The Criminal Lawyer

The January 30 issue of the New Yorker has an intriguing article by Adam Gopnik, “The Caging of America: Why do we lock up so many people?” Perhaps we’ve grown a bit cynical, but we expected yet another inane media whine about increasing rates of imprisonment “despite” fewer crimes being committed. We were surprised to find a thoughtful — at times insightful — look not only at the reality of American incarceration, but also at what causes crime to go up and down. It’s rare enough for a news or magazine writer to do even that much. To his credit, Gopnik goes one further, making a creditable attempt at objectivity — dismissing, debunking and blaming both the right and the left — though his apparent left-ish leanings still come through from time to time.

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Gopnik’s main points are these:

Incarceration is happening on an unprecedented scale in our history. It’s been growing ever faster since the 1970s. Its ubiquity and brutality have become accepted parts of the culture. Northern and Southern thinkers have come up with different explanations and solutions. Northern thinkers like William J. Stuntz see prison as a place for rehabilitation, and the injustices as the result of our system’s reliance on procedural correctness rather than individual justice, from the Bill of Rights through the present day — a problem to be solved by letting common sense and compassion be the focus on a case-by-case basis. Southern thinkers like Michelle Alexander see prison instead as a means of retribution, and the injustices of the system are part of its design to trap and control young black men.

As incarceration rates more than tripled between 1980 and 2010, the crime rate itself went down. “The more bad guys there are in prison, it appears, the less crime there has been in the streets.” The huge growth in imprisonment, and the policies that led to it (such as harsher drug laws, zero-tolerance policies, restricted sentencing discretion, etc.) were a reaction to the big-city crime wave of the 1960s ad 1970s — a crime wave that owed its existence to liberal policies that had crossed the line from mercy to abdication. Meanwhile, research began to reveal that rehabilitation doesn’t work, and bad guys weren’t getting better, and so all you could do was lock them up to keep them off the streets.

Starting in the 1990s, crime rates began to drop — by 40% nationwide, and 80% in New York City. Demographic shifts don’t account for it. Neither do broken-window policing, keeping the really bad guys behind bars, welfare reform, or other right-wing explanations. The left’s insistence that crime comes from poverty, discrimination and social injustice didn’t work, either, as none of those things changed enough to account for the drop in crime. The economy didn’t have an effect.

What did have an effect in New York City, however, was Read the rest of this entry »

Andrei Chikatilo was serial killer who murdered at least 56 young women and children starting in 1978 until his capture in 1990. The details are as bad as one might expect, and apparently the murders and mutilations were how he achieved sexual release. His killings seemed unpredictable to investigators at the time, and even in retrospect there appears to be no clear pattern.

Now, however, UCLA mathematicians Mikhail Simkin and Vwani Roychowdhury have published a paper where they see not only a pattern, but one that is meaningful to those who might want to stop other serial killers. In their paper, “Stochastic Modeling of a Serial Killer,” published a couple of days ago, Simkin and Roychowdhury discovered that the killings fit a pattern known as a “power law distribution.” One of many kinds of statistical distribution (the bell curve being another), power law distributions are often found for out-of-the-ordinary events like earthquakes, great wealth, website popularity and the like.

First, they looked at a timeline of his killings. They saw apparently random periods of inactivity. Each time Chikatilo started killing again, however, the next murder would come soon after. And the one after that even sooner. And so on and so on until the next period of no killing.

The study doesn’t take account of the reasons for two of the longer pauses — Chikatilo’s first arrest and detention on suspicion of being the killer, and the period where the media started reporting on the investigation — but the reasons aren’t important. What’s important is being able to make some kind of sense out of the seemingly random events.

What they noticed was that, when these ever-increasing murders were plotted on a logarithmic scale, they came out in almost a straight line — indicating the possibility that a power law might be at work here. What’s more than that, they noticed that the curve’s exponent of 1.4 was pretty darn close to the 1.5 found for the power curve of epileptic seizures. What if (they wondered) the killings fit a neurological pattern? What if, like epileptic seizures, psychotic events like these killings came about when an unusually large number of neurons in the brain started firing together?

So they plugged in some givens of what is known about how neurons work, modeled on how epilepsy works. They made the model a little more realistic — seizures come unbidden when the conditions are met, but killers probably need some time to plan once their brain is ready for the next attack. Then they ran a simulation.

The simulated probabilities for the length of time between murders tracked the real-life data almost perfectly.

In other words, if you know when the last murder took place, you can calculate the probability that another killing will happen today. And the more time has passed since the last one, the less likely another will happen.

