Drug Overdoses Decreasing U.S. Lifespan: A U.S. Government report found that life expectancy in 2017 dropped compared to the previous year. Kerry Sheridan of AFP reports that over 70,000 drug overdoses, an increase of 9.6%, and a 3.7% increase in suicides are driving the numbers. Drug overdoses from synthetic opioids such as fentanyl and tramadol increased by 46% between 2016 and 2017. This drop in life expectancy follows and earlier drop between 2015 and 2016. The chief of mortality statistics for the National Center for Health Statistics noted that the country has not seen a similar trend since the great flu pandemic of 1918 and World War 1. Perhaps securing the nation's borders to slow the trafficking of illegal drugs would save some lives.
November 2018 Archives
Border-Jumper Going to Federal Prison: An admitted drug mule and gang member has been sentenced to nearly six years in federal prison as a deportee who illegally reentered the U.S. David Harris of KCTV reports that Jose Salazar-Aguilar had been deported eight times prior to his recent arrest in Kansas City for drunk driving. After entering the country illegally in 2012, Aguilar was convicted of DUI in Arizona. As a drug mule he also has a previous conviction for trafficking heroin, and claims to be a member of the Norteno street gang.
Illegal Kills Woman in Hit & Run Crash: A 24-year-old man in the U.S. illegally has been charged with the Thanksgiving Day hit and run death of a Texas school teacher. Genevieve Curtis of KFOX 14 reports that Joel Velazquez was free on bond from a 2017 assault charge when he blew through a red light Thanksgiving morning and hit 28-year-old Mandy Weyant, a sixth-grade teacher in El Paso. The impact knocked the woman's body 50 feet, as Velazquez drove away. Two days later he turned himself into police. Because of his criminal record and illegal status, he is being held without bond. "She was my world, she was my wife's best friend but she was my baby girl," the victim's father told reporters. How many like Velazquez are trying to jump the fence in San Diego this morning? How many are walking into Arizona and New Mexico?
The Rage Against Due Process on Campus: A proposed rule from the U.S. Department of Education regarding the handling of sexual assault allegations on college campuses has been met with outrage by feminists and academic leaders. Manhattan Institute scholar Heather MacDonald writes that the proposed rule for campus tribunals recommends a presumption of innocence, a higher standard of evidence to sustain a sexual assault charge, raising it from a preponderance of evidence to clear and convincing evidence. It also allows and an advocate for the accused to question the accuser. Currently many colleges and universities deny accused students the opportunity to review all the evidence, fail to
provide an impartial decision-maker, ignore the presumption of
innocence, and forbid the assistance of counsel.
Characteristic of the responses from feminists, the abortion rights group NARAL called the proposed rules "absolutely sickening." MacDonald notes that the senior vice president of the American Council on Education produced
the most self-damning argument against the proposed regulation.
"Colleges and universities are not courts," Terry Hartle told the New York Times,
"and these sorts of proceedings would require us to legalize student
disciplinary proceedings. We lack the knowledge, the expertise, and
credibility to do this." This is probably true, and suggests that colleges get out of the rape-adjudication business entirely.
CO Murderer Pleads Guilty to Avoid Death Sentence: A Colorado man who murdered his pregnant wife and two daughters was sentenced to five life-without-parole terms Monday. Emily Shapiro of ABC News reports that Chris Watts pleaded guilty to all charges related to the murders last August in exchange for an agreement that prosecutors would not seek the death penalty. The state of Colorado will likely save millions in trial and appeals costs because of the plea deal. According to a 2009 study by CJLF; "The average county with a death penalty disposes of 18.9% of murder cases with a plea and a long sentence, compared to 5.0% in counties without a death penalty." Watts reported his wife and daughters missing on August 13, and made a passionate televised plea for their return to reporters from the porch of his family's home. Watts admitted the murderers after investigators caught him in several lies about events leading up to the victims' disappearance. Days later his wife's body was found in a shallow grave and the girls' bodies were found in an oil pit where Watts worked.
