Category: Lawyering

Criminal law, Justice, Lawyering, Torts

John Frederick Ames and the Law’s Misuse in a Fatal Fued

October 9, 2005 Sunday
Washington Post: A Faulty Law, a Feud, a Fatality

BODY:

Last month John Frederick Ames, a bankruptcy lawyer from Richmond, was acquitted of the murder of his neighbor, Oliver “Perry” Brooks [Metro, Sept. 17]. It was the latest chapter in a story worthy of William Faulkner that concerns an arcane 1887 law and a state legislature that refused to repeal it.

The dispute that led to Brooks’s death began in 1989, when Ames, who had purchased a 675-acre Caroline County farm from a widow facing bankruptcy, sent his neighbors a registered letter informing them that he was going to build a fence around his property. The letter also said that he was going to charge his neighbors for half the cost of the fence, which amounted to thousands of dollars. Ames said the 1887 law allowed him to bill them for the fence even without their consent.

Ames’s neighbors, who included retirees on fixed incomes, received bills of $6,000 to $45,000. All of them, including Brooks, who was living on $400 a month from Social Security, refused to pay. Ames had billed Brooks $45,000 for his share of the fence. Ames reportedly offered to forget about the $45,000 if Brooks would deed over some of his land, but Brooks refused. The case went through the courts, and in 1991, Ames finally prevailed in the Virginia Supreme Court.

His neighbors then scraped together the money for the fence — all but Brooks, that is, who continued to refuse to pay. Ames subsequently sued his neighbor for $450,000 for fence damage caused by a bull that Brooks owned. The bull repeatedly broke the fence and strayed onto Ames’s cattle farm. Ames called these bull incursions an “intentional disregard” of his rights. Brooks responded with obstinacy and anger.

The bad blood finally boiled over in April 2004, when Brooks’s bull once again strayed onto Ames’s land. Despite court orders barring him from entering Ames’s property, Brooks went to retrieve his livestock. An armed Ames told him to leave the animal. When Brooks brandished a stick he used to herd the bull, Ames shot in the face and then four more times.

Ames said the shooting was in self-defense. But his acquittal by a jury last month on a murder charge on the basis of self-defense isn’t the end of the story. Ames still may get the land that he was seeking from Brooks. He previously sued the Brooks family for $11.3 million in an action that originally cited everything from infliction of emotional distress to terrorism. He recently withdrew that action, but he still has a lien on the Brooks property and an outstanding fence payment that could exceed $150,000 with interest. The Brooks family is suing Ames for wrongful death.

Ames may fit the stereotype of a lawyer who will use any law to his advantage, regardless of the cost to others, but the Virginia General Assembly deserves equal blame for the mess that culminated in the death of a man. It repeatedly failed to repeal the archaic law that allowed the feud to get going in the first place.

When the state Supreme Court ruled in favor of Ames in 1991, it noted that Virginia was out of step with the common-law rule that a landowner’s boundary line is a lawful fence and that a cattle owner is liable for trespass by his animals. Virginia, however, does not impose such liability on livestock owners and allows them to force neighbors to pay toward “fencing out” livestock. Despite the feud and requests for the law to be changed, the legislature did not act. Only after Brooks was dead and Ames was facing a murder charge did it change the law — and then only to exempt landowners without livestock, which would not have protected Brooks.

The common law and most states impose costs on livestock owners for any damage that their animals cause to a neighbor. This sensible “fence-in” approach recognizes that a livestock owner should not be able to impose the cost of his or her enterprise on neighbors.

A fundamental purpose of the law is to reduce conflicts among neighbors by maintaining clear, consistent and fair rules. The Virginia legislature clearly failed in that duty. It may be true that good fences make good neighbors, but the Brooks killing shows that bad laws, like bad fences, make for bad neighbors.

UPDATE: It appears Donald Trump uses the same questionable means to harass home owners.

Justice, Lawyering

The Duke Rape Case and Prosecutorial Abuse

Lots of Prosecutors Go Too Far. Most Get Away With It.

