The Criminal Lawyer

So yesterday, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in Berghuis v. Thompkins (opinion here) that you need to actually tell the cops that you’re invoking your right to remain silent, if you want them to stop asking questions (or at least not be able to use your subsequent responses against you).  Merely remaining silent isn’t the same as invoking the right.

This, of course, got all kinds of clever responses in the media, along the lines of “to invoke your right to remain silent, speak up!”  Very witty, we agree.

But we have to say, this decision is not that big a deal.

Our immediate reaction on reading the slip opinion, right when it came out, was “yeah, that sounds about right.”

We headed over to court for a case later that morning, and while we were sitting in chambers with some other defense lawyers and prosecutors, we summed up the Court’s decision.  The immediate reaction of literally everyone in the room was “yeah, that sounds about right.”  The judge’s law secretary added “isn’t that already how we do it here in New York?”

Later in the day, we discussed the case with some defense types who are fairly well-known for their pit-bull approach to the law.  Their immediate reaction was “yeah, that sounds about right.”

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Here’s how we see it, in a nutshell: (more…)

The Washington Post reports that the Obama administration wants Congress to change the Miranda rule, so that in terrorism cases law enforcement will be able to interrogate longer before having to give suspected terrorists their Miranda warnings.

This is stupid, and unnecessary.

The general idea is to expand the “public safety exception” to the rule. The way that exception works, cops don’t have to Mirandize someone when there’s an immediate danger, and they’re trying to get information so they can deal with it right away. The second the threat stops being imminent, the exception no longer applies.

Attorney General Eric Holder now says that this isn’t enough in terrorism cases, because it doesn’t give investigators enough leeway. Last week’s Times Square bombing suspect was questioned for three or four whole hours before being Mirandized, and last Christmas’ underwear bomber was questioned for (egads!) nearly fifty minutes before the warnings were given. And these delays, Holder says, are already “stretching the traditional limits of how long suspects may be questioned.”

The Obama administration wants to keep terrorism suspects in the civilian criminal justice system, rather than putting them in the military system or designating them as enemy combatants. The Miranda rule is a cornerstone of the civilian criminal justice system, precluding the use at trial of a defendant’s statements made in response to questioning while in custody, unless first informed of the right to remain silent and to a lawyer, and then waiving those rights before speaking. So if the administration is going to keep terrorists in the civilian system, but still wants to get useful intelligence, they’re going to need time to interrogate first before the defendant gets Mirandized and shuts up. That’s what Holder’s saying, anyway.

But that’s complete bullshit, and anyone with any actual experience in the criminal justice system knows it.

First of all, nobody — and we mean nobody — shuts up just because (more…)

The Supreme Court heard a very important argument this week in the case of Maryland v. Shatzer. It was one of those situations where the oral argument makes a huge difference in the outcome of the case. We read the briefs earlier this month, and remarked to colleagues that both sides’ arguments seemed eminently reasonable. So reasonable that we couldn’t form a strong opinion either way.

But the oral arguments convinced us thoroughly: Both sides are stupid.

So we wrote back on October 8, when this case was argued. This morning, the Supreme Court issued its decision.

While Shatzer was in prison on another conviction, allegations arose that he’d molested his son. A detective went to the prison to interrogate him. Shatzer invoked his Miranda right to counsel, and the detective ended the interrogation and left. Shatzer went back into general population, and the investigation was closed. Three years later, another detective began investigating again, went to the prison to interrogate Shatzer, and this time Shatzer waived his Miranda rights and incriminated himself. The Maryland Court of Appeals said his statements should have been suppressed, because there was no break in custody between his invocation of his right to counsel and his subsequent interrogation, because he’d stayed in prison the whole time.

At oral argument, Maryland proposed an idiotic rule that any break in custody, no matter how short, would end the Edwards presumption that the invoked rights were still invoked. That would just allow catch-and-release until the suspect broke down and waived his rights.

Shatzer’s position was even more idiotic — that invoking the right to counsel in one case now, counts as an invocation of the right to counsel in all future cases he may ever have, even in other jurisdictions decades later.

We suggested a simple rule:

1) If a suspect was in custody, was read his Miranda rights, and invoked his Fifth Amendment right to have a lawyer present during questioning…

2) And if there was a break in custody, so that an objectively reasonable person would have felt free to leave his questioners…

3) Then there is a rebuttable presumption that his invoked right to counsel continues to be invoked with respect to any subsequent questioning about the same underlying allegations.

4) The state can rebut this presumption with facts that demonstrate, by clear and convincing evidence, that the suspect no longer desired the presence of counsel during questioning. (This will necessarily be extremely rare, though not at all inconceivable.)

The rule could be streamlined even further, by deleting the phrase “there is a rebuttable presumption that” from #3, and deleting #4 altogether.
This rule provides all the protections that defendants, law enforcement and the courts require. At the same time, it avoids the absurdities of the existing bright-line rule, and of the more extreme bright-line rules proposed by the parties in this case

In today’s decision, the Supreme Court agreed with us that the positions taken by both sides are absurd. But they didn’t impose a new rule. Instead, they merely focused on what counts as “uninterrupted Miranda custody” for the purposes of Edwards.

First, the Court imposed a bright-line rule, in the hopes of preventing catch-and-release tactics. They said that, once a person has been released from police custody, a period of 14 days must elapse before he can be said to have waived his Miranda rights voluntarily. So if a suspect invokes his rights, ending the interrogation, and he is released from custody, he cannot be interrogated again for 14 days. Once that fortnight has passed, the Court felt that enough time had passed for the suspect to shake off the coercive effects of custody and get back to normal life.

That’s a bright-line rule, and so that’s going to create injustices on either side of the line for suspects who are more or less able to shake off the coercive effects of custody. Which can be truly traumatizing.

The Court has always liked bright-line rules for police conduct, of course, because it leaves less room for police judgment or discretion, which makes it easier for the police to know what they’re allowed to do. The thinking goes that the less gray area there is, the less likely police will be to cross the line, and the more likely individuals will not have their rights violated. That may be true so far as it goes, but only at the cost of new injustice for those whose individual circumstances would move the line. What’s reasonable for me may not be reasonable for you.

Scalia tries to avoid this interpretation by reassuring us that (more…)

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.

The Supreme Court heard a very important argument this week in the case of Maryland v. Shatzer. It was one of those situations where the oral argument makes a huge difference in the outcome of the case. We read the briefs earlier this month, and remarked to colleagues that both sides’ arguments seemed eminently reasonable. So reasonable that we couldn’t form a strong opinion either way.

But the oral arguments convinced us thoroughly: Both sides are stupid.

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The case involves custodial interrogation, and whether and when it can be started again after someone has asked for a lawyer.

When someone is in custody, and they ask for a lawyer, interrogation is supposed to stop. If the police keep questioning anyway, then the defendant’s answers cannot be used to prove the case against him.

So even if someone confesses to the crime at that point, the confession cannot be used to prove he did it. Even if there is no evidence of duress, and there is every reason to believe that the confession is perfectly reliable, it cannot be used.

