Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Crime and punishment roundup

  • Why Baltimore’s Civilian Review Board hasn’t done much to fix its police crisis [J.F. Meils, Capitol News Service/Maryland Reporter]
  • Three prosecutors with high national profiles who’ve put up dogged, maybe too dogged, resistance to actual-innocence claims [Lara Bazelon, Slate]
  • Carceral liberalism: Advocates press to do away with statute of limitations for sex assault prosecutions [Scott Greenfield]
  • “No charges have been filed against the cops. All of the officers involved are still employed by the department.” [Christina Carrega, New York Daily News on nearly $1 million award to Oliver Wiggins, unsuccessfully framed for DWI after police car ran stop sign and crashed into his vehicle]
  • Founding-era views of duty-to-retreat vs. stