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 (more…)

Or maybe not…

For some reason, common wisdom would have it that crime should go up when the economy is going down. Violent crime in particular. Apparently, the thinking is that less prosperity leads to increased frustration and desperation, leading to more beatings killings muggings and rapes. As if the people who otherwise would commit such crimes are less likely to do so when banks are lending and people are investing in new and bigger business ventures.

Of course, common wisdom is frequently wrong. Which is good, because as we’ve pointed out before, the economy is going to continue to suck. Europe is facing massive uncertainty in the face of its Mediterranean peoples voting themselves the treasury. Here in the U.S., the Obama administration, elected on a platform of “hope,” is doing everything in its power to kill off any hope that investment in growth would be worth the risk. Instead of ensuring the stability and predictability necessary for economic growth, the governments of Europe and the U.S. are only spreading uncertainty and worry. It is now pretty much a certainty that a double-dip recession is upon us.

But the economy just isn’t that strong an influence on crime. During the prosperous 1950s and 1980s, violent crime went through the roof. During the Great Depression and the recent Crappy Recession, violent crime plummeted. The influence of economic hardship on crime is just not that strong. It is certainly not cause-and-effect — any effect is likely limited to exacerbating the effect of those things that actually do drive up crime. And right now, those things aren’t driving crime up.

So what are those things? What factors do drive violent crime? And are they going to come back any (more…)

Wanda: What would an intellectual do?  What would… Plato do?

Otto: Apol-

Wanda: Pardon me?

Otto: Apollgzz.

Wanda: What?

Otto: Apologize!

Well, no.  He probably wouldn’t.  Not Plato.

And certainly not in the case of Troy Davis, whose final clemency request was denied this morning, and who now faces execution tomorrow evening for the killing of a police officer in 1989.  He was convicted at trial 20 years ago, but since then the reliability of that verdict has been called into serious question.  Seven of the nine major witnesses recanted their testimony, many claiming that the police pressured them to give false eyewitness accounts.  No forensic evidence ever tied Davis to the crime, the murder weapon was never found.  In the intervening years, ten new people have come forward to point the finger at another individual known to have been present at the scene.

So it’s possible that Troy Davis might not have shot the officer.  It’s possible that he might have.  Twenty years of second-guessing and changing stories make it uncertain.  But what is certain is that he was convicted, and that the conviction stands.

Should we be troubled by this?

We started pondering this after our kids’ bedtime story the other night.  We were reading to the lads from the Dialogues of Plato [what, you got a problem with that? Shut up, these are not your children.], specifically the Crito.  That’s the one where Socrates has been condemned to death, and his friend Crito shows up to talk him into escaping.  Boiled down to its essence, the Crito runs something like this: (more…)

Looks like there’s going to be more work for defense lawyers, and that’s a real shame.

Hey, we like working as much as the next guy, but we’d rather have a lower crime rate.  After Obama’s little press conference yesterday, though, we can’t help but think that the crime rate is going to go up.  Because the economy is going to continue to suck.

Of course there’s a whole lot more to crime rates than just the economy.  The gang crimes of the crack epidemic flourished during boom years, after all, driven not by poverty but by the turf battles and growing pains of an exciting new industry, like a dot-com bubble with guns instead of IPOs.  While wages were rising in the 50s, the crime rate was rising twice as fast.  And a tanking economy does not always coincide with rising crime rates — they dropped about a third during the Great Depression.

Demographics are a much larger factor, especially in violent crimes, which surge and recede with the unmarried young male population.  That population is responsible for about half of all crimes that get committed.  Cultural attitudes also play a big role — different communities of our wonderfully heterogeneous country can have markedly different views of what is right and wrong, and what is tolerable in others — so that population shifts and evolving community attitudes bring about noticeable drops or rises in local crime rates.

But although the economy is not the biggest factor, it still does have an effect on crime rates.  Financial crimes seem to bloom in downturns, partly out of reckless desperation, and partly because frauds are easier to conceal when everything is going up.  It also affects violent crimes committed by people other than the young-male demographic, for whom economic stress can lead to domestic strife.  For some of those feeling the lack of opportunity the most, opportunistic crimes lose some stigma and are more likely to be seen as options.

It would be foolish to claim any cause and effect between a down economy and the crime rate.  But a down economy — especially a long-term downturn — certainly amplifies the effects of more direct factors like demographics.

Well, the at-risk demographics have been swelling for a few years now, and we’re starting to see an effect on the statistics.  It’s likely that critical mass has been reached, or will be fairly soon.  Cultural shifts work in both directions, but in recent years they’ve been balancing out in favor of less, not more, homogeneity.  (It’s not that particular communities are more or less likely to commit crimes; it’s just that greater cultural diversity correlates strongly with deviation from the singular norm of the law.)  The amplifying effect of a long-term crap economy is most likely to be significant in precisely these circumstances.

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So why do we think the economy’s going to stay down for a while?  Because it’s the message the Obama administration has been sending lately.  What the president said after yesterday’s gloomy jobs report only solidified this impression.

The news was (more…)

The short answer is yes.  Yes, it is.

One of the lovely ironies of criminal defense is that most of the things we fight for are conservative values — individual liberties, constitutional rights, defending actual people from the insane might of the State — even though the defense attorneys themselves tend to be fairly liberal.

Needless to say, gun control is a wedge issue on which conservatives and liberals in this country tend to have strong, and strongly divergent, views.  Our own personal position on gun control is that it’s best to use two hands when aiming, take your time, and hold your breath while smoothly squeezing the trigger.  But only a fool would claim that public safety is not a legitimate governmental concern.  If anything, it is the number-one job of government at every level.  And only a fool would claim that guns do not affect public safety.  There is certainly some legitimate scope of governmental involvement in who gets to own a gun, and how you’re allowed to use it.

But New York State, and the City of New York, do it wrong.  And in light of the recent Second Amendment decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court, it is now clear that their restrictions are unconstitutional.

We’ve got a case pending where this has become the key issue.  As always, briefing it for the court really forced us to go deep into the competing policies and laws, the history and precedent that got us here.  It’s one of the things that we absolutely love about being a lawyer.  We’re not going to go into any of that here, however.  Instead, we’re just going to focus on the basics.

First of all, gun possession is presumptively illegal here.  There are only narrow exceptions where someone might get a license to own one.  Just applying for the license is prohibitively expensive and takes a very long time.  The licensing decision is purely at the discretion of a bureaucrat, who also has complete discretion to revoke the license later.  A statistically insignificant number of licenses actually get granted.  Of the few licenses that are granted, the vast majority are extremely limited in scope.  And even with a license, one’s gun must be kept disassembled or locked up, with any ammunition stored separately.  Except when  the weapon is actually in one’s grasp, it must be rendered inoperable.  There’s also a presumptive ban on ammunition.

