by Kent Scheidegger · Mar 11, 2020 9:38 am
“Harvey Weinstein, the once-powerful and internationally acclaimed Hollywood producer, was sentenced to 23 years in a New York state prison Wednesday following a conviction stemming from sexual-assault allegations that sparked the #MeToo movement,” reports Deanna Paul for the WSJ.
by Kent Scheidegger · Mar 11, 2020 9:13 am
United States v. Briones, No. 19-720, is a federal case regarding what finding needs to be made before an under-18 murderer can be sentenced to life without parole. On Monday, the Supreme Court took up a Mississippi case raising the same question, as noted in this post. Yesterday the Solicitor General filed a letter with the Court asking for its case to be put on hold pending a decision in the Mississippi case.
by Kent Scheidegger · Mar 9, 2020 2:00 pm
Little noticed in a tumultuous week, USDoJ’s Inspector General released a redacted report Wednesday titled, Audit of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Efforts to Identify Homegrown Violent Extremists through Counterterrorism Assessments.
by Kent Scheidegger · Mar 9, 2020 8:58 am
by Kent Scheidegger · Mar 6, 2020 9:57 am
There a nationwide drive to install prosecutors who are actually “defense lawyer[s] with power,” as Philly’s Larry Krasner described himself. It is fueled by massive campaign contributions from entities controlled by George Soros and more recently with Netflix dollars. But the drive appears to have stumbled in massive Los Angeles County.
by Kent Scheidegger · Mar 5, 2020 4:09 pm
Rafael Mangual has this issue brief for the Manhattan Institute with the above title.
After enacting a sweeping bail reform, New York lawmakers have drawn the ire of constituents who are troubled by the many stories of repeat and serious offenders—some with violent criminal histories—being returned to the street following their arrests. In the state’s biggest city, the public’s growing concerns are buttressed by brow-raising, if preliminary, crime data, amplifying calls for amending or repealing the bail reform.
by Kent Scheidegger · Mar 5, 2020 3:56 pm
The debate over the use of algorithms to “help make decisions about whom to release before trial, whom to release from prison on parole or who receives rehabilitative services” continues. Zhiyuan Lin et al. have this op-ed in the WaPo defending the value of using algorithms.
by Kent Scheidegger · Mar 3, 2020 10:10 am
Immigration is a subject fully within the authority of the federal government. A federal statute requires new employees to complete a form to confirm they are not unauthorized aliens. The law makes it a federal crime to provide false information on this form. It also preempts state laws imposing sanctions on employers for hiring unauthorized aliens.
A general Kansas law forbids identity theft. Can this law apply to an employee who put someone else’s Social Security number on the work authorization form and also on the tax withholding forms? The Supreme Court today said yes in a surprisingly close decision.
by Kent Scheidegger · Mar 2, 2020 4:22 pm
The soft-on-crime movement makes an emotional pitch to convince people to let more criminals out of prison by claiming that incarcerating a parent is necessarily bad for children. I noted that the premise of this argument was very doubtful in this post last October, citing a newly released study.
Rafael Mangual has this article in the City Journal with the subtitle, Evidence suggests that children are often better off when criminal parents are imprisoned.
by Kent Scheidegger · Mar 2, 2020 3:59 pm
California’s Proposition 47 created a new offense of shoplifting to deal with the overreach of charging people with burglary when they only walked in the open door of an open store to steal something, a crime which should have been charged as theft.
A creative defendant charged with misuse of personal information tried to get his crime reclassified as shoplifting, and a Court of Appeal panel actually bought that. Today, the California Supreme Court unanimously reversed.
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