He grew up in Canoga Park, went off to UC Berkeley Boalt Hall School of law and just won the American Bar Association's National Outstanding Young Lawyer Award. In looking over his resume and talking to him, I can see why the ABA was so wowed by his work. Reyes gave me a holler on Friday and we crammed his career into 30 minutes that seemed to just scratch the top of his accomplishments.

It all started with his dad, he said, an independent filmmaker from the Philippines who fiercely insisted on making movies on his own terms. That didn't always go so smoothly.

"He got sued so much, I thought, 'I would love to represent him one day. I want to help defend him,'" Reyes said.

After graduating from Canoga Park High in 1989, he went off to BYU before taking a two-year Mormon mission. While his friends went all over the world, he ended up in Chicago before returning to finish his degree. Then it was off to Boalt.

Reyes ended up at Parsons Behle & Latimer, a large corporate law firm where he's now a partner.

"I had a lot of friends from Berkeley making fun of me: 'What the heck! No one's out there, what are you going to do in Utah?'" he said. "Then a lot of them followed me out."

I think we all went to high school with someone like him, the kind who was the ASB president, yearbook editor, captain of the football team, valedictorian and homecoming king, all at the same time. In addition to his regular law practice, he served on Utah's Third District Judicial Nominating Commission, as committee chair, officer and member of the executive council for the Young Lawyers Division of the Utah bar and as liaison to the Utah Supreme Court's Committee on Standards & Professionalism. He also became a Mormon bishop at 31.

And on top of all that, he played an active role in the Utah Minority Bar Association, helping organize a tribute to the first 50 Minority Attorneys in Utah. That helped raise money for scholarships and allowing the organization to mentor and place students with law firms, molding the next generation of Sean Reyeses.

"My biggest thing is giving them lots of confidence. They can do it. They've got people to support them," he said. "But they've got to work their butts off and perform, too."

All in all, an interesting character -- and he's only 36. I wish I'd had more time to chat with him, but he agreed to answer my pestersome questions about the law in the future, so we probably haven't seen the last of Mr. Reyes. Stay tuned for more to come...

"I'm a Cali boy, but as an adopted son of Utah, I'm part of the new Utah," he said. "It's a lot more diverse than it used to be. To represent Utah, the LDS community, my family, my law firm, and everything else, it's gratifying to portray something different than what people have in mind."

Posted by Brent Hopkins at 6:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Rick has got a great one today about SWATting, where pranksters use cybertrickery to send out SWAT teams to scare the beejeezus out of unsuspecting homeowners. Here, I'll let him lead it off...

He told the 911 dispatcher he had killed someone in the house and more bloodshed would follow.

Randal Ellis, 19, who lived 1,200 miles away in Washington state, used a computer to trick the 911 dispatcher into believing the "emergency" was inside a home in Orange County, prosecutors allege.

It's all fun and games until someone gets blown away by an AR-15, right? And I don't suppose it's real cheap to wake up the D-team and send them charging across town in hot pursuit of your dumb joke, either.

Further down, I noticed an interesting legal argument... .

In the Orange County case, Ellis is facing five felony counts and one misdemeanor for the March incident, including computer fraud, assault with a machine gun and false imprisonment by violence, Emami said.

"It's our legal opinion that the law does not support that kind of assault by proxy or that vicarious liability," Brower said.

Now the proxy angle's pretty interesting. It's like the prosecutors are saying Ellis is the puppetmaster here, directing the cops to show up with their rifles against their will. And that makes sense on one hand, but how far does this hold up?

This ended safely enough, with no one getting hurt. But suppose this was a different homeowner, freaked out that there's all these guys running around in black jumpsuits with rifles in his front yard, grabs a gun. Maybe he's a gun enthusiast and he thinks this is Ruby Ridge all over again. The cops, who've been warned that there's a crazy man inside, see someone running around with a strap. One side sees the other, someone gets antsy, a trigger gets pulled and pretty soon, someone's fun little prank turns into an epic gun battle. Cops die, the homeowner gets shot up, the neighbors' houses catch on fire-- it's not that hard to imagine.

So when it's all sorted out, how far can they extend this proxy charge? Is the caller then guilty of murder, by causing the cops to show up, instilling legitimate fear in the homeowner and setting off a blow-up that didn't have to happen? I guess that would be up to a jury, but could they even be charged with it? It looks like they could. I wonder if this works for lo-tech means, as well. If you trick someone into committing a crime for what they thought were legitimate reasons (self-defense, for example), can they avoid the charges and you end up the defendant. It seems you would _ and should.

This is weird stuff, friends, very weird, something you'd expect in a Morgan Freeman/Ashley Judd thriller, rather than here in the Daily News. Nice work, Rick, glad you brought it to light.

Posted by Brent Hopkins at 11:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Our downtown rivals had an interesting piece over the weekend about disarray in the way the state prison system releases people who've served their time.

SACRAMENTO -- The counselor at Salinas Valley State Prison paid a surprise visit to Nicholas Shearin's cell with good news: He would go home in two days, after a decade behind bars.

But "they did what they wanted to do at the Department of Corrections," said Shearin, who learned from a reporter that he had stayed in prison too long. "They just told me no."

For more, read the whole thing. This is serious stuff, too-- in addition to being completely unfair, it's not cheap to keep those folks locked up. The Times says it'll cost the state $44 million through the end of the fiscal year. And, if those prisoners start figuring out that they were walking the yard weeks after they would be supposed to be on their way, you think some might ring up their local attorneys at law?

Nice work by Mr. Rothfield on that one-- we'll keep an eye out to see if any reform follows.

And, as I was tripping around the Times not-very-search-friendly Web site (I found a 1990 article on Scientology and an abstract about porn star Savannah's suicide, but not that piece until I found an AP rewrite on our site that gave me the relevant terms I could search over at their site), I ran across another thought-provoking piece.

SACRAMENTO -- Three years after state officials promised to fix California's troubled juvenile prisons, advocates for incarcerated youths are urging a judge to appoint a receiver to take over a system they say remains tragically broken.

"Youth on suicide watch are isolated and deprived of programming and human contact. Youth in restricted programs spend 20 hours or more a day in their filthy, dimly lit cells, released only for one hour of school a day or to exercise in a cage."

Read on here if you'd like. Now I realize that kids in prison aren't as popular as kids in pre-calculus, but let's think about this a bit. If the juvie system's that bad, are we really helping stave off future violence? Or are we just incubating people who will graduate to real, grown-up prison once they're out and re-offending?

Alright, that's enough question marks for one post. If any of you, dear readers, have answers to those or any other questions, please share.

Posted by Brent Hopkins at 11:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I was looking at the number of posts in the last few days and I was downright embarrassed. The constraints of the court-animal-baby-Hollywood street folks (more to come on that later) have kept me sadly ensnared. But today, ironically when the courthouse is closed, I'm hoping to get back on track. Stay tuned.

Posted by Brent Hopkins at 10:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)