These laws effectively ban gun possession for all but a few people and the police.  To date, New York’s courts have justified this by saying it’s only a privilege to bear arms, and not a right.  So the licensing scheme is perfectly within the state’s authority.  And any review of decisions made by licensing authorities is limited to an arbitrary-and-capricious, abuse-of-discretion analysis.  In other words, you can’t have a gun, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

At the end of the ’08 term, the Supremes issued their decision in (more…)

So yesterday, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in Berghuis v. Thompkins (opinion here) that you need to actually tell the cops that you’re invoking your right to remain silent, if you want them to stop asking questions (or at least not be able to use your subsequent responses against you).  Merely remaining silent isn’t the same as invoking the right.

This, of course, got all kinds of clever responses in the media, along the lines of “to invoke your right to remain silent, speak up!”  Very witty, we agree.

But we have to say, this decision is not that big a deal.

Our immediate reaction on reading the slip opinion, right when it came out, was “yeah, that sounds about right.”

We headed over to court for a case later that morning, and while we were sitting in chambers with some other defense lawyers and prosecutors, we summed up the Court’s decision.  The immediate reaction of literally everyone in the room was “yeah, that sounds about right.”  The judge’s law secretary added “isn’t that already how we do it here in New York?”

Later in the day, we discussed the case with some defense types who are fairly well-known for their pit-bull approach to the law.  Their immediate reaction was “yeah, that sounds about right.”

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Here’s how we see it, in a nutshell: (more…)

Lanny Breuer, the DOJ’s Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division, gave a speech today announcing a “new era of heightened white-collar crime enforcement — an era marked by increased resources, increased information-sharing, increased cooperation and coordination, and tough penalties for corporations and individuals alike.”

You can read his prepared remarks here.  We did, and we find them very troubling.

This is, of course, part of a larger trend back towards more white-collar enforcement. For much of the post-WWII era, through the early 1990s, white-collar cases didn’t get much attention. They were hard to spot in the first place, taking place behind closed doors in boardrooms and offices, not really part of any policeman’s beat. And allegations were challenging to investigate, and ever harder to prove to a jury. Agents and prosecutors lacked the knowhow and the tools to do the job.

And white-collar crime just wasn’t worth the effort — the law classified these crimes at the less-serious end of the spectrum. This wasn’t murder, it was just money. The crooks weren’t burglars or muggers, they were college-educated productive members of the community, involved in charities and otherwise living “normal” lives. Their crimes weren’t violent; they were almost administrative. Victims weren’t in your face, with visceral injuries and tangible losses; they were anonymous and diffuse. Devoting a lot of resources to prove minor offenses you didn’t really understand, with hard-to-identify-with victims, with easy-to-identify-with defendants, just wasn’t a big priority.

This all started to change in the mid-90s. By then, we’d gone through the junk-bond crisis and S&L meltdown of the (more…)

Tonight, we attended a panel discussion on federal sentencing that was actually worth commenting on. Usually, these things are either so basic or insubstantial as to be a waste of time. But this one had a few choice moments we’d thought we’d share with our readers.

The panelists included John Conyers (Chairman of the House judiciary committee), William Sessions (Chair of the U.S. Sentencing Commission and Chief Judge of the District of Vermont), Jonathan Wroblewski (policy director for the DOJ, among other things), Alan Vinegrad (former US Atty for the EDNY and now a white-collar partner at Covington), Tony Ricco (mainstay of the federal defense bar), and Rachel Barkow (NYU professor, didn’t speak much). It was moderated by Judge John Gleeson of the EDNY, and we recognized in the standing-room-only audience a number of distinguished jurists and counsel.

Everyone seems to agree that the Guidelines are in need of a major overhaul. As Judge Gleeson put it, “when even the prosecutors are saying that sentences are too severe… the sentences are too severe.”

But not everyone agrees on what changes ought to be made, how drastic the changes ought to be, or even what’s causing the problems in federal sentencing.

Here’s the take-away: Everyone knows what the right thing to do is. Judges want to do the right thing, regardless of what the Guidelines say. The DOJ forces its prosecutors to do what the Guidelines say, regardless of what they think is just. Congress is incapable of doing the right thing, in its efforts to pander and blame rather than solve. And the Sentencing Commission is afraid to be independent of Congress, preferring instead to make baby steps toward eventually maybe doing the right thing.

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“Unnecessary cruelty”

For as long as we’ve been practicing law, everyone has been complaining bitterly about (more…)

The Supreme Court today decided Graham v. Florida (opinion here), ruling 6-3 that it violates the Eighth Amendment’s Cruel and Unusual Punishment clause to sentence a juvenile offender to life in prison without parole, for a non-homicide crime. This is a hugely significant decision, creating a new precedent in sentencing law (and also forcing Florida to make some law of its own, as it did away with parole a while back).

(Companion case Sullivan v. Florida was dismissed, as certiorari was improvidently granted in light of the Graham decision.)

The opinions are a stirring read. Chief Justice Roberts, in the majority, was in strong opposition against his fellow conservatives Alito, Thomas and Scalia, who dissented. During oral argument, it was clear to observers that Roberts wanted to bring them into the fold and get a unanimous decision that youth deserves a second chance at some point.

Roberts couldn’t get them to agree, which must have been a disappointment to the Chief, who openly aspires to as much unanimity and consensus as possible on his Court. It moved him enough to write a scathing concurring opinion, taking to task the arguments of his conservative brethren.

Kennedy doesn’t let any of the conflict or disappointment show in his majority opinion, which is a balanced and philosophical treatise of the evolution of Cruel and Unusual Punishment law, and well worth reading.

(Had it been up to us, we’d have preferred for the Chief to write an opinion that stays above the fray, and leave it to others to write the criticisms of the dissents. That would free it of any taint of personal feeling.)

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This was really an unexplored territory in American jurisprudence. The Supreme Court has long carved out exceptional (more…)

So we took a few minutes just now to check out some headlines with Google’s “Fast Flip” news browser (which, by the way, is super-cool). And this headline totally caught our eye: “Some Sex Crimes Get a Pass – Why?”

That’s a damn good question! What do you mean, some sex crimes don’t get prosecuted — that’s appalling! Either the crime is something society doesn’t think worth punishing, or prosecutors aren’t doing their job! So we checked it out.

What we found instead was a totally inane article on the Huffington Post, leading off with the following lines: (more…)

The past couple of weeks, there’s been some discussion about a recent paper by Adam Gershowitz and Laura Killinger called “The State (Never) Rests: How Excessive Prosecutor Caseloads Harm Criminal Defendants”.

The authors argue that prosecutors in large jurisdictions often have “excessive” caseloads, so they don’t have enough time and resources to devote to each case. And injustice results. Rushed and overwhelmed, they fail to spot cases deserving special treatment, such as more lenient pleas or drug-court diversion. They don’t notice Brady evidence favorable to the defense. Weak cases don’t get dismissed. Jammed up caseloads cause delays that make defendants take pleas to time served, just to get out of jail. Nobody has the time to spot innocent people, who wind up getting convicted in the rush.

