The Criminal Lawyer

One of our favorite topics here at the Criminal Lawyer has been the interaction of brain science and criminal law. So it’s with a pleased tip of the hat to Mark Bennett that we have the video linked above, an excellent summary of modern neuroscience as it applies to deep policies of our jurisprudence — Culpability, free will, the purposes of punishment, and how (or whether) to punish. The lecture was given about a year and a half ago by David Eagleman, a neuroscientist with a gift for explaining the stuff to non-scientists like us.

Most popularized science is weighed down with histories of how we got here, rather than discussions of where “here” is and where we might be going next. It’s a necessity, but unlike most popularizers Eagleman manages to cover that ground in just the first half of the lecture, rather than the more usual first 80%. So if you want to cut to the chase, you can skip to around the 15-minute mark. We enjoyed watching it all the way through, however. Once he gets going, he neatly and clearly presents ideas that many should find challenging — not because they undermine criminal jurisprudence, but because they challenge much that it merely presumes.

One particularly challenging idea of his is that, as we understand more and more how the brain works, and especially the smaller and smaller role that free will plays in our actions, the less focused on culpability we should be. Rather than focusing on whether or not an individual was responsible for a criminal act, the law should instead care about his future risk to society. If he’s going to be dangerous, then put him in jail to protect us from him, instead of as a retroactive punishment for a crime that may never happen again. The actuarial data are getting strong enough to identify reasonably-accurate predictors of recidivism, so why not focus on removing the likely recidivists and rehabilitating the rest?

Of course, as we mentioned the other day, there’s an inherent injustice when you punish someone for acts they have not yet committed, just because there’s a statistical chance that they might do so at some point in the future. That kind of penalty must be reserved for those who have actually demonstrated themselves to be incorrigible, those who reoffend as soon as they get the chance. Punishment must always be backwards-looking, based on what really happened, and not on what may come to pass.

We have quibbles with some other points he makes, as we always do when people from other disciplines discuss the policy underpinnings of criminal jurisprudence. But on the whole, this is a worthwhile watch, and we’d like to hear what you think of it.

“You are saying it was unfair to have a fair trial?”

That was a fair question put by Justice Kennedy at oral argument today. The issue is whether a criminal defendant can be deprived of the effective assistance of counsel (for Sixth Amendment purposes) when a lawyer screwup prevents him from taking a plea deal.

The issue was presented in two companion cases, Lafler v Cooper and Missouri v. Frye. In Lafler, defense counsel gave bad advice, so that the defendant rejected a plea offer and went to trial instead. In Frye, the defendant did take a plea, but an earlier more favorable offer had never been conveyed.

Everyone accepts as given that the lawyers in these cases screwed up big time. The issue is only whether the screwups were so deficient as to rise to a constitutional violation.

Defendants do not have a right to a plea bargain, of course. The Supreme Court has spoken pretty firmly on that one. The plea bargain is, however, almost universally lauded — it allows defendants to cut their losses, prosecutors and courts to free up resources, and gives the system a chance to impose a “more fair” penalty than that which the legislature would otherwise have imposed. Plea bargains are wonderful. But there is no constitutional right to them.

Given that, the layman might be forgiven for scratching his head and wondering why these two cases were granted cert in the first place. (Laymen do that, you know.) There was no constitutional right being deprived, and there’s no doubt about the reliability of the conviction, so how could there possibly be ineffective assistance here?

That’s pretty much what the government argues — that there’s no prejudice, so there’s no Strickland problem. Being convicted after a fair trial is not prejudicial. Voluntarily taking a guilty plea is not prejudicial. The mere fact that a less harsh sentence could have been gotten with a better lawyer may perhaps be a pity, but it is not prejudicial. A do-over ought to be out of the question.

But Padilla held that ineffective assistance applies to the plea bargaining stage, that failure to advise as to immigration consequences can require just such a do-over. So the defendants argue that what was prejudiced was the outcome of the plea process itself, and not the outcome of the case. The issue for them is not whether the defendant would have been convicted or not, but whether ineffective assistance deprived them of the opportunity to get a better deal.

Both defendants argue that the correct fix would be to give them a chance to accept the earlier offer that, but for their lawyers’ failing, they would have accepted in the first place.

