250 Years of the Declaration

Norm Murdock and Steve Palmer led off this week, reflecting on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, with a timely reminder about where Americans’ rights derive. As Norm Murdock noted at 02:04:

“A lot of people think the US really began with our Constitution. It did not. The 250th anniversary of the United States is keyed off the Declaration of Independence.”

Steve Palmer emphasized the critical difference between rights that come from government (which can be taken away) and rights that come from the Creator (which government exists only to protect) at 04:16:

“If the government created your rights, then the government can take them away.”

Cuba’s Independence Day

On May 20th, Cubans (especially those in the U.S.) honor their independence from Spain, a moment rooted in U.S. history following the Spanish-American War.

But, as Norm Murdock explained at 01:30, Cuba’s current government does not officially recognize this date—reminding us how history’s meaning can shift with political tides.

Mangione, Free Speech & Modern Dangers

A major segment focused on the Mangione assassination case and the disturbing trend of justifying violence for political or moral causes.

Steve Palmer broke down the legal technicalities at 25:17, including why crucial evidence was excluded due to police search procedures—a real-world lesson in the powers and limits of the exclusionary rule:

“If the police conduct an unlawful search or seizure... the penalty for that is that the state cannot use the evidence seized in a case against the suspect.”

They connected these legal questions to broader concerns about political violence, groupthink, and historical amnesia regarding free speech and individual rights.

True Crime: The Mackenzie Shurilla Case

Norm Murdock spotlighted the Netflix documentary “The Crash” about Ohio’s own Mackenzie Shurilla case:

A 17-year-old who drove into a building at 100mph, killing two friends, was tried as an adult. Was it murder… or a failed suicide?

Steve Palmer cautioned at 45:47 against quick judgments and reminded listeners of the reason juvenile protections exist in law:

“It is an enormous decision to take a kid from juvenile court and move them to adult court and treat them with adult penalties.”

Winners, Losers & Local Gripe

Winners:

• D.C. residents and visitors, with beautification projects, fountain repairs, and even a free IndyCar race coming up!
• Steve Palmer honored his colleague Troy’s graduation from Capital University Law School.

Losers:

• Politicians opposing Trump in primaries—feeling the power of endorsements firsthand.
• The "Mangionettes," protesters justifying political violence.

Harper CPA Plus

Moments

00:00 Discussing the origin of rights

06:18 Advancement of human rights

10:55 Discussing radical protest movements

16:01 Free speech concerns in England

24:31 Exceptions to the Fourth Amendment

27:37 Police arrest and wingspan search

34:40 Judicial perspective on search warrants

37:38 Challenges faced by police officers

42:46 Judge sentences woman for deaths

47:59 Parental influences and mistakes

54:49 Discussion on trial strategy

01:00:24 Discussion on Trump's Influence

01:06:04 Building a White House bunker

01:08:21 Acknowledging those who came before

Recorded at the 511 Studios, in the Brewery District in downtown Columbus, OH.

info@commonsenseohioshow.com

Stephen Palmer is the Managing Partner for the law firm, Palmer Legal Defense. He has specialized almost exclusively in criminal defense for over 26 years. Steve is also a partner in Criminal Defense Consultants, a firm focused wholly on helping criminal defense attorneys design winning strategies for their clients.

Norm Murdock is an automobile racing driver and owner of a high-performance and restoration car parts company. He earned undergraduate degrees in literature and journalism and graduated with a Juris Doctor from the University of Cincinnati College of Law in 1985. He worked in the IT industry for two years before launching a career in government relations in Columbus, Ohio. Norm has assisted clients in the Transportation, Education, Healthcare, and Public Infrastructure sectors.

Copyright 2026 Common Sense Ohio

All right, it is that time again. May 20, 2026. And your weekly dose of common sense coming at you. Common sense, Ohio, brought to you, by the way, by Harper plus accounting. I just spent, I don't know, 30 minutes on the phone with Glenn Harper over at Harper Plus.

Okay.

You know, you would think we're talking about fun stuff like what line your income goes on your tax return. No, we were planning out my, my retirement plan at the office. And. Wow, what's the best one if you have multiple employees? Is it a 401k? Is it a simple IRA? The point is, he's not just an accountant. He can help with all that kind of stuff and really guided me in the right direction. So, yeah, our accountant could be yours. Harper plus accounting. Let's jump right in on May 20th.

For those of you or for those Cubans who are mostly the Cubans now living in Miami and the United States and elsewhere, they celebrate their Independence Day today from the United States. Turns out on May 20th from Spain. From Spain, yeah.

Not from the U.S. well, right.

Formal end of the U.S. occupation.

Oh, okay.

After the Spanish American War, when Cuba. When the Cuban flag was raised over Havana's Moro Castle for the first time, it symbolizes the true birth of the Cuban Republic. Currently, it's celebrated widely by Cuban Diaspora, especially in Miami and other US Cities, but not officially recognized by the. As a public holiday by the current, current Cuban government. Meaning the commies don't like it.

Well, yeah, because their independence was courtesy of the United States. Had we not defeated Spain in the Spanish of American war, perhaps Spain would have hung on to that.

Yeah.

And it would be a colony of Spain to this day.

Yeah.

We don't know.

Yeah.

Same with Puerto Rico.

So Anyway, we. In 1902, so lots to talk about.

Yeah.

You know, there's stuff going on in the law. There's stuff going on in the world. There's a war to be fought in Iran, sort of.

Yeah.

Anyway, talk to us.

Right, right. Well, let's Talk about the 250th anniversary just a little bit first because it actually made some news today or made news this week of a political nature, I guess. There was a prayer event in D.C. and the speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, was a featured speaker. And he had the temerity, for God's sakes, to. No pun intended, for God's sakes. He had the temerity to actually bring up factually he. He didn't invent this.

That God the Creator is referenced in the founding document of The United States, the Declaration of Independence. So a lot of people think the US really began with our Constitution. It did not. It be. The 250th anniversary of the United States is keyed off the Declaration of Independence.

Yeah.

And people don't get that. And it mentions God four times.

It does.

And Thomas Jefferson to interrupt. And I'll just get to the end of it here in a couple seconds. So Thomas Jefferson correctly, and Speaker Johnson correctly reiterated that the rights of citizens in the Declaration are said to have come from God, not from government. And that's just what Johnson said. And the liberal media just lost their minds over this. And there has been.

There's debate about it.

There's debate. It's like what Thomas Jefferson said. It's not debatable that he said that. Now you may debate Thomas Jefferson and say, well, you're wrong, but.

But this is.

That's what he said.

So the. You know, anybody who studied this in law school, you have to get a little dose of this. But it turns out I studied legal history and undergrad.

Sure.

And legal philosophy and this idea of natural law versus something like a Machiavellian type government where the government just supplies everything. And there's a huge difference here. And the difference is this. If the government created your rights, norm, then the government can take them away.

Yes.

