Kept getting caught.
Jesus, Bricker! Can’t a person be, you know…wrong, without you jumping their shit?
Have all of your predictions come to pass? If you’ve ever been wrong yourself (I imagine you have. More than once), take a cold shower. This hard-on you’ve got is very unbecoming.
And you could be a 17-year-old from Omaha who has decided it would be fun to impersonate a conservative Virginia lawyer remarkably well informed on the law, with a strong taste for stare decisis and an equally strong distaste for Holmesian positivism (I think), and a tendency to nitpick precise legal points at the expense of the principles others seem to be arguing.
The point I’m making here is not to impugn you – I respect very much who you are, despite strong philosophical objections to some of the stances you take – but to stress that for you, like everyone else on this board, the onus of proof is on the person making the claim.
I don’t think it would be a major burden to cite your claim, even though it’s a negative. People would be inclined to believe you that X, Y, and Z are the three main legal reporting mechanisms serving the Old Dominion – and that X reported 13 cases relating to domestic violence, in none of which was DOMA raised, etc., etc.
But the bottom line, Rick, is that in this case you are the one making the claim – viz, that Steve’s prediction did not pan out. And the burden of proof therefore falls on you.
Saying that you read the journals and they haven’t reported any is more believable coming from you than from some random member who joined last July – you do have a track record. But it’s still not proof at the SDMB standard.
I’m trying to phrase this in a manner that makes the basic point and does not get us into areas of legal disagreement. Whether or not I agree with you on any issue related to DOMA or domestic violence, my point is that you have the burden of proof here because it’s you raising the issue (again) and making the claim that Steve’s predictions have not been borne out. I think you can document that fairly simply, but I don’t think your case is made until you do.
I almost never find myself on Bricker’s side, but I think it’s perfectly fair to call out Steve MB on this.
Oh, good. Was our 2008 bet for President or Congress?
God almighty, this is silly. Steve MB’s prediction was “the claim”. Bricker said “that sounds like bullshit. We’ll wait and see”. Now apparently Bricker is assigned the oh so simple task of looking up every domestic violence case to “prove” Steve’s wild-eyed prediction didn’t come true. Never mind the fact that had a case proved his point it likely would have been immediately publicized by groups that had made similar predictions to Steve.
Bullshit. The prediction was the claim. Guy should just say he was wrong because he is.
Agreed. If the shoe was on the other foot, I don’t doubt for a second there would be the expectation of a quick accounting by Bricker to back up his assertion. We shouldn’t expect anything less from SteveMB.
And if his position is that two years need to pass before conceding, can we look for another Pit thread next year about this?
Christ on a cracker–let it go. It’s been a year. You’re the only one who is bothered by this now. To seek a concession this far after the disagreement strikes me as a bit petty. You really need this “win”? Why? 
Do people really hold on to stuff that’s posted here that long? I used to think you, Bricker, were all right-don’t agree with you much on politics, but I respected your legal knowledge. This has me puzzled. I’ve seen some old threads dug up to embarass Dopers, but this is a bit much. <shakes head> Reading the thread, it seems I’m in the minority. OK. Have at it.
Arlington was my favorite, and Fairfax trailed near the back. My biggest beef with the Commonwealth Attorney’s office in Fairfax was that too many of the prosecutors seemed to have a personal stake in the cases, or act personally affronted at what my clients were accused of. Not to say my guys were angels, of course, but I found a difference between the thugs and the stupid-kid-who-made-a-mistake. The Arlington CA office was much more likely to have someone who would listen to, “This is a kid that did something dumb,” and go along with a joint recommended disposition. In Fairfax, it was much more of a hard line, which I was perfectly prepared to hear when someone has a PSI ten pages long. But when you had a first offender, or a first felony offender, I found myself marveling at the lack of empathy I was seeing in Fairfax.
Had I been representing paying clients, perhaps my experience would have been different.
I’m convinced that much the the “attitude” in Fairfax trickled down from Horan, who had a sort of “holier-than-thou” approach to his work… and who’s been in the job since roughly the time Lee surrendered to Grant.
Why did I quit? There were a lot of reasons. Some were financial, but the truth is… I lost my taste for the job. I had a particular case that went well for me but ended up very poorly for others involved in the issue, and it left me still a firm believer in the adversarial system in the abstract, but no longer really willing to play my part in the system. Beyond that, you can create your own details; they’d probably be more exciting than the truth, anyway…
Congress.
Yeah, I’m not too happy about that just now. 
We could press on the Presidency?
But it’s not quite like that. There’s no collection of docketed cases at the General District Court or Circuit Court level – that is, there’s no online, Internet accessible link that provides a summary of all domestic violence cases across the Commonwealth. Once a case reached an appellate decision, there is, but I wouldn’t expect that there would have been time for that.
Some counties have their current and recently past trials available on line, but even then it’s just docketing information and disposition - no statement of facts about the case. Judges typically don’t issue formal written opinions at the general district court level anyway; it’s not a court of record. They will scribble the finding and sentence on the back of the capias or arrest warrant or summons.