The underlying policy is that our criminal justice system puts a greater value on not overriding someone’s free will. We don’t want people to be forced to hang themselves. Getting into someone’s mind, and making them testify against themselves, against their will, is abhorrent to us. It reeks of torture, the Inquisition and Star Chamber.

That explains why custodial interrogation gets the Miranda rights, but there is no similar concern with taking non-testimonial evidence from someone against their will. A breathalyzer, a blood test, a voice exemplar, a vial of spit — we don’t really care whether you want to provide the evidence or not. The evidence exists independently of your free will. But a confession during interrogation is solely a matter of free will.

And confessions are dramatic evidence, to be sure. Once evidence of a confession comes in at trial, it’s nigh impossible for a jury to think the defendant didn’t do it. It’s a game-ending bit of evidence, in most cases.

Police custody, in and of itself, is such an extreme and distressing situation that the law just presumes it to be coercive. If an objectively reasonable person would not have thought he was free to leave, then he’s being compelled to sit there and deal with the cops. There’s compulsion, because the cops can keep questioning you until you break, and confess. Maybe it’s a true confession, and maybe you’re just saying it to make it all stop, but either way your free will was overridden.

And so we have the Miranda rule, which says that defendants must be informed of their right to remain silent and the right to have a lawyer present during any custodial questioning. If someone’s questioned in custody without being given these warnings — even if they’re a respected jurist who already knew them — then his answers cannot be used against him. And if he is given the warnings, and exercises his right to remain silent or his right to counsel, but the police keep questioning him, then his answers cannot be used against him.

If the defendant says he won’t talk without a lawyer present, then allquestioning must cease. This is a per se exclusion, period. The police cannot re-start questioning unless the defendant himself initiates further discussion. Unlike the right to silence, which can be waived down the road after new Mirandawarnings, the right to a lawyer once asserted can never be waived again, no matter how many times the police re-Mirandize him. It can only be waived if the attorney is actually present at the time. That’s the principal rule of Edwards.

(Note that asking for a lawyer here is the same as saying you won’t talk without a lawyer present. Unlike the Sixth Amendment right to counsel, where once you’ve actually been charged with a crime you’re entitled to have a lawyer provided, this is the Fifth Amendment right to counsel. The cops don’t have to get you a lawyer, they just have to stop questioning you until you get one.)

This is a bright-line rule. Our jurisprudence likes bright-line rules here. We don’t want the cops to have to think about what they can and cannot do; we want them to know. We don’t want a balancing test of competing principles, because that means the courts would have to get involved and decide what can and cannot be done. It would have to be decided after the fact, on a case-by-case basis. Without a bright-line rule, the police would probably engage in more improper interrogations than otherwise, because who knows what some judge down the road might think was okay? And who knows whether the case would even get that far?

So bright-line rules here protect defendants’ interests, police interests, and the courts’ interests. And Edwards is nothing if not a bright-line rule.

The problem with bright-line rules is that they are absolute, they have no exceptions, and so unless they are narrowly-tailored they can have absurd results.

And that is why this week the Supreme Court heard the case of Maryland v. Shatzer.

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Six years ago, Michael Shatzer was in state prison, serving a lengthy sentence. Meanwhile, a social worker got a report that Shatzer had (before going to prison, obviously) forced his then-three-year-old son to perform fellatio on him. The social worker told the cops, and an officer came to the prison to talk to Shatzer about it.

Shatzer was taken to an interrogation room, and was given his Miranda rights. Shatzer asked for a lawyer, and the officer ended the interrogation. The officer went away, and Shatzer was taken out of the interrogation room and returned to his regular custody. The investigation was eventually closed.

Nearly three years passed. Shatzer remained in prison.

Now his son was a few years older, and was able to give more details about what had happened to him. The police began a new investigation, which was assigned to a new police officer.

The new officer went to the prison, Shatzer was taken to the interrogation room, and the officer Mirandized him.

This time, Shatzer waived his rights, and agreed to speak with the officer. He flatly denied the allegations that he had forced his son to perform fellatio on him. But he did admit to having masturbated in front of his little boy.

A few days later, the questioning continued. Shatzer was Mirandized again, and he again waived his rights. He took a polygraph test and failed it. Then he started crying and said “I didn’t force him. I didn’t force him.”

At this point, he finally asked for a lawyer, and the questioning ended.

Shatzer was prosecuted for sexually abusing his son. He tried to suppress his statements, on the grounds that he should never have been questioned the second time, under the Edwards rule. He’d asked for a lawyer, and that per se prohibition never evaporated.

The trial court said no, the statements could come in, because the intervening three years constituted a “break in custody” that ended the Edwards prohibition on further questioning. Custody had ended, so the compulsory situation had gone away. The new questioning was a new custodial interrogation justifying a new Miranda warning that was properly waived.

After Shatzer got convicted, the Maryland Court of Appeals reversed. The appellate court held that the passage of time cannot constitute a break in custody. The court held that, if there is a break-in-custody exception to Edwards, it first of all would have to mean something different than the break-in-custody exception for the right to remain silent, and secondly it wouldn’t have existed here anyway when Shatzer had remained in prison the whole time.

The state appealed to the Supreme Court, arguing that the Edwards prohibition must evaporate over time, so that a substantial lapse of time between interrogations would allow the cops to re-Mirandize and try again. The point of Edwards is to prevent the cops from “badgering” a defendant into answering questions without a lawyer, the state said. (At the end of its brief, Maryland even suggested that the bright-line rule ought to be overturned.)

Shatzer’s brief argued that the bright-line rule had to be maintained, to ensure that defendants aren’t coerced into making confessions. If a defendant asks for a lawyer, and all he gets is another reading of his rights, he’s hardly going to expect a second request for a lawyer to be effective, and so he might as well speak. It would undermine the whole point. And if a “break in custody” is all it takes to restart the Edwards rule, then all the cops would have to do is release, rearrest and repeat until the defendant finally gave in.

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Both merits briefs seemed eminently reasonable.

But the oral arguments were frankly idiotic. Both sides made absolutely unreasonable claims that could only undermine their arguments.

For example, Chief Justice Roberts let Maryland’s A.G. get three sentences out before cutting to the point: “A break in custody of one day, do you think that should be enough?” Maryland’s response: Yes.

Roberts pressed on: “So what if it’s repeatedly done? You know, you bring him in, you give him his Miranda rights, he says ‘I don’t want to talk,’ you let him go. You bring him in, give him his Miranda rights, he says ‘I don’t want to talk.” You know, just sort of catch-and-release, until he finally breaks down and says ‘all right, I’ll talk.” Maryland’s response: “We would suggest that the break of custody would be the end of the Edwards irrebuttable presumption.”

Shatzer’s position was even worse, if you can believe it.

The Public Defender opened her mouth to speak, and Justice Alito jumped down her throat. Her first words were that the Court couldn’t create any exceptions to the rule. Alito said, hold on, let’s say “someone is taken into custody in Maryland in 1999 and questioned for joy riding, [invokes his right to counsel, is] released from custody, and then in 2009 is taken into custody and questioned for murder in Montana…. Now does the Edwards rule apply to the second interrogation?” The lawyer’s response: “Yes it does, Justice Alito.”