-=-=-=-=-

There is a fear that, if the defendants win, there will be a rash of appeals claiming that prior plea offers hadn’t been conveyed, or had been rejected for stupid reasons. Who wouldn’t want to take advantage of a chance to cut their 10-year sentence down to the 2-year offer that was originally rejected? How easy is it to claim that a lawyer told you something stupid, or didn’t tell you anything at all, especially as those discussions aren’t typically recorded or transcribed — it’s a he-said-she-said at worst, and who knows what lawyers might not be persuaded to bend the truth and swear out an affidavit substantiating the defendant’s claim?

One might also fear that, given this safety valve, defendants would be more likely to take cases all the way to trial, on the off chance that they win, knowing that if all else fails they can just go back to their saved game from the plea levels. That would sort of undermine the courts’ stake in plea bargaining, clogging the courts rather than freeing them up.

These are policy issues that may well be persuasive to the justices. Not law issues, so much as practicalities.

-=-=-=-=-

But what did the justices actually say today? That might give a (more…)

Over at Edge, in a short video, we get an intriguing look at criminal justice from the perspective of neurological science.

Put all this together, as you can see here, and we discover little areas that are brighter than others. And this is all now easily done, as everyone knows, in brain imaging labs. The specificity of actually combining the centers (where information gets processed) with the actual wiring to those centers has been a very recent development, such that it can be done in humans in vivo, which is to say, in your normal college sophomore. We can actually locate their brain networks, their paths: whether they have a certain kind of connectivity, whether they don’t, and whether there may be an abnormality in them, which leads to some kind of behavioral clinical syndrome.

In terms of the Neuroscience and Justice Program, all this leads to the fact that that’s the defendant. And how is neuroscience supposed to pull this stuff together and speak to whether someone is less culpable because of a brain state?

Then you say, well, okay, fine. But then you go a little deeper and you realize, well, this brain is a very complicated thing. It works on many layers from molecules up to the cerebral cortex; it works on different time scales; it’s processing with high frequency information, low frequency information. All of this is, in fact, then changing on a background of aging and development: The brain is constantly changing.

How do you tie this together to capture what someone’s brain state might be at a particular time when a criminal act was performed? And I should have said it more clearly — most of this project was carried out asking, “Is there going to be neuroscience evidence that’s going to make various criminal defendants less culpable for their crime?”

Well, probably not. Even if this were to become reality — which it isn’t, yet — the whole focus of mens rea culpability is what the defendant’s mental state was at the time he committed the act. Even if police officers were equipped with infallible handheld brain scanners, so they could get a mental reading at the moment of arrest (and oh, the fascinating Fourth Amendment issues there!), the moment of the crime is past. The reading is not evidence of what the brain was doing five days ago, or even five minutes ago.

And at any rate, it’s not usable science yet. So why bother thinking about it now?

To his credit, the speaker, neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga, admits as much.

Now, the practicing lawyer asks “is this thing useful, can we use it tomorrow? Can we use it the next day? Can’t? Out. Next problem.” So, after four years of this I realize, look, the fact of the matter is that from a scientific point of view, the use of sophisticated neuroscientific information in the courtroom is problematic at the present.

But then he says “it will be used in powerful ways in our lifetime.” What powerful ways? Mainly the ability to show that someone simply couldn’t have thought a certain way, because his brain doesn’t work that way. This defendant shouldn’t be punished like a normal adult, because his brain isn’t wired like a normal adult, and he could not have had the same mens rea as one would otherwise expect under the circumstances. Research is showing that children and teenagers are wired differently, as well, which could affect juvenile justice.

That’s useful for the defense. It could be a valuable tool in raising defenses showing that mens rea was lacking, because it couldn’t have existed. Not useful for prosecutors, more than showing that it was just as theoretically possible as for any normal human, which is sort of presumed for everyone anyway. So yay for science.

Another way it’s expected to be useful, however, is preventing future crimes. Stopping the next mass-murderer before he actually starts shooting kids on campus and whatnot. Of course, we immediately get creeped out the second anyone (more…)

On the New York Times op-ed page today, Clifford Winston asks the question “Are Law Schools and Bar Exams Necessary?” The writer, an economist with the left-ish Brookings Institution think tank, answers with a resounding “no.” They only increase the cost of entry into the profession — and thus the cost of legal services — while doing nothing to ensure the quality, honesty and accountability of the lawyers performing said services.

