In Which Your Host Fails Yet Again to Heed Proverbs 26:4

From time to time, I have written things about Massad Ayoob’s really bad legal advice. He is a non-attorney and freelance writer who worked as a part-time cop in a town containing several times fewer people than a college basketball stadium. He has also worked as an expert witness from time to time, and many people consider him an authority on firearms tactics.

Mr. Ayoob is not a ballistician, gunsmith, engineer, physician, military veteran, or lawyer. He didn’t have gunfights with criminals when he was a cop; if he had, we would never have heard the end of it. Far as I can determine, his education is limited to a bachelor’s degree.

A number of people have given me hell for criticizing the Great Ayoob because he makes videos and writes articles in which he pretends to understand the law. He may be a true expert on protecting yourself with a gun, but he has no business talking about legal matters. He did an inept analysis of the Zimmerman case, and he has also coached people on the things they should say to the police after a shooting. Real attorneys coach them on what they should not say, which is…anything. Ayoob tells people to say nasty things about the deceased and claim innocence, and these are real stupid ideas.

An Internet commenter has accused Ayoob of propagating “Fuddlore” on the web. That is funny. I almost never type this, but LOL.

One thing that bugged me about this man’s uninformed, intractable defenders was that they often claimed he was a legal expert because he had testified in court cases as an expert witness. An expert witness is legally barred from testifying about the law. In a court, attorneys try to tell the judge what the law is (because often, he has no idea), and he makes all rulings of law. No witness gets to butt in. If Matlock himself were giving testimony in a case, and he tried to talk about the law, he would be interrupted and told to knock it off.

You don’t have to be a big brain to be an expert witness. If you go to sites listing the areas in which expert witnesses offer to testify, you will find they list things like marijuana cultivation. In South Florida, a portly local personality and famous fishing captain named Bouncer Smith has worked as an expert. He used to be the voice of the fishing hotline, which I called from time to time for tips on catching dolphin and sailfish. He got in trouble once for refusing to move his boat to help a man who was nearby, drowning. Hey, he had paying customers.

Imagine his expert testimony.

Plaintiff’s Counsel: Dr. Bouncer, let’s say it’s 10 a.m., mid-June, two to four-foot seas, a nice weedline but no birds working, nice color change, sunny, and you’re in 1200 feet of water off Haulover Beach with a heading of 172°. Finger mullet on a bead rig, or a staggered spread of Dolphin Jrs.?

Dr. Bouncer: That’s a trick question! No one uses a bead rig with finger mullet!

Defense Counsel: Bastard!

Would you hire Captain Bouncer to represent you in a divorce?

I looked up some things Ayoob allegedly said about his experience as a witness, and I found them pretty silly, not to mention impossible to believe.

Ayoob said he was a witness in a “court” case involving Christine Hansen, a disgruntled FBI agent, and other members of her class. He said, “I testified. The court listened.”

The obvious implications here are 1) there was a court case, 2) Ayoob testified in court, and 3) the court delivered an order implementing changes based on Ayoob’s remarks.

Today I learned that none of those things are true. There was no court. That’s the thread you pull to unravel the sweater.

Ayoob calls the case Christine Hansen et. al., v. Federal Bureau of Investigation. I used to try to look it up, and I couldn’t find it anywhere. I couldn’t understand why. You can find any federal case online, as long as an opinion was published. Today I found out there was no court, therefore no court case, therefore no Ayoob in-court testimony.

What actually happened, then? Hansen felt women were facing discrimination from the FBI, so she filed an EEOC complaint. Ayoob talked to the EEOC, which is the farthest thing from a court. The EEOC took Hansen’s side to some extent, and it supposedly made recommendations. The DOJ, which owns the FBI, had a special officer named Squire Padgett issue an internal opinion, and in that opinion, he agreed with the EEOC on a number of points, but not all. The DOJ made some changes based on the EEOC’s “recommendations.”

