Overlawyered » prosecution http://overlawyered.com Chronicling the high cost of our legal system Tue, 14 Feb 2012 16:11:47 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 en hourly 1 America as “prosecutocracy” http://overlawyered.com/2012/02/america-as-prosecutocracy/ http://overlawyered.com/2012/02/america-as-prosecutocracy/#comments Sat, 04 Feb 2012 14:56:02 +0000 Walter Olson http://overlawyered.com/?p=27348 Deposed press lord Conrad Black is taking a public stand against the law enforcement and corporate-governance authorities that put him behind bars. [Andrew McCarthy/The New Criterion, earlier]

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]]> http://overlawyered.com/2012/02/america-as-prosecutocracy/feed/ 0 Labor and employment law roundup http://overlawyered.com/2012/01/labor-and-employment-law-roundup-3/ http://overlawyered.com/2012/01/labor-and-employment-law-roundup-3/#comments Fri, 13 Jan 2012 05:12:05 +0000 Walter Olson http://overlawyered.com/?p=26697
  • NLRB rules employment contracts that specify arbitration for group grievances violate federal labor law even in nonunion workplaces [D. R. Horton, Inc. and Michael Cuda; Ross Runkel, Corporate Counsel]
  • Richard Epstein on “living wage” legislation [Defining Ideas]
  • In Greece, law providing early retirement for “hazardous” jobs was extended to some that are not so hazardous, like hairdressing, pastry making and radio announcing [Mark Steyn via Instapundit, IBTimes, Reuters]
  • “Prosecutor’s double-dippers draw millions from New Jersey pension funds” [Mark Lagerkvist, DC Examiner] Even if convicted on felony charges of misappropriation of public funds, Beverly Hills school superintendent unlikely to forfeit pension [LA Times]
  • “Against Forced Unionization of Independent Workers” [Ilya Shapiro on Cato amicus brief in Harris v. Quinn]
  • Whoops: UAW officials appeal extortion sentence, 6th Circuit sends it back as too lenient [AutoBlog via Kaus]
  • New York appeals court makes it harder to get weak NYC job-bias cases dismissed on summary judgment [Judy Greenwald, Business Insurance] Connecticut’s job-bias commission doesn’t seem to consider any cases frivolous any more [Daniel Schwartz]
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    ]]>     http://overlawyered.com/2012/01/labor-and-employment-law-roundup-3/feed/ 2     Kim Strassel: “Stringing Up Gibson Guitar” http://overlawyered.com/2011/11/gibson-raid/ http://overlawyered.com/2011/11/gibson-raid/#comments Sat, 26 Nov 2011 21:04:05 +0000 Walter Olson http://overlawyered.com/?p=25899 Kim Strassel has a must-read piece at the Wall Street Journal exposing the politics of the Lacey Act’s extension to importation of plant products, by no means fueled just by inflexible environmentalist sentiment: crucially, wood-products industry and union forces recognized that the law could serve as a way to eliminate competition from imports.

    Trees are ubiquitous, are transformed into thousands of byproducts, and pass through dozens of countries. Whereas even a small U.S. importer would know not to import a tiger skin, tracking a sliver of wood (now transformed into a toy, or an umbrella) through this maze of countries and manufacturing laws back to the tree it came from, would be impossible.

    Furniture maker Ikea noted that even if it could comply with the change, the “administrative costs and record-keeping requirements” would cause furniture prices to “skyrocket.” The wood chips that go into its particleboard alone could require tracking back and reporting on more than 100 different tree species.

    Which is exactly what the Lacey expanders wanted.