Push to Pass Sentence Reduction Bill: Congress is pushing to pass a bi-partisan sentencing reform measure called the "First Step Act" that would allow the release of "4,000 hardened federal prisoners" immediately upon passage, according to Daniel Horowitz at the Conservative Review. The proponents' current plan is to combine the early release provisions of the House bill and the front end sentence reductions of the Senate bill and get it passed before the end of the year. As usual proponents claim that the measure will cut prison costs by sending thousands of drug-dealers to halfway-houses and home-confinement under "community supervision." The Bureau of Prisons found that such alternatives cost two to three times as much per diem as prison. While the author agrees that code review is necessary to cure unjust sentencing disparities, cutting sentences for drug dealers by 2/3s and releasing thousands of drug dealers, including armed dealers, early will increase crime at a time when drug overdoses and urban violence are at record levels.
Released Illegal Charged With 3 Murders: An illegal alien released from a New Jersey jail in defiance of an ICE detainer, has been charged with killing three people in Missouri. Louis Casiano of Fox News reports that Luis Rodrigo Perez killed the three victims and wounded two others in shootings on November 1 and November 2. An ICE detainer for Perez was ignored by New Jersey police when they released him from the Middlesex County Jail last February after serving two months for domestic violence. Middlesex is a sanctuary county which refuses to cooperate with federal immigration authorities. Missouri police determined that Perez killed two men in Springfield who were former roommates who had kicked him out. The next day Perez shot and killed a 21-year-old woman who allegedly saw him kill the two men. Middlesex County issued a statement claiming that it would honor detainer
requests from ICE if the inmate has convictions for first- or
second-degree offenses or is ordered deported by a federal judge. Considering that illegals are protected from arrest on their immigration status in sanctuary jurisdictions and that the backlog for deportation hearings before a federal judge are several months, if the illegal shows up for the hearing, the county's claim that these deaths are the fault of ICE is groundless.
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There is a major political push going on to get law enforcement organizations to flip and support the badly drafted and ill-conceived legislation titled the "First Step Act," which I prefer to call the Faux Pas Act. See this post.
There have been reports that the National Sheriffs' Association, the Major County Sheriffs Association, and the Major Cities Chiefs Association had "gone wobbly" on us, to borrow Margaret Thatcher's famous phrase. They have not.
These three organizations today issued this joint letter.
The current draft of the First Step legislation remains troubling to the leaders of law enforcement. Sheriffs are elected solely to protect our communities, and Police Chiefs have taken an oath to protect the public. We feel unless the changes recommended below are enacted, this legislation creates a high-risk path for dangerous criminals with gun crime histories to early release from prison. This amounts to a social experiment with the safety of our communities and the lives of Sheriffs, deputies and police officers in the balance. Please know that we did not come to this conclusion lightly. We have been working diligently with the Administration to correct these inequities. It is our hope the Senate will listen to the nation's elected Sheriffs and the Chiefs of Police of our nation's most populous cities.* * *In its current form, we oppose this legislation. However, if these changes can be made to address our concerns, we stand ready to work further with the Senate and the Administration.
Reports that the Fraternal Order of Police has gone wobbly are, unfortunately, true.
Jonathan Turley has this post with the above title at his eponymous blog.
Update (Nov. 14): The Office of Legal Counsel came to the same conclusion.
Asylum Requirements Tightened: The Trump administration announced a change in asylum rules which prohibits aliens who enter the U.S. illegally to claim asylum. Kathryn Watson of CBS News reports that, in order to be considered for asylum, immigrants would be required to cross into the country at an official port of entry. There are several of these along southern borders of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California such as Rio Grande City in Texas, San Luis in Arizona or Calexico in California. In announcing the new rule, Homeland Security Secretary Kristjen Nielsen told reporters, "Today, we are using the authority granted to us by Congress to bar aliens who violate a presidential suspension of entry or other restriction from asylum eligibility." The American Civil Liberties Union immediately called the rule illegal. The betting starts on how quickly a federal district judge in San Francisco will issue a nationwide injunction to block enforcement of the new rule.
The annual National Lawyers Convention of the Federalist Society is next week, Thursday the 15th through Saturday the 17th. The panel sponsored by the Criminal Law Practice Group is The Pros and Cons of Plea Bargaining, 3:30 to 5:00 Eastern Time Thursday. That's 12:30 to 2:00 here on the Left Coast.
