“Violence Interrupters” — A Story You Can’t Make Up

by · Dec 10, 2020 5:23 pm

What in the world is a “violence interrupter”? If you thought that might be a euphemism for a law enforcement officer—or maybe a prison guard—you’d be wrong. Here’s what Wikipedia says it is: “Violence interruption is a community-based approach to reducing communal and interpersonal violence that treats violence as a public health problem. Individuals providing violence interruption services are known as violence interrupters.” 

OK, sounds a little nutty but probably harmless  —  until you see the rest of it, courtesy of Steve Hayward’s note on PowerLine.

Continue reading . . .

Statutes of Limitations and Rape in the Military

by · Dec 10, 2020 10:34 am

The U.S. Supreme Court today upheld three court-martial convictions for rape, interpreting the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) statute of limitations in effect at the time as imposing no limit on rape prosecutions in the military. In the process, the Court found it unnecessary to decide whether the Eighth Amendment limitation of Coker v. Georgia (1977), forbidding the death penalty for rape, applies to the military. Continue reading . . .

Gascón Plans to Release Thousands of Criminals

by · Dec 9, 2020 2:07 pm

Newly elected Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascón told ABC News Monday that he estimates that his directive forbidding sentence enhancements for habitual felons will impact at least 20,000 cases.  Hans Bader writes in Liberty Unyielding that Gascón’s directive would prevent prosecutors in LA County from seeking the “increased penalties for repeat offenders who commit willful homicide, forcible rape, robbery and aggravated assault with a firearm,” approved when California voters adopted Proposition 8.

Continue reading . . .

LA’s New DA: Hugs for Thugs, Snubs for Victims

by · Dec 8, 2020 10:09 am

The new District Attorney for Los Angeles County yesterday issued a series of criminal-friendly policies. There is so much wrong with them, it will take multiple posts to describe it all. Among other things, the office will not seek any sentence enhancements under any circumstances, and the office will take the criminal’s side in seeking to remove already imposed enhancements in prior cases. That includes the ultimate sentence enhancement, capital punishment.

One of the things that strikes me about all the sentencing policy memos is how they almost completely ignore the victims of the crimes. Continue reading . . .

No New SCOTUS Cases Today

by · Dec 7, 2020 8:05 am

The U.S. Supreme Court issued an orders list from last week’s conference this morning, but it took up no new cases. On Friday, the Court took up one civil case.

The Court is hearing oral arguments this week, but no criminal cases are on the docket. Perhaps that comes under the “no news is good news” rubric.

A Teague Primer

by · Dec 4, 2020 4:46 pm

Before getting to the oral argument of December 2 in Edwards v. Vannoy, a basic explanation of the rule of Teague v. Lane is in order. To understand the rule, and to understand why it has an exception that is never met, one needs to know the background.

Before Teague, the Warren Court had established a three-prong test for when a rule would be applied retroactively to earlier cases. The Court was making up new rules at a brisk pace, so this question was important. The majority that created this approach to retroactivity, initially, was a coalition of the more pragmatic members of the liberal wing of the Court, including Chief Justice Warren and Justice Brennan, who saw non-retroactivity as a way to reduce resistance to changes they thought were needed, and the relatively conservative justices who saw it “as a way of limiting the reach of decisions that seemed to them fundamentally unsound,” as Justice Harlan put it in his separate opinion in Mackey v. United States, 401 U.S. 667, 676 (1971). Continue reading . . .

What Ramos v. Louisiana Says About Its Own Retroactivity

by · Dec 4, 2020 1:29 pm

Last April 20, the U.S. Supreme Court decided in Ramos v. Louisiana that juries must be unanimous in state criminal trials, contrary to the result reached by a splintered Court in 1972 in a pair of cases, Apodaca v. Oregon, 406 U.S. 404 and Johnson v. Louisiana, 406 U.S. 356. Those two states continued to allow convictions by juries split 10-2 or 11-1 in reliance on those decisions for many years, although the voters of Louisiana changed to a unanimity requirement for future trials in the 2018 election.

What about cases tried before Ramos ? On the day of the decision, this seemed like an easy question. Under well-established Supreme Court precedent, those cases of nonunanimous verdicts still pending their initial appeal would be reversed, but that would not be a ground for a collateral attack (i.e., habeas corpus or an equivalent procedure) for old cases that were tried and became final in accordance with what had been the law at the time. Indeed, the several opinions in Ramos itself either said or clearly implied as much. Continue reading . . .

The Danger of Introducing New Factual Claims at the Supreme Court Level

by · Dec 3, 2020 3:13 pm

Yesterday, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral argument in Edwards v. Vannoy, No. 19-5807, on the retroactivity of the unanimous jury requirement of Ramos v. Louisiana. See this post from the day the Court took up the case. I will have much more to say on the law of retroactivity in a later post, but for now I want to call attention to an alarming practice that the Supreme Court should squash — introducing new factual claims at the Supreme Court level with no realistic opportunity for the other side to challenge them. Continue reading . . .

Get Used to Increased Crime

by · Dec 3, 2020 2:02 pm

For months local news outlets have been reporting on a spike in shootings and homicides in large American cities, often with experts attributing it to the pandemic and the unrest following the death of George Floyd.  But with most businesses closed and most people staying home shouldn’t there be less violent crime?  George Floyd’s death was in May, and while there are still sporadic protests in places like Portland and Seattle, this does not explain the reported 728 people shot in Philadelphia in the month of November, the highest number of Los Angeles murders in a decade, the 26% homicide increase in Nashville, or the 38% increase in Sacramento.

Continue reading . . .