Commentary on Pearson v. Callahan: At SCOTUSblog guestblogger Nancy Leong weighs in on the Supreme Court's decision in Pearson. Leong criticizes Justice Alito's opinion for failing to acknowledge "the cognitive difficulty that judges may face in attempting to keep the
two parts of the qualified immunity inquiry segregated from one another
in their minds." She argues that the Pearson opinion falls short in failing to discuss the reality that "an easy immunity determination may - on a subconscious level - influence
a judge's thinking about the outcome of a more challenging
constitutional issue." Leong's criticism leads up to discussion of her forthcoming Pepperdine Law Review article, "The Saucier Qualified Immunity Experiment: An Empirical Analysis." For her article Leong randomly selected 600 federal cases, decided before and after Saucier, to examine the impact of the Saucier approach to qualified immunity cases. Her analysis apparently revealed that the decisions that used the Saucier approach tended to favor defendants. She wonders whether abandoning this approach will lead to more pro-plaintiff decisions.
Advice for Fourth Circuit Judicial Nominations: Hattip to Ed Whalen at Bench Memos for his link to Judge Harvie Wilkinson III's op-ed in Today's Washington Post. The piece, "Storming the 4th Circuit," expresses Wilkinson's thoughts on why appointing federal judges based on their ideologies is not always a good idea. Orin Kerr at Volokh Conspiracy also has this post on the op-ed.
Executions in the United States and Internationally: Doug Berman at Sentencing Law and Policy posts links to stories covering capital punishment in the United States, Iran, Uganda and China. The AP story by Michael Graczyk discusses the two executions that took place in the United States yesterday. Reginald Perkins was executed yesterday for strangling and robbing his stepmother, and in Oklahoma Darwin Brown was executed for beating a convenience store clerk to death with a baseball bat.
Terry Stop: Orin Kerr at VC points us to this decision from a Louisiana appellate court: "In the present case, Detective Peterson, a law enforcement officer with approximately 10 years experience, observed the defendant chambering a round into a firearm while driving with no hands on the wheel. Detective Peterson testified that, although he did not witness the defendant committing a specific crime, he stopped the defendant to investigate because '[he] did not know if a crime had been committed or was about to be committed.' We cannot say that the trial court erred in finding that Detective Peterson had sufficient reasonable suspicion that a crime was being committed, had been committed, or was about to be committed to justify an investigatory stop." Um, isn't driving with no hands on the wheel at least an infraction in Louisiana?
Advice for Fourth Circuit Judicial Nominations: Hattip to Ed Whalen at Bench Memos for his link to Judge Harvie Wilkinson III's op-ed in Today's Washington Post. The piece, "Storming the 4th Circuit," expresses Wilkinson's thoughts on why appointing federal judges based on their ideologies is not always a good idea. Orin Kerr at Volokh Conspiracy also has this post on the op-ed.
Executions in the United States and Internationally: Doug Berman at Sentencing Law and Policy posts links to stories covering capital punishment in the United States, Iran, Uganda and China. The AP story by Michael Graczyk discusses the two executions that took place in the United States yesterday. Reginald Perkins was executed yesterday for strangling and robbing his stepmother, and in Oklahoma Darwin Brown was executed for beating a convenience store clerk to death with a baseball bat.
Terry Stop: Orin Kerr at VC points us to this decision from a Louisiana appellate court: "In the present case, Detective Peterson, a law enforcement officer with approximately 10 years experience, observed the defendant chambering a round into a firearm while driving with no hands on the wheel. Detective Peterson testified that, although he did not witness the defendant committing a specific crime, he stopped the defendant to investigate because '[he] did not know if a crime had been committed or was about to be committed.' We cannot say that the trial court erred in finding that Detective Peterson had sufficient reasonable suspicion that a crime was being committed, had been committed, or was about to be committed to justify an investigatory stop." Um, isn't driving with no hands on the wheel at least an infraction in Louisiana?
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