Most people know the 13th Amendment to the Constitution ended slavery. At least most slavery, as there was a carve out for prisoners.

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Now you know. But what about detention facilities holding immigrants? It’s one thing to put prisoners to work, whether cooking meals or breaking big rocks into smaller ones, but contrary to popular ignorant belief, being an undocumented immigrant isn’t a crime, per se, and being held pending deportation isn’t having been duly convicted.

And they still need to eat. Continue reading →

In the olden days of Second Wave Feminism, the goal was gender equality. A study published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science shows that the judiciary didn’t get the memo.

Judges may be just as biased or even more biased than the general public in deciding court cases where traditional gender roles are challenged, according to a new study published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science.

This study examined the role of gender bias relating to judges and legal decisions, and the sex discrimination worked both ways, sometimes against women and sometimes against men.

The study sought responses to two hypotheticals (which they called “mock” cases, because it seemed like a cooler name), one involving a discrimination case and another involving a child custody case.  Continue reading →

The Sixth Circuit, like every court, every judge, likes dogs. And so begins its decision in United States v. Perkins.

Many good Fourth Amendment stories begin with dogs. See, e.g., Florida v. Harris, 568 U.S. 237 (2013) (featuring Aldo the dog). And so it is here. This story began when a dog’s sniff alerted law enforcement to a suspicious-smelling package. The dog’s sniff was accurate. The package contained methamphetamine. The intended recipient was “B. PERKINS,” with the address “5831 Rowe Gap RD Belvidere, TN 37306.”

But they went from Aldo the dog to Warren and Brewer, two mutts. Continue reading →

His case gave rise to Joe Goldstein doing the new round of “testlying is still a problem” articles in the New York Times.

The Times examined Mr. Desormeau’s career in an article in October. More recently The Times investigated the phenomenon of “testilying” within the New York Police Department in a series of articles.

Testilying was a hot topic a generation ago as well, and after everybody got done with their “tsking” over it, life went back to normal in the courtroom, with every cop embellishing his testimony, filling in the details, glossing over the gaps, to make sure the bad dude got convicted. As the late Murray Kempton liked to say, “there they go again, framing the guilty.”

But what made 34-year-old former Detective Kevin Desormeau different is that there was no video in the good old days, so it was just the defendant’s word against the cops. Guess who won that pissing match? Continue reading →

The police description of why three plainclothes and two uniform cops* took him out is both “perfect” and makes no sense.

“The suspect then took a two-handed shooting stance and pointed an object at the approaching officers,” the chief said, holding up a surveillance photo of a blurry figure standing next to a bodega ice machine with his arms outstretched.

Why would a person holding a piece of pipe with a knob on the end, described by some as a shower head, do such a thing unless he was trying to commit suicide by cop? You can’t shoot someone with a pipe and a knob. It’s crazy.

But then, 34-year-old Saheed Vassell was bipolar, refused his meds and was well-known in the neighborhood for being disturbed. Harmless, but disturbed. Continue reading →

I’ve never found John Oliver to be funny or particularly enlightening, and his recent low-rent attack on Dustin Hoffman reeked of self-righteousness and ignorance about the criminal justice system. But there is a clip from his show about Immigration Courts that merits discussion.

Oliver, and the people (some of whom are former Immigration Judges) in his clip, make the following points about Immigration Court, in the following order:

• Immigration Courts in essence handle “death penalty cases” in a traffic court setting;
• There is a gargantuan backlog of cases, with some courts taking up to 5 years to process cases. This is sometimes detrimental to defendants respondents

Continue reading →

There’s some room for variation on a police officer’s belt. Their service weapon. Maybe OS spray or a Taser. Cuffs, ammo, a flashlight. What else should they carry? Cato’s Clark Neily says liability insurance.

The total payout for injuries caused by NYPD officers in 2017 was an unprecedented $308.2 million (up from a “mere” $92.4 million in 2007, and $152 million in 2012). That money didn’t come out of the pockets of the officers responsible for the misconduct; the bills were covered by you, the taxpayer.

That’s because police departments nearly always pick up the tab for damages caused by the officers they employ.

Clark looks to the intersection of law and economics for a solution. Continue reading →

A summary reversal ordinarily would capture no interest, but for the dissent by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, with whom the Notorious RBG joined, calling out the obvious to the oblivious.

Its decision is not just wrong on the law; it also sends an alarming signal to law enforcement officers and the public. It tells officers that they can shoot first and think later, and it tells the public that palpably unreasonable conduct will go unpunished.

And that’s the message sent by the majority in its per curiam opinion in Kisela v. Hughes. From a distance, this may look terribly misguided, but close up one realizes that it’s the message the Court meant to send to police, and has been consistently sending to cops since they decided Graham v. Connor, the Reasonably Scared Cop Rule. Continue reading →

For those unaware, the law has many masters, one of which is finality. It’s not that the issues raised, and their consequences, aren’t extremely serious, but that there must ultimately be conclusions, ends to the debate, the fight, the doubt. One such line happens when a defendant pleads guilty to a crime.

The process varies. In some courts, the defendant is put under oath to admit his guilt. In some, he engages in an allocution, where he is asked to state, in his own words, what he did. The judge may ask a litany of questions to be sure the defendant is pleading of his own free will, not due to coercion or promises about which the court is unaware.

But once done, once the guilty plea has been entered, guilt admitted, that aspect of the case is over. As far as the law is concerned, there is no turning back, no denying that the defendant committed the crime, once he’s pleaded guilty. Continue reading →

When the argument was grounded in mass produced statues of confederate generals that were erected just as the civil rights movement was gaining momentum as a reminder to blacks in the south to stay in their place, there was no reason not to tear them down. They were offensive and meant to be. They weren’t artifacts of history, but tin soldiers.

Even those whose heritage was at issue conceded that the statues were crap and had to go.

The concern that remained, however, wasn’t about the statues per se, but about whether this would be a slippery slope. “Presentism,” the viewing of history through the prism of current values, was already taking its toll. Christopher Columbus was a rapist colonizer. Washington and Jefferson were slaveowners. And our first Chief Justice, John Marshall, was, ahem, problematic. Continue reading →