I use quotation marks because I have worked with the EEOC, and I don’t recall seeing them issue recommendations. They make findings and tell people they can sue. Maybe they do make recommendations. It has been a long time, and I have forgotten a lot of what I knew. Making recommendations would carry zero legal weight and add work (the civil servant’s kryptonite), so it would be pointless.

In certain types of employment cases, a plaintiff can’t run out and sue an employer right off the bat. Federal law requires the filing of an EEOC complaint, and after the EEOC makes its findings, it issues a right to sue letter. Then you go to federal court, and the actual case begins. If the EEOC takes too long to issue the letter, you can go to court without it.

The EEOC is kind of a joke. Forcing attorneys to work with it is almost a harassment tactic. They can’t stop lawsuits from going forward. All their investigations do is waste people’s time and money. Lawyers (plaintiffs’ lawyers, anyway) want to get into court and get their money. They are not interested in kissing and making up before the EEOC.

The EEOC has “investigators.” Unless the ones I know about are unusual, they don’t really do anything. I had an investigator call me, an attorney with a clear agenda, asking for facts. This made it unnecessary for this person to get out of a comfortable chair and do real work, and that was probably the goal.

I am amazed to see that Ayoob says he “testified.” I didn’t know the EEOC had hearings with witnesses, and I was an employment lawyer. Maybe I once knew and forgot. I don’t recall having a hearing in any of my cases. The web says they have examiners who function as administrative judges, so the EEOC is apparently like the National Labor Relations Board and the Florida Public Employee Relations Commission.

An administrative hearing is not court, so talking to the EEOC is not court testimony, and your words would presumably be inadmissible hearsay in a court anyway. I believe a court would expect you to show up to testify again. I can’t think of an applicable hearsay exception offhand. I don’t think Ayoob knows the definition of hearsay or how courts feel about it.

Thinking the EEOC is a court would be proof one doesn’t know much about the legal system.

Before my first visit to the EEOC, my dad told me what to expect. He let me know I was in for a laugh. When I arrived, I saw exactly what he described. Big, pleasant women padding around in houseshoes. The office was more like their apartment than a place of business. They had made it downright homey. It was like a slumber party at Oprah’s house.

Walking into a federal courtroom is a lot different. After you show the marshals you’re not armed, you go into a big, cold room where people’s lives are completely destroyed every day, and you wait with armed bailiffs and whoever else works there. You turn your cell phone off, and you check it and recheck it, because God forbid it should ring while Judge Thanos is talking. He may confiscate it and give it to a homeless shelter, and if he’s really nuts, you may get fined or held in contempt. There is no refrigerator with grandchildren’s drawings on it. There are no cookies. Forget about wearing houseshoes.

I can’t find the Hansen documents online. I could look them up somewhere with additional effort, but it would be a pain. What I know, I found in news articles.

The FBI has had problems with female agents, including their physical weakness and their unwillingness or inability to learn how to shoot a 10mm pistol. The FBI’s experts recommended the 10mm in the wake of the famous Miami shootout, which suggested their existing firearms weren’t too good. Female agents and near-men said it was too much for them, so, famously or infamously, the 10mm was cut down for girls and sissies, and the .40 S&W was created.

Anyway, Hansen and the gals complained about a number of things including transfers, assignments, and being weeded out through difficult-for-ladies firearms requirements. They probably complained about sexual harassment, too, because every big organization has a harassment problem.

Obviously, Ayoob couldn’t testify as an expert about everything, so it is extremely unlikely that he was asked about anything other than firearms. No one wants to know what Massad Ayoob thinks about punitive reassignments.

The DOJ’s man, Padgett, supposedly agreed with some or all of the EEOC’s recommendations. Hansen is quoted as saying she was not going to appeal the DOJ’s decision. It was good enough for her.

Did Ayoob persuade Padgett? Maybe, but maybe his input wasn’t needed. Government employers are not known for standing up to feminists. My best guess is that the DOJ planned to buckle from the word “go.” It was the Carter/Reagan era, and times were changing fast. The FBI may have been in the wrong on some issues, the government definitely didn’t want the limitless financial exposure of a trial, and the DOJ probably wanted to score PR points with the public.