As one might expect, the justices went to town on the lawyers. Scalia, as usual, got in some good laugh lines at their expense. We’ll leave the entire oral argument to your own reading enjoyment (you can read it here), but these opening exchanges sum it up pretty well.

Maryland’s position is idiotic. They want a bright-line rule that any break in custody ends the Edwards prohibition. It would allow precisely the catch-and-release badgering that Roberts suggested. They argued that, during the release period, if the defendant didn’t go out and get a lawyer, then they’ve essentially revoked the request to have an attorney present at any future questioning.

Shatzer’s position is equally idiotic, if not more so. He wants a bright-line rule that any invocation of the right to counsel essentially immunizes a defendant from any further police questioning in any subsequent action anywhere, for the rest of his life, whether or not the police could have even known about his prior invocation of the right. A police officer in Alaska would have to ascertain whether a suspect had ever been interrogated by police anywhere else in the country at any time in the suspect’s life, and whether the suspect had asked for a lawyer then. That’s flatly impossible and unrealistic.

Both of the parties claim that the existing bright-line rule might create absurdities in theory. To prevent them, they each propose reductio ad absurdum rules at the extreme ends of the spectrum, guaranteed to create absurdities in practice. Well done, folks.

(The lawyer for the United States, as amicus, did make an important point — that the whole purpose is to make sure people aren’t being compelled to incriminate themselves against their will — but the rest of his time was eaten up by nonsense about how long a break in custody would count as enough of a break to evaporate an assertion of the right to counsel.)

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So what should the rule actually be? Seriously, this is not rocket surgery here. The answer seems perfectly obvious:

1) If a suspect was in custody, was read his Miranda rights, and invoked his Fifth Amendment right to have a lawyer present during questioning…

4) The state can rebut this presumption with facts that demonstrate, by clear and convincing evidence, that the suspect no longer desired the presence of counsel during questioning. (This will necessarily be extremely rare, though not at all inconceivable.)

The rule could be streamlined even further, by deleting the phrase “there is a rebuttable presumption that” from #3, and deleting #4 altogether.

This rule provides all the protections that defendants, law enforcement and the courts require. At the same time, it avoids the absurdities of the existing bright-line rule, and of the more extreme bright-line rules proposed by the parties in this case.

With only two more decision dates remaining in this Supreme Court term, we’ve got our eyes on four criminal cases yet to be decided. Either next Monday (June 22) or the following Monday (June 29), we should expect to hear from the Supremes.

We’re going to make a prediction right now that all four cases will be decided in favor of the defense. Furthermore, we predict large majorities or unanimous decisions in each case. (Go ahead and laugh, we’ll wait for you.)

The four cases are:

Safford USD v. Redding, No. 08-479. We talked about this one before (see here). A public school had an absurd zero-tolerance policy (surprise, surprise), this time prohibiting prescription Advil. A girl got caught with some. She blamed someone else (surprise, surprise). School authorities confronted the other girl, Redding, who denied being involved. They searched her backpack, and found nothing. They searched her clothes, and found nothing.

Now at this point, a reasonable person might have figured out that the girl who was caught with the actual pills was trying to pull a fast one here. But these were not reasonable people — they were public school officials. So they had Redding — a 13-year-old girl — expose her breasts and vagina. They found no pills. Then they shook out her underwear, and found nothing. Then both the school nurse and another school official physically searched the girl’s body. They found nothing.

Now at this point, a reasonable person would have surely figured out that there was nothing to see here. But these bright bulbs instead stuck the girl in the principal’s office alone for a few hours, didn’t contact her folks, and didn’t bother searching anyone else.

The girl sued, claiming (surprise, surprise) that her Fourth Amendment rights had been violated.

The Supreme Court has now been asked to decide whether public school officials are permitted by the Fourth Amendment to perform a warrantless strip search of a student whom they merely suspect of possessing forbidden contraband.

The school wants the Court to say yes, schools can perform strip searches any time they have reason to suspect that a student has forbidden contraband. They want a rule that doesn’t let judges second-guess the judgment of school officials.

Our prediction is that the Court isn’t going to grant such a bright-line rule. For the reasons we set out in our previous post, we predict that the Court will require a case-by-case analysis. It will be fact-specific, whether the officials have evidence that is sufficiently credible to justify an articulable suspicion that contraband will be found during a strip search. And it will require a balancing, to ensure that the invasiveness of the search is proportionate to the danger of the contraband sought. A strip-search to find an explosive is one thing; but examining a young girl’s private parts to find Advil is another thing entirely.

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The next case we’re looking for is Yeager v. United States, No. 08-67.

The issue in Yeager is collateral estoppel after a hung jury. Specifically, a jury acquitted on some counts, and hung on other counts, all sharing a common element. Perhaps the only explanation for the acquittals is that the jury decided that common element in the defendant’s favor. So is the government prevented from re-trying the hung counts, by collateral estoppel?

Yeager was an executive with Enron’s telecom unit, charged with 176 white-collar crimes. After a three-month-long trial, the jury acquitted him on the counts of conspiracy, securities fraud and wire fraud. But the jury hung on the counts of insider trading and money laundering.

The Fifth Circuit said that one explanation for the acquittals is that the jury found that Yeager had no inside information. That was also an element of the insider trading count. But the Circuit said it was impossible to determine “with any certainty what the jury” actually must have decided. So that meant there could be no collateral estoppel precluding a new trial.

At oral argument, Justice Souter honed in on the real issue here, which is a conflict between two underlying principles of our current jurisprudence. On the one hand, once a jury has determined a fact, the government doesn’t get a second chance to prove it. On the other hand, the government is permitted a full opportunity to convict, so it is allowed to re-try counts where a jury hung. Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Kennedy and Breyer explored the conflicting principles in greater depth. Although the government’s attorney was more deft at handling the philosophical argument, and Yeager’s attorney seemed to be stuck in a surface argument, it seemed by the end that the Court was siding with Yeager.

What seems to have killed the government’s position here was its assertion that acquittals should not affect retrials if they are not “rational” — meaning they are inconsistent with the jury’s remaining outcomes — and that a hung count is an outcome that can be used to determine whether the actual verdicts were rational. That not only conflicts with precedent that permits inconsistent verdicts, but also defies common sense by treating the absence of a decision as an affirmative determination.

This one’s a tossup, but we’re going to predict a ruling in favor of Yeager here.

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The third case to watch for is District Attorney’s Office v. Osborne, No. 08-6.

Osborne was convicted 14 years ago for kidnapping and sexual assault. The victim was brutally assaulted and raped in a remote area in Alaska. Osborne was alleged to have used a blue condom. A blue condom was found at the scene, containing semen. Osborne now wants to get discovery of the semen, and have DNA testing done at his own expense, in the hopes that it will demonstrate his innocence. The State of Alaska refused.

Osborne brought a 42 U.S.C. §1983 civil rights suit, arguing that Alaska’s refusal violated his Due Process rights. The district court dismissed the suit, saying he should have brought a Habeas claim instead.

