Crime and Consequences

Commentary on Baze: SCOTUSblog has posted a commentary by our own Kent Scheidegger on what the Court's opinions in Baze will mean for the states as they look to implementing death sentences. The commentary states that in the wake of Wednesday's opinions, the delay in executions "should be nearly over."

Crackdown on Sex Offenders: Sentencing Law and Policy posted a link to Stateline.org's article titled "Lawsuits test crackdown on sex offenders." The article gives summaries of some cases challenging state punishments for sex criminals pending in state and federal courts.

More on Kennedy v. Louisiana: Dan Slater at Wall Street Journal Law Blog posted yesterday on highlights from the oral arguments.

Posted by Lauren Altdoerffer at 03:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Nearly lost in the hubbub over Baze v. Rees were two federal sentencing decisions handed down by the high court this week. For those who practice mainly in the state courts, the results are less important than the statutory interpretation principles applied. These are likely to have persuasive value in state cases.

Rule of Lenity: In Burgess v. United States, the Court addressed when a prior is a "felony drug offense." It is a drug offense punishable by more than a year, even if the state that imposed it has an oddball rule where a defendant can get more than a year but it's still a misdemeanor. Why? Because Congress said so in a specific definition statute, and the specific controls more general language elsewhere. No surprise there. At the end of the opinion, the Court rejects the "rule of lenity" argument, saying the rule is simply inapplicable if the statute is not ambiguous. There are lots of other cites for that point, but a recent, unanimous Supreme Court decision by Justice Ginsburg is nice to have in the toolbox for it.

Watch those example lists: Begay v. United States is particularly important for those involved in drafting legislation, but also for those who must interpret it. Is DUI a "violent" offense for the purpose of the three-strikes provision of the Armed Career Criminal Act? On the word "violent" alone, I wouldn't have thought so. Is it "conduct that presents a serious potential risk of physical injury to another"? No doubt about it. Given that Congress defined "violent" as including any conduct of that type, that would seem to settle the matter. Justices Alito, Souter, and Thomas think so.

But hold on, says Justice Breyer for the majority. That general language is preceded by the specific offenses of "burglary, arson, or extortion, [or a crime that] involves use of explosives." So the general language refers only to crimes within its description that are similar in nature to those listed. "The listed crimes all typically involve purposeful, 'violent,' and 'aggressive' conduct." And, no, Justice Breyer doesn't resort to the rule of lenity. Justice Scalia would, but the majority specifically rejects the usage.

Posted by Kent Scheidegger at 03:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Execution on Hold. Although the U.S. Supreme Court upheld lethal injection to be constitutional, the Nevada Supreme Court will not lift a stay on a convicted murderer’s execution. AP writer Brendan Riley reports that a Nevada Supreme Court spokesman says the justices will review the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling. In the case of William Castillo, the state supreme court stopped his execution 90 minutes before he was to receive a lethal injection for beating a woman to death with a tire iron. Read more on this story here.

Special Order 40 Confusion to be Resolved. Richard Winton, LA Times staff writer,reports that LAPD Police Chief William Bratton said Wednesday that the department’s controversial policy dealing with illegal immigrants would be cleared up within the next few weeks. Special Order 40 was designed 29 years ago to “encourage illegal immigrants to cooperate with the police without fear of being deported.” This policy is being scrutinized after the killing of a teenager, Jamiel Shaw, by an alleged illegal immigrant gang member. Bratton believes the recent criticism is based on a faulty understanding of the rule.

Fighting Back: An employee of the Wah Fay liquor store in Oakland, California took an "old school" approach to combating armed robbery. He shot one of the robbers, reports Henry Lee in the SF Chron. Now let's see if the robber sues the employee or the store.

Posted by CJLF Staff at 11:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The August, 2007 issue of JLE is now available online. Two articles relate to criminal law: Is Crime Contagious? by Jens Ludwig and Jeffrey R. Kling and Heavy Alcohol Use and Crime: Evidence from Underage Drunk-Driving Laws by Christopher Carpenter. Abstracts after the jump.

