Criminal Law

Unsafe Food and Senate Inaction

Posted on July 25, 2010
EVERY day, about 200,000 Americans are sickened by contaminated food. Every year, about 325,000 are hospitalized by a food-borne illness. And the number who are killed annually by something they ate is roughly the same as the number of Americans who?ve been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2003...

Hiring Felons

Posted on July 21, 2010
Boston, Chicago and San Francisco set a welcome example earlier in the decade when they abandoned counterproductive policies that often barred former offenders from municipal jobs, no matter how minor their crime nor how distant in the past. Connecticut, New Mexico and Minnesota have recently passed laws protecting the employment rights of former offenders...

Money vs. Lives

Posted on July 15, 2010
In an effort to make children safer while they sleep, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission voted unanimously Wednesday in favor of new proposed mandatory standards for cribs. The new rules, likely to go into effect next year after a final vote by the federal commission, would render many cribs in the country as not up to code, regardless of whether the crib style and model was ever considered unsafe, and essentially would ban the manufacture and sale of drop-side cribs...

Drug Manufacturer Hid Test Results

Posted on July 14, 2010
In the fall of 1999, the drug giant SmithKline Beecham secretly began a study to find out if its diabetes medicine, Avandia, was safer for the heart than a competing pill, Actos, made by Takeda. Avandia?s success was crucial to SmithKline, whose labs were otherwise all but barren of new products...

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Penny-wise and Pound-Foolish

Posted on July 09, 2010
The proposed state budget cuts $55 million out of the Medi-Cal methadone program for 35,000 individuals in California. It is tantamount to destroying the lives of 35,000 people, as well as having them return to addiction. The impacts are significant, and go beyond the patients themselves...

Needle Exchange Programs

Posted on July 03, 2010
President Obama did the right thing in December when he repealed the 21-year-old ban on federal financing for programs that give drug users access to clean needles. Almost nothing has happened since because the Department of Health and Human Services still has not issued the new rules that states and localities need before they can use any federal money to expand existing exchange programs or start new ones...

Arresting the "Big People"

Posted on June 17, 2010
As BP watches its bill rise quickly for the oil spill, including $20 billion it is setting aside for claims, it could find the tally growing much faster in coming months if the United States Department of Justice files criminal charges against the company...

Politics Rears Its Ugly Head Again

Posted on June 16, 2010
Mr. Kempfert is now certain that his father, William Macumber, is innocent. Arizona?s clemency board, citing Mr. Kempfert?s ?very moving testimony? and saying there had been ?a miscarriage of justice,? unanimously recommended last year that Mr. Macumber be freed...

Perpetuating Prison Violence

Posted on June 13, 2010
"RAPE IS VIOLENT, destructive, and a crime -- no less so when the victim is incarcerated." These were the opening words of a report delivered to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. last June by the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission. By law, the attorney general was given one year to consider the report's recommendations and issue standards to reduce the scourge of sexual violence in the nation's prisons...

Probation, parole for nonviolent crime could save states billions of dollars

Posted on June 10, 2010
The United States currently incarcerates a higher share of its population than any other country in the world. We calculate that a reduction in incarceration rates just to the level we had in 1993 (which was already high by historical standards) would lower correctional expenditures by $16...

Six Times is....

Posted on June 06, 2010
Curtis Flowers has stood before five juries in the past 13 years on capital murder charges, accused of killing four people in a Mississippi furniture store. This week, prosecutors are hoping his sixth trial will be the last. Flowers, 40, is believed to be the only person in recent U...

"A Human Rights Nightmare is Occurring on Our Watch"

Posted on June 06, 2010
With 5% of the world's population, the United States today boasts 25% of its prison population. Despite declining crime rates in the last three decades (even in the midst of our current recession), rates of incarceration in the U.S. have been stunning...

More Erosion of Miranda Rights

Posted on June 02, 2010
The Miranda warnings remind suspects of their right to remain silent but were never particularly clear on what happens when a suspect actually stays silent. Can the police question the suspect? If so, can they do they so for just a few minutes or as long as they want? The court?s 5-to-4 opinion in the case of Berghuis v...

Prosecutorial Misconduct

Posted on May 26, 2010
He was known as a jailhouse lawyer, a high school dropout turned amateur legal adviser who helped other inmates file legal motions and craft appeals while he served a sentence of 34 years to life for a murder he swore he never committed. But the cause for which the inmate, Jabbar Collins, most zealously advocated was his own...

Reported Crime Down for 2009

Posted on May 25, 2010
Preliminary data indicates that, for the third year in a row, the rate of violent crime in the United States is down. It appears that property crime also declined, for the seventh straight year. Read more... Reported crime is down nationally for 2009...

A Rare Breed

Posted on May 24, 2010
In his 43-year career as a federal judge, Jack B. Weinstein has come to be identified by his efforts to combat what he calls ?the unnecessary cruelty of the law.? His most recent crusade is particularly striking because of the beneficiary: a man who has amassed a vast collection of child pornography...