His diagnosis is on the nose, but his prescription is bad. He is right that simply graduating from an ABA-accredited law school and passing the bar are not sufficient quality control. But his solution — eliminating such barriers to entry — is the exact wrong approach. If anything, the barriers to entry need to be higher.

-=-=-=-=-

Law school, as experienced by most law students, is an enormous investment with little application to the actual practice of law. The first year is great for teaching how to spot issues and do the necessary legal research to answer questions, and for instilling core principles that underlie our jurisprudence. But beyond that first year, the time spent in class after class could be better spent in an apprenticeship where one learns how the law is actually practiced — and more importantly, acquiring the experience and judgment required to advise and deal with clients. Apart from the exceptional few who truly get a lot out of their continuing studies as preparation for real life — in particular, those who take advantage of clinical programs — law school after year 1 is a bit of a wasted opportunity for the run-of-the-mill students

The cost of law school is staggering, but only in part because of the requirements of maintaining ABA accreditation. These costs could be trimmed. The law library is the single greatest mandatory expense, what with the required accumulation of endless paper volumes of statutes, regulations, case law, treatises and their myriad pocket parts and updates. It’s a required expense, but not a necessary one, especially as everything’s been available digitally since forever.

Most of the cost of law school is not mandated, but the result of simple supply-and-demand. Tons of people want to go to law school, either to fulfill a calling or to make money or get status or just kill time until they find themselves. The demand drives up tuitions. Add to that the subsidy of student loans, and the price gets driven ever higher. Costs, on the other hand, remain fairly low. Staffing is not an enormous cost, considering. The ratio of students to professors is huge. When you figure 400 students in a section, each paying however many tens of thousands of dollars in tuition, the salaries of the handful of professors teaching them account for a minor fraction of it. Because of this, and the apparently endless supply of prospective students, law schools are a veritable cash cow — which is why so many have popped into existence in recent decades.

One byproduct of all these new law schools is a dilution of the quality of legal education, and thus the quality of many graduates with a JD. This is not to denigrate those with degrees from lower-tier schools, many of whom provide better services than some top-tier grads after gaining greater experience in the trenches. But whenever someone complains about “too many lawyers,” what they’re really complaining about is “too many bad lawyers.” Making it harder to get into law school, and then making it harder to actually get one of those JDs once there, would weed out many of the incompetent and misguided before they can do any damage to a real client.

The solution is not to abolish law school, but to make it harder and more relevant. Change the accreditation standards away from expense for its own sake (which, like several other such ABA standards like those for evening students, are actually holdovers from an earlier time when they existed to discourage minorities and those who needed to work for a living from joining the profession), and instead make the accreditation turn on selectivity of admissions and the quality of education provided. Require clinical courses (another astronomical expense, but one which makes sense). Require a uniform grade curve, so that performance can be measured accurately across multiple schools. Require practical courses alongside the general and theoretical, especially in the second and third years. Require more rigorous training in practical ethics, not just the bare-minimum survey everyone’s been doing since the ’70s.

Don’t eliminate the barrier; make it meaningful.

-=-=-=-=-

With respect to the bar exam, as we’ve said before, nobody in their right mind believes (more…)

So you were hanging out with your buddy Joe, a guy who buys weed off you every now and then. Joe tells you he knows a guy who’s looking to buy more than Joe usually gets, and offers to introduce you. One thing leads to another, and soon you’re making a big sale to this new guy. As soon as everything changes hands, you’re cuffed and arrested. Turns out your buddy Joe was an undercover all along. He set you up! A cop! That’s entrapment, right?

Or maybe you were a out on a call, meeting another poor schlub at his hotel room to trade a little physical pleasure for a little cash. As is your practice, you make sure to confirm he’s not a cop first. He says no, you discuss what he’d like to do and for how much, and now you’re in handcuffs. What the hell? He lied to you! A cop! That’s entrapment, right?

Or maybe you were out protesting the latest outrage du jour, and you and your buddies decide to move the protest to a major thoroughfare at rush hour. The cops don’t stop you until you’re there, and then they arrest you. They let you do it! The cops! That’s entrapment, right?

