Could such a sequence of events actually happen? It seems to have happened to Paul Clerke of Merstham, England. [ThisIsSurreyToday via Coyote]
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Posts tagged as:
crime and punishment
Counting the weight of water in reaching for maximum penalties: “The Minnesota Supreme Court, in a 4-3 decision, has now ruled that Bong Water (water which had been used in a water pipe) was a ‘mixture’ of ‘25 grams or more’ supporting a criminal conviction for Controlled Substance crime in the first degree.” [Minneapolis Criminal Lawyer via Greenfield] More: Sullum.
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Mark Steyn calls this news clip from Canada “the descent into societal madness distilled into one perfect paragraph”:
People with outstanding warrants will be denied income assistance in British Columbia as soon as next year if legislation introduced yesterday is passed into law, said Rich Coleman, Minister of Housing and Social Development. “People who have outstanding warrants shouldn’t be getting welfare until they clean up the problem,” said Mr. Coleman, adding that to qualify, warrants must be for indictable offences such as murder, sexual assault and drug trafficking. But Mr. Coleman said the government will not run criminal background checks on welfare applicants to enforce the policy. Instead, it will rely on criminals to disclose their outstanding legal issues when they make an application.
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- Speech-curbing proposals continue to get polite academic reception: NYU’s Jeremy Waldron, big advocate of laws to curb “hate speech”, delivered Holmes Lectures at Harvard this past week [HLS, schedule]
- Lawsuit over collectible baseball hit into stands by Phillies’ Ryan Howard, his 200th career homer [Howard Wasserman, PrawfsBlawg; NJLRA]
- Orchid-importer prosecution a poster case for the evils of overcriminalization? Maybe not [Ken at Popehat]
- Texas State Fair and city of Dallas don’t have to allow evangelist to distribute religious tracts inside the fair, judge rules after three years [Dallas Observer blog]
- Drug maker: FDA’s curbs on truthful promotion of off-label uses impair our First Amendment speech rights [Beck and Herrmann and more, Point of Law and more]
- Did plaintiff Eolas Technologies go to unusual lengths to ensure Eastern District of Texas venue for its patent litigation? [Joe Mullin, IP Law and Business via Alison Frankel, AmLaw]
- Update: “Lesbian Denied Infertility Treatment Settles Lawsuit” [San Diego 6, earlier]
- Even in the Ninth Circuit, “psychological injury resulting from a legitimate personnel action” is not compensable [Volokh]
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“In December, North Carolina state legislators barred sex offenders from coming within 300 feet of any place intended primarily for the use, care or supervision of minors. Three months later, Nichols was arrested at his home after attending Sunday services. He said he was ‘floored’ to learn that he had been picked up because Moncure Baptist Church has a child-care center for families attending services.” [AP/Google] More on sex offender laws: The Economist (”Unjust and ineffective”); Lenore Skenazy (predicate is often teen misconduct with other teens); Radley Balko, Reason (several Georgia offenders told to camp in woods, then told not to); earlier. Related: Oklahoma Citizens for Change.
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- Florida man and attorney file multiple ADA complaints against businesses in Seminole-Largo area [Tampa Bay Newspapers]
- “The growing ambitions of the food police”:
dietary paternalism in Bloomberg’s NYC and Washington, D.C. doesn’t go over well with writers at Slate [William Saletan, Jacob Weisberg, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Glenn Reynolds] - Assumption of risk is alive and well in New York cases over sports and spectator injuries [Hochfelder first, second, third posts, NYLJ]
- Favorable review of William Patry, “Moral Panics and the Copyright Laws” [BoingBoing]
- Kentucky high school case: “Coach Acquitted in Player’s Heatstroke Death” [ABA Journal]
- Olivia Judson on the Singh case and the many problems with British libel law [NYT; earlier here, here, etc.]
- Kids behave stupidly with girlfriends/boyfriends or dates, then the law ruins their lives [Alkon, Balko, Sullivan]
- “Report a bad doctor to the authorities, go to jail?” [Orac/Respectful Insolence, Texas; disclosure of patient and official information alleged against nurses]
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I’m not taking sides, but those who read the excellent New Yorker article should also read some of the materials and arguments left out of the story. (Judge John Jackson, Corsicana Daily Sun, Aug. 28). The newspaper has also published its archives on the case to the web if you’re interested in the contemporaneous reporting in the case.
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- On the medicalization of nearly everything: “Bitterness, Compulsive Shopping, and Internet Addiction” [Christopher Lane, Slate]
- Lawyer representing Sarah Palin to blogger: do you want to be served with our defamation suit at the kindergarten where you help out? [Alaska Report via Rachel Weiner, HuffPo]
- “The 7 Most Baffling Criminal Defenses (That Sort of Worked)” [Cracked via Popehat]
- Canada: crash victim gets C$2M, sues deceased lawyer for omitting a defendant who’d have chipped in another C$1.3 million [Calgary Sun]
- Privacy breach notifications mostly a costly waste of time but do keep lawyers busy [Lee Gomes, Forbes]
- “News Websites in Texas and Kentucky Invoke Shield Laws for Online Commenters” [Citizen Media Law]
- North Carolina suit against TVA “a sweet gig for the state’s attorneys” [Wood, Point of Law]
- Blawg Review #223 is at Scott Greenfield’s [Simple Justice] with another part hosted at the Blawg Review home site itself.
