by Kent Scheidegger · Oct 28, 2022 10:01 am
The WSJ has this report on the break-in of Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s home and attack on her husband, Paul Pelosi. It appears at this time that the attack was politically motivated. “The intruder shouted, ‘Where is Nancy?’ before attacking her husband, one of the officials said.” Continue reading . . .
by Kent Scheidegger · Oct 13, 2022 2:45 pm
For the sentencing phase of capital cases, some states have true unanimous verdict laws. The jury must deliberate until it is unanimous one way or the other, just as they do in the guilt phase. If they are truly hung, the penalty trial is done over before another jury. California and Arizona have true unanimity laws.
Unfortunately, when Florida rewrote its sentencing law in the wake of a Supreme Court decision throwing out the old one, the Legislature unwisely chose a single-juror-veto law. In this system, if the jury votes 11-1 for the death penalty, the view of the one prevails over the view of the eleven, and the defendant gets a life sentence. That system introduces needless arbitrariness into sentencing, as the luck of getting one juror who has hard-core anti-death-penalty views (and possibly lied on voir dire) or who is willing to accept claimed mitigation that most people reject will result in a life sentence for one defendant under circumstances where others will be sentenced to death. Continue reading . . .
by Kent Scheidegger · Sep 16, 2022 9:29 am
Karen Bass, a member of Congress and candidate for LA Mayor, was the victim of a home burglary recently. KTTV has this interview.
Ms. Bass says “my safety was shattered” and describes returning home to find the house burgled as “traumatic.” But isn’t burglary a “non-violent property crime”? Aren’t people who commit such crimes nearly harmless, to be handled with kid gloves and let off lightly? That’s what the folks on Ms. Bass’s side of the aisle have been telling us for years, and California has seen a cascade of laws designed to water down the consequences of committing such crimes. Continue reading . . .
by Bill Otis · May 11, 2022 3:45 pm
After the unprecedented leak of a draft of a possible SCOTUS decision on the case overruling Roe v. Wade, pro-abortion activists have decided it would be a good idea to flock en masse outside the neighborhood homes of the Justices to make sure they know that, if the “wrong” decision were handed come late June, they would, in Chuck Schmer’s words, “pay the price.”
Gathering in menacing mobs at the homes of Justices has been defended by exactly those people who, for four years, were loudly aghast at the “breaking of norms.” But as it turns out, the mob activity is not merely disgusting but illegal — or at least such is the view of that right-wing rag, the Washington Post. Its article is quoted in part below.
by Bill Otis · Mar 10, 2022 5:58 pm
CNN has this story about today’s sentencing of actor Jussie Smollett. He was given 30 months of felony probation, ordered to pay restitution of more than $120,000 and a $25,000 fine and spend 150 days in jail for making false reports to police that he was the victim of a hate crime in January 2019. In fact, Smollett himself hired two men he knew to stage the “attack” so that he could go on the now routine diatribe about how Amerika is a racist and homophobic cesspool. One might think he was trying out for a spot in the administration of an Ivy League college.
Mr. Smollett’s performance today did not disappoint.
by Bill Otis · Jan 13, 2022 6:38 pm
Baltimore is a disaster area for its grotesque number of murders. Almost all the victims are black. The police force, at one time at least marginally effective, has been cowed ever since the Freddie Gray indictments. In that case from 2015, the State’s Attorney charged six police officers with a variety of offenses stemming from the death, in police custody, of Mr. Gray, a small-time (though repeat) drug dealer. The state obtained exactly zero convictions on any of the counts against any of the officers, but the damage to desperately needed robust policing was done.
The State’s Attorney responsible for that debacle of a prosecution and the consequent cratering of police morale is Marilyn Mosby. I blogged about Mosby’s startling incompetence and leftist political grandstanding many times (too many to go back and retrieve right now).
Today Ms. Mosby was indicted by the Biden Justice Department for lying and cheating in order to get her hands on moola sufficient to finance — ready now? — a fancy rental property in Florida.
For those of you still wondering about the true mindset of “prosecutors” who favor the interests of hoodlums over those of ordinary citizens, welcome to the window into the deeper-than-you-thought embrace of criminality that this case gives us. It shouldn’t come as a surprise. Continue reading . . .
by Bill Otis · Dec 9, 2021 4:33 pm
Black actor Jusse Smollett was found guilty today by a Chicago jury of lying to police when he reported being the victim of a hate crime in the early morning hours of a frigid night near his apartment almost three years ago. As the WSJ reports, “Mr. Smollett was the star of the hit show ‘Empire’ when he told police that two men had used racist, antigay language and a pro-Trump slogan before hitting and kicking him and placing a noose around his neck around 2 a.m. on Jan. 29, 2019.”
According to the jury, the whole thing was made up, as (necessarily) was Smollett’s trial testimony, plus numerous of his public statements reiterating his “victimhood.”
by Michael Rushford · Dec 1, 2021 3:20 pm
As if we already did not know this, but sometimes the national media exposes itself so blatantly it defies logic. Jason Riley has this piece in the Wall Street Journal discussing the amazing double standard in the way the national media covered the death of George Floyd, the Rittenhouse case and the Waukesha massacre. “The protests that followed Floyd’s death rested on two assumptions. The first is that Floyd, a career criminal and drug addict, was somehow representative of black America, which is not only false but deeply insulting. The second is that police acted out of racial animus, which has never been proven. This is what happens when racial identity becomes the centerpiece of politics and public life in a multiracial society.” But that was the prevailing narrative and the riots and murders swept the country in response to Floyd’s death were generally reported as justified. “The Biden administration has picked up where the Obama administration left off.” Although the criminals killed by Rittenhouse were white, he was immediately characterized as a racist white supremacist in “a clumsy attempt by President Biden and his allies to further a narrative about bias in the criminal justice system.”
by Kent Scheidegger · Nov 24, 2021 2:11 pm
The felony-murder rule, in effect in some form in most states, is the controversial rule that if a person is killed during the commission of certain felonies, all parties to the felony are guilty of murder of that person. The rule can be harsh in some applications, and I agree that some judicious pruning is in order in many jurisdictions, but many critics want to get rid of it altogether.
Here is the WSJ’s report of the today’s verdicts in the Ahmaud Arbery case:
Travis McMichael, 35, chased Mr. Arbery with his father, Gregory McMichael, 65, and William “Roddie” Bryan Jr., 52, in two pickup trucks on Feb. 23, 2020. Travis McMichael shot Mr. Arbery three times with a 12-gauge shotgun, killing him.
Travis McMichael was found guilty on all counts, including one count of malice murder and four counts of felony murder. Gregory McMichael was found guilty of four counts of felony murder and acquitted on a charge of malice murder. Mr. Bryan was convicted on three counts of felony murder and acquitted on malice murder and an additional felony murder charge.
Two of the three would have been acquitted of murder, and convicted only of non-homicide offenses, if Georgia did not have the felony-murder rule. Continue reading . . .
by Kent Scheidegger · Oct 25, 2021 10:43 am
Is the Federal Death Penalty Act’s evidence provision unconstitutional? Does the defendant have a constitutional right to introduce evidence of marginal probative value outweighed by other considerations, which the statute says the trial judge may exclude?
These are the surprising implications of the defense argument in the Boston Marathon Bomber case, argued in the U.S. Supreme Court October 13. I suppose if you are defending the indefensible you have to argue something. But it is surprising when a lawyer barely mentions the primary ground of the decision she is asking to have affirmed. Continue reading . . .
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