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Fascinating stuff, but so what? The so what is that Read the rest of this entry »

In this Information Age, it is hard to grasp sometimes that everybody does not know everything. And yet it is so. It is common knowledge, for example, that dinosaur fossils are the bones of creatures that lived scores of millions of years ago, that terrorist hijackers flew planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and that eyewitness identification testimony is statistically as reliable as a ’78 Chevy. And yet there are tons of people who sincerely believe that fossils are just a few thousand years old, that the U.S. government conducted 9-11, and that an eyewitness I.D. is the be-all-and-end-all of Truth.

Actually, it’s not fair to lump the I.D. believers in with 9-11 conspiracy theorists, Genesis literalists, truthers and the like. The others are sort of fringe-y. But if you put 12 ordinary citizens in a jury box, of good intelligence and sound common sense, and the victim points dead at the defendant and says “there is no doubt in my mind, THAT is the man who raped me…” you can almost hear all twelve minds slamming shut. They’ve heard all they need to hear. So far as they’re concerned, this case is over.

This despite the fact that study after study after study reinforces the fact that eyewitness testimony sucks.

And innocent people go to jail — or worse — because of it.

So you can imagine how keen the legal world was to get the Supreme Court’s decision in Perry v. New Hampshire, which came down yesterday. Perry, identified by an eyewitness as someone she’d seen breaking into cars, argued that Due Process required a judicial hearing on the reliability of that testimony before it could be admitted at trial.

Which was the exact wrong thing to argue.

Due Process requires that the government makes sure that it does not do things that make its identification procedures unreliable. It does not require that a judge do the jury’s job. Particularly when that job — weighing the reliability of a given bit of testimony — is incredibly fact-specific.

And especially given all the evidence of all the various factors that go into making eyewitness testimony unreliable — racial differences, time lapse, focus of attention, lighting, familiarity, stress, presence of a weapon, etc. — what judge in his right mind is going to want to be the one deciding whether this particular eyewitness’s memory is good enough?

So it’s hardly any surprise that the Supreme Court balked at Perry’s Due Process argument. By a vote of 8-1 (former prosecutor Sotomayor as the lone dissenter, none better to know the power of the EW ID) the Supremes held that, unless law enforcement is alleged to have gotten the I.D. under unnecessarily suggestive circumstances, there’s no Due Process issue and certainly no reason for a pre-trial hearing on reliability.

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No, what Perry could have argued for is either Read the rest of this entry »

We haven’t gone anywhere.

Well, actually we did. We spent a couple of weeks visiting family for Christmas and New Year’s. And then took a week getting back on top of work. In the meantime, a dozen great post topics have come to mind only to be forgotten (or, if we happened to have a pencil handy, rapidly jotted down for later rejection).

Still, we’ve managed to put out some more installments in our illustrated guide to criminal law. Part 8 on actus reus just went up, and you can click the link at the right to see the whole series. Next up is attempt, then we’ll cover strict liability, liability for the acts of others, defenses, where the law comes from, examples of crimes, the rule of law, terrorism… and then we’ll get to the procedural, constitutional and policy stuff. Enjoy!

But we’re not neglecting the blog. We’ll be back shortly.

Any SEO guru worth his fee will tell you that, once your blog gets some mention or award or whatnot, you need to pump out a lot of content right away. Otherwise, people who come to visit out of curiosity will stop coming back when they don’t see updates. And I have no reason to doubt that they’re right.

Nevertheless, we don’t write this for the hits. So after the ABA Journal very kindly put us on their blawg list a couple of weeks ago, we didn’t start churning out more posts — on the contrary, we’ve only had one substantive post since then. There has been plenty to write about, but we just haven’t gotten to it.

The reason, of course, is that we started doing our illustrated guide to criminal law about the same time, and the response has been so unexpected and overwhelming that we’ve felt obligated to get at least the introductory sections finished before the holidays. Starting off with first principles, we’ve covered what crime and punishment are, and the various purposes of punishment, and now we’re working on a sixth installment on mens rea and culpability. With any luck, we’ll have that out this week.

And then we’re taking a break with the family, which usually means even less time to write than usual, so there might not be another update here until after New Year’s.

So if we don’t get a chance to rap at ya before then, here’s wishing you a merry Christmas, happy Hannukah, cool Kwanzaa, super Solstice, and a very happy New Year!

Best wishes,

Nathan

Harry Morgan died this week. When we were in grade school, we knew him as Col. Potter on M*A*S*H and as the Sheriff in “The Apple Dumpling Gang,” two characters that seemed to our young eyes to be the most “real” on either show. But of course he did a lot more than that. Plenty of excellent eulogies have been written elsewhere, but we thought we’d share a clip from his old “Dragnet” days that seems as appropriate now as it did then.