If God created your rights, the government exists only to preserve those rights. So look, folks, whether you believe in a Christian God, whether you believe in, you know, some mythical Zeus, it doesn't matter. I mean, it matters to me. But yeah, from a philosophical standpoint, the idea is if you ascribe the origin of your rights to something other than human, human government that we've created, then it changes how you look at things. Then the government doesn't have the power to take those rights away.

Yeah.

Which is why we said we hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. To secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, is the right of people to alter or abolish it, and institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organization, its powers in such form as to has to them shall most likely to affect their safety and happiness. In other words, it's what we just said in fancy terms, the government didn't create your rights. It's there only to preserve the rights that God gave us. And you know, it's such a fundamental distinction and it's such a dangerous argument to say that we created these rights.

Right, right.

And it's not to say you have to believe in God, although I do.

Yeah.

It's not to say that you have to believe in this higher power. You have to believe it. But if you ascribe the origin of rights to the government, then you are also giving the government the power to take the.

And the American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence in particular were in advancement upon the classical instructions and the classical understanding of what government is. So if you go back to Plato,

Plato, Aristotle, you go back to those

guys and you study what they thought legitimate government was or how it should be structured. The idea of inalienable rights didn't even exist for them. Our Constitution, excuse me, our form of government is actually a progress. It's an advancement on classical thought. It's an advancement for Western thought and for the freedom of human beings. It's part of what makes our country and the founding so incredible and so remarkable. And if people would, if people understood the, the panoply of human history and they could unders. And look at it as a timeline of the growth of human rights from, you know, women were chattels and slaves were, were, you know, no better than cows and ducks that the, the plantation owner owned.

And, and if you come all the way up to today, it is, it's the United States that has taken human rights to the level that it is now. And for people not to understand that and not to look at things like the Declaration of Independence and, and, and to misinterpret or not understand it, they didn't. They. The First Amendment forbids the creation of a state church. So on one hand they're saying our rights came from God. On the other hand, they were in no way oppressing people to have to join a church.

It gives you chills when you think about it. It's unbelievable how ingenious and insightful and open minded. And open minded it is. You know, it was it perfect. No, no, no. And we are striving for that.

The guy who wrote those words was a slave owner.

Right.

And he knew he was wrong.

They knew he was wrong. And, and it just is. It's so incredible to me that people can stand on the shoulders of these giants and piss down which is what they're doing. Right. On the same platform that this document created, these people stand arguing to abolish it.

It's incredible.

They're cutting off the limb that they're sitting on. It is insane. Because if I tell you what really insane. Study government throughout history and you see what happens when you give the government the power to instill and take away rights. It is death.

Right.

Almost inevitably death. So you may have it good for a period of time in history, maybe even a long period of time in history, but sooner or later it goes south.

Yeah. You mentioned Cuba, you know, and I'm sure at the time, you know, having gotten his law education in America, I'm sure at the time, Castro and his communist buddies that overthrew Batista, I'm sure at the time they had some kind of notions that they were doing something high minded and they're going to liberate people from, you know, this oppressive dictatorship that did exist in Cuba, but then it went all wrong and, and now Cuba is run basically by a family mafia.

Right.

You know, it's, it's, you know, it's, it's not at all what it, what they had and advertised.

And the fact that our founders and

they put people up against the wall

and shot and shot them.

Right.

Killed them.

Yeah.

And the fact that our founders recognized the danger in that form of government before it really had been experimented and tried.

Right.

You know, like they recognized that this is not what we want. So this is before Stalin, before Lenin, before all those.

Yes.

And Mussolini and, and before the, the Cuban revolution. I mean, it's like we, these guys figured it out and said we don't want that.

Yeah.

We want a government where God provides the rights.

Yeah.

And we just protect those rights.

Yeah.

And every time we have a, as a country, have experimented beyond that, it's gone bad.

Yeah, it has gone bad.

And it's a remarkable thing that people want to destroy it rather than embrace it.

Yeah.

And you know, maybe this is a segue into the Mangione mess.

Yeah. Yeah, I would love to discuss that. That, that, that. And is it Robinson or the guy who shot Charlie Kirk? I'm not even going to say alleged.

Yeah.

But yeah, those two cases are very disturbing. The, the attempts to suppress the evidence.

Well, that. So that's it. We'll take that one apart a little bit.

Yeah, I wish you would, Steve. So get, let's get into that when you're ready.

Yeah. What is interesting to me about the Mangione situation is that we have fostered the far left communists, if you will call them what you will, but the Marxist and I think Hassan Piker, whatever his name, he was actually citing Engels in support of this idea of social murder. And they have found a way to justify cold blooded murder of somebody who is attached to a, A business system or a. Yeah, a model that they don't like cities kill them and that's okay. And these people are out. This was going to be my bad for the day. I'll just talk about it now. Yeah, these people are out there protesting on the streets and in favor of killing this guy.

It's a justified cold blooded murder in their eyes. Because he stood for something they disagreed with.

Yeah. And surprise, surprise, one week after Piker said that a guy runs into the correspondence dinner with guns and knives, right. And he's going to do something to, you know, make of society better by getting rid of the killing people, the

Orange man, by killing people. And you know, it's what hab. It's what Castro did, it's what Stalin did. Yeah, it's like what it's like. And do you think you people think that you're going to be better at it?

Right.

You know, shame on. Like you said, I think on some level Castro and his cronies probably thought, look, doing this for the good, Right? Same as Stalin, same as Lenin. I mean, they thought that this was for the good. Ma. We're going to instill men, we're going to instill this, this utopian existence, but we just have to kill a couple million people first and, but this is how it starts so that you can, if you can, kill the people that you disagree with and do it on your own moral high horse without any sort of moral consequence, that's the first step down this path. It just is.

Yeah, it, it truly is. And you know, Stalin remarkably said, you know, show me the man, I'll show you the crime. I mean, once the government can define what is moral and immoral and after all laws are, are, you know, the foundation of all law is some sort of moral code. And either you have a good code or you have a, a horrible code.

Right.

And if your code is simply might makes right and the government has all the guns and all the power, well then whatever I say is what's moral.

Yeah. And these Manets are on the, I think that's what they're calling them. Mangionettes or man.

Yeah, whatever they are, they're on the,

they're on the courthouse steps like spewing this nonsense. And one of them even said, and this is a quote, kids are better off without them. You know, it's like, think about that. Yeah, think about that. You Took this man's children's father. You took him. You took, as Clint Eastwood said, you took all he's got and everything's ever going to have. You killed this man.

Yeah.

And you did it because you didn't like the health care system.

So my generation, the idiots, would wear these Che T shirts. And, you know, Che was one of Castro's consiglieres. He was, if you will, Castro's deputy during the revolution. And the CIA arranged basically for his assassination. But before that, Che basically was. He was a doctor by profession. And there's a movie, you know, that. That romanticizes his life called the Motorcycle Diaries.

And. But. But what Che really was is he was the head executioner and the head torturer for the Castro regimen. He's the guy. He's the Adolf Eichmann of the Castro regime. He's the guy that did the political purity tests and put people up against the wall and tortured them. As a physician, he knew how to extract the maximum pain. And he would torture people before he killed them.

