Study: 40% of Fatal Car Crash Victims Are Stoned

According to the American Journal of Public Health 62 million Americans aged 12 or older are using marijuana, and the market for the drug has reached nearly $40 billion.  The increase in marijuana use corresponds with the effort to legalize it, which has now occurred in 38 states and U.S. territories.  The impact of the drug on public health has become difficult to ignore with numerous studies documenting the negative effects both psychological and physical which are common among regular users. One of those negative impacts is fatal vehicle accidents. A Wright State University study published in the Journal of the American College of Surgeons reports that more than 40% of those who die in car crashes have high levels of THC, the compound in marijuana what makes users high. The average blood level in fatal accident victims was 30.7 ng/ML.  The legal limit among states which have legalized marijuana for recreational use ranges from 2 to 5 ng/ML.  This suggests that users involved in car crashes had smoked or ingested the drug shortly before getting behind the wheel, or while they were driving. Money is driving the marijuana industry’s continued push for more states and the federal government to legalize the drug for recreational use although at least half of the marijuana currently sold in the U.S. is on the black market. It was a mistake for America to start down this path and it’s costing people’s lives.

New Cases for the New Term

The U.S. Supreme Court’s term begins Monday. As usual, the court held a conference the Monday before to discuss which cases to take up from the long list that accumulated over the summer. A short list of cases taken was released this morning. A long list of orders from the conference will be released Monday. In past years the opening Monday orders list has typically had a long list of denials and no additional grants. Update (10/6): As expected, the Monday orders list has no additional grants.

Today’s list has five cases taken up, all civil cases, and only one even tangentially related to crime. This continues a disturbing pattern of disinterest in fixing the massive number of precedents in criminal law and procedure that are clearly wrong under the current doctrine of interpreting the Constitution according to its original understanding.

The tangentially related case is Wolford v. Lopez, AG of Hawaii, No. 24-1046. This is a gun control case regarding controlled carry on private property. Three years ago, the Supreme Court issued a major decision regarding the Second Amendment and original understanding (or “text, history, and tradition”) in N.Y. State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen, 597 U.S. 1 (2022). Major decisions always involve a lot of detail-filling in the years following. In Wolford, the petitioner asked the high court to review two questions. It took one of them: Continue reading . . .

Walters: Newsom Delusional on Cal. Mask Law

Dan Walters has this column at CalMatters on California Governor Newsom, masked ICE officers, and the recently enacted state statute on masking. “Newsom and any other critics of ICE tactics are delusional if they believe federal officers will be arrested and prosecuted for wearing masks after SB 627 takes effect.” The column headline, probably written by an editor and not by Walters, is oddly equivocal: “Court rulings cast doubt on California mask ban for federal officers.” Walters doesn’t say the ban is in doubt. He says there is no way it will be enforced. Continue reading . . .

Guardsmen as Cops

Barry Latzer and Peter Moskos have this article in the National Review. Sending in the National Guard for law enforcement has some benefits, but it is not an optimum solution.

But there are limits to what soldiers can do.

First, troops do not have police powers and cannot enforce laws or arrest lawbreakers. They are not trained in the chain-of-custody protocols needed for evidence preservation. Nor can they do the detective work needed to track down suspects.

Second, national guardsmen cannot prepare a case for the prosecutor. This is a vital job for which the police have training. Cops are taught how to interview victims and other witnesses, gather physical evidence, and preserve the chain of custody, and then testify in court to help obtain a conviction. Soldiers can’t do this, and without convictions, offenders cannot be sentenced and incarcerated for their crimes.

Continue reading . . .

Exposing the Big Lie

The assassination of Charlie Kirk on September 10 by the radicalized 22-year-old boyfriend of a transgender male roommate has become a polarizing event eclipsing even last year’s attempted assassination of Donald Trump at a campaign rally. The day after the shooting MSNBC commenter Matthew Dowd said in an on-air interview that Kirk had been “one of the most divisive, especially divisive younger figures in this, who is constantly sort of pushing this sort of hate speech or sort of aimed at certain groups. You can’t stop with these sort of awful thoughts you have and then saying these awful words and not expect awful actions to take place.”  A day later Dowd was fired for making that statement. On his late night September 15 show, host Jimmy Kimmel told his audience “The MAGA Gang [is] desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.”  Two days later ABC announced it was pulling Kimmel’s show off the air indefinitely after two of ABC’s largest broadcast networks reported they would no longer air it.

Continue reading . . .

Why is America No Longer Safe?

