by Kent Scheidegger · Oct 12, 2021 1:49 pm
One of the great accomplishments of New York’s former law-and-order Mayors Giuliani and Bloomberg was to rescue Times Square from the disgrace it had become and make it once again a vibrant place that people wanted to visit.
To the surprise of no one with sense, in two terms of crime-and-disorder Mayor Bill de Blasio, Times Square has descended back into the sewer. Nicole Gelinas has this article in the City Journal with the above title. Continue reading . . .
by Kent Scheidegger · Oct 5, 2021 11:06 am
“An error occurred at trial. I have grave doubt whether this error contributed to the verdict. Therefore, no reasonable person could fail to have at least a reasonable doubt whether it contributed to the verdict.”
Does this follow, or is it a non sequitur? The U.S. Supreme Court puzzled over that question this morning in Brown v. Davenport, No. 20-826. To answer it correctly, in my view, the Court may have to disclaim a bit of dictum in Fry v. Pliler (2007). Continue reading . . .
by Kent Scheidegger · Oct 4, 2021 7:57 am
The U.S. Supreme Court opened its October 2021 Term today, the First Monday in October. As usual, it released an orders list from last week’s conference containing many denials of certiorari, a number of “vacate and remand” orders for lower courts to reconsider judgments based on decisions from last term, a few individual opinions regarding denial of certiorari, and no grants for full briefing and argument. The latter were in the short list issued last Thursday.
Among the notable denials is Deck v. Blair, No. 20-8333, denying review of the Eighth Circuit’s reinstatement of the death sentence of Carman Deck for the 1996 murder of an elderly couple, James and Zelma Long. Deck had to be sentenced to death three times in this case because of erroneous decisions by the Supreme Court itself, one in Deck’s own initial case and another that caused his second sentence to be overturned in state court. CJLF filed an amicus brief on behalf of the Long family in the Eighth Circuit. The State of Missouri may now proceed with long-overdue justice, absent any extraordinary interventions by the courts. Continue reading . . .
by Kent Scheidegger · Sep 30, 2021 12:07 pm
The U.S. Supreme Court today released this short orders list with the partial results of the “Long Conference” on Monday. The Court took up one federal criminal case on the First Step Act and a few civil cases. Continue reading . . .
by Kent Scheidegger · Sep 22, 2021 2:59 pm
Talks in Congress regarding a bipartisan bill on policing have collapsed, Alan Fram reports for AP. Continue reading . . .
by Kent Scheidegger · Sep 22, 2021 2:09 pm
Two recent articles deal with one of the most persistent myths in justice policy: the “root cause” obsession. Large numbers of people are haunted by the vision of Victor Hugo’s fictional character Jean Valjean, who went to prison for stealing bread to feed his sister’s starving children. If only we provided a better social safety net, the myth goes, crime would disappear. Whatever validity it may have had in mid-nineteenth century France, stealing for the necessities of life has virtually nothing to do with crime in the post-World War II United States.
This “poverty is the root cause of crime” vision was, to a large extent, how LBJ sold America on the Great Society, and it was a cataclysmic failure. Yet the myth weirdly persists and in the last few years has even grown stronger. Jason Riley has this column in the WSJ today titled The Destructive Legacy of the Great Society: Government subsidies for antisocial behavior stalled decades worth of black progress. Charles Fain Lehman has this article in the Summer edition of City Journal titled, Contra “Root Causes”: What the work of James Q. Wilson can teach us about the fight over criminal justice today. Continue reading . . .
by Kent Scheidegger · Sep 1, 2021 10:14 am
The Metropolitan News-Enterprise has this story on George Gascón and a few other “woke” California District Attorneys supporting the murderer in the recent California Supreme Court case of People v. McDaniel. (See earlier posts on the decision here and here.) The Met is an LA legal paper, so the story focuses on Gascón and the criticism of his friend-of-the-murderer brief by former DA Steve Cooley, among others.
Former Los Angeles County District Attorney Steve Cooley, whose office in 2004 obtained a death sentence for double-murderer Donte McDaniel, has taken to task the county’s present chief prosecutor, George Gascón, for joining in an amicus curiae brief in support of that inmate, whose novel legal proposition, spurned last week by the California Supreme Court, would have resulted in the sentences of about 700 persons being upset.
by Kent Scheidegger · Aug 31, 2021 3:01 pm
In last week’s post, I noted the press report that two of Sen. Robert Kennedy’s children spoke in favor of the parole of assassin Sirhan Sirhan. Turns out those two were definitely not speaking for the family as a whole. AP reports:
BOSTON — Former congressman Joseph P. Kennedy II, the oldest son of Robert F. Kennedy, denounced the possible parole of the man convicted of killing his father in California in 1968.
“Two commissioners of the 18-member California Parole Board made a grievous error last Friday in recommending the release of the man who murdered my father,” Kennedy wrote in the emailed statement released Sunday. “I understand that there are differing views about ending the sentence of this killer, including within my own family. But emotions and opinions do not change facts or history.” Continue reading . . .
by Kent Scheidegger · Aug 27, 2021 3:40 pm
Sirhan Sirhan was deservedly sentenced to death for the assassination of Robert Kennedy. Regrettably, a double hit of judicial activism struck in 1972, saving him and many others from their deserved punishments. In February of that year, the California Supreme Court declared that capital punishment violated the California Constitution, brushing off the inconvenient truth that the constitutional convention had debated and voted on the precise question and decided it the other way.
A few months later, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that the way nearly all capital punishment statutes at the time gave wide-open discretion to the jury violated the United States Constitution. Only a year earlier, the high court had decided 6-3, in a thorough and scholarly opinion by Justice Harlan: “In light of history, experience, and the present limitations of human knowledge, we find it quite impossible to say that committing to the untrammeled discretion of the jury the power to pronounce life or death in capital cases is offensive to anything in the Constitution.” Had the Constitution been amended in the interim? No.
California had no life-without-parole alternative at the time, so all the death row inmates got life with parole, including Charles Manson and Sirhan Sirhan. But surely no parole board would actually let either of these two out, considering the magnitude of their crimes, right? Continue reading . . .
by Kent Scheidegger · Aug 26, 2021 3:25 pm
Press coverage of today’s California Supreme Court decision in People v. McDaniel is available from Don Thompson of the Associated Press, Bob Egelko of the San Francisco Chronicle, and Maura Dolan of the LA Times.
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