And this is my idiot coke. You know, people my age were wearing Che T shirts and they still sell them today. And you're like, well, why don't you just put on a Saddam Hussein T shirt?

Well, because they probably would, actually.

They probably would.

I've seen something similar. Somebody, some college kid was debating. This is like YouTube stuff, but it's true. They're doing it. He's debating and say, no, we're not communists, we're Maoists. It's like, that's your model. That's. That's what you're looking for.

You're a Maoist.

Yeah.

Like, interesting.

Yeah, yeah, right?

It is. I don't know the psychology, but it's catchy. It's catching on. And now, now we fostered this environment in our society in the United States where. And you've seen what's going on in Britain, too, and there's a big backlash. But it's okay to kill people that you don't agree with, and you do it under the guise of righteousness because you up here have a better moral structure than.

Right.

Everybody else does. Right. And if that's how you feel, you can kill people, think where that ends.

So you really don't believe in free speech if you think that way? You really don't believe in it.

And free speech, to the extent you agree with it?

Yeah, yeah, I believe in free speech for me, not for thee. And that is the problem in England right now. There is. There's probably no other country other than like North Korea or China that is more concerned about what is inside somebody's head and what comes out of their mouth than England. And you're just like, oh, my God. All the founding fathers of the United States in one way or another trace their roots either immediately preceding their birth, or they were themselves from England. And so that entire enlightenment that the Western world went through, it's like it's dissipated now and were under some kind of weird Sharia law in England, which was the fountainhead of the American Revolution.

Yeah.

That's where we got our ideas.

Yeah. Go back to the Magna Carta and before that.

Exactly.

There's something called the Assizes of Clarendon. I mean, there's all sorts of cool stuff that's rich in history and these rights. And it created people like dice and John Locke, Adam Smith, you know, it's like.

And Ben Franklin and on and on.

Yeah, yeah.

George Washington, who fought for the British during the French Indian War.

Yeah.

You know, it's like.

And these people, again, they're standing on the shoulders of these giants thinking, you know, it's almost like the fish that don't know the water they're swimming in. You don't realize that you're. You're complaining on the screen of your 1500 iPhone that capitalism and freedom invented.

Yeah.

And you. I even heard Joe Rogan say this the other day about oil. We just need the government to take over the oil business. Like, what do you. What could possibly go wrong, Joe?

Right, right.

When's the last time the government ran any business efficiently? I mean, it's lunacy. These people that think they can. They can fix the market by fixing the prices. The Zorin Mandamius who think that they have the aptitude to actually go and set prices and create an entire market structure on your own. Because the last time Rogan knew anything about the market prices of oil and how the oil is extracted, how it's sold, how it's transported, what the regulatory scheme does, what do the investors do for prospecting.

Yeah.

What is the government regulation that's going to come into effect in like, 2030 have to do with whether somebody's going to go spend 10 billion now? It's like, I'm making this stuff up, but I think I'm about right.

Yeah.

On the market. And, and these, these, these arrogant people who think that they could do it better. It's lunacy.

Yeah, yeah.

Anyway, that's my soapbox.

Well, it's a good one. You brought up the war. Just, you know, since that's such a huge topic in the topic of oil. I'll just say. And then I think I would love to get into the two assassin cases with you.

Okay.

But yeah, I think now after six weeks of truce or whatever it's been, or whatever, this low key, low Boyle,

sort of a hot truce.

Yeah, hot truce. I'm with General Jack Keane and a lot of these really good students of military history. We just need to end this. These people, it's pretty clear they're trying to foil the midterms for Trump. They're, they're also undermining American citizen support for Trump. And there, this is the classic. It's what happened during the Vietnam War, it's what happened in Afghanistan. Eventually you grind the willpower of the American people down to where they're just done with something and it can be over the price of gas, frankly.

And you know, we can argue about how, you know, a nuclear free Middle east in terms of the mullahs and Iran, a nuclear free Iran is worth a short term high gas prices. But if the public isn't buying that and they're about to throw Trump and the conservatives out of office, effectively out of office during the midterms, to me, it's not worth it at that point.

You're spear speaking my language. Fine.

Yeah. It's not, I mean, he's got to get this done now. Got to get it done, get it over with.

And I think I like what he's trying. I totally.

And I get it.

I appreciate what he's trying to do. And there is an economic war going on and I think slowly Iran is dying economically and the more, I mean, they don't. Yeah, I guess they have no place to store their oil. They can't, you know, sooner or later they're just going to die. And I think that's what he's hoping is to win this attrition, but it's, if you lose power, trying to do that, you've lost everything. There is no win.

Yeah, he's going to get impeached.

Yeah.

Again.

Yeah. It's going to happen for the third time. He's going to just grind to a halt and that's that. That's like you can't do it now. The redistricting has helped, I think, but still, I think now it's only May,

it's on the bubble, only may.

So there's plenty of time to recover, but it has to happen. And I would, I would put like a 14 day fuse on this thing and say we are either.

Yeah.

We're either gonna do it all in or we're gonna be done.

Yeah.

All out or I don't know what, whatever the strategy is, do it.

Yeah.

Not that I disagree with what the long term strategies, I probably do agree. But you can't do that at the cost of losing power.

Right, right. And I'm sensitive like Trump seems to be that he wants to leave some economic infrastructure left for the 30 million or whatever the number is of Iranian citizens who are not part of this insane government. And I get that. But, you know, at a certain point, we have to end this thing. I mean, I think Xi Jinping is licking his chops. There would be almost no better time for him to invade Taiwan than right now because we have all these carrier task force in the Middle East. What are we really going to do if he went into Taiwan right now?

Yeah. It's time to fisher cup agents.

Yeah. And redeploy our resources. But yeah, please talk about, talk about the two assassination cases because they're, they're interesting to me. Both were, were, were committed by assassins who had some kind of twisted, you know, philosophical beef.

The idea we were talking about.

Right. Yeah.

They were justifying it rationally because they think their moral high horse was a little bit bigger than the moral high horse or the guy that they shot.

Yeah. And I think both are probably not in full control of their legal defense because they're being incredibly hypocritical. I mean, they both bragged even before the assassinations. And in, in the case of Mangione afterwards, he was yelling to the media about how this was justified. And, and now they're hypocritically like, it's like they don't want to take credit for the assassinations that they did. Well, look, and I know it's their attorney's duty. I get that. That's our system.

And I'm not criticizing the attorneys. I think they're doing, you know, I think they're doing what that is the system. Challenge the evidence, slow walk things. If, if you, if there's a PR battle, no question in both cases to try to get the right kind of jury in, you know, that they perceive.

I get all that both will end up convicted. That's my.

Yeah.

Humble prediction. Yeah. And then the question is, what's it look like in the meantime? And I think some of what's going on here is that people are viewing these cases differently because they're huge media cases with huge public assassinations. I mean. Yeah, rightfully so.

Yeah.

