Results matching “first”

A mucho stupid Pennsylvania man, convicted of drunk driving, showed up for his sentencing drunk according to this story by Morning Call reporter Chris Parker. The judge was thoroughly displeased.

A habitual sex offender with 14 priors, set free last year by a compassionate Washington jury, is back in jail facing charges for the 2004 rape and murder of a young woman according to a story by Tracy Johnson in the Seattle Post Intelligencer.

Cannibalistic plot? Kevin Ray Underwood made his first court appearance this morning in Purcell, Oklahoma. A judge ruled today that Underwood will be charged with first-degree murder for the strangulation of 10-year-old Jamie. According to the AP story, Underwood planned on eating the girl’s nearly decapitated body.

Oklahoma Execution. In other Oklahoma news, the state has modified its injection protocol to meet objections, according to this AP story. (Hat tip: Doug Berman.) However, the scheduled execution of James Malicoat was stayed anyway on the unusual ground that he was needed to testify in another inmate's hearing, according to this later AP story.

An AP story by Dan Sewell begins, "Even though the administration's warrantless surveillance program is heading toward an appellate court loaded with Bush appointees...." The second paragraph quotes a law professor on what a "conservative-dominated" court is likely to do.

Huh? "Loaded"? "Conservative-dominated"? The Sixth Circuit?

In United States v. Mills, the Aryan Brotherhood case noted in the previous post, U.S. District Judge David Carter of the Central District of California held that the Confrontation Clause applies to the entire penalty phase in a federal capital case, not just the factors needed to make the defendant eligible for the death penalty. This decision conflicts with Judge Henry Hudson's opinion in United States v. Jordan, 357 F. Supp. 2d 889 (E.D. Va. 2005). If the district court split develops into a circuit split, which is likely, this dispute is headed for the Supreme Court. In my humble opinion, Jordan is correct.

Richard Hinojosa was executed yesterday in Texas for abducting, raping and fatally stabbing Terry Wright in 1994, he was pronounced dead at 6:19p.m. CDT. According to the AP story, Hinojosa spent 2½ years in prison for fatally shooting a man in 1986.

Samuel Flippen who was convicted of first-degree murder for beating his 2-year-old stepdaughter to death over a decade ago, was executed this morning in North Carolina. He was pronounced dead at 2:11a.m. EDT. The AP story is here.

Howard Basham provides this preview of the first oral arguments scheduled to be heard by the Supreme Court next term in his "On Appeal" column for law.com.

Lyle Denniston at SCOTUSblog has this post on the November calendar just announced.

46 relatives of a N.C. death row inmate have filed a lawsuit asking that they all be allowed to attend the execution. The Associated Press story is here (hat tip: Sentencing Law & Policy).

The brief for the defendant/habeas petitioner/Supreme Court respondent has been filed in the case of Ayers v. Belmontes, previously noted here. The merits briefs filed so far are collected here.

Curiously, there are no amici supporting the defendant. This seems to be happening more often in capital cases. We saw it last term in Oregon v. Guzek. Why none in this case?  Maybe the national capital defense folks are focused on the South and consider this a uniquely California problem. Maybe they consider it a hopeless loser and don't want to throw resources on a lost cause. Maybe defense counsel asked them not to, on the theory that flocks of amici would be inconsistent with his strategy of painting this as a fact-bound case of limited significance.

If there was one thing I thought nearly all Supreme Court-watchers could agree on, it was that the two newest Justices were exactly as we expected them to be: very competent, writing solid opinions, leaning conservative but willing to vote for the other side when the law so requires. Justice Alito's first opinion for the Court, for example, was a unanimous reversal for a South Carolina murderer. So along comes Senator Edward Kennedy, with an op-ed in the Washington Post titled "Roberts and Alito Misled Us." For comments on his comments, see Bench Memos here and the Volokh Conspiracy here.

Morris Hoffman and Stephen Morse have this thoughtful piece in the New York Times on the insanity defense. They note that the concept of responsibility is a moral judgment, not a scientific one, and that the insanity defense should be narrow but not eliminated altogether.

Two Executions Scheduled this Evening.

Brandon Hedrick is scheduled to be executed this evening in Virginia. Hedrick, who chose electrocution over lethal injection, will be the first inmate since April 2003 to use Virginia’s electric chair. He was found guilty of abducting, sexually assaulting and murdering Lisa Alexander Crider in May of 1997. The Washington Post story states that Virginia, Florida and South Carolina give inmates the choice between electrocution and lethal injection.