One of the better posts was by Scott Greenfield yesterday at his blog Simple Justice, where he makes the point that delay is actually a good thing for the defense, thanks to speedy-trial rules. More importantly, he points out that prosecutors actually have the discretion to do what it takes to make their caseloads more manageable. To get rid of cases, they can offer lower pleas, dismiss them, do an ACD/DP, what have you. There are easy options to put a case on hold while investigating whether a defendant is deserving of special treatment.

But we haven’t seen anyone yet make the blazingly obvious point that prosecutors aren’t likely to do any of that if the defense attorney doesn’t bring it up, first.

So we’re going to say it now. We defense attorneys can’t just sit there and hope that the prosecutor does the right thing. We actually have to get off our butts and make a case. Good defense lawyers know this, and much of their advocacy involves convincing the prosecutors to exercise their discretion in the client’s favor. Even the best prosecutor only knows what’s in front of him. He’s made up his mind about what this case is worth, based on the evidence he has. The only way to get him to change his mind is to give him new facts, or a new way to look at the facts.

So if a client might be innocent, and the prosecutor doesn’t realize it, then the defense attorney’s job is to bust his ass to make sure the prosecutor figures it out. Ditto for clients who really deserve a lighter-than-usual sentence, or a creative sentence, or treatment instead of jail. This has nothing to do with prosecutor caseloads, and everything to do with defense counsel. Sorry, but it’s the truth.

Beyond that, we still don’t see much cause-and-effect between prosecutor caseloads and the problems decried by the paper’s authors. That’s just not the problem here. And lowering caseloads or increasing resources won’t fix the real problems.

The best prosecutors do try to screen out the innocent, the weak cases, the special cases. Oddly enough, they are pretty common in some offices with the heaviest caseloads. The worst prosecutors don’t seem to want to exercise their discretion at all, or even recognize that they have been given it for a reason. And they’re common enough in offices with hardly any caseload to speak of. In our experience, prosecutor caseloads have zero effect here. The quality of the individual prosecutor, and the culture of their office, has everything to do with it.

So the trick is to get better, not more, prosecutors. How do you do that?

You don’t really need to pay them more. It’s a government job, so it (more…)

Last year, for reasons we’re not entirely clear on, Hamas-led Palestinians started firing rockets and mortars at civilian populations in Israel. Israel put up with it for a while, but then after Christmas it finally responded with a bunch of air strikes on targets in the Hams-controlled Gaza region, and blocked shipping into the area.

As usual, there was a U.N. outcry against Israel’s actions, and a commission was formed. Last week, after several months of review, the commission came out with its report. Although it did say that Hamas shouldn’t have fired rockets at civilians, it came down hardest on Israel, concluding that Israel had committed major violations of international law, probably war crimes, and its actions did not count as self defense.

There have been the usual cries of unfairness all around, what one would expect in any such matter. The whole matter seems to be just par for the course, and we admit to not paying all that much attention to any of these goings-on.

But this morning, a piece in the WSJ by notable criminal law scholar Paul H. Robinson caught our eye. In his article, “Israel and the Trouble With International Law,” Mr. Robinson argues that, although the U.N.’s report might strike many as “a bit unsettling or even bizarre,” in nonetheless is probably correct, in terms of international law.

Mr. Robinson argues that the rules of international law forbid the kind of self defense that American criminal law would allow. Under international law, he says, if a gang of thugs is openly preparing to rob your store and kill your security guards, and is assembling in the parking lot across the street, and there are no police, you still cannot act in self defense until they actually start their attack. But under American criminal law you would be allowed to use such force as is “immediately necessary” to prevent the attack from happening, without waiting to be attacked first.

Similarly, he says, if a neighbor was letting thugs use his house, from which they regularly attacked your family, and there are no police, then international law would forbid you from using force against the thugs and the house they’re taking sanctuary in. But American criminal law would let you do it.

And as a third example, he says that international law only allows force against those thugs when they’re presently in the act of attacking your family, and not during the periods in between attacks, even though it’s an ongoing series.

So, he concludes, by going after the source and trying to prevent further acts of violence against its civilian population, Israel probably did violate international law here. The rules only let it use force to stop the individual attacks, and only while they’re actually happening.

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We admire Mr. Robinson very much, but he’s not precisely correct here. He focuses on Article 51, but that’s not the only source of law here. The law on pre-emptive self defense is a non-Charter use of force, but which is nonetheless permitted by customary international law.

Article 51 of the U.N. Charter says that nothing in the Charter is to be construed so as to impair the “inherent right” (meaning it pre-existed the U.N.) of nations to use self defense against armed attack.

“Armed attack” does seem pretty limiting. Not every act of aggression counts as an attack, after all. Merely threatening force doesn’t count. The enemy may in fact be involved in a use of force, and it may even be an illegal use of force, but it still might not be an armed attack.

So Robinson cites the Nicaragua case, where the Sandinistas in Nicaragua were unlawfully supplying arms and sanctuary to insurgents trying to topple El Salvador’s government. Even though this was an illegal use of force, El Salvador had no right under international law to use force itself in order to stop Nicaragua’s violations of its sovereignty.

But an armed attack can be taking place if the enemy is massing across the border. Like his example with the thugs across the street, who are just waiting for night to fall before they attack your store. If that massing of troops is just an exercise, well then you’re not allowed to attack them.

But if it truly is preliminary to an imminent attack, then by all means strike them. Read on to see why it’s okay to do so.

Remember, though, you need to immediately report to the Security Council that you are under armed attack. And you need to promptly report your response actions to the Security Council.

The main things to keep in mind are that your force must be necessary, and it must be proportional.

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The most famous case in international law, The Caroline (1906), deals with the hot-button issue of preemptive self defense. This one predates Article 51, and it is certainly part of customary international law.

The United States had a bunch of nasty battles with Canada during the War of 1812. There was a lot of bad blood, and the two countries remained hostile for many years thereafter. Unlike now, Canada was the major power, and the U.S. was the little guy. Nevertheless, the U.S. kept trying to take bits of Canada, and the border between Lake Erie and Lake Ontario was heavily militarized. Sound familiar?

The Canadians learned that the U.S. was planning a military incursion across the border into Canadian territory. Before the U.S. began its attack, however, the Canadians struck first.

The Canadians crossed the border first, grabbed the U.S. ship The Caroline, and killed everyone on board. Then they set the ship on fire. Then they launched it over Niagara Falls.

The U.S. Secretary of State at the time was Daniel Webster. He and his British counterpart Lord Ashburton began writing back and forth about what constituted proper self defense. It resulted in a letter from Webster saying:

The President sees with pleasure that your Lordship fully admits those great principles of public law, applicable to cases of this kind, which this government has expressed; and that on your part, as on ours, respect for the inviolable character of the territory of independent states is the most essential foundation of civilization. And while it is admitted on both sides that there are exceptions to this rule, he is gratified to find that your Lordship admits that such exceptions must come within the limitations stated and the terms used in a former communication from this department to the British plenipotentiary here. Undoubtedly it is just, that, while it is admitted that exceptions growing out of the great law of self-defense do exist, those exceptions should be confined to cases in which the ‘necessity of that self-defense is instant, overwhelming, and leaving no choice of means, and no moment of deliberation.’

