This post by Carimah Townes at thinkprogress.org demonstrates once again that truth is optional with our pro-criminal crusader friends.The thrust of the post is that Justice Scalia's last judicial act before his death was to deny a stay of execution to Texas double murderer Gustavo Garcia and allow him to be executed. "Scalia denied Garcia's final appeal for a stay of execution last Wednesday," the post says.Not that there would be anything wrong with that if it were true, but it's not. The post links to the order via a "tweet," and the order unambiguously says that Justice Scalia did not act on the stay himself but instead referred the application for stay to the full Court. This is standard procedure in SCOTUS capital cases. The stay was denied by the Court, not by Justice Scalia individually, with no dissents noted.
ThinkProgress and Truth Optional
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Colorado Recording of Interrogations Bill Unanimously Passes Key House Committee
Wrongfully convicted man Chris Ochoa joined Innocence Project, stakeholders in testifying in support of bill that would prevent false confession, wrongful conviction (Denver, Colorado – Feb. 11, 2016) A Colorado bill (HB 16-1117) that would require police to record the entirety of interrogations in class 1 and class 2 felonies unanimously cleared the state's House Judiciary Committee today, 11-0. Chris Ochoa, who was wrongfully convicted of murder in Texas in part because of a false confession, attended today's hearing with the Innocence Project and members of Colorado’s prosecutorial, law enforcement and defense communities to testify in support of the legislation. False confession is a leading contributor to wrongful conviction, having played a role in over a quarter of the nation’s such cases proven by DNA evidence. Recording suspect interrogations is a proven method to protect against this well-documented phenomenon. The…
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"Of Systems and Persons: The Ability and Responsibility of Corporate Law to Improve Criminal Punishment"
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Gardner on Rape
John Gardner (University of Oxford - Faculty of Law) has posted two manuscripts on rape. The first is The Opposite of Rape. Here is the abstract: Nicola Lacey once lamented that a theoretical focus on rape, with its 'individualised notion...
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New forms available for use for expunging and sealing records in Illinois
The Illinois Supreme Court Commission on Access to Justice has approved new statewide forms for expunging and sealing records in Illinois. This will greatly streamline and simplify the expunging and sealing process as there will no longer be different forms from county to county that pro se petitioners and attorneys alike must familiarize themselves with. Moreover, the new forms deal with a wide range of possible scenarios a petitioner is confronted with, including when/if he or she is receiving an expungement post gubernatorial pardon: pursuant to 20 ILCS 2630/5.2(e), "Whenever a person who has been convicted of an offense is granted a pardon by the Governor which specifically authorizes expungement, he or she may, upon verified petition to the Chief Judge...have a court order entered expunging the record of arrest from the official records of the arresting authority and order that the records of the circuit court clerk and the Department be sealed until further order…
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A DUI is No Laughing Matter…
Though I have to admit, I chuckled a bit at the image of Joel Allen Sloan, of Fultondale, AL, standing with his arms cuffed behind his brightly colored get-up. Sloan has been pulled over by deputies for driving under the influence…and doing so dressed in full clown garb. Though rainbow wigs and oversized sneakers are certainly not a crime (against fashion maybe), operating a vehicle with a blood alcohol level of .08 certainly is. Motorists alerted a deputy of a red Ford SUV driving erratically and changing lanes the night of Saturday, February 6th. When pulled over, Sloan admitted to having a few drinks earlier that evening at a local restaurant. He was held at the Jefferson County Jail with a bond set at $2,500. In addition to the DUI, Sloan was being held for an outstanding warrant felony warrant for first-degree theft of property. No word yet as to why Sloan was dressed as a clown that evening. So before you down your rainbow afro and get…
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Booker T. Roberts of Fort Lauderdale, Florida Arrested and Charged With Attempted Murder
Booker T. Roberts of Fort Lauderdale, Florida was arrested earlier this month for an attempted murder charge. Roberts, 34, allegedly shot Alphonso Palmer in the stomach outside a Kwik Stop Food Store in Lauderhill on December 12, 2015. News reports did not specify a lawyer for Roberts, who is being without bond. Palmer accused Roberts of the crime while recuperating at Broward Health Medical Center, sources say. Palmer claims that the grudge that led to Roberts alleged shooting started after Palmer won a $100 bet against Roberts on a football game last October, sources say. Palmer reportedly told detectives that he would sometimes buy drugs from Roberts, who allegedly threatened him with a gun on several occasions. The situation purportedly escalated at the Kwik Shop Food Store when Roberts confronted and threatened Palmer with a gun again. Palmer told police that Roberts shot at him, but that his first shot missed. Roberts then allegedly struck Palmer on the head with the gun…
