The Criminal Lawyer

“Why is this case here, except as an opportunity to upset Melendez-Diaz?”

So wondered Justice Scalia during oral argument a couple weeks back in the case of Briscoe v. Virginia. For some background, see our previous post on this case here. Briefly, the Supreme Court held last year in Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts that, in a drug case, the prosecution cannot prove the existence of a controlled substance by merely introducing the lab report — the chemist has to testify, or else the Confrontation Clause is violated. There was a huge outcry from prosecutors’ offices across the country. It would be too much of a burden to get chemists to testify at every drug trial. There was a concerted effort to get around this new ruling, or better yet to get the Supremes to reverse themselves.

So in Briscoe, Virginia tried to get around the rule by saying the prosecution only needs to introduce a lab report, and if the defense wants to confront the chemist then the defense can subpoena the chemist as a witness.

More than half the state attorneys-general filed an amicus brief, arguing that the expense and administrative burden of getting chemists to testify at trial would just be unworkable. At oral argument on January 11, it sounded like Justice Alito, at least, was buying into that argument (Tr. at 16, lines 16 to 18). And there was hope that Justice Sotomayor would be that one extra vote to undo Melendez-Diaz.

In our previous post, we pointed out various reasons why such hopes weren’t based in reality, and why the claims of expense and burden don’t hold water. We seriously doubt that anyone at the Supreme Court bothers to read this blog. But these observations are fairly self-evident, we think.

So it was no surprise to see a one-sentence smackdown from the Supreme Court this morning:

We vacate the judgment of the Supreme Court of Virginia and remand the case for further proceedings not inconsistent with the opinion in Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts, 557 U.S. ___ (2009).

It is so ordered.

In other words, if the states do not put the chemist on the stand in the People’s case, then they violate the Confrontation Clause. End of story. Bureaucratic convenience does not trump individual rights.

As for all those prosecutors’ offices who whine that it can’t be done? We’d ask them to look at New York City, whose courts are far busier than theirs ever will be, and who nevertheless manage the job as a matter of routine. Defense counsel often stipulates to the substance being what it is, and when there is no stipulation then getting the chemist to court is no more challenging than any other police employee who’d rather not be there. It’s just part of the job, and amazingly enough it works out just fine.

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The Fourth Amendment says the police can’t go into your home or other private place without a warrant. Over the years, we’ve come up with a lot of exceptions to the warrant requirement. So many, in fact, that getting a warrant has become the exception, and the exceptions have become the norm.

That’s because privacy isn’t the only interest society has here. The various exceptions to the warrant requirement allow the police to go in when other important interests outweigh the privacy interest.

One common exception to the warrant requirement is the Emergency exception. Under the emergency rule, the police can go in when there is good reason to believe there’s someone inside who needs help right away — either they’re seriously hurt, or they’re in danger.

In New York, that rule was formalized by the Mitchell case in 1976. The Mitchell rule has two objective conditions, and one subjective condition. If all three are met, then the police would be allowed to enter under the emergency rule. The objective conditions require that a reasonably prudent officer would first have thought there was an emergency, and second would have had probable cause to believe the emergency was inside the place to be searched. The subjective condition was that the police had to actually be going inside to help someone — the emergency couldn’t be a pretext for some other ulterior motive such as looking for evidence.

For about 15 years, now, the U.S. Supreme Court has been rejecting subjective rules like that. So far as federal law is concerned, the Supremes don’t care if the police had some ulterior motive or pretext. So long as there was a legitimate basis for the police conduct, they don’t care what the police were actually thinking.

So in 2006, in the Brigham City case, the Supreme Court specifically addressed the three-part Mitchell rule, and said New York’s subjective condition is not required under federal law. All federal law requires is that the police had an objectively reasonable basis to believe that there was an emergency, and probable cause to believe that the emergency was inside the place to be searched.

That’s only the federal rule, however. Federal law only provides a minimum of protections, a base line of individual rights. The states can’t give less protection, but they can certainly grant greater protections. So New York remains free to adopt the Brigham City rule, or keep the Mitchell rule, or come up with a new one. (New York could even get rid of the emergency exception altogether, though that would be a silly result — nobody wants the police to be forced to watch helpless from the sidewalk while someone is being beaten to death on the other side of a window.)

But to date, New York’s courts have neither adopted nor rejected the Brigham City rule. It’s still up in the air whether the subjective prong will continue to be part of the rule in New York. This uncertainty has been going on for nearly four years now, and that’s bad for all concerned. It’s certainly high time to settle the issue.

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The other day, we were asked for a solution. We were arguing an appeal here in New York last week, which dealt only with the objective prongs of the rule. The People were appealing from a suppression ruling, and they were claiming that the search was good under the emergency doctrine of Brigham City. The hearing court never applied the subjective prong of the Mitchell rule, so its validity was not really at issue in the case.

So imagine our surprise when the court asked us what New York’s rule ought to be now, whether the state should keep or abandon Mitchell’s subjective prong. We were surprised, but not unprepared of course. We proposed that there does need to be a subjective part of the rule, but not the pretext rule of old.

There needs to be a subjective belief on the part of the police that their search was lawful. They had to have some justification for their search at the time, whether it was an emergency or some other exception to the warrant requirement. Nobody wants a rule that gives the police an incentive to commit a bad search, knowing it’s bad, in the hope that some clever prosecutor down the road can think up some objective justification after the fact.

So what would our proposed rule look like? Let’s take a crack at writing it out in plain English.

Under the Emergency exception, the police may conduct a warrantless search when:

1) Based on evidence actually known to the searching officer before commencing the search, a reasonably prudent officer would have believed that a person was in danger of serious physical injury or death;

2) Based on evidence actually known to the searching officer before commencing the search, a reasonably prudent officer would have thought it more likely than not that the emergency was inside the place to be searched; and

3) Before commencing the search, the searching officer actually and reasonably believed the search to be justified by this or some other exception to the warrant requirement.

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This seems to be nothing more than good common sense.

Unlike previous language, we go out of our way here to specify that the objective basis has to be based on facts known to the officers at the time. They can’t justify their search with facts that they only learned about later — if they don’t have reason to think someone’s injured inside, they can’t justify their bad search just because they happened to find an injured person there. Similarly, they can’t justify their search with baseless suppositions that have no foundation in what they knew at the time — if they don’t have reason to think someone’s injured inside, they can’t justify their bad search after the fact with a hypothetical scenario they clearly hadn’t considered at the time. (And if you think this should go without saying, you should read the People’s brief in the case we just argued.)

We also go out of our way to replace legalese with its plain language definition. So “basis approximating probable cause,” for example, becomes “more likely than not.” This makes the rule more comprehensible, and thus more easy for police to follow and courts to enforce. We’re a big fan of plain language.

Most importantly, of course, we changed the pretext language of Mitchell to a more reasonable requirement that the police at least think they have some lawful basis for their intrusion. And that they have some reasonable basis to think so. They don’t have to have subjectively thought there was an emergency at hand, but they had to have subjectively thought their search wasn’t unlawful.

Any other rule, we think, would send precisely the wrong message to the police. The cops would have an incentive to go ahead and commit searches they know to be bad, on the off chance that some clever prosecutor can think up a justification after the fact (which is precisely what happened in the case we just argued, if you’re wondering).

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We could be wrong, however. So we invite suggestions on what the New York rule ought to be. What do you think?

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Yesterday, we were talking with a colleague about whether we’d ever take a terrorism client. We frankly don’t have any more qualms about defending that type of case than about any other type. But the conversation turned to whether such cases ought to be brought in the courts in the first place. And we just don’t think terrorism should be fought in the courts.

In the years before 9/11, the U.S. dealt with terrorism as a criminal matter. Conceptually, it was no different from any other multiple homicide: the bad thing would happen, law enforcement would try to find out whodunit, and if the suspect was still alive and could be arrested then he’d get prosecuted.

This didn’t work so well. Some people eventually got punished, but the system didn’t stop or deter any future attacks. The criminal justice system can’t do that, after all. It’s purely an after-the-fact thing. Its job is to punish people after the crime is already committed. The courts can’t act proactively to prevent crimes that haven’t been committed yet — punishing people before they’ve done anything would be outrageous. No, proactive national defense is the job of the armed forces.

More than that, our criminal justice system is flatly contrary to the goals of counterterrorism. Preventing terrorist acts requires intel. Any client of mine is going to shut up the second I’m retained, if not sooner. And law enforcement isn’t allowed to arrest people before they’ve done anything wrong. Nor can they coerce confessions, or get wiretaps or search warrants on mere suspicion alone — which is all you’ve got during most investigations. So much for your intel. The White House says we can get intel as part of a plea, but as Mike Mukasey points out in today’s WSJ, any plea is going to take place years after the information would have been of any use.

Law enforcement is not in the job of preventing acts of war. If, during the Cold War, the Soviets had sent a team in to blow up the Capitol Building, it would not have been the FBI’s job to prevent it from happening. Nor would the attackers have found themselves facing criminal prosecution in civilian courts. It would have been treated as an act of war, and the combatants would have been treated accordingly.

Terrorism is no different. And yet there is this bizarre mindset that it is completely different from an act of war, and is instead nothing more than violent crime. But crime is not the same as deliberately sending attackers from foreign lands with the purpose of killing and destroying, in order to attack the nation itself. That’s war, whether it is launched by a governed nation or by a transnational organization.