But what's going on in these cases. Happens every day, all day long in every system across the country. We get. I'm a criminal defense lawyer for those who don't know. I do this stuff. And I broke down. I have another podcast called Lawyer Talk where I did break down the mangione search and seizure incident that happened at the start. At the coffee shop.

Yeah, McDonald's or McDonald's rather.

And the backpack.

The backpack.

He was in handcuffs and they went through the backpack. Somehow him being in handcuffs deprived him of the rights he needed. They needed a search warrant.

Yeah. Let me explain all this. So look, the fourth Amendment says what it says, no. No person shall be subject to a seiz and search, search and seizure without a warrant. And then as time has evolved, the United States Supreme Court has carved out several carefully delineated and well defined exceptions to the rule that you have to have a search warrant to search. All right, one would be like a Terry vs Ohio stop, where if an officer has reasonable suspicion that criminal activity is afoot, then that officer can go sort of say, norm, halt right there. I just saw you walking away from what looked like a drug deal, because I saw a baggie exchange hands with somebody and you pulled out money and gave it to the guy and then you walked away. So that's some suspicion that there's crime.

So I can stop you right there. That's a seizure within the confines of the fourth Amendment, but it didn't require a warrant because it's a limited detention, says the Supreme Court. So it's, it's exceptions like that that have evolved. Now, before we get to what happened here, I think the first thing to note is that our court going way back, I think to the 60s in a case, it's one of two cases, I can't remember which came first. One is called Wong Sun W N G Son and the other is map versus Ohio. Ohio makes it big again. Which established something called the exclusionary rule. Now, if you pull out your pocket constitution and read the fourth Amendment, it says nothing about what's to happen if the government violates your fourth Amendment.

Yeah, nothing.

Yeah.

The Warren Court, I think, or the, the, in the great, quote, expansion of rights, the U.S. supreme Court established something called the exclusionary rule, which says that if the police conduct an unlawful search or seizure that violates the fourth Amendment, the penalty for that is that the state, the government cannot use the evidence seized in a case against the suspect. So the police go to your house, Norm. They barge in without a warrant and they lo and behold, they find a bunch of machine guns that you didn't have a license for.

Yeah.

They seize those guns, and then you get prosecuted and indicted in the United States District court over here in the Southern district, Eastern division of Ohio, charged with possession of machine guns in violation of National Firearms act or some version of that.

Yeah.

I'm representing you, and I say, well, hold on a second here, cowboys. You went into my client's house without a search warrant, seized evidence that you have to have in order to prove this case, and because you violated my client's fourth amendment under Matt versus Ohio and Wong sun and a bunch of other cases, you can't use that evidence against my client. So you got to throw it out of court. Doesn't mean the case is dismissed. But it does mean the prosecutor has to figure out how to prove it without that evidence.

Yeah.

All right, now let's switch over to Mangione.

Yeah.

And what happens here is the police approach. There's a suspect all over tv.

He matches the description.

He matches it to a T. Yeah. The police approach. This guy turns out to be Mangioni in the McDonald's, and they stop him. They conduct a stop, a Terry type stop.

Yeah.

And they detain the guy, and eventually they realize that it does match Mangione, so they put him in handcuffs. Then the police go and they search his backpack after Mangione is in handcuffs. Now stop there. The U.S. supreme Court in a case called Chimel, I think Chimel versus California. C H I M M E L I'm shooting from memory. So you law, you lawyers out there, correct me, has said that the police can conduct something called a quote, wingspan search, meaning if I'm under arrest, anything, like, around me that I can maybe get in my Wingspan that could hold a weapon or hide a weapon.

Yeah.

I can search those things for officer safety and that. And I think Chimel or some of the case law even got so far as there's a guy in the dirt, face down in handcuffs. The police searches bag. And the US Supreme Court says, well, he could have gotten out broken free somehow and then got into that. So it's okay.

Yeah.

That's federal law. Now, state law might be a little different. And if you search a closed container like this, a backpack, after a guy is already in handcuffs, it.

It.

According to the court in New York who is applying, this is. This is the oddity of this. The New York court is applying Pennsylvania law. Little odd. I'm not sure that's okay or not okay, but it just is.

Yeah.

And the court held, look, under the law that we applied, if it is not possible for a suspect to gain access to the backpack or the closed container, in other words, he's in handcuffs, he's already in custody, couldn't possibly get to it. There's no reason you can't just go get a search warrant and search the bag that way.

Yeah.

Now we can agree with that or disagree with that, but that was the court's reasoning.

Yeah.

What, what they found in that bag was a handgun, I think his manifesto or notes or something, and some pretty damaging evidence that's going to be that would have been essential for the government to use to prove the case against Mangione. Now, it doesn't mean they can't prove it to some extent. I think the video is not clear of the shooting, but he still sort of matches, he made some other statements. There's stuff that's going to be useful to prove the case, but it took it from a slam dunk to a layup or maybe a slam dunk to a free throw.

I don't know. Let me ask you this, Steve. So my understanding, being a Holiday Inn lawyer, my understanding is that somehow the federal prosecution were that to happen, and if that happens, of Mangione, would they. Would not. The federal prosecutors could use the evidence contained in that backpack because in that case, the federal government had no, they had no role in spoiling that evidence.

No, no, no, no. It's more like this.

Okay, explain how they can use it.

I think it's more like this. So we have the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Ohio has its own version, Article 1, Section 10 of the Ohio Constitution, I think, or maybe Article 10, Section 1. Anyway, we've got an Ohio Constitution. Most of the time, both those things operate in parallel. If you violate the Fourth Amendment, you also violate Ohio. Now, under the Supremacy Clause, and I think I can't remember the case, so I'm not going to quote it.

Yeah.

The states can provide a stricter standard of enforcement. In other words, more protection.

Okay.

Under the Fourth Amendment or any constitutional amendment, but not less.

Okay.

So the Fourth Amendment creates the boundary.

Okay.

And you can come within the boundary.

You have to at least meet the federal understanding of the Bill of Rights.

Therefore, when I file a motion to suppress evidence, meaning what Mangioni's lawyers did throw out the evidence, I'm going to suppress it from them. The police use, or the prosecutor using it at trial because the police violate my clients constitutional rights under the federal Fourth Amendment as well as the state Constitution. I file a motion to suppress based on both.

Okay.

And I just had this come up in Ohio in a case where Ohio law was better for us than federal constitutional law.

Okay.

In the chimel case I was talking about, I think it's chimel guys, where there was a guy in the dirt behind his car in handcuffs. The police search a closed container. And the U.S. supreme Court says that's okay because he could have gotten away.

Yeah.

And gotten access to that bag. So therefore it's going to qualify as a chimal search or a wingspan search for officer safety. Now, if in Ohio, or say Ohio law says now we're tighter than that. Yeah. We're not going to permit that. I can be.

You're thinking it's that. That's the difference.

So we can. The search may well have. Have federal fourth Amendment and it may have violated the Pennsylvania Amendment. That's what I've heard.

I didn't understand why. And that's a great explanation.