If I went outside on a cloudy day and yelled “RAIN!!!”, and then it rained, it wouldn’t mean the clouds listened to me.

I don’t think it would.

The gals got some money, some FBI policies were changed, and the case never went to court. This is what is known as an out-of-court settlement, not a verdict.

Ayoob later made it look like he was very brave to testify, saying something about how he was told (by unnamed persons) his career would be over if he did. This, I do not believe. Maybe a bartender told him that. Maybe his wife told him. Maybe a bored federal prosecutor in a courthouse elevator said it as a prank. No professional would have said it with any seriousness.

No one cares what expert witnesses do. It is understood that they will show up and say whatever their clients want them to, to the greatest extent possible without having their pants, on the witness stand, actually burst into flames. No one ever leaves a courtroom and whispers, “That accountant is DEAD.”

It’s also unclear what repercussions Ayoob expected. Surely he didn’t expect a rendition to a CIA safe house stocked with rubber hoses and, maybe, a VCR and a shelf full of Mork and Mindy tapes.

Actually, that last part might not work on Ayoob, but it would definitely work on me. I would roll on my own mother to avoid hearing Robin Williams say “shazbat” again.

It has been suggested to me that Ayoob might have feared that law enforcement agencies and prosecutors would never hire him to testify again. The problem with that idea is that in criminal cases, he was a defense witness, and the government is not in the defense business. If he really testified in lots of criminal cases, he did so for defendants, against LEO’s and DA’s. If he testified in civil cases involving the government, he worked as a plaintiff’s witness, and the government is not in the business of suing itself.

Look, the government doesn’t need to pay self-taught magazine writers for expert testimony. They generally use people they already employ. People like Dr. Michael Baden and Dr. Martin Fackler. People like “Dr. Lak” in the OJ farce. They don’t have to pay these people insane expert witness fees; they’re already on salary. And they have lots of degrees.

If you’ve seen any criminal cases involving forensic experts, you’ve probably noticed the government’s witnesses were government employees. There must be exceptions, but the government probably never hired Ayoob, and I’m sure it wasn’t making his monthly nut. No DA ever said, “Send the pathologist from Johns Hopkins home! We found a guy who writes for Guns & Ammo!”

The government couldn’t retaliate by refusing to hire him again, because it never hired him to begin with, except to write speeding tickets in New Hampshire. It couldn’t tell lawyers not to hire him, either. First, it would be free advertisement for Ayoob. Second, lawyers would’t pay any attention to the FBI’s requests. Third, there would be ethical problems which would guarantee Ayoob more free advertising. “Hire the man who got 10 prosecutors disbarred!”

It makes no sense to say Ayoob was afraid of offending LEO’s and their pals. He has buddied around with that exact crowd his whole life. It’s strange, but he seems very popular with them even though he has tried to help free people, probably including guilty ones, they strove to imprison.

I don’t know how effective Ayoob was, but all over the US, really good expert witnesses make prosecutors and cops like like morons every day, they never turn up floating in canals or scattered around wood chippers, and they don’t get blackballed. No one cares.

Retaliating against an expert who testified in an EEOC hearing would be like hiring a hitman because you lost a nursing home shuffleboard tournament. “I’ll teach YOU to wax your pucks!!!”

It’s inconceivable to me that he was worried at all. If he was, he was deluded. I think he just wants people to think he’s a hero who took on the MAN and risked it all, when in reality, he was doing what thousands of expert witnesses do every day. Anyone who works in a town with 4 or 5 police officers, puts two bars on each side of his collar, and calls himself Captain Ayoob has to be eyed critically.

From now on, I’m Captain Steve, heading my farm’s private police force. I live alone with Marvin the parrot, so he’s my lieutenant. That makes the wife Officer Rhodah. I won’t tell her Marvin outranks her. I wonder if there is any way I could locate and buy Inspector Clouseau’s Silver Hornet.

Captain? What am I thinking? General. Generalissimo. Generalissimo Esteban.

