The air up there

Less than a month after a corrections deputy in my county survived a 20-minute struggle for her life while trapped with an inmate in a stuck courthouse elevator, one of the assistant federal public defender authors of Ninth Circuit Blog has offered "Some Thoughts on Shackling":

...I offer some thoughts not on whether we – again, meaning the system as a whole – can shackle defendants, but whether we should...

The risk, while perhaps not absolutely zero, is minimal...

Read the post, it's a good read. It's written with passion, riffing on caselaw and Blackstone, the Gulag and FDR's Four Freedoms, U.S. Marshalls' memos and the Patriot Act. It also bears about as much relationship to my experience as state court does to Cloud Cuckoo Land.