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Is A Search Warrant Required to Access Cell Phone Records In California
“THE STINGRAY” STING Daniel Rigmaiden might have seemed a bit crazy to his attorneys. He was arrested in 2008 after he was caught in his elaborate and meticulous scheme filing fraudulent tax claims while living “off-grid” in the woods. He couldn’t understand how the authorities found him; he operated on fake IDs, had virtually no public identity and he ran his scam through anonymized web browsing. Mr. Rigmaiden surmised that the only way the authorities could have found him was through the cellular AirCard that he used to access the internet. He told his attorney, “I think they tracked me down by sending rays into my living room.” That may still sound a little kooky now but back in 2008, before Edward Snowden’s revelations, he sounded like a crazy person. After his fourth attorney withdrew from his case, he ended up representing himself. Turns out Mr. Rigmaiden wasn’t crazy at all —at least not about the rays in his…
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Wei & Lin on China's Pretrial Detention System
Shen Wei and Xifen Lin (Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU) - KoGuan Law School and Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU)) has posted Reforms to China's Pretrial Detention System: The Role of the Procuratorate ((2016) 44 International Journal of Law, Crime...
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Plant High School Student Accused of Bringing Guns to School
A Plant High School student has been arrested after he was allegedly found in his car with weapons while the school was on lockdown Wednesday morning. Tampa Police charged the 18-year-old student with two counts of possession of a firearm on school property. According to a report, the school, initiated a “modified” lockdown due to a phone call communicating a vague threat. During a search of the school’s perimeter by officers and school security, the teen was allegedly found in his car with weapons. A Hillsborough Schools spokesperson said the teen is an avid hunter, and the alleged weapons were unrelated to the earlier phone threat to the school. The lockdown lasted a little more than an hour. The school was not evacuated. With school violence such a hot button issue and deadly shootings occurring even in elementary schools, school districts and Florida law have cracked down on individuals, including juveniles, who bring weapons onto school property. Weapons…
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Citrus County Sheriff’s Office Volunteer Arrested for DUI
A Citrus County Sheriff’s Office volunteer was arrested Tuesday for driving under the influence. Officials allege a Citrus County deputy spotted the 68-year-old Sheriff’s Office Rails to Trails volunteer driving erratically and pulled him over. The man was arrested and taken to the county jail and charged with driving under the influence. He was reportedly in uniform and driving a Sheriff’s Office vehicle at the time of his arrest. Deputies said the man’s volunteer status with the Citrus County Sheriff’s Office was subsequently terminated. The man had been a Rails to Trails volunteer for approximately four months. Anyone can get charged with DUI, as this case highlights. Although there are many defenses available to DUI charges, there are two that are commonly used to justify the reason behind the initial stop and the process used to test the driver’s BAC. Law enforcement officers must follow certain procedures in order for a drunk driving…
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Johnson on Causation after Burrage
Eric Alan Johnson (University of Illinois College of Law) has posted Cause-in-Fact After Burrage v. United States (Florida Law Review, Vol. 68, 2016 Forthcoming) on SSRN. Here is the abstract: What significance, if any, should state courts assign to the...
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Defense of Mistake to Massachusetts Theft Crime Charges
In Commonwealth v. Tremblay, the defendant was accused and convicted of breaking and entering while intending to commit misdemeanor larceny and a fifth offense of operating a motor vehicle while under the influence. He appealed on the basis that the trial judge made a mistake in limiting his cross-examination of a witness about an issue that was key to his defense. At trial, the defendant argued he’d made a factual mistake about whether he was permitted to go onto the property of his dead uncle’s neighbor, break a lock, and take a model airplane. He tried to present evidence to this effect. However, the trial judge wouldn’t allow the defendant to question the neighbor about the defendant’s father’s challenge to the uncle’s will, which gave the neighbor the contents of the shed, including the model airplane. The defense attorney claimed that if the neighbor admitted that the ownership of the model airplane was disputed by the defendant’s…
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Mesa Duct Tape Case: Have you heard?
