The Criminal Lawyer

In a sort-of unanimous opinion today, the Supreme Court reversed the conviction of a Mexican who’d tried to get a job by using counterfeit Social Security and Alien Registration cards along with a fake name and date of birth. He’d been convicted of aggravated identity theft, 18 U. S. C. §1028A(a)(1) — a federal crime for “knowingly” using “a means of identification of another person.”

There was no evidence that this guy, named Flores, knew that the Social Security cards (plural) or Alien Registration cards (yes, plural) he’d tried to use had actually belonged to anyone else. And in fact, they didn’t, as they were made-up counterfeits. The feds said it wasn’t necessary to prove that Flores knew it was someone else’s ID. All they needed to prove, they said, was that Flores knew that… well… that he was using a means of identification.

The trial court, for some reason, bought that argument. Flores then decided to forego a jury and let the judge decide the case. The judge found him guilty of aggravated identity theft. On appeal, the Eighth Circuit agreed with the trial judge’s ruling.

Writing for the Court today in Flores-Figueroa v. U.S., Justice Breyer gave the feds (and the trial judge, and the Circuit) an “F” in basic English grammar. The phrase “knowingly using someone else’s ID” has a simple plain meaning, which is that you knew it was someone else’s ID. Nobody in their right mind would expect the word “knowing” to only modify the verb “using.” Nobody with a third-grader’s grasp of English would think it did not modify the verb phrase “using someone else’s ID.” In fact, to read the sentence the way the feds wanted to would make no sense whatsoever.

The feds, for their part, could not present a single example of a statute being interpreted the way they wanted this one to be interpreted. Their arguments were just lame. And so all nine Justices agreed that this conviction needed to be reversed.

But not all nine could agree with the rest of Breyer’s reasoning. And neither can we. If Breyer had stopped right here, this would have been a great opinion. But he didn’t stop there. Instead, as pointed out by (still concurring) Justices Scalia, Thomas and Alito, he added some unnecessary extra bits of reasoning that only serve to weaken the Court’s opinion.

All three properly called him out for making a baseless statement that courts “ordinarily” read the mens rea of “knowingly” to apply to every element of the crime. Breyer said that there are certainly examples where “knowingly” does not apply to every element. For example, it’s illegal to knowingly transport someone under 18 years old across state lines for prostitution. But you didn’t have to know that the victim was under 18 to be convicted of this crime. The law doesn’t care whether you knew that element or not. All you had to do was know that you were transporting the victim across state lines for prostitution.

Scalia remained “agnostic” on whether courts “ordinarily” interpret laws this way. But Breyer seems to imply that courts should interpret laws this way, and Scalia cautioned against that firmly. “It is one thing to infer the common-law tradition of a mens rea requirement, where Congress has not addressed the mental element of a crime,” he said (a tip of the hat to one of Breyer’s own dissents last week). But “it is something else to expand a mens rea requirement that the statutory text has carefully limited.

Scalia also raised another good point, that Breyer shouldn’t have gone on about the legislative history here. “Relying on the statement of a single Member of Congress or an unvoted-upon (and for all we know unread) Committee Report to expand a statute beyond the limits its text suggests is always a dubious enterprise.” That is especially bad, he added, when doing so would criminalize acts that the text would otherwise permit.

* * * * *

It is clear that the feds improperly charged Flores with identity theft here. Although he clearly used a false identity, and absolutely tried to pass off counterfeit identification documents, it was equally clear that he had never stolen or used anyone else’s ID.

Why did the feds charge him with a crime he clearly hadn’t committed? It’s not as if they didn’t have other stuff to charge him with. Were they just not thinking? Did they just not understand what the law said in plain English? Did they just not care? Or were they intentionally trying to stick it to him?

Hmm… that’s a nice little mens rea question. Their reasons determine their culpability. Were they idiots (and therefore bad at their job, but not bad people), or were they abusing their power (and therefore bad prosecutors, and bad people)? What do you think?

The other day, by a vote of 249 (59%) to 175 (41%), the U.S. House of Representatives voted to expand the scope of federal “hate crimes” to include crimes against gay people, transgender people, the mentally disabled and the physically disabled. With strong support from the White House and from Senate democrats, we expect to soon see this become law without many changes.

We frankly don’t like hate crimes, but from a jurisprudence perspective there really isn’t any problem with them. More on that below. At the same time, however, this particular bill is problematic. More on that below, as well.

The bill, H.R. 1913 (text here), imposes up to 10 years in prison if you to commit violence because you thought someone was black or gay or whatever. (It also authorizes grants of up to $100,000 per year in federal money to the various state, local and tribal law enforcement agencies. The money is to go towards investigating and prosecuting hate crimes, and programs to reduce the occurrence of hate crimes.)

In the form passed by the house, the hate crimes portion of the law would now do the following:

1. With respect to:
Race,
Color,
Religion, and
National Origin

…A. In general.

………1) If you attempt to cause bodily injury to someone, or if you willfully cause such injury, AND

………2) If you did so with fire, a gun, a dangerous weapon, an explosive, or an incendiary, AND

………3) If you did so BECAUSE of the actual or perceived race/color/religion/national origin of the victim, THEN

………4) Your maximum sentence goes up to 10 years.

…B. If someone died or you tried to kill, or you kidnapped or tried to kidnap someone, or you also committed or tried to commit aggravated sexual abuse, THEN

………1) There is no maximum sentence, and you can get anything up to life in prison.

2. With respect to:
Religion (again),
National Origin (again),
Gender (I guess they’re referring to biological sex, as opposed to foreign grammar),
Sexual Orientation,
Gender Identity, and
Disability

…A. In general.

………1) The exact same stuff as above applies, but only if you acted under any of these circumstances:

…………..a) Either you or the victim crossed state lines or a national border.

…………..b) Either you or the victim used an instrument of interstate or foreign commerce.

…………..c) You used a weapon that had traveled in interstate or foreign commerce.

…………..d) Your conduct interferes with the victim’s economic activity.

…………..e) Your conduct otherwise affects interstate or foreign commerce.

Finally, to forestall the criticisms that hate crime laws infringe on First Amendment rights, the statute says it shall not be construed to prohibit any expressive conduct protected by the Constitution. Nor to prohibit any activities protected by the Constitution.

* * * * *

So, what does this mean?

Critics of hate crimes laws, like Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), say that such laws undermine the principal of equal justice for all. “Justice will now depend on the race, gender [gah!], sexual orientation, disability or other protected status of the victim,” Smith said during debate. “It will allow different penalties to be imposed for the same crime.” House Republican Leader John Boehner of Ohio said that this “places a higher value on some lives compared to others. That is unconstitutional, and that is wrong. All life was created equally, and all life should be defended equally.”

Such criticisms miss the point, a little bit.

As written, this law does not put greater value on a victim’s life because of their race, sex, religion, or what have you. The victim’s actual status has nothing to do with it. The law doesn’t care if the person actually was black or female or Methodist — it only cares whether the offender thought so.

The focus is not on the victim. It is on the offender’s state of mind. In other words, all this law does is insert a new form of mens rea into criminal jurisprudence.

Mens rea is the legal word for an offender’s state of mind, and is almost always a crucial element of a crime. A harmful act that was committed without the requisite mental state is not going to be a crime. For the most part, society doesn’t want to punish people when they weren’t trying to do something wrong, or when they weren’t breaching any duty to be careful.