And so look in. I think I heard Ben Shapiro, of all people talking about the exclusionary rule and sort of rolling eyes at it, et cetera. And I, I'm not sure I disagree. You know, I people the criminal offense lawyers out there. Like, I have lived with the exclusionary rule as of you probably for most of your life.

Sure.

It always existed, but.

Fruit of the poisonous tree.

Fruit of the poisonous tree. So if you violate somebody's constitutional rights, there's, there's a. But again, the Constitution doesn't say it. And I, I've actually kicked this around. Justice Scal. I can't remember the case, but back in the 2000s or late 90s, wrote an opinion. It's like, all right, it's probably time to get rid of the exclusionary rule. And I remember just being aghast.

Yeah.

How dare he.

Yeah, yeah.

How dare he tinker with the precious exclusionary rule. But he was a strict constructionist. And it doesn't say that the police can't. Now, that doesn't mean there's not other. Other rights or other means to redress those violation rights. Right. And people would say you can't sue the cops because you don't never get any money. But I wonder what would have happened if we didn't have the exclusionary rule.

How would the other law have developed.

Yes.

You know, without tinkering, without. Because what the exclusionary rule did, guys. And you can agree or disagree with whether you think it's a good rule, but you can't agree or disagree with this. It is not in the constitution. And the U.S. supreme Court basically wrote a constitutional addendum or amendment to the Fourth Amendment saying if you violate it, here's what happens to figure out how

to make it operational. If you will practice Miranda.

There's no Miranda.

No.

In the, there's nothing like that. So in the last couple of years, I've given us a lot of philosophical thoughts like what happens.

Right.

If you just got rid of the exclusionary rule.

Right.

How would the law have developed? I. I dare to say, I suspect that civil rights litigation would have exploded. There'd be lots of lawsuits against cops.

Yeah.

For violating people's Fourth Amendment rights. And eventually that would, that would matriculate up to some consequences, probably more severe on the individual cops and more severe on the police than throwing out the evidence.

I'm going to hazard a guess that in a case with like Scalia or Alito or Clarence Thomas, they might look at it kind of like a nunk pro tunk kind of thing. Like, okay, the cops in process should have gotten a search warrant. But now, knowing what was in the backpack and knowing that any court would have issued a search warrant, we're going to cure that defect retroactively because we're going to make what happened before okay based on the knowledge that we have now, maybe. And that in a way resolves the conundrum. But it also might trigger more police infringement because the police would say, well, if I screw this up, that's the argument.

Right.

Some judge will correct this after the fact.

And that's why had we never have had the exclusionary rule. This is just interesting. I'm sure I'm not the only one that's had this.

Oh, no. Yeah. Chicken and egg.

Had we never had the exclusionary rule. I wonder if the civil rights litigation. Because what Scalia said, and let me point this out, he said, look, there's other means to redress this. Like, you can go sue the cops.

Yeah.

Now, right now, if you sue the cops, you get nothing.

Yeah.

Unless you're, unless they kill you or less. Whatever. I mean, you can get big settlements, but, yeah. You know, it's hard. But if, if we didn't have the exclusionary rule and there were lots of these lawsuits, I wonder how that law would develop statutorily and what Congress would do, what the local legislators would do, because nobody wants cops out there going rogue, committing searches and seizures outside the Fourth Amendment. And, and, you know, basically you're, you're. Shapiro pointed this out, and he's right, is that you're basically punishing the people for the act of the police. The people being those who you want safe from crime.

Yeah.

And you know, you can agree or disagree, it just is. Right now the exclusionary, the exclusionary rule is, and there is something called a conceptual understanding called super precedent in the U.S. supreme Court. There are certain things that I think if you asked everybody is this good now, we've always done it this way, so we're going to keep doing it that way. It's become super precedent.

Yeah.

Now Roe v. Wade was not super precedent because we didn't all agree on it.

No, no.

So I'm talking about like, like Miranda would be super precedent.

Yeah. And that is a nice bright line because, I mean, let's face it, these people aren't out there. I mean, they're out, it's a thin blue line. They're out there between chaos and civilization. And, and it's the police that, that, that keep that boundary up. If, if you have a healthy society, you want people, you know, out there protecting society and you've got to give them a rule book that, and I'm in no way trying to say police are any less intelligent, but they're under pressure.

They're also no less human.

They're no less human. And they're under tremendous pressure. And you know, and they don't have postdoctoral degrees in most cases to understand all these fine, you know, exceptions and all of that, they have to make a decision within seconds. Hey, I've got this guy in handcuffs, but I've seen guys in handcuffs take guns away from cops and shoot people while they're in handcuffs. So do I go through this backpack before we throw it in the trunk just to see if there's guns in there or, or not. And you can understand a cop unzipping it, taking a peek? Oh, shit, there's a, you know, there's a Smith and Wesson in there zipping it back through now, you know, he supposedly violated the search and seizure.

Right. You can see it. And you know, what is the, what's

he supposed to do?

I have seen or I, I, people have heard me sort of talk about this for years. Is that we, we, we're always on. Like you said, Norma, careful balance between chaos and actually like, we'll call it Nazi style fascism. Because look, if you, you could say what you want about Mussolini and Hitler, but there was probably very little crime. Street crime. Yes, street crime when they were in power, except they were committing crimes like insane.

Their brown shirts and their fascists were

committing street crime, but street crime but

not, not what they considered you weren't

getting mugged on the streets. And it's, unless you were a Jew. It's like when they say the, the mob used to run Vegas. It was clean and it was safe for people, except that they were, they were ripping everybody off and committing crimes and murdering people and bury them in the desert.

Yeah.

You know, so it's like if you don't, if you want to get rid of crime. I've said this for years. If you want to eliminate all crime streets, just put jackboots out there with ar go to, go to Mexico to a tourist city. And you see these guys in jeeps walking around with masks and, and they've got AK47s and.

Yeah.

They're the only ones that are allowed to be armed. And it's like, you can eliminate crime that way. All crime except the government crime. That's the problem.

Yeah.

And so we've got this balance and it's imperfect. I've never said our system is perfect. Only the best.

Yeah, right.

Yeah.

Because there is no perfect.

Right.

And I, you know, I, I, I think these various civil rights, Supreme Court cases, law largely are correct, you know, and I, I, because you've got to go from the theoretical to the practical at some point. And if I was a police officer, I'd, I'd want to know the black letter law. Like, what can I do? What I, what can't I do? Because I, I can't guess in real time what the right thing is. I need to know if, if I arrest somebody and they say something or it, you know, maybe they got a, a bunch of bullets in their pocket. Well, then I'm thinking, well, where's the gun? Right.

So, well, that's a little bit, so things get a little different. And they're, they're, they're, it gets very nuanced. That's, it gets very nuanced. So, I mean, look, I don't, I don't think this evidence getting thrown out.

I like this reach thing that you mentioned, that decision.

Wingspan.

Yeah, I like the wingspan thing because at least that's an attempt to say if the guy could grab something within his wingspan.

And for officer safety, you're allowed to search this close.

It kind of makes sense.

Makes sense.

It's an attempt to be practical. And I like that. I like practical things.