So it’s hardly surprising that our reliance on the courts and law enforcement alone didn’t get the job done. Because it’s not their job. In the terrorism cases before 9/11, the criminal justice system did its job about as well as can be expected, but it failed abysmally at the task of counterterrorism. It will continue to fail, if we decide that’s how we’re going to fight it.

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On January 25, 1993, Mir Aimal Kansi got out of his car during a red light at an intersection near CIA headquarters, and with an AK-47 shot every male in sight. He drove off and wasn’t pursued. (He actually took a wrong turn into our parents’ cul-de-sac nearby, and our mother watched him trying to find his way, but she thought nothing of it afterwards because the police announcements described a completely different car.) Surprised at the ease of his escape, Kansi caught a flight to Pakistan the next morning. Eventually, his roommate reported him missing and the police found the AK-47 under Kansi’s bed. By that time, he was long gone, being sheltered by a Pashtun tribe in the Afghan border regions (sound familiar?). There was no extradition treaty with Pakistan, so the U.S. didn’t bother with the extradition process. Four years later, they just went in and kidnapped him after luring him out with a smuggling ruse. He was eventually tried in Virginia state court, which sentenced him to death. Kansi was executed at the end of 2002, after many more terrorist attacks had taken place. His body was sent back to Pakistan, and his funeral was attended by province’s entire leadership, the army commander, and the nation’s ambassador to the U.S. It’s safe to say that our criminal justice system didn’t do much here to combat terrorism, or even deter it, though it did eventually punish the culprit.

One month after the CIA shooting, on February 26, 1993, Al-Qaeda terrorists set off a powerful truck bomb under the World Trade Center, hoping to topple Tower One into Tower Two. Ramzi Yousef masterminded it, drove the van an lit the fuse. The project was financed by his uncle Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, and several others took part. It didn’t go exactly as planned, but six people were killed and more than a thousand were injured. Law enforcement didn’t know how it had happened, but the NYPD and FBI began looking for clues. The VIN number on a piece of axle eventually led to Abdul Yasin, the Iraqi who had constructed the bomb. Yasin was taken to FBI headquarters in Newark, questioned briefly, and released. Yasin caught a plane back to Iraq the next day, and his whereabouts are now unknown. Ramzi Yousef’s apartment was then searched, where the police found bomb-making stuff and the business card of Al-Qaeda’s chief bomb-maker and money-launderer Mohammed Khalifa. Ramzi Yousef was not captured, and escaped to fight another day. Khalifa was arrested in 1994 for his role in the bombing, as he was preparing to leave for the Philippines, but the U.S. simply deported him to Jordan. Jordan let him go, and he continued to prosper until he was assassinated in 2007. A few of the henchmen were tried in 1994, and got life sentences. Subsequent events show how abysmally the criminal justice system failed here.

In 1995, anti-government radical Timothy McVeigh copied the truck-bomb idea to retaliate against recent atrocities committed by the feds at Waco and Ruby Ridge. He succeeded in blowing up the federal building in Oklahoma City, killing and injuring hundreds, including the children in the day care center. McVeigh walked away, but his Darwin-Award stupidity got him arrested and ultimately convicted. He got pulled over 90 minutes after the bombing for driving without a license plate, resulting in his arrest for a concealed weapon. He wasn’t suspected of the bombing yet, but he copied the 1993 bombing so well that he gave the feds a road map that eventually led them right to him: he also rented a Ryder truck, the VIN on a part of the axle identified the truck, which was recognized by the motel workers where he’d checked in under his own name. A couple of days later, after he was released on his gun charge in state court, the feds took him into custody. His accomplice Terry Nichols turned himself in that same day, and a search of Nichols’ home turned up all the bomb-making stuff and plans. McVeigh’s own sister would testify against him. Thousands of law-enforcement personnel took part in the investigation, 28,000 interviews were conducted, literally tons of evidence were amassed, millions were spent, and after a massive trial in 1997 McVeigh was sentenced to death. On June 11, 2001, he was executed. The system did its job here, but that’s all it did.

Soon after their 1993 bombing, Al-Qaeda compatriots Ramzi Yousef, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Mohammed Khalifa popped up again. Yousef had kept busy in the meantime, first trying to bomb Pakistan’s prime minister a few months after the WTC bombing, and then killing and injuring hundreds in the bombing of the Imam Reza shrine in Iran. Now in 1994 they planned to kill the Pope while he visited the Philippines the following year, and then during the distraction they’d blow up 12 airliners in the air crossing the Pacific from Asia to the U.S., killing 4,000 people. The next phase would involve hijacking planes and flying them into landmark buildings. For the bombings, their idea was to plant small explosives on the planes during the first leg of a two-leg flight, concealing the bombs in childrens’ toys, and then get off the plane so as not to be blown up with it. First, they needed a trial run to see if that would work. So on December 11, 1994, Ramzi Yousef got on a Philippine Airlines 747 en route to Tokyo, went into the lavatory to assemble the explosive, and set it under seat 26K, which in older 747s would have been directly over the center fuel tank. He got off the plane at Cebu, and the bomb went off during the leg to Tokyo. It wasn’t over the fuel tank, so the plane didn’t blow up, but the bomb killed the man sitting in the seat. Also, it had been aligned up-and-down instead of side-to-side, so the wall of the plane wasn’t punctured. Still, those were easy details to correct, and the team started working on a dozen more bombs in Manila. Fortunately, a fire in Yousef’s apartment led to suspicions. The Manila police raided the apartment, had a wild rooftop chase, and ultimately seized a laptop containing all the plans. A later raid turned up the plans for flying planes into buildings. Yousef escaped to Pakistan. He was turned in by one of his recruits in return for a $2 million bounty, and brought back to the U.S. to stand trial for the conspiracy to blow up the flights to the U.S. (We watched that trial while interning with the Southern District’s terrorism and organized crime unit, it wasn’t bad.) He was convicted after a long trial in 1996, and got a life sentence. He was later convicted in 1997 of masterminding the 1993 bombing, and got another life sentence. He was convicted again for conspiring in the 1993 bombing (a complete waste of the system’s resources by this point), and got another life sentence. He’s doing his time in solitary at the Supermax in Colorado. Sure, the system punished the culprit, but as we now know it didn’t do a damn thing to prevent future terrorism.

In July 1996, Eric Rudolph decided to protest against abortion and the “global socialist” Olympics. He did so by setting off a bomb during the games in Atlanta. One person was killed, and over a hundred were hurt. Rudolph put three pipe bombs in an army pack, filled the pack with nails, wedged a steel plate in to direct the blast like a claymore, and hid it under a bench. He called 911 to issue his warning, and meanwhile a security guard had already noticed the pack and was clearing the area so the bomb squad could check it out. Before the bomb squad arrived, the bomb went off, and nails flew everywhere. The security guard, Richard Jewell, was at first praised as a hero, but then the feds started investigating him as a potential suspect. The media had a field day with the idea of a failed police officer who planted a bomb so he could be a hero, but in October the U.S. Attorney formally cleared him of suspicion. The feds then admitted that there were no other suspects, and the case went cold. Rudolph probably would have gotten away with it, but like other similar offenders he was emboldened to try it again. He used similar bombs in 1997 to attack an abortion clinic and a lesbian nightclub in Atlanta. The feds were able to figure out they were all made by the same person. Another bomb at an abortion clinic in Birmingham gave them the last clues they needed, including part of a license plate, to tie it all to Rudolph. They tipped their hand, however, allowing Rudolph to flee into the Appalachians. He remained a fugitive for more than five years. He was arrested by accident: while scavenging for food in a garbage can, a rookie cop suspected him of trying to commit a burglary. Five months later, in October 2003, the feds charged him with the four bombings. Time passed. Then in April 2005, Rudolph took a plea to a life sentence, avoiding the death penalty. He’s with Yousef at the Supermax now.

In February 1997, a Palestinian named Ali Hassan Abu Kamal went to the observation deck of the Empire State Building to carry out a suicide attack. He’d left Ramallah in December, and entered the U.S. on Christmas Eve. He bought a gun in Florida, then went up to New York. On the evening of his attack, he went to the observation deck, pulled out his gun, and started shooting into the crowd. One tourist was killed and six others were injured. Then he put the gun to his head and shot himself. Under orders from Yasser Arafat’s regime, the gunman’s family gave a false story that he was suicidal after a failed business venture, but in 2007 the family revealed that it had been a politically-motivated attack on the U.S. for its support of Israel. Law enforcement wasn’t able to piece together his sudden entry from a place known for its suicide bombers, his purchase of a firearm, and travel to a landmark population center. Nor should that have been law enforcement’s job. But others could have.

In September 2001, a lot of bad things happened. Al-Qaeda did it, masterminded by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed again, using a barely-tweaked version of his and Ramzi Yousef’s Phase II plans from Manila. A lot of finger-pointing went on afterwards, because although U.S. intelligence agencies knew a lot, and were expecting “something very, very, very big,” and in August the president’s CIA brief even said Al-Qaeda was determined to strike inside the U.S., the intelligence community didn’t — indeed, believed that they couldn’t — share this information with domestic law enforcement. CIA had minimal capacity to conduct paramilitary operations of its own, and the military was completely uninvolved in countering Al-Qaeda. The FBI had almost no capabilities that could have prevented the attacks, even though it had significantly ramped up its counterterrorism efforts after the 1993 WTC bombing. But as with any other law enforcement agency, its focus was exclusively after-the-fact and case-specific. The FBI’s ability to gather intel was limited, there was no sharing of intel from other agencies, and the FBI didn’t have the training or resources to do anything about it even if they did get anything useful.