The traditional mens rea have coalesced over time into a continuum that looks something like this:

…FAULTLESS. There is no culpability here. You weren’t doing anything wrong, or you can’t be held accountable for your actions. Society doesn’t want to punish you, because it would serve no purpose. It would be mere retaliation, and that’s just not civilized. (Don’t start thinking we’re too evolved, however — we do still have STRICT LIABILITY laws, like statutory rape and certain weapon and drug possession crimes, where society couldn’t care less whether you meant to do it, or even knew that you were doing it. So we still have some holdovers from the old “eye-for-an-eye” days of punishing even mere accidents.)

…NEGLIGENT. This is the lowest level of culpability. You were supposed to be careful, and you weren’t and now someone got hurt. You weren’t trying to do anything wrong, but you did anyway, and you ought not to have. Society wants to punish you for this, but only a little. We want to make sure people are careful when they’re supposed to be. Not paying enough attention while driving, then running over a pedestrian, is a crime of negligence.

…RECKLESS. This is punished somewhat more severely. You knew what you were doing might hurt someone, but you did it anyway. Society wants to punish you more for this, because you were just indifferent to the consequences of your actions. You were putting your own interests above those of the rest of us, and someone could have gotten hurt. Shooting a gun indiscriminately out a window is reckless. Driving so fast that you can’t safely react is reckless.

…KNOWING. This is even more severe. When you were reckless, you disregarded the mere chance that something bad might happen. But when you had a pretty good reason to believe that something bad would happen — even though it’s not what you were mainly trying to accomplish — then society wants to punish you much more. Let’s say you caught your spouse cheating on you, so that Saturday night you cut their brake lines. You’re trying to kill your spouse when they take their mother to church the next morning. The resulting accident kills your mother-in-law as well. You weren’t trying to kill her, but you knew she could die as well.

…PURPOSE. This is the most severe. You were actually trying to do it. Society punishes intent the most severely of all, as it’s the most culpable of the mental states. When you severed your spouse’s brake lines in the example above, you intended to kill your spouse.

There are other mens rea out there, which sort of come at this continuum from right angles. ATTEMPT is the big one. It’s a form of intent, of purpose, but it slips in between each of the standard categories. You were trying to commit a crime, but for whatever reason it failed. If you tried to shoot a gun randomly out the window, but it jammed, you’re guilty of an attempted crime of recklessness — you intended to commit a crime with a reckless state of mind. If you tried to purposely shoot someone, but the gun jammed, you’re guilty of attempted murder, attempting to commit a crime with an intentional state of mind. Attempts aren’t punished as severely, because the state of mind is not the only reason for enhanced punishment — the events themselves also play a part in determining culpability (a fact that some on the Supreme Court seem to have forgotten).

So all “hate crimes” laws like this one do is define a new mens rea. This one does not fall within the standard continuum, however. It does not care so much whether you were negligent, reckless, knowing or purposeful. It only cares what you believed to be true of the victim, and that you acted because of that belief.

This really doesn’t even come at the continuum from right angles. It’s wholly separate and apart. It’s a one-off. It’s not even on the same piece of paper. It’s a new kind of mens rea, because it has less to do with your mental state with respect to your actions, and more to do with the reasons why you’re committing them in the first place.

But does that make this new mens rea improper? Not really. It just so happens that, over the past couple hundred years, our national culture has gradually come to consider harmful — actually harmful to society — mistreating people based on attributes beyond their control. People can’t help what color they are, or where they were born, or what religion they were raised in, or what turns them on, or whether they have Down syndrome. Mistreating them because of such things is, to modern eyes, harmful to society.

Society punishes harm to itself by criminalizing it. So it’s a simple step to criminalize mistreating people because you thought they possessed certain attributes beyond their control. That belief, the reason for the criminal act, is just a new form of mens rea, and a harmless one at that.

* * * * *

However, just because we don’t have a problem the concept of this hate crime law, that doesn’t mean we think it is a good one. In fact, there are significant problems with it.

For example, there is a real vagueness with respect to religion and national origin. On the one hand, they’re the same as race, and don’t require additional circumstances. On the other hand, they are grouped in with the new categories requiring additional circumstances. It has to be one or the other, and this vagueness could make hate crimes based on religion and national origin void, under the Rule of Lenity.

Of course, the Commerce-Clause-related circumstances could make this merely a distinction without a difference. But if it there was no difference, then why did Congress go to the effort of writing those conditions for certain victims, but not for others? A savvy defense attorney might well argue that these particular hate crimes are unenforceable.

In addition to this unnecessary vagueness, the law is also overbroad.

Let’s back up. The policy underlying this (and pretty much any other American law against discriminatory behavior) is that we don’t want people being singled out for mistreatment for reasons they have no control over. Again, people can’t help what race they are, so it’s bad to mistreat them for it. It now seems pretty clear that people can’t help what their sexual proclivities happen to be, so it’s bad to mistreat them for that as well.

But there are sexual proclivities that society still wants to punish. There are those who can only get sexual gratification from acts involving children. For the most part, they can’t help this, which is why they usually cannot be rehabilitated. So we have two competing interests here: society’s desire to protect those who can’t help being the way they are, and society’s desire to protect children from sexual predation. It should be obvious to most who read this what the policy ought to be on this. But this law doesn’t go there.

So you could have a situation where a father catches a sexual predator making moves on his young child, and beats him severely with a metal baseball bat. The act was committed primarily because of what the victim was, and it was based on his sexual orientation, so now the father is facing prosecution for a hate crime in addition to the assault.

Or you could have a religion whose believers are sworn to kill all redheads on sight. You happen to be a redhead, and members of that religion just established a temple down the street from your house. You willfully torch the temple, and someone gets hurt. Now, in addition to the arson, you’re looking at a hate crime.

These are extreme examples, to be sure. It’s not something that’s likely to happen. It merely shows that the law is inartfully written, and that it is conceivable that it could therefore be applied in ways that were not contemplated by Congress. These merely illustrate that the law could serve to protect those whom the law does not wish to protect, and penalize those whom the law did not wish to penalize.

These examples also raise a policy question as to defenses. In the first, the father could raise a defense of temporary insanity to challenge the assault claim. In the second, the arson might be challenged with perhaps a Bush-doctrine preemptive self-defense.

But is there room for such defenses in this law, the way it’s written? Temporary insanity is a defense to mens rea. It posits that the necessary mental state did not exist, because circumstances were such that the offender could not have been thinking that way. But here, the temporary insanity would be proof that the necessary mens rea did exist. It’s the result of the knowledge that the victim was a sex offender, and tends to show that the violence was inflicted because of it.

* * * * *

In short, we don’t have a legal or constitutional problem with hate crime laws. They actually seem to be a natural extension of our criminal jurisprudence. But this one seems to have been passed without anyone actually reading it (not surprising, as it hardly spend any time in committee).

An administration and the same-party majority in Congress just want to push a law through, and so they will. And they will wind up passing a law that probably doesn’t mean what they wanted it to mean, and which might not stand up under scrutiny.

So what’s new?