Nope, nope, and nope.

Entrapment is not what most people think. It’s not when the police conspired with you to commit the crime. It’s not when your decision to go ahead with the crime was based on a police lie. And it’s not when the police didn’t stop you from committing the crime.

The police helping you commit a crime is not entrapment. Entrapment is when the police made you commit the crime, when you wouldn’t have done so otherwise.

Entrapment is when you would not have committed the crime, period, if the police hadn’t made you do it. If you’d never sold drugs in your life, but the undercover begged you for weeks to do the deal to save him from being killed by his supplier… maybe that’s entrapment. If you were not going to that hotel room as a prostitute, but for a purely social encounter, and the cop gave you money you’d never asked for… that’s probably entrapment. And if the cops out-and-out told you and your fellow protesters to go onto that street, and then arrested you for doing what they told you… that’s entrapment.

-=-=-=-=-

Different states deal with this differently. Some look at your (more…)

Or maybe not…

For some reason, common wisdom would have it that crime should go up when the economy is going down. Violent crime in particular. Apparently, the thinking is that less prosperity leads to increased frustration and desperation, leading to more beatings killings muggings and rapes. As if the people who otherwise would commit such crimes are less likely to do so when banks are lending and people are investing in new and bigger business ventures.

Of course, common wisdom is frequently wrong. Which is good, because as we’ve pointed out before, the economy is going to continue to suck. Europe is facing massive uncertainty in the face of its Mediterranean peoples voting themselves the treasury. Here in the U.S., the Obama administration, elected on a platform of “hope,” is doing everything in its power to kill off any hope that investment in growth would be worth the risk. Instead of ensuring the stability and predictability necessary for economic growth, the governments of Europe and the U.S. are only spreading uncertainty and worry. It is now pretty much a certainty that a double-dip recession is upon us.

But the economy just isn’t that strong an influence on crime. During the prosperous 1950s and 1980s, violent crime went through the roof. During the Great Depression and the recent Crappy Recession, violent crime plummeted. The influence of economic hardship on crime is just not that strong. It is certainly not cause-and-effect — any effect is likely limited to exacerbating the effect of those things that actually do drive up crime. And right now, those things aren’t driving crime up.

So what are those things? What factors do drive violent crime? And are they going to come back any (more…)

We’ve posted several times about how there are just too many federal crimes, many created by regulatory fiat or otherwise without meaningful oversight by elected officials. About how a great many of them are apparently drafted by people with no understanding of how criminal law works and why. About how, as a result, there are an insane number of federal crimes (all felonies, of course) that penalize without any mens rea requirement at all. The most innocent accident, the most harmless and unintentional error, can make any honest and decent citizen a felon. (Sample posts here and here.)

We’re not the first to talk about it, by any means. We won’t be the last. But it’s starting to look like we’re reaching a tipping point — a critical mass of public awareness that might actually lead to … dare we say it … change?

Back in July, we cited a recent study that showed that, when a perception is firmly held by fewer than 10% of a population, it doesn’t really catch on. But for some reason, once the magical number of 10% is reached, the opinion spreads like wildfire. From obscurity, the idea suddenly becomes a majority view.

This 10% number pops up no matter what relevant population you’re looking at, no matter what social network. All that it takes to change the world is to have 10% of them be firmly committed, stubborn, and outspoken.

Over the rest of this summer, we’ve seen more and more references to this overcriminalization.  They’ve come mainly from the libertarian right and the defense bar, as one might expect, but it’s also been catching on in the mainstream press, left-leaning internet fora, and other places indicating that the idea is starting to take root in the general consciousness.

The last several days have seen a marked uptick in the topic. The New York Times cited it three days ago as a reason why people are taking pleas rather than going to trial. The Wall Street Journal has been doing a series on it, culminating yesterday in a long article on pretty much everything mentioned in the first paragraph of this post. And various bloggers and redditors and the like have been talking it up more than usual.

It’s starting to look less and less like a passionate few shouting in futile obscurity, and more and more like a movement.

Excellent. Let’s keep it up, shall we?