The Ninth Circuit issued two decisions. The first was that a §1983 suit is fine here, because the outcome would not necessarily undermine the state-court conviction. The DNA evidence could potentially prove his guilt, or be inconclusive. It would only require Habeas if the evidence would have to demonstrate innocence. And he could still bring a Habeas later if the §1983 action fails.

In its second decision, the Ninth Circuit forced the Supreme Court’s hand. The Supremes have long taken pains to avoid deciding whether a convict can overturn his conviction based only on a claim of innocence, rather than on pointing out defects in the way the trial was conducted. But the Ninth assumed that this is permissible.

Then, based on that assumption, the Ninth said that in circumstances like that — in fact, only in circumstances like that — where a convict could later use the evidence in a freestanding innocence claim, then Brady gives a post-conviction right to access potentially favorable evidence.

The Supreme Court is now deciding both issues: whether the §1983 suit is appropriate for accessing DNA evidence post-conviction, and whether Due Process requires such access if it could establish innocence.

At oral argument, Justice Souter barely let the Alaska A.G. get a word out before launching a lengthy debate over whether Osborne merely sought evidence that might or might not allow him to establish a claim later, or whether he sought evidence that he affirmatively believes will be the basis of a claim of innocence. By the end, both Scalia and Ginsburg had gotten involved, and the Chief Justice was wondering whether the State even had the evidence any more. Breyer got everyone back on track, pointing out that §1983 was appropriate when you didn’t know what the evidence was yet, and Habeas is appropriate when you do know. And here, nobody knows what the DNA evidence is, yet. So how come the State doesn’t have a constitutional obligation to give him the DNA?

The AG gave a terrible response, saying that Osborne simply followed the wrong procedure. Half the bench jumped in to interrupt him, dumbfounded at the assertion, given that Alaska doesn’t have a statutory procedure in the first place. The one statute out there (as Scalia pointed out) first requires an assertion that the evidence establishes innocence, which is the one thing nobody can say yet, because it hasn’t been tested yet. Souter and Scalia tag-teamed the AG on that mercilessly. At one point, Scalia had the audience laughing at the AG. For the rest of the oral argument, the Justices would refer to the fact that they “must have missed” this procedure being mentioned in any of the briefs.

By the end of the AG’s time, nobody had even gotten to the juicy issues yet. Breyer tried to give the AG a chance to talk about it, but the AG just went back to his procedural claim that had used up his time already. This only frustrated the Justices.

The U.S., as amicus to Alaska, started off better, getting to the heart of the issue — the issue the Supreme Court has so long avoided — arguing that prisoners do not have the right to challenge their conviction based on a freestanding claim of actual innocence. But Souter suggested that the right may be found, “not in procedural, but in substantive Due Process,” and asked a hypothetical about letting counsel speak to another prisoner who claims to have exonerating evidence. The Deputy S.G. floundered, and got laughed at as well. They never even got to the constitutional issue (as Souter repeatedly pointed out), and got mired in whether the government even has an interest here in the first place. And then time was up.

Osborne’s lawyer did much better. He deflected the Court’s concerns that at trial the defense had chosen not to test the DNA, and thus must have believed it would show guilt, by pointing out that both sides chose not to test it, because the tests available would have destroyed all of the evidence, precluding later testing.

The Justices across the board expressed concern that they were being asked to create a new constitutional right here. Shouldn’t a prisoner have to make a claim, under penalty of perjury, that he is actually innocent first? Shouldn’t there be a requirement of due diligence, so that claims aren’t made years and years after they could have been brought? Osborne’s attorney admitted that those are fine ideas, and wouldn’t be an obstacle here.

Then Scalia tipped his hand a little. Osborne’s lawyer observed that this is the first case where a prosecutor conceded that DNA would be “absolutely slam-dunk dispositive of innocence,” but doesn’t let the prisoner access it. Scalia thought out loud, “you know, it is very strange. Why did they do that, I wonder?” “Well, it’s very…” Scalia interrupted, “there was a lot of other evidence in the case, wasn’t there?” “Well, that’s…” Scalia cut in, “I don’t know what they thought they were doing.”

Scalia, for one, is not likely to side with the DA’s office here.

Souter came back to his conclusion that this is a substantive Due Process issue, which would require that the prisoner first claim that he is actually innocent. This conflicted with the sworn testimony before the Parole Board admitting guilt. But Breyer pointed out that prisoners often wisely admit guilt before such Boards, because they’re not getting out otherwise. (As defense lawyers like to say, forget guilt or innocence, “out is out.”) So relying on Parole Board admissions would be an arbitrary basis for withholding DNA evidence. So “suppose we said that the rule is non-arbitrary, with illustrations. Send it back to the states. And of course, when they apply their own statutes, by and large they’re not being arbitrary.” Osborne’s counsel agreed, “I think that’s a very sound approach to this.” Breyer responded, “well, it does help you win.”

I don’t think Breyer or Souter are siding with Alaska here, either.

The Chief Justice wondered if the right would be depend on the accuracy of the testing available. No, said Osborne’s lawyer, it has nothing to do with it — the right would just prohibit the state from arbitrarily preventing access to evidence. So long as there’s a reasonable probability that the test will demonstrate evidence, then that should be enough.

On rebuttal, the AAG got maybe three words in edgewise.

So just going from the oral argument, we’re going to predict a loss for Alaska.

Now whether that means a whole new constitutional right or not, well we’re not so sure. This only affects a handful of defendants whose convictions came before the Federal Innocence Protection Act in the mid-1990s.

The trick, though, will be whether the Court can continue to avoid the elephant in the room, the issue of whether one can assert a freestanding claim of innocence. The Ninth Circuit made it a prerequisite, and both the liberal and conservative Justices seemed to put a lot of weight on whether the prisoner first asserted innocence.

We predict that the Court is going to go all the way here. And as long as we’re going out on a limb, we’ll also predict a unanimous decision.

* * * * *

The final criminal case yet to be decided is also the oldest: Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts, No. 07-591.

The issue is straightforward: Is a lab report, by itself, a form of testimony for Confrontation Clause purposes, per Crawford v. Washington, 541 U.S. 36 (2004)?

Crawford says you can’t introduce earlier statements of a government witness, if they hadn’t been subject to cross-examination.

Well, a police lab report wasn’t subject to cross-examination when it was created. But they are often admitted into evidence without live testimony from the chemist or forensic expert who made the report — they’re self-authenticating. If lab reports are testimonial, then Crawford would preclude this practice. If they are not testimonial, but merely a record, then they could continue to be admitted without live testimony.

The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court looked at this conundrum a couple times, and decided that drug analysis reports were simply records of “primary fact, with no judgment or discretion,” by the chemist who prepared them. So they weren’t testimonial, and there was no Confrontation Clause problem.

Melendez-Diaz was the defendant in the second such case, which affirmed the first one.

It’s a sure bet that Scalia is going to side with the defendant here. He has long been a champion of the Confrontation Clause, and his contributions at oral argument were true to form.