So now we have a Tumblr.

It was bound to happen, really. There are plenty of questions, issues and misconceptions about criminal law; we like explaining things; we like drawing things (poorly); people like learning stuff with pictures… So doing a webcomic sort of guide to criminal law just seemed natural.

And making a Tumblr out of it makes more sense than posting them here on the blog. The voices are just too different to put them both in the same place. And Tumblr’s more of a visual medium.

We’re calling it “The Criminal Lawyer’s Guide to Criminal Law (with pictures!)” We are very creative with titles, as you probably are aware.

We’ve got several posts already planned out, and the first one is up here. They’re going to be very rudimentary at first, but soon we expect to have worked through to some tougher concepts.

It’s silly, sure… but it’s fun. We’ll get a kick out of it, even if nobody else does.

The Criminal Lawyer made the ABA Journal Blawg 100 today, much to our surprise. We are quietly proud.

Be sure to check out the list, there are a lot of excellent blogs there that might be new to you. And weren’t you just saying to yourself how you need some fresh stuff in your RSS reader?

During the month of December, the ABA Journal is having people vote for their favorites in each category. If you’re so inclined, you can give us an upvote in the “Criminal Justice” category here.

More importantly, we’d like to thank those who nominated us (whoever you are), and especially thank all of our sexy sexy readers. You guys are awesome, and not just because you have excellent taste in blogs.

Thanks!

There seems to be a growing recognition that there’s a lot more law to deal with these days than there used to be. But when you say “more law,” what does your audience think you’re talking about? Are you addressing policy makers and the sociologists who influence their thought? If so, consider this:

Law is a quantitative variable. It increases and decreases, and one setting has more than another. It is possible to measure the quantity of law in many ways. A complaint to a legal official, for example, is more law than no complaint, whether it is a call to the police, a visit to a regulatory agency, or a lawsuit. Each is an increase in the quantity of law. So is the recognition of a complaint, whether this is simply an official record, an investigation, or a preliminary hearing of some kind. In criminal matters, an arrest is more law than no arrest, and so is a search or an interrogation. An indictment is more law than none, as is a prosecution, and a serious charge is more than a minor charge. Any initiation, invocation, or application of law increases its quantity, even when someone brings law against himself, as in a voluntary surrender, confession, or plea of guilty. Detention before trial is more law than release, a bail bond more than none, and a higher bail bond more than one that is lower. A trial or other hearing is itself an increase of law, and some outcomes are more law than others: A decision in behalf of the plaintiff is more law than a decision in behalf of the defendant, and conviction is more than acquittal. The more compensation awarded, the more law. And the same applies to the severity of punishment as defined in each setting: the greater a fine, the longer the prison term, the more pain, mutilation, humiliation, or deprivation inflicted, the more law….

And so on and so on, for another couple hundred pages, goes Donald Black’s “The Behavior of Law.” This is no minor piece of academic drivel — it is a seminal and highly influential book in the field of Sociology, hailed on its publication in 1976, required reading in our graduate course on Law and Society at U.Va. eleven years later, and with a new edition out just last year. Professor Black’s explanation of the law is now the basis of the school of Pure Sociology, which scholars use to explain pretty much any intense human interaction — ranging from the courtroom to artists and scientists, to the acts of terrorists and genocides.

It is no minor piece of drivel. It’s serious drivel. It screws up the way people think about law, making a very Babel of what should be basic, shared understanding. To the extent that sociologists affect public policy, confusion like this can only make things worse. And sociology is indeed important to law. It may or may not be a true -ology constrained by the scientific method, but pretty much all modern ideas of social improvement are deeply affected by it. Legislators may be motivated by re-election concerns, but sociological conclusions strongly inform what they see as the stance to take. Regulators are, if anything, much more influenced by sociological studies of what is or is not good for the public welfare. Sentencing commissions, juvenile justice, and diversion programs are almost entirely based on sociology.

It’s possible that we’re just nursing a grudge for having to endure a semester of it a gazillion years ago, but we doubt it. Pure Sociology isn’t itself a bad thing. It tries to explain why one criminal gets punished more severely than another for essentially the same act; why two groups of people are still fighting long after the initial conflict ended — and how third parties are likely to maneuver with respect to that conflict; why conflicts begin in the first place; why one becomes a predator while another becomes a peacemaker. Perfectly appropriate areas of human study. Furthermore, the factors that Pure Sociology takes into account are as commonsensical as they come: the strength or weakness of social ties, differences in status, the social structures within which the various actors exist, and the like. The general conclusions of Pure Sociology aren’t all that objectionable, either — that the fewer social ties between two people, the more likely government is to get involved, and the more severe its actions; that people tend to see people of high status as having gotten there through the exercise of free will, while people tend to see the most disadvantaged of us as victims of circumstances beyond their control; that the worst conflicts seem to happen between parties that, to an outside observer, appear to have more in common than otherwise.