But if someone dodged a domestic violence conviction because of the “Defense of Marriage” provisions, I would expect it to make news. It would be reported, certainly by The Virginia Lawyer’s Weekly, perhaps by the Virginia Bar Association News Journal, perhaps as commentary in a law review article from one of Virginia’s law schools. Unfortunately, the Lawyer’s weekly is a subscription service. I can tell you that I subscribe, that I read it religiously, and that there hasn’t been any mention of any such event. But how would that help anyone else verify it?
To aks me to prove that it’s NEVER happened is the classic “prove a negative.” President Bush’s Iraq actions have prevented a major terror attack here in this country. Prove they haven’t. Gay people can change through the power of prayer. What do you mean, they can’t? Cite every gay person who’s tried prayere and failed, please.
Yes, it’s for the person making the claim to provide evidence. But in this case, I have: the fact that it’s not been mentioned in the very publciations that are dedicated to such news and would carry it if it DID happen. Surely that’s sufficient to shift the burden to the other side and say, “OK, if you think it HAS happened, you need to provide the details.”
If the contrary view is held, then Steve starts to look like a pretty smart prognosticator – who and with what method could possibly prove him wrong?
And if you’re still stuck on “The person making the claim must provide proof…” then look at it this way: Steve made the claim, last year. I’m now asking him for the proof.
Shit, no! What I’m saying is that Bricker has made the claim that Steve’s prediction has not come to pass. Bricker has access to the legal research databases – and they’re smooth and fast, IMO. All he needs to do is say, “I rana search on Westlaw-Virginia and Lexus for Virginia domestic violence cases over the last 12 months. There were 193 cases; in only one, Greenwood v. Greenwood (9 Staunton Co. 493), was DOMA brought up, and the judge essentially blew the claim out of the water.” (All info. here made up as examples.) Total time elapsed: 2-3 minutes for search, 5 minutes to retrieve and read the Staunton case.
He’s essentially said he’s been doing just that:
All I’m asking is that he expand that from “my post is my cite” to “here’s what I checked that you can take the time to check if you like, and it bears out exactly what I said in the OP.” I don’t think it would be fair to ask him to do time consuming research – but a quick database search, and reading the 1-2 cases that may actually relate to the subject if there are any, is not asking too much.
And it is Bricker who is making a claim in this thread: “SteveMB’s prediction this time last year is dead wrong.” He’s cited his own expertise and reading in the area as proof – and that’s more or less good enough. I’m urging he expand from that to quickly recover data to validate his observation. If he had to read every damn case, I’d be arguing the same as you, more or less. I’m saying to make the quick electronic search it takes, and then possibly spend a short time skimming any cases that actually are relevant (if there are any, something he believes is not the case, and I suspect he may be right).
And during the 45 minutes that I spent composing post #33 (with a long interruption in the middle, granted), Bricker responded in post #32 with the fact that my assumption of searchable databases is in fact not the case. And gave enough data in that post to make me happy about his sources, FWIW. (Thanks, Rick!)
So discount post #33, everyone. Though I think it makes a valid point about onus of proof in situations like this.
I can certainly believe it. I don’t think that I would want to do it since it would get to me especially when you start to see the same folks over and over again. I find that dealing with the same clients doing the same things over and over again after I tell them not to frustrates me to no end.
I think that if there were cases where DOMA had been used to beat a domestic assault rap it would have been reported in the mainstream media as well as the Virginia Lawyer’s Weekly. I am almost certain that the Washington Post would have picked up the story and ran with it.
Well, it’s not much of a technical debate point, but “There will be x result from y”, is a claim. I am not sure what sort of general point can be drawn from the specific prediction, true or false, but it seems a claim was made. Onus of evidence lies with the one making the claim.
Asking for a cite that the claimed change in status quo has occurred eleven months later seems entirely reasonable. Claiming a win on the point without some evidence that it was not the case (and, “surely we would have heard” is not evidence) moves a bit beyond asking for a cite. No one has won the argument, so far. Silence is not much of a response, though.
I don’t know of any actual law that has passed based on the “defense of marriage amendment.” That doesn’t mean there are not reams of new laws about it, though. (I live in Virginia.)
Tris
Like many (most?) SDMB exchanges, this one rests on nitpicks and not substance.
Unless I completely missed SteveMB’s point, he’s not pleading his case by appealing to an argument of who has the burden of proof. But it’s irrelevant that he might be wrong…so far.
In post 4, it seems to me, he tacitly accepts the term of the original challenge to be 52 weeks. He then dismisses the matter by pointing out that Bricker’s premature gloating violates Bricker’s own terms.
Case dismissed on a technicality, Orpheus. Ya just couldn’t wait.
As Bricker notes, the adversarial system is easy to love in the abstract. When the guilty walk on a technicality and there are no do-overs?..not so great.
So **Bricker ** has the satisfaction of calling SteveMB out and SteveMB has the satisfaction of not being proved wrong. And I have the satisfaction of mocking lawyers again. Until I need one.
I think we should do this more often, it’s fun. But I’m really lazy and don’t feel like writing down who predicts what and when, so…