Of all the excuses offered in sentencing memos, this one takes the cake: It's President Trump's fault.

Patrick Stein could get life in prison after a Kansas federal jury in April found him guilty of conspiring to bomb a mosque and an apartment complex housing Somali refugees in Garden City, Kansas.

On Monday, his lawyers—solo practitioner James Pratt and Michael Shultz of Shultz Law in Wichita—filed a doozy of a sentencing memo. (Hat tip to the Huffington Post for flagging it).

In addition to the usual sad story about their client's difficult childhood and struggles with addiction, they offer this up as the “backdrop to the case”:

“2016 was 'lit.' The court cannot ignore the circumstances of one of the most rhetorically mold-breaking, violent, awful, hateful and contentious presidential elections in modern history, driven in large measure by the rhetorical China shop bull who is now our president.”

Jenna GreeneUm, OK. Wow.

First of all, don't use “lit” in a court brief. Or really ever, if you're older than 20.

It might also behoove the lawyers to remember that Trump won Kansas by 20 points. And that the judge, Eric Melgren, was appointed by George W. Bush.

“Much has been written about Trump's election, but two things are relevant to the time period surrounding this case,” they continue.

“First, almost no one thought Trump was going to win. Second, Trump's appeal as the voice of a lost and ignored white, working-class set of voters (Patrick Stein) is the connection most often cited for his ultimately surprising victory.

“This matters for two reasons. First, Trump's brand of rough-and-tumble verbal pummeling heightened the rhetorical stakes for people of all political persuasions. A personal normally at a 3 on a scale of political talk might have found themselves at a 7 during the election. A person, like Patrick, who would often be at a 7 during a normal day, might 'go to 11.' See SPINAL TAP. That climate should be taken into account when evaluating the rhetoric that formed the basis of the government's case.”

Except for the (superfluous) Spinal Tap reference, they're arguing what every liberal pundit has been saying from day one: The president's rhetoric opens the door for hate.

But it's a stretch to invoke it as an exculpatory factor.

Stein and his two co-conspirators (who were also convicted) planned the bombing for the day after the election, assuming that Hillary Clinton was going to win. They were arrested in October 2016, before their plot progressed to the actual bomb-making stage.

But Trump's victory would have changed Stein's calculus, his lawyers argued.

“Patrick Stein was an early and avid supporter for Donald Trump. His connection to Donald Trump was so complete and long-standing that the surprising win cannot be ignored when evaluating the actual danger or likelihood of an actual attack. Trump's win changed everything, and it is reasonable to speculate that it would have changed things among the defendants as well. The urgency for action would be gone. The feeling of a losing battle would be gone. …. It is logical to conclude that the discussed attack would never have happened in the world that existed post-Trump.”

So… This sentencing memo was filed on Monday. Did Stein's lawyers not follow any news at all for the past week? The Trump devotee who sent pipe bombs to critics of the president? The man who gunned down 11 worshippers inside a Pittsburgh synagogue on Saturday, and who allegedly told a SWAT officer that he wanted all Jews to die?

It's ludicrous to suggest that Trump's election would have mollified Patrick Stein. If anything, it might have emboldened him further.

This Would Be Awesome if I Could Figure It Out

As a person who spends a lot of time (and a lot of my employer's money) on Pacer, I applaud the Harvard Law School Library's Case Access Project, a “free public access point” to 6.4 million federal and state court decisions.

After five years of scanning documents—40 million pages of material covering 360 years of American case law—the project launched on Monday.

“Driving this effort is a shared belief that the law should be free and open to all,” said then-Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow in a 2015 news release announcing the initiative. “Using technology to create broad access to legal information will help create a more transparent and more just legal system.”

Right on!

The only problem is, I can't figure out how to use it.

Admittedly, I'm not very good at tech stuff. But I'm also not terrible. I'm maybe average. This, however, is way beyond my skill set.

The project offers two ways to access its data. “Our open-source API is the best option for anybody interested in programmatically accessing our metadata, full-text search, or individual cases,” it says. (The other option is a bulk download, which seems even more complicated.)

Under the section titled “Getting started,” this is the second sentence: “API results are in JSON format with case text available as structured XML, presentation HTML, or plain text.”

Yep, I'm lost.

The examples don't help. Like this line of text is a model for how to add a date range filter to your search. You just type https://api.case.law/v1/cases/?cite=347 U.S. 483&decision_date_min=1900-12-30&decision_date_max=2000-06-15

I'm sure there are some people to whom this all makes perfect sense. I'm just not one of them. But I'm also not the project's intended audience, at least not now.

“We use this format because software developers can easily utilize data in that format in their own programs. We do intend to have a more user-friendly case browser at some point soon, but we're not quite there yet,” the project states.

I hope so. It seems like an amazing resource, and its goal—“to make all published U.S. court decisions freely available to the public online”—is fantastic. But right now, let's just say it's not going to put Pacer out of business.

Check out the project yourself here.

“This case connects the dots at the Trump Organization and involves systematic fraud that spanned more than a decade, involved multiple Trump businesses, and caused tremendous harm to thousands of hard-working Americans,” said plaintiffs lawyers Roberta Kaplan and Andrew Celli.

Apple attorney Ruffin Cordell of Fish & Richardson complained that Qualcomm is playing a game of patent Whac-a-mole, while Cravath's Evan Chesler for Qualcomm said Apple is “trying to destroy our business.”

Several attorneys said they doubt that the shooter, even if sentenced to death, would actually be executed (the last involuntary execution in Pennsylvania was 1962), and also thought it unlikely the social media site where he posted anti-Semitic messages would face liability.

The court's pro-arbitration momentum still faces some obstacles, in the form of liberal justices who may be skeptical of arbitration's omnipresence.

Since the plaintiff didn't technically die from cancer, the lawyers had to legally link the tobacco companies to his death caused by radiation treatments for the cancer.

If even a portion of these allegations are true, they should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves.

In case you missed it…

Writing a check from corporate coffers to make a messy legal problem go away is business as usual. But whoa does that calculation change when actual people face actual prison time.

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