Did you see any of the strife or hear any people chatting about all the chaos that's happening in France

right now? Oh, we saw it.

So we got there Friday.

The big day was Saturday.

So during the day, I was bike riding with my buddy, and various times we'd come in contact with – different big groups that were heading towards the ultimate destination.

So we might run into like 300 or 500 student look liking, you know, student, is that how am I saying that? Like headed towards the, in en masse towards the kind of the big meetup spot.

And so during the daytime hours, it was very seeming, seemed very peaceful basically.

owned basically all of

Do you feel like that this should be happening in other places, too?

Yeah.

What, what doesn't make sense, and we talked about this on the show, the idea that defense counsel cannot, in the ordinary course of business, receive the grand jury transcripts, all of them, as a routine matter, makes no sense to me.

You know, you don't have to disclose the identities of the grand jurors.

But the colloquy, the dialogue that goes on between the prosecutors and the grand jurors, of course, should always be known to the defense counsel.

If they're making false statements, if they're misleading the grand jurors, if they're saying things, w- it's called vouching, you know, using your personality to persuade grand jurors to vote for an indictment, all that should be known.

There's no reason why, in our system- Defense counsel and the court cannot receive on a regular basis all of the grand jury transcripts.

There, there it was.

Walk us through a couple of the broad strokes here.

Sure.

So first of all, it's called the Illinois End of Life Options Act.

I think that was a very intentional choice.

And of course, the people who are opposing it say, "It's a suicide act, it's a death act," or whatever.

Um, but essentially what it does is it allows an individual, not someone acting for the individual, to make the choice to end their life.

And it has certain requirements.

In fact, you mentioned that one judge said, "Hey, you don't have standing in this." You might now start to see individuals who can claim some sort of standing once these things actually start happening, correct?

Walk us through what they were contending.

Yeah, so there's a history to all this litigation.

So about a year or so ago, lawyers started bringing claims on behalf of clients against the giant social media companies, Meta, Facebook, YouTube.

So then earlier this summer, there was what we call kind of a bellwether trial, which was the first trial against Meta.

And essentially the allegations were An individual plaintiff brought the case, the family of an individual plaintiff, arguing that their daughter, this young woman who was in her teens, was essentially harmed, suffered extreme emotional distress because of the algorithms inherent in the social media platforms.

So as you and I talked about months ago when these cases kind of first came on the scene, it was very analogous to back in the old days, the cases against the cigarette makers where It wasn't just that, hey, you used a product that could harm me.

It was the idea was that you intentionally knew it could harm me.

Yeah,

But Mike Leonard, you have something

special for us today.

Extremely exciting.

We have in town the True Crime Podcast extraordinaire, Jack Lawrence from Australia, who about four years ago started from scratch.

He was an Australian, well-known Australian radio personality, and he decided to do True Crime Podcast with no audience, no money, no nothing, exclusively covering the American system.

Huh.

And from the perspective of the person who has been found guilty, who's in prison.

And what

Well, talk about some of your favorites.

I'm going to go with because, you know, when you're trying cases as a federal defense lawyer or a state court criminal defense lawyer, you know, we do both.

The biggest thing for us, your whole job is really dependent upon cross-examination, okay? And that's because, you know, the government goes first, puts on their cases.

It might be two or three witnesses.

It might be 25 witnesses.

And your whole job... for that whole time is cross, cross, cross, right? So the Sixth Amendment right to confront and cross-examine witnesses at trial is enormous, and it's like your calling card.

And without that, and without that ability to test, probe, show bias, show prejudice of the government's witnesses, It would be nothing.

Those weren't taken into consideration.

know what?

I don't want to answer any questions.

Okay.

But it's much more important right when you're representing defending a student against allegations to be able to probe and cross-examine all the other parties, which you cannot really meaningfully do.

So what I'm suggesting, John, is we need real reform, because especially in the Title IX context, like...

To say that you can cross-examine or question witnesses, which is really kind of an illusory fake right when the witness can simply say, oh, sorry, I'm done.

But it's worse.

But the process itself was a joke.

So Mike, I'll let you go first.

Yeah, so what I was thinking about, Miranda, when you were going through these was, and you had mentioned, you know, it's not just the chair that has, I'll call it a responsibility, but, you know, also will have the opportunity to pose questions to their peers and prompt people to add or contribute to conversations.

But if you're on a board, so, you know, for all of you who are on the call today, you're on a board.

If this is not the environment that you're in in your boardroom, to get it started and to really start to build that culture or that tension tolerance, I think...

The chair has a huge role, a huge leadership role to play to encourage these types of behaviors, to recognize them and acknowledge them when they're exhibited, to take people aside who disintegrate.

or who don't react well, to take people aside and coach them, counsel them, you know, that's not acceptable.

You know, you don't have to berate somebody in the middle of a board meeting, but the chair does have a major responsibility in setting the tone, especially if you want to change or move, evolve the culture that you have around the board table.

Mike, did you want to take that one

Just reset the stage for us, for the listeners who are kinda new to this story.

Sure.

So the Broadview 6 trial, there was allegations that there was misconduct before the grand jury.

In normal case, we as federal defense lawyers do not get the complete, sometimes any of the grand jury transcripts.

We certainly do not get the colloquy, meaning the talking between the prosecutors and the grand jurors.

We never get that.

We will get witness statements prior to trial of people who are gonna testify, because if they testified under oath at a grand jury, we can use that transcript during the trial to impeach their testimony if they testified differently.

Still.

[laughs]

If you remember back in October, Governor Pritzker created the Illinois Accountability Commission right in the middle of the Operation Midway Blitz activities that were going on, and the idea was to sort of be a watchdog and to investigate ICE and border patrol agents and what they were doing in our community.

As we all remember, there was a lot of uproar from many things, from people being shot to people being tear-gassed to journalists being attacked.

All, all sorts of stuff, to people having their cheeks swabbed, uh, before they're being detained.

So that commission was set up.

They heard from a lot of witnesses, uh, victims, and they pres- they prepared sort of, like, you know, kind of one of those blue ribbon reports, and they released that last week.

And, you know, it was kind of, it was kind of fun to sit back and k- sort of watch the, the skirmishing and the, and the posturing.

Do you use it, or does anyone at your firm use it? And not from a sense of [laughs] where we've seen lawyers get in trouble for filing briefs that include hallucinations from AI of made-up cases, but in the paralegal world in which a lot of it is research and diving and flipping through pages and going through microfiche, is that world changing and changing quickly, Mike? And then I'll go to Patrick too.