    The WSJ also recently interviewed Gibson Guitar CEO Henry Juszkiewicz [related, Reuters; earlier] while Pat Nolan points out how the feds’ raid on the facility points up many evils of unbridled prosecution power [NRO] Musicians and others held a “We stand with Gibson” rally and concert [Mark Perry, rally pics] As for press coverage, Andrew Revkin at the NYT notes that outrage over the raid is energizing those horrid “anti-regulatory campaigners” ["DotEarth"] while an op-ed contributor at the paper explains that (not to sound like those same awful campaigners!) the operation of the Lacey Act does indeed menace innocent artisans who make musical instruments [Kathryn Marie Dudley] Tim Cavanaugh finds the L.A.Times strumming a derivative ideological tune, while Radley Balko notes, in a police-restraint-for-me-but-not-for-thee vein, that a reporter arrested at Occupy Nashville had mocked concern over the gun-toting Gibson raid. More: ABA Journal.

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    ]]>     http://overlawyered.com/2011/11/gibson-raid/feed/ 6     Prosecution roundup http://overlawyered.com/2011/11/prosecution-roundup/ http://overlawyered.com/2011/11/prosecution-roundup/#comments Fri, 25 Nov 2011 16:08:03 +0000 Walter Olson http://overlawyered.com/?p=24896
  • Six-year-old charged with sexual assault [Channel3000.com, Wisconsin; Radley Balko]
  • “Beware: Cities Hunting You Down For Reagan-Era Parking Tickets” [David Kiley, AOL]
  • Waco, Texas: “McLennan DA fights DNA testing because exonerations override juries” [Grits for Breakfast] Robert Mosteller, “Failures of the Prosecutor’s Duty to ‘Do Justice’ in Extraordinary and Ordinary Miscarriages of Justice” [Legal Ethics Forum]
  • Controlled substances: “Could a US lawyer lawfully counsel clients about this proposed new law?” [John Steele, LEF]
  • Mens rea erosion a “deeply troublesome trend” [Kevin LaCroix on WSJ] “Trial penalty,” long sentence minimums give prosecutors muscle to extract plea deals [NYT, Sullum] “Settlements feed U.S. prosecutor overreach” [Reynolds Holding, Reuters BreakingViews] “Responsible corporate officer doctrine” worries pharma defense lawyers [WSJ Law Blog] “The continuing quest to criminalize business judgment” [Kirkendall]
  • “More than three-quarters of turn-of-the-century Chicago homicides led to no criminal punishment — not because the perpetrator could not be identified, but because no jury would convict.” [William Stuntz's posthumous book via Cowen]
  • “Scalia criticizes narcotics laws” [for over-federalization] [WSJ]
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    ]]>     http://overlawyered.com/2011/11/prosecution-roundup/feed/ 2     Prosecuting Wall Street executives http://overlawyered.com/2011/10/prosecuting-wall-street-executives/ http://overlawyered.com/2011/10/prosecuting-wall-street-executives/#comments Fri, 14 Oct 2011 14:35:10 +0000 Walter Olson http://overlawyered.com/?p=25142 My new Cato post has a suggestion for Time magazine: how about prosecuting only the executives who’ve actually committed crimes? (& Kenneth Silber, RealClearPolitics “Best of the Blogs”). Related: Politico.

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    ]]>     http://overlawyered.com/2011/10/prosecuting-wall-street-executives/feed/ 6     “Devil’s Bargain: Wall Street and the Martin Act” http://overlawyered.com/2011/08/devils-bargain-wall-street-and-the-martin-act/ http://overlawyered.com/2011/08/devils-bargain-wall-street-and-the-martin-act/#comments Tue, 30 Aug 2011 11:15:11 +0000 Walter Olson http://overlawyered.com/?p=24354 My new op-ed at the New York Post looks at the history of Spitzer-to-Cuomo-to-Eric Schneiderman prosecutorial overreach and asks: how exactly did the New York Attorney General come to have so much power with so little constraint? (& welcome Instapundit, Real Clear Markets, Timothy Carney/Examiner, CEI readers)

    More: I and others have written about the act here and at Point of Law.

