Judge Bybee begins the tale by explaining that there was a minor girl -- L.G. (I'll call her "Laura" just to avoid initials) -- who moved from San Francisco to LA for a "fresh start" and lived with her cousin there. While in LA, Laura started dating Calvin Sneed, a not-so-great character who was pimping young women there, and Laura eventually starts advertising herself on various prostitution websites.
Laura's family finds out about all this and tries to drag her away from Sneed. Her mother travels from SF to LA one day to try to persuade Laura to return with her, but to no avail. But three days later, Laura and Sneed drive up to SF, and Sneed drops Laura off at her parent's house at 4:00 p.m. The parents again try to persuade Laura to leave Mr. (Alleged) Pimp and return to them.
All of that's great. The mother is trying. Hard. There's perhaps only so much a parent can do, but she's making as much of an effort as humanly possible. Good for her.
But it doesn't work. Laura continues to argue with her mother about staying in SF and leaving Sneed, but at 12:15 a.m., Laura finally decides to return to Sneed and texts him to pick her up. The effort to get her out of Mr. Pimp's clutches fails.
Then here comes the depressing part. Your minor daughter has decided to go back to the pimp who's prostituting her. Your wife is actively arguing with her, trying desperately to get her to reconsider. All the while, Mr. Pimp is literally on the way to your home to pick up your daughter and take her away. Yet, while Mother screams and pleads and begs, here's all that Father says to daughter:
"You grown. Before you leave, turn the lights off."
What?! "You grown?!" She's a minor. Hardly in a position to intelligently decide to devote herself to sex work for Mr. Pimp. And what the hell about the lights?! Your daughter's leaving to return to prostitution, and all you care about is not having to get out of your chair and turn the lights off?!
Wow.
It just sounds so incredibly, stunningly heartless. How can a father demonstrate such a lack of compassion and caring for the events around him?
So as I leave that paragraph, I have a definite view of the father. And it's not a good one. At all.
Total lack of caring. Total lack of parenting.
But I was wrong.
Because here's (allegedly) what actually went down. Yes, Father was facially uninterested. But when Laura went outside to wait for her boyfriend, there's an SUV waiting outside with its lights on. And when Mr. Sneed shows up, the SUV pulls up beside him and promptly shoots him in the head, killing him.
All allegedly set up at the direction (at least in part) of Father.
So you can say a lot of things about Father. But the lack of caring that I first imagined when I read about his reaction to Laura leaving isn't one of them. Because, yes, he didn't feel like continuing to argue, but that's because he thought that further discussion was useless.
And he had a far more direct plan to resolve the matter. Kill the guy.
Today's opinion is about the validity of the warrant to search some cell phone location data, and it's an interesting one, with a majority opinion by Judge Bybee and a dissent by Judge McKeown. So on the legal issues, worth reading.
But even on the non-legal front, it's also one where I thought one thing at the outset, and a very different thing at the end.
Proof positive that, in legal opinions as well as elsewhere, things are not always as they may initially seem.