But it got pushed, and the federal, the U.S. supreme Court eventually pushed it to its absurd. Extreme. Absurd extreme by saying, even if the guy's in cuffs, even if he's face down in the dirt. Even if he's got the police boots on his back and four cops around.

Right.

We're still going to let him search bag because guess what, he might escape.

Right.

And he might get to that bag.

But using that logic. Well, he might escape. He might go take the keys to the squad car and he might drive back to his house where he has an arsenal. So then that justifies searching his house without a warrant.

That's right. I mean it's a slippery slope.

Yeah.

And the quote term reasonableness is always used to somehow sort it out, which is really like what makes sense to the majority of justices on any given day.

On any given day.

All right, so you heard it here first.

Well, some local stuff and this is kind of, well this is Law and Order. So on Netflix right now, Steve, if you haven't seen it. And I recommend it to our, our listeners and viewers Today there's a program called the Crash and it's about a fairly famous incident up in Cleveland. Up in Strongsville. Yeah, Cleveland area, I believe. In 2022 a 17 year old girl, Mackenzie Shurilla, who's currently in prison, was accused and found guilty at bench trial. She opted for not a jury trial but a bench trial which is the right of somebody accused of in a murder case. So she and her lawyer picked a judge to decide this.

The judge found her guilty two 15 year to life concurrent sentences for killing basically her two best friends, two boys, one whom she lived with and the other who was a very close friend. And they looked at the, they looked at the car as some kind of Nissan or Toyota. They, they looked at the last several seconds of operation and she was full throttle into a building, just no brakes, a 100% throttle application. According to the computer, the engine was not failing. There was no stuck throttle. There was no, you know, carpet that got balled up on the accelerator. You know, no floor mats, nothing like that, just full throttle. And it turns out that her and the boyfriend had argued and were about to break up perhaps and she, you know, it got a little bit of an alleged moment.

Yeah. So she was found guilty. And it's really, I would say for a civilian non attorney, a really a good synopsis of how our system works and how in spite of somebody not providing evidence, not cooperating, including several of her friends, how enough circumstantial evidence can amount to a successful prosecution. It was fascinating. And even though she was 17, she was tried as an adult.

Yeah. So look, I've got some thoughts on this. I'm not Going to go into too much detail, but start with that. I mean, let's just talk abstractly about trying a 17 year old as an adult. That's a enormous decision that the government had to make.

Yeah.

And that would be the first place I would question what happened here. And there's a reason I've done a lot of juvenile defense. I've represented folks who have national and you know, some very, very nationally known significant juvenile cases where the state has tried to bind people over and try them as adults. And I've learned a thing or two about the psychology. You know, is our kids these days perhaps differently than kids in, in, in the days of yore, you know, in days past?

Oh sure. And there's some good evidence. This girl was really on a unusual path. Yeah, she was a recidivist. That's a terrible word, I shouldn't use it. She was a frequent, I think maybe three, four times a day, tick tock. She would put little films together featuring herself and she was a stoner and lots of videos of her tick tock smoking, you know, weed and mushrooms and stuff. And, and so yeah, diminished capacity or immaturity.

The idea of the juvenile system. So we don't talk about getting convicted in juvenile court. You become adjudicated as a delinquent minor. Now different states have different terms, but the idea is later on, if you're asked have you ever been convicted of a crime, you can say no. Yeah, I was adjudicated a delinquent minor. That's not a crime by definition. And the reason we do that is because going all the way back to the common law, in old days we understood that kids don't have the same developmental capacity as adults, meaning at 17, particularly boys, your prefrontal cortex isn't really developed yet. There's a reason we send the young kids off to go fight the war is because they don't appreciate fear and risk the same way that that's true.

Well, yeah, we don't. That they don't appreciate the same risk. So anybody used to climb trees as a kid and tries to do it as a 30 year old, you're like holy crap, I can't believe I did that. Because you don't have that, you don't perceive the same risk. And that's why it is an enormous decision to take a kid from juvenile court and move them or her over to adult court and treat them with adult penalties. Where instead of say from 17 years old she would have served maybe till she's 21 years old in A juvenile detention facility or juvenile. A juvenile prison.

Yeah.

Now she's subject to life sentences, meaning she doesn't get out. So people are like, when does she get out? Well, you know, maybe it's 20 to life or 15 to life times two. So maybe 30 to life. I don't know. You know, it's like, you know, start, start breaking that down. Look at your kid. So everybody out there who's, who's banging the gavel saying, send this woman off to prison forever. I want you to wake up tomorrow as you make your teenager breakfast and think to yourself, yeah.

That per. Ask yourself, is that person capable of the kind of adult decisions and thoughts that he or she will be in five years?

Yeah.

And the answer is no.

Yeah.

Under now. Doesn't mean to give him a pass. But, you know, this is again, one of those balancing.

I agree, I agree with you, Steve. So watching I would have, I wouldn't

have bound her over.

Okay. Did, did you see this program?

I did not see the program.

Okay. No, I'm, and that's, no, that's.

I know the case.

I think it came out and I think the program. Kind of recent.

From what I hear, the program took it like these Netflix series, they always take a, they, they take an approach.

It's not a series, it's a one shot.

It's a one shot. Well, they take, they take sort of, they guide you in a certain direction based on what they want.

And it was a British crew. I, I think they played it straight up the middle. The thing, because they, the, her parents and her got as much time as the prosecutor did. And I, and, and, and then they brought in her friends and they made pretty, pretty good case that, you know, she was a little daffy and, and just not mature. And her parents really, what really struck me about this and, and this is where I'm kind of leaning on, on your, on your youth thing, is that she, she was, I, God, this sounds awful. I, I feel for her parents, but I'm just going to say I think her parents failed her. They allowed her to move in at like 16 with this guy who's like 22. So she left their house as a high school student and moved in with this guy and her dad and mom, who I think might be users, were 100%, it was okay with them that she was a stoner and they called her that.

They said, yeah, she used pot all the time and it's safe. And her parents had completely bought into the notion that pot is not a gateway. And it's safe. And I'm just thinking, man, you're 17. You're breaking up with the only boyfriend you've ever had. And it's one in the morning. And no, she didn't have thc. The blood said no thc, no mushrooms in her system at the time.

But you can see her making some kind of insane. She was going 100 miles an hour when she hit this building. Now, did she know that it was the end of the road and she was going to hit the building, or did she think she was going to be able to keep going? I don't know. She says she has amnesia. And it just seems to me like to take the keys and throw away the rest of her life. Maybe the parole board or somebody will let her out early, but she's lost

two appeals already, at least 15 years. So look, but I think you are onto something. The notion that we can eliminate boundaries in our society and. Or adjust them to what our own moral compass would say, oh, that's cool. Just go get high and use drugs, do those things. As parents, you're depriving your kids of the toolbox. They need to operate with a certain responsibility in society.

It's like no guardrails for her.

Yeah. And it's like, I've, you know, this. I still to this day understand, like, like am blown away by this phenomenon. Say, Norm, your wife goes out of town, your pets are all gone somewhere, and you wake up on Saturday morning and you have nothing to do. That's when I tend to do the least. I mean it.