But that was because the FBI is not in the job of preventing acts of war. If, during the Cold War, the Soviets had sent a team in to blow up the Capitol Building, it would not have been the FBI’s job to prevent it from happening. Nor would the attackers have found themselves facing criminal prosecution in civilian courts. It would have been treated as an act of war, and the combatants would have been treated accordingly.

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Terrorism is no different. And yet there is this bizarre mindset that it is completely different from an act of war, and is instead nothing more than violent crime. But crime is not the same as deliberately sending attackers from foreign lands with the purpose of killing and destroying, in order to attack the nation itself. That’s war, whether it is launched by a governed nation or by a transnational organization.

Timothy McVeigh wasn’t sent by some foreign opponent, though. Does that make his acts a crime as opposed to war? Yes, and more: They are treason, as well as crime. Article III Section 3 defines treason, and puts it within the realm of the federal courts: “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.” Congress duly adopted that definition of the offense in 18 U.S.C. §2381, which allows a sentence of death.

What about Eric Rudolph? Yes, that sort of terrorism counts as crime. If he was trying to force a political decision by violence, then it was terrorism, but he wasn’t trying to attack America, so it stays at the level of a crime. And his attack on the lesbian bar wasn’t so much political as a hate crime, really. Not all mass-murder is war, nor is it treason.

So who should be prosecuted in the criminal courts? Not terrorists directed from abroad. Not combatants captured during war, whether declared or not. It should be limited to offenders like Eric Rudolph.

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On June 25 last year, the Supreme Court held in Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts that in a drug case the prosecution can’t simply use a sworn lab report to prove the existence of a controlled substance. If the chemist doesn’t testify, it violates the Confrontation Clause. (See our previous post about it here.)

Four days later, on June 29, the Court granted cert. in Briscoe v. Virginia, to decide whether the states can get around this requirement if they permit the defendant to call the lab analyst as a defense witness. Oral arguments are scheduled for next Monday, and we can’t wait to hear how the Commonwealth of Virginia tries to make its case.

It seems to us that there is an obvious burden-shifting problem here. The state, and only the state, has the burden of proving every element of the crime. Since the Winship case in 1970, this has been a due process requirement of the Constitution. Unless he asserts an affirmative defense, the defendant has no burden to prove a thing.

So the prosecution has to prove an element. It needs a forensic test to prove it. It needs the testimony of the analyst to introduce the results of that test. The defense does not have a burden to prove anything, one way or the other, about the test.

But Virginia wants to be able to prove its case using only the lab report, and get around the Confrontation Clause by saying the defense is allowed to call the analyst if they want to confront him.

First, who cares whether the state allows the defense to call the analyst or not? Last time we checked, the defense could call any witness they chose, by subpoena if need be. The defense always has the opportunity to put the analyst on the stand as a defense witness. This “permission” doesn’t actually give the defense permission to do anything it couldn’t already do. All it does is imply wrongly that the defense couldn’t have done so otherwise.

Second, the state cannot impose a burden of proof on the defense like this. Virginia’s scheme essentially precludes the defense from challenging the state’s evidence during the state’s case. It forces the defense to act affirmatively and put on a defense case in order to challenge the state’s evidence. That’s a big due process violation.

Third, the state does not get around the Confrontation Clause by shifting the burden to the defendant to call those witnesses it wishes to confront. In a murder case, it would absurd to let the prosecution introduce an eyewitness’s written account of what happened, and no more, so long as the defendant himself could have called the eyewitness if he wanted to. That’s indistinguishable from what Virginia wants to do.

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Lots of prosecutors’ offices are hoping that the Supremes will side with Virginia on this one. Particularly in the more amateurish offices, there is a feeling that the Melendez-Diaz decision imposes too great a cost on the criminal justice system, and imposes unworkable inefficiencies, by requiring chemists to take time off from their busy jobs to testify at trial. An amicus brief filed by half the nation’s attorneys general makes these arguments.

But just look here at New York City, the busiest criminal courts and crime lab in the world. Lab reports are used in the grand jury, where there is no confrontation right, but the chemists themselves must testify at trial. Somehow, this requirement has not bankrupted the city. Getting the chemist to show up is just one more minor hassle that prosecutors have to deal with, no more challenging than getting cops to show up. The requirement is so minor that nobody really thinks about it.

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Still, Melendez-Diaz was a 5-4 decision. And one of the five, Justice Souter, has been replaced by former prosecutor Justice Sotomayor. So people are thinking that she’s going to be more pro-prosecution here, and help the Court either reverse or severely limit that decision.

We don’t think so. We’d remind Court observers that Sotomayor came out of the Manhattan DA’s office, not one of the “amateur hour” offices. Her own personal experience is that requiring the chemist to testify at trial is really no big deal.

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So we’re looking forward to the oral arguments next week. If Scalia gives as good as he did in last June’s decision, and if we’re right about Sotomayor, then Virginia’s in for a spirited beatdown.

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We’re on vacation starting tomorrow, and that means we’ve been extra-busy trying to get as much work done as possible beforehand. So we’re not taking the time to post anything particularly thoughtful today. Maybe while we’re on vacation, but not today.

Still, we were pleased to see we were quoted in Crain’s this morning. Essentially, we were asked to comment on a recent USA Today article claiming that white-collar prosecutions plummeted even as the economic crisis worsened. First of all, USA Today’s stats exaggerate things. As the actual statistics (shown below) show, the drop wasn’t that big. And it’s easily explained by the shift in the FBI’s focus after 9/11. And once the political pendulum started to swing back to financial crimes in 2007, more investigations got started, and we’re now beginning to see plenty more white-collar cases.

We weren’t quoted as accurately as we’d have liked, and they said we used to be a federal prosecutor when we were really a state prosecutor, but they did spell our name and firm correctly, so we’re not complaining.

Anyway, it occurred to us that we’ve been getting some good press lately. And that gave us a great idea for a post. Instead of writing anything of substance, we’d just post some links to the various articles, and call it a day. So here’s some shameless self-promotion:

How Dirty Are Hedge Funds? (Forbes, Oct. 20)

Galleon SEC, FBI Informant Roomy Khan Worked at Intel (Bloomberg, Oct. 22)

Galleon Wiretap Defense Not ‘Hopeless,’ Experts Say (Bloomberg, Oct. 28)

Bear Stearns Defense Holds Lessons For Execs (Forbes, Nov. 17)

After Lull, Financial-Crime Prosecutions Seen Set to Rise (Crain’s, Dec. 22)

And for those who need some useful CLE credits, here are the lectures we gave this year (CLE credit good for most states):
Hope for Hopeless Cases I: Defending an Internet Pornography Case

Hope for Hopeless Cases II: Defending Wiretaps and Tape Recordings

Hope for Hopeless Cases III: Better Loss Calculations for Lower Sentences in Financial Crimes

Hope for Hopeless Cases IV: Your Client Confessed! Now What?

Enjoy!

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We’ve never liked how most lawyers write. They overload their motions with a dozen words where two would do the trick. They use words incorrectly all the time (New York lawyers take note: “wherefore” means “why” — it is not a synonym for “therefore”). They employ all kinds of pointless stylistic tics, for no better reason than “that’s how it’s always been done.” We’re of the opinion that legal writing should be clear, period.

At least one judge is of a like mind. Minnesota federal bankruptcy judge Robert Kressel (shown above) is equally passionate about writing properly. It’s particularly annoying when lawyers submit proposed orders for him to sign, asking him to put his name to their stylistic messes.

So last week Judge Kressel issued some pointed style and grammar rules for proposed orders. You can check them out here. His tone is a little cheeky, perhaps, but his rules are golden.

We encourage all our readers to check them out, and pass them along.

(H/T: WSJ Law Blog)

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On Sunday, the Philadelphia Inquirer published a lengthy article on that city’s abysmal conviction rate for violent crimes. For every three violent-crime arrests in Philadelphia, only one results in a conviction. There are a lot of worse-sounding statistics in that article, but they’re completely meaningless, as they refer only to convictions of the top count, ignoring the reality of plea bargaining. Still, this meaningful stat, the one-in-three conviction rate, is appalling.

Worse than that, about ten thousand violent arrestees walked, no conviction at all, in 2006 and 2007. Only 8% of that number were found “not guilty” after trial. The remaining 92% walked after their cases were dropped or dismissed.

At the same time, FBI stats show that Philadelphia has the highest violent-crime rate of all the big cities.

Coincidence? Of course not.

Violent-crime defendants aren’t getting convicted, and violent crimes are through the roof. There is causation there.

Conviction rates matter. A low conviction rate means the system is broken. If it was working, the rate would be 70% or higher. 33% = broken. Broken means people are being prosecuted for crimes when they shouldn’t have been charged in the first place. Broken means people aren’t getting punished for their violent crimes. And society suffers both ways.

We blame the prosecutors. More on that in a bit.