Idaho Ranks Among Bottom Five States in Mental Health Spending

Posted on May 24, 2010
On average, a seriously mentally ill person in the USA is three times more likely to be incarcerated than hospitalized, a report concludes today. In no state was a seriously mentally ill person ? someone with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, for example ? less likely to be incarcerated than hospitalized, the report by the National Sheriffs' Association and the Treatment Advocacy Center found...

I am a Criminal and So And So Are You

Posted on May 20, 2010
Lately, I've been telling people that I'm a criminal. This shocks most people, since I don't "look like" one. I'm a fairly clean-cut, light-skinned black woman with fancy degrees from Vanderbilt University and Stanford Law School. I'm a law professor and I once clerked for a U...

Great News, But....

Posted on May 17, 2010
The Supreme Court has ruled that teenagers may not be locked up for life without chance of parole if they haven't killed anyone. By a 5-4 vote Monday, the court says the Constitution requires that young people serving life sentences must at least be considered for release...

Idaho Not Leading the Way

Posted on May 15, 2010
As your editorial points out, there are a number of options that the federal and state governments can choose to alleviate our nation?s overincarceration problem without jeopardizing public safety. Essential to any comprehensive reform is sentencing reform, including repeal of one-size-fits-all mandatory minimums...

It Is Beyond Sad that this is the Best that Idaho Can Do

Posted on May 13, 2010
An Idaho man diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia has been sentenced to at least 40 years in prison for intentionally ramming two motorcycle troopers who were parked along the median of Interstate 84 last October. Fourth District Judge Darla Williamson imposed a 60-year sentence on David Turnovec, 30, of Buhl, in an Ada County courtroom Thursday morning...

U.S. Drug War Has Achieved None of Its Goals

Posted on May 13, 2010
After 40 years, the United States' war on drugs has cost $1 trillion and hundreds of thousands of lives, and for what? Drug use is rampant and violence even more brutal and widespread. Even U.S. drug czar Gil Kerlikowske concedes the strategy hasn't worked...

Norway Builds the World's Most Humane Prison

Posted on May 11, 2010
Halden, Norway's second largest prison, with a capacity of 252 inmates, opened on April 8. It embodies the guiding principles of the country's penal system: that repressive prisons do not work and that treating prisoners humanely boosts their chances of reintegrating into society...

Here We Go Again

Posted on May 10, 2010
The Obama administration said Sunday it would seek a law allowing investigators to interrogate terrorism suspects without informing them of their rights... Read more... Here is the reality of interrogations with those accused of terrorism: "Despite the political furor over reading terrorism suspects their Miranda rights, it is not clear that doing so has had a major impact on recent interrogations...

Just Another Exonaration? It Is Never That Simple

Posted on April 29, 2010
ROCHESTER, N.Y. ? A former truck driver who spent nearly 19 years behind bars for a 1988 slaying he didn't commit walked free Wednesday after DNA testing exonerated him and instead pointed to a man who strangled a 4-year-old girl in 1994. "There's no question that in this case the police officers had tunnel vision, and they latched onto Frank three years after the fact, even though his confession didn't make sense, even though there was no other evidence to suggest he did it," said the group's co-director, Peter Neufeld...

More Than an Ethical Lapse

Posted on April 28, 2010
The Supreme Court abdicated its responsibility to address fundamental questions of ethics and fairness when it declined to review the case of Charles Dean Hood, an inmate on death row in Texas. The one-line order, issued without comment from any of the justices, left in place an egregiously tainted 1990 double-murder conviction...

Prohibition Doesn't Work

Posted on April 28, 2010
Using drug and racketeering statutes and extradition agreements, federal prosecutors are sending a steady parade of Mexican drug lords into U.S. prisons. Although that is having a chilling effect on the smuggling cartels, there is no sign that the convictions are breaking the organizations, which are growing more violent, according to U...

When Will It End?

Posted on April 28, 2010
A former inmate is suing a private prison company, saying guards watched as he was beaten by a fellow inmate in an attack that went on so long his assailant had time to stop and drink some water before continuing.Attorneys for Hanni Elabed filed the lawsuit against the Correction Corporation of America in Boise's U...

It Doesn't Have to be This Way

Posted on April 20, 2010
Idaho?s state prison system is eliminating 24 more staff positions, bringing the number cut in the past two years to 102, and imposing far-reaching furloughs on all prison staffers in the coming year to cope with state budget cuts. Because of shifts of workers from one job to another and non-filling of positions that become vacant, there have been few layoffs, the Idaho Department of Correction reports...

The Cry of Victims' Families

Posted on April 18, 2010
Calling capital punishment in California an "empty promise," the father of murdered teen Chelsea King said he supported a deal to take death off the table for his daughter's killer in order to bring closure to the community. "We stand here because of a despicable evil act committed against our beautiful daughter, Chelsea, committed against our family and committed against our community," Brent King said in a news conference Friday...

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