Yeah.

When, when you, when you take away structure or you create infinite choices for people.

Yeah.

You're not giving them freedom here. I think, I think you're actually restricting them in a lot of ways.

Yeah.

Because you're depriving them of. Of structure and a path.

Yeah.

And you know, when I have the most choices available? Going to a carpet store and try to pick carpet, and you have like 50 different colors of brown, 50 different colors of blue.

The aisle goes on forever.

And it's overwhelming. You get. You have to leave. You're just like, listen, just give me three choices. I'll pick the best one.

Right.

And I think there's some of that going on. Like, you give your kids too much freedom to go explore the world and, you know, flower, if you will, to do whatever you're going to do. Right. Then I think it creates mental health. I'm no psychologist, but I just think that creates mental health problems. That's why it's so dangerous when you have checked out parents.

Yeah. And she had trouble at school and she was accused of bullying because she's a TikTok star. Right. Very attractive young lady.

And I'm not commenting on her. I don't know anything about her.

Yeah. And so I will say, I will say at the end of the program, I thoroughly disliked her, but I was sympathetic to the fact that she was a child when this happened, not a baby, but still under the age.

That makes it even more dangerous to me. So if a defendant is unlikable, it's sort of the opposite problem that we were talking about. If somebody is unlikable, it becomes very easy to forego protection and concern that you might have for somebody accused of a crime.

Right.

Which is why, you know, you, you would say our system is there to protect the worst, because if it's not there to protect the worst, it's not going to be there when they want to protect the best. Right. And you can define worst and best however you want. People you like or don't like, or maybe somebody's guilty or not guilty, whatever it is.

Yeah.

You have to have boundaries in place. And I have found that, that when somebody makes themselves unlike. I'm not talking about this girl, but when somebody makes themselves unlikable, it gets really easy for the system to forget about them or to maybe act in a harsher way than it normally would.

And I think that happened in this case because I disliked her. I'm not saying I dislike her now, but her character at 17, based on the TikTok videos and all her. The snippets off of her phone, it was just. She was just so immature, such a self interested, self obsessed person that it's the kind of punky teenage person always dropping the F bomb and telling people they can go F themselves and think it's thinking she's a bigger thing than she is. It's like, hey, girl, you're just like all, you're no better than the fat girls at school. Just because you're skinny and attractive doesn't make you anything.

Well, look, I.

It's that immaturity.

I was a jackass in my teen years.

Yeah.

Of the highest order. I am the first person, in fact, so bad that there are times I wish I could pick up the phone and call people and say, look, I'm sorry. I'm sorry, right. I was an asshole.

Yeah.

You know, and I didn't really realize all the harm I was causing. I survived it. I grew up. I can look back with regret. This girl will Too.

Yeah, she will too, probably.

And whether. And so if she gains that. But my point is the system has to recognize that. You would think the system has to. And that's why keeping somebody like her in juvenile court. And here's, here's the other problem I found. And I banged the, I pounded the table on how to the moon about it. People make political choices that impact kids.

I've had a case where the prosecutors sought to send somebody over to dull court and try to send him to prison for the rest of his life for something that would have, that in a, in a non politically charged scenario would have been a misdemeanor in juvenile court.

Yeah.

Making a political statement because it's a media cave. This is the danger that our system has sort of inherently evolved to.

I don't know if, you know, I don't, I'm not a defense attorney and I don't know how to assess what her defense attorney did. But I think a jury trial would have been much better for her. And the other thing that he had said, so I saw his summation was in the documentary. And the one point the defense attorney made that really struck me is this is a really like a cold blooded murder. It was, if you will, a failed suicide attempt if you buy what the prosecution saying. Because she's in the very same car. She had two broken femurs, a broken arm, lacerated liver, spleen, like all kinds of internal injuries. Not a broken, but a sprained neck.

She was in a collar. She was really effed up. And I think she may have been trying to kill herself.

Well, if that's.

And the, and the.

Dude, this is why the juvenile system is there, to protect or to account for that kind of. Yeah, well, I'm not going to call it because what kind of a murder

is it where you're killing yourself too?

Manslaughter or, you know.

Yeah.

Or, or something.

There's a hybrid.

There are different crimes that could have been charged. That's why like I have, I am putting as much, I am throwing a lot at the feet of the state on this one.

Okay.

Because I think this case should not have been bound over. And I get it. They're, they're victims.

Oh yeah.

And these family members are suffering.

Yeah. The two boys families and the one was adopted.

I cannot, I, look, I'm praying for, I, I literally, I am praying for you.

Yeah. It was really ugly.

But sending this girl to prison for the rest of her life doesn't change it.

Yeah.

And you know, it's, it's that balance of the system. Do you lock people up and throw away the key?

Yeah.

Or who's redeemable, who's not. Is this a life changing decision? If it's true what they're saying about her, on the other hand, she was not mentally capable yet and mature enough yet to make. It's a tough case. And that's why the charging decisions by the prosecutor are so critical in these cases.

Well, thank you, Steve, for that. Because, you know, it happened in Ohio. It's a high. I mean, it's getting international attention now. It's on Netflix. You're probably going to get some calls on your other show about this. And I just appreciate the discussion. I just wanted to grump about something before we get to winners and losers.

So I think the civil engineering by our local officials all over Ohio is just really, really bad right now. I don't know if it's funding. I don't know if it's priorities. I don't know if it's the ongoing war against the automobile. And we just don't care about motorists because, you know, they shouldn't be driving. They. We should all be telecommuting or we should be taking mass transit. I don't know what the attitude is, but I know this, that whether it's green lanes for bicycles or whether it's not cleaning up a fatal accident for half a day or a truck accident for half a day, we are really shafting people or construction traffic.

We are really shafting. And frankly, I think creating an emergency vehicle issue. People who need to get to the hospital or have doctor appointments, there's a lot of urgent people on the roads that are in cars that need to get to places. And it seems like our engineers, our public officials just kind of like, well, you know, we can shut down a road and people just have to go 30 miles out of their way.

And it's the like.

So, like it doesn't matter.

Look, this is my, this is my pet peeve about government. It's the one thing that they should do.

Yes.

It's not the one thing, but it's in the, it's in like even the.

Yes.

Even the hardest core libertarians would say you have to deal with infrastructure.

Right.

Right. And the problem is our government's wasting so much time dealing with all this other nonsense.

Yeah.

That it's not its job to do like take over oil. Yeah. Instead of just like fix the effing road. Yeah.

Have city grocery stores. It's like the fire hydrants are dry. Can you put water, get water in

the reservoir so when California burns you can put it out. It's like, it just, it's so. Yes, I know you used to gripe about the buses.

Yes.

For God's sakes, the roads were crap, but darn it, we had buses at Easton. Yeah.

And there's nobody in them. You know, step aboard and you're just

like, you know, like, why? Because it's political and it looks good.