The law arising from this case is that, for pre-emptive self defense to be lawful:

1) The necessity must be immediate;

2) The necessity must be overwhelming;

3) There must be no other choice;

4) There must be no time to deliberate; and

5) It should also be proportional. (This comes from an earlier letter. Here, killing everyone, burning the ship, and sending it over the falls was found not to have been proportional.)

The Caroline keeps coming up again and again whenever the question of anticipatory self-defense is proper. These five criteria are the ones that get cited by pretty much everyone.

The Nazis, for example, when they invaded Poland, went out of their way to make it look like Poland had started it, so as to justify their invasion. They even dressed up Polish prisoners in German uniforms, shot them and filmed it, and blamed it on Poland. They were trying to make the facts appear to fit the requirements of The Caroline. The Nuremburg tribunal, however, did not buy it.

In the Cuban Missile Crisis, the United States went out of its way to say its actions were not self-defense, but merely a quarantine of Cuba on the high seas to keep the missiles out. A blockade certainly is a kind of use of force, but it is less intrusive than other kinds. The United States proposed this theory in the U.N., and it was representatives from Ghana (who, unlike ours, had been well-educated in international law) who stood up and cited The Caroline case, asking “is this emergency instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation?”

When the Israelis bombed Iraq’s nuclear reactor in 1981 (because it could have been capable of making weapons-grade plutonium), that also led to lengthy discussions of whether the standards for preemptive self-defense attacks had been met. Of course, the act had already been done by then.

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So if one reads the U.N. report more closely, one finds that it goes out of its way to find Israel’s strikes to have been disproportionate to the threat, primarily by including the blockade of shipping. The reasoning goes that the blockade punished the entire population, and wasn’t necessary to self defense.

We’re not particular fans of Israel, but that simply doesn’t wash. Gaza doesn’t produce its own rockets and mortars. Hamas gets them from Iran, Syria or other sources. So a blockade to prevent the ongoing attackers seems perfectly proportionate and necessary here.

Going through the five factors, what do we have?

1) Was the necessity immediate? Certainly. Israel had been under ongoing attack for months, with no sign of it letting up.

2) Was the necessity overwhelming? Sure. Civilians were being targeted for strikes by military weapons, and sovereignty was at stake as well.

3) Was there no other choice? It sure looked like it. Negotiations and diplomacy seemed only to be encouraging further attacks, as they always seem to do in that part of the world.

4) Was there no time to deliberate? Hmm. On the one hand, the Israelis seem to have been deliberating for months already, but if that precludes them from eventually saying enough is enough, then such a rule would encourage less deliberation, not more. Their population was under attack, and there was reason to believe it was going to happen again immediately, so it seems justifiable to call this as being no time to deliberate.

5) Was the response proportionate? The blockade was, to the extent it was focused at preventing Hamas from making further attacks. The air strikes targeted Hamas command, control and munitions, using precision-guided weapons to minimize collateral damage. It sure seems to have been proportional within the meaning of the law. Although many non-Hamas civilians were killed or wounded by the strikes, that does not change the fact of their limited purpose and execution.

So yes, if one only has the U.N. Charter to go by, Israel would seem to have violated international law. But there’s more to international law than just the U.N. charter. And under customary international law, it looks like Israel’s use of force was a lawful act of pre-emptive self defense.

We’ve asked it before, but what the heck is going on with some of these federal prosecutors nowadays? There was the whole Ted Stevens fiasco over the winter, when the feds actively withheld exculpatory evidence and witnesses in their rush to convict the former Senator. Then the 7th Circuit directed an acquittal after the feds blatantly misrepresented the facts in a food labeling case. The W.R. Grace case was screwed by federal prosecutors who withheld exculpatory evidence and gave the judge reason to say he has “no faith in anything the Government says” any more.

And now we get yet another case of the feds blatantly misrepresenting the facts. This time, the 9th Circuit reversed and ordered a new trial, though it’s doubtful that there will be another one.

The case is U.S. v. Reyes, decided this morning. This was one of those options backdating cases that were all over the news for a while back in ’06 and ’07. (“Backdating” is when a company retroactively picks an effective date for stock options, so as to maximize the potential value of those options. It’s a crime when the extra value isn’t accounted for as an expense, because then the books give investors a false image of the company’s finances.)

Gregory Reyes was the CEO of Brocade Communication Systems. In August 2006, Reyes was charged with securities fraud and related crimes for backdating options without properly accounting for them. At trial, his defense was that he had no intent to deceive. He just signed off on the options in good-faith reliance on his company’s Finance Department.

High-ranking Finance Department employees had given statements to the FBI, describing how they knew all about the backdating scheme. But they didn’t testify at trial. Instead, the prosecution called a Finance Department employee who said she didn’t know about the backdating.

The prosecutor was well aware of the fact that others in the department knew all about it. But during closing arguments, he told the jury that the Finance Department employees “don’t have any idea” that backdating was going on.

After several days of jury deliberations, Reyes was convicted. He was sentenced to 21 months in prison with $15 million in fines. That was stayed pending appeal.

This morning, in an opinion byJudge Schroeder, the 9th Circuit held that this was prosecutorial misconduct, and reversed the conviction, ordering a new trial. Reyes argued that he didn’t know the Financial Department wasn’t accounting properly for the backdating, and the feds argued that the Financial Department didn’t know about the backdating. So that was a key question for the jury to decide. And the feds had lied to the jury.

And this wasn’t just a simple little throwaway line, either. The prosecutor did not even limit his argument to the testimony of the witness he’d cherry-picked to give the false impression that nobody in the Finance Department knew about it (which might actually have been permissible). No, the prosecutor:

asserted as fact a proposition that he knew was contradicted by evidence not presented to the jury. In direct contravention of the statements given to the FBI by Finance Department executives that they did know about the backdating, the prosecutor asserted to the jury in closing that the entire Finance Department did not know about the backdating, and further that the government’s theory of the case was that “finance did not know anything.”

“Our theory is that those people didn’t know anything. . . . [The cherry-picked witness] says finance didn’t know. Did you need everybody in the Finance Department to come and tell you that they didn’t know?”

The government even displayed for the jury a diagram explaining the prosecutor’s position that the Finance Department did not know of the backdating. The prosecutor asked the jury to assume other employees of the Finance Department would testify that they did not know about Reyes’ backdating procedure, when the prosecutor knew they did.

Federal prosecutors have “a special duty not to impede the truth.” As the 9th Circuit pointed out today, there is good reason to hold prosecutors to a higher standard: Their words carry the weight and imprimatur of the government itself, which can be very persuasive to a jury.