In a stunning 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court today reversed its longstanding bright-line rule which had permitted warrantless car searches after an arrest, even when there was no concern for officer safety or the preservation of evidence. The case is Arizona v Gant.

Writing for the majority in this important decision, Justice Stevens held that the police may only search the passenger compartment of a vehicle, pursuant to the arrest of a recent occupant, if it is reasonable to believe that the arrested person might access the car while it’s being searched, or that the car contains evidence of the crime for which that person was arrested.

Interestingly, the votes were contrary to common stereotype. The majority, which limited police powers, included the two most right-wing justices in the popular mind, Scalia and Thomas. The minority, which would have expanded police powers, included two fairly liberal justices, Kennedy and Breyer.

Rodney Gant was arrested for driving with a suspended license. After he was arrested, the police handcuffed him and locked him in the back of their cruiser. Once he was secured, the police then searched his car and found a jacket on the back seat. In a pocket of that jacket, they found some cocaine.

The trial judge in Arizona denied the motion to suppress, saying that the police are allowed to conduct such a warrantless search of a car incident to arrest. The police had seen Gant driving without a license, so the search was incident to a lawful arrest, and that was enough for the trial court. The Supreme Court, after all, had ruled in New York v. Belton, 453 U.S. 454 (1981) that a warrantless vehicle search incident to lawful arrest was proper. At the suppression hearing, one of the officers explained that the search was done “because the law says we can do it.”

This is actually the common interpretation of Belton. It is widely regarded (and reviled) as a bright-line rule. Stevens pointed out in today’s opinion that it “has been widely understood to allow a vehicle search incident to the arrest of a recent occupant even if there is no possibility the arrestee could gain access to the vehicle at the time of the search.” He added that “the chorus that has called for us to revisit Belton includes courts, scholars, and Members of this Court who have questioned that decision’s clarity and its fidelity to Fourth Amendment principles.”

The bright line has seemed only brighter in the past decade, however, especially after Whren v. United States, 517 U.S. 806 (1996), which held that the police could seize evidence in plain view within a car even after an arrest for a mere traffic violation, regardless of whether there was an ulterior motive in making the traffic stop. So the trial court’s ruling was not a surprise.

Despite the common interpretation, Gant appealed, arguing that Belton shouldn’t be read so broadly as that. It shouldn’t permit a search of the car when the arrestee poses no present threat to the officers. And it shouldn’t permit a search of the car when there is no way it could contain evidence of the crime for which he’d been arrested. There was simply no exigency that satisfied the policy underlying the Belton rule.

The Arizona Supreme Court agreed, and reversed. The Arizona Supreme Court found that Belton only had to do with how much searching could go on during a vehicle search incident to arrest, and did not have to do with whether such a search was permissible once the scene was secure. The Supreme Court of the United States had explained its underlying policy back in Chimel v. California, 395 U.S. 752 (1969), saying that the reasons justifying warrantless search incident to arrest is for the safety of the officers, and for the preservation of destructible evidence. In this case, those justifications did not exist at the time of the search.

The State of Arizona filed cert, arguing that the bright-line rule of Belton permitted the search, and that the common interpretation is the right one.

Writing for the majority, Stevens said that the bright-line rule, though the common interpretation, is the wrong interpretation. He saw that this came about because of an inappropriate reliance on Brennan’s dissent in Belton. Brennan had felt that the Belton rule created a legal fiction that the interior of a car is always within the immediate control of an arrestee, even when that person is no longer near the car at the time of the search.

Stevens acknowledged that this reading leads to absurd outcomes, including searched “incident to arrest” after the arrestee had long since left the scene.

To avoid such absurdity, the Court rejected the bright-line interpretation, and held that the underlying Chimel policy only authorizes vehicle searches incident to arrest “when the arrestee is unsecured and within reaching distance of the passenger compartment at the time of the search.”

The Court added a second condition when such searches are permissible, derived not from Chimel but from Scalia’s concurring opinion in Thornton v. United States, 541 U.S. 615, 632 (2004). (Yet another example of a concurring or dissenting opinion later becoming law of the land.)

This second condition is when, based on the individual circumstances, it would be reasonable to believe there is evidence relevant to the particular crime for which the suspect was arrested.

The bright-line rule has clearly been demolished, and replaced with a case-by-case analysis of the facts.

Now bright-line rules aren’t necessarily a bad thing, in and of themselves. There is a tradeoff between the necessity to account for the vagaries of real life, and the necessity for an easily-understood rule that police can follow. Both considerations are necessary for the protection of individual liberties. If the line is too bright, then law enforcement can ignore common sense and violate rights just because they can. But if the rule is too convoluted, to take into account all the vagaries of real life, then law enforcement won’t understand it, and risks violating rights by accident (or on purpose).

Stevens came up with a rule here that we think is easy enough to understand. The police can conduct a warrantless vehicle search incident to arrest if:
(1) the arrestee can still reach into the passenger compartment, or
(2) there’s reason to believe that the car contains evidence relevant to the crime he was arrested for. That’s not going to cause any confusion. Police officers and trial judges won’t have a hard time applying it.

- – -

There has been a movement in American jurisprudence away from formalism and bright lines, toward balancing. Instead of emphasizing bright-line rules requiring warrants, or dispensing with the need, the courts have been leaning more towards whatever is reasonable under the particular circumstances. A judicial, backward-looking approach, rather than a legislative one.

This ruling clearly fits that trend.

Well, except for Scalia’s concurring opinion. This ruling is in large part a result of his Thornton concurrence, but his focus is still a legislative, forward-looking approach, at least with respect to the process of judicial interpretation. His first sentence begins: “to determine what is an ‘unreasonable’ search within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment, we look first to the historical practices the Framers sought to preserve…”

We find this concurrence to be almost as good a read as his dissents. He lays plain the absurdities of the bright-line rule, only hinted at by the majority opinion. He does acknowledge that the Founders weren’t thinking of this stuff at all. And he tears the dissent of fellow conservative Alito to shreds. But we’ll let you read it all for yourself.

For now, suffice it to say that a major case was decided today, and the ruling is a good one for defendants and law enforcement both.

In October, we reported that functional magnetic resonance imaging (better known as fMRI) is being touted as an honest-to-goodness lie detector. Unlike a polygraph, which required interpretation of physical bodily reactions, an fMRI looks at real-time brain activity to see if brain areas associated with lying are activated during any given answer.

The issue, of course, was whether such evidence would be admissible in court. Polygraphs aren’t admissible (except in New Mexico) because they’re more art than science. But fMRI is all science, and brain scans are already widely admissible at sentencing. They are now de rigeur in capital cases, and the Supreme Court based its ruling precluding execution of adolescents on brain scan evidence.

When we wrote about it, the issue was purely hypothetical. Nobody had yet tried to introduce such evidence in court. But now, a court in San Diego is going to have to decide that very issue.

The case is a child protection hearing. The defendant is a parent accused of committing sexual abuse. Defense counsel is seeking to introduce fMRI evidence for the purpose of proving that the defendant’s claims of innocence were not lies.

If admitted, this will be the first time fMRI evidence will be used in an American court.

The fMRI in this case was performed by a San Diego company with the somewhat uninspiring name “No Lie MRI.” The company’s name isn’t so much an issue, however, as the actual reliability of these tests on an individual basis.

