Since leaving the bench, Paul Cassell has dedicated his energies toward the plight of crime victims, attempting to fundamentally alter the calculus of the criminal legal process so that the constitutional rights afforded the accused are tempered by the “third table in the well” for the victims. The state creates crimes to deter people from engaging in conduct the state determines to be wrong or seeks to prohibit. Criminal prosecution is not about giving the victims “justice,” no matter how hard it tugs at your heartstrings.

While the legitimacy of criminal law is based upon the fundamental notion that it is a matter between the defendant and the state, Cassell has long sought to reinvent criminal law by making it a conflict between the accused, the state and the victim. Continue reading →

I’ve always been somewhat ambivalent about marijuana legalization. It’s not that I don’t abhor the impact of criminalization, but that there are perils to having altered states of consciousness. That goes for alcohol as well. Get high if you want, but do it responsibly. The problem is that getting high and being responsible do not easily go hand in hand.

The New York Times has an editorial addressing the experience of recreational pot legalization that begins by recognizing that predictions that it wouldn’t result in widespread use didn’t bear out.

It is now clear that many of these predictions were wrong. Legalization has led to much more use. Surveys suggest that about 18 million people in the United States have used marijuana almost daily (or about five times a week) in recent years. That was up from around 6 million in 2012 and less than 1 million in 1992. More Americans now use marijuana daily than alcohol.

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Career prosecutors are fleeing the offices  of the United States Attorneys and Department of Justice. The MAGA faithful call them “Biden prosecutors,” but they were there long before Biden, including during Trump’s first term, when Bill Barr, the fellow who told Trump he lost the election, was the Attorney General. Bondi is trying to fill the gaps with JAG lawyers, while her former chief of staff, Chad Mizelle, put out a solicitation on twitter.

If you are a lawyer, are interested in being an AUSA, and support President Trump and anti-crime agenda, DM me.

We need good prosecutors. And DOJ is hiring across the country. Now is your chance to join the mission and do good for our country.

— Chad Mizelle (@chad_mizelle) January 31, 2026

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Granted, it’s Steve Bannon, who has inexplicably managed to remain popular with the MAGA base even after stealing their money donated to build the border wall, conclusively proving they, too, are stable geniuses. But Bannon’s ideas still get play among top White House advisors like Laura Loomer, so it’s worth taking seriously.

The former White House strategist called for the Trump administration to send Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers to polling sites to prevent noncitizens from voting, citing a debunked conspiracy theory about widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election.

“We’re going to have ICE surround the polls come November. We’re not going to sit here and allow you to steal the country again,” Bannon said Tuesday on his podcast. “And you can whine and cry and throw your toys out of the pram all you want, but we will never again allow an election to be stolen.”

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The year was 1971. Paul Cohen wore a jacket in a California courthouse that bore the words “Fuck the draft.” Writing for the majority, Justice John Marshall Harlan wrote that the “four letter expletive,” while provocative, was protected speech.

One man’s vulgarity is another’s lyric.

Apparently, this message failed to make its way to Punta Gorda, Florida, where Police Officer David Joseph Lipker arrested Andrew Sheets, appearing pro se, for standing on the sidewalk with two flags, one stating “Fuck Trump” and the other stating “Fuck Biden.” Lipker moved for dismissal based on qualified immunity, that the officer relied on the local ordinance against disturbing the peace. Middle District of Florida Judge Kyle Dudeck denied the motion. Continue reading →

The action was brought by five Haitian immigrants, here legally under the Temporary Protected Status, unceremoniously, and likely unlawfully, ended so that they miraculously morphed from legal immigrants to illegal aliens, thus turning them from friends and neighbors to targets for ICE thugs to target, beat, and imprison. DC District Court Judge Ana Reyes said no.

On December 2, 1783, then-Commander-in-Chief George Washington penned: “America is open to receive not only the Opulent & respected Stranger, but the oppressed & persecuted of all Nations & Religions.” More than two centuries later, Congress reaffirmed President Washington’s vision by establishing the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) program. See 8 U.S.C. § 1254a (TPS statute). It provides humanitarian relief to foreign nationals in the United States who come from disaster-stricken countries. It also brings in substantial revenue, with TPS holders generating $5.2 billion in taxes annually.

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From the travel blog, View from the Wing, Gary Leff raises chilling allegations about the consequences of ICE checking your citizenship.

The Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement is expanding use of identification and tracking – not just immigration targets but also on U.S. citizens who are documenting, protesting, and observing enforcement operations. And participating in these events is getting Global Entry yanked.

The government is using a smartphone app called “Mobile Fortify” that lets agents scan a face and even capture ‘contactless’ fingerprints and run them through biometric matching systems to return names and biographical data. Reportedly the agency has used Mobile Fortify over 100,000 times. They use BI2 Technologies for smartphone iris scanning against a large law enforcement iris database. The agency defends this all as “lawful.” Continue reading →

I’ve been asked many times lately what can be done about the excesses of ICE and CBP violating the constitutional rights of American citizens, whether by killing them or lesser methods. Given the current status of Bivens actions, the answer is “not a damn thing” beyond a state criminal prosecution. As Adam Liptak relates, there was a proposal back in 1987 that could have done the trick.

The key to holding Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents accountable for constitutional violations may lie in a 1987 law review article by a young law professor named Akhil Reed Amar.

“I think it was a good idea then,” he said last week, “and it’s only taken more than half a lifetime for people to actually read the thing.”

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The opinion is a mere three pages, almost nothing in the scheme of judicial decisions these days, which can stray into the hundreds of pages with the formulaic content and a bit of cut and paste. But Western District of Texas Judge Fred Biery didn’t want to bury the lede in his ruling for five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and his father.

In a blistering opinion ordering Liam’s release, Judge Fred Biery of the Federal District Court for the Western District of Texas condemned “the perfidious lust for unbridled power” and “the imposition of cruelty.” The boy’s father, Adrian Conejo Arias, was also arrested and the pair were taken to an immigration detention center outside San Antonio. A lawyer for the family previously said in court filings that Mr. Conejo Arias, who is from Ecuador, had legally entered the country under American guidelines for asylum. The Department of Homeland Security had charged that Mr. Conejo Arias had entered the country illegally in December 2024.

To call the opinion “blistering” is an understatement. I called it a “scorcher.” Continue reading →

It was outrageous that an employee of an Internal Revenue Service subcontractor revealed Donald Trump’s tax return to the New York Times. And it was entirely proper that the employee, Charles Littlejohn, was prosecuted, convicted and sentenced to five years imprisonment for his conduct. But it didn’t end there.

Not until Thursday, though, had a sitting president filed such a suit. President Trump’s complaint, filed in federal court in Miami against the I.R.S. and the Treasury Department, created what legal experts said was the unparalleled situation of federal agencies facing a lawsuit from the head of the executive branch. Mr. Trump has demanded at least $10 billion in damages.

This is a conundrum. Suing the IRS for the breach of confidentiality, something DOGE might give some thought about, is a recourse available to the victim of the IRS breach. And this time, at least, Trump was indeed the victim. Continue reading →