It doesn’t matter if the underlying offense was serious or trivial. Don’t show up in court when you’re required to do so? Bench warrant.  Don’t pay a fine on time? Bench warrant. A warrant here, a warrant there, and next thing you know, you’ve got 1.2 million bench warrants on your hands. That’s a lot of warrant.

“Warrants never go away. There’s no expiration date,” Bratton said in an interview with The Associated Press. “It would be great to get rid of a lot of that backlog. It’s not to our benefit from a policing standpoint to have all those warrants floating around out there.”

While some warrants are for people who committed crimes, say robbery, others are for offenses like drinking in public.  Among the problems is that when a warrant falls, a person is taken into custody, held and, after about 24 hours, taken before a judge. Often, the offense itself would be disposed of without jail, maybe some community service, maybe even dismissed, but the warrant means they spend a night (at least) in jail, plus are exposed to the additional. and more serious, charge of bail jumping.

In light of the “crime” originally charged, it all can seem pretty crazy: Continue reading →

Jeff Blackburn, chief counsel and one of the founders of the Innocence Project of Texas, has had enough. He’s resigned from the organization,* and explains why**:

When we founded this project 10 years ago we were part of a movement. That movement was a loose coalition of groups devoted to freeing the innocent and changing the criminal justice system from state to state.

We did our part. We got people exonerated. We got good legislation passed. We made history with the Tim Cole case. We stayed small, democratic, and focused on reforming the Texas system. We created some great relationships with law enforcement officials and forensic scientists. We built a  resilient, authentic, and independent outfit.

While we were doing that, the New York-based Innocence Project went from being a small nonprofit to an organization with a multi-million dollar budget. As its size grew, so did its appetite for money and its need to control the reform movement. What was once a movement has now become a business.

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Jessica Cooke was on her way from Norfolk to beautiful Ogdensburg, New York, at the tippy-top of New York State where the predominant industry is prisons, when she came to a border checkpoint.  A CBP agent decided to have her pull over for a secondary screening, meaning a dog sniff, claiming she was “nervous.”  Contrary to popular belief, there is no Nervous-O-Meter 2700 to register and provide confirmatory proof when someone is so incredibly nervous as to evoke criminality, so we’re left with only the agent’s word.

Cooke got a little tired of waiting around for the brave pooch, and confronted the CBP agents, recording it on her cellphone.

At Reason, Jacob Sullum runs through the plethora of constitutional rights that should apply given that this is a person who is traveling from one place in America to another, as she is fully entitled to do.
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Imagine that you’re engaged in a serious debate of some significance to a strongly held belief, and after you make a particularly worthwhile point, the other guy says, “I’ll get back to you in 15 months on that.”  It would be ridiculous to think that the debate would hang, waiting for his reply.

Okay, that analogy doesn’t cut it for you? How about taking a child from a parent because of allegations that the parent was neglectful, and it took 15 months before it was decided that, oops, the parent was fine and there was no neglect. Here’s your kid back. What does that 15 month period mean to the parent? More importantly, what does that 15 month period mean to a child, the period representing a substantial portion of his life during which he was denied his parent’s love and guidance?

Meet the law. Some decisions never seem to get made, while others are snap decisions despite the lack of evidence or deep thought. Some claim to maintain the status quo ante, while others claim to avoid irreparable harm.  And then the case falls into the black hole of delay. The clock ticks. Days, then weeks, then months, pass. And nothing. Nobody can give the people involved, the people whose lives are touched, that time back.  And the legal system couldn’t care less.

In his dissent from the 9th Circuit’s refusal to sua sponte rehear the denial of an emergency stay of the order directing the removal of the film (and then modified to remove a scene from the film) Innocence of the Muslims, Judge Stephen Reinhardt packs quite a wallop, decrying the prior restraint, the infringement of fundamental First Amendment rights, and the significance of delaying the court’s dealing with this fiasco until it came before the court under the “regular procedure.” Continue reading →

The American Law Institute, once a prestigious body of scholars and thinkers who strived to craft laws that better served societal needs, has been taken over in a bloodless coup by ideologues bent on recreating the law to suit their ideology. It’s not like I didn’t tell you this was coming.

As you are aware, the American Law Institute (ALI) has undertaken a review of the sexual assault provisions of the Model Penal Code. The undersigned members of ALI are concerned about the direction the project has taken. Although the drafts have generated little attention outside of the project itself and although the project has been criticized for late distribution of drafts (see e.g., ALI Reporter, Summer 2014 at 23), we hope that you will consider our concerns both before and during the upcoming Annual Meeting session on Tuesday, May 19 at 9:00 a.m. when Discussion Draft No. 2 dated April 28, 2015 will be considered.