You’re all errand boys sent by grocery clerks to collect bills.

The more I learn about this guy, the less impressed I am. His legal advice is crazy wrong. I used to think he was a useful source of information on defending myself, but now I question even that. I have read two of his books, and the information in them seemed basic, intuitive, and unproven. Anyone could write 300 pages of his best guesses and call it a treatise. There are zillions of real cops and veterans out there who have actually used firearms successfully, so why would I listen to a guy who has no real-world resume? A good Grand Theft Auto player probably knows more about the subject.

You don’t have to be John von Neumann to come up with good ideas for dealing with burglars.

Let me write a treatise right here, off the top of my head.

Don’t open the door to strangers. Get a camera system and identify everyone who comes to your house. If someone enters your house, lock yourself in a bedroom, call the police, and get your gun ready. If someone enters your yard, stay indoors, call the police, watch from a safe place, and get your gun ready. Do not go outside unless you like being bitten by dogs and shot full of .40 S&W.

Being a he-man sounds exciting, but the cops will do it for nothing, and you get to stay inside, alive, with your cocoa. If someone kills a burglar and gets charged with a crime, it won’t be you. You’ll be safe at home, watching him get the Chauvin treatment on TV. Never engage or even make your presence known unless you have no choice. If you can do it, run away and conceal yourself on another property until the cops arrive.

Use a rifle with a big magazine for home defense. If you use a pistol, you may shoot yourself, you’re likely to miss the burglar, and if you hit him, he may keep right on coming. A good rifle will shred his organs. If you’re really serious, get night vision and kill the lights.

Don’t use a shotgun. They hold too few rounds. If you use a shotgun anyway, use a semiauto. Pumps are unreliable, and they are slow for repeat shots.

Keep your cell phone charged all the time. Keep it on you. Keep shoes, a jacket, a flashlight, and ear protection beside your bed.

Use a pocket holster for concealed carry. Other holsters are very hard to draw from, and they can get you killed. A pocket holster is fast and safe, and you can put your hands in your pockets when confronted without letting anyone know you’re already holding your gun. Carry as much ammunition as you can stand to. No one ever walked away from a gunfight complaining about having too much ammo.

Get a Crimson trace pistol laser. They really work, and they require no brains to operate. They turn on automatically. Get a pistol with no manual safety, because you will forget to disengage a manual safety when you’re scared, and you will look like an idiot confidently pulling the trigger on a gun that won’t fire.

Keep a round in the chamber. You will never remember to rack the slide when you need to.

Learn to shoot well. A .22 short in the middle of the face can better than 10 9mm rounds in nonvital areas such as walls. Practice with whatever you choose to use.

Get bulletproof bedroom and closet doors with gun ports. Why not? Can’t hurt. Your walls won’t stop anything, so you might as well have something.

Carry a really big, really sharp knife. A machete would be good. A pointed sword is better. If you can’t hit the perp with your gun, you will need something else. The general rule with knife fights is that the long knife wins. This is why swords exist.

Buy a big, illegal laser pointer and the proper eye protection. You can blind your burglar from a good distance, and there will be no recoil or reloading to deal with.

Get three really big pit bulls or something similar. Before you shoot, turn them loose. Maybe you can prevent a gunfight, and they will be hell on destructive squirrels and coons.

If you’re the shooter, make someone else call the cops. Everything you say is admissible in court to put you away. You can deny anything someone else says, and it will also be hearsay, which may be excluded from evidence. Meanwhile, call your attorney. When your helper calls 911, they start recording while the phone is still ringing. Keep that in mind. Don’t say, “Remember the lies I told you to tell after I murdered this guy.” Actually, don’t use the advice in this paragraph. I’m not your attorney, and my legal advice may be wrong. See how I’m smarter than Massad Ayoob?

I just made all that stuff up, but it looks pretty good. Is it right? Am I an expert?

Should I write a book? Don’t think so.

Now that I seem to know what actually happened in the FBI case, I think I can rest.