Criminal Law

Why Guns on College Campuses are Bad Policy

Posted on March 15, 2011
H 222 would prohibit the governing bodies of Idaho colleges and universities from regulating the lawful possession of a firearm while on campus. Eight other states are currently considering similar legislation. Florida just defeated its version of this bill...

Juvenile Waivers: Another Failed Policy

Posted on March 07, 2011
A generation after record levels of youth crime spurred a nationwide movement to prosecute more teenagers as adults, a consensus is emerging that many young delinquents have been mishandled by the adult court system. Read more... In the quest to get tough on criminals, many policy makers lost sight of seeking  balance between the best interests of the offender and the interests of society...

Hold Prosecutors Accountable

Posted on March 03, 2011
The federal government's reaction to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks once again returned to the Supreme Court on Wednesday as justices considered whether former attorney general John D. Ashcroft could be held personally liable for the detention of an American Muslim...

A Case of Murder?

Posted on February 22, 2011
The death of a 2-year-old Houston boy from a rare infection blamed on contaminated alcohol wipes may be only the first casualty tied to allegedly shoddy sterilization practices by a Wisconsin medical products firm. Read more... We can learn several things from this case...

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Surprise!

Posted on February 15, 2011
Most of the 113 medical devices recalled by the FDA from 2005 to 2009 for serious or life-threatening hazards were not subjected to the Food and Drug Administration's more stringent approval process, known as "PMA", or premarket approval, according to a review of the FDA's recall data...

Dignified?

Posted on January 28, 2011
Even with judicial blessing, the conduct of executions in this country is a shambles. In Arizona and Georgia, the sodium thiopental used in executions has possibly been ineffective and almost certainly been illegal. It came from Dream Pharma, an unlicensed British supplier, run from a driving school...

Reducing Prison Spending

Posted on January 18, 2011
The centerpiece of Mr. Daniels?s approach is a set of reforms governing sentencing and parole. Judges would be allowed to fit sentences to crimes and have the flexibility to impose shorter sentences for nonviolent offenses. A poorly structured parole system would be reorganized to focus on offenders who actually present a risk to public safety...

Hell Just Froze Over

Posted on January 07, 2011
We can no longer afford business as usual with prisons. The criminal justice system is broken, and conservatives must lead the way in fixing it. Read more... Conservatives broke it and now they want to fix it. Good for them. It is too bad that this conversion had to result from the budget crisis instead of the revelation that "get tough" crime control polices were failing...

Another Failed Policy

Posted on December 09, 2010
Sara Kruzan was 16 when she lured her former pimp into a motel room, shot and killed him and took his money. The terrible crime was committed in Riverside County by a girl who had been sexually molested and physically abused since her earliest days, raised by an addicted mother, gang-raped at 13 and at the same age sent into the streets to make a living as a prostitute by the man she would eventually kill...

The Beat Goes On

Posted on December 06, 2010
Word quickly reached top executives at Abbott Laboratories that a Baltimore cardiologist, Dr. Mark Midei, had inserted 30 of the company?s cardiac stents in a single day in August 2008, ?which is the biggest day I remember hearing about,? an executive wrote in a celebratory e-mail...

Crimes Against Us All

Posted on December 06, 2010
In 2005, when a federal court took a snapshot of California?s prisons, one inmate was dying each week because the state failed to provide adequate health care. Adequate does not mean state-of-the-art, or even tolerable. It means care meeting ?the minimal civilized measure of life?s necessities,? in the Supreme Court?s words, so inmates do not die from rampant staph infections or commit suicide at nearly twice the national average...

Who Profits, Indeed

Posted on December 06, 2010
Who really profits from the spew of bills recently advanced by the legislators across the country, and here in Texas, that make immigration enforcement a state matter? The answer is private prison corporations. In a recent feature on National Public Radio, it was made abundantly clear to anyone who cared to listen that the real motivation behind the Arizona anti-immigrant bill titled SB 1070 was profits for the private prison industry, which hoped to garner new markets from contracted prisons they would build to house the estimated tens of thousands of immigrants, undocumented and otherwise, that they believed would be snagged in this ever-widening net...

More Evidence of the Failure of the War on Drugs

Posted on November 28, 2010
IN VERACRUZ, MEXICO Exploiting loopholes in the global economy, Mexican crime syndicates are importing mass quantities of the cold medicines and common chemicals used to manufacture methamphetamine - turning Mexico into the No. 1 source for all meth sold in the United States, law enforcement agents say...

We Should Be Ashamed

Posted on November 17, 2010
The British government has decided to pay former detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, tens of millions of dollars in compensation and conduct an independent investigation into its role in the mistreatment of prisoners. The United States still operates the Guantánamo camp, with no end in sight...

Looks can kill

Posted on November 09, 2010
"This is the condition where the death penalty was meant to be applied. The crime was so heinous, and there was so little remorse shown on the part of the defendant. He sat there with such a blank look," the juror said. "The guy continued to stare straight ahead like he was watching a movie...