If you can't make it to Washington, I expect it will be available live-streamed here. The panel is:
- Hon. Stephanos Bibas, United States Court of Appeals, Third Circuit
- Mr. Greg Brower, Shareholder, Brownstein, Hyatt, Farber, Shreck
- Prof. Carissa Hessick, Anne Shea Ransdell and William Garland "Buck" Ransdell, Jr. Distinguished Professor of Law, University of North Carolina School of Law
- Mr. Clark Neily, Vice President for Criminal Justice, Cato Institute
- Moderator: Hon. Lisa Branch, United States Court of Appeals, Eleventh Circuit
Monday, the Government filed in the Supreme Court a highly unusual petition for writ of certiorari before judgment in the case challenging DHS's recission of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. In plain English, they asked the high court to take the case up before the lower federal court was finished with it. Such petitions are rarely made and even more rarely granted.*
Well, it's no longer "before judgment." The Ninth Circuit today issued its opinion, against the Government. Amy Howe notes, "The ruling means not only that the Supreme Court is now more likely to
take up the DACA dispute, but that it could do so this term." I agree.
The SCOTUS case is Dept. of Homeland Security v. Regents of the Univ. of California, No. 18-587.
Continue reading USCA9 Rules in DACA Case.
Jeff Sessions could have been a great Attorney General. Unfortunately, he made a serious mistake in drafting an overly broad recusal from what became the Mueller probe. That probe has since suffered from exactly the kind of "mission creep" that caused both parties to abandon the old independent counsel law. DAG Rosenstein did nothing about it, and AG Sessions could not. President Trump has allowed himself to be obsessed with it, and that brought us, unfortunately, to where we are now. So where do we go from here?
If Mr. Trump is serious about being the law-and-order President he promised to be, then the departure of Mr. Sessions should not mean the departure of his strong law enforcement agenda. We need an AG who will be a strong leader at the Department of Justice. Just as importantly, the new AG must have the determination and the fortitude to stand up to the attacks on law enforcement and the mad rush to release as many criminals as possible regardless of the consequences to innocent people.
One good screening criterion would be a potential nominee's view of the Faux Pas Act. Anyone who cannot or will not see that this is a reckless measure for indiscriminate releases under a thin veneer of rehabilitation is not suited to be our nation's chief law enforcement officer.
Update: Heather MacDonald has this commentary at the City Journal.
Sessions Resigns: Fox News reports that Attorney General Jeff Sessions has resigned today and his Chief of Staff Matthew Whitaker has been appointed by the President as Acting Attorney General. Sessions' departure from the Justice Department was not unexpected. Whitaker, who unlike Sessions had no involvement in the 2016 presidential campaign, is likely to assume Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein's role in overseeing the Russian collusion investigation. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer immediately called for Whitaker to recuse himself from the investigation. From a law enforcement perspective Sessions was the toughest Attorney General on crime since Edwin Meese held that post. Let's hope that his replacement shares that commitment.
Trial of El Chapo Begins Today: Jury selection began Monday in New York for the trial of drug cartel kingpin Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman. Sonja Sharp of the Los Angeles Times reports that Guzman was extradited from Mexico to the U.S. for trial last year. He had twice escaped from Mexican prisons. Guzman built the Sinaloa cartel into "the largest drug trafficking organization in the world," according to the Justice Department indictment. While his defense attorneys are portraying him as a hero, prosecutors plan to introduce hundreds of thousands of documents confirming his multi-billion dollar operation which smuggled huge volumes of cocaine, heroin, meth, and fentanyl across U.S. borders. Jurors selected for the massive prosecution may not be able to deliver a verdict until Valentine's Day. Over the past year "El Chapo" has made several complaints about his housing conditions in federal prison.
The U.S. Supreme Court released a short orders list from its conference today, presumably so the newly taken up cases can be briefed as soon as possible to get them on the oral argument calendar. There are two criminal cases.