Although general regions are known to be associated with lying, logic, decision making, etc., their specific location in each individual varies. So some baseline analysis would be required for any person, so that his brain activity during questioning can be compared to a valid exemplar of his own actual brain.

fMRI basically measures oxygen levels in the brain’s blood vessels. When a part of the brain is being used, that part of the brain gets more blood. Studies have indicated that, when someone lies, more blood is sent to the ventrolateral area of the prefrontal cortex.

Only a few studies have been done on how accurate fMRI is at identifying specific lies, though their figures range from 76% to 90% accuracy. (For more info, see Daniel Langleben’s paper Detection of Deception with fMRI: Are we there yet? Mr. Langleben owns the technology licensed by No Lie MRI.) Ed Vul of MIT’s Kanwisher Lab told Wired.com that it’s too easy to make fMRI data inaccurate, because a defendant who knows what he’s doing can game the procedure too easily.

Of course, the big challenge to the defense in this case will be establishing that fMRI lie detection is generally accepted within the relevant scientific community. As with any other novel scientific evidence, if the relevant community is defined narrowly enough, it can come in. The trick would be in determining how narrow the relevant scientific community is in this case. If it includes researchers like Mr. Vul, for example, the defense is going to have a hard time. Even Mr. Langelben, who owns the technology used here, is on record saying that not enough clinical testing has been done to establish how reliable it really is.

We predict that the evidence will not be admitted. Down the road, sure, this stuff will come in on both sides. But right now it’s too new. Courts just don’t go out on a limb for truly novel evidence like this.

And besides, they’re trying to admit it to prove the truth of the defendant’s own statement. The issue is not whether he was lying when he declared that he believed himself to be innocent, however. The issue is whether he committed the acts of which he is accused. Whether he thinks he did or not isn’t really the point. It might be relevant at the sentencing phase of a criminal trial, but not at the fact-finding phase here.

There has been a spate of news articles over the past week about a supposedly new teen trend called “sexting” — basically kids taking nude photos and sending them to each other’s cell phones and computers. The articles follow a Today Show interview with the mother of a girl who committed suicide last July after her photos started getting spread around. Most of the articles out there are of the “how do we protect our children from themselves” variety, but there is also a legal consideration. A lot of this activity could count as child porn, and could result in criminal prosecution.

Jesse Logan was a high school student in the Cincinnati area. Like plenty of teenage girls before her, she gave her boyfriend some nude photos. Unlike the Polaroids of previous generations, she sent them electronically, either by cell phone or by email.

Also unlike physical Polaroids, making copies of these photos would be free and easy. A potentially unlimited number could be sent off to others, just as she had sent them to her boyfriend. When they broke up, the ex-boyfriend sent copies to other high school girls. The photos spread around from cell phone to cell phone, and she started getting harassed at school. She became miserable, stopped going to school, and even went on a local TV station to tell her story.

Two months later, one of Jesse’s acquaintances committed suicide. She went to the funeral, then came home and hanged herself.

Hers is only the most tragic case making the news right now. But it happens all the time. There are reports that nearly half of all high school boys these days have seen nude photos of girls in their school. Some of those are spread by the girls’ boyfriends after a breakup, but most seem to have just been disseminated through normal teen chat.

If those ex-girlfriends were under 18 — and most of them probably were at the time, this being high school — then those photos are child porn. Distributing child porn, possessing it, and disseminating it to minors are all crimes that can get those high schoolers in serious trouble.

The consequences could be very severe. The ex-boyfriends and others who spread their photos could be charged with child porn, receive real jail sentences, and spend the rest of their lives as registered sex offenders.

Realistically, a teenage boy with a nude photo of his girlfriend isn’t likely to be charged with child porn. But someone who sends that photo to others, or posts it online, or otherwise spreads it around… that’s a whole ‘nother story.

It doesn’t even have to be intentional. Alan Grieco, a psychologist who treats Florida sex offenders, told Tampa Bay Online about a client who, when a young 20-year-old man, had dated a 17-year-old girl. He had a nude photo of her on his cell phone, which he did not share with anyone else. But after breaking up, his new girlfriend found the photo and sent it to the first girl’s parents. That young man was then charged with child pornography, and is going to spend the rest of his life living with that.

The kids who voluntarily send nude images of themselves aren’t thinking about how easy they will spread, how permanent such things are once they’re in the wide electronic world, and how much of an embarrassment they could be in the years ahead. That’s bad enough. But what’s worse is that the kids who receive, post and pass around these photos could be putting themselves in very hot water indeed.

A couple of weeks ago, we were at a luncheon with some white-collar defense attorneys, listening to a presentation by the acting U.S. Attorney, Lev Dassin. Mr. Dassin let us know that, although he couldn’t spill any particulars, there are a number of ongoing investigations at the Southern District of New York right now, which he expected to provide a lot of work for us later this year.

He also confirmed our impression that there is a lot of political pressure right now, causing prosecutors and law enforcement to focus more assets on white-collar crime. Many see the current economic downturn as the result of Wall Street skullduggery, so law enforcement is being tasked with doing something about it.

Our biggest fear is that people who did nothing illegal may get caught up in the frenzy to blame people for the recession. A federal criminal investigation is a serious matter, and even people who did nothing wrong can wind up in prison because of how they behaved during the investigation.

Still, a lot of white-collar crime is now coming to light these days, because of the hurting economy. Ponzi schemes and other fraudulent investments are being caught out left and right, as investors start trying to pay bills by cashing out their accounts, only to discover that their money isn’t there.

Furthermore, PricewaterhouseCoopers today published a white paper, “Boom Time for White Collar Crime,” predicting that the economy will cause greater numbers of people to commit white-collar crimes, such as embezzlement and fraud.

PwC partner Andrew Gordon told GAAP web that “sales targets seem ever more out of reach, bonuses are under threat, and people’s reputations and livelihoods are at stake. Together, these can be powerful motives for individuals to cross the line.”

The white paper predicts an increase in specific types of fraud: data theft by criminal organizations, “rogue traders” in corporate finance departments, and fraudulent mis-reporting of business numbers to make companies appear better to investors. The paper also sees more Ponzi schemes and fraudulent investment schemes collapsing as investors try to cash out.

So criminals caused a bad economy which is causing more criminals? That sounds a little simplistic.

Of course, the economy didn’t go south because a few Wall Streeters went around defrauding investors. The economy tanked for a lot of reasons, but mostly because lenders stopped believing they’d get paid back. Institutions with the most leverage — financial institutions particularly — got their margins called and couldn’t get new credit, a deadly combination. No amount of government stimulus would change that, without a condition that capital infusions to lenders must turn into loans. The government didn’t make such conditions, so lenders just hoarded their cash to sit out the storm. The credit market, already dying, was pretty much killed. The U.S. Congress and the new Administration have since then acted fairly consistently to prevent lenders from regaining sufficient confidence to start lubricating the economy again. In modern economics, perception is everything — if you are perceived to have liquidity, even if you are at risk, you will have liquidity (see JPMorgan Chase this time last year), but if you are perceived to be at risk even though you aren’t, your liquidity dries up (see Bear Stearns this time last year). Once lenders start perceiving that they will get their money back, things will start picking up. This crisis of confidence was caused, not by white-collar criminals, but by Clinton-era directives to make mortgages to people who can’t pay them, by borrowers and lending agents who cashed in on the resulting laxness, and by an ever growing house of cards that was destined to collapse.

