It’s a provocative idea, that the consequence for the commission of a crime might be something other than prison. Not petty offenses by first-timers, who don’t get prison now, but the more serious crimes, the ones that do real harm to real people. Yet, this is what Ruth Wilson Gilmore proposes.

Prison abolition, as a movement, sounds provocative and absolute, but what it is as a practice requires subtler understanding. For Gilmore, who has been active in the movement for more than 30 years, it’s both a long-term goal and a practical policy program, calling for government investment in jobs, education, housing, health care — all the elements that are required for a productive and violence-free life. Abolition means not just the closing of prisons but the presence, instead, of vital systems of support that many communities lack. Instead of asking how, in a future without prisons, we will deal with so-called violent people, abolitionists ask how we resolve inequalities and get people the resources they need long before the hypothetical moment when, as Gilmore puts it, they “mess up.”

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The great Murray Kempton wrote, “There they go again, framing the guilty.” His point was there could be wrong on both sides, and often is. New York has made a significant change to its bail statute, one that was needed not because the old law was inadequate but because prosecutors and judges failed to do their job with the level of honesty and bravery necessary to make any piece of the legal machinery work as intended.

But given the window of opportunity, when the Dems took over the New York State Senate, and held both houses of the lege, they would make reform happen. In a budget bill, of all places, without public discussion in the dead of night.

Despite the promise of a new era in the state Legislature, certain things didn’t change. Complex public policy, in this case criminal justice reforms, got forced through in a rushed budget process. And all New Yorkers may soon be less safe as a result.

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Well sure, you probably are one already. Today alone, by the time you read this, but that doesn’t mean you can’t learn ever better ways from Mike Chase. If Mike’s name doesn’t sound familiar, that’s likely because he’s far better known by his twitter nom du guerre, @CrimeADay. Mike’s Sisyphean project to go from one inane federal offense to another, and reach the end before SMOD finally gets his act together, is a labor of love and inanity. And it shows.

How To Become A Federal Criminal, an illustrated handbook for the aspiring offender, is far more than a collection of the wacky and absurd crimes created either directly, because some dolt took West Side Story to heart, or as an offshoot of some otherwise benign, often trivial, regulation bootstrapped into a crime by federal agency enforcement mechanisms. It’s not so much that there was a desperate need to protect the official tube socks of a postal worker’s uniform from street gang adoption, but that it just worked out that way.

Not that it will prevent the feds from taking you down, if that’s what they have to do. Continue reading →

Ed. Note: This is a guest post by Roswell, Georgia, lawyer Charles Landrum, who apparently shares the same devotion to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that I do to the New York Post.

Breaking news down south. The Cobb County, Georgia Democratic Party is getting a new office.

The house is only two or three traffic lights from I-75, and has excellent street exposure. The local party’s formal headquarters will remain in the nearby law office of former Gov. Roy Barnes. But larger meetings will take place at the new location, with an eye toward 2020.

“We hope that as these campaigns ramp up, presidential or Senate or whatever, this will be the first point of checking in,” said Jacquelyn Bettadapur, who chairs the county operation.

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There are many good, sound, maybe even overwhelming, reasons not to hand over your DNA to 23andMe or Ancestry. Foremost is that they’re “good corporate citizens” performing their moral duty of handing it over to the government for the safety of the nation, where it magically finds its way into the federal DNA database, CODIS.

But that’s not the reason Erin Aubry Kaplan refuses to get her DNA tested, or even to hear about the results when her sister had it done.

When my sister called me a few months ago to say, a little breathlessly, that she had gotten back her results from 23andMe, I snapped at her, “I don’t want to know!” She kept trying to share, but I kept shutting her down, before saying I had to go and hanging up. Afterward I felt a little shaky, as if I’d narrowly escaped disaster.

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As that well-known legal wag Orin Kerr put it, why bother?

Reminder: Every defendant who wins at SCOTUS when the court takes a broad interpretation of the 4th Amendment right will quietly lose on remand a year later under the good faith exception to the exclusionary rule.

He points to the opinion of the Virginia Supreme Court, to which the Supreme Court remanded Collins v. Virginia.

This case returns to us on remand from the United States Supreme Court. It involves an
unsuccessful motion to suppress filed in the trial court by Ryan Austin Collins. Convicted of
receipt of stolen property, Collins appealed to the Court of Appeals, claiming that the trial court should have excluded evidence obtained by police during a warrantless search of a motorcycle parked on a private residential driveway. Continue reading →

From the description of former University of Alaska archaeology professor David Yesner, there is nothing good to say about him.

That investigation, first obtained by KTVA, found that Yesner created a hostile environment for the students and violated numerous university policies against sexual misconduct, including assault. The nine complainants’ reports ranged from inappropriate comments and touching, to taking pictures of students’ breasts at work sites, to — in one case — rubbing his genitals against a student in a public shower. The reports were deemed credible.

Yesner was forced to retire in 2017, banned from campus and denied emeritus status. Despite having taught for years, he was determined to be such a threat that the school felt compelled to notify its students to be on the lookout. Continue reading →

In the juvenile 1981 sex-comedy, Porky’s, there’s a scene where teenaged boys are looking at the girls’ showers through a hole. At the time, it was considered hysterically funny. Today, it would be outrageous, an inexcusable violation of the privacy of the young women. But Judge Jorge Alonso of the Northern District of Illinois says otherwise.

So far, the right not to be seen unclothed by the opposite sex is not on the Supreme
Court’s list. By bodily integrity, the Supreme Court was talking about physical bodily integrity,
not visual bodily privacy. Rochin v. California, 342 U.S. 165, 172 (1952).

This will no doubt come as a shock to some, that there is no substantive due process right to not be viewed naked by “the opposite sex.” There are many who argue, without basis beyond the depth of their passion, that there should be some free-floating right to privacy from all, including the teenagers who might pull a Porky’s. But here, one step further away, the government can compel a woman to shower knowing that the boys are looking. Well, not exactly the fact pattern Judge Alonso was talking about. Continue reading →

A simple word takes on magical meaning to some. The word “discrimination” is such a word, and when invoked, it’s bad. Isn’t discrimination bad? Except we discriminate all the time, such as when we decide whom to invite to dinner or whom to marry. Should we be compelled to marry the first person who comes along so as not to discriminate?

Transparency is another magical word, but unlike discrimination, it’s a good word. Transparency is invoked for goodness, and everyone knows it’s a wondrous thing. Don’t we all want to see the Mueller Report because transparency? So what if most of America will lack the competency to understand its significance. It’s our right to have the good thing we call transparency, is it not?

New York Times editorial board member Binyamin Appelbaum has taken transparency a step farther, arguing that not only should Trump’s tax returns be public, but so should everyone’s. Yours. Mine. His. Everyone’s. Continue reading →

In a twit that’s either perceived as bold and brave, by those who choose to do so, or shallow and defensive, by those who have chosen to view words independent of their emotion, Representative Ilhan Omar fired back at Trump’s 9/11 video interposing a sound bite from a speech with images of the fall of the Twin Towers.

I did not run for Congress to be silent. I did not run for Congress to sit on the sidelines. I ran because I believed it was time to restore moral clarity and courage to Congress. To fight and to defend our democracy.

A cursory pass might make those words seem inspirational to the unduly passionate, but as Mark Bennett notes, any call for “moral clarity” should scare the crap out of you. Those are the words of theocracy. Continue reading →