Is Crime Contagious?
Jens Ludwig and Jeffrey R. Kling
The Journal of Law and Economics August 2007, Vol. 50, No. 3: 491-518.

Understanding whether criminal behavior is “contagious” is important for law enforcement and for policies that affect how people are sorted across social settings. We test the hypothesis that criminal behavior is contagious by using data from the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) randomized housing mobility experiment to examine the extent to which lower local area crime rates decrease arrest rates among individuals. Our analysis exploits the fact that the effect of treatment group assignment yields different types of neighborhood changes across the five MTO demonstration sites. We use treatment by site interactions as instruments for measures of neighborhood crime rates, poverty, and racial segregation in our analysis of individual arrest outcomes. We are unable to detect evidence in support of the contagion hypothesis. Neighborhood racial segregation appears to be the most important explanation for across-neighborhood variation in arrests for violent crimes in our sample, perhaps because drug market activity is more common in high-minority neighborhoods.

Heavy Alcohol Use and Crime: Evidence from Underage Drunk-Driving Laws
Christopher Carpenter
The Journal of Law and Economics August 2007, Vol. 50, No. 3: 539-557.

This paper provides new evidence on the causal effect of alcohol use and crime. I use variation induced by the adoption of strict zero-tolerance (ZT) drunk-driving laws, which significantly reduced binge drinking by males aged 18–20 years but did not affect slightly older males aged 22–24 years. I use age-specific arrest data for police agencies in metropolitan statistical areas to estimate the effect of ZT laws on crime, controlling for both year and police agency fixed effects. I find that ZT laws significantly increased the fraction of adult male arrests for driving under the influence attributable to 18–20-year-olds and decreased the fraction of nuisance and property crime arrests attributable to 18–20-year-olds, with no effects on violent crime. These results are validated by important null findings: ZT laws did not affect arrests in any crime category for males aged 22–24 years. These results suggest that heavy alcohol use causes the commission of property and nuisance crimes.

Posted by Kent Scheidegger at 08:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last October, the Supreme Court denied certiorari and a stay in Earl Berry's case from the Mississippi Supreme Court but then granted a stay in his federal § 1983 case from the Fifth Circuit. Previous posts are here and here. By its terms, that stay terminates automatically if the certiorari petition is denied.

Berry's certiorari petition, No. 07-7348, is now on conference for tomorrow. A decision on it will probably be announced Monday. Lyle Denniston at SCOTUSblog has this post and Berry's supplemental brief, noting differences between Mississippi's protocol and Kentucky's.

But the judgment Berry wants reviewed wasn't decided on the merits.

Berry was convicted of murder 19 years ago and resentenced to death over 15 years ago. His conviction and sentence became final upon the 7 October 2002 denial of certiorari by the United States Supreme Court. Only now, mere days before his scheduled execution, does Berry first challenge the execution protocol used in Mississippi. Our precedent requires the dismissal of “eleventh hour” dilatory claims such as Berry’s.

Berry v. Epps, USCA5 No. 07-70042 (Oct. 26, 2007).

That decision was correct the day it was issued, and it would have remained correct regardless of how Baze came out. The Supreme Court paralyzed capital punishment nationwide while it considered Baze in order to look dignified and not upset the witnesses. Cf. Baze, slip op. at 19 (lead opinion). The differences between Mississippi's protocol and Kentucky's do not warrant reviving a claim that the Fifth Circuit correctly held was untimely.

Denial of this petition Monday would be welcome signal that the de facto moratorium is truly over.

Jimmie Gates has this story in the Jackson Clarion-Ledger.

