« "Positive Credentials That Limit Risk: A Report on Certificates of Relief" | Main | As SCOTUS heads into homestrech, any prediction for any criminal justice "sleeper" opinions? »
June 9, 2024
A big (but still abridged) Sunday round-up of lots of (non-capital) stories major and minor
In this post a few days ago, I flagged a handful of notable capital sentencing stories making headlines at the start of June. I also noted that I hoped to find time to do a broader round-up of a broader array of sentencing news and commentary. A little extra time allowws me the chance to note these pieces (which are still not all those of note in recent days):
From the AP, "Trump’s case casts a spotlight on movement to restore voting rights to those convicted of felonies"
From The Atlantic, "Why California Is Swinging Right on Crime"
From Empower Mississippi, "Prosecutorial Overreach: Not Just a Trump Problem"
From Forbes, "Federal Prisoner’s Dilemma, Cell Phone Or Not"
From KRCA, "Gov. Newsom, Democratic leaders are trying to negotiate Prop 47 reform off the November ballot"
From PennLive, "Value of human body parts becomes sentencing issue in federal trafficking case"
From Politico, "‘Cooking someone to death’: Southern states resist calls to add air conditioning to prisons"
From Real Clear Politics, "Restoring Confidence in DOJ Requires Accountability, New Leadership"
From Reason, "Federal Supervised Release Is a Wasteful Mess. A Bipartisan Bill in Congress Is Trying To Fix That."
From Rolling Stone, "Feds Closed a Prison Notorious for Abuse. Things Only Got Worse"
From NBC News, "Trump probation interview set for Monday after hush money conviction"
From the New York Times, "Alvin Bragg’s Next Decision on Trump Presents a Political Quandary"
From the Washington Examiner, "Sentencing reform should bring accountability and redemption"
June 9, 2024 at 09:34 PM | Permalink
Comments
What a joke that Trump has to show up for this BS interview. The time that Trump has lost needs to be taken out of the hides of his persecutors.
Posted by: federalist | Jun 10, 2024 10:08:55 AM
federalist, every convicted felon has to have a presentence report prepared before sentencing, but each is free to forgo the interview.
I have had clients refuse the interview.
Posted by: anon | Jun 10, 2024 10:26:39 AM
anon, you make my point--this is why you cannot have prosecutions such as this one . . . .
Posted by: federalist | Jun 10, 2024 11:45:28 AM
And anon, let's take a prosecution like the Duke lax case. Those guys lost freedom (being haled into court) etc. and had to suffer. That's bad enough when the prosecution is in good faith . . . .
Posted by: federalist | Jun 10, 2024 11:48:05 AM
https://hotair.com/jazz-shaw/2024/06/10/garlands-appointment-of-weiss-was-a-sham-from-day-one-n3789960
I think that one should have made your list, Doug.
Posted by: federalist | Jun 10, 2024 12:12:11 PM
It would have been hard, federalist, for me to link to a June 10 article in a list created on June 9. And, if you have a time machine, I hope you use it for better things than seeing to change past blog posts.
Posted by: Doug B | Jun 10, 2024 1:13:42 PM
Ha. Ha. Homer nods. Of course, McCarthy is no bomb-thrower, and he's implicating Garland in some shady shady stuff. The favoritism reeks, and I. for onw, hope Hunter is maxed out. The bigger question is whether the rest of the federal judiciary is going to make things difficult on prosecutors. Were I a federal judge, I'd be asking very hard questions as to why other defendants didn't get the "hunter" treatment.
Posted by: federalist | Jun 10, 2024 1:28:40 PM
With respect to cooking inmates in southern prisons without air conditioning, this is an interesting problem in the southern states, where all of the Federal prisons have air conditioning, but the state prisons do not. In Florida, a particularly hot state in the summers, the state prisons only have air conditioning in their medical facilities, but all of the regular prions are un-airconditioned.