By Jonathan Turley
Sunday, June 24, 2007; Page B03

It was an extraordinary scene when Michael B. Nifong, the district attorney in Durham, N.C., took the stand to defend his law license after his failed crusade to convict innocent Duke University lacrosse players of gang rape. He had no more success with his own defense. After being disbarred for “dishonesty, fraud, deceit and misrepresentation,” he was suspended from his job last week and now faces a possible lawsuit in civil court.
What’s most remarkable about the whole scene, though, is how rare it is. Nifong’s misconduct was hardly unusual: Some of the most high-profile cases in history have involved strikingly similar acts of prosecutorial abuse. But instead of being punished, the worst violators are often lionized for their aggressive styles — maybe even rewarded with a cable television show.
Nifong is a classic example of the corrosive effect of high-profile cases on a prosecutor’s judgment and sense of decency. Even before the players were indicted, the district attorney had played to the passions surrounding a black stripper’s allegations that she had been raped by affluent white college boys. Nifong called the Duke players “a bunch of hooligans” and promised that he would not allow “Durham in the mind of the world to be a bunch of lacrosse players from Duke raping a black girl in Durham.”
But he had a problem. The accuser kept changing her story, and there was no evidence of a gang rape. In addition to his prejudicial comments, Nifong was accused of withholding test results showing that DNA found on the woman’s body and underwear came from at least four unknown males — but none of the 46 lacrosse team members.
Nifong isn’t the first prosecutor who, in his words, “got carried away” in the glare of television lights. In 1921, the silent-film star Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle was tried for the alleged rape and murder of a 30-year-old showgirl named Virginia Rappe during a party in a hotel suite. The San Francisco district attorney, Matthew Brady, faced a situation almost identical to Nifong’s: His chief witness was less than credible.
Rappe’s friend Maude Delmont dramatically described how Arbuckle had dragged Rappe into the bedroom, gleefully proclaiming, “I’ve waited five years to get you.” She insisted that she spoke with Rappe three days later, just before the young woman died (of peritonitis caused by a ruptured bladder), and related the too perfect account of how Rappe yelled, “I’m hurt, I’m dying. He did it, Maude.” In reality, rather than staying by her dying friend’s bedside, Delmont had run to send a telegram to friends that read: “We have Roscoe Arbuckle in a hole here. Chance to make some money out of him.”
It didn’t matter. Brady was hooked. Like Nifong’s conflicting DNA report, the coroner’s report in the Arbuckle case found “no marks of violence . . . and absolutely no evidence of a criminal assault, no signs that the girl had been attacked in any way.” Just as Nifong insisted that he had clear evidence against the lacrosse players, Brady released a statement (soon after receiving the coroner’s report) saying that the evidence “shows conclusively that either a rape or an attempt to rape was perpetrated.” Notably, when Arbuckle was finally acquitted in a third trial, the jury issued a written apology for the “great injustice . . . done him.”
The Duke case also has some striking resemblances to the trial of the so-called Scottsboro Boys. This case of prosecutorial abuse stemmed from a fight on the evening of March 25, 1931, in which a group of black youths threw a group of white boys off a freight train in northern Alabama. When police pulled the black boys off the train, they found two white girls dressed in men’s clothing also riding the train. The girls claimed that they had been held against their will, beaten and raped by the black youths.
Like Nifong, the Scottsboro prosecutors ignored the conspicuous absence of forensic and medical evidence supporting the rape charges — particularly the lack of bruises or torn clothing. (One girl later admitted that they had made up the story to avoid getting in trouble with the law themselves.) All nine Scottsboro defendants were convicted in one-day trials and sentenced to death, with the exception of a 13-year-old boy who was spared death by one holdout juror. (After the Supreme Court intervened and after multiple trials and pardons, the accused were released years later.)
This abuse occurred because the critical safeguard of prosecutorial discretion — the decision whether to pursue a case — didn’t protect the suspects. Despite what you see on television, the chances of being convicted in a criminal case are extremely high. Grand juries are said to be willing to “indict a ham sandwich,” and it’s not uncommon for prosecution offices to have conviction rates of 90 percent or higher. Some prosecutors grow callous and cavalier about their role. When told that he had secured the death penalty against an innocent man, a Texas prosecutor once reportedly boasted that “any prosecutor can convict a guilty man; it takes a great prosecutor to convict an innocent man.”
History is rife with such “great prosecutors” convicting the innocent to satisfy the public. In the 1913 Leo Frank trial, Atlanta chief prosecutor Hugh Dorsey pursued a Jewish factory owner for the rape and murder of 13-year-old factory worker Mary Phagan. It was a period of intense anti-Semitism, with crowds chanting “Kill the Jew” outside the courtroom. Prosecutors ignored the fact that all the evidence pointed to a janitor, Jim Conley, as the killer. Instead, they repeatedly rewrote Conley’s conflicting statements to help him manufacture a coherent account for trial. Conley was identified years later as the killer by a witness, but it was too late for Frank. He was kidnapped from prison by vigilantes (including many leading lawyers) and hanged near Mary’s grave.
Prosecutors are sworn to protect the rights of the accused as well as the accuser, to refuse to pursue cases that would not serve the interests of justice. Yet in today’s environment, it appears that prosecutors can never be too tough, the way models can never be too skinny.
Consider the career of Nancy Grace. Before becoming a CNN and Court TV anchor, she was a notorious prosecutor in Alabama. In a blistering 2005 federal appeals opinion, Judge William H. Pryor Jr., a conservative former Alabama attorney general, found that Grace had “played fast and loose” with core ethical rules in a 1990 triple-murder case. Like Nifong, Grace was accused of not disclosing critical evidence (the existence of other suspects) as well as knowingly permitting a detective to testify falsely under oath. The Georgia Supreme Court also reprimanded her for withholding evidence and for making improper statements in a 1997 arson and murder case. The court overturned the conviction in that case and found that Grace’s behavior “demonstrated her disregard of the notions of due process and fairness and was inexcusable.” She faced similar claims in other cases.
You might have expected Grace to suffer the same fate as Nifong. Instead, she has her own show on CNN, and the network celebrates her as “one of television’s most respected legal analysts.” On TV, she displays the same style she had in the courtroom. (In the Duke case, her presumed-guilty approach was evident early on, when she declared: “I’m so glad they didn’t miss a lacrosse game over a little thing like gang rape.”) The Grace effect is not lost on aspiring young prosecutors who struggle to outdo one another as camera-ready, take-no-prisoners avengers of justice. Grace’s controversial career also shows how prosecutors can routinely push the envelope without fear of any professional consequences. Often this does not mean violating an ethics rule, but using legally valid charges toward unjust ends.
Take the case of Genarlow Wilson. An honors student and gifted athlete, he was preparing for college in 2005 when he was charged in Georgia with aggravated child molestation for having consensual oral sex with a 15-year-old girl.
Though Wilson was only 17, Douglas County District Attorney David McDade and Assistant D.A. Eddie Barker secured a 10-year sentence for an act committed by thousands of teenagers every year. It’s not a crime in most states, and Georgia recently reduced it to a misdemeanor. But the prosecutors are now fighting a judge’s efforts to release Wilson. They can’t be charged on ethical grounds, but they’ve used the criminal justice system to brutalize a young man who should have received a stern parental lecture, not a 10-year prison term.
Nifong’s disbarment may deter some prosecutorial abuse, but until less visible cases are subjected to more scrutiny, it may prove to be an isolated event — driven by the same publicity that led to the abuse in the first place. If the case hadn’t been so high-profile, it’s doubtful that Nifong would have been charged, let alone disbarred, for his misconduct. The Duke case should teach us that a truly fair criminal justice system must strive to protect the rights of the accused as vigorously as it does those of the accuser.