The 9th Circuit didn’t go so far as to direct an acquittal or dismiss the indictment, because the defense had also played it pretty aggressively. Instead, they ordered a new trial. It is anyone’s guess whether the feds will be up to the task of trying the case all over again, years after the fact. But we’ll go out on a limb and predict that this case will never see a jury again.

For crying out loud, feds! And for shame.

The other day, by a vote of 249 (59%) to 175 (41%), the U.S. House of Representatives voted to expand the scope of federal “hate crimes” to include crimes against gay people, transgender people, the mentally disabled and the physically disabled. With strong support from the White House and from Senate democrats, we expect to soon see this become law without many changes.

We frankly don’t like hate crimes, but from a jurisprudence perspective there really isn’t any problem with them. More on that below. At the same time, however, this particular bill is problematic. More on that below, as well.

The bill, H.R. 1913 (text here), imposes up to 10 years in prison if you to commit violence because you thought someone was black or gay or whatever. (It also authorizes grants of up to $100,000 per year in federal money to the various state, local and tribal law enforcement agencies. The money is to go towards investigating and prosecuting hate crimes, and programs to reduce the occurrence of hate crimes.)

In the form passed by the house, the hate crimes portion of the law would now do the following:

1. With respect to:
Race,
Color,
Religion, and
National Origin

…A. In general.

………1) If you attempt to cause bodily injury to someone, or if you willfully cause such injury, AND

………2) If you did so with fire, a gun, a dangerous weapon, an explosive, or an incendiary, AND

………3) If you did so BECAUSE of the actual or perceived race/color/religion/national origin of the victim, THEN

………4) Your maximum sentence goes up to 10 years.

…B. If someone died or you tried to kill, or you kidnapped or tried to kidnap someone, or you also committed or tried to commit aggravated sexual abuse, THEN

………1) There is no maximum sentence, and you can get anything up to life in prison.

2. With respect to:
Religion (again),
National Origin (again),
Gender (I guess they’re referring to biological sex, as opposed to foreign grammar),
Sexual Orientation,
Gender Identity, and
Disability

…A. In general.

………1) The exact same stuff as above applies, but only if you acted under any of these circumstances:

…………..a) Either you or the victim crossed state lines or a national border.

…………..b) Either you or the victim used an instrument of interstate or foreign commerce.

…………..c) You used a weapon that had traveled in interstate or foreign commerce.

…………..d) Your conduct interferes with the victim’s economic activity.

…………..e) Your conduct otherwise affects interstate or foreign commerce.

Finally, to forestall the criticisms that hate crime laws infringe on First Amendment rights, the statute says it shall not be construed to prohibit any expressive conduct protected by the Constitution. Nor to prohibit any activities protected by the Constitution.

* * * * *

So, what does this mean?

Critics of hate crimes laws, like Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), say that such laws undermine the principal of equal justice for all. “Justice will now depend on the race, gender [gah!], sexual orientation, disability or other protected status of the victim,” Smith said during debate. “It will allow different penalties to be imposed for the same crime.” House Republican Leader John Boehner of Ohio said that this “places a higher value on some lives compared to others. That is unconstitutional, and that is wrong. All life was created equally, and all life should be defended equally.”

Such criticisms miss the point, a little bit.

As written, this law does not put greater value on a victim’s life because of their race, sex, religion, or what have you. The victim’s actual status has nothing to do with it. The law doesn’t care if the person actually was black or female or Methodist — it only cares whether the offender thought so.

The focus is not on the victim. It is on the offender’s state of mind. In other words, all this law does is insert a new form of mens rea into criminal jurisprudence.

Mens rea is the legal word for an offender’s state of mind, and is almost always a crucial element of a crime. A harmful act that was committed without the requisite mental state is not going to be a crime. For the most part, society doesn’t want to punish people when they weren’t trying to do something wrong, or when they weren’t breaching any duty to be careful.

The traditional mens rea have coalesced over time into a continuum that looks something like this:

…FAULTLESS. There is no culpability here. You weren’t doing anything wrong, or you can’t be held accountable for your actions. Society doesn’t want to punish you, because it would serve no purpose. It would be mere retaliation, and that’s just not civilized. (Don’t start thinking we’re too evolved, however — we do still have STRICT LIABILITY laws, like statutory rape and certain weapon and drug possession crimes, where society couldn’t care less whether you meant to do it, or even knew that you were doing it. So we still have some holdovers from the old “eye-for-an-eye” days of punishing even mere accidents.)

…NEGLIGENT. This is the lowest level of culpability. You were supposed to be careful, and you weren’t and now someone got hurt. You weren’t trying to do anything wrong, but you did anyway, and you ought not to have. Society wants to punish you for this, but only a little. We want to make sure people are careful when they’re supposed to be. Not paying enough attention while driving, then running over a pedestrian, is a crime of negligence.

…RECKLESS. This is punished somewhat more severely. You knew what you were doing might hurt someone, but you did it anyway. Society wants to punish you more for this, because you were just indifferent to the consequences of your actions. You were putting your own interests above those of the rest of us, and someone could have gotten hurt. Shooting a gun indiscriminately out a window is reckless. Driving so fast that you can’t safely react is reckless.

…KNOWING. This is even more severe. When you were reckless, you disregarded the mere chance that something bad might happen. But when you had a pretty good reason to believe that something bad would happen — even though it’s not what you were mainly trying to accomplish — then society wants to punish you much more. Let’s say you caught your spouse cheating on you, so that Saturday night you cut their brake lines. You’re trying to kill your spouse when they take their mother to church the next morning. The resulting accident kills your mother-in-law as well. You weren’t trying to kill her, but you knew she could die as well.

…PURPOSE. This is the most severe. You were actually trying to do it. Society punishes intent the most severely of all, as it’s the most culpable of the mental states. When you severed your spouse’s brake lines in the example above, you intended to kill your spouse.

There are other mens rea out there, which sort of come at this continuum from right angles. ATTEMPT is the big one. It’s a form of intent, of purpose, but it slips in between each of the standard categories. You were trying to commit a crime, but for whatever reason it failed. If you tried to shoot a gun randomly out the window, but it jammed, you’re guilty of an attempted crime of recklessness — you intended to commit a crime with a reckless state of mind. If you tried to purposely shoot someone, but the gun jammed, you’re guilty of attempted murder, attempting to commit a crime with an intentional state of mind. Attempts aren’t punished as severely, because the state of mind is not the only reason for enhanced punishment — the events themselves also play a part in determining culpability (a fact that some on the Supreme Court seem to have forgotten).

So all “hate crimes” laws like this one do is define a new mens rea. This one does not fall within the standard continuum, however. It does not care so much whether you were negligent, reckless, knowing or purposeful. It only cares what you believed to be true of the victim, and that you acted because of that belief.

This really doesn’t even come at the continuum from right angles. It’s wholly separate and apart. It’s a one-off. It’s not even on the same piece of paper. It’s a new kind of mens rea, because it has less to do with your mental state with respect to your actions, and more to do with the reasons why you’re committing them in the first place.