-=-=-=-=-

(Aside — If we were a Republican presidential candidate, we’d jump on this in a heartbeat. Not only would we be getting out in front of the movement, the better to be mistaken for a leader, but it would be a great way to repackage part of the platform. The present platform calling for less regulation comes off as a kind of “help out corporations at the expense of the people and the environment” thing. But make it a call for less regulation in the name of social justice — with plenty of anecdotal examples of real individuals who have been fucked by the fourth branch — and it becomes a populist battle cry. Just sayin’.)

Wanda: What would an intellectual do?  What would… Plato do?

Otto: Apol-

Wanda: Pardon me?

Otto: Apollgzz.

Wanda: What?

Otto: Apologize!

Well, no.  He probably wouldn’t.  Not Plato.

And certainly not in the case of Troy Davis, whose final clemency request was denied this morning, and who now faces execution tomorrow evening for the killing of a police officer in 1989.  He was convicted at trial 20 years ago, but since then the reliability of that verdict has been called into serious question.  Seven of the nine major witnesses recanted their testimony, many claiming that the police pressured them to give false eyewitness accounts.  No forensic evidence ever tied Davis to the crime, the murder weapon was never found.  In the intervening years, ten new people have come forward to point the finger at another individual known to have been present at the scene.

So it’s possible that Troy Davis might not have shot the officer.  It’s possible that he might have.  Twenty years of second-guessing and changing stories make it uncertain.  But what is certain is that he was convicted, and that the conviction stands.

Should we be troubled by this?

We started pondering this after our kids’ bedtime story the other night.  We were reading to the lads from the Dialogues of Plato [what, you got a problem with that? Shut up, these are not your children.], specifically the Crito.  That’s the one where Socrates has been condemned to death, and his friend Crito shows up to talk him into escaping.  Boiled down to its essence, the Crito runs something like this: (more…)

Anyone who has served on a jury or tried a case knows that the American jury system is pretty stupid.  Don’t get us wrong — it is absolutely without a doubt a sacred institution designed to ensure justice better than any other system we know of — but it’s still stupid.

Think about it — You take a dozen people who probably don’t practice criminal law.  You tell them they’re going to be deciding someone’s guilt or innocence, and then you shove a few weeks of testimony and exhibits in front of them.  But you don’t tell them what the law is — what they’ll be applying — until after all the evidence is over.  You don’t tell them what they should have been listening for, until it’s too late.  You don’t let them ask questions of witnesses to clarify points they didn’t get.  When everything’s over, and it’s finally time to tell them the law they’re going to apply, you simply read it to them for a few hours.  You don’t let them take notes.  You don’t give them a copy of the law you just read them.  They are presumed to have memorized and applied correctly the intricate flowchart of criminal elements for each crime, definitions of legal jargon, and all the other attendant instructions.  If they ask for clarification later, you simply read the instruction to them again.

And that’s not even half of it.  On top of all that, you make them do the judge’s job, in addition to their own.

The jury’s job is to make findings of fact.  The judge’s job is to make rulings of law.  The jury’s job is very important — their job is to decide on the official version of the facts.  The court cannot do anything until the facts are established, and then it can take the necessary action — whether it be punishing the guilty or freeing the not guilty.  But the determination of “guilty” or “not guilty” is a legal conclusion reached by analyzing the official version of the facts.  And in our system, we tell the jury to make that ruling of law.

In fact, those who were not in that jury room will only ever see the ultimate legal conclusion, and will only be able to speculate as to what the actual facts were on which that conclusion was based.  Based on studies of jurors (and anecdotal discussions after many trials), it appears that a large number of verdicts are based on flawed application of the law to the facts — or even without any such application whatsoever.  People are found guilty of crimes where jurors did not think essential elements had been proven beyond a reasonable doubt.  People are found not guilty of crimes where the jurors were actually persuaded of the necessary elements.  Jurors hang, or screw up, because they don’t understand what they’re doing.

The system is stupid, and almost guarantees injustice.

Fortunately, the problems are easy to fix.

-=-=-=-=-

One simple fix, which resolves quite a few of these inanities, would involve little more than (more…)

Last week, the prosecution and the defense filed their sentencing memoranda in the Rajaratnam case.  Raj was convicted of 14 counts in all — 9 counts of securities fraud, and 5 conspiracy counts.  So what do the parties think that’s worth?  The feds asked Judge Holwell to sentence Raj in the range of 19.5 to 24.5 years.  The defense didn’t make a specific request, just said it ought to be “well below” what the feds want.