Justice, Lawyering, Politics

The Criminalization of America

Published March 2007

Texas Rep. Wayne Smith is tired of hearing about parents missing meetings with their children’s teachers. His proposed solution is simple: Prosecute such parents as criminals. In Louisiana, state Sen. Derrick Shepherd is tired of seeing teenagers wearing popular low-rider pants that show their undergarments — so he would like to criminally charge future teenagers who are caught “riding low.”

Across the USA, legislators are criminalizing everything from spitting on a school bus to speaking on a cellphone while driving. Criminalizing bad behavior has become the rage among politicians, who view such action as a type of legislative exclamation point demonstrating the seriousness of their cause. As a result, new crimes are proliferating at an alarming rate, and we risk becoming a nation of criminals where carelessness or even rudeness is enough to secure a criminal record.

There was a time when having a criminal record meant something. Indeed, it was the social stigma or shame of such charges that deterred many people from “a life of crime.” In both England and the USA, there was once a sharp distinction between criminal and negligent conduct; the difference between the truly wicked and the merely stupid.

Legislators, however, discovered that criminalization was a wonderful way to outdo one’s opponents on popular issues. Thus, when deadbeat dads became an issue, legislators rushed to make missing child payments a crime rather than rely on civil judgments. When cellphone drivers became a public nuisance, a new crime was born. Unnecessary horn honking, speaking loudly on a cellphone and driving without a seat belt are only a few of the new crimes. If you care enough about child support, littering, or abandoned pets, you are expected to care enough to make their abuse a crime.