But the core definitions are simply wrong. You do not get “more law” when someone is arrested as opposed to merely searched. You get more governmental intrusion. That is not the same thing as law. You do not get “more law” when the party bringing a case wins than when the defendant wins. You get more government authority to act against the defendant. That is not the same thing as law. In all the scenarios listed by Prof. Black, the amount of law is not changing. The things which the law permits to happen vary, not the amount of law itself. These and similar definitions are central to the school of Pure Sociology, from which all else is derived, and they are wrong.

This is not a minor quibble, harrumphing over a perfectly typical misappropriation of a word within the academic community. It is a failure to define some fundamental concepts, an understanding of which would be absolutely required before any of the higher explanations of human conflict can be attempted.

First of all, Law. Generally speaking, law is the Read the rest of this entry »

We probably shouldn’t have titled our last post “Free Time.” Apparently that was too hubristic for the gods, who have denied us any more for the writing of a post this week. At least one that’s more wheat than chaff. (The blogosphere has more than enough chaff as it is.) But we did have sufficient time to spot some other folks’ posts that are insightful, thoughtful and remarkably chaff-free. In case you missed them, here are a couple from the past day or so really worth the read:

First, Radley Balko’s piece “Driven by Drug War Incentives, Cops Target Pot Smokers, Brush Off Victims of Violent Crime.” In it, he describes even more of the perverse incentives our well-meaning politicos have given the police, incentives not only to devote disproportionate resources to drug enforcement, but also to make bad arrests, plant evidence, seize whatever they can get their hands on as forfeiture, and otherwise do the exact opposite of what we pay them to do.

Next, Scott Greenfield’s “Those Who Can’t, Teach Law.” One of the more thoughtful responses we’ve seen to the less-than-awesome NYT piece on law school failing to teach the practice of law.

We’ve got some pretty strong views on both of those topics, and maybe if we get a chance we’ll impose them on you share them with you later. But in the meantime, or if we never get around to it, you could do a lot worse than to read these.

We love reading the advances of real scientists doing real research. It puts us in our place when we’re feeling all smart — here are people actually advancing knowledge and doing stuff for real! — and at the same time we get to learn some really cool stuff.

For example: It was January of 2000, and we were sitting in a Hell’s Kitchen Dunkin’ Donuts, just looking out the window, thinking about this and that, when suddenly we had an epiphany: What if the wave function was a real thing, and we just saw the sliver of it that coincided with our own dimension?

You have to understand, this was back before we got married and had kids, and so we occasionally had what was called “free time.” (We’re not sure what it’s called these days, it’s been so long since we had any.) How it worked was, we had “free time,” which we spent pursuing various hobbies like motorcycling, playing in bar bands, and the like. We had gone to the Dunkin’ Donuts after a lackluster rehearsal with an acting company we were with at the time (another hobby), and our mind must have turned to quantum physics — which had been a mild hobby of ours ever since John Crowley showed us that Omni article on string theory back in our freshman year of high school. The more we learned about it, and all the spooky nonsensical impossible stuff that apparently was really being observed, the more we dove into it. By 2000, we’d written off string theory as hopeless, and were waiting for some brilliant scientist to come up with something like Garrett Lisi did some years later. We weren’t contributing anything, of course; just trying to understand the current state of knowledge.

So anyway, what our epiphany was, was that it seemed you could explain a lot of that spooky nonsensical impossible stuff if you thought of things like photons and electron as not being particles or waves or whatever, and instead thought of them as wavelike things rippling or oscillating in a higher dimension, and what we saw was nothing more than the points where they intersected our 4-dimensional reality. You need more dimensions for the math, but you only need 5 to explain it.

Take the standard 2-slit experiment. You shine a beam of photons at a screen with two slits on it, and on the far wall you’re going to get an interference pattern as the two sets of waves from each slit interact with each other (as in the hastily-photoshopped image at the top). If you shoot individual photons through a single slit, you get just a single patch of light on the far wall. If you shoot individual photons at the two-slit screen, the same interference pattern builds up as if each photon had interfered with itself, and found a spot on the far wall in that interference pattern. It makes no sense if the photon only exists in our 4-dimensional world, and yet it happens.

But if you think of the photon as something one dimension higher, it’s easy to contemplate.