But does that make this new mens rea improper? Not really. It just so happens that, over the past couple hundred years, our national culture has gradually come to consider harmful — actually harmful to society — mistreating people based on attributes beyond their control. People can’t help what color they are, or where they were born, or what religion they were raised in, or what turns them on, or whether they have Down syndrome. Mistreating them because of such things is, to modern eyes, harmful to society.

Society punishes harm to itself by criminalizing it. So it’s a simple step to criminalize mistreating people because you thought they possessed certain attributes beyond their control. That belief, the reason for the criminal act, is just a new form of mens rea, and a harmless one at that.

* * * * *

However, just because we don’t have a problem the concept of this hate crime law, that doesn’t mean we think it is a good one. In fact, there are significant problems with it.

For example, there is a real vagueness with respect to religion and national origin. On the one hand, they’re the same as race, and don’t require additional circumstances. On the other hand, they are grouped in with the new categories requiring additional circumstances. It has to be one or the other, and this vagueness could make hate crimes based on religion and national origin void, under the Rule of Lenity.

Of course, the Commerce-Clause-related circumstances could make this merely a distinction without a difference. But if it there was no difference, then why did Congress go to the effort of writing those conditions for certain victims, but not for others? A savvy defense attorney might well argue that these particular hate crimes are unenforceable.

In addition to this unnecessary vagueness, the law is also overbroad.

Let’s back up. The policy underlying this (and pretty much any other American law against discriminatory behavior) is that we don’t want people being singled out for mistreatment for reasons they have no control over. Again, people can’t help what race they are, so it’s bad to mistreat them for it. It now seems pretty clear that people can’t help what their sexual proclivities happen to be, so it’s bad to mistreat them for that as well.

But there are sexual proclivities that society still wants to punish. There are those who can only get sexual gratification from acts involving children. For the most part, they can’t help this, which is why they usually cannot be rehabilitated. So we have two competing interests here: society’s desire to protect those who can’t help being the way they are, and society’s desire to protect children from sexual predation. It should be obvious to most who read this what the policy ought to be on this. But this law doesn’t go there.

So you could have a situation where a father catches a sexual predator making moves on his young child, and beats him severely with a metal baseball bat. The act was committed primarily because of what the victim was, and it was based on his sexual orientation, so now the father is facing prosecution for a hate crime in addition to the assault.

Or you could have a religion whose believers are sworn to kill all redheads on sight. You happen to be a redhead, and members of that religion just established a temple down the street from your house. You willfully torch the temple, and someone gets hurt. Now, in addition to the arson, you’re looking at a hate crime.

These are extreme examples, to be sure. It’s not something that’s likely to happen. It merely shows that the law is inartfully written, and that it is conceivable that it could therefore be applied in ways that were not contemplated by Congress. These merely illustrate that the law could serve to protect those whom the law does not wish to protect, and penalize those whom the law did not wish to penalize.

These examples also raise a policy question as to defenses. In the first, the father could raise a defense of temporary insanity to challenge the assault claim. In the second, the arson might be challenged with perhaps a Bush-doctrine preemptive self-defense.

But is there room for such defenses in this law, the way it’s written? Temporary insanity is a defense to mens rea. It posits that the necessary mental state did not exist, because circumstances were such that the offender could not have been thinking that way. But here, the temporary insanity would be proof that the necessary mens rea did exist. It’s the result of the knowledge that the victim was a sex offender, and tends to show that the violence was inflicted because of it.

* * * * *

In short, we don’t have a legal or constitutional problem with hate crime laws. They actually seem to be a natural extension of our criminal jurisprudence. But this one seems to have been passed without anyone actually reading it (not surprising, as it hardly spend any time in committee).

An administration and the same-party majority in Congress just want to push a law through, and so they will. And they will wind up passing a law that probably doesn’t mean what they wanted it to mean, and which might not stand up under scrutiny.

So what’s new?

The Supreme Court took on five Fourth Amendment cases this term. Four have been decided, and the fifth was argued on Tuesday. Although it may be premature to do so before the last decision comes down, we think it’s safe to draw some conclusions about the Court’s jurisprudence here, and predict what it might mean for the course of criminal justice.

The Fourth Amendment protects citizens against unreasonable searches and seizures. Like most other protections in the Bill of Rights, the whole point is to ensure that the State does not use its awesome power to override the necessary liberties and free will of individuals in a just society. The Bill of Rights prohibits the government from limiting ideas and their expression, from preventing individuals from arming themselves, from forcing soldiers into people’s homes, from extracting confessions by means that override the individual’s free will, from conducting secret “Star Chamber”-like trials or otherwise deny fair trials to defendants, from imposing indecent punishment, etc. If you sum up all the injustices that individuals face under medieval or tyrannical rule, the Bill of Rights pretty much says the U.S. government shall not do such things.

“Unreasonable” search & seizure basically means that, as a baseline, police ordinarily need to get a warrant first, by proving to a judge that they are more likely than not to find what they’re looking for, and that they’ll find it in the place they plan to look. There are exceptions to the warrant requirement, of course. Most searches don’t take place pursuant to a warrant, but under one of the exceptions.

If a person consents to a search, then no warrant is needed. Neither is a warrant needed if there is good reason to believe that evidence is going to be lost, or someone’s going to get hurt, if the cops take the time to get a warrant. There are various other exceptions.

The devil is in the details, of course. So the more exceptions you carve out from the general rule, the more room for error you create, and the more gray areas of confusion can pop up. Over the past few decades, various Fourth Amendment exceptions have indeed created confusion, gray areas, and absurdities.

The Supreme Court has taken the opportunity this term to attack those confusions, gray areas and absurdities head on.

On Tuesday, the Court ruled in Arizona v. Gant with respect to vehicle searches. (We reported on this here.) Back in the 60s, a warrant exception was carved out for searches of an individual and his “wingspan” — the area in his immediate reach — pursuant to a lawful arrest. The purpose was to ensure the safety of the officers and to preserve evidence. So long as the arrest was lawful, the search was lawful. Fast-forward to just after Reagan’s first swearing-in, when the Court expanded the search-incident-to-lawful-arrest to include the search of the passenger compartment of a car in which the arrestee had been riding.

Almost immediately after that ruling, everyone started to get the idea that cops could search the passenger area even after everyone was out of the car. The “wingspan” concept was lost, and instead a bright-line rule arose that, if the cops arrested someone who had been inside a car, then that car could be searched, period. Even after that person had long ago left the scene.

Some policy-makers like bright-line rules, because they require no thought. Individual circumstances need not be considered. An action that might not make sense, upon casual reflection, is still taken, because that’s the rule. If you don’t trust people to be able to weigh circumstances reasonably, then you give them bright-line rules.