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The Philadelphia courts have created a public perception that violent crime will not be punished. The odds of getting convicted are minor, and the odds of taking a felony are even lower. It doesn’t take too long for people to figure that out. And the bulk of crimes are committed by people who have frequent contacts with the criminal justice system. This critical demographic repeatedly experiences that the odds are in their favor. The system keeps reinforcing this perception that, if you commit a violent crime, you’ll probably get away with it.

Perception is everything in this system. In order to prevent crimes from happening, our system relies heavily on the deterrent effect of punishment. Deterrence is important. It doesn’t affect crimes of passion in the heat of the moment, but most crimes involve some planning or forethought, and those are the ones we want to make people think twice before committing. Whether they think twice or not depends on what they think might happen.

If people generally believe that a criminal act will probably result in punishment, then they will generally avoid that behavior. This would be true even if such acts were never actually punished (think of the budget savings, increased productivity, and human value society could preserve if we could devise such a system!). And the converse is true — if every criminal act got punished, but nobody realized it, then all that punishment would have zero deterrent effect.

In general, our system tends to fall somewhere between the two extremes. There is an amorphous sense that people can get caught, and that most of those who do get caught wind up getting punished. This perception results in a general background level of deterrence that’s meaningful.

Most law-abiding folks add a huge layer of deterrence on top of that, arising from the morals and ethics ingrained during their socialization and upbringing. But those folks aren’t the ones the criminal law really cares about. The law isn’t designed to deter them; it’s designed to deter those who would gladly commit such crimes if they didn’t they’d get punished.

Such people come from all walks of life. Sure, there are plenty of thugs from anarchic streets, who couldn’t care less about their victims or the rules. But there are also the spoiled suits who are just the same, caring nothing for their victims and thinking the rules don’t apply to them. For every crime, there are opportunists of every stripe.

And if the system fails to create the right perceptions, opportunists are going to take advantage of the perceived opportunities… obviously.

And that’s what’s happening in Philadelphia, it seems.

-=-=-=-=-

How did it happen? The Inquirer has 6 ideas. We think one or two might even be worth considering.

1) First, the Inquirer says that witness intimidation is working. Witnesses and their families are known to get killed in that city. That scares potential witnesses, who decline to come forward. So cases can’t be proven, and get dismissed or result in minimal plea bargains.

The way we see it, the number of such instances is vanishingly small, but the visceral significance of such instances is dramatic, and so the statistics have a lot more weight than they perhaps deserve.

Regardless, we still have a major problem with this explanation: What are the prosecutors thinking? If you don’t have your witnesses lined up, if you are not in a position to prove your case at trial, you have no business filing charges in the first place. You investigate before charging someone with a crime, not after. It is this blog’s position that any prosecutor who files charges before being able to prove them beyond a reasonable doubt is committing misconduct. The better prosecutors’ offices don’t allow such behavior.

But if the Philly prosecutors are having to get rid of cases because they couldn’t round up any witnesses, that means they were charging these cases prematurely and unethically.

So this “witness intimidation” excuse is really nothing more than a symptom of a deeper problem — that the Philly prosecutors are jumping the gun, and then having to deal with the consequences. And the result of their behavior is a public perception that violent criminals can get away with it. Well done, that DA.

2) The caseload is too high. The judges are too busy, says the Inquirer, so they “put a premium on disposing cases” rather than going to trial.

That’s just nonsense, of course. The vast majority of cases everywhere are disposed of before trial. It’s not the judges who make it happen, either. Defendants agree to plea bargains that cut their losses. Prosecutors agree to plea bargains that result in a fair sentence. And both sides avoid the enormous uncertainty, expense and risks of going to trial.

Plea bargaining does not begin to explain how two-thirds of violent arrestees don’t wind up getting convicted, nor does it explain a public perception that violent criminals are probably going to get away with it.

3) The Inquirer points to the statistic that nearly 10,000 violent-crime defendants had their cases dropped or dismissed in ’06 and ’07.

Again, this means to us that the finger must be pointed squarely at the DA’s office. What the heck are they doing, charging 10,000 people with crimes they couldn’t prove? Cases get dropped or dismissed because they shouldn’t have been charged in the first place. This statistic shows an appalling lack of judgment on the part of the Philly prosecutors.

What are they doing, just charging everyone who got arrested? Perhaps. It’s a sad fact that there are some DA’s offices out there who think it’s their job to zealously advocate for the conviction of everyone who got arrested. But of course that is not only not their job, it’s unethical for them to behave that way.

Prosecutors are given enormous power and discretion, and it is an abuse of that discretion not to exercise it in the first place. They’re supposed to first figure out whether the case should and could be prosecuted, before wasting time and treasure on a pointless case, and dragging people through a horrific process. And they’re certainly not supposed to delegate their discretion to the police, who have neither the authority nor the purpose to exercise it. But those DA’s offices that simply take on every arrest are doing precisely that.

Maybe instead they’re just charging people without proof, in the hopes of getting a plea bargain, and hope nobody calls their bluff. That’s nothing short of criminal extortion, if true.

It should be nigh impossible to dismiss a case, unless there is newly-discovered evidence, or the interests of justice demand mercy. Otherwise, there ought to have been enough evidence to take the case to trial before charges were ever filed. This staggering statistic demonstrates that the DA’s office is charging thousands of people with crimes, when they had no business doing so.

4) The Inquirer says the DA’s office doesn’t track how well or how poorly its cases fare, and as a result cannot prioritize the work of its 300 prosecutors.

That’s sort of irrelevant, really. 300 prosecutors is plenty. The Manhattan DA handles way more cases, and better, with not many more ADAs.

And prioritizing who’s working on what isn’t really something the stats ought to affect. A significant number of losses and dismissals are an indicator that a particular prosecutor might need to be reassigned, but wins and losses don’t affect where you focus your manpower. It’s really just a supply-and-demand thing — put the bodies where they’re needed, that’s all.

5) Philadelphia’s courts are uncoordinated. The basic logistics of getting the parties and witnesses together for trial becomes a disorganized fustercluck of delay. Eventually, cases just collapse because they can never be brought to trial. Defense attorneys know this, and take advantage of it.

We can’t speak to how things work in Philly, having never practiced there. But this doesn’t sound too much different from state court in New York. Unlike federal court, where your trial date is your trial date, NY state courts just set date after date until by lucky chance everyone is ready to go at the same time. It’s pointless and inefficient as hell, but it doesn’t seem to be a huge problem. Most cases get there sooner or later. (Our magic number is usually 5 — if we’ve answered ready four times, it’ll usually go on the fifth. YMMV.)

Getting the cops to show up is a hassle for state prosecutors everywhere. Cops think they’re job is done when they made the arrest, court keeps them from making more arrests, and they don’t like being cross-examined any more than the next fellow. But that’s a simple fact of life everywhere, and doesn’t explain why Philly’s any different. Ditto for herding cats and witnesses. And ditto for defense attorneys who take advantage of the government’s inability to get its act together. It happens everywhere. It’s really irrelevant here.

6) Finally, the Inquirer says the courts aren’t enforcing bail. “Defendants skip courts with impunity,” so that there are nearly 47,000 fugitives in that town. “Impunity” means they never forfeit their bail. The city courts estimate “a staggering $1 billion” in supposedly forfeited bail remains uncollected. Fugitives don’t get convicted, because they’re not in court.

That is appalling. The whole point of bail is to ensure a defendant comes back to court, by holding his money hostage. The defendant puts up his cash or gets a loan from a bondsman. If the defendant doesn’t show up when he’s supposed to, he loses his cash or the collateral for the bond.

But if the defendant never forfeits his bail, then bail serves no purpose.

-=-=-=-=-

Whatever the reason, the conviction rate in Philly is so low as to be counterproductive. The DA’s office is acting in ways that increase, rather than decrease, the incentives to commit crimes.

People are being chewed up by the criminal justice machine when they never should have been charged in the first place. Not all of them got dismissed or acquitted. Who knows how many more went through it and went to jail? And criminals are committing more crimes with impunity. Everyone suffers.

This low conviction rate is merely a symptom of a deeper illness. The DA’s office is charging people when it shouldn’t be. It’s either jumping the gun before enough evidence is in, or it’s abusing its discretion and taking on every single arrest, or it’s trying to extort pleas. From the evidence in this article, it looks like the DA’s office is the disease at the root of it all.

There’s going to be a new DA there in January. We’ll see if he does anything about it. In the meantime, on the whole, we’d rather not be in Philadelphia.

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Our friends at the Cato Institute forwarded this to us, and it looks like it even might be halfway decent. The folks at Flex Your Rights are about to release a new DVD, “10 Rules for Dealing with Police.” It looks like a primer on how the police can lie and trick people into giving up their constitutional rights. Not a shock to those of us who do this stuff for a living, but it might be worth a watch for others.

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The Chief was at it again.

Everyone had their theories. J.P. said the Chief had lost it, gone soft in the head. Nino thought he was just having fun. Sam didn’t say anything, so he was probably in on it.

None of us thought it made any sense, though. Except me. I had my own ideas. What the Chief was doing made perfect sense, if anything can make sense in this world. He was like me.

No, not like me. I only have contempt for the tedium, the routine drudgery the rule-boys keep feeding us. The Chief wanted to do something about it.

