by Kent Scheidegger · Feb 6, 2020 10:21 am
I received the hard copies of the Fall 2019 issue of Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law, v. 17 no. 1, yesterday. It includes a symposium on capital punishment. My contribution is online here.
Mine is the sole pro-death-penalty contribution, but one is vastly better than none, and none is the norm for politically incorrect viewpoints in academia. I thank Doug Berman, who genuinely cares about diversity of viewpoint, for the invitation.
by Kent Scheidegger · Feb 5, 2020 2:42 pm
Yesterday’s News Scan noted the case of Texas quintuple murderer Able Ochoa. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals denied his stay request Monday. Now he has gone to the U.S. Supreme Court, case No. 19-7572, stay application 19A876.
The reason that the highest court of the land should stop the execution of long overdue justice for a man who murdered five people in his own family, including his two baby daughters, is that the prison wouldn’t let him make a video for his clemency application. Really, I’m not making that up.
by Kent Scheidegger · Feb 4, 2020 4:51 pm
The FBI released the Preliminary Semiannual Uniform Crime Report in late January. See the press release. For several years now, I have been comparing the one-year changes in California to the rest of the country for cities over 100,000, the only data released that lets us compare by state. See this post two years ago and this post four years ago.
The latest data are consistent with the overall trend, i.e., California is not sharing proportionately in the national drop in crime.
by Kent Scheidegger · Feb 4, 2020 1:31 pm
New York City has long been the exemplar of a big city that achieved big drops in it crime rate. Today, though, the NYPD released a disturbing report that crime in the month just ended is up nearly 17% over the same month the year before.
Robbery, burglary, assault, and grand larceny are all up substantially, and grand larceny auto is up a staggering 72%.
Murder is down 21% even though shootings are up 29%, prompting the Seinfeldian Question, “What’s up with that?”
by Kent Scheidegger · Jan 31, 2020 3:31 pm
The U.S. Supreme Court has released its calendar of March oral arguments. Only one is an actual criminal case.
On March 23, the joined cases of United States v. Briggs, No. 19-108 and United States v. Collins, No. 19-184 will address the statute of limitations for rape under military law.
by Kent Scheidegger · Jan 31, 2020 2:46 pm
Today’s “how not to do it” lesson comes from our neighbors to the north. Stephane Giroux reports for CTV in Montreal:
A parolee charged with murder had been allowed by his case manager to meet women for sex.
In 2004, Eustachio Gallese killed his wife, Chantale Deschenes, by beating her with a hammer before repeatedly stabbing her. A judge sentenced him to life in prison in 2006. After serving 15 years, in Sept. 2019, Gallese was granted day parole. Last week, while out on parole, Gallese entered a Quebec City hotel where 22-year-old sex worker Marylene Levesque gave massages. Police later arrested and charged him with her murder.
Gallese was on parole despite a moderate risk of reoffending, his case manager had written.
by Kent Scheidegger · Jan 30, 2020 11:52 am
In the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, Congress clamped down hard on repeated habeas corpus petitions by prisoners. Under 28 U.S.C. ยง2244(b), “second or successive” petitions are only allowed under very narrow circumstances.
But what happens if a prisoner obtains partial relief from his judgment and a new judgment is entered? Does that reset the petition counter to zero, giving him full range to attack the judgment on any ground?
by Kent Scheidegger · Jan 29, 2020 11:11 am
Bob Brody has this essay in the WSJ with the above title. The subtitle is “My great-grandfather refused to give $4 to a robber in 1926. Would I have done the same?”
by Kent Scheidegger · Jan 29, 2020 10:38 am
Incentives matter. Increase the likelihood or severity of the penalty for doing X and fewer people will do X. This is a basic principle of human behavior, yet the soft-on-crime crowd regularly insists that deterrence is useless (implying that criminals are mindless beasts, not fully human).
San Francisco has only one land boundary, with San Mateo County to the south. (SFO Airport is in San Mateo.) The differing approaches to auto burglary provide one more data point confirming what common sense tells us.
by Kent Scheidegger · Jan 28, 2020 11:25 am
For purposes of sentencing and immigration, federal courts must often categorize prior convictions from state courts to see if they qualify as “aggravated felonies” or “violent felonies.” The “categorical approach” is the method established by the Supreme Court that looks only at the elements of the crime under state law, not what the perpetrator actually did. It asks if it is possible to commit that crime in a way not included in the “generic” definition of the crime.
Concurring in an immigration case, USCA9 Judge Susan Graber “write[s] separately to add my voice to the substantial chorus of federal judges pleading for the Supreme Court or Congress to rescue us from the morass of the categorical approach. [Citations.] The categorical approach requires us to perform absurd legal gymnastics, and it produces absurd results.”
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