Yes. Well, my losers, before I get to the winners, because I want to finish on a high note. If I, if is it okay to go to losers, Steve, let me know. Okay? Losers have to be these non endorsed by Trump. Republicans getting shellacked. I mean, John Cornyn in Texas, Senator Cornyn, Bill Cassidy now Cornyn's elections a week from now against Ken Paxton for the Republican nomination for Senate in Texas. But Bill Cassidy in Louisiana lost his primary. And Thomas Massie, the, in my view, a fake libertarian, he, he's just, he just, he didn't like Trump and Trump didn't like him.

And I think it was all personal. But at any rate, he lost his race for that rural congressional district in Kentucky. So I don't, you know, people have been saying, well, Trump's, his, his public numbers are low, but apparently not when it comes to Republican primaries. He carries evidently some real weight. And Cornyn said, oh, I'll vote for the Save America Act. And Paxton actually said, if you and John Thune get that passed in the Senate because the House passed it. If you pass that in the Senate, I'll drop out. I'll drop out of the race and you're senator again for six years.

And he didn't do it.

He didn't do it.

So, hey, what do they say? F around and find out.

Yeah, F around and find out. There you go.

Did you have some losers?

Yeah, my loser. We already talked about these jackass mangionites. Look, I'm not taking issue with your cause.

They're like Manson girls. It's the same weird thing.

I'm not taking issue with your cause. I mean, I am, but this isn't why I'm saying this.

Are they looking for conjugal visits?

No. What they want to do is that what they're saying is that this guy's kids are better off without their dad.

Yeah.

I mean, it just, it's such a, it's such a disconnect from reality to advocate killing people because you don't like the system.

But there's also some kind of weird sexual. Women are really all over these two assassins. They just think they're cutie pies. And I don't know what's going on with that.

Yeah, it's just, it's just insanity. So look, this is anybody's. Anybody's. I've never been a victim of a crime like that. Thank, thank the Lord. But I've been around criminal defense my entire career. It's like I see what that does to families and people, etc. Yeah, nobody deserves to get shot.

No, not like that.

Nobody deserves to get executed in cold blood because you disagree with their cause.

No, that's, that's crazy. I mean that, that goes back to that. Oh, if I would have killed baby Hitler.

Yeah, okay. Yeah, well, because you're, because you're. You. You understand. You're going to play God, right? It's, it's back to the same thing that. Look, these aren't inalable rights. These are rights that we get to dole out and take away as we see fit. So this guy's right to the pursuit of happiness.

Well, we don't think he deserves it because of his job.

Well, it's also, you know, it also.

And their premise is flawed too.

It's the premise. Yeah. Well, it also presumes that human behavior and human development is a static thing. So whatever that United Healthcare executive believed at the time he was assassinated, if you, if you presume you can kill him, the presumption is that he'll never change. His policies won't change. And you can't, you can't convince him of anything.

Maybe he was one of the guys that was trying to change the system from the inside.

They said he was a good guy.

Yeah.

So at any rate, my winners. Now this is off the wall because we're an Ohio show, but it's the residents and the visitors to Washington D. These are my winners of the week. So there is a series of cool things that are going on there. Whether it's Janine Pirro's announced prosecution. She's going to go after parents now of these kids who get detained or arrested in these pop up takeovers. Like they, they trash this Chipotle restaurant over the weekend. Just completely destroyed the restaurant in one of these, you know, pop up riots.

And she's like, you know, the kids know that as. Because we just discussed juvenile law. They know that pretty much. You know, they're going to get, you know, a finger wagged at them and then they're, they're out. Right. Nothing's going to happen. So that's why The Mafia had kids running numbers in New York for the, for the crime family. I mean, that's a classic thing to use children as, as your soldiers.

But he's going to go after parents, which. And murders are down in DC. The mayor of DC, outgoing, cooperated on the National Guard help. There's 40 water fountains, public fountains, and I, you know, I've been to Europe, and the public fountains in Europe, you know, usually have sculpture and statues, and they're beautiful. And it's a, it's a civic gathering place for neighborhoods. Well, DCs had 40 fountains that didn't work. And the federal government's getting them all to work in time for the 250th anniversary.

Only for people to criticize Trump for doing that. Making it blue instead of black, like making the reflection.

Yeah. So the, the reflection pond is being redone. That's a good one, Steve. And there's a free IndyCar race if, if you want to enter the lottery. They're giving away up to four free tickets per winner, and it's free. And the idea. They're going to race IndyCars down Pennsylvania Avenue, past the National Mall and the White House. On August 22nd and 23rd, the lottery opens up on Ticketmaster.

You enter it for free starting on May 29th through June 9th. That's the window. Get your free tickets. You can go to DC, see an IndyCar race at no charge other than, obviously you got to get there and get home and stay somewhere. But. And then the other thing is, I'll say it, I know he's getting criticized for it, and there's a lot of things I disagree with Trump on. We talked about the war. I think he should prosecute it, get it over with.

But one thing I agree with is this ballroom thing that they're building. It's not really a ballroom. I mean, that's the top story. Right. It's really a civil defense structure that's going to be military. It's, it's going to be made so that, you know, penetrating bombs can't take out the White House, the staff, the president, the vice, you know, they can go down, I don't know, 20 floors, however deep. They're building this thing with high, dense tensile steel and concrete. They're going to have a drone command center on the roof of this thing for all of dc, not just the White House.

It's really. And I guess everybody since Harry Truman has wanted to do this.

Yeah.

So.

And then they, they like, even Trump's like, well, I guess you Guys are going to know now because you've sued me and now here, like, yeah, it's like just because Trump was doing it, calling it a ballroom, he was trying to conceal all this stuff was going on.

Now he is paying and his supporters, they are paying for the ballroom portion of this development. So it really is a gift. That part of it. The rest of it the taxpayers are paying for. So anyway, pretty cool time to go to D.C. in my opinion.

Indeed. So I got some good. I. We've talked about Troy. He's not here. He's up there working. Working his young lawyer tail off.

And Troy is.

Troy is our host. He is also a young new lawyer. He's still got to pass the bar exam, but he graduated last week. So I got to go to the Capital University Law School. Nice graduation. I was an honor to hood him, meaning I got to put the little thing around his neck.

That's fantastic.

And so one of the highest honors I've had. Yeah, I, I don't want to overstate that because, like, it felt very torch passing, huh? Yeah, it felt significant. So I really appreciated the opportunity to do that. And I. He's not here to thank, but I did thank him for the. For asking me to do that for him. And I was, I was happy to do it, but the honor was mine, not his.

That is cool.

And then finally, we have Memorial Day coming up started. And we've covered this before. We'll do it quickly. Started as Decoration Day in the years following the Civil War where people would the spring tradition of decorating graves of flowers and such. Eventually it got standardized and now we have Memorial Day. I'm not going to go into history. But look, spend the time with your family. Spend a time with loved ones and friends.

Think about those who that those from the past.

Yeah.

Who the shoulders of whom you were standing on, pissing down on. Who created a system that lets you criticize the very system they created. So that common sense, I come into you week in and week out, right from the middle.