But his methods… Like some Frankenstein, trying to animate the dead… Well, maybe he was more like me than I imagined.

While sipping a cup of last night’s coffee, I decided I liked it. I silently congratulated the guy, and wished he’d keep it up.

-=-=-=-=-

At the beginning of the ’08 term, Chief Justice Roberts sparked a miniature kerfuffle when he opened a decision with a factual recitation in the style of Hammett or Spillane. It wasn’t half bad, and it certainly got the facts across without losing the reader’s interest. But it wasn’t at all what we’re used to reading in Supreme Court opinions. So one heard comments and criticisms in the corridors and over cocktails, for a few days anyway. But people got over it. After all, it was only a dissent to a denial of cert, and who even reads those? It’s probably the one kind of opinion where a justice could get away with a bit of fun. It was just a one-off, let it go.

Except it wasn’t just a one-off. It was just the beginning. Since then Roberts has kept at it, putting a bit of dramatic flair into his opinions. Particularly, it seems, in cases that aren’t all that dramatic to begin with.

Take today’s opinion, for example, in Beard v. Kindler. The issue couldn’t be more boring — whether a discretionary ruling on state procedure is something that can be pursued in a federal habeas claim. The case has nothing to do with the underlying facts of the case, but instead inquires into whether the state courts had regularly followed that procedure, and the general policy arguments for and against allowing habeas.

Yawn. If Dirty Harry or Mike Hammer were here, they’d be shooting or punching someone. They’d deal with the tedious legal processes and technicalities, but on their own terms.

And so did Chief Justice Roberts. He dealt with it on his own terms, in his own way, by opening his decision with a lengthy and dramatic recitation of the underlying events — events that have absolutely nothing to do with the discrete legal issue before the court.

Roberts told the gritty story of Joseph Kindler, which itself seems made for TV or a pulp novel: In 1982, Kindler and two associates robbed a store, only to get caught during the getaway. “In a harbinger of things to come, Kindler escaped.” When one of the associates agreed to testify against him, Kindler and the other one bludgeoned him almost to death with a baseball bat, shocked him repeatedly with a cattle prod, threw him in the trunk, hauled him to the river, tied a cinderblock around his neck, and threw him in the river, where he died of drowning and massive head injuries. He was convicted of murder, the jury recommended execution, but before sentencing Kindler escaped. Using smuggled tools and a lot of help from other inmates, he sawed through the bars of his maximum-security prison, and fled to Canada. He got caught there committing more crimes. Canada refused to extradite him, because he faced execution, and Kindler became a minor celebrity, going on TV and everything. Eventually, however, Canada agreed to extradite him, whereupon he promptly escaped again. With the help of his fellow inmates, he broke through a skylight in a high ceiling, climbed to the roof, then rappelled down a rope made of 13 bedsheets. Kindler made it, but when another tried to follow the sheet ripped, and he fell 50 feet to his death. Kindler was caught again after America’s Most Wanted did a segment on him. Several years later, he was eventually extradited back to the U.S. In the meantime, the state court had long since dismissed his original sentencing motions, as he had escaped before they were decided. The case has been going back and forth on appeal over that dismissal, ever since. The original arrest was in 1982.

Roberts tells it much more entertainingly than this, of course. But almost none of that was necessary or even relevant. It could just as easily have been replaced with “A jury convicted Kindler of capital murder for the brutal slaying of a state witness. The jury recommended a death sentence, and Kindler filed postverdict motions. Before the trial court had considered the motions or the jury’s death recommendation, Kindler escaped. While Kindler remained a fugitive, the trial court dismissed his postverdict motions. Seven years later, Kinder was returned to court, and moved to have his motions reinstated. The trial court found that the original judge had not abused his discretion, denied the reinstatement motion, and imposed the death sentence.”

Frankly, we like it Roberts’ way better.

And we hope he keeps it up, particularly in the more humdrum cases. It does no harm, and it might even keep one or two young associates from nodding off during some tedious night of research down the road.

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In a seemingly ho-hum decision today, the Supreme Court made the shocking pronouncement that the states cannot afford their citizens more rights than the bare minimum allowed federally. A complete reversal of 200 years of American jurisprudence. And though it’s buried at the end of the opinion, it’s at the core of this otherwise routine Fourth Amendment case.

-=-=-=-=-

Although the Fourth Amendment says the police need a warrant to search your house, most of the time they never get one. We have exceptions to the warrant requirement in circumstances where getting a warrant would be pointless, or where concerns for safety take priority. One such exception is when the police have reason to believe that someone is in immediate need of assistance, because they might be hurt or in danger.

The issue is very simple — did the police have an objectively reasonable basis for believing that someone in the house needed help right away?

The issue is not whether, using perfect hindsight, there really was such an emergency. We only care about whether the police acted reasonably under the circumstances. If it sure looked like someone needed police help, then the fact that nobody actually did need help is irrelevant. The police are allowed to check it out to make sure.

The Supreme Court issued an opinion today, in Michigan v. Fisher, repeating this fairly basic rule. They had to, the majority wrote in a 7-2 per curiam opinion, because the Michigan Court of Appeals mis-applied the law, replacing the rule’s “objective inquiry into appearances with its hindsight determination that there was in fact no emergency.”

What happened was fairly simple. Some concerned citizens directed the police to Fisher’s house, where he was supposedly “going crazy.” Once they got there, it looked like Fisher’s pickup truck had smashed into his fence, and there was blood on the crumpled hood. There was blood inside the truck, and on the door to the house. Three of the windows had been busted from the inside. Looking through a window, the police saw Fisher screaming and throwing things, but they couldn’t see what or whom at. Fisher had a little cut on his hand, and the front door was barricaded with a sofa. The cops asked if Fisher needed medical attention, and he told them to fuck off and get a warrant. One of the cops pushed the front door open a bit, then saw Fisher pointing a shotgun at him through the door’s window. The cop beat a hasty retreat. End of intrusion.

The trial court and the state’s highest court said the gun had to be suppressed, because the police never should have poked in through the front door in the first place.

The Supremes said this sure looked like a reasonable basis to believe someone needed immediate assistance. Fisher clearly acted as if he posed a threat to himself, if not to an unseen target of his violence inside the house. The police couldn’t see everything through the window, so pushing open the front door and peeking in was justifiable. The fact that nobody else ultimately was found to be inside, and that Fisher’s only injury was very minor in actuality, doesn’t change what the police knew at the time.

Stevens and Sotomayor dissented, saying that the Supreme Court essentially usurped the trial court’s role here. The Supremes weren’t there to assess the evidence during the hearing, so it was improper for them to say the trial court got the facts wrong. That’s not a bad argument. But that’s not really what the Supremes were doing here. They weren’t saying the court got the facts wrong — in fact, everyone pretty much agreed on the relevant facts — all they were saying is the Michigan Court of Appeals got the law wrong. And it certainly is the Supreme Court’s job to ensure that the law is being applied correctly.

What the Supreme Court did get wrong (though Stevens and Sotomayor missed it) is in saying that the Michigan court erred in holding the police to a higher standard than federal Fourth Amendment law requires. This is a hugely significant error of jurisprudence, and it should not go unremarked-upon.

The rights espoused in the federal Constitution are not the only rights that American citizens may have. They are nothing more than a minimum, a floor below which no government may go. But the states have their own constitutions, and are permitted to grant extra rights and freedoms to their citizens.

For example, on this same Fourth Amendment topic, the most important recent Supreme Court case is Brigham City v. Stuart, 547 U.S. 398 (2006), which said that the federal Constitution does not forbid the police to have had an ulterior motive. So long as the police had objectively reasonable grounds to believe that an emergency was at hand, the federal Fourth Amendment does not care whether the police wanted to see if there was any contraband there as well. It’s like the Whren case, saying that so long as the cops had probable cause in the first place, the federal Constitution doesn’t care whether the stop was really just a pretext so the cops could do something else. This is consistent federal law.

But the states are free to adopt the Brigham City rule or not, as they see fit. New York, for example, hasn’t gotten around to making that call yet. Its rule under People v. Mitchell, 39 N.Y.2d 173 (1976) imposes a requirement that the so-called emergency search not be a pretext for something else. Brigham City, if adopted, would do away with that requirement. But for the moment, it is still New York law, under the New York constitution.

The same goes here. Michigan’s highest court is the final arbiter of what the Michigan constitution requires. And if they say that the citizens of Michigan are entitled to greater protections from police intrusion than are afforded by the federal minimums, then the Supreme Court has no place saying otherwise.

And yet that is precisely what the Supremes have done here. The opinion is per curiam, but it reads as if Roberts wrote it. But whoever wrote it screwed up. They reversed because “the Michigan Court of Appeals required more than what the Fourth Amendment demands.” That is not grounds for reversal. Period. For the Supremes to even think that it is reflects a disturbing antifederalist, Hamiltonian, big-government, centralized-government arrogance that is totally contrary to basic principles of American jurisprudence.

Right result, wrong reason. Bad decision.

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Last week, we argued that capital punishment as practiced in America does not work, because it takes too long.

The appellate process can take decades, during which time the convict remains on death row, the victims get no closure, and any deterrent effect gets completely washed out. In fact, the huge gap between the crime and the punishment, and the uncertainty as to whether execution would even result, adds even more injustice into the system while imposing enormous unnecessary societal costs.