Posted by Kent Scheidegger at 03:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Judicial Thought Process: Ed Whelan at Bench Memos (NRO) posted a link to his review on Judge Posner's new book How Judges Think. The review strings together a series of seven comments on Posner's book, and ultimately argues that Posner has failed to make a case for legal pragmatism over legalism. Whelan's commentary on Chapter 10 of Posner's book, "The Supreme Court Is a Political Court", is particularly interesting. There, Whelan discusses whether a Justice's personal politics do actually interfere with his judicial findings.
More Baze: Orin Kerr at the Volokh Conspiracy posted these thoughts on yesterday's decision in Baze v. Rees.
Professor Denno on Baze: Capital Defense Weekly had this post on a quote from Fordham University's Professor Deborah Denno, one of the experts who testified in the Franklin Circuit court hearings on Kentucky's death penalty protocol. Fordham University School of Law also authored an Amicus brief on behalf of Petitioners.
Washington finds Blakely error not harmless: Sentencing Law and Policy has a post on today's Washington Supreme Court decision in State v.Recuenco, on remand from Washington v. Recuenco, 548 U.S. 212 (2006). The opinion holds that while the United States Supreme Court held in Washington v. Recuenco, that a Blakely-type error could be subject to harmless error analysis, Washington law did not permit harmless error analysis under the circumstances of this case. The Washington opinion can be found here.

Posted by Lauren Altdoerffer at 11:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

DNA samples will soon be taken on every person arrested by federal law enforcement officers according to this story by Washington Post writers Ellen Nakashima and Spencer Hsu, and another by AP writer Eileen Sullivan. The new authorization, part of the Violence Against Women Act, passed recently by Congress, may also allow samples to be taken of illegal aliens captured by border patrol agents.

Posted by CJLF Staff at 10:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Baze decision has extensive coverage in the news today. Here is a sampling:

Adam Liptak in the New York Times.
Jennifer McMenamin in the Baltimore Sun.
Debra Saunders in the San Francisco Chronicle.
David Savage in the Los Angeles Times.
A Florida-enhanced version of the LAT story in the Tampa Tribune with contribution by Valerie Kalfrin.
Kelley Shannon for AP in Austin.
Sean O'Sullivan in the Wilmington News Journal.
Heather Ratcliffe in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Posted by CJLF Staff at 09:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Baze is one of those dreaded splintered opinions where we will have to pick our way through to figure out what the law is for some time to come. Even so, there are a number of important points on which the Court not only has a coherent majority but actually is unanimous. These are worth noting.

The plaintiffs got no support for a standard of "unnecessary risk" in the sense that any method of execution could be challenged indefinitely into the future merely by showing that some other method had less risk of pain. Justice Ginsburg writes at page 4, "Proof of 'a slightly or marginally safer alternative' is, as the plurality notes, insufficient."

No one endorses the argument that monitoring by a person qualified to assess "anesthetic depth" is required. See petitioner's brief 57-59. The plurality recognizes the Catch-22 strategy of requiring the participation of people who are forbidden to participate and rejects it. No one on the Court disagrees.

No justice buys the argument that a single-drug protocol is constitutionally required. The contrary standard for human euthanasia in the Netherlands pretty well neutralized the veterinary standard argument. A comment in the Stevens opinion was the only positive mention of that argument, and both the plurality and Justice Breyer dismiss it.

All appear to be agreed that the three-drug protocol is clearly constitutional in those states that add a consciousness check after the pentothal injection. The main point of the dissent is to emphasize that such a check sharply reduces the chances of a "botched" execution. Kentucky and other states that do not yet have such a check would be well advised to add one.

Posted by Kent Scheidegger at 04:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

DNA testing methods are found “scientifically sound.” The Wales Government commissioned an independent study to test the reliability of low template (LCN) DNA testing as reported by Gavin O’Connor in the Western Mail. The test is considered accurate but recommendations were made for improving the collection and interpretation of samples. The soundness of LCN testing was questioned in December after one test wrongly linked a sample from a car bomb in Northern Ireland to a 14-year-old boy in Nottingham.

Virginia schedules an execution this May
Washington Post reporter Tim Craig writes that Virginia Gov. Timothy M. Kaine will proceed with executions now that the U.S Supreme Court has upheld lethal injections in Baze v. Rees. The state has set May 27 for the execution of Kevin Green, who was convicted of murdering a convenience store owner in 1998.