So 20 years, huh?  Wow, he must have been an awful bad guy.  Must have hurt a whole lot of people, right?

After all, a mugger in a dark alley only takes one person’s wallet.  A “white-collar criminal” can steal from thousands of people — and takes not just their wallet, but their life savings!  Right?

Well, hang on.  Did Raj actually steal from anyone?  How many investors did he really harm?  And did any of them really lose enough money to warrant locking someone up till we all have flying cars and jetpacks?

Judging from the feds’ sentencing memo, you bet.  Just look at this, from the introduction:

Raj Rajaratnam’s criminal conduct was brazen, arrogant, harmful, and pervasive.  He corrupted old friends.  He corrupted subordinates.  He corrupted entire markets.  Day after day, month after month, year after year, Rajaratnam operated as a billion-dollar force of deception and corruption on Wall Street.

Wow, that sounds awful.  So the victims are… who again?

But wait, there’s more:

Rajaratnam repeatedly leveraged the power of money and his position as the head of a 7-billion dollar hedge fund to induce friends, employees, and associates to participate in his criminal activities.  Although already rich, Rajaratnam did this to drive up his personal wealth through profitable trading in his hedge fund.  He did it to make sure that investors did not pull their money out of Galleon and to attract new money to his fund.  And he did it because of his egomaniacal drive to triumph over his competitors on Wall Street.

Again, wow.  (The feds sure like their adjectives, don’t they?  Comes off a tad over-the-top, if not insulting to the intelligence.)  So he was trying to increase his wealth, gotcha.  But at whose expense?  Guess we have to read more:

That was what he cared about: money and success.  What he did not care about, at all, was the extensive harm he left in his wake: harm to the capital markets; harm to the average, ordinary investors who played by the rules; harm to the companies whose secret information was misappropriated; and harm to the lives of those he corrupted.

Well, that sounds a little more like it… but again, who was harmed, and how?

Although particular investors on the other side of Rajaratnam’s illegal trades are not easily identifiable, there should be no question that ordinary investors paid the price for Rajaratnam’s crimes and that public companies were harmed by Rajaratnam’s repeated theft of corporate secrets.

Oh for crying out loud.  Are they joking?  Stripped of its demagogical rhetoric, this translates to “We have not identified any actual victims.  But we shouldn’t have to.  It’s obvious that lots of people must have been harmed, even if we don’t know who they were.”

If they don’t know who — or even whether — anyone was actually harmed here, how in blazes do the feds justify asking for 19.5 to 24.5 years of imprisonment?  Here’s how:

[The feds want that much time because they feel it is] proportionate to the historic nature of his crimes.  He is arguably the most egregious violator of the laws against insider trading ever to be caught.  He is the modern face of illegal insider trading.

That’s it.  That’s all.  “Because this is the first time we’ve ever caught someone so red-handed,” and “because this case got so much press.”  Those are the sole reasons why they are looking to put this guy away until he dies of old age.

Really?

-=-=-=-=-

For the record, we’re predicting (more…)

At the close of yesterday’s post, we talked a little about how we’re starting to see signs of opposition to the insane quantity of federal crimes.  More and more people are starting to see how bad it really is, we noted — perhaps enough some day soon to reach a tipping point that results in actual change.

It would have to be a big freaking tipping point, though, wouldn’t it?  Current attitudes are rapidly swelling the numbers of crimes, and the tide is only rising.  Idealists push for criminalization of unsavory attitudes (see hate crimes). Crusaders criminalize failure to keep up with the crusade du jour (EPA, anyone?).  Pencil-pushers criminalize failure to comply with arbitrary procedures (see any random page of the C.F.R.).  The public cries out for crimes named after children, to punish everyone for an outlier result.  And politicians ratchet up the penalties so they don’t look “soft on crime.”  Overcoming such a mass of societal attitudes is a daunting prospect.

As it happens, though, societal change may not be as impossible as all that.  Science Daily now reports on a study showing that, when just 10% of a population holds a firm belief, that belief will always be adopted by the majority of the society.