Our point was not that appeals should be limited — on the contrary, they are never more necessary. Our point was simply that the process takes so long that it nullifies the whole reason for capital punishment in the first place.

We did not explore, however, whether this delay ought to count as “cruel and unusual punishment” in violation of the Eighth Amendment. We figured we’d leave that one for another day.

Well, today’s the day. In dueling opinions yesterday, Justices Stevens and Thomas went head-to-head over just that issue. We think they’re both right, and they’re both wrong.

-=-=-=-=-

The case is Cecil C. Johnson v. Phil Bredesen, Governor of Tennessee, et al., No. 09-7839. Stevens’ opinion can be found here, and Thomas’ can be found here.

Cecil Johnson was executed yesterday, after the Supreme Court denied cert.

In July 1980, a man robbed a convenience store in Nashville. During the robbery, the thief brutally murdered the store owner’s 12-year-old son, and two other men who were sitting in a taxi.

A couple of days later, Cecil Johnson’s father turned him in. There was no physical evidence that tied him to the crime. He was convicted and sentenced to death in 1981.

For the next 29 years, Johnson plodded through the capital appeals process, persistently maintaining his innocence.

In 1992, Tennessee for the first time gave him access to evidence that might have undermined key testimony against him.

-=-=-=-=-

Justice Stevens argues that this 11-year delay, before Tennessee finally made that disclosure, is a state-caused delay that counts as “unacceptably cruel.”

Thomas replies that it is pure chutzpah for a convict to file appeal after endless appeal, and then claim that the resulting delay violated his rights. He caused the delay, not the government.

But they’re both wrong. The delay wasn’t caused by the government in the way Stevens says, and that only covered the first of three decades anyway. It doesn’t affect the other two decades that this case meandered through the courts. And the delay wasn’t caused by Johnson in the way Thomas says. It’s not Johnson’s fault that the courts took so damned long.

So if the government wasn’t to blame as Stevens argued, and Johnson wasn’t to blame as Thomas argued, then who is to blame?

-=-=-=-=-

It is the procedural setup itself that is to blame. We cannot blame a convict for seeking review, to ensure that he was properly convicted and sentenced, and to ensure that the government did not abuse its power and violate his rights. Far from it — we insist on it. Ensuring that the government did it right for this defendant helps protect all of us, and Americans want it that way.

But we can blame the delays that are built into the system’s procedural rules. There is no reason why it should take years to get from a challenged ruling to an appellate decision on that ruling. The only reason why it does take years is because the procedural rules allow it. And human nature being what it is, it is hardly surprising that lawyers and judges will take all the time they are permitted to argue and decide matters of life and death.

Some amount of delay is reasonable, of course — it would be equally unjust to impose time limits that are too short to permit thoughtful argument and careful analysis. But even with longer than usual time limits, there is no reason why state appeals couldn’t be exhausted within a year of sentencing, and federal challenges exhausted within another year. Two years, not twenty or thirty.

(Think this way: Give the defendant 30 days after sentence to file a notice of appeal, then another 60 to file his brief. 90 days is more than enough time to do the work. Give the prosecution a generous 60 days to reply. Take 30 days to prepare for oral argument, and then give the judges another 30 days to noodle it through and make a decision. That’s 210 days, and the first appeal is over. Subsequent appeals are going to go over the same ground, so time limits can be shorter now. Say another 30 days for the defendant to announce he’s taking it to the state’s supreme court. Then 30 days to brief it, 30 days for the prosecution to brief it, 30 days to prepare for oral argument, and 30 days to reach a decision. That’s 360 days. One year. Federal appeals and habeas shouldn’t take more than one more year. And we’re done.)

-=-=-=-=-

Okay, so the delay is preventable. It’s caused by government rule-making. And the rules can be changed to protect the defendant’s interest in speedy resolution while continuing to protect his interest in thorough vetting of his conviction.

But does that make this delay “cruel and unusual punishment” for Eighth Amendment purposes? Probably not.

Think about it. All that’s happening to the defendant during this delay is that he’s being incarcerated. In a world without capital punishment, he’d be in the same position. He’d still be incarcerated, while going through the same appellate process that every other inmate goes through. The same process, and the same incarceration, that clearly does not violate ordinary convicts’ Eighth Amendment rights.

So no, the appellate delay is not cruel and unusual. But it still totally defeats the purpose of capital punishment in the first place, and for that simple policy reason the death penalty should be banned until such time as the system works out a way to complete the appellate process soon enough and consistently enough to make it worthwhile.

-=-=-=-=-

There are other problems with Stevens’ and Thomas’ arguments. Stevens, for example, is about to retire after a long tenure on the bench, and recent years have seen him going all-out to make a legacy for himself. He is adamantly opposed to the death penalty, and will make any argument against it. As a result, he winds up trying to have it both ways, as Thomas unkindly points out — decrying both the length of the appellate process, as well as the perversity of carrying out executions before every appeal has been exhausted.

Thomas, meanwhile, flatly ignores the interests of justice, and gets hung up on whether the technical procedural requirements were satisfied. He forgets that the procedures are there to serve the interests of justice, and not the other way around. The rules are there to help ensure that defendants’ rights are protected, but the rules are not the only safeguard. The mere fact that the rules were satisfied does not necessarily mean that the system worked properly. Judges — particularly Supreme Court justices — need to be able to step back and determine whether this individual’s rights really were protected, and whether society’s policy interests were advanced.

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The AP’s Sam Hananel has a nifty piece on Law.com today, called “Drug Courts Successful for Few Who Get In.” He sums up the situation fairly well. The short version is “drug court works, and with more funding it would work even more.”

A lot of crime is the result of drug addiction. Addicts deal drugs, rob, steal, burglarize and hurt people just to feed their addiction. Other crimes would never have happened but for that addiction. And addicts tend to keep committing these crimes over and over again. The damage to society is great, and the public cost of dealing with it is enormous.

So if we could somehow stop the addiction, the thinking goes, then we could prevent a large amount of future crimes and save ourselves a lot of resources. That’s where drug court comes in. If selected for drug court, addicts get treatment and counseling. And if they succeed, their case gets dismissed or reduced in the interests of justice.

That’s the carrot. There’s a stick, as well. Before entering the program, the offender has to take a plea. No judgment is entered, however. If the offender completes the program successfully, then they get their plea back. If they fail, however, then that plea can be enforced, and they face jail.

But a drug program that’s going to work is also going to be very hard to endure. Lots of offenders would rather just do the time, frankly. Because it’s not just about kicking the habit. Quitting is the easy part. Look at any population of inmates who can’t afford to maintain their drug habit while incarcerated, if you want to see “cold turkey” in action. The problem is, when they get out, they go right back into the same neighborhoods, with the same temptations, the same social pressures, and the same inability to just say “no.” They never rejoin lawful society.

So a decent drug program is going to hammer home, not only the ability to say “no” and keep pissing clean, but also the skills one needs to survive in law-abiding society. How to get a job, and keep it. How to take care of oneself, one’s family, and even put some savings aside. How to get that high school equivalency, or vocational certificate that can make all the difference in the world. It’s damn hard.

But it works. For those who graduate these programs, a mind-boggling 75% stay out of trouble. They’re cured. It worked.

Of course, a large reason why the success rates are so high is that candidates are cherry-picked by DA’s offices. Sources cited in the AP article complain about this selectivity, but in a world where the number of addicts vastly outweighs the resources available for treatment, it is hardly surprising that the government would focus its resources on those addicts most likely to respond to treatment. Accepting someone who’s probably going to fail is doubly unjust — it wastes tax dollars that could have helped another equally-needy addict, and it sets up the failer for the big stick punishment.

That big stick punishment is another complaint we’ve heard, and it pops up in the AP article, too. It’s not fair, they say, to require defendants to take a plea before they go into treatment. But these critics fail to recognize that it is a crucial part of the equation. Without the plea first, there is no incentive not to backslide. We’re talking about people who have already exercised poor judgment, poor impulse control, and a general tendency to take the easy way out. And again, this is a difficult process. Offering a risk-free escape route would set the whole system up for failure. It would be unjust, and a huge waste.

On top of that, the system would have to resuscitate each case one by one as people dropped out of the programs. DA’s offices would never be able to close a case, really. It would only increase their uncertainty and their workload. What possible incentive would they have to recommend our clients for treatment in such a situation? Time to be realistic, people.

So screw the naysayers. When we were narcotics prosecutors, we liked it. Now that we’re on the side of the angels, we love it. It makes a difference. It works. Keep both the carrot and the stick, if you want it to keep working. And if you want less cherry-picking, cough up more taxes so there are enough spots for all the good candidates, and then cough up some more to pay for the long shots.

In the meantime, let’s keep working to make it work.

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The Last Lawyer: The Fight to Save Death Row Inmates
By John Temple
2009 University Press of Mississippi, 234 pages, $25.95
Amazon.com :: Barnes & Noble

The world is loaded with books about criminal lawyers. They fill the shelves in the mystery and thriller aisles, dominate true crime and related nonfiction genres. After all, a book about what we do is almost a guaranteed page-turner. Conflict? We got it — trials, accusations, at least two sides fighting in every case. Character? Our characters range from the noblest of all to the most despicable and inhuman. Plot? It’s already there, from the crime to the acquittal or execution. And the stakes couldn’t be higher. We’re not fighting over love or money, we’re fighting for people’s lives and liberty.