So the economy didn’t go south because of criminals. Similarly, a worse economy doesn’t necessarily translate into more crimes being committed. People who would steal in bad times would have stolen in good times, too. White-collar types aren’t exactly Jean Valjean, stealing a crust of bread so their families don’t starve. No, white-collar crime requires a combination of opportunity and character traits, neither of which correlate with economic pressures.

What is true, however, is that more white-collar prosecutions are going to happen because an under-informed public and its politicians are screaming for blood. Unfortunately, we do not believe that all prosecutors out there understand the complexities and realities of the financial world well enough to accurately sift the guilty from the merely unlucky. Some innocent people are going to get caught in this ever-widening net.

18 U.S.C. § 1346 expands the definition of mail & wire fraud to include “a scheme or artifice to deprive another of the intangible right of honest services.” That’s short and sweet, but what does it mean?

The courts have been left to define the crime for themselves. Unfortunately, they differ wildly in what the theft of honest services means. The Fifth Circuit says it’s only a crime if the deprivation of services was also a crime under state law. The Seventh Circuit says the crime is when someone abuses their position for private gain. The Third Circuit says gain is irrelevant.

In general, they agree that employees and public officials have a duty to act only in the best interest of their employers and constituents. But there are lots of ways to act otherwise, and the courts seem to agree that not all of them ought to be criminalized. There is a spectrum of behavior, ranging from the socially acceptable to the abhorrent. Where the line ought to be drawn is undefined and uncertain.

So the Supreme Court finally had a chance to clear it all up, define what “honest services” means, and give straightforward guidance to the courts and to all the employees and officeholders out there. Sorich v. United States, No. 08-410 came to the Supremes on a cert petition, asking them to define the crime and settle the issue at last. That’s what the Supreme Court likes to do, after all — if the circuits can’t agree, it the Court’s job to define the correct approach.

Instead, the Supremes punted, and denied cert.

Scalia wrote an intense dissent, pointing out that this is precisely the kind of issue that the Court ought to resolve, that the split among the circuits is causing confusion in the law, and that real injustice is resulting. “It seems to me,” he wrote, “quite irresponsible to let the current chaos prevail.” We can’t help but agree.

“If the honest services theory… is taken seriously and carried to its logical conclusion,” Scalia pointed out that all kinds of actions would be criminal. Not all ought to be. “A state legislator’s decision to vote for a bill because he expects it will curry favor with a small minority essential to his reelection,” a perfectly normal and expected aspect of electoral politics, would be a federal crime. “A mayor’s attempt to use the prestige of his office to obtain a restaurant table without a reservation,” a perhaps obnoxious act, but one hardly worthy of punishment, would also be included. “Indeed, it would seemingly cover a salaried employee’s phoning in sick to go to a ball game.”

“What principle it is that separates the criminal breaches, conflicts and misstatements from the obnoxious but lawful ones, remains entirely unspecified.” Failing to define what the crime actually means invites unjust prosecutions by “headline-grabbing prosecutors.” Furthermore, nobody knows if their actions would be considered criminal or not, and “it is simply not fair to prosecute someone for a crime” that won’t be defined until the judge’s ruling that sends him to jail. “How can the public be expected to know what the statute means when the judges and prosecutors themselves do not know, or must make it up as they go along?”

Scalia closed with an excellent dictum, quoting from another useful dissent — that of Hugo Black in Green v. United States, 365 U.S. 301, 309 (1961) — “Bad men, like good men, are entitled to be tried and sentenced in accordance with law.” It is truly unfortunate that the Supreme Court has passed on an excellent opportunity to ensure just that.

First, a recap: Last July, former Alaska Senator Ted Stevens was indicted on seven counts of failing to report gifts he’d received, including renovations to his house in excess of what he’d paid for, but mostly goods and services from oil tycoon Bill Allen. Sen. Stevens pled not guilty, and with an election coming up he demanded a speedy trial to clear his name. The trial began on September 25.

Soon after the trial began in Washington, D.C, the prosecutors came under fire for sending one of their witnesses home to Alaska without letting the judge or the defense know. The witness, Rocky Williams, then contacted the defense team and told them that he’d spent a lot less time working on Stevens’ home than the renovation company’s records indicated. That severely weakened the prosecution’s argument that the company had spent its own money doing the renovations.

Then it came out that the government had withheld Brady material. FBI records containing prior statements of a witness had been handed over to the defense, but the prosecutors — Brenda Morris, Nicholas Marsh and Joseph Bottini (pictured) — had redacted parts of the statements that were potentially exculpatory. This wasn’t affirmatively exculpatory material, but it was impeachment material, and should have been turned over.

A memo from Bill Allen was discovered during trial, in which Allen stated that Sen. Stevens probably would have paid for the goods and services, had he been asked to. The prosecution claimed that their failure to disclose it beforehand was an inadvertent oversight.

The judge was reportedly angered by all this, stating with respect to the Brady material that “it strikes me that this was probably intentional. I find it unbelievable that this was just an error.” Nevertheless, the judge did not declare a mistrial, and on October 27 the jury convicted Stevens on all seven counts.

Then in late December, FBI agent Chad Joy went public with the accusation that the prosecutors really had intentionally withheld exculpatory evidence, and had intentionally sent Rocky Williams back to Alaska to conceal him from the defense.

Now, as the New York Times reports, Joy has come forward with additional allegations of prosecutorial misconduct.

In his latest whistleblower filing, Joy claims that another FBI agent conspired with the prosecutors “to improperly conceal evidence from the court and the defense,” as the Times puts it.

“I have witnessed or learned of serious violations of policy, rules and procedures, as well as possible criminal violations,” Joy stated in his affidavit.

With respect to Rocky Williams, Joy stated that the witness was sent back to Alaska not because of ill health (the reason given by the prosecution), but because after preparing him for testimony, the prosecutors decided that his testimony would help the defense case. Joy stated that Nicholas Marsh came up with the idea, after Williams fared poorly in a mock cross-examination.

Joy stated that the prosecution team also tried to hide the Bill Allen memo that stated that Sen. Stevens would have paid for the items if he’d been asked to. Rather than an accident, as prosecutors claimed at trial, Joy now alleges that it was intentionally withheld.

In addition, Joy claims that fellow FBI agent Mary Beth Kepner had an inappropriate relationship with the star witness, Bill Allen. She almost always wore pants, he said, but on the day that Bill Allen testified, Joy says she wore a skirt, which she described as “a present” to Allen. Joy also states that Kepner went alone to Allen’s hotel room. Although Joy’s redacted affidavit doesn’t say it specifically, the defense team now claims that Kepner and Allen appear to have had a sexual relationship.

Joy also claims that FBI agents received gifts from Allen, including help getting a job for a relative.

The judge, Emmet Sullivan, has ordered a hearing to be held in two days, this Friday the 13th, on whether a new trial is warranted. If the judge determines that Sen. Stevens did not receive a fair trial, he could very well scrap the conviction and order a do-over. It would be anyone’s guess, at that point, as to whether the prosecutors would actually try the case again.

Watch this space for future developments.