(Note: what follows is not science, but only what occurred to us as we sipped our hot chocolate that day.)

Think of a 3-dimensional sphere. If you only experienced Read the rest of this entry »

The Facebook post above was posted to Reddit earlier today.  We don’t know if this is an accurate copy or not, the internet being what it is, but it’s close enough to what we’ve heard actual officers say that it is useful to illustrate a couple of points.

First, the whole “Collars for Dollars” mentality we’ve mentioned before. In short, the NYPD is a unionized labor force, whose workers get paid a base salary plus overtime. The base salary is barely sufficient to meet the expense of living in NYC (so many cops choose to live pretty far away from the city, cutting any ties to the communities they police, with attendant consequences). The way for an officer to make some real money is by working overtime.  That lovely, lovely overtime is what pays for their mortgages, their kids’ schools and the occasional night on the town. The way to make overtime is either (1) by making arrests or (2) working a “detail.”

Arrests generate overtime because, at the end of one’s shift, one gets to stay at the precinct for many more hours filling out the reams of attendant paperwork, securing evidence, and helping a prosecutor draft the various complaints. If any of the collars were for felonies, ideally they have been timed so that the resulting grand jury presentation will be held on the cop’s regular day off — RDO for short — which gives the cop 8 hours of overtime even if he only showed up at the DA’s office for half an hour.

Details are out-of-the-ordinary assignments where an event requires extra police to provide security, police not otherwise assigned to a normal duty — police working overtime or on their RDO. Details can range from providing a police escort for a visiting dignitary, to lining the streets for a parade, to dealing with an unruly mob. Details are a great source of overtime.

You see this in the Facebook discussion, which appears to include more than just one NYPD officer. The original poster is on his RDO, and he’s hoping the OWS protesters start acting up so he can get called in to do a double tour and get 15 hours of overtime pay (for getting the chance to hit some protesters). Another jokes that he hopes they don’t start rioting until his shift starts that night, presumably so he can maximize his overtime.

There’s nothing wrong with police officers joking about stuff that, to the rest of us, might sound obscenely offensive. It is often a tough job, often horrific, and black humor is how people of all walks of life deal with such things. The post about pretending to be a protester, shoving people from the inside, shouting invective, and leaving a BB- or paintball- gun behind? That one’s probably a joke (although — and probably because — such things have been known to happen).

But there are other wishes expressed here which, though certainly cathartic, are probably more sincere. The desire to “rock,” or get physically violent with a protester, comes out strong here. Why? Because the protesters are the enemy.

That’s our second point: To the police, it’s “Us against Them,” and Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve just adopted a nifty little tool we’ve noticed on a few other blogs we follow — When you’re leaving a comment, if you provide the web address of your own blog, then it’ll provide a link to your latest blog post at the end of your comment. A harmless way to share the love, we think. (And you can disable it by unchecking the CommentLuv box before commenting.)

That is all.

We have more and more college graduates these days, but is it doing any good?

On our first day of college, at UVA back in the late summer of ’87, we didn’t feel the usual nervous excitement one gets from moving away from home, meeting new roommates, trudging through the various long lines to register for classes and get ID cards etc., and hearing the old “look to your left, look to your right” speech. We didn’t feel that way partly because we’d already been there and done that and more at military school, but mostly because we were feeling another emotion entirely that completely overpowered all the rest. It’s an emotion we can’t quite name, though there’s probably a great name for it in German — a great hopeful sensation of “at last, it’s about time!”

We were stoked to finally start getting an education. After years and years of schooling, we were ready to get learning. College for us wasn’t a prerequisite for getting a job or anything like that — it was a chance to gain as much knowledge about as many different subjects as we could cram into four (ultimately five) years. A chance, moreover, to learn how to use that knowledge and apply it and, maybe, start contributing to it. A truly liberal education that would prepare us for pretty much any future by preparing us to think critically and analytically and have the basic underlying data to do it well.

Back in 1987, most of our friends thought we were out of our mind. Most of them were there to get ready for a career, whether it be in engineering, business, architecture, teaching, or the arts. Or a career yet to be determined once they found the right major. Going to college was mainly about getting a good job after graduation.

Now in 2011, that seems even more the case than ever. College is seen as a prerequisite for a good job, period. Many kids are told this from kindergarten through high school, but it’s such an implicit societal assumption these days, that even if it wasn’t drilled into them they’ve picked it up by osmosis.

The problem is, college these days is not something you can rely on to prepare you for a job, unless you’re pursuing a technical degree in the soft or applied sciences.

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Here’s how education is supposed to Read the rest of this entry »