Update: Hedrick was pronounced dead at 9:12 p.m. EDT. Washington Post story on the execution here.

Robert Anderson will be executed this evening in Texas by lethal injection. Anderson abducted a 5-year-old girl in front of his home in June of 1992. A neighbor discovered the girl’s body inside of a styrofoam ice chest in a dumpster. Anderson confessed that he abducted, assaulted, beat, stabbed and drowned the little girl before disposing of her body. Visit the Texas Department of Justice for more information on this inmate here.

Update: Anderson was pronounced dead at 6:19 p.m. CDT. AP story on the execution here.

This is off-topic for a crim law blog, I know, but it's important. Yesterday, the House of Representatives passed H.R. 2389 which would remove jurisdiction from federal courts, not including D.C.'s local court system, to consider challenges to the Pledge of Allegiance, and it would also eliminate the U.S. Supreme Court's appellate jurisdiction over such cases. Lyle Denniston has a post on SCOTUSblog here.

With 51 state & D.C. high courts, it is a near certainty that at least one, maybe more, will accept the argument that the Pledge violates the First Amendment. Others will, of course, reject that argument. With no U.S. Supreme Court jurisdiction to review these decisions, "one nation, indivisible" will be divided on the question.

The congressmen who voted for this bill thinking they were protecting the Pledge are seriously mistaken. Let us hope that cooler heads prevail in the Senate.

Here are some scheduled events and some predictions for the Supreme Court's opening in the fall.

Tuesday, September 26: Look for an orders list from the conference of the day before, with grants of certiorari.

Monday, October 2: The traditional opening day of the First Monday in October coincides with Yom Kippur, which caused a bit of a flap a few years back. The Great Compromise, which we see again this year, is that the Court formally opens its term and will probably announce an orders list, but will hear no arguments. There will likely be a long list of cert. denials and no grants, the grants having been announced the week before.

A Proposed New National Sex Offender Registry Bill:
The proposed bill will require states to share information on sex offenders who move to new states and would make it a crime, not a misdemeanor, if sex offenders did not register with their state. Senator Orrin Hatch, Elizabeth Smart and Ed Smart are supporting this bill that the House and Senate may vote on today. The story published by ABC News—Good Morning America is available here. The text of S. 1086 is here.

Impeachment. Henry Weinstein of the L.A. Times has this article on House Judiciary Chairman Sensenbrenner's tentative first step toward the possible impeachment of L.A. Federal District Judge Manuel Real. Mr. Sensenbrenner notes the case as a breakdown in the judicial self-policing mechanism that Congress set up in 1980. His statement is available here (thanks to "federalist" for this link). The Ninth Circuit decision is here.

Competency to Waive Appeals. Jack Elliott of the Associated Press has another article here on the case of Mississippi murderer Bobby Glen Wilcher and the question of his waiver of further appeals. The Supreme Court has scheduled the question of whether to take his case for its conference of Sept. 25.

The Roberts Court. James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal has this interesting article on the first term of the Roberts Court, unanimity, and minimalism in judging.

Congress and Military Tribunals. Maura Reynolds has this article in the Los Angeles Times on efforts to enact statutory authorization for military tribunals to replace the executive order struck down in Hamdan. Senator Specter has scheduled a hearing for July 11. Kathryn Lopez at Bench Memos has this post with a section-by-section analysis of Specter's bill.

Today, the U.S. Supreme Court decided two cases on the continuing conundrum of "harmless error." That is, under what circumstances can a reviewing court decide that a ruling by the trial court was an error yet affirm the judgment because the error made no difference in the outcome.

The outcomes of these cases are not particularly remarkable. What is somewhat peculiar is the way the Court deals with its own precedents. The line of cases involved here is a case study in the wisdom of minimalist judging and the danger of painting with too broad a brush.

Is the Supreme Court finally ready to stop tinkering with capital sentencing procedure? Today's decision in Kansas v. Marsh raises that possibility. Years ago, when Justice Blackmun said he would "no longer tinker with the machinery of death," many of us said, "Good! Stop tinkering!" Regrettably, the Court continued.

