After 36 Years, Utah Set to Execute Murderer

by · Jan 18, 2024 4:03 pm

Utah is preparing to execute Ralph Leroy Menzies for the 1986 robbery and murder of Maurine Hunsaker. Scott Pierce of the Salt Lake City Tribune reports that after decades of appeals, Menzies has run out of further opportunities to delay his execution. This morning the Utah Attorney General asked a District Court Judge to sign an order for Menzies’ execution by firing squad. While that method of execution was Menzies choice, in December he and three other condemned murderers claimed that it was cruel and unusual punishment which violates the Eighth Amendment. That claim was rejected. It would be the first time a murderer has been executed in Utah since 2010.

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The Persistent Myths of Mass Incarceration

by · Jan 18, 2024 1:41 pm

Professor Paul Robinson and a fellow colleague from Penn have posted an in-depth article that is worth a read.  The abstract, sans the roadmap:

Few claims have won such widespread acceptance in legal academia as the “mass incarceration” narrative: the idea that the rise in America’s prison population over the last half century was fueled largely by the needless and unjust imprisonment of millions of criminal offenders due to punitive changes in sentencing. To many academics and activists, the question is not how accurate the mass incarceration narrative is, but how mass incarceration can be ended. This Article argues the “mass incarceration” narrative is based on a series of myths and, as a result, many proposed reforms are based on a misunderstanding of America’s past and present carceral practices. A more accurate understanding is needed to produce effective reform.

The central myth of the mass incarceration narrative is that exceptional and unjustified punitiveness largely explains America’s significant increase in prison population since the 1960s. This explanation overlooks the numerous non-sentencing factors that increased incarceration: a near doubling in U.S. population, higher crime rates, increased justice system effectiveness, deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill, new and tightened criminalizations, worsening criminal offender histories, and more. While this Article makes no attempt at statistical precision, these non-sentencing factors can easily explain most of America’s elevated incarceration compared to the 1960s—a fact in direct conflict with the mass incarceration narrative. Additionally, while some punishments have increased in severity since the 1960s, most of these increases are likely to be seen as moving sentences closer to what the community – and many incarceration reformers – would believe is appropriate and just, as in cases of sexual assault, domestic violence, stalking, human trafficking, firearm offenses, and child pornography, among others. Continue reading . . .

More on the Grants Pass Case

by · Jan 17, 2024 10:13 am

The U.S. Supreme Court’s agreement last Friday to review an appeal by the City of Grants Pass challenging a Ninth Circuit ruling which is blocking the enforcement of ordinances prohibiting camping on streets and in parks, has garnered national attention. While that ruling (Martin v. City of Boise) only affects the nine western states in the Ninth Circuit, twenty states have submitted argument to the high court seeking to overturn the Martin ruling in the case of City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, including Texas, Oklahoma and Florida. CJLF has filed a brief in that case and Legal Director Kent Scheidegger was a guest yesterday’s John Kobylt show, the most listened to talk radio broadcast in Los Angeles, to discuss it. Here’s the link to the podcast. The interview is at 24 minutes into hour 2 of the show.

DOJ to Seek Death Penalty for Buffalo Mass Murderer

by · Jan 16, 2024 9:39 am

Payton Gendron, the 18-year-old who murdered 10 people at the Tops Grocery Store in Buffalo in May 2022, is facing federal murder and hate crime charges which, if convicted could result in a death sentence. Greg Norman of Fox News reports reports that Gendron’s case will be the first time Attorney Merrick Garland’s Justice Department has decided to seek or uphold a death sentence since it defended Boston Bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s  conviction and death sentence in 2021. Under Garland’s leadership, the DOJ has withdrawn from seeking the death penalty in over two dozen federal murder cases. As with the Boston Bomber case (United States v. Tsarnaev) the Attorney General’s decision  appears to be political. Gendron has already been convicted of the murders in New York and is serving a life without parole sentence.  He has agreed to plead guilty to the federal charges in exchange for another life sentence.

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Labs, Experts, and the Confrontation Clause

by · Jan 10, 2024 4:29 pm

The U.S. Supreme Court today heard oral argument in the case of Smith v. Arizona, No. 22-899. Docket is here. Audio and transcript are here.

It has been 20 years since the high court overhauled its approach to the Sixth Amendment right to confront witnesses in Crawford v. Washington, and this is the fourth time it has addressed the application of that approach to expert testimony about lab results without the technician who did the tests being present and available for cross-examination.

Under Federal Rule of Evidence 703 and equivalent rules adopted in most states, an expert can give an opinion based on facts that would not otherwise be admissible in evidence if they are facts that would normally be relied on by experts in that field. How that squares with the Sixth Amendment has not yet been made clear. Continue reading . . .

Supreme Court Conference

by · Jan 5, 2024 3:16 pm

The U.S. Supreme Court held its first conference of 2024 today. The Court issued three orders after the conference, two of which took up new cases for briefing and argument. One order granted a stay in an abortion case from Idaho and took the case up. Another order took up and fast-tracked the Trump disqualification controversy.

Sometimes the Court issues a short order list of cases granted on the day of the conference and a long list of cases denied on the following Monday. Other times it issues a single list with both on Monday.

Given the unusual nature of both cases taken up today and the need for rapid action, this does not look like the typical short Friday order list situation. I expect that Monday’s list with have both grants and denials.

There were two cases scheduled for today’s conference where CJLF wrote or assisted with a brief: Grants Pass v. Johnson, involving the Ninth Circuit’s theory that the Eighth Amendment severely limits cities’ ability to ban camping on public property, and Glossip v. Oklahoma, involving repeated attacks on a murder conviction. Continue reading . . .

Federal Tax Dollars Fund Woke Criminal Justice Reform

by · Jan 3, 2024 2:46 pm

Roughly $1.27 million in federal American Rescue Plan Act dollars is being spent to support alternatives to law enforcement in Wichita, Kansas. The Act was passed out of Congress and signed by President Biden in 2021 on the fiction that the $1.9 trillion slush fund would be spent to help the country recover from the Covid-19 pandemic. Chance Swaim of The Wichita Eagle reports that the Wichita interrupter program will be run by the non-profit Community Restorative Innovation and will send counselors and “violence interrupters” into high crime neighborhoods to implement the Cure Violence model, which treats violent crime as a public health problem which can be reduced through education, counseling and encouragement.  The same model has been utilized in Chicago for 24 years.  How has that been working out?

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