High crimes

Consider the budding criminal career of Kay Leibrand. The 61-year-old grandmother lived a deceptively quiet life in Palo Alto, Calif., until the prosecutors outed her as a habitual horticultural offender. It appears that she allowed her hedge bushes to grow more than 2 feet high — a crime in the city. Battling cancer, Leibrand had allowed her shrubbery to grow into a criminal enterprise. (After her arraignment and shortly before her jury trial, she was allowed to cut down her bushes and settle the case.)

Of course, it is better to be a criminal horticulturalist than a serial snacker. In 2000, on her way home from her junior high school in Washington, D.C., 12-year-old Ansche Hedgepeth grabbed some french fries and ate them as she went into the train station. In Washington, it is a crime to “consume food or drink” in a Metrorail facility. An undercover officer arrested her, searched her and confiscated her shoelaces.

Running out of adult targets, many state laws pursue the toddler and preteen criminal element. In Texas, children have been charged for chewing gum or, in one case, simply removing the lid from a fire alarm. Dozens of kids have been charged with everything from terrorism to criminal threats for playing with toy guns or drawing violent doodles in school.

In the federal system, Congress has been in a virtual criminalization frenzy. There are more than 4,000 crimes and roughly 10,000 regulations with criminal penalties in the federal system alone. Just last year, Congress made it a crime to sell horse meat for human consumption — a common practice in Europe where it is considered a delicacy. Congress has also criminalized such things as disruptive conduct by animal activists and using the image of Smokey Bear or Woodsy Owl or the 4-H club insignia without authorization.

The ability to deter negligence with criminal charges has always been questioned by academics. Negligent people are, by definition, acting in a thoughtless, unpremeditated, or careless way. Nevertheless, prosecutors will often stretch laws to make a popular point — even when the perpetrators have suffered greatly and shown complete remorse.

In 2002, Kevin Kelly was charged criminally in Manassas, Va., when his daughter, less than 2 years old, was left in the family van and died of hyperthermia. With his wife in Ireland with another daughter, Kelly watched over their 12 other children. He relied on his teenage daughters to help unload the van and did not realize the mistake until it was too late.

The suggestion that people like Kelly need a criminal conviction to think about the safety of their children is absurd. Kelly was widely viewed as a loving father, who was devastated by the loss. The conviction only magnified the tragedy for this family. (Though the prosecutors sought jail time, Kelly was sentenced to seven years probation, with one day in jail a year to think about his daughter’s death.)

The cost to all of us

The criminalization of America might come as a boon for politicians, but it comes at considerable cost for citizens and society. For citizens, a criminal record can affect everything from employment to voting to child custody — not to mention ruinous legal costs.

Yet, it now takes only a fleeting mistake to cross the line into criminal conduct. In Virginia, when a child accused Dawn McCann of swearing at a bus stop, she was charged criminally — as have been other people accused of the crime of public profanity.

Our insatiable desire to turn everything into a crime is creating a Gulag America with 714 incarcerated persons per 100,000 — the highest rate in the world. Millions of people are charged each year with new criminal acts that can stretch from first-degree murder to failing to shovel their sidewalks.

We can find better ways to deal with runaway bushes, castaway pets, or even potty-mouth problems. Congress and the states should create independent commissions to review their laws in order to decriminalize negligent conduct, limiting criminal charges to true crimes and true criminals. In the end, a crime means nothing if anyone can be a criminal.

Lawyering, Military, Politics

The Feres Doctrine: What Soldiers Really Need Are Lawyers

The president and Congress have been falling over themselves to pledge better care for our wounded veterans in the wake of the scandal over “squalid” conditions at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center that included mold, rats, cockroaches, rotting walls and callous treatment of patients. The president has empanelled the perfunctory “blue-ribbon commission.” The hospital walls have literally been whitewashed, so politicians can use them again as backdrops for speeches about “nothing being too good” for our troops. Yet no one is talking about the one thing that soldiers and sailors are most desperately lacking: They don’t need another spit and polish; they need lawyers.
For decades, our military members have been barred from suing for medical malpractice and other forms of negligence by the government. Whether it is a military doctor cutting off the wrong leg or a military gasoline station cutting a brake line, military personnel are not allowed to seek legal relief as other citizens can. The result is that they are victims of grotesque forms of negligence that have not been widely seen in the civilian world for more than a hundred years. In the civilian system, the threat of lawsuit serves a critical deterrence of negligence by the government, companies and others. A rational actor will avoid liability costs by taking measures to minimize accidents.