A panel of three federal judges yesterday essentially ordered the State of California to reduce its prison population by as much as 57,000 people, because crowding is causing violations of prisoner rights. This doesn’t mean that wardens will be releasing thousands of hardened criminals back onto the streets, but it does raise questions of how to do it. In its ruling, the court accepted certain possible solutions, but rejected the one obvious solution of building more prison space.

The panel was made up of U.S. District Court judges Thelton Henderson and Lawrence Karlton, as well as Stephen Reinhardt of the Ninth Circuit. These judges are known for their left-leaning policies, so it’s hardly surprising, perhaps, that they accepted and rejected the solutions that they did. Increasing prisons is not widely regarded as a liberal position.

Although the panel only issued a “tentative ruling” in Coleman v. Schwarzenegger (link from the L.A. Times), this is probably going to be the final ruling, which is why they were confident enough to issue it formally. Unless it’s overturned on appeal, California is going to have to think up and enact some creative methods of carrying out the order, so the judges wanted to give the state time “to allow them to plan accordingly.”

The case, actually two cases, were brought by prisoners who alleged that crowding — not overcrowding, just crowding — was causing violations of their constitutional rights. These aren’t new cases — one has been in the remedy stage since 1995, and the other since 2002.

The dispute now was not over whether crowding exists, or whether care is unconstitutionally inadequate. Gov. Schwarzenegger issued a state of emergency in 2006, still in effect today, because overcrowding was putting prisoners’ and guards’ health and safety at risk. So the fact of crowding couldn’t be in dispute. Also not in dispute is a previous court ruling that the prisons were not providing constitutionally adequate medical and psychological care.

The issue here was whether the crowding was the main reason for the failure to provide adequate medical and psychological care. And if so, then what to do about it.

The court found that there aren’t enough clinical facilities, resources or personnel to accommodate all the inmates who needed them. The risk of the spread of infectious disease is also enhanced by bunking prisoners in gyms and other spaces not intended to be used for housing. Lots of experts testified that crowding was the primary cause of the problems.

That being decided, California wanted a chance to fix the problem without decreasing the prison population. California showed that, under monitoring by a receiver and special master during the past 11 years, the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation had already made significant improvements in conditions. So they asked for more time to fix these particular problems.

The court said no. They’ve had 11 years, and haven’t fixed the problem yet, so the court didn’t trust the monitors to fix it now. And anyway, “many of their achievements have succumbed to the inexorably rising tide of population.” Furthermore, California has no money to spare for new facilities, resources and personnel. Remedies for these cases have been tried since 1995, for 14 years now, and any future efforts of the receiver and special master could take many more years to have effect. The court felt that any further continuation of the already lengthy deprivation of constitutional rights would be wrong.

The court couldn’t think of any other relief that would work, other than reducing the prison population. Because scores of remedial orders had so far failed, “we are at a loss to imagine what other relief short of a prisoner release order a court could grant.”

So back to the question of how to do it. The court suggested various methods, such as “parole reform,” which we guess would mean changing parole rules, so that violators don’t necessarily go back to prison. Or “good time credits,” which could include both granting greater time off for good behavior, and letting more bad behavior count as good behavior. Or “evidence-based programming intended to reduce recidivism,” which simply means implementing services that are scientifically proven to actually reduce subsequent criminal behavior, as opposed to trying things that just sound good.

The court felt that building more prison space, the one obvious solution, was not something the court could order California to do, because it “may not be within the court’s general powers under the PLRA.” The PLRA, 18 U.S.C. §3626(g)(4) defines a “prisoner release order” as anything that has the effect of reducing or limiting the prison population. So the examples above would work. But one that merely reduces crowding — the problem to be solved here — doesn’t count, because it doesn’t reduce the number of prisoners.

We think that’s probably wrong. Building more prison space would solve the problem complained of. It may not be within the scope of the PLRA, but that’s not the sole authority that the court has. It has equitable power to order the state to do whatever works to stop the constitutional violations.

The court went on to say that California’s inmate population was about 200% of intended capacity, but reducing that population to about 120% to 145% would be sufficient. The court felt that this was the proper balance between concerns of public safety and prisoner rights.

The state immediately announced that it will appeal, of course. This will be one to watch, as pretty much every state is operating prisons beyond their design capacity, and fixes need to start happening soon. What happens here will influence how other states deal with the problem.

Gang crime is on the rise, the FBI reports. The politicians and prosecutors, however, are focusing on white-collar crime these days. Here’s a look at why this is happening.

Gang crime seems to have increased, ironically, as a result of improved anti-gang law enforcement in the big cities.

According to the 2009 National Gang Threat Assessment, street gangs have started expanding more rapidly from urban centers into suburban and rural areas. This has spurred new membership, as fresh populations are opened to gang recruitment. By the end of last year, about a million people were estimated to belong to gangs within the U.S.

One might think that the burbs lack the same social pressures that drive gang membership. Gangs are products of the inner cities, after all, where kids lack fathers to lead them, involved communities to belong to, competent schools to teach them, and opportunities for money and glory. We expect gangs to arise in the inner cities of single moms, apathetic neighbors, dysfunctional schools, government welfare and hopelessness. Suburbia’s not like that, right?

Well, according to the NGTA, drugs drove the expansion. During the 1980s, the suburbs began to become a profitable new market for drug dealers who had previously focused on the urban market. During the 1990s, the huge profits from suburban drug sales caused the street gangs to physically expand their territory, often resulting in violence as urban gangs clashed with local toughs and with each other in the race to occupy the burbs.

Meanwhile, law enforcement started cracking down on gang and drug crime in the cities. It was getting dangerous to operate in NYC, LA and Chicago. Suburban cops, however, just weren’t as much of a concern. The burbs were also seen as safe places to hide from unsuspecting law enforcement, unused to dealing with a gang element.

The combination of weaker opposition from law enforcement, and higher profits from suburban drug users paying “white boy prices,” was a clarion call for gang expansion. It was an irony that improved law enforcement actually resulted in the spread of gang-related crime.

There were other reasons for the spread of gangs into suburban and rural communities, not detailed by the NGTA report. From the author’s own interviews with drug traffickers in the New York area, gangs sometimes followed inner-city populations that had moved out there first. People on government assistance began moving out to places such as Lancaster, Pennsylvania and various towns Upstate along the Hudson River, because a person on welfare could have a nicer quality of life there. Many of them brought with them the quality of life that they were trying to avoid, unfortunately. And those who were drug users brought their demand with them. And so the dealers followed, the gangs followed, and the forces that spurred gang recruitment never went away.

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Despite the spread of violent crime and drug trafficking, however, the FBI is focusing more on white collar crime. White collar crimes certainly are on the rise lately, especially fraud cases.

“We may not be doing as many drug enterprise operations,” Special Agent in Charge Richard Lambert recently said, “so we can focus more on mortgage fraud and corporate fraud problems.”

In just the past month or so, 3000 new FBI positions have been created to combat white collar crime. On top of those new hires, the Senate Banking Committee is preparing a $110 million fund that would hire 500 new FBI agents, 50 new AUSAs, and 100 new SEC agents.