So it’s no surprise that there are so many John Grishams out there, and so many nonfiction books about criminal defense. And with so many books out there, you’d think that there would be plenty that give a fairly accurate insight into what criminal practice is really like.

And you would be wrong.

For it is rare indeed to find a book that really does the job. There are plenty that entertain, grip the reader, and even have something worth saying. But books that really draw the reader into our world, and let the reader see it with our eyes and our experience? Such books are few and far between.

Which is why we were genuinely delighted to read The Last Lawyer, by John Temple, an associate professor of journalism and associate dean at West Virginia University. Temple is not a criminal lawyer, he’s not a mystery writer, and that’s a good thing. He’s the kind of writer who comes from the outside, and digs deep into his subject. Like the lawyers and investigators he describes in this book, he clearly put in the time and effort to find out what really happened, who did it, how it happened, and why. And then he took all that data and crafted it into a story that is no less powerful simply because it is true.

True stories almost always suffer from bad writing. “But that’s how it really happened” is a crutch for lame writing, an excuse for having told a story poorly. Yes, real life does not play out according to a scripted dramatic formula. But that doesn’t mean reality can’t be presented that way. The Last Lawyer, however, tends to avoid this trap. With few exceptions, Temple grabs the reader and doesn’t let go.

So okay, he’s a good writer. But what does he have to say? That’s the best part.

Because Temple really gets it. He really, really gets it. If you read only one book in your life about what it’s like to be a criminal defense lawyer, read this one.

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When we’re reading a book that particularly engages us, it’s like we’re having a conversation with the author. We find ourselves picking up a pen and scribbling back at him. Books at our house sometimes become dog-eared and annotated beyond any hope of resale. Our copy of The Last Lawyer quickly joined their ranks.

Why, when we already do this stuff for a living? Were we picking fights, or pointing out errors? Not at all. Instead, we frequently found ourselves encountering an insight, or a way of looking at things where we hadn’t looked at it ourselves that way. And we’d go “oh!” or “aha!” And then we’d take that fresh insight and run with it a bit in our head, and it would lead to a new thought we’d always sort of known, but had never actually thought before.

Not as much as we do when reading Proust, Patrick O’Brian or Terry Pratchett. But often enough. Often enough.

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The Last Lawyer takes you through Ken Rose’s decade-long fight to appeal the capital conviction of Bo Jones, a low-IQ Black man sentenced to die for a 1987 murder.

Trial counsel had done little of the work that needed to be done now, and the case had to be investigated from scratch.. Uncooperative witnesses, some who lied and others with good reasons to lie — these were the least of their worries. They had to deal with a client who just did not seem to get the concept. And worse, judges who didn’t get the concept, and couldn’t be bothered to make the effort in the first place. Prosecutors who were the opposite of sympathetic, who railed against attempts to make technical legal arguments, but who were perfectly happy to get a conviction on technicalities themselves. A broken legal system that, instead of seeking justice, becomes a machine for churning people into prison or the gas chamber.

The book takes you through ten years of this struggle, as Ken Rose and his team slowly and gradually discover the facts and arguments they need to save Bo Jones’ life. In the process, you get to see firsthand the best and the worst that our system has to offer. Like any other human enterprise, you see a handful of outstanding performers, another handful of ruinous subverters, and a huge majority of folks just going along to get along. You see a system with powerful inertia.

Our adversarial system is designed to achieve justice, but it needs honest and good-faith opposition to function properly. Both sides need to play by the rules, and try their best, if justice is going to result. And it needs judicial referees to keep a keen eye out, not only for fouls, but for merit as well. But the reader of this book sees law enforcement that isn’t always as honest as we expect it to be, prosecutors who stop trying to seek justice and instead get invested in winning at all cost, defense attorneys who stop protecting their client above all else and instead become mere grease in the wheels of this machine. And judges who have seen so many frivolous arguments that they can’t spot the valid ones any more, and who aren’t terribly inclined to look for them in the first place.

But there’s more to it than that. It’s not just the broken system. There is good out there. And you get to see that, too. The single most important variable in whether a case is won or lost is preparation. And you see how good lawyers prepare, do the hard work, take the time to do the job right. You see real dedication, not to ego or money or advancement, but to saving the life of a fellow human being. To seeking real justice. To making the system a little bit better, for all of us.

This is the day-to-day experience of a criminal lawyer. The sometimes odd personalities, the deep injustices, the soaring heights of the human spirit, and everything in between.

Go get the book.

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Without much media fanfare, the Supreme Court has already decided two capital-punishment cases this month.

The first, Bobby v. Van Hook, came down on the 9th, and dealt with a case from early 1985. Nearly 25 years ago, Van Hook went looking for someone to rob, trolled a Cincinnati gay bar, and seduced a guy he met there. The victim invited Van Hook to his apartment, where Van Hook got him into “a vulnerable position.” Then Van Hook strangled his victim till he was unconscious, killed him with a kitchen knife, and mutilated his body, before taking off with his victim’s valuables. Van Hook later confessed, and was sentenced to death.

His appeals lasted for nine years, all of which were denied. He then spent the next 14 years litigating a single federal habeas petition. First, he unsuccessfully challenged the constitutionality of his confession, losing those arguments all the way up to a denial of certiorari by the Supremes in 2007. Then he tried a new argument, that he’d gotten ineffective assistance of counsel at sentencing, because all the work they had done wasn’t enough. The Sixth Circuit said his sentence should be reconsidered under new standards that had arisen 18 years after the fact. Ohio appealed, and the Supreme Court said you can’t apply these new standards retroactively like that. Van Hook argued that his counsel was ineffective under the standards at the time, anyway, to which the Supremes replied: “He is wrong.”

The Sixth Circuit being reversed, Robert Van Hook is now once again back in the queue for execution, nearly a quarter of a century later.

The second case decided was Wong v. Belmontes, which came out on the 16th. This case started way back in 1981, when Fernando Belmontes bludgeoned Steacy McConnell about 20 times with a steel weightlifting bar. She fought back desperately, to try to save herself, but ultimately Belmontes succeeded in killing her, so he could steal her stereo. He sold it for $100, which he spent on beer and drugs for that evening. He was convicted in California and sentenced to death.

His appeals went back and forth, and he lost. He tried to get federal habeas relief, but the District Court wouldn’t go for it. He appealed that, and the nothing-if-not-consistent Ninth Circuit bent over backwards to find instructional error, but the Supreme Court slapped that down in 2006. The Ninth Circuit tried again, this time finding ineffective assistance of counsel at sentencing. In its ruling this month, the Supreme Court pointed out not only how much work went into the defense case at sentencing, but also how wise and skillful it had been. “If this counsel couldn’t make it work,” the Court seems to say, “then nobody could.” You just can’t mitigate away a case where the victim had obviously suffered so needlessly and brutally.

So now, the Ninth Circuit is reversed, and Fernando Belmontes is back on the capital-punishment track 28 years after the crime.

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It being close to Thanksgiving, these decisions remind us of one of the first cases we ever worked on, back when we labored at all hours over Thanksgiving 1995 with the famed Carter Phillips, trying to prevent the execution of a retarded man, Walter Correll. Especially in light of the Supreme Court’s turnaround in the 2002 Atkins v. Virginia decision, ruling that executing the mentally retarded is a violation of the Eighth Amendment, we always get a little gloomy when we think back on that case.

But these decisions also remind us that, Republican though we may be, we remain firmly opposed to the death penalty. Not because it’s inherently cruel or inappropriate, but because it takes so damn long to carry out. The way the death penalty works in this country results in real injustice, harms society, and just makes things worse.

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Look at the graph we stuck up there at the top of this post. We made that graph based on data freely available from the United States Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics. You can see the raw data here.

That chart shows the average elapsed time, from sentence to execution, for each year. This is the average, and as the recent cases attest, actual times can be much much longer. But on average, the wait has gone from 51 months (4-1/4 years), to 153 months (12-3/4 years). That is an insane delay!

Elsewhere in the statistics, we see that the average inmate on death row right now has been waiting for 141 months, or about 11-3/4 years.

That’s a long time, in anyone’s book.

Now don’t get us wrong — we’re glad of the opportunity this affords us to find evidence of actual innocence, DNA evidence, or other means to exonerate the truly innocent. We’re not advocating for speedier executions, here. It takes this long because that’s just how long it takes. Our system is set up to give a lot of opportunity to review death sentences before they’re carried out. There is no appeal after execution, so society wants to make sure that everything was done right, that the convict has been afforded every procedural and constitutional protection that our jurisprudence has devised. And it just takes a long time to do that.

Our point is that the death penalty is improper (among perhaps other reasons) because this necessary delay makes it counterproductive.

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Why do we punish people in the first place? Punishment is when the awesome might of the government is brought to bear on an individual, taking away rights, liberties, property, and even his life. Why do we do that?

We do that because we’ve deemed some actions so harmful to society that, to protect itself, society has to impose this harm. But that begs the question. It’s more of a definition of “what is a crime” than “why do we punish, to begin with.”