Kentucky improves child abuse law
WAVE 3 News reports that the statute will make it a felony to sexually abuse a child up to 16 years of age. The law extends the victim's age to 18 if the abuser is an authority figure. The law also allows victims to report the crime within five years of their 18th birthday.

Supervisor found guilty of sexually assaulting inmates
Jon Cassidy of the Orange County Register reports that animal shelter supervisor Frank Bojorquez Jr., 55, has been convicted of sexually assaulting six female inmates assigned to the shelter as part of their sentence. Bojorquez, who will be sentenced on May 30, is facing 33 years in prison for six felonies and five misdemeanors. The six victims testified that they feared no one would believe them if they reported the crime.

Posted by CJLF Staff at 01:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

U.S. Supreme Court Opinions: SCOTUSblog has posts on the U.S. Supreme Court decisions released today. Today the Court announced rulings in Begay v. United States, Baze v. Rees, and Burgess v. United States. Lyle Denniston's in-depth post on the opinion in Baze can be found here, and a quick summary of Breyer's majority opinion in Begay can be found here.

Kennedy v. Louisiana: Today the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Kennedy, a case addressing Louisiana's implementation of the death penalty for child rape. Corey Rayburn Yung's summary of the arguments can be found at Sex Crimes Blog.

Concurring Opinions: Dave Hoffman at Concurring Opinions has an interesting post comparing Stevens' and Scalia's concurring opinions in Baze. Both Scalia and Stevens address whether empirical studies support the deterrence theory of capital punishment. Stevens notes recent scholarship supporting the deterrent effect but then claims, without explanation, that the criticisms of those studies constitute "an equal, if not greater, amount of scholarship." Scalia asserts the Court cannot rely on empirical studies when making this judgment - at least not yet. Hoffman says, "Justice Scalia has the better of the argument here."

Giles Preview: Richard Friedman at The Confrontation Blog has this post on an article he wrote for the ABA's Preview of United States Supreme Court Cases. Giles will be argued on April 22 and addresses whether an accused forfeits his right to confront a witness who would have testified against him if he murders the witness. Friedman is an amicus in Giles, taking the unusual posture of supporting the petition for certiorari at the petition stage but supporting the respondent on the merits. His article can be found here.

Posted by Lauren Altdoerffer at 11:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My written statement on the death penalty to the California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice is now available here.

Posted by Kent Scheidegger at 10:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Supreme Court decided the lethal injection case, Baze v. Rees today. The opinion is here. There is no majority, but I expect the plurality opinion by Chief Justice Roberts will be treated as the authoritative word. A couple of key passages:

Accordingly, we reject petitioners’ proposed “unnecessary risk” standard, as well as the dissent’s “untoward” risk variation. See post, at 2, 11 (opinion of Ginsburg, J.) [footnote omitted]

Instead, the proffered alternatives must effectively address a “substantial risk of serious harm.” Farmer, supra, at 842. To qualify, the alternative procedure must be feasible, readily implemented, and in fact significantly reduce a substantial risk of severe pain. If a State refuses to adopt such an alternative in the face of these documented advantages, without a legitimate penological justification for adhering to its current method of execution, then a State’s refusal to change its method can be viewed as “cruel and unusual” under the Eighth Amendment. [footnote omitted]

Slip op. at 11-12.

A stay of execution may not be granted on grounds such as those asserted here unless the condemned prisoner establishes that the State’s lethal injection protocol creates a demonstrated risk of severe pain. He must show that the risk is substantial when compared to the known and available alternatives. A State with a lethal injection protocol substantially similar to the protocol we uphold today would not create a risk that meets this standard.