For 34 years now, the Supreme Court has been unable to agree with itself from one year to the next what the Constitution forbids and what it requires. Some of this history is described in CJLF's brief in Ayers v. Belmontes, a California capital case to be argued next Term. While the whole line of Eighth Amendment cases beginning with Furman v. Georgia was intended to prevent arbitrariness in capital sentencing, the constant tinkering with the rules has itself been a primary source of arbitrariness. Murderers have been regularly taken off death row with no regard for the heinousness of their crimes because a court decided that a standard procedure or instruction previously considered valid has magically become a violation of an amendment ratified over 200 years ago.

Gina Holland of AP has this article on the remaining cases of the Supreme Court term.

The Chicago Tribune was widely rumored to be coming out with proof that Carlos De Luna, executed in Texas in 1989, was actually innocent. Turns out the first article in the series says they have evidence that "suggests" that.

SCOTUSblog has this report on the Washington Legal Foundation's briefing on the Supreme Court term, including Tom Goldstein's comments on the large number of Ninth Circuit reversals.

Doug Berman at SL&P points us to this article by Rachel Barkow at NYU, making the case that "the relationship between originalism, politics, and criminal law [is] far more complicated than is commonly believed." That is, you can't assume that "conservative" judges necessarily favor the prosecution, with the Apprendi line of cases as Exhibit A.

The New York Times has this article on alternatives to the prevailing lethal injection protocol.

Joel Jacobsen at Judging Crimes has this post on Hudson v. Michigan and the exclusionary rule.

The Bureau of Justice Statistics has this report on citizen complaints regarding police use of force.

On June 12, the Supreme Court decided in Hill v. McDonough that death row inmates could use the civil rights law rather than habeas corpus to challenge lethal injection procedures. This decision effectively denied the states two protections against last-minute challenges enacted in 1996: the habeas statute of limitations and the rule against successive habeas petitions.

Ten days later, though, the high court may have handed the states an alternative defense, based on another statute enacted the same year: the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PRLA).

Today the Supreme Court decided one criminal case and one law-enforcement-related civil case. In Dixon v. United States, a 7-2 opinion by Justice Stevens, the Court decided that the burden of proving the affirmative defense of duress may be placed on the defendant. In Woodford v. Ngo, a 6-3 opinion by Justice Alito, the Court held that the administrative exhaustion requirement of the Prison Litigation Reform Act requires a prisoner to actually use the administrative remedy within the time allowed for it, not just let the time lapse and then file in federal court.

Still undecided are . . .

The Associated Press reports on the Dixon case on the duress defense here.

A 21 year old in the UK is the first person to be caught through an International police agency website targeting pedophiles. The full story published by the ITV.com is available here.

Supreme Court of Canada decided that one day in jail was an acceptable sentence for a teen who beat a man to death using a billiard ball wrapped in a sock. The controversial story can be found here.

by Barry Latzer
Professor, John Jay College of Criminal Justice

David McCord’s Afterword in Judicature (March-April 2006) contends that capital punishment is akin to consumer fraud. These are the same old anti-death penalty arguments in new guise.

Consider first his claim that the death penalty “does not work to sentence only the guilty to death” because “over 20 demonstrably innocent persons . . . have been sentenced to death in the post-Furman era.” In the first place, the death penalty has nothing to do with the wrongful convictions. These 20 (I will assume McCord’s number is accurate) also would have been wrongly convicted if they had been given life sentences. Does McCord think that capital trials, which, as a rule, are far more scrupulously conducted than noncapital proceedings, are less reliable for guilt determination? I’d be interested to hear his arguments on this point.

Second, again assuming that there were 20 miscarriages of justice, isn’t the “does not work” conclusion premature without looking at the failure-to-success ratio? According to the recent Bureau of Justice Statistics count, there were 7,187 death sentences from 1977 to 2004. With 20 wrongful sentences, the failure ratio is .003 (20/7187). Does Professor McCord know of any other product – criminal justice or otherwise – with that low a failure rate?

U.S. Supreme Court won't hear case on sex offender visitation
Associated Press

INDIANAPOLIS - The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday said it would not consider a constitutional challenge to a state policy that sharply restricts minors' visits to imprisoned sex offenders who victimized children. more

GPS tracking leads to Megan's Law arrest
The Associated Press
Published: Tuesday, May 30, 2006
Updated: Tuesday, May 30, 2006

NEWTON, N.J. (AP) - A high-tech tracking system led authorities to charge a high-risk sex offender with a Megan's Law violation in a first-of-its-kind case in the state. more

This is the first post for the second blog attempt. Here is a link to our main site.