The Massachusetts AG was frankly an embarrassment, making inaccurate assertions (and being corrected by the Court), resting heavily on the lame argument that nobody’s made this particular claim before, and claiming that requiring chemists to testify would be an “undue burden,” even though it’s no such burden to California or New York or any other state where it’s routinely done at trial. Kennedy even coached the AG with arguments that she ought to have been making, and scolded her when she still didn’t make them.

Justices Kennedy, Scalia and Stevens had little patience for the amicus Assistant S.G., whose argument was that machine-generated reports aren’t testimonial. There’s a difference between an automated record and a computerized document created for the purpose of proving an element of a crime at trial. And they’re different from computerized documents reflecting the observations and conclusions of a human being.

Based on how the oral argument went, we’re going to predict yet another win for the defendant.

In a unanimous decision today, the Supreme Court held that the Double Jeopardy Clause doesn’t prevent Ohio from re-litigating a capital defendant’s mental retardation, after the state’s highest court had opined that he had “mild to borderline” mental retardation.

The case is unique, in that the defendant was sentenced to death before the Supreme Court’s 2002 decision in Atkins v. Virginia, 536 U.S. 304, which outlawed execution of mentally retarded offenders. So the mental capacity of the defendant was taken into consideration at sentencing, but was held to be outweighed by the horrific facts of the crime (the aggravated murder, kidnapping and attempted rape of a ten-year-old boy). Evidence of borderline mental retardation was presented, but no factual finding was reached as to his capacity. On appeal, the Ohio Supreme Court upheld the conviction, and made a passing observation that the defendant had mild to borderline mental retardation, but agreed that its mitigating value was outweighed by the crime.

But then the Supreme Court rendered its Eighth Amendment decision in Atkins, so the trial court ordered a new hearing to make the factual finding of the defendant’s mental capacity, for the purpose of determining whether his death sentence should be commuted to a life sentence.

The defendant, Michael Bies, challenged that on habeas, and the federal District Court said the new hearing shouldn’t be held, and the defendant’s death sentence should be vacated, because the Ohio high court’s observation amounted to a finding of fact that Bies was retarded.

The state appealed that order, but the Sixth Circuit upheld it, holding that the Ohio high court had made a definitive determination of fact, and that determination entitled Bies to a life sentence. Any new hearing would violate Double Jeopardy, by putting Bies at risk of a death sentence again.

Writing for the unanimous Supreme Court today, in Bobby v. Bies, Justice Ginsburg stated that the Sixth Circuit didn’t understand what Double Jeopardy means. The Circuit “fundamentally misperceived the application of the Double Jeopardy Clause and its issue preclusion (collateral estoppel) component.”

Bies was not “twice put in jeopardy,” wrote Ginsburg. Ohio took no action to seek further prosecution or punishment. The new efforts were entirely of the defendant’s doing — rather than serial prosecutions, we have “serial efforts by the defendant to vacate his capital sentence.”

Also, the issues to be litigated aren’t identical. The first time around, the issue was whether his mental capacity mitigated the criminal offense. This time around, the issue is whether he is mentally retarded for the purposes of Atkins, which has not yet been decided.

Also, the Sixth Circuit failed to understand that “issue preclusion” is not a claim that the loser gets to bring. It’s only a claim that winners get to bring, so they don’t have to keep litigating determinations that were necessary to the outcome of a prior proceeding. Here, the Ohio high court did recognize Bies’ mental capacity as a mitigating factor, but that observation was not essential to the death sentence he got — it was the opposite, something that “cut against” it. “Issue preclusion, in short,” wrote Ginsburg, “does not transform final judgment losers, in civil or criminal proceedings, into partially prevailing parties.”

So the upshot is that “the federal courts’ intervention in this case derailed a state trial court proceeding designed to determine whether Bies has a successful Atkins claim.” And the state hearing is exactly what the Supreme Court intended to happen when it wrote Atkins.

* * * * *

Interestingly, in the briefs and arguments, the defense made a point of showing that Ohio wasn’t making much of an argument on AEDPA grounds (the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996). The Supreme Court dismissed the entire issue in a footnote:

This case, we note is governed by the [AEDPA]. Bies plainly fails to qualify for relief under that Act: The Ohio courts’ decisions were not “contrary to, or . . . an unreasonable application of, clearly established Federal law,” 28 U.S.C. § 2254(d)(1), and were not “based on an unreasonable determination of the facts in light of the evidence presented in the State court proceeding.” §2254(d)(2).

* * * * *

Although it may seem at first glance that the defendant got a raw deal here — he has to re-litigate an issue he already thought he’d prevailed on — the Court’s reasoning is sound. Double Jeopardy happens when the same sovereign tries to get a second chance to punish you for the same offense.

Here, the state wasn’t trying to do that at all. All Ohio was trying to do was determine whether new caselaw permitted it to let the original punishment stand, or whether the new law required it to reduce the original punishment.

You can see how easy it is to make the Sixth Circuit’s error, of course. It appeared as though the Ohio high court had made a factual determination that, by operation of the new caselaw, automatically required commutation of the death sentence here. So ordering the new hearing looks like the state trying to get a second shot at it. But really, as the Court pointed out, the issues are not the same. There never was any finding of fact that the defendant actually was mentally retarded for Eighth Amendment purposes, and that was precisely what needed to happen.

* * * * *

And Ginsburg is the last person on the Supreme Court to rule otherwise, if there was any chance that the defendant ought to have prevailed.

We recall a case we worked on back in 1995 with the famed Carter Phillips. We worked through our holiday with him, well into the night, trying to get the Supreme Court to commute the death sentence of a mentally retarded convict. But this was pre-Atkins, and the Court rejected our application. Only Justice Stevens and Justice Ginsburg would have granted it. The case was Correll v. Jabe, No. 95-7283, and Mr. Correll became the last mentally retarded person to be executed in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Justice was not done then, and the case has since become the stuff of plays and campaigns, but had Ginsburg had her way then, we might now be discussing the Correll rule instead of the Atkins rule. So it would be dishonest to claim that she is callous to this defendant’s situation.

All in all, this is a good opinion. The clarification of what Double Jeopardy and issue preclusion mean was absolutely necessary. And while Mr. Bies’ situation cannot worsen, it actually stands a good chance of improving after his upcoming hearing.

In a decision sure to be fought before the 9th Circuit, a federal judge in the Eastern District of California yesterday upheld mandatory DNA collection from people merely arrested for federal felonies, regardless of the nature of the crime charged.

Obviously, this raises eyebrows in certain circles. Taking DNA from people who haven’t even been convicted yet? Taking DNA from people who aren’t suspected of committing crimes where DNA would even be relevant? Doesn’t this violate basic principles of our jurisprudence?

Well… and this is a defense attorney talking here… no.

The case is U.S. v. Pool, decided by Judge Gregory G. Hollows. The defendant was charged with possession of child porn, and was released on bond. One of the conditions of release was that he provide a DNA sample.