In recent weeks, crime has become the central topic of debate among politicians and the major media. The President is responsible for this. Crime was a primary issue in his campaign and helped get him elected. His decision to deploy the national guard to augment police in Washington, DC and send troops to assist the ICE removal of illegal alien criminals in Los Angeles has been met with harsh criticism by democrats who continue to claim that crime is not a serious problem. While crime rates are lower than during the Black Lives Matter crime explosion of 2020, the 283 murders in Chicago and 186 in New York City this year represent crisis-level violence to most people. The New York Post reports that on September 1, a stolen car pulled up to a popular deli in the Bronx at 7:30 PM and two young black men jumped out and opened fire, killing one and injuring four. All of the suspects were arrested, including a 16-year-old. A week earlier, a 15-year-old repeat offender on an ankle monitor was arrested by New York police for killing a man during a botched robbery. On August 23, four young black men, including a 16-year-old, were arrested for shooting up a basketball tournament at a New York park, killing one and injuring three others , including a 17-year-old girl currently fighting for her life from a gunshot to the face. Is anyone surprised that many New Yorkers don’t feel safe?

Continue reading . . .

CA Legislature is Clueless on Crime

Last November over 68% of California voters announced that they wanted state law enforcement to crack-down on thieves, drug dealers and addicts.  Proposition 36 passed in all 58 counties including the liberal strongholds of San Francisco, Marin and Los Angeles. The measure was opposed by the democrat party, almost every democrat in the Legislature, the Governor, Secretary of State, Attorney General and every liberal/progressive public interest and non-profit organization in the state.  It mandated that habitual thieves and drug dealers be charged with felonies and that drug addicts arrested for a third time for drug possession be ordered into either treatment or jail.  So how did democrat lawmakers react? Earlier this year Assemblywoman Sade Elhawary, who represents gang-infested South Central Los Angeles, introduced a bill that ABC News reports would allow habitual felons to go into a rehab program rather than jail or prison. This bill,  AB 1231, the Safer Communities Through Opportunities Act, is a direct rebuke of the California voters, including several million democrats who voted for Proposition 36.  In July during the budget process, media exposure shamed Elhawary and her colleagues in the Legislature into approving a one-time set aside of 1/4 of the funds needed annually to allow counties to fully enforce Proposition 36.  Now they are considering a bill allowing judges to completely ignore it and let the criminals go.  In order to actually restore public safety in California, at the 2026 election voters must burst the bubble that the democrat majority of the state legislature are living in by removing them from office.

Back-from-the-Dead Attack on Habeas Corpus Reform

Like a bad horror movie, a monster we thought we had killed in a past episode is back. The monster is the notion that the most important element of Congress’s 1996 reform of federal habeas corpus violates Article III of the Constitution because it binds federal courts to state courts’ interpretation of the Constitution, precluding the federal court from exercising independent judgment. In a nutshell, the law requires that when a defendant’s constitutional claim has been decided on the merits in state court, a federal court is precluded from nullifying that judgment on habeas corpus unless the state court was clearly wrong based on U.S. Supreme Court precedent.

In 1998, Columbia Law Review published an issue devoted to habeas corpus. James Liebman and William Ryan advanced the thesis described above in “Some Effectual Power”: The Quantity and Quality of Decisionmaking Required of the Federal Courts, 98 Colum. L. Rev. 696. I wrote the response article, Habeas Corpus, Relitigation, and The Legislative Power, 98 Colum. L. Rev. 888.

The Supreme Court resolved the issue in Williams v. Taylor, 529 U.S. 362, 411 (2000). The resolution left a lot to be desired, but the result was that 28 U.S.C. § 2254(d) was enforced as the major reform it was intended to be, not watered down to a minor change based on the supposed constitutional limitation. Continue reading . . .

Compulsory Drug Treatment

As I have noted before on this blog (see, e.g., this post) a major part of the homelessness problem is addiction. Charles Lehman has an article at City Journal titled Compulsory Drug Treatment Works: Activists who say otherwise hide their views behind a cloak of scientific objectivity.

The actual state of the research is not as definitive as that title implies. A big part of the difficulty in evaluating efficacy is the lack of a good comparison group, and there is disagreement as to what comparison is appropriate. Do people compelled to accept treatment do as well as those who seek it out? A “no” answer to that question would prove nothing, as the seekers had a better attitude out of the gate. The actual evidence is mixed.

Is compulsory treatment better than no treatment at all? Lehman cites a couple of studies that find an improvement while conceding that there is a selection bias problem in these studies as well. Random and quasi-random assignment studies are better, and they provide some evidence of a benefit. Continue reading . . .