A court case in Mesa has sparked a lot of controversy, where a man and the mother of a 3 year-year-old girl are being charged with multiple felonies after the girl was was found duct-taped and covered in feces inside of a closet, according to the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office. Francisco Rios-Covarrubias and the mother in this case of child neglect and abuse face multiple charges, including dangerous crimes against a child, kidnapping, child abuse and sexual conduct with a minor. In a news conference last month, County Attorney Bill Montgomery told the Arizona Republic: “In contrast and comparison to the kindness I received growing up … with the treatment of some children in our community, it is absolutely heartbreaking,” he said. “It’s why I am so committed to wanting to fight for the most vulnerable and defenseless in our community who should receive that same kind of care and compassion instead of what they all too often…
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At Least We’re Not Earth
Here’s a premise for a movie: The Chinese become the first ones to discover the existence of alien life forms in outer space. Without telling anyone they develop the capability to track down and capture these alien life forms and succeed in bringing one back to Earth for further research. They hope that in doing so they will gain the upper hand in becoming the sole superpower on this planet, leaving all other countries in the dust. The Chinese give the alien the code name Alibaba 2.0. Unfortunately for the Chinese Alibaba 2.0 manages to escape because the Chinese, in their haste to extract information from the alien, leave out critical parts in building their alien containment and research pod. Alibaba 2.0 ventures out on to the streets of China but no one notices because everyone is too preoccupied with his or her smartphone. The alien realizes that it can discover the key to happiness on Earth if it can gain access to the data stored on all these…
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Lead Public Defender Explains How Overwhelmed Court System Harms Defendants
In a revealing opinion piece published in today’s edition of the New York Times, the Chief District Defender for Orleans Parish Derwyn Bunton writes about his office’s recent decision to stop taking new cases; it’s one, he explains, that “did not come easily. No one becomes a public defender to tell a poor person, ‘No, I can’t help you.’ As was covered in November by the “Innocence Blog,” the Orleans Parish Defenders Office, under the duress of an insurmountable case load, asked a judge at the local criminal district court to stop assigning new criminal cases to the office’s attorneys until their existing caseload was significantly reduced. According to Bunton and the New Orleans Deputy District Defender Jee Park, the city’s public defenders were so overwhelmed with cases that any more would jeopardize the quality of their services and put at risk the constitutional rights of defendants. In today’s…
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26 and Counting
To what end, exactly?That's the question Ohio Supreme Court Justice Paul Pfeifer asks today. Actually, that's my phrasing. What Justice Pfeifer said is. The act begs the question: Why?The "act" was the court's order setting an execution date for James Frazier, sentenced to be killed for the March 2004 murder of Mary Stevenson in Toledo. It's scheduled, now, for October 17, 2019 (yes, 2019).The question, whether in my form or as Justice Pfeifer put it in his dissent (joined by Justice O'Neill) from that order, isn't about whether Frazier should be killed. After all, Pfeifer joined the unanimous opinion affirming Frazier's conviction and death sentence.*Nor, at least not exactly, is the question about the wisdom of setting execution dates more than three years in the future. That's the sort of thing the court's been doing for some time. In fact, as Pfeifer points out, as of yesterday we here…
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Leading Republican Candidates In A Nutshell
All hat, no cattleAll hate, no cattleAll hair, no cattle
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The Evolution of Drunk Driving Laws in California
Your parents or grandparents might remember the days when a drunk driver was given a warning and then escorted home by the police and told to sleep it off. Maybe you watched Mad Men and wondered if drunk driving was just a way of life back in the 60s. Until late in that decade, drunk driving laws relied on the officer’s subjective evaluations, rather than on the chemical tests that are now mandated by the law, to determine whether someone was driving under the influence of alcohol. Thus, it was not unusual, especially outside of large urban areas, for the police to find “old Jimmy” weaving his truck on his way home again and either drive him home or give him a slow-moving escort. At worst, most drunk drivers could expect fines and a lecture by a judge. Back then, there was no driving license suspension or mandatory drunk driving courses. While chemical tests were available, California law did not mandate that a driver submit to a chemical…
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"Legislating Forgiveness: A Study of Post-Conviction Certificates as Policy to Address the Employment Consequences of a Conviction"
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