This was a peculiar problem for former U.S. District Judge Samuel Kent, after he was traded off by the BOP to the Florida Dept. of Corrections, which kept him in solitary confinement for protective custody in an un-airconditioned Florida prison. Kent and his counsel even field a Motion for Habeas Corpus, per 28 U.S. Code sec. 2255, seeking to withdraw his guilty plea, based upon him being swapped off to Florida and kept alone, in isolation for years. Kent had anticipated serving his sentence in a BOP prison camp or a medical facility. Initially, he was sent to the smallest FMC in Devins, Massachusetts, but that didn't work out with the BOP, for reasons that have never been publicly explained. The BOP decided that they had to swap Kent off to a state system, because they couldn't properly protect him in any BOP facility. Although he lost the 2255 Motion, former Judge Kent was eventually given a furlough transfer that permitted him to attend his daughter's wedding (no other inmate would have gotten this deal), and then he spent his last 6 to 9 months in home incarceration with electronic monitoring at his hunting cabin in West Texas.
The most interesting speculation I have heard about Donald Trump's sentence in his New York case would be him getting re-elected as President and then have to spend it on home incarceration with electronic monitoring at The White House!
Posted by: Jim Gormley | Jun 10, 2024 3:10:44 PM
federalist --
A small measure of justice -- too small -- but the prosecutor in the Duke lacrosse rape hoax case, Mike Nifong, went to jail (for one day) and got disbarred. He was an anti-white racist playing to a bunch of BLM-type hoodlums, quite a few of whom were on the Duke faculty.
Posted by: Bill Otis | Jun 10, 2024 10:08:41 PM
Far too small. Garland deserves to spend the rest of his life in prison. If I were a federal judge, I would order that everyone in America gets the same credit that Hunter got as a result of the failure to enforce tax law.
Posted by: federalist | Jun 11, 2024 8:48:22 AM
And Bill, this is why it is so important that prosecutors not sink--if Nifong's plot had succeeded, you likely would have said that the process needs to be respected and those lax kids should have meekly gone to prison. I don't think so. Society does not have the right to ask anyone to stand down after a railroading. Doug thinks that the Duke kids would have no right to defend themselves against such a monstrous outcome.
Posted by: federalist | Jun 11, 2024 12:15:16 PM
federalist --
As a general matter, the results of the process have to be obeyed (not necessarily respected) simply because the alternative is worse. If each person gets to decide for himself whether he's been given his version of justice, we'll be back to vigilantism by tomorrow afternoon and the jungle the day after that. Vigilantism will produce BOTH more violence AND more injustice than we have now by a huge margin.
I might point out that it was the system that put the skids to Nifong, the local Durham, NC prosecutor. The State AG's Office investigated the case and removed Nifong.
Error is inevitable in human life. There is not now and has never been any arrangement that escapes it. The question is how to minimize it and what to do when it happens. The answers to those question will ALSO inevitably have a degree of error, but going that route, while unsatisfactory and sometimes maddening, is better than any alternative yet devised.
Hundreds if not thousands of prisoners are totally convinced they got a raw deal and are "innocent," as they view innocence. If we allow their certitude, which is almost always as mistaken as it is ironclad, to give them license to shoot their way out, we'll be going down a dark path.
Posted by: Bill Otis | Jun 11, 2024 12:45:44 PM
Yet again, federalist, you misrepresent my position while continuing to fail to explain yours with any intellectual rigor. Innocent persons wrongly convicted have every right to use every legal means to defend themselves against a wrongful conviction. And, of course, I repeatedly and robustly urge having these legal means open and broad so that prosecutors cannot use waivers of appeals/habeas or all sorts of other means to make sure the railroaded are denied legal pathways for securing relief (and, I would hope compensation is also made legally robust in this context, which is why I generally oppose special forms of tort immunity for law enforcement/prosecutors etc.) Perhaps you can/will explain, federalist, why you seem often to support all sorts of waivers and other limits on the existing LEGAL means to contest railroading.
Now, on to your (still incomprehinsible) other claims: do you claim those who reasonably believe thet are being railroaded by the legal system have some kind of (legal?) right to use extra-legal means to "defend themselves"? I assume you think Donald Trump (and many of this supporters) reasonably think he is being railroaded in the NYC case. Does he and his supporters, federalist, have a right to kill or violently threaten AG Bragg and other prosecutors and/or Judge Merchan and other court personnel and/or the jurors who convicted him? You have never explained your quirky views in a cogent way before --- and keep misrepresenting mind. Let's stick to your claims and maybe the Trump case can allow you to explain your strange assertions more competently.