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- Bad move for GOP to call disappointed litigant as witness at Sotomayor hearing [Taranto via Barnett] Nominee’s disavowal of Legal Realism and identitarian/viewpoint-based judging should be seen as a victory for legal conservatism [Copland at PoL, related Examiner and NRO "Bench Memos"; Adler/WaPo; coverage in NYT] Why do Senators speechify instead of asking questions? “Why does the rain fall from up above?” [Althouse]
- “Illinois Law Dean Announces New Admission Policy in Wake of Scandal” [NLJ; earlier] “U of I Law School Got Scholarship Cash for Clout Admissions” [ABA Journal]
- Weird warning sign in Swedish elevator [BoingBoing; commenters there disagree as to whether the elevator in question is of an old continuous-motion type called a Paternoster which has fallen out of use in part because of its high accident risk, or an elevator of more conventional design but lacking an inner door]
- “Gambler Appeals; Wants More of His Money Back From Casino” [South Korea; Lowering the Bar]
- The price of one Ohio Congresswoman’s vote on Waxman-Markey [Washington Times via Coyote, who has a followup]
- “Want to live like tort king Melvin Belli?” [real estate listing in Pacific Heights; WSJ Law Blog]
- Fierce moral urgency yada yada: “Put nothing in writing, ever” advised Carol Browner on CAFE regs [Mark Tapscott, D.C. Examiner] Alex Beam zings Obama on signing statements [Boston Globe]
- Constitution lists only three federal crimes: treason, piracy, and counterfeiting. How’d we get to 4,500 today? [Ryan Young, CEI "Open Market"]
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A high-profile federal environmental prosecution has struck out following charges of prosecutorial misconduct as well as disputes over the quality of the evidence [Montana's News Station, Van Voris/Bloomberg] Carter Wood and others have been blogging the case at Point of Law, and a joint blog effort of the University of Montana’s law and journalism schools has given the case extensive coverage. See also Kirk Hartley.
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Harrowing story of Brian Leckie, an Ontario therapist and crisis counselor cleared on charges of sexual assault; the legal fees ate up his life savings, and there’s nowhere he can turn to get his good name back. “Only the ER nurses seemed to give me the benefit of the doubt, because they’ve seen it. They’ve seen the lies and the accusations that come through emergency rooms. They see it all the time.” Meanwhile, the two accusers whose charges a judge found to have “no credible” basis cannot even be named in the press because of a publication ban [Mark Bonokoski, "Justice for an innocent man", Toronto Sun, May 4, via Amy Alkon]
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Wisconsin: “A Beloit teen faces three felony charges after allegedly burglarizing cars in Janesville to help pay for a lawyer, according to a criminal complaint.” [Beloit Daily News via Obscure Store]
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The Supreme Court “has agreed to consider whether a law barring videotapes and other depictions of animal cruelty violates the First Amendment.” The law could result in criminal charges being filed over, say, videos of bullfights or cockfights taken in nations where those practices are perfectly lawful, or taken in U.S. states where until recently various forms of animal fighting were lawful. The Third Circuit ruled it an unconstitutional infringement on free speech. [ABA Journal, Lyle Denniston/SCOTUSBlog, Adler @ Volokh; earlier] Nearly ten years ago (yes, believe it or not, this blog will turn 10 as of the first of July) we covered the original federal legislation, and visitors still arrive regularly at this site after searching on the term “crush videos”.
As we noted in a 2006 post, litigators for the Humane Society of the U.S. have been trying to force the U.S. Postal Service to ban the use of the mails by animal-fighting magazines like The Feathered Warrior. Now, according to an HSUS release, they have gotten a judge to order the USPS to reconsider its non-censorship policy. [Rebecca Baker, "Completely Legal" Gannett Westchester legal blog, Apr. 23]
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You may recall the earlier trial of the Kentucky fen-phen attorneys who had stolen tens of millions of dollars from their clients ended in a mistrial for two and an acquittal for their third compatriot. This time around, a federal court jury, after ten hours of deliberation, found William Gallion and Shirley Cunningham Jr. guilty of eight counts of fraud and one count of conspiracy. A streamlined prosecution case no doubt helped make a difference; defense attorneys sought to blame the matter on Stan Chesley, who negotiated the underlying settlement and received millions more than he was contracted to receive, and it remains mysterious why he was not charged. [Courier-Journal]
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At least if there’s no one around watching.
And Larry Ribstein reasonably asks: What about Jeff Skilling?
Baltimore: “Accepting a plea bargain that her attorney described as unprecedented in American jurisprudence, a 22-year-old Maryland woman yesterday agreed to cooperate in the prosecution of other defendants in the death of her son under the condition that charges against her be dropped if the child rises from the dead.”
Notice one thing missing in the New York Times’s discussion of the ethical complaint against Texas Court of Criminal Appeals Judge Sharon Keller? That’s right: any discussion of the underlying merits of the appeal that Keller refused to permit to be filed late. The Supreme Court held in Baze v. Rees that lethal injection was constitutional. Michael Richard, who raped and murdered a mother of seven, had multiple levels of meritless appeals, and this is a complaint that he should have gotten yet another one at the eleventh hour to raise a brand-new attack on his death sentence, and that Judge Keller should have politely informed the lawyers that they were asking permission for a late filing from the wrong judge to pointlessly delay the execution for another year while the Court decided Baze. One hopes that this ethical complaint and related press coverage is looked at as the political attack that it is. See also Beldar’s earlier analysis and follow-up.
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