This requirement was mandatory under two federal laws: the Bail Reform Act, 18 U.S.C. § 3142(b) and (c)(1)(A), which mandates it for pre-trial release; and the DNA Fingerprinting Act of 2005, 42 U.S.C. § 14135a, which mandates it for everyone arrested on a federal felony charge.

DNA is usually collected by dabbing a cotton swab in the person’s mouth or something similar. Rarely, it is collected by a blood test. The DNA is to be used solely by law enforcement for identification purposes.

Pool argued that this warrantless DNA sampling violates the Fourth Amendment. It’s a search, there’s no warrant, and there’s no special need for the testing for nonviolent arrestees.

Judge Hollows rejected that argument, stating that every Circuit to consider the issue has held there to be no Fourth Amendment violation here, and that the criterion is not “special need” but rather the “totality of the circumstances.” The reasonableness “is determined by assessing, on the one hand, the degree to which it intrudes upon an individual’s privacy, and on the other, the degree to which it is needed for the promotion of legitimate governmental interests.”

Pool argued that pre-conviction sampling is improper, based on the Supreme Court cases Ferguson v. City of Charleston, 532 U.S. 67 (2001)(unconstitutional search for law enforcement to use hospital’s diagnostic test of pregnant patient to obtain evidence of drug use), and City of Indianapolis v. Edmond, 531 U.S. 32 (2000)(vehicle checkpoint unconstitutional when primary purpose was to detect evidence of drug trafficking). Those cases relied on the “special need” analysis he suggested.

Judge Hollows rejected that as well, as those searches involved police fishing for evidence, before anyone was formally charged with a crime. The statutes at issue here subject people to DNA testing after a finding of probable cause by a judge or grand jury. After someone’s been indicted, courts can impose all kinds of restrictions on liberty. The situation is much more like that of people who have been convicted, than of people who have not yet been charged with anything, and so the “totality of the circumstances” test is more appropriate.

For more than 45 years, it’s been well-settled that someone who’s been arrested has a diminished expectation of privacy in his own identity. He can be compelled to give fingerprints, have his mug shot taken, and give ID information. DNA is no different than fingerprints — a unique identifier that helps law enforcement find the right suspect, and eliminate the wrong suspect. In fact, DNA is more precise than photos or fingerprints, so the government interest in obtaining it is even stronger.

Meanwhile, the invasiveness is minimal. Even blood tests are considered “commonplace, safe, and do not constitute an unduly extensive imposition on an individual’s privacy and bodily integrity.” Oral swabs are considered no more physically invasive than taking fingerprints.

The judge also rejected arguments that DNA evidence, once taken, might possibly be stolen and put to an impermissible use. That risk applies to everything, and there are criminal penalties to deter it. Just because someone might break the law doesn’t mean the setup is improper.

Judge Hollows pointed out that all the same concerns being raised about DNA were raised in the early part of the 20th Century with respect to fingerprints. And since at least 1932 it’s been understood that the public interest far outweighs the minimal burden to the individual being fingerprinted. The same reasons that justify post-arrest fingerprinting without a warrant justify post-arrest DNA sampling without a warrant.

Pool also argued that this violates Fifth Amendment procedural due process, because it’s mandatory, and thus precludes an opportunity to be heard. But that only applies if the defendant’s privacy rights outweigh the government interest, and it’s the other way around here. Pool argued that there is a risk of erroneous deprivation of his privacy interest, for arrestees who are not ultimately convicted. But the system is set up to expunge DNA records if the person is exonerated or the charges are dismissed. So the risks are minimal, and the government interests are compelling, and that means there is no procedural due process problem.

Pool also argued that this violates the Eighth Amendment protection against excessive bail. Bail conditions have to be proportionate to the perceived government need requiring the condition. But the Supreme Court case that set this rule, U.S. v. Salerno, 481 U.S. 739 (1987), specifically rejected any idea that this “categorically prohibits the government from pursuing other admittedly compelling interests through regulation of pretrial release.” This being nothing more than a booking procedure, and not comparable to conditions of release that actually have to do with the concerns arising from letting someone out on bail, there’s no reason to consider it excessive.

Pool also argued that the statutes violate the Separation of Powers, as Congress has intruded on judicial decision-making in the setting of bail conditions. But here, Congress didn’t direct any judicial findings. It merely directs what the judge needs to do after a certain finding has been made. That’s what Congress is supposed to do. There’s no problem there.

Poole finally argued that this is an unconstitutional extension of power, because the Commerce Clause doesn’t authorize DNA sampling. But the Commerce Clause lets the government make conduct a federal crime. The resulting government powers, such as incarceration and terms of release, have nothing to do with it, and don’t need to be independently authorized under the Commerce Clause.

* * * * *

What to make of this?

Pool’s arguments stem from a presumption that a person out on bail is more like a pre-arrest suspect. Judge Hollows’ decision stems from the opposite conclusion, that a person out on bail is more like a person on post-conviction supervised release. Any arguments before the 9th Circuit will have to focus on which it is, and we are inclined to believe that the Circuit will side with Judge Hollows here.

Central to the distinction is the fact that there has already been a judicial determination here, separating the defendant from the class of unarrested individuals. Either a judge or a jury has found that it is more likely than not that a federal felony was committed, and that this person did it. Once that has happened, a person’s rights are substantially changed. Society has an interest in ensuring that they come back to court to be judged. Society has an interest in ensuring that they don’t cause more harm in the meantime. These interests outweigh a defendant’s interests in liberty and property, to varying degree depending on the individual. That’s why we have bail and bail conditions.

What is odd, however, is that Congress made DNA sampling a mandatory bail condition, when it has nothing to do with pre-trial release.

Judge Hollows correctly points out that, conceptually, DNA sampling is no more invasive than fingerprinting, and is used for the same purposes. It’s a booking procedure, not a release consideration. Congress could just as easily have made DNA sampling a mandatory part of post-arrest processing, along with the mug shot and fingerprints. It would have been just as constitutionally sound.

By calling it something that it’s not, Congress subjected DNA sampling to this exact challenge.

Now, the ACLU differs with us, and calls the ruling “an incredible threat to civil liberties.”

“We think this ruling is incorrect,” ACLU attorney Michael Risher told reporters. “It ignores the presumption of innocence and it does not pay enough attention to the protections of the Fourth Amendment.” He also opined that police now have an incentive to make pretext arrests, just to get people’s DNA to help them solve crimes. How this changes things from the already-existing incentive to make pretext arrests to get fingerprints is unclear to this defense attorney. And anyway, police don’t need to arrest someone to get DNA or fingerprints — they can be collected by pretext in any number of ways, without a warrant, and often are.

With respect to the Fourth Amendment, what is clear here is that this is not a search for evidence. The crime has already been charged. It’s very clearly an administrative tool for establishing the identity of the defendant. Evidentiary consequences are merely hypothetical, if the person should somehow commit a violent crime in the future and leave behind DNA that gets compared to the database. That’s no different from mug shots, and unlike mug shots (where the chances of a false positive are unreasonably and embarrassingly high, given their variety and the innate unreliability of eyewitness recognition) DNA has an insignificant risk of identifying the wrong person. Mug shots aren’t a Fourth Amendment issue, neither are fingerprints, and neither is DNA, really.