And so it was that the police in Gant found themselves searching his car. Gant had already been arrested, handcuffed, and locked in a police cruiser, so the interior of his car was certainly no longer within his reach. So there was no reason to believe that he could destroy any evidence in the car or use something in the car to hurt the police. And he had been arrested for driving with a suspended license, not the kind of crime involving physical evidence, so there was no reason to believe that any evidence of that crime would be found in the car. In fact, the cops admitted on the stand that the only reason they search the car after the arrest was “because the law says we can do it.”

That was absurd. It’s an absurdity that just sort of happened, too. Nowhere in the 1981 Belton case did the Court lay out a bright-line rule. But that rule became the common interpretation, and has been the common interpretation for a quarter of a century.

On Tuesday, however, the Court finally stepped in to undo the absurdity. In a narrowly split 5-4 decision, the Court ruled that the police are not allowed to search a car simply because they made an arrest. The bright-line rule was thrown out the window. Interestingly, the case made for strange bedfellows. Contrary to popular expectation, Scalia and Thomas joined the pro-defendant side, and Breyer joined the pro-government minority. Scalia, in fact, felt that the majority opinion didn’t go far enough to limit the government’s power to search a car after an arrest.

The dissent essentially boiled down to a version of stare decisis — the common interpretation has been around for so long, that it has become the law of the land, and should be treated as such. That’s an interesting, but flawed, rationale. Stare decisis has to do with longstanding judicial precedent, not with some sort of jurisprudential adverse possession. Common practice does not equal legal precedent. Just because nobody has bothered to claim till now that the common interpretation was wrong, that doesn’t mean that nobody ought to be able to claim that now.

Anyway, the rule now is that the bright-line rule is no more. Cops can only search the passenger compartment if they have reason to believe — on a case-by-case basis — that the arrestee can still gain access to the car or that the car contains evidence of the crime for which he had been arrested. They can’t go looking just because the guy was arrested. They can’t go looking for evidence of other crimes. (They can still, however, either get a warrant, or impound the car and do an inventory search.)

- – -

Argued the same day as Gant was decided was Safford Unified School District v. Redding. This also has to do with bright-line rules, in a way.

For context, the oral arguments were made almost to the day on the 10th anniversary of the Columbine shootings. Ten years ago, a couple of juvenile delinquents killed 12 people in a high school, the worst such violence that the U.S. has ever seen.

Due to the resulting hysteria and misinformation about the events, schools nationwide began passing bright-line “zero tolerance” rules out of fear that similar crimes might happen to them. Although it is now known that the killings were totally random, there arose a misconception that the killers sought out specific categories of victims. This led to panicked overreaction whenever a kid was found to have identified people in the school that they didn’t like. In fact, the killers wanted to kill everyone, setting (faulty) bombs to go off in the cafeteria (the fact that nobody every mentions the totally obvious similarities to the plot of the 1988 movie “Heathers” is beyond us).

Zero tolerance policies resulted in the expulsion of even little kids for bringing anything remotely resembling a weapon to school. Even when doing so was clearly absurd, as with water pistols, plastic army men, miniature toys, eating utensils, and the like.

Zero tolerance policies went after anything that might even slightly imply to the most paranoid hysteric an imaginary threat of unlikely harm to students or teachers. This included little girls hugging (because touching without permission can sometimes be a bad thing, all touching must be bad!). It included bringing a cake knife to school to cut a cake one had also brought to school.

And drugs are bad, by definition. So zero-tolerance included bringing any drugs to school. Passing out Tylenol can get kids expelled. It’s serious!

These bright-line zero-tolerance rules are imposed because school administrators are afraid. They’re afraid of their students. And they’re afraid of having to act rationally on a case-by-case basis. So they just over-react to everything, and establish bright-line rules so they don’t have to think.

And so we have Safford Unified School District v. Redding.

In Safford, we have a middle school (also in Arizona), where school authorities caught a 13-year-old girl with (gasp!) prescription-strength ibuprofen. This was a zero-tolerance school, and even though there is no way that ibuprofen counts as a dangerous drug, it was a bright-line prohibited medicine. So this girl was in serious trouble.

The girl (gasp!) pointed the finger at someone else. She said that another girl, Redding, had given her the medicine.

School officials have the authority to preserve the health and safety of their students. Most would say they even have the responsibility to do so. So it is not suprising that the school investigated the culprit’s claims.

Without taking the time to get a warrant, and acting only on the say-so of the girl they actually caught with the medicine, school officials searched Redding’s backpack, and found nothing. Then they took Redding to the nurse’s office, and searched her outer clothing. Nothing. Then they had her stretch out her bra and panties, exposing her breasts and genitals. Nothing. They shook out her underclothes, and her body was inspected by the nurse and another school official. Nothing. Then they put her in the principal’s office, and left her there alone for a few hours, without calling her mother or anyone else. No drugs of any kind were found during all this searching, and nobody else was strip searched.

Redding sued, claiming that her Fourth Amendment rights had been violated when she was subjected to this strip search.

The school district seeks a bright-line rule that permits strip searches whenever a school has reason to suspect that a student has prohibited contraband on them. At the same time, and without appearing to notice the inherent hypocrisy, they argue that the courts should not second-guess the judgement of school officials. Here, they had a reason to suspect Redding, and that should be enough to let them strip search her.

Now, if the Court is inclined to lay down a bright-line rule at all here, that surely is not going to be the rule they impose. There is no way the Court is going to let school officials make an unreviewable decision as to whether there’s reason to conduct a given strip search or not.

Instead, they’d probably impose a bright-line rule requiring first that there be sufficient credible evidence — first, that this student has drugs in the first place; and second, that the drugs are concealed in the private regions of the student’s body.

But then, in addition to an evidentiary requirement, they’d probably have to include a proportionality requirement as well. The Court is unlikely to permit extraordinarily invasive searches for contraband that poses no real threat. Strip searches for plastic toys would be within the realm of lawful possibility, otherwise.

But if your bright-line rule requires weighing evidence on a case-by-case basis, and weighing proportionality on a case-by-case basis, then it really isn’t a bright line at all, is it?

No, we’re going to go out on a limb here and predict that the Court will reject any bright-line rule, and instead impose a balancing test. A good rule will require that strip searches are only allowed when there is credible evidence that the student is concealing contraband in or on her private body parts. Not just the say-so of another student trying to direct blame onto someone else.

And a good rule will require that a strip search be proportionate to the danger. It’s more reasonable if the kid’s believed to have explosives strapped to his body (a la Christian Slater in “Heathers”), or a weapon in his underwear, or decks of heroin in his nether regions. It’s not so reasonable if the kid’s only believed to possess a toy, or harmless medicine, or even a list of kids he doesn’t like.

A good rule will be fact-specific, and will require schools to actually exercise good judgment. A rule that lets them just act without thinking would be contrary to the direction this Court seems to be taking with its Fourth Amendment cases.

- – -

That leads us to the third Arizona case in this term’s Fourth Amendment decisions. On January 26, Justice Ginsburg wrote a unanimous decision for the Court in Arizona v. Johnson (which we wrote about here).

