Criminal Law

439. Armed incoherence watch

Posted on July 16, 2010
The Chicago gun control decision was a great liberal triumph, the culmination of nearly 50 years of such triumphs.  It shows the wonderful influence William Brennan continues to exert beyond the grave.  (See post 365.)   Justice Brennan spent much of the 1960s and 1970s voting to make this or that portion of the Bill of Rights "applicable to the states...

438. Resisting reality

Posted on June 25, 2010
Recently I completed a series of all-day training sessions for law enforcement in outlying areas of New Mexico, a state with more than its share of outlying areas.  My fellow-instructor was a retired officer, and it was interesting to hear the assembled officers, from a variety of forces, complain about prosecutors and their reluctance to take cases to court...

437. Megalomania watch

Posted on June 15, 2010
From Seattle, where you'd think they'd really have better things to do with their time: A King County judge has been accused of violating the state's Code of Judicial Conduct for speaking out and writing on behalf of Amanda Knox during her murder trial in Italy...

436. Astorga

Posted on June 06, 2010
On Friday, Michael Astorga was convicted of murdering Deputy Sheriff James McGrane in an Albuquerque courtroom.  I wrote about Astorga in the not-quite-published book Whatever Happened to Justice?  This is what I wrote a couple years ago, updated to reflect developments since then: I worked on a case involving the Astorga brothers, Michael and Matthew...

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435. Talk as tough as you fight

Posted on May 26, 2010
It was refreshing to travel to South Carolina, the eighth most conservative state in the country.... Yeah, I know, I figured it would score higher than #8, too, but that's what Gallup says its surveys find.  The campaign signs don't just identify candidates as "Republican" but as "conservative Republican...

Resilience project (a belated apology)

Posted on April 14, 2010
Cutting-edge research in the last 20 years has finally proven Freud right, at least in his original insight.  Early childhood experiences can alter a person's entire life course, and even lifespan.  Children who suffer adverse experiences – including neglect or abuse, but also death of a parent, poverty, or parents' divorce – exhibit changes in their blood chemistry and brain structure that only in the past few years has become measureable by medical technology...

434. Britney, Charlie and John

Posted on March 11, 2010
Isn't it exciting, in a guilty-pleasure kind of way, when celebrities live down to your worst opinion of them?  You know, like Britney Spears, Charlie Sheen, and Chief Justice John Roberts? Texas Professor Lucas Powe predicted the justices would skip the State of the Union next year because their feelings were hurt that the mere President of the United States said, rather more concisely, what their own most senior colleague had just said about the Onion-worthy campaign finance decision...

433. Inexcusable and excusable

Posted on March 07, 2010
From a suburb of Seattle with one of those early-settler's-wild-guess-at-Indian-word names comes this story: A King County District Court judge could be suspended for 90 days based on his conduct in an Issaquah courtroom. Judge [name withheld] was censured April 10 by the state Judicial Conduct Commission for disrespectful behavior...

432. Near-term career-related uncertainties

Posted on March 05, 2010
My law school has been scaring me recently, which is pretty impressive considering it's been more than 24 years since I last darkened its doors, and nearly as long since it darkened my life.  For instance, the dean recently emailed me: The current economic environment presents significant employment-related difficulties for all law schools, and I am cognizant of the anxiety that many of you face in confronting the near-term career-related uncertainties...

431. Mating habits of the domestic judge, Pennsylvania version

Posted on March 02, 2010
Pennsylvania's Judge C. Joseph Rehkamp was foolish enough to drink the water at the Luzerne County Courthouse, that ill-proportioned lump of architectural notions, when he was persuaded to venture down from his roost in Perry County to fill in for the gangster judges caught collecting "finders' fees" for selling children...

429. The brush-off

Posted on March 01, 2010
It's not often that you can watch video of a really bad judge abusing his power on TV, but Seminole County, Florida, offers a Mickey Mouse judge, Ralph Eriksson, to go with the nearest big roadside attraction.  To fully grasp the piquancy of this video, you need to know that the defendant, Mr...

430. Mating habits of the domestic judge, Ohio version

Posted on March 01, 2010
The Florida Supreme Court recently ruled that for a judge to deny justice to victims of intimate partner violence and sadistically toy with them in open court, is, to be entirely candid, just not altogether top-drawer form.  (See post 429.)  But what if the judge goes one step beyond re-victimizing by knocking off the "re-"? Consider Cleveland  Juvenile Court Judge Joseph Russo: According to the Supreme Court's ruling...

428. Fatuity Watch

Posted on February 15, 2010
CNET has been covering a Third Circuit case that seems to involve a novel legal issue when all it really involves is a no-longer-new technology: The FBI and other police agencies don't need to obtain a search warrant to learn the locations of Americans' cell phones, the U...

427. Bluegrassed

Posted on February 14, 2010
There are always new ways to be corrupt.  That's the wonderful thing about it.  Like April, the cruellest month, treating yesteryear as so much mulch (after having the droghte of march perced to the roote), corruption is always springing anew with renewed newness...

426. System justification

Posted on February 12, 2010
Every state has a judicial standards commission of one sort or another.  It's easy for people like to stand on the outside and criticize them with the benefit of hindsight, but the fact is that many hard choices have to be made, priorities established, resources wisely utilized, and cliches recited...