* * * * *

One issue, however, is when the DNA is being taken for the purpose of gathering evidence, in the investigation of a crime.

That’s not the case here, and it’s sort of off point, but should a warrant even be involved then?

Well, isn’t it a Fifth Amendment violation then? You’re making someone incriminate himself against his will, right?

Wrong. Self-incrimination doesn’t enter into it, because what’s important there, the underlying policy of the right, is that we don’t want the government overriding people’s free will, and making them convict themselves out of their own mouths. We don’t want another Star Chamber. We don’t want the government using its overwhelming power to extort unwilling confessions, whether by thumbscrews, lead pipes, or simple custodial interrogation.

But taking blood samples has been held not to involve the right against compelled self-incrimination. Nobody’s being forced to say “I did it.” All they are being forced to do is provide physical evidence. There is no free will involved in the creation of that physical evidence — it exists whether the person wants to hand it over or not — but there is free will involved in the creation of confessions and incriminating statements.

But that brings us back to the Fourth Amendment. If someone is being compelled to give a swab or blood sample, then the government is seizing pre-existing evidence just as if they were seizing drugs from someone’s home. So shouldn’t a warrant be required after all?

Yes it should. But that’s only when the evidence is being sought as evidence. Constitutional rights really do depend on what’s going on. An administrative requirement is not the same thing as a criminal investigation. A DNA sample for administrative ID purposes is not the same thing as one taken to identify a potential suspect.

That’s the big difference here. And even given the 9th Circuit’s pro-defendant tendencies from time to time, we have a hard time predicting anything but an affirmation of Judge Hollows’ decision when this comes up on appeal.

The clip above is from a speech Nat Hentoff gave a little while ago, summarizing some of the problems he has with hate crime legislation in general, and with the bill currently being rammed through Congress. The day after he gave that speech, we wrote in more detail about our own concerns with the law.

Although we do not like hate crimes any more than Mr. Hentoff does, we differ with him in that we don’t think they’re per se unconstitutional or inconsistent with American jurisprudence.

Hate crime laws stink because they fail to distinguish between criminal conduct and that which is merely nasty. They take something offensive, and call it an offense. That’s not what criminal law is for. The purpose of criminal law is to identify those acts that are not merely unpleasant, but which are so dangerous to society that they call out for the State to impose its might on the individual and punish him by taking away his life, liberty or property.

Now, there is a PC echo chamber that has a disproportionate voice in today’s government, and in that chamber “hate” really is seen as something requiring extra punishment. Commiting a crime with hate required more punishment than if you committed the same crime for some other reason. But outside of that echo chamber, the mainstream culture just doesn’t see a distasteful motive as a justification for extra punishment.

Hate crime laws also stink because they are inherently un-American. They’re something you’d more expect to see in continental Europe, where state dominion over the individual has been the norm since time out of mind, and there are fewer protections for offensive thoughts. Hate crimes are the stuff of the horror show that England has lately become, as London’s Mayor Boris Johnson writes today, complaining of an England with “its addiction to political correctness — where people are increasingly confused and panic-stricken about what they can say and what is forbidden, a culture where a police officer can seriously think he is right to arrest a protester for calling a police horse ‘gay.’ [England's] courts and tribunals are clogged with people claiming to have suffered insults of one kind or another, and a country once famous for free speech is now hysterically and expensively sensitive to anything that could be taken as a slight.” That is not the direction in which Americans tend to see themselves heading. Off campus, America simply is not a place where the ASBO could exist. And so it is not a place where hate crimes ought to exist.

That doesn’t mean such laws are necessarily inconsistent with the underlying principles of how we make criminal laws in general. They may not fit with American sensibilities, but they don’t violate our jurisprudence. As we wrote last time, the general idea of hate crimes is simply to add a new level of mens rea. It’s not only doable, it’s something that we’ve done before.

Today, Mr. Hentoff published another piece on the upcoming hate-crimes law, spelling out why he thinks it is unconstitutional and not merely a bad idea. It “violates all these constitutional provisions,” he says: the First Amendment, equal protection of the laws under the Fourteenth Amendment, and the double jeopardy clause of the Fifth Amendment.

We do think the bill, as written, is so vague that is must be voided by the Rule of Lenity. And we do think that, as written, it could well have unintended consequences, and create far more injustice than it’s supposed to prevent.

But unconstitutional? We hate to say this, but we think Mr. Hentoff… we think he… (we can’t believe we’re saying this about one of our intellectual idols)… we think Mr. Hentoff has mischaracterized the rights and protections of the Constitution.

How does it violate the First Amendment? Hentoff acknowledges that the bill explicitly says that it isn’t to be read so as to “prohibit any expressive conduct protected from legal prohibition” or speech “protected by the free speech or free exercise clauses in the First Amendment.” But he alludes to 18 U.S.C. § 2(a), which makes you punishable as a principal if you merely “abet, counsel, command or induce” a crime. Speech that induces a hate crime would make you guilty of the hate crime, and so free-speech protections would be violated.

This point was raised in 2007, the last time this bill was considered, when Democratic Rep. Artur Davis said that the law could conceivably be used to prosecute a pastor who had preached that homosexuality is a sin, if it induced someone else to commit violence against a gay person.

There are two big problems here. First of all, the First Amendment protection of free speech is not absolute, and Hentoff of all people should know this. There is always a balancing of the right to free expression against the harm to society that such expression may cause. You don’t have a free-speech right to shout that you have a bomb while standing in line at an airport. You don’t have a free-speech right to offer to sell crack to an undercover. When speech makes out an otherwise criminal act, you’re going to face jail for having said those words. And the First Amendment won’t protect you.

The other problem is that 18 U.S.C. § 2 does not impose criminal liability for unexpected consequences. A pastor who speaks about the Bible to his congregation isn’t going to be liable for subsequent acts of a deviant member of his flock. That’s not the same as a similar authority figure instructing an unstable young man that God wants him to kill gay people. There’s an element of willfulness or recklessness that’s required. And if you willfully said something to induce an act of violence, then it is not speech that the First Amendment protects.

How does this hate crimes bill violate the Fourteenth Amendment? Hentoff says it violates equal protection, not in the way it’s written, but in the way it will be enforced. A white person targeting black people will be punished for the hate crime, but a black person targeting whites won’t be.

That may make intuitive sense, as the law was originally conceived to battle discrimination against minorities. And prosecutors may choose not to apply it if the victim is a white male. That has happened before, as Hentoff points out. A gang in Colorado had an initiation ritual of raping a white woman, and the prosecutor in Boulder opted not to charge a hate crime there.

Nevertheless, the law itself, as written, does not violate equal protection. Yes, prosecutors will (and must) always have the discretion to choose whether to bring a charge or not in a given case. And it is entirely likely that a black guy who punches someone in the nose just because they’re white may not be charged with a hate crime, even though it clearly fits the bill, because of other factors going through the prosecutor’s head — it might not be politically savvy to further penalize someone who (to the paternalistic PC) already had to suffer the discrimination and indignity that made him act out like this. Or it just might not feel right.