Slip op. at 22 (emphasis added)

Posted by Kent Scheidegger at 07:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Social Science Journal: Psychology and Crime News posted comments on three Social Science Journal articles that addressed: homicide in the southern United States, individual perceptions and how they affect hate crime legislation, and a study on whether capital murderers (murderers who are executed) were “more likely to murder or commit other violent crimes again” if they had not been executed, compared to "other murderers or the average citizen."

Arguing for a Windfall: Orin Kerr at Volokh Conspiracy had this amusing post on the Ninth Circuit's decision to deny a criminal defendant's request for all of the money listed in his presentencing report. The defendant had been convicted for his role in an ecstasy ring, and the presentencing report stated $485,000 had been found on his dresser. The government claimed the $485,000 was a typo, and only $485 had been found on the dresser. The defendant argued the government was estopped from making this argument since he had been sentenced using the larger number.

Justice Department and Wesley Snipes: In a sentencing report released today the Justice Department argued that Wesley Snipes should be sentenced to three years in prison for failing to file income tax returns. The Blog of the LegalTimes post has more details. It's April 15th... think this request for a three year prison penalty might have been strategically planned by the Justice Department...

Posted by Lauren Altdoerffer at 03:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The U.S. Supreme Court celebrated Tax Filing Day by filing two tax opinions. Lyle Denniston discusses them at SCOTUSblog.

This is also National Crime Victims' Rights Week. Perhaps the Court could celebrate that by deciding Baze v. Rees and bringing to an end the de facto moratorium on justice in the worst murder cases that the Court has imposed since last fall. Among the rights of victims of crime and their families is the right to proceedings free from unreasonable delay, and that includes federal habeas corpus. See 18 U.S.C. § 3771 (a)(7) & (b)(2)(A).

Speaking of delay, the high court yesterday denied certiorari in the case of Fields v. Ayers, No. 07-8724. Stevie Fields is on California's death row for a "one man crime wave" in 1978. His conviction and sentence were affirmed on direct appeal in 1983. Since then, there has been a quarter century of collateral review of a case with no question of guilt. A previous post on this exemplar of overdue process is here.

"The Supreme Court said Monday it would take up a Los Angeles case to decide whether a chief prosecutor can be held liable for a man's wrongful conviction of murder." David Savage has this story in the LA Times on Van de Kamp v. Goldstein, No. 07-854.

Tony Mauro has this post at BLT on the unusual circumstance of the Court hearing two cases on the same day where the United States had declined to defend a judgment in its favor and the Court appointed an amicus to argue in support of the decision below. Defending a position the SG has abandoned is usually a lost cause, but Mauro thinks these two have a shot.

Posted by Kent Scheidegger at 09:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Stop the presses. A politician has wildly exaggerated.

“If you take a one-eighth square mile which is generally the size of a city block in most cities, and you end up with one foreclosure on that city block, two things happen immediately,” [Sen. Christopher] Dodd told two separate radio interviewers. “The value of every other home on that city block declines by 1% immediately, and the crime rates go up 2% immediately in that square block.”

An immediate 2% increase from one foreclosure? Oh, come now. Mark Lieberman, senior economist at Fox Business, dissects this claim here.

Posted by Kent Scheidegger at 08:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Ed Silverman over at Pharmalot notes that the Supreme Court denied cert. in the "Zoloft Defense" case, Pittman v. South Carolina.

From the New York Times article linked at Pharmalot:

The Supreme Court declined on Monday to hear an appeal from a South Carolina teenager who was sentenced to 30 years in prison for killing his grandparents with a shotgun when he was 12 years old....

The “Zoloft defense” was hotly debated at the time of his trial in February 2005. Shortly before the killings of Nov. 28, 2001, the 12-year-old Christopher had begun taking Zoloft that was prescribed. His parents had taken him to Chester County, S.C., to live with his grandparents, Joe and Joy Pittman, because he was having trouble at home in Florida...

Christopher waited for his grandparents to go to bed, then loaded a shotgun, entered their bedroom and shot them to death in their bed. He then lit several candles and positioned them in an apparent attempt to burn the house down, court records recounted. Then he took some money, weapons and his dog and drove off in his grandparents’ car.