Most Americans do not know that we deny our servicemembers the basic right to sue when they are injured by negligence. They live in a type of tort-free zone where their injuries are subject to relatively minor levels of compensation. With the silent approval of Congress, we have created a system of discount citizens who become easy fodder for incompetent or even criminal actors. Indeed, killing a soldier on an operating table or in a military recreation area is a virtual bargain at a fraction of the cost of a full-value citizen.

The military’s loss of legal protections is the result of a 1950 Supreme Court ruling on a series of cases that became known collectively as the Feres Doctrine. It was named after Army Lt. Rudolph Feres, who died in a fire allegedly caused by an unsafe heating system in his New York barracks. In this and later opinions, the Supreme Court interpreted the Federal Tort Claims Act to effectively bar any tort actions by servicemembers, even though Congress exempted only “combat-related” injuries. The court unilaterally decided that even injuries in peacetime that are far removed from any combat-related function are still “incident to service.” Thus, in one of the Feres cases, a soldier was barred from suing after an Army doctor left a 30-by-18-inch towel inside him marked as property of the “Medical Department U.S. Army.”

Little deterrence

As a result of the Feres Doctrine, there is little deterrence for military negligence beyond self-regulation, bad publicity or a political scandal. Because most accidents are isolated and military personnel tend to stay within the chain of command, these are relatively low risks for military tort-feasors. Moreover, since such accidents are not litigated, there is no reliable system to determine the rate of accidents in the massive military complex. Thus, we cannot reliably compare the accident rates in recreational or medical areas with their counterparts.

The military medical system is a prime example of what happens when patients are stripped of their legal protections. The military has long had many talented and dedicated doctors and nurses. Nevertheless, it also has long been plagued by scandals involving everything from doctors without medical licenses to medical treatment that borders on the medieval. Consider a few examples from the military malpractice-free-zone:

•Lt. Cmdr. Walter Hardin spent 11 months with red lesions from his legs to his torso that a doctor classified as eczema. It was correctly diagnosed as cancer shortly before he died.

•Sailor Dawn Lambert had to have a fallopian tube removed, but military surgeons left five sponges and a plastic marking device in her abdomen. They remained there for months until resulting complications forced a second surgery to remove her other fallopian tube, leaving her infertile. She was given $66 monthly in disability pay.

•Linda Branch lost her husband while he was serving in the Air Force after he was turned away twice by a military hospital that told him his intense stomach pains was nothing more than stomach flu. He died of a bowel obstruction.

•Navy Petty Officer Joe Cragnotti went to a military hospital with pneumonia, which is treatable with antibiotics. The doctor left it untreated, then Cragnotti suffered brain damage.

•Air Force Staff Sgt. Dean Patrick Witt had appendicitis but was repeatedly misdiagnosed and sent home with some antibiotics. When he finally collapsed at home, he was rushed into surgery. He came out brain-dead. It’s alleged that a series of malpractice led to his death, including the use of a pediatric rather than an adult device to open an airway when he had trouble breathing.

When civilian doctors leave a patient paralyzed or crippled for a lifetime of care, the family members often receive millions in compensation. In the military, the families receive a couple thousand dollars a month and, you guessed it, more military medical care. Dorothy Meagher found herself carrying for her son after he went in to have a cyst removed at a Navy hospital. Her family alleged that, due to an overdose of anesthetics and the failure of a Navy doctor to immediately call for assistance, her son was left a quadriplegic.

Unanswered questions

Many families in the military never know that they were the victims of malpractice because, without discovery, there is no routine way of forcing such disclosure. For example, Army Staff Sgt. Michael McClaran had a simple surgery for acid reflux. He said he was not told that the surgeon had severed two critical nerves — the cause of chronic respiratory and digestive problems.

Feres extends beyond medical malpractice. It bars lawsuits in a vast array of activities in such areas as travel, recreation, housing, restaurants, bars and service stations — military enterprises often run in competition with civilian businesses. Thus, when a rented water ski loses its brakes or a soldier is raped at a concert, the military invokes Feres and walks away immune from its own negligence.

Liberals and conservatives on the court — such as Justices John Paul Stevens and Antonin Scalia — have denounced the court’s continued use of this doctrine, as have dozens of lower court judges. This doctrine has done more harm to military personnel and families than any court-made doctrine in the history of this country.

Congress must amend the Federal Tort Claims Act to put an end to this disastrous doctrine. We can no longer afford to leave our servicemembers in the hands of politicians who express shock every 10 years as new scandals regularly emerge. Some lawmakers knew of the appalling conditions at Walter Reed but took no legislative action.