Posted by: Doug B | Jun 11, 2024 12:46:53 PM
Innocent people don't. Railroaded people? Easy to sit in the ivory tower and talk about "extra-legal" means when talking about people who are dealing with an armed government deliberately doing extra-legal things.
Trump's remedies against Alvin Bragg and crew . . . . let's just say that I hope he is elected, and he hounds the entire crew with the lawfare he suffered.
Society has no moral right to expect anyone to submit to a lawless prosecution. Once you agree, as you must, that a woman has the right to resist, with deadly force, a sexual assault by a police officer, then where do you draw the line when it comes to resisting unlawful applications of government force.
And Bill, with the Bragg prosecution, they are trying to take away our democracy. I was told that was treason.
Posted by: federalist | Jun 11, 2024 1:02:03 PM
federalist: you show your hand when you reference "moral right" without giving much reasoned thought to critical distinctions between your feelings about morality and the law in operation. But, tellingly, you seem to only urge Trump to use only legal means to respond to his prosecution, thereby revealing you really do not have the courage to assert that your moral convictions provide a sound basis for all sorts of people violating the law in service to your feelings.
A police officer, like a prosecutor or a judge or a defense attorney or a movie producer, clearly never has any basis whatsoever to claim any lawful authority to engage in sexual assault. And so, as would be true as to anyone else involved in a sexual assault, the law provides a woman (or a man) with a legal right to resist such harmful illegality with force (even deadly force, depending on the circumstances). But a police officer often will have a basis to claim lawful authority to detain a citizen (even using a gun), and so the law would not generally allow a woman (or a man) with a legal right to resist such an arrest with force (but if, say, a defense attorney seeks to forcefully restrain someone this way, the story could be legally quite different). Some police officer arrests turn out to be quite suspect and even unlawful --- I would call that the reality in the armed arrest of Scottie Scheffler --- but I certainly do not think Scheffler's pals or the equivalent should be shooting at the police the moment they fear he or others are subject to any possible "unlawful applications of government force."
As I see it, federalist, the law does reasonably sound job sorting this out, and the law certainly seems a lot more predictable that your feelings or the feelings of all those who (not unreasonably) have a view that they are often subject to all sorts of "unlawful applications of government force." But, as I always you to know, FFM.
Posted by: Doug B | Jun 11, 2024 1:50:10 PM
federalist --
My reaction to the Bragg prosecution of Trump is here: https://ringsideatthereckoning.substack.com/p/trump-convicted-of-everything and here, https://ringsideatthereckoning.substack.com/p/why-a-conviction-will-be-reversed
In sum, I think it's a disaster both for democracy and the rule of law. Its destabilizing consequences for both will take years to remedy, if they can be remedied at all. It reeks of banana republic politics, a poison this country has managed to avoid for over two hundred years.
Posted by: Bill Otis | Jun 11, 2024 3:47:47 PM
Doug, a cop knows that you cannot be arrested for a Facebook post criticizing her cop ex-husband, but yet a woman was arrested for just that in Louisiana--so under your view she could resist becaus he would know that the had no lawful authority to arrest her. Or what about a judge haling a non-party into court for a show cause hearing because he is butt-hurt about criticism? he's the cause of force (so he did it)--under your logic, resistance would be justified.
Nice try.
Posted by: federalist | Jun 11, 2024 4:57:56 PM
federalist: I would need to know more of the details of the cases you mention, becuase the nature of the threat and the options beyond defensive force always matter in assessing the legality of defensive use of force (eg, the Model Penal Code's basic formulation says defensive force is generally “justifiable when the actor believes that such force is immediately necessary for the purpose of protecting himself against the use of unlawful force by such other person on the present occasion.” § 3.04(1)). So the "unlawfulness" of the threat is relevant, as well as the possibility of those being threatened using means other than force for self-protection.
And that's my main point. Legally speaking, defensive force rights are to be defined by law, and I am a fan of being committed to the rule of law in this setting and others. You may be eager to say someone should have broader moral rights to attack certain government court actors under certain situations --- and others may be eager to say anti-war activists should have broader moral rights to attack members of military under certain situations --- but those are claim about moral feelings, not about legal rights. You seem unable to separate your moral feelings from your claims about legal right, but they are conceptually distinct even though they may (often?) overlap.
Posted by: Doug B | Jun 11, 2024 5:30:06 PM