When the number of committed opinion holders is below ten percent, there is no visible progress in the spread of ideas.  It would literally take the amount of time comparable to the age of the universe for this size group to reach the majority.

But,

Once that number grows above ten percent, the idea (more…)

A few times, now, we’ve talked about how there are too many federal crimes, and how an enormous number of them are frankly unjust.  We’re just one of many voices crying out about this deep and dangerous problem.  The other day, the WSJ entered the conversation with a piece titled “Federal Offenses: As Criminal Laws Proliferate, More Are Ensnared.”  We’re not going to comment on the piece other than to say it’s well written, and worth reading.

It is certainly true that the number of federal crimes has risen rapidly in recent decades.  And it is beyond rational dispute that a growing number of these crimes are flatly unjust.

Far too many are created by regulatory bureaucrats, unbeholden to any voters, as tools for enforcement of their strictly civil rules (the proper methods of enforcement being fines and restrictions/denials of permit).  And by “far too many” we mean “all crimes created by regulatory agencies.”  Criminal law is not just some tool for rule enforcement; it is the singular means by which the awesome might of the state is brought to bear to punish those whose conduct is so bad that society demands that we take away the transgressor’s liberty, his property, his reputation, and sometimes even his life.  As an old bureau chief of ours used to say, “it is a big fucking hammer, not to be used lightly.”

Many of the federal crimes are unjust for that reason, because they do not punish conduct that society (through elected officials) requires punishment.  Far too many are also unjust because they lack any (more…)

Because we were bored out of our skull this afternoon, we checked this blog’s stats on Google Analytics.  Browsing through the various keywords people have used to find this blog over the past year, all we can say is “The hell is wrong with you people?”

Leaving aside the freaks and weirdos (and possibly some of their clients), however, it seems that most people find this blog by asking Google the same handful of questions.  The number one search engine query that get people here, every month this year, is something along the lines of “why become a lawyer.”  Number two includes variations on a theme of “can a cop lie about whether he’s a cop.”  The top five are rounded out by queries about what crimes Goldman Sachs may have committed, connections between Adam Smith and insider trading, and what one should say to a judge at sentencing.

We’re not sure that we’ve actually discussed all of these topics here.  Then again, we might have, and just forgot it (which is a distinct possibility — these posts are all written in a single pass, without any real editing, and usually are not given another thought once they’re posted.  If you ever wondered what “ephemera” meant, you’re looking at it right now.)

Still, in the interests of alleviating our boredom public service, here are some quick answers to our readers’ most pressing questions:

1. Why Should You Become a Lawyer?

Because you feel a calling to serve others.  Because you want to make a difference in the lives of others.  Because you are genuinely interested in the rules by which human society functions, why people behave the way they do, and the policies and interests underlying it all.  If those are your reasons, then you belong.

Not because you want to (more…)

Looks like there’s going to be more work for defense lawyers, and that’s a real shame.

Hey, we like working as much as the next guy, but we’d rather have a lower crime rate.  After Obama’s little press conference yesterday, though, we can’t help but think that the crime rate is going to go up.  Because the economy is going to continue to suck.

Of course there’s a whole lot more to crime rates than just the economy.  The gang crimes of the crack epidemic flourished during boom years, after all, driven not by poverty but by the turf battles and growing pains of an exciting new industry, like a dot-com bubble with guns instead of IPOs.  While wages were rising in the 50s, the crime rate was rising twice as fast.  And a tanking economy does not always coincide with rising crime rates — they dropped about a third during the Great Depression.

Demographics are a much larger factor, especially in violent crimes, which surge and recede with the unmarried young male population.  That population is responsible for about half of all crimes that get committed.  Cultural attitudes also play a big role — different communities of our wonderfully heterogeneous country can have markedly different views of what is right and wrong, and what is tolerable in others — so that population shifts and evolving community attitudes bring about noticeable drops or rises in local crime rates.

But although the economy is not the biggest factor, it still does have an effect on crime rates.  Financial crimes seem to bloom in downturns, partly out of reckless desperation, and partly because frauds are easier to conceal when everything is going up.  It also affects violent crimes committed by people other than the young-male demographic, for whom economic stress can lead to domestic strife.  For some of those feeling the lack of opportunity the most, opportunistic crimes lose some stigma and are more likely to be seen as options.