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    ]]>     http://overlawyered.com/2011/08/devils-bargain-wall-street-and-the-martin-act/feed/ 1     “Sometimes the dog means the difference between a conviction and an acquittal” http://overlawyered.com/2011/08/sometimes-the-dog-means-the-difference-between-a-conviction-and-an-acquittal/ http://overlawyered.com/2011/08/sometimes-the-dog-means-the-difference-between-a-conviction-and-an-acquittal/#comments Wed, 10 Aug 2011 10:52:24 +0000 Walter Olson http://overlawyered.com/?p=24215 Prosecutors bring in adorable “therapy dogs” to assist witnesses in rape and abuse trials. Aside from the jury sympathy issue, and the possible sending of “this is a victim” signals, defense lawyers argue that the dogs’ presence makes testimony easier whether accusations are true or not: “They argue that as a therapy dog, Rosie responds to people under stress by comforting them, whether the stress comes from confronting a guilty defendant or lying under oath.” [N.Y. Times] More: Greenfield.

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    ]]>     http://overlawyered.com/2011/08/sometimes-the-dog-means-the-difference-between-a-conviction-and-an-acquittal/feed/ 4     Prison for unauthorized use of “Smokey Bear” image http://overlawyered.com/2011/07/prison-for-unauthorized-use-of-smokey-bear-image/ http://overlawyered.com/2011/07/prison-for-unauthorized-use-of-smokey-bear-image/#comments Tue, 26 Jul 2011 05:17:20 +0000 Walter Olson http://overlawyered.com/?p=24019 Great WSJ article on the unending proliferation of federal crimes, with appearances by a family that ran into a law making it a felony to dig for arrowheads on federal land, Bobby Unser and his snowmobile-astray ordeal, and a man effectively ruined by the $860,000+ cost of successfully defending himself against a federal charge of violating Russian hunting regulations.

    “Most people think criminal law is for bad people,” says Timothy Lynch of Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. People don’t realize “they’re one misstep away from the nightmare of a federal indictment.”

    More: from Tim Lynch, and (via PoL) Josh Blackman, William Anderson/Regulation mag.

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    ]]>     http://overlawyered.com/2011/07/prison-for-unauthorized-use-of-smokey-bear-image/feed/ 13     A false-statement epidemic? http://overlawyered.com/2011/07/a-false-statement-epidemic/ http://overlawyered.com/2011/07/a-false-statement-epidemic/#comments Mon, 18 Jul 2011 12:12:26 +0000 Walter Olson http://overlawyered.com/?p=23905 Jeff Rosen has a sharp review in the New York Times of a new book by veteran business writer James Stewart entitled “Tangled Webs: How False Statements Are Undermining America: From Martha Stewart to Bernie Madoff”:

    Although Stewart, now a business columnist for The New York Times, claims that lying has been on the rise, a more plausible thesis is that prosecutions for false statements have been rising — not because of growing contempt for the truth but because defendants are increasingly prosecuted for doing nothing more than denying their guilt to investigators. (These are the kinds of lies that courts used to excuse under a doctrine called the exculpatory no.) It wasn’t until the post-Watergate era that prosecutors began routinely to indict people not merely for lying under oath but for lying to federal officials even when not under oath — using a novel law that is the basis for several of the prosecutions Stewart celebrates.

    (& Bad Lawyer)

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    ]]>     http://overlawyered.com/2011/07/a-false-statement-epidemic/feed/ 6     Faulty forensics, child death division http://overlawyered.com/2011/07/faulty-forensics-child-death-division/ http://overlawyered.com/2011/07/faulty-forensics-child-death-division/#comments Wed, 13 Jul 2011 16:03:38 +0000 Walter Olson http://overlawyered.com/?p=23816 A Frontline/NPR/Pro Publica joint investigation makes a powerful case that prosecutors have drawn on the work of errant labs and expert witnesses to generate unreliable charges, and sometimes convictions, following unexplained deaths of children. Among the targets: numerous parents falsely accused of murdering their own children.

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