In Johnson, the Court clarified that a police officer can do a pat-down search, feeling someone’s outer clothing for weapons, if the officer has reason to believe that the person is armed and poses a threat to safety. The police don’t lose that ability to protect their own safety when other circumstances change.

Ginsburg pointed out that this really shouldn’t have been a point of confusion. A long line of cases, starting with Terry v. Ohio, clearly say cops can pat someone down for weapons if they have reason to believe the person’s armed and dangerous. And yet there obviously was confusion, evidenced by the Johnson case itself.

In Johnson, a female officer with gang experience was involved in a traffic stop. Before the stop, she had no reason to believe the passengers had committed any crimes. But during the stop, she saw things that led her to believe that one of the passengers was a gang member. She talked to him about things unrelated to the reason for the traffic stop, and some of the things he said led her to believe that he was armed and dangerous. So she asked him to step out of the car, to talk about things out of earshot of the other suspected gang members, then patted down his clothing and found a gun in his waistband. The passenger was later convicted of possessing the gun.

The Arizona Court of Appeals ruled that the officer lost her authority to pat him down once she started talking to him about matters unrelated to the traffic infraction. Even though she had reason to believe he was armed and posed a threat to her, the fact that she had talked to him about other things erased her ability to pat him down for her own protection.

The unanimous Supreme Court cleared that right up. The passenger was already seized, and not free to leave. The fact that he was being asked questions about other things didn’t change that. And the officer did have reason to suspect that he was armed and dangerous, and the topic of conversation didn’t change that.

Now in one respect, this is a bright-line rule. And as we pointed out in our previous post, we have problems with this bright-line rule, insofar as it has to do with whether a person involved in a traffic stop is free to leave. Under the Court’s rule, the answer is simply no, until the stop is over or the police let him go.

But the meat of the decision is not a bright-line rule. It is yet another case-by-case analysis: did the officer have reason to believe there was a weapon and that she could be in danger? The ruling simplifies the analysis by removing other considerations from the equation, as being irrlevant. The bright-line issue of whether someone is seized or not really has nothing to do with the core issue. And the Arizona court’s issue of whether the conversation has switched topics is beyond irrelevant.

- – -

The fourth case this term was Herring v. United States, which had to do with the exclusionary rule. (We wrote about this decision here.)

In Herring, the Court ruled that the exclusionary rule doesn’t apply when a policeman acts on flawed information from law enforcement in the next county. Herring, a character who’d had several run-ins with local law enforcement in Alabama, went to get his truck out of impound. The officer ran a check to see if any warrants were outstanding for him. There was a hit for an outstanding warrant in the next county. Herring was arrested on that warrant, and drugs were found. It turned out that the neighboring county’s records were erroneous, and there wasn’t any warrant.

Writing for the narrow 5-4 majority, Chief Justice Roberts ruled that the error was too separate from the search and seizure of the drugs. The officer who conducted the search didn’t have anything to do with the error, and it would be pointless to attribute it to him. Thinking of the exclusionary rule as a rule of deterrence, Roberts said it should only apply when excluding seized evidence would deter wrongful conduct. So the police conduct would have to be sufficiently deliberate that it could be deterred. And the conduct would have to be sufficiently wrongful to be worth the loss of evidence.

It’s easy to see where the majority was going here. It’s common for people to think of the exclusionary rule as balancing, on the one hand, our concern for protecting individuals against unlawful government intrusions, against our concern against “letting people off on a technicality” on the other hand. So here, the arresting officer wasn’t being negligent. He acted totally reasonably, relying on a criminal justice database. Excluding this evidence wouldn’t deter future reliance on criminal justice databases, and we actually don’t want that kind of reliance to be deterred in the first place.

But that common way of thinking really is a misconception. The exclusionary rule is not a rule of deterrence. And thinking of it that way can lead to confusion.

The exclusionary rule is the typical remedy for police violation of Fourth Amendment rights, by suppression of the evidence that would not have been gathered but for the violation. This protects the justice system, by ensuring that the maximum lawfully-gathered evidence is available, while ensuring that defendants aren’t prosecuted with unlawfully-gathered evidence.

Police officers and departments are not punished for violations, because that would be deterrent — it would create an incentive to avoid borderline situations where evidence could have been obtained lawfully.

Rather than do that, the exclusionary rule lets officers go right up to the line of what they’re allowed to do, and only takes away what they shouldn’t have been allowed to get, the evidence they got by crossing the line. The get to keep the other evidence.

The exclusionary rule is not an individual right, but is rather a remedy that has been crafted over generations of thoughtful jurisprudence. It simultaneously maximizes protection of the individual’s rights, and society’s interest in law enforcement. It balances two powerful and competing interests, and it does the job elegantly. As such, it is a beautiful rule, but one that is nevertheless criticized — both by law-and-order types and by defendant-rights types — when its role is misunderstood. Unfortunately, it is misunderstood all the time, and the Supreme Court itself did so here.

- – -

The last case is Pearson v. Callahan, decided on January 21. It involved Utah police officers who conducted a warrantless search of a home. There were no exigent circumstances. Instead, they thought their conduct was lawful under the “consent once removed” doctrine.

This is a legal doctrine that had been gaining traction out west (and in New Jersey) since the early 1980s. The way it worked here was, they flipped a suspect into an informant. Then they sent the informant to his drug spot, the defendant’s home. The informant was invited in, saw drugs, and went back to tell the cops what they’d seen. The defendant had consented to allow the informant into his home, and that consent was deemed transferred to the cops, as “consent once removed,” and so the defendant was deemend to have consented to the police entry into his home. Under that doctrine, he’d consented, so they didn’t need a warrant.

The cops were sued, and the issue was whether they had qualified immunity here. The Court’s unanimous decision, written by Justice Alito, mostly dealt with a procedural issue raised sua sponte. But in the end they briefly mentioned the underlying issue of whether the police acted lawfully here.

The test for qualified immunity was whether the unlawfulness of the officers’ action was clearly established at the time of their actions. If it was clearly unlawful, then they did not have qualified immunity.

As it happened, however, there was a line of cases that instead established that this kind of “consent once removed” search was fine back in 2002, at least out west. So the police were entitled to qualified immunity.

Disappointingly, the Court did not deal with the issue of whether this kind of attenuated consent is actually proper now in 2009. So there’s really no meat to this decision, which is why we saved it for last.

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All in all, it looks like the Court is shying away from any judicial activism here. Rather than creating broader interpretations of individual rights, or establishing greater police powers, the Court is focusing on clarifying existing rights and powers. And instead of expanding the existing rules, the Court is simply trying to rein in misconceptions and absurdities.

Part of that trend seems to be the relaxing of bright-line rules. Bright lines are great when you don’t want people to have discretion, when you don’t trust them to think, or they’re not trained to understand the issues. You get some efficiency that way. But in real life, facts don’t always fit within those lines, and an unthinking application of bright-line rules will sometimes result in injustice. This Court seems to be moving away from the seeming mass efficiencies, in favor of individual justice.

Well, we like that very much.