Supervised released in the federal criminal system gets more scrutiny in Mont v. United States, No. 17-8995. I will quote the Solicitor General's version of the Question Presented because the petitioner's borders on incomprehensible:
"Whether a period of supervised release for one offense is tolled under 18 U.S.C. 3624(e) during a period of pretrial confinement that upon conviction is credited toward a defendant's term of imprisonment for another offense."
Flowers v. Mississippi, No. 17-9572 is back again after a "grant, vacate, and remand" order two years ago. The order directed the Mississippi Supreme Court to look at Flowers's claim of racial discrimination in jury selection again after considering a then-new SCOTUS precedent. The petitioner's Questions Presented page is another case study in how not to do it and will doubtless be skewered by Bill Bilderback at next year's capital litigation conference. The Court wrote its own QP, limiting review to: "Whether the Mississippi Supreme Court erred in how it applied Batson v. Kentucky, 476 U. S. 79 (1986), in this case."
Expect Monday's orders list to be all certiorari denials, no grants.
Shannon Bream has this report for Fox News on the junior Justice's first days on the job.
Lloyd Billingsley has this article in the City Journal on the case of double murderer/torturer Daniel Marsh, now 21 but just short of 16 at the time of the crime. Originally, Yolo County, California prosecutors directly filed the case in adult court, as the law allowed at the time. Then Gov. Brown, fueled with Soros money, convinced the people of California to change their mind and decide that judges and not prosecutors should decide whether a case was appropriate for adult court or juvenile court. That was Proposition 57.
If a case is tried in juvenile court, the perpetrator cannot be kept incarcerated past age 25, no matter how heinous the crime.
Okay. In accordance with Proposition 57, the judge decided that this case was indeed one for adult court. That was obvious the whole time.
But on January 1, a legislative bill takes effect that contradicts the vote of the people and says that the Legislature, not judges, has decided that 14- and 15-year-old murderers will always be tried in juvenile court, with the resulting limit on sentence. Gov. Brown signed that bill.
Needless to say, we will be challenging the constitutionality of that bill. The irony is that those of us who opposed Proposition 57 must now cite it as higher authority than the product of our demented Legislature. It's a strange world, and an even stranger state.
How often does it happen in America that innocent people are convicted of crimes they did not commit? Is it really as common as the estimates we so often see cited, or is the real frequency different?
The Arizona Law Review has published new estimates by two authors giving different answers to this question: a lot lower and drastically lower.
Paul Cassell of the University of Utah gives us the "drastically lower" answer in the lead article. His estimate of the frequency of wrongful convictions is a range of 0.016% to 0.062%, in contrast to the commonly cited estimates ranging from 1% to 4%. George Thomas of Rutgers gives us the "a lot lower" answer in his "partial response" article, with a range of 0.125% to 0.5%. Prof. Cassell also has a reply article and a post at the Volokh Conspiracy.
We should not, of course, minimize the problem of wrongful convictions. A single one is a miscarriage of justice and devastating to the people involved. That is why, even as we limit repeated reviews of convictions on innocence-irrelevant grounds, we should maintain or widen avenues of review for cases of genuine "got the wrong guy" innocence. I insisted on that in the drafting of what became California's Proposition 66.
We also should not uncritically accept dubious estimates from notorious exaggerators. See Ward Campbell, Exoneration Inflation (2008). I welcome these new contributions to the field and look forward to reading them more closely.
Tennessee Murderer Faces Execution Today: A double-murderer who won a federal court ruling ordering Tennessee to execute him in the electric chair may get his wish today. Katherine Lam of Fox News reports that Edmund Zagorski won the October 10 ruling arguing that the state's three-drug lethal injection process would subject him to feeling like he was drowning and burning alive at the same time. His lawyer said that his client's execution in "old sparky" would be the lesser of two evils. In 1984 Zagorski lured two men into the woods to buy drugs, where he murdered them and stole their money and pickup truck.
Update: Zagorski was executed in old sparky at 7:26 pm Thursday night, after SCOTUS turned down his last minute appeal arguing that allowing him to choose the electric chair rather than lethal injection, which delayed his execution for a month, was unconstitutional. The Tennessean has the story.