Killer Mines

Posted on November 08, 2010
Over the years, the federal government has done far less than it should ? and far less than the law requires ? to guarantee the safety of Appalachia?s miners. So it was a welcome break with grim history when the Labor Department asked a federal judge last week to shut down a Kentucky mine owned by the Massey Energy Company...

Prison Economics

Posted on October 28, 2010
Last year, two men showed up in Benson, Ariz., a small desert town 60 miles from the Mexico border, offering a deal. Glenn Nichols, the Benson city manager, remembers the pitch. "The gentleman that's the main thrust of this thing has a huge turquoise ring on his finger," Nichols said...

Just the Cost of Doing Business

Posted on October 27, 2010
GlaxoSmithKline, the British drug giant, has agreed to pay $750 million to settle criminal and civil complaints that the company for years knowingly sold contaminated baby ointment and an ineffective antidepressant ? the latest in a growing number of whistle-blower lawsuits that drug makers have settled with multimillion-dollar fines...

So Much for the Rule of Law

Posted on October 27, 2010
Arizona executed a man last night after the US supreme court lifted a stay granted when the state refused to reveal how it obtained one of the drugs used in the death chamber from a British manufacturer. The state's attorney general, Terry Goddard, used a little known law preventing the identification of executioners ? and others with "ancillary" functions ? to defy a court order requiring the state to reveal the exact source of an anesthetic, sodium thiopental, used in the execution...

Justice?

Posted on October 25, 2010
This is a court of law, not a court of justice. Oliver Wendel Holmes Troubling questions over Georgia's controversial death penalty system will remain unresolved for now, after the Supreme Court declined Monday to review an appeal from a death-row inmate who received unwanted help from state prosecutors on his legal representation...

Race and the Drug War

Posted on October 25, 2010
According to a report released Friday by the Marijuana Arrest Research Project for the Drug Policy Alliance and the N.A.A.C.P. and led by Prof. Harry Levine, a sociologist at the City University of New York: ?In the last 20 years, California made 850,000 arrests for possession of small amounts of marijuana, and half-a-million arrests in the last 10 years...

Impossible

Posted on October 22, 2010
In his decades working as a forensic psychiatrist, Dr. Richard Coons of Austin has testified at dozens of death penalty trials across Texas in which he opined about how defendants would behave in the future. Read more....  Dr. Coons is in a situation similar to Dr...

Playing Politics with the Death Penalty

Posted on October 22, 2010
RALEIGH, N.C. ? A top North Carolina House Democrat whose daughter was murdered 25 years ago said Wednesday he wants the state Republican Party to retract a mailer it sent out alleging that a law he voted for could parole death row prisoners. The mailer, which was sent to residents in Majority Leader Hugh Holliman?s district in Davidson County, focuses on his support for the Racial Justice Act in 2009...

Are sex offenders a Halloween threat?

Posted on October 20, 2010
Just last week, I wrote about a California district's controversial move to ban sex offenders from celebrating Halloween, but Tulare County is hardly alone. Police are gearing up for similar crackdowns across Tennessee and Virginia, where they officially refer to it as Operation Trick No Treat and Operation Porch Lights Out (for serious)...

A Court of Law, Not a Court of Justice

Posted on October 18, 2010
It was an unusual hearing. The subject at the center of it all, Cameron Todd Willingham, was not present. After being convicted of murdering his three children in a 1991 house fire, he was executed in 2004. Members of Mr. Willingham?s family, working with lawyers who oppose the death penalty, had asked for the rare and controversial hearing, held here on Thursday, to investigate whether Mr...

A Failure to Act

Posted on August 30, 2010
"THIS IS SOMETHING that I think needs to be done, not tomorrow, but yesterday." Those were the words of Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. in March to a House subcommittee on the subject of preventing sexual abuse in prison. Five months have passed since then, and two have passed since the June 23 deadline for Mr...

Japanese Officials Reveal Execution Chambers

Posted on August 28, 2010
The Japanese government opened up its execution chambers to the public for the first time on Friday, taking journalists on a tour of Tokyo?s main gallows. The insides were stark: a trapdoor, a Buddha statue and a ring for the noose. The opening of the chambers was a bid by Japan?s justice minister, Keiko Chiba, to stir debate over a practice that is widely supported here...

Process v. Outcome: Which is More Important?

Posted on August 03, 2010
Sullivan & Cromwell is a law firm with glittering offices in a dozen cities around the world, and some of its partners charge more than $1,000 an hour. The firm?s paying clients, at least, demand impeccable work. Cory R. Maples, a death row inmate in Alabama, must have been grateful when lawyers from the firm agreed to represent him without charge...

The New Jim Crow

Posted on July 26, 2010
A ?tough on crime? federal law that requires harsher prison terms for people arrested with crack cocaine than with the powered version of the drug is scientifically indefensible and hugely unfair. A bill that reduces this onerous sentencing disparity has passed the Senate easily...

Death at the Hands of the Indifferent

Posted on July 25, 2010
If Don Blankenship had any sense of shame, he'd crawl into a mine and hide. As CEO of Massey Energy, he has presided over a coal company that had thousands of violations in recent years, leading up to the April explosion that killed 29 of his miners...

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