The next morning, two hunters found Christopher wandering in the woods. He told them that he had been kidnapped by a black man who had slain his parents and set their house ablaze, but that he had been able to escape. The hunters, who were members of the Corinth Fire Department, took him to a fire station and alerted the police.

As the police were searching futilely for a black suspect, examinations of the crime scene and the vehicle that Christopher had taken turned suspicion toward him. After being told his Miranda rights, he confessed and was convicted of murder and arson on Feb. 15, 2005.

Afterward, a juror said the jury had agreed that Zoloft might have affected Christopher’s behavior, but not enough to impel him to kill.

SCOTUSblog also has brief coverage.

Posted by Steven K. Erickson at 05:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

The reasons for the United States' crime drop in the 1990s have been the subject of considerable debate. As noted here, tough sentencing policies are one major reason, with even the anti-punishment side's experts grudgingly conceding that tough sentencing caused more than a quarter of the drop. Other estimates are higher.

One of the most controversial* hypotheses is that of Donohue and Levitt that the legalization of abortion by the Supreme Court's decision in Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973) was actually a major factor. See Donohue & Levitt (2001) The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2, 379-420.

A new study of English data challenges that hypothesis.

This post on Vox, a European economics and policy blog, is by Leo Kahane from Cal. State, David Paton from Nottingham, and Rob Simmons from Lancaster. They plot out crime data for the U.S. and for England & Wales** in years since legalization, normalized to the starting point. A drop in crime rates where the first post-legalization cohort reaches its peak crime years appears in the U.S. data but not the English data.

No response has been posted yet on the Freakonomics Blog, but we have probably not seen the end of debate on the question.

* "All the death threats I got came from the left and not from the right." -- Steven Levitt.

** In the U.K., crime data for Scotland and Northern Ireland are tabulated separately. England and Wales together are one unit.

Posted by Kent Scheidegger at 04:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

A New York Times Editorial directed me to a study published in Constitutional Commentary's Spring 2007 issue. The article, titled “An Empirical Analysis of the Confirmation Hearings of the Justices of the Rehnquist Natural Court”, comments on the correlation between a Supreme Court nominee's statements during Senate confirmation hearings, and the same Justice's Supreme Court voting decisions and opinions. The study focused on the years 1994-2005, a period where the same nine Justices served together, and examined the statements each Justice made during their confirmation hearings on the subjects of: (1) stare decisis; (2) commitment to originalism; (3) commitment to criminal defendants' rights; and (4) use of legislative history. The study then compared the statements made during hearings with the voting records of each of the Justices. Some interesting findings from the study can be found after the break. Interesting points: (1) Stare Decisis. Based on confirmation hearings comments, the study found Chief Justice Rehnquist had the "least commitment to precedent" and Justice Scalia and Ginsburg had the most. But in actual practice, it was the "conservative" Justices, Thomas, Scalia, Kennedy, Rehnquist and O'Connor, who were the most likely to alter precedent than the four "moderate/liberal" Justices: Breyer, Ginsburg, Stevens and Souter. Of the "conservative" Justices, Thomas led the pack with 23 out of 535 votes to alter precedent. Only O'Connor, Breyer and Ginsburg voted as their confirmation hearing statements indicated they would. (2) In the arena of criminal defendants' rights, the study examined whether those who expressed a strong preference for protecting criminal defendants' rights (such as Miranda, the exclusionary rule, etc.) were more likely to vote to protect criminal defendants. During confirmation hearings, O'Connor, Rehnquist and Kennedy appeared to have the least commitment to criminal defendants' rights, while Ginsberg, Stevens and Thomas appeared to have the most. In practice however, Thomas, Rehnquist and Scalia voted against the criminal defendant over 75% of the time. Justices Kennedy and O'Connor voted against the criminal defendant 68.7% and 66.4% of the time respectively. And Justice Stevens voted for the criminal defendant in 72.9% of the cases examined. The correlation between the Justices' comments at hearings and their voting record in the area of criminal rights was the strongest of the first three categories examined. Seven out of Nine Justices' voting decisions were in line with the statements made during confirmation. (3) Legislative history. The study's authors - Jason J. Czarnezki, William K. Ford, and Lori A. Ringhand - examined Justices' opinions as to the use of legislative history (with the exceptions of Kennedy and Stevens who were not questioned on legislative history during confirmation), and compared it to Justices' use of legislative history in his or her opinions. As the authors predicted from the comments made during confirmation, O'Connor was the most frequent user of legislative history. Justice Scalia was the least likely to use legislative history. The authors were surprised to find however, that while Justice Thomas had indicated he might accept particular forms of legislative history during his hearings, he cited to legislative history in only 17% of his opinions. The study concludes by stating that confirmation hearings have provided very little substantive information as to the nominee's future judicial behavior. The authors recommend that to fix this, Senators should focus on specific issues and refrain from asking "Big Picture" questions that allow nominees to offer vague responses. After reading the study I found it interesting that the authors used the phrase "altered precedent" to describe how the "conservative" Justices (Chief Justice Rehnquist, Justices Scalia, O'Connor, Kennedy and Thomas) had voted. I would be curious to know how many of the votes to overturn or "alter" precedent were cast to overturn decisions of the more liberal Burger and Warren Courts.