It would be foolish to claim any cause and effect between a down economy and the crime rate.  But a down economy — especially a long-term downturn — certainly amplifies the effects of more direct factors like demographics.

Well, the at-risk demographics have been swelling for a few years now, and we’re starting to see an effect on the statistics.  It’s likely that critical mass has been reached, or will be fairly soon.  Cultural shifts work in both directions, but in recent years they’ve been balancing out in favor of less, not more, homogeneity.  (It’s not that particular communities are more or less likely to commit crimes; it’s just that greater cultural diversity correlates strongly with deviation from the singular norm of the law.)  The amplifying effect of a long-term crap economy is most likely to be significant in precisely these circumstances.

-=-=-=-=-

So why do we think the economy’s going to stay down for a while?  Because it’s the message the Obama administration has been sending lately.  What the president said after yesterday’s gloomy jobs report only solidified this impression.

The news was (more…)

This morning’s WSJ has a short article with a long headline, “Manhattan DA Is Put on Defensive: Vance’s about-face on bail in sexual-assault case follows two high-profile court defeats for office.”  The blurb from the website’s front page summarizes the story pithily: “The newly surfaced problems in the sexual-assault prosecution against Strauss-Kahn represent the latest of several recent high-profile setbacks for Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr.”

We’re a proud alum of the office, but lately the office has had a different vibe, one that make us less proud.  Outside the investigative division, which so far as we can tell has remained as professional as ever, there seems to be a distinct shift away from the higher standards of the Morgenthau office towards those of lesser offices.  Although it hasn’t gone quote the way of, say, Nassau County, the change has been clearly noticeable.

In this morning’s article, the DA’s spokeperson tried to defend the office’s handling of the Strauss-Kahn case.  In doing so, she made a key statement that seems to explain what’s going wrong:

“At every step of the way, the district attorney’s office made the right decisions. We pursued an account of a sexual assault that was corroborated by witnesses, electronic evidence and DNA evidence. That evidence was more than enough to present to a grand jury, which indicted the defendant. After the indictment, the district attorney made clear that the investigation would continue and prosecutors would take the case wherever the facts led. Today, we did just that.”

This is a defense?  Cy, if you’re reading this, that statement is an indictment of your office, not a defense.

First of all, if you only have enough evidence for an indictment, you don’t seek an indictment.  We were trained not to write up a case unless it was one we were confident we could prove beyond a reasonable doubt at trial.  The evidence sufficient to obtain an indictment is laughingly slim — one only needs to convince a bare majority of the grand jury that it’s probably more likely than not that the crime could have happened, on the barest evidence that has not been tested or challenged in any way.  If the best you can say of your evidence is that is is “enough to present to a grand jury,” then you need to keep investigating.

Second, “after the indictment, the district attorney made clear that the investigation would continue and prosecutors would take the case wherever the facts led?” Are you shitting us?  You mean you sought an indictment before you’d even completed your investigation?  That’s the kind of amateurish, shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later approach we’ve come to expect of the embarrassingly bad DA’s offices.  It’s not what the Manhattan DA’s office is supposed to do.  No, you’re supposed to complete your investigation first, and only then seek an indictment.  You don’t go to the grand jury until (1) the investigation is complete, (2) the investigation has convinced you that the suspect is guilty and that you can prove this guilt beyond a reasonable doubt at trial, and (3) you’ve made a policy determination that prosecution is the right thing to do in this case.  Ideally, but not required, one also (4) presents the opportunity for a pre-indictment plea, which in our experience often leads to discussions that can shut down a misguided prosecution before it’s gone too far.

We’ve certainly seen more of this reckless prosecution lately, and it’s never been to the credit of the office.  Each time, it’s only made the office look worse.  And we’re not the only ones noticing.  When we speak with other defense colleagues about this, almost all are in agreement that this change under Vance has only damaged the office’s reputation.

It’s a shame for the office, of which we would like to remain proud.  It’s a shame for Vance, whom we genuinely like and want to see succeed.  But it’s worse than shameful to shoot from the hip like this, trying to score points at the expense of the lives of real people.