Bill co-sponsor Chuck Schumer (D-NY) stated in the accompanying press release that “our white collar crime divisions are under-staffed, under-funded, and overwhelmed. When a wave of violent crime sweeps through a city, the immediate response is to beef up the police forces, putting more cops on the beat, extending overtime, and making sure the city returns to safety. Our reaction to the financial crisis and the massive and complex financial fraud investigations that loom should be no different.”

Why the rise in white collar cases? It’s not just the economy, stupid.

Sure, people may be tempted to commit crimes in an economic downturn. But this usually applies to people who are on the bottom rungs of the economy. Wall Street types and CEOs don’t start robbing banks just because their net worth slipped a bit.

Instead, white collar crime goes on all the time. What’s changing now is not the number of crimes being committed, as the number of cases being prosecuted. There’s a difference. As Anne van Heerden, head of forensics at KPMG Switzerland told Swissinfo, “I do not believe that the number of cases is growing, but rather the detection rate is increasing.”

Sophisticated financial crimes have always been sexy for law enforcement. What prosecutor didn’t want to convict the next Ivan Boesky, Andy Fastow or Michael Milken? The problem is, they’re hard to catch. The crimes take place on paper, in back rooms, and on golf courses. Not places frequented by cops or detectives. Evidence is often hard to find, and even harder to comprehend if found.

But the new economic downturn — which many see as the direct result of white collar crime — has led to new political pressure to “do something about it.” (At a function last week, we joked with a prominent judge that our white-collar defense practice was recession-proof, to which the judge responded “yes, but your clients caused the recession.”) Elected officials feel that pressure to “do something,” and they start rewarding successful prosecutions, and funding more of them.

So the word has come down from above that white-collar prosecutions are what the chiefs want. And that’s what they’re getting.

Expect to see more.

As previously reported, the ICC prosecution of Sudan’s leader Omar al-Bashir has had its share of challenges. Yesterday, the African Union threw another monkey wrench into an already shaky machinery.

The African Union is an international organization of all African nations except Morocco. The organization, which is expected to name Libyan head Muammar Khaddafi as its new chairman next week, lacks significant authority to do much more than scold or impose mild trade sanctions. But it does have a peacekeeping force in the Sudan. After the force ran out of funds a couple of years ago, the United Nations stepped in to run the operation in a joint effort known as UNAMID.

Yesterday, the AU formally called on the UN Security Council to suspend the ICC indictment of al-Bashir. The leadership fears that any arrest would cause violent uprisings by al-Bashir’s supporters. They also claim that al-Bashir is a necessary party to ongoing peace mediations in the region, and indicting him would derail the peace process.

The Security Council has authority to defer the prosecution under Article 16 of the Rome Statute, which established the ICC in 2002.

The Security Council’s permanent members already have incentives to stall the prosecution. The Sudan is a major oil supplier to China, and the two regimes are very tight. China also opposes any action that would create a precedent of interference in domestic affairs. Russia also has strong economic ties, particularly as the supplier of Sudan’s weapons and attack helicopters. The U.S. wants to avoid any precedent of having leaders held to “international” standards of conduct. Britain and France would prefer any solution that calms the ongoing violence, rather than causing more.

So the AU’s plea is certain not to fall on deaf ears. It’s almost as if the AU is preaching to the choir.

But the suspension of prosecution on these grounds would actually cause a much worse precedent for the AU and the UN. The position essentially boils down to “we’d better leave thugs alone, because if we try to enforce the rules then they’ll act like thugs.”

In other words, if the Security Council goes along with this, its policy will essentially be to stay out of situations like Darfur. This is contrary to the stated policies and desires of the UN and its membership. It would be a mistake from a policy point of view, and it would create an undesirable precedent from a legal standpoint.

The ICC should just get it over with. Exercise its authority, hold a civilized trial, and act accordingly. That would demonstrate to the world that it exists for a reason. Delay would only fan widespread belief in the ineffectiveness and injustice of international law, as crimes go unprosecuted and unpunished for years and years. If there’s sufficient evidence, then there’s no reason not to proceed. If there’s insufficient evidence, then let that come out too. Either way, let the world move forward.

But to refuse to act because of a fear that people might riot as a result… well, that just takes authority away from the civilized bodies and hands it back to the lawless types that law is supposed to protect against in the first place. It would be an act of cowardice masking itself as prudence, and would be despicable.

On Monday, a unanimous Supreme Court reiterated its rule that a police officer may pat down the passenger of a car that was stopped for a traffic infraction, if the officer has reason to believe the passenger is armed and dangerous. The Court also added that the authority to conduct a patdown doesn’t end when police start asking about matters unrelated to the traffic stop.

Writing for the Court in Arizona v. Johnson (No. 07-1122), Justice Ginsburg pointed out that this is not exactly new law. Pennsylvania v. Mimms, 434 U.S. 106, held that police are allowed to ask the driver of a car to get out, after a lawful traffic stop. The interest in officer safety outweighed the “de minimis” additional intrusion of having the driver exit the car. Then, once the driver is out of the car, Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, says he can be patted down if there’s reason to believe he’s armed and dangerous.

Maryland v. Wilson, 519 U.S. 408, said that the Mimms rule applies to passengers the same as to drivers. Passengers and drivers both have the same incentive to avoid being arrested for more serious crimes than the traffic violation, and have the same incentive to use violence to avoid such arrest. The interest in officer safety again outweighed the “minimal” additional intrusion of being asked to exit the car. Everyone’s already been seized, essentially, by the car stop.

Here, Officer Maria Trevizo, of Arizona’s gang task force, was part of a car stop for driving with a suspended registration. At the time of the stop, she had no reason to suspect any of the passengers of a crime. However, on approaching the car, she saw that the passenger Lemon Johnson wore Crips clothing, and had a police scanner sticking out of his pocket. When asked to identify himself, Johnson said her was from Eloy, Arizona, which Trevizo knew was a Crips gang location. Johnson also said he’d done prison time for burglary.

Trevizo wanted to ask more questions out of earshot of the others in the car, to see if she could get any info about the gang Johnson might have been in. So she asked him to get out of the car. Her observations so far, plus his statements, gave her reason to think he might be armed, so when he got out she started to perform a Wilson frisk. When she found a gun in his waistband, Johnson started fighting with her, and she handcuffed him. Johnson was later convicted at trial of, among other things, possession of a weapon by a prohibited possessor.

The Arizona Court of Appeals reversed his conviction, holding that Trevizo’s authority to pat him down ended when she started asking about matters unrelated to the traffic stop. Yes, he was initially detained pursuant to the traffic stop, but then the encounter devolved into a consensual conversation. As Johnson was no longer technically seized by the car stop, the police no longer had authority to conduct a patdown.

The Supreme Court held that the Arizona court got that wrong. Nothing ever happened that would have given Johnson reason to believe he was free to leave without police permission. He was seized by the car stop, and a reasonable person would understand that throughout the time the car is stopped, he isn’t free to just walk away. The mere fact that Johnson was being questioned about non-traffic-related matters wasn’t something that would change that understanding.

Moreover, the Arizona ruling just didn’t make sense. If it was to stand, then an officer who asked a passenger to step out of the car would have to first give the passenger a chance to walk away, before being allowed to pat him down. “Trevizo was not required by the Fourth Amendment to give Johnson an opportunity to depart without first ensuring that, in so doing, she was not permitting a dangerous person to get behind her.”