Posted by Lauren Altdoerffer at 12:12 PM | Permalink

Rape and the Death Penalty. Wednesday the United States Supreme Court will determine if a state law which allowed a child rapist to receive a death sentence is constitutional. The case of Kennedy v. Louisiana, (see blog scan April 10), involves the death sentence that Patrick Kennedy received for raping his 8-year-old stepdaughter. Robert Barnes from the Washington Post notes that while supporters demand retribution for those that harm the most vulnerable, child advocacy experts say if the death penalty is utilized for child rapists, it might encourage the rapist to kill the victim.

Cameras for speeders. Steve Hymon of the L.A. Times reports on the new idea that Beverly Hills police have for speed demons. They want the Legislature to allow cameras to capture the faces and license plates of motorists that speed along residential roads. Since similar cameras have been used on roadways in Arizona, the average speed has dropped about 9 mph. While the subject is somewhat controversial, residents and officials think the cameras would focus the attention of motorists.

U.S Supreme Court denied Teen Killer appeal
A story by CNN’s Bill Mears reports that the Court has rejected 12-year-old Christopher Pittman's appeal of his 30-year prison sentence. Pittman killed both of his grandparents with a shotgun and was tried as an adult. His lawyer wanted to argue that the sentence was cruel and unusual because there is no other inmate serving as severe a sentence for a crime committed at such a young age.

National Crime Victims' Rights Week
April 13th through the 19th is the week when the nation recognizes crime victims, with rallies, candlelight vigils, and other events to honor victims and those who advocate for them. To get more information about what you can do this week go to the National Center for Victims of Crime website.

Death Row inmate Challenges Alabama Lethal Injection Process
The Birmingham News reports that serial murderer Daniel Lee Siebert is challenging the state’s death penalty procedures. Siebert was convicted of killing five people and has confessed to killing more across the country. Alabama's protocol requires that after administering anesthesia to a murderer, a prison officer must call the inmates name, pinch his arm and brush his eyelashes to ensure he is unconscious, before the other two other drugs are injected. Siebert’s argument is that the officer who will test the inmates’ response has no medical background and could make a mistake.

A Nebraska inmate is a "sewer"
According to the AP story, jail Inmate Eric Lewis, awaiting trial for second degree murder, has filed 149 lawsuits since January, 2007. Lewis' lawsuits have sought protection orders against jail employees. All six Lancaster County District Judges signed an order that would limit him to six lawsuits a year unless he can show he is in immediate danger. The judges stated in the order that “Lewis has flagrantly and repeatedly abused the judicial process.”

Posted by CJLF Staff at 10:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)