425. Yadkinville

Posted on February 05, 2010
There are certain subtle advantages to living in a city best known to the outside world for the way Bugs Bunny pronounces it.  Once is that you learn not to make fun of other cities' names.  Such as Yadkinville.  Even though Booger Swamp Road meets up with Main Street just west of town...

424. Hissy fitting?

Posted on January 31, 2010
ABC's Jake Tapper, who almost certainly dislikes the Elvis Costello song "Brilliant Mistake," has a blog entry with a prediction from University of Texas professor Lucas Powe.  Unfortunately, the quotation doesn't answer the mystery of why he didn't drop the final "e" from his surname, like Al Green...

423. So who's scarier?

Posted on January 29, 2010
The San Francisco Chronicle recently reported: The Assembly approved legislation Wednesday that would make it a crime to not report violent attacks... Assemblyman Pedro Nava, D-Santa Barbara, the measure's author, said the bill closes a loophole in state law, which previously required people to report a violent crime only if it is being committed against a child younger than 14...

421. They do things differently over there

Posted on January 26, 2010
Braving the pigeons, thousands of photographers demonstrated in Trafalgar Square against the "stop and search" laws granted British police by a 2000 anti-terrorism law.  In December Guardian reporter Paul Lewis was stopped and searched while taking pictures of the Gherkin building in London and Grant Smith, an architecture photographer, was apprehended around the corner while photographing Sir Christopher Wren's Christ Church...

422. Non-Judging Crimes

Posted on January 26, 2010
Immigration judges aren't, as their name might otherwise imply, judges.  They're Department of Justice employees, complete with union.  They're not judges in another sense, too, according to a South Florida Sun-Sentinel (in Miami, even the sun needs a sentinel) article posted by Sonia Ansari over at Our Curious Immigration Laws...

420. Expanding the Forbidden City

Posted on January 22, 2010
Anyone out there think it's coincidence that the Supreme Court should choose this moment in our political history to declare that insurance companies have a constitutional right to spend unlimited amounts of cash to defeat members of Congress who vote in favor of health care reform? My Examiner...

419. Texas [redacted]

Posted on January 21, 2010
The great medical journalist and commentator Atul Gawande published an eye-opening piece about health care costs in McAllen, Texas, last June.  He reported that health costs were twice as high in McAllen, in Hidalgo County down near the Gulf, than in demographically-similar El Paso...

418. The miracle and mystery of the law

Posted on January 19, 2010
Equal Danger, by the great Sicilian novelist Leonardo Sciascia, is set in an unnamed country not, perhaps, entirely unlike Italy.  The hero, Rogas, goes to see President Riches of the Supreme Court.  As tactfully as he can, he suggests judicial error may have resulted in the conviction of an innocent man: "You are a practicing Catholic?" "No...

417. It keeps getting worse in NE Pennsylvania

Posted on January 18, 2010
You and I might think it's a bad thing for a judicial standards board to ignore detailed evidence of wrongdoing by judges on the ground that the wrongdoing is so wrong that the FBI is investigating it. But that's the difference between you and I and judicial standards boards: When the [Pennsylvania] state Judicial Conduct Board received an anonymous eight-page complaint in 2006 about alleged wrongdoing by a Luzerne County judge, it reportedly deferred conducting an investigation because there was an ongoing outside criminal probe of the judge...

416. Responsibility

Posted on January 17, 2010
Food, Inc. is a documentary about the concentration of market power in the United States responsible for the sameness and mediocrity of our chain restaurants, radio stations ("chain radio stations" is very nearly redundant), newspapers, beer, and food suppliers...

415. No tomorrow

Posted on January 16, 2010
From the Stanford alumni magazine: Shortly after she was named to head the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in 1996, Brooksley E. Born was invited to lunch by Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan.The influential Greenspan was an ardent proponent of unfettered markets...

414. Mediocrization

Posted on January 12, 2010
John Cassidy's "Letter from Chicago" in the January 11 New Yorker makes a good case for the proposition that the harm done by the pseudo-Nobel for Economics has outweighed all the good done by the prizes actually established by Alfred Nobel's will. It makes the case just by mentioning in passing all the various pseudo-Nobels rung up by University of Chicago economists...

413. Microsoftness

Posted on January 10, 2010
Since post 412 my PC has made two more trips to the ER.  The docs couldn't find anything wrong.  I've begin to worry they think I'm a psychosomatic complainer, or worse yet afflicted with a computer version of Munchhausen's by proxy syndrome...

412. Most cheering / most nauseating

Posted on November 25, 2009
Earlier this week the New York Times published a cheering article about the criminal justice system, observing--forty or fifty years late--that what's conventionally considered the "left" position on crime is indistinguishable from the "right."  The headline was: "Right and Left Join Forces on Criminal Justice," but the article itself was an updating of the old joke about law school, where the dean tells the assembled first year students, "Look to the right of you...

411. Sound familiar?

Posted on November 23, 2009
I've had to steel myself to write this post.  It involves more self-revelation than, frankly, I'm altogether comfortable with.  But I must see it through, if you, my reader, are to fully understand what follows. ...  You see, I'm the sort of person who sometimes borrows Teaching Company and Modern Scholar courses from the library and listens to them while driving, walking the dog, even while doing the dishes...

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