It goes before the annual meeting tomorrow, and it’s everything a feminist college sophomore coed could dream of.  The predominant position on the ALI task force is progressive academics who want to turn the criminal law into a reflection of that which has overtaken colleges across the nation.  A minority group has been left to join in a letter to ALI to protest the capture. Continue reading →

Richard Emery was once a firebrand civil rights lawyer, fighting the man.  That is, until he became the man.  Because of his background litigating against police misconduct, he was given a seat on the New York City Civilian Complaint Review Board, the toothless tiger created as a palliative body designed to give the impression of oversight of police.

With each subsequent scandal, and its related commission, it was tweaked a bit to acknowledge its worthlessness and finally make it work, until the next scandal, next commission. In 2014, Emery became its chair. Within a few months, Emery was fully co-opted into the system.

The CCRB issued a 110-page annual report, its first with Emery as its chair, revealing this shocking epiphany.

In New York, the number of false statements noted by the agency, while small, has grown in an age of easy and widespread video and audio recording by civilians. In 2014, the agency found 26 instances where they believed an officer gave a false statement to investigators, a total equal to the previous four years combined. Continue reading →

There aren’t many young men who are unfamiliar with the atomic wedgie, whether because they gave them or received them, or both.  It’s a staple of childish pranks, of school yard bullies, or fraternity initiations.  And it can kill.

Atomic wedgie is the slang name for the most extreme version of the common underwear-yanking prank bullies pull in high schools across America. There are both how-to and how-to-survive videos online related to atomic wedgies that have been watched thousands of times.

Yeah, you remember it. Don’t lie. Don’t deny it.  Ripping the elastic waistband as it was pulled up your back was the least of your concerns.  You know exactly what I’m talking about. Continue reading →

Seth Stoughton comes at this with some well-deserved street cred, having spent five years as a Tallahassee police officer before going to law school and, after graduating in 2011, turning lawprof at the University of South Carolina.  His recent New York Times Room for Debate essay made a great point, distinguishing the legal justification for police force from its avoidability.

He’s now written a brief listicle for Time, entitled “8 Things We Still Get Wrong About Policing,” which seeks to balance misperceptions by the public and police grounded either in excessive anger and cynicism or defensiveness.  In just a few words, Stoughton makes strong, clear points, not an easy feat.  That said, the well-intended effort to balance the sides may itself create imbalances, false equivalencies, worthy of consideration. He asserts by way of introduction:

There is anger on both sides of the debate, and for good reason. Communities are angry because they feel victimized by police abuses. 

But while anger can motivate us to have important conversations, it becomes counterproductive when we allow it to dominate those discussions. 

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The Commonwealth of Massachusetts had no death penalty, so Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was tried by the feds.  Because the Boston Marathon bombing, together with the subsequent murder of MIT Police Officer Sean Collier, was, without question, a heinous crime causing terrible harm to so many.  Yet, death?

In a sweeping rejection of the defense case, the jury found that death was the appropriate punishment for six of 17 capital counts — all six related to Mr. Tsarnaev’s planting of a pressure-cooker bomb on Boylston Street, which his lawyers never disputed. Mr. Tsarnaev, 21, stood stone-faced in court, his hands folded in front of him, as the verdict was read, his lawyers standing grimly at his side.

Judy Clarke and her team did an extraordinary job trying to prevent a sentence of death. The primary thrust was that Dzhokhar, the younger brother, was under the influence of his older brother, Tamerlan. It was a well-grounded argument, but the jury rejected it.

With its decision, the jury rejected virtually every argument that the defense put forth, including the centerpiece of its case — that Mr. Tsarnaev’s older brother, Tamerlan, had held a malevolent sway over him and led him into committing the crimes.

According to verdict forms that the jurors completed, only three of the 12 jurors believed that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev had acted under his brother’s influence.

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While it appears that there is a general, amorphous right to film police, a decision by Judge Kevin Castel, SDNY, Higginbotham v. City of New York, both focuses and fuzzies the right at the same time.  The cases involved Douglas Higginbotham, a free-lance video-journalist, working for TV New Zealand covering Occupy Wall Street. And New York’s Finest treated him like anyone else.

While he was filming “an arrest that resulted in a significant injury to the person being arrested,” he was ordered to climb down from the telephone booth by the defendant police captain, but could not immediately comply because there were too many people surrounding the booth. Eventually, he began to climb down, and when he did so, the three individual [police officer] defendants pulled his legs out from under him, causing him to drop his camera and fall onto the ground.

He was cuffed (plastic) for three hours, held until issued a summons for disorderly conduct, which was subsequently dismissed.  And he sued.  In a decision denying summary judgment, the court rejected the defendants’ claim of qualified immunity by holding:

The Court concludes, however, that the right to record police activity in public, at least in the case of a journalist who is otherwise unconnected to the events recorded, was in fact “clearly established” at the time of the events alleged in the complaint. When neither the Supreme Court nor the Second Circuit has decided an issue, a court “may nonetheless treat the law as clearly established if decisions from . . . other circuits ‘clearly foreshadow a particular ruling on the issue.’”

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