Other writers out there are seeing this ruling as a travesty, another nail in the coffin of Fourth Amendment protections. Over at Simple Justice, for example, the mere reiteration of the existing Wilson rule is called “the evisceration of rights by baby steps.” It’s clear that such writers simply disagree with the greater value the courts have placed on officer safety, as opposed to the freedom from being patted down. Those are their values, and we can’t fault that.

But critics such as these are missing the real point of the case, which is that a traffic stop never devolves to a lesser encounter until either the traffic stop is over, or until the police say so. To us, this seems to be a far more troubling bright line. Certainly, situations can be envisioned in which a passenger would reasonably believe that he was free to leave, even though the stop wasn’t over and the officer might disagree.

We, for example, once took a cab to an important meeting across town. The cab driver, playing to type, showed a remarkable ignorance of the workings of a motorized vehicle, as well as the difference between the street and the sidewalk. One of New York’s finest swiftly stopped the cabbie before anyone (including us) got hurt. While the officer dealt with the cabbie, we simply walked away and caught another cab. Under this new ruling, however, it would have been appropriate for the officer to stop us. The officer could then even frisk us, if he thought the wallet in our suit jacket was a suspicious bulge.

That’s what you get with bright-line rules, though. One the one hand, you get the efficiency and most-of-the-time fairness of an easy rule for officers to remember and follow. But on the other hand, you lose case-by-case judgment, and wind up with exceptional situations of authorized injustice. Yet another pair of considerations for the ongoing balancing test that is the law.

Yesterday, we observed that there have been a lot of Ponzi schemes coming down lately, and asked what gives? Today, the Wall Street Journal made the same observation, and asked the same question.

Here are some points from the article:

* In 2007, the SEC had brought civil actions from 15 alleged Ponzi schemes. In 2008, they brought 23 such cases. So far this month, they’ve already brought 9. And that doesn’t include all the state-level fraud cases that have come down.

* On the criminal side, there have already been 6 multimillion-dollar fraud cases brought this month.

* Experts say these schemes are being discovered now because of the economic downturn. Investors try to cash out their investments, only to learn that the money’s gone. There’s also less money out there being invested, so the source of cash for these schemes dries up, and the house of cards comes crashing down.

The New York Times also had some similar observations:

* “What is causing them to surface now appears to be a combination of a deteriorating economy and heightened skepticism about outsize returns after the revelations about [Bernie Madoff]. That can scare off new clients and cause longtime investors to demand their money back, which brings the charade tumbling down.”

* The Commodities Futures Trading Association has also experienced a doubling of reported Ponzi schemes in the last year.

* On Thursday last week, Senators Chuck Schumer and Richard Shelby introduced a bill to hire 500 new FBI agents, 50 new AUSAs, and 100 new SEC officials to crack down on these crimes.

Nick Cosmo, the 37-year-old head of Agape World Inc. and Agape Merchant Advance, was arraigned today on charges that he ran a Ponzi scheme that cheated investors out of $370 million since 2006.

The feds allege that about 1,500 investors were promised annual returns of as much as 80%. These huge profits were to come from short-term loans to businesses. Instead of coming from actual profits, however, the complaint states that returns paid to investors actually came from the outlays of subsequent investors.

Investor money went mostly to pay other investors, in a rob-Peter-to-pay-Paul setup similar to the Bernie Madoff and seemingly countless other Ponzi schemes hitting the news these days. About $55 million went to pay brokers who brought in the investors. A bunch of cash was allegedly spent on expensive luxuries for Cosmo himself, as well as to pay the restitution ordered in a previous mail fraud conviction. Only about $10 million actually went to the loans that were supposed to be the core investment. The firm also transferred $100 million since 2003 into Cosmo’s futures-trading accounts, of which $80 million was lost. As of last Thursday, said prosecutors, Cosmo’s firms had less than $750,000 in the bank.

Agape World was listed as #73 in Entrepreneur Magazine’s Hot 100 fastest-growing businesses in America. (See its listing, screenshotted above.)

This is just one more in a series of prosecutions that have been coming down lately. Prosecutors are clearly ramping up their focus on financial crimes in the wake of the Bear Stearns meltdown — it’s definitely the sexy crime of the moment, where the press is throwing a lot of ink, where reputations stand to be made. Of course, crime is only found where it’s looked for, and right now this is a hot (and relatively easy) crime to prosecute. So it makes sense that this is where prosecutors are focusing lots of assets.

But apart from that, what does it mean about the rest of us? Almost all of these Ponzi schemes promised investors stupid-high returns. Wasn’t it obvious to the investors what was going on? Were they just blinded by the go-go stock market, while it was hot? Were they desperate for a winning number after the market soured? Lots of the alleged victims out there were sophisticated investors — one would think they at least would have known the meaning of “too good to be true.” We’d like to hear what you think is going on.

We guess people’s common sense just gets blinded by the prospect of easy gains. And it happens often enough, to enough people who ought to know better, that this crime continues to proliferate nearly a hundred years after it became part of the common lingo.

Oh well, more work for us defense attorneys.

White-collar prosecutors and defense attorneys have been keenly awaiting today’s decision in U.S. v. Ionia Management. At oral arguments last November, the court permitted amicus filer Andrew Weissmann (former head of the Enron Task Force) to make a case for limiting the criminal liability of corporations. The fact that he was given oral argument time meant that the court was at least considering the argument, hence the interest in today’s decision.

Weissman’s argument was that, although the doctrine of respondeat superior holds a corporation criminally liable for the acts of an employee, the corporation should not be liable if the employee acted contrary to the corporation’s policies.

In today’s decision, the court flatly rejected this argument. “We refuse to adopt the suggestion that the prosecution, in order to establish vicarious liability, should have to prove as a separate element in its case-in-chief that the corporation lacked effective policies and procedures to deter and detect criminal actions by its employees.”

The court went on to re-state that a corporation cannot be immunized from liability just by having a compliance program, no matter how extensive it may be. The existence of a compliance program would only be relevant to whether an employee was acting within the scope of his authority. But if employees are acting within the scope of their authority, and they break the law, then the corporation is going to be liable.

The court’s decision was a disappointment to many defense attorneys, who believe that the standard for criminal prosecution of corporations is too low. The ability to charge a corporation with a crime is a deadly weapon, as demonstrated by the downfall of Arthur Andersen in 2002. The ease of bringing such charges gives prosecutors a lot of leverage to demand full cooperation from the company when its employees are under investigation. The government can often stiff-arm corporations into making huge concessions, including stiff fines, to avoid prosecution.

But the decision was not exactly a surprise. During oral arguments, Judge Guido Calabresi questioned whether judges even could limit the existing scope of respondeat superior. It was an interesting academic issue, but Congress or perhaps the Supreme Court would have to deal with it.

It wouldn’t be very surprising to see this issue brought before the Supreme Court. Weissmann has been working on changing this bit of law since he left the government. At the heart of the problem, he says, is a misinterpretation of the Supreme Court case New York Central v. U.S., 212 U.S. 481 (1909). That case has been interpreted in such a way that criminal liability is easier to prove than civil liability under respondeat superior. That’s the opposite of how it usually works, of course.

Our prediction is that the Supreme Court won’t make the change, and it will be up to Congress to tighten up the doctrine. If at all. For the time being, nothing is changed.