The fact is that military hospitals are often treated as little more than a reservoir of human props for political photo ops. The only other part of Reed that members of Congress routinely visit is the VIP floor located on the top floor. Known as the Eisenhower Executive Nursing Suite, it’s where high-ranking politicians, jurists, generals, admirals and diplomats are treated. Of course, the politicians, judges and foreign dignitaries are allowed to sue for any negligence.

Former senator Bob Dole, who co-chairs the new blue-ribbon commission, was treated there and recently noted that he never saw anything to complain about. That is not surprising since, unlike the vermin-infested and mold-covered rooms of wounded soldiers, politicians are given suites that include fine carpets, antique furniture, separate dining rooms and fine china.

If members of Congress truly want the best for our troops, they should start by giving them the same legal protections that the members themselves enjoy. No one is asking for Congress to treat our soldiers as high-value VIPs, but simply full-valued citizens with the same protections as the people they are defending around the world.

Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University and a member of USA TODAY’s board of contributors. He is the author of a three-part study of the military, including its legal and medical systems.

Lawyering

A lawyer’s guide to fatherhood

Published in June 2007

Fatherhood is the one job that you can get without the slightest degree of experience, knowledge or talent (despite what you may hear to the contrary on Father’s Day). For that reason, when a friend had his first child recently, I quickly rattled off the most important things that I have learned as the father of three boys and a girl: Don’t wear white shirts while changing boys (they consider it a type of canvas); the easiest way to extract material from noses is a hot bath (except for cheese sticks); always check your briefcase for toy guns before entering a courthouse; and always check the children for captive animals before leaving a forest.

But the most important lesson is that all children are born with an innate sense of the law. Indeed, when the Framers spoke of natural rights, they might have hit on the same discovery in their own children. You can actually track your kids’ development by the legal arguments they make. Take it from me, the best way to prepare for parenting is to take a law course at your community college.

Takings. The Constitution prohibits the taking of property without compensation by the government. Within their first two years, all children embrace this principle with a vengeance. Parents learn they must compensate for any item removed: a toy for the car keys; a cracker for the 12-inch butcher knife.

Contracts. By 3, negotiating with kids is like working with little Teamsters on a labor contract. Bring a sandwich truck to the site; it becomes part of the contract. Likewise, once a parent buys a scone at Starbucks or allows cartoons in the morning, it is part of an unwritten but enforceable contract. This develops into a form of collective bargaining with the addition of another sibling: Any benefit to one is instantly an expected benefit to the other. Break the contract and you’ll face work stoppages, unending protests and even sabotage that ranges from spilled milk to items in the trash can.

Cruel and unusual punishment. By 3, children have defined what they view as cruel and unusual punishment. Denials of favorite foods or toys are considered to be measures that “shock the conscience” and require immediate redress.

Privacy. As soon as a child goes through potty training, privacy becomes an increasingly important right — reaching its apex in the teen years. The same parents who spent two years changing them and bathing them must now sequester themselves in a distant room to avoid the “chilling effect” of surveillance.

Equal protection. By 6, all children put themselves in what the Supreme Court calls “a suspect class” — any different treatment based on their identity as a sibling can be enforced only after parents show a compelling reason that they are using “the least restrictive means.” Otherwise, a difference of only 10 minutes in television time is enough to unleash demonstrations reminiscent of the march on Selma.

Due process. By 6, kids will insist on full due process in adjudicating their claims. Major penalties such as loss of Game Boys require something close to a full trial with two days of arraignment, jury selection and sequestration — and inexhaustible appeals.

Free speech. By 10, children have developed an almost unlimited expectation of free speech. Indeed, since they have now concluded that your views are worthless and out of date, it increases the necessity of your listening to them. Parents are forced to change their content-based regulations from the toddler years to “time, place and manner” restrictions for teens.

Free association. When you object to a boyfriend with more body-pierced metal than a tank, your child will discover the right to association. With the acquisition of a learner’s permit, she will add a claim of free travel (which also involves your car).

The final years of adolescence are filled with conflicts over search-and-seizure rules and the monitoring of electronic communications without probable cause. Of course, by the time your child reaches the late teenage years, you have become the Alberto Gonzales of parents: continual surveillance, spontaneous searches, detention without appeal. You can then wait for your little litigators to become parents in their own right. It is then that you can undermine their authority by plying their children with unlimited sugar-based products and allowing them to live as anarchists under your roof. Your children will then learn the meaning of James Madison’s observation that “if men were angels, no government would be necessary.”