We punish because, over history, societies have discovered that it works. At some instinctive level, you get retaliation. Someone hits you, so you hit them back without thinking. It’s a primal urge, not a civilized one, but it would be foolish to pretend that society does not have its own primal urges. We don’t punish strictly to hit back at those who would hurt us, not consciously perhaps, but it is part of the reason why.

A more civilized reason is deterrence. It’s like spanking a child — the criminal associates the punishment with the crime, and decides not to do that any more. And if the spanking is public and seen by others, then others will also realize that this could happen to them, and they won’t do it either.

Deterrence only works, of course, if the punishment is close enough in time to the offense to have a psychological effect. If you spank a kid for something he did three weeks ago, the only psychological message you’re sending is that you’re unfair and cruel, and thereby weakening your own authority.

Deterrence only works if the punishment is connected to the crime. If you spank a kid and he has no idea why you’re spanking him, you’re not deterring anything. All you’re doing is demonstrating that you are arbitrary and unjust. The kid doesn’t know what to expect from you, and will grow to fear and despise you.

General deterrence of other potential criminals only works if the punishment is known, in addition to being close in time and tied to the offense. If people don’t know that it happened, then there is zero deterrent effect from any particular offense.

Perception then, as in so much of life, is everything. You want the system set up in such a way as to create the impression that sentences are just and fair, but you also want the perception that sentences are also going to be imposed. That, if you commit this offense, that punishment is actually going to happen.

Ideally, a utilitarian and a social idealist might even agree that the best way to do this would be to create the perception that sentences are speedily and fairly meted out, without going to all the expense and social harm of actually imposing them.

The flip side of that would be the opposite of ideal, then. And the flip side is exactly what we’ve got.

In our present system, capital punishment is not imposed close in time to the offense. It takes a decade or two before it is carried out. That’s like spanking a kid three weeks later. Far from having any deterrent effect, it undermines faith in justice and weakens the law’s authority.

As practiced, capital punishment is not connected to the crime. It’s almost random. Some horrific murders get the death penalty, others don’t. The reasons for the variety are not obvious or predictable. Unpredictability = no deterrent effect.

And public perception? After all the randomness and delay, there may be a perception that you could get the chair for a given crime, but nobody really thinks you will get the chair. Folks just don’t have an experience of the death penalty as being imposed consistently enough that we simply understand, deep down at a visceral level, that a given crime is likely to result in one’s own death. At best, public perception is a vague theoretical possibility. At worst, and what is more likely, is the perception that the death penalty is so rarely imposed, and only after such an interminable (ha) delay, that it’s really not a factor worth considering in the first place.

(Of course it goes without saying that no punishment can have a deterrent effect on crimes of passion, where no thought went into the crime. But those kinds of crimes tend not to be death-penalty cases, so that argument isn’t really applicable here.)

Another purpose of punishment is rehabilitation, but it’s hard to get one’s act together after one is dead, so that one is out the window.

The only remaining purpose of punishment is removal — getting this threat to public safety off the streets.

Now this one has some promise. Execution certainly removes the offender from our midst. So does exile, though, without all the mess and expense (though dumping our worst threats on someone else could create bigger problems). Life without parole does the same job, though at theoretically great cost — 75% of all death-penalty inmates were under 35 years old when they went in (see more statistics), so they’ve got lots of decades of feeding, sheltering, guarding, clothing, counseling, treating, educating, etc. to pay for.

Unfortunately, as practiced, capital punishment is just a more expensive form of life without parole. At some point, an ordinary prisoner is going to run out of appeals, but the capital inmate doesn’t. And the capital appeals take priority over other judicial needs, while costing the system and everyone involved a lot more in time and resources. By the time someone actually gets executed, all the various costs involved more than cover the costs of a life sentence.

So if removal is the only concern, then life without parole would be the way to go. You don’t get any extra removal from execution. All you get is increased tax burdens, significant extra burdens on the judicial system, loss of enormous amounts of time and money all around, and the intangible losses from harm to the system’s perception and reputation and authority.

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So, speaking as a fairly conservative Republican here, we just don’t see how capital punishment as practiced in America today makes the least bit of sense. It accomplishes little, at enormous unnecessary societal cost.

That’s not the message the Supreme Court probably intended to send with these two cases this month, but that’s the message we heard loud and clear.

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Finally, the trial that would. not. end. is over. Three weeks to try a case that should have taken no more than five days. In the case that just would not end, either. The arrest was more than three years ago — that’s plenty long to have a felony case hanging over your head.

Especially one as over-charged as this one. A responsible prosecution team would have charged maybe 3 counts in this case. But for reasons unknown, the folks who originally brought the case in 2006 went into insane overkill mode, charging 18 counts.

Now, finally, 15 of those original 18 counts have been acquitted or dismissed. A lesser-included thrown in there at trial, to give them a second bite at the top count, was also dismissed. All the big charges got kicked, along with most of the little ones. The jury only said “guilty” to three of the b.s. minor charges that had been tacked on to this bizarrely over-charged indictment.

We’re calling this one a win, because this is precisely the outcome the client wanted on day one. It’s what he’s repeatedly asked for over the three years this case has been going on. And yet, from the get-go, this prosecution team has obstinately insisted on a plea to the charge, from day one. (They did so even after the judge, after their main witness had been pretty much destroyed in a day and a half of cross, firmly suggested that the offer be made.) It took three years, and three weeks of trial, to get to where this case should have been at arraignment. Where it would have been, had these prosecutors done the right thing.

Why didn’t they? Good question.

We come from the Manhattan DA’s office, where this sort of thing just isn’t done. This was not the crime of the century, there were no victims, nobody got hurt. The defendant didn’t commit perjury in a grand jury, not having testified. In a halfway decent DA’s office like Manhattan, the prosecutors would have exercised their prosecutorial discretion, as is their duty, and extended an offer.

But here, the prosecutors abused their discretion, by not exercising it in the first place. If you think that sounds like misconduct, we’re not sure we don’t disagree with you. But we’re still not sure, so we’re not identifying the office in question.

The likely reason is that there was a clash of personalities between the original prosecution team and the original defense team, which then became institutionalized over time.

The official reason, however, is just as unjustifiable. The official reason is that the defendant did not let the prosecutors break the law.

In New York, when a defendant hasn’t made bail and so remains in jail after arrest, we have a “speedy charge” rule. The government has six days to get an indictment, or else he gets released so he can do the rest of the case without posting any bail.

These prosecutors wanted the client to waive that requirement. They wanted him to agree to stay in jail for as long as they needed to get their act together and get an indictment in their own time. Because he didn’t, they said they would never make any plea offer whatsoever.

This is their official office policy, it seems.

And yet that is totally improper. It is nothing more than a policy forbidding the exercise of prosecutorial discretion, in retaliation for the mere refusal to give up one’s rights. That’s wrong on at least three levels.

That retaliatory aspect probably also explains why they over-charged this case so dramatically in the first place. And why they persisted in refusing to make an offer even after it was perfectly clear that they’d never get a conviction on any of the felonies.

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Whatever the reason, they lost big-time here. The jury threw them a bone on some of the little stuff, but they can’t see that as a win. It’s nowhere near what they’ve wanted for three long years, what they got so invested in.

So yeah, we’re calling this a win. Not an epic win, but definitely a win.

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Well, now we’re back, and we’ll have more time to blog on what’s going on out there. Plenty has gone on in the past three weeks — from the Bear Stearns acquittal, to Lynne Stewart starting her prison sentence, to a cop tasing a 10-year-old girl who wouldn’t take a bath. But it’s too late to blog in a timely fashion on those things. Sigh.

Oh well, there’s always more! Criminal law does not disappoint.

(Okay, we can’t resist. The girl who got tased? What’s up with that? We’re not talking about the cop using such extreme force on a little girl. We’re not all that concerned that he only got disciplined for not having a camera on the taser. We’re not even perturbed that he responded to a call of, essentially, “come arrest my kid who won’t take her bath.” We’re angered at the mom who made the call, and all the other moms out there just like her. This is a common symptom of the what Big Government programs and entitlements have done to ruin the very classes of people they were meant to help. We now have had generation after generation of people in inner cities and elsewhere who have been raised to expect government to do everything for them. They never have personal responsibility. Government provides all, does all. It also controls all. It takes charge of everything. When that’s all you know, then you reasonably expect government to take charge all the time. So moms commonly call the cops to make their kids clean their room, go to school, etc. The same moms (almost never raising these kids with a dad), lacking in a certain quale of personal responsibility, seem also to share the inability to properly rear and socialize their offspring. So these kids sometimes wind up getting locked up after the police arrive. And then the moms call their public defender in tears, unable to believe why their kid is locked up. Unable to comprehend the inevitable answer: “Ma’am, you put him there.” This is of a piece with the reasons why projects turn into ratholes, because it’s nobody’s responsibility to take care of them, it’s the government’s job. Why the schools suck, because the single factor affecting the quality of a school, parental involvement, is entirely absent because it’s not the parents’ job to educate, it’s the government’s job. This is a mindset that does not naturally occur in Americans. Maybe in Europe, where they are used to thinking of themselves as subjects rather than citizens, where the government has all the power and thus all the responsibility. But not in America. The only reason this mindset exists is because our well-intended big-government programs and institutionalization first removed the incentive to take care of oneself, and then destroyed the ability to do so. Rant off.)

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