by Kent Scheidegger · Apr 1, 2021 7:52 am
Today was decision day at the U.S. Supreme Court. No criminal cases were decided. Facebook v. Duguid is an exercise in statutory interpretation regarding a law on autodialers. Justice Alito has an interesting concurring opinion warning of loose canons of interpretation. (That’s my pun, not his.)
If a statute refers to “A, B, or C with X” does the modifier “with X” apply to all three or just C? Continue reading . . .
by Kent Scheidegger · Mar 30, 2021 3:35 pm
“Everybody knows” that the reason that incarceration rates are so high in the United States is that we sentence people to far longer terms than their crimes warrant. As the old saying goes, it’s not what we don’t know that gets us in trouble; it’s what we know for a fact that just isn’t so.
On the left is a reasonable facsimile of Figure 1 from a new Bureau of Justice Statistics Report, Time Served in State Prison, 2018. It shows the median time actually served by state prisoners released in 2018, by their most serious offense. The ones serving long sentences are murderers and rapists, exactly the criminals whom persons of sense believe should be put away for a long time. Continue reading . . .
by Kent Scheidegger · Mar 29, 2021 7:49 am
The U.S. Supreme Court this morning once again reversed a federal court of appeals, this time the Sixth Circuit, for exceeding the limits placed on its authority in Congress’s landmark 1996 reform of federal habeas corpus. Mays v. Hines, 20-507, involves a Tennessee murder case where the defendant was convicted on overwhelming evidence of stabbing to death an employee in a motel and stealing the motel cash, along with the employee’s car.
In state collateral review, the witness who discovered the body finally admitted that he had lied about the reason he was at the motel. He was there for an illicit rendezvous. But this had very little to do with the strength of the evidence that Hines was the murderer, and so the state courts left the judgment intact. Continue reading . . .
by Kent Scheidegger · Mar 26, 2021 4:33 pm
When the number of people being shot and killed is rising sharply and misguided city policies are a substantial factor in the increase, what should the city council do? Double down with more of the same? Rafael Mangual has this article with the above title in the City Journal. Continue reading . . .
by Kent Scheidegger · Mar 26, 2021 11:51 am
The Associated Press has this article on Gov. Newsom’s nomination of Rob Bonta to fill the Attorney General vacancy.
Kent Scheidegger, legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation that has typically opposed previous Democratic attorneys general, said Bonta is “fully on board with the fundamentally wrong direction that California criminal justice has been taking in recent years.”
I appreciate the quote, but the description of CJLF’s relationship with past attorneys general is not correct. Continue reading . . .
by Kent Scheidegger · Mar 25, 2021 12:51 pm
James Hohmann has this piece in the Washington Post making the argument against televising the high court’s arguments.
I disagree with Hohmann on one point. He concedes away the argument that some attorneys presenting argument might play to the cameras. Continue reading . . .
by Kent Scheidegger · Mar 25, 2021 8:31 am
The U.S. Supreme Court held today that a police officer “seizes” a fleeing suspect, within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment, by shooting her, even if the officer never gains actual control and the suspect escapes.
The Court split 5-3* in the case of Torres v. Madrid, No. 19-292.
The opinion of the Court by Chief Justice Roberts applied the common law definition of when a person has been “arrested” to the Fourth Amendment question of when the protection against unreasonable seizures comes into play when the claimed seizure is of the person. The status of arrest had a variety of legal consequences, including liability of the officer for escape or a tort suit for false imprisonment. Continue reading . . .
by Kent Scheidegger · Mar 24, 2021 10:46 am
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit today rejected a challenge to Hawai’i “open carry” law in a 7-4 decision. Judge Bybee writes for the court majority, “After careful review of the history of early English and American regulation of carrying arms openly in the public square, we conclude that Hawai‘i’s restrictions on the open carrying of firearms reflect longstanding prohibitions and that the conduct they regulate is therefore outside the historical scope of the Second Amendment.” Continue reading . . .
by Kent Scheidegger · Mar 22, 2021 6:45 am
The U.S. Supreme Court today took up the case of the Boston Marathon Bomber for full briefing and argument. See previous posts here and here. It is too late in the present term to hear argument of this case, so it will be heard in the term beginning next October.
The case is United States v. Tsarnaev, No. 16-443. Continue reading . . .
by Kent Scheidegger · Mar 17, 2021 2:46 pm
The Los Angeles District Attorney Office issued this release touting the “accomplishments” of George Gascón’s first quarter in office. Among them is “a 71 percent reduction in enhancements filed by the office when comparing a three-month span between December 2020 and February 2021 to the same period the prior year.”
Why is that an accomplishment? “Conservative estimates suggest the reduction equates to more than 8,000 years of unnecessary exposure and the three-month cost savings are projected to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars.” (Emphasis added.)
How do we know that exposure was “unnecessary”? How do we know there is any net “savings” at all, rather than a net cost, when the full cost of the additional crimes that will be committed in the future are factored in? Continue reading . . .
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