But then again, this bill, as amended, is now written very broadly. It casts a much wider net than mere black vs. white. In addition to race, it considers violence committed because of national origin, religion, sex, sexual preference and disability. Everyone is a potential victim of a hate crime now. There are going to be plenty of opportunities to charge members of “victim classes” for hate crimes when they attack members of other victim classes. A disparate effect has yet to occur, and there’s good reason to believe that it never will.

And how does the bill violate double jeopardy? Hentoff is concerned that someone could be charged with an assault in state court, and be found not guilty, only to find himself haled into federal court to face a new prosecution for the same act under the federal hate crime law.

Unfortunately, this is not a double jeopardy problem. It is not unconstitutional for the feds to prosecute someone for a federal crime after he’s already gone through a prosecution for the same act in state court. Double jeopardy does not apply to prosecutions brought by different sovereigns. Each state is a separate sovereign, in addition to the federal government. If you stand in Manhattan and shoot someone on the other side of the Hudson in New Jersey, both states are allowed to prosecute you for it. Some states have extra protections for the individual here — New York won’t prosecute someone after the feds did — but the feds are not so constrained.

And the feds already do this kind of thing routinely with gun laws. If you committed certain crimes with a gun, you can be prosecuted in state court for the crime, and then afterwards get prosecuted in federal court for possessing the gun at the time. These cases are extremely straightforward — either you possessed the gun or you didn’t — and they often go to trial, because of mandatory sentencing, so young federal prosecutors tend to cut their teeth on this stuff. It’s routine, and it does not at all violate double jeopardy.

* * * * *

Hentoff ends his piece today by urging President Obama, before signing the bill into law, to refresh his understanding of the Constitution. He suggests that, as the “former senior lecturer in that document at the University of Chicago, [Obama] should at least take it with him on Air Force One, where there are fewer necessary distractions, and familiarize himself with what the Constitution actually says.”

We love Nat Hentoff. We idolize the man. We agree that hate crime laws have no place in this country. But we think he ought to take his own advice and re-familiarize himself with what the Constitution does and does not protect.

We admit it: we like to skip to the Scalia dissent.

Not because we necessarily agree with his philosophy of jurisprudence. But because it’s a good bet to be an entertaining read. Whether he’s dissenting from an expansive activist or a fellow limited-role jurist, he’s good for a bit of snark while mercilessly pointing out flaws and internal inconsistencies in the other fellow’s opinion.

So when we saw that Alito, and not Scalia, wrote the dissent in this morning’s Corley v. United States decision on the exclusion of statements, we sighed a little and took in the majority opinion first.

Well, we learned our lesson. Alito can give good dissent.

At issue is 18 U.S.C. § 3501. The statute was passed by Congress back in the 60s, in an attempt to undo some of the aggressive jurisprudence of the Warren Court. Particularly, Congress was trying to nullify the Court’s perceived expansion of the Exclusionary Rule with respect to statements. Miranda made statements inadmissible if suspects weren’t advised of their rights before custodial interrogation, and McNabb and Mallory excluded confessions during extended detention prior to arraignment. §3501(a) tried to nullify Miranda by saying that, notwithstanding any warnings, if the statement was voluntary, then it was admissible. §3501(c) similarly said that custodial confessions weren’t automatically inadmissible because of delay, if they were voluntary. Congress flatly said that voluntary statements were going to be admissible.

Now, all this shows is that Congress didn’t understand Miranda or the McNabb-Mallory rule. At heart behind both rules is the concept of voluntariness. If someone voluntarily inculpated themselves, then the Court has never had a problem with admitting that statement into evidence. The only thing that the Court has ever had a problem with — no matter who was on the bench — is involuntary statements being used against people.

Seriously, the single policy that explains all of the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence on the exclusion of statement evidence is this: “We won’t allow the government to convict somebody by overriding that person’s free will.”

So if the defendant was forced to incriminate himself out of his own mouth, then we won’t let that in. We won’t let the government beat confessions out of suspects, and this is all of a piece.

By the same token, we have no problem with taking blood or DNA samples without the suspect’s permission, because we’re not forcing him to convict himself. We’re just taking already-existing physical evidence, not forcing the suspect to create evidence to be used against him.

Hence the rule of Miranda and its progeny: If a reasonable person wouldn’t feel free to leave, and he’s being quizzed by the government, then incriminating response is by definition involuntary. The only way the government can cure that is to make sure the suspect knew his rights against self-incrimination, and knowingly waived those rights.

And hence the rule of McNabb-Mallory: The longer you’re being held by the government without being informed of the charges against you, the less likely anything you say will be voluntary. At some point, your statement is going to be by definition involuntary, unless the government has taken some affirmative action to ensure it really was voluntary.

Given this, §3501 is really a dead letter. Oh, there have been those who argue that its effect is what Congress intended, the nullification of the case law (see, e.g., U.S. v. Dickerson, 166 F.3d 667 (4th Cir. 1999)). But all §3501 says is that, if a statement was really voluntary, then it is admissible. And that is precisely what the case law also says.

So we come to today’s case, Corley v. U.S. The decision was 5-4, split right down the (jurisprudentially) liberal/conservative line. Souter wrote for the majority, joined by Stevens, Kennedy, Ginsburg and Breyer. Alito fired off the dissent, joined by Roberts, Scalia and Thomas.

And Souter — whom we like immensely — messed it up. Of all Justices, he was the one we expected to really get it, and lay out the real policy and uphold the majesty and wisdom of the law. Instead, he made a hash of it.

All he had to do is say, “yes, §3501 means what it says. But it does not do what Congress meant. The plain language of the statute does not affect our case law in the slightest.” We are willing to bet money that Scalia would have joined the majority if he had said that. And he might have taken the others with him for a Roberts-pleasing unanimous decision.

But instead, Souter said §3501 meant what it said as to Miranda, but it did not mean what it said as to McNabb-Mallory. His internally-inconsistent, self-contradictory interpretation required 18 pages of justification. At the end, he concluded that Congress didn’t mean to nullify McNabb-Mallory while trying to nullify Miranda, and so a Mirandized confession is still excludable if made during an extensive pre-presentment delay.

Souter’s reasoning was unnecessarily convoluted, and required a patchwork of equally risible arguments to fill in the obvious gaps. In dissent, Alito seems to gleefully dissect each one in turn. You just know he was grinning like a fool while writing (or directing) some of these passages. Oh sure, he tries for a veneer of objectivity with phrases like “the Court cites no authority for a canon of interpretation that favors a ‘negative implication’ of this sort over clear and express statutory language.” But that can’t conceal the snark within. Although Scalia might have had more fun with the point that “although we normally presume that Congress means in a statute what it says there, the Court today concludes that §3501(a) does not mean what it says,” it’s obvious that Alito was enjoying himself too.

Interestingly, the dissent does not disagree with the majority’s result, but only with its analysis. We really do think that if Souter had thought it through, he could have had a unanimous opinion clearing up this misunderstood line of cases for posterity.

That’s okay, we just did it for you.