Domestic Violence and Lockdowns
Kate Snow reports for NBC News on concerns over domestic violence during the lockdown. Continue reading . . .
Category: General
Elon Thoreau Musk?
You find civil disobedience in the strangest places these days. Tim Higgins reports in the WSJ: Continue reading . . .
SCOTUS Takes Up Computer “Fraud” Case
The U.S. Supreme Court today took up the case of Van Buren v. United States, No. 19-783. The case involves a law enacted to prohibit computer hacking but which can be, and by some courts has been, interpreted to make a crime out of a mere breach of contract. Continue reading . . .
No, misuse of ID info is not shoplifting
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.
A Belated Lesson From a Murdered Ancestor
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?”
Frisco County Line
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.
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