On: Court stenographers often misunderstand Black English

[treis]

In this case ambiguous or equivocal means:

>ambiguous or equivocal in that a reasonable police officer in light of the circumstances would have understood only that the suspect might be invoking his right to counsel

So the judge isn't saying that he is confused and thinks the statement is ambiguous because he doesn't know what a lawyer dog is. He's saying it's ambiguous because the statement didn't clearly request a lawyer, canine or otherwise.

This isn't anything confusing to a lawyer or someone familiar with the law. It's a well known legal standard. What the article claims is equivalent to saying that Java takes a lot of memory because the code is so verbose. It's just so obviously wrong to anyone with legal knowledge.

[JshWright → treis]

That's all well and good, but the judge is quite clear that it is 'the defendant’s ... reference to a “lawyer dog”' that is 'ambiguous and equivocal'.

I'd be curious about your views on why the judge chose to include that sentence if the 'reference to a “lawyer dog”'' wasn't relevant to his decision?

[treis → JshWright]

>That's all well and good, but the judge is quite clear that it is 'the defendant’s ... reference to a “lawyer dog”' that is 'ambiguous and equivocal'.

In that it was not a clear and unambiguous invocation of the right to counsel.

>I'd be curious about your views on why the judge chose to include that sentence if the 'reference to a “lawyer dog”'' wasn't relevant to his decision?

I don't know why he chose to quote "lawyer dog" and not more or less of the defendant's quote. I'm not a mind reader. But when he writes:

>I believe the defendant ambiguously referenced a lawyer

It's clear that the ambiguity he is arguing does not derive from his lack of knowledge of what a lawyer dog is.