifted by the warmth in the air, but throughout the course of the morning, a sense of melancholy has set in.

Warm mornings and the oncoming of summer always remind me of my dad. Just simple little memories that have a permanent headquarters in my heart and mind. Remembrances of his laugh and his love of coffee. I can close my eyes and hear him call me..."Babe". My dad never called me Kim. Literally, never ever, not once did he call me by my name. The only time I ever heard him say the word "Kim" was when he was referring to me in conversation with someone else. When he talked about me to my mom he called me "The Baby". Up until the last days of his life, I was always "Babe".

My dad passed away in January of 2003 at 83 years of age. He died here in my home on hospice. It was a long process and difficult to watch. Even now, I have a hard time remembering him as he was when I was young. The first couple of years after he died, all I could remember of him was the last month of his life. Little by little, I am able to remember him for the man and the dad that he was throughout my life

I can remember now, the particular gait that he had when he would slowly and meticulously mow the lawn. I can smell the grape kool-aid that my mom would often keep in the refrigerator for him. I can close my eyes and smell the coffee perking on the old O'Keefe & Merritt in our tiny little kitchen. My dad would pour a cup of coffee and sit at the kitchen table and read the paper. The front door and back door opened to the summer sounds of the outside world.

So, little by little I am reclaiming the memories of my dad as he was when he was vibrant and strong and funny. So much can be stolen with death. For quite a while, I thought that death had stolen my dad from me completely. It seemed to have left a big canvas, completely empty except for one black corner. Now, I am starting to see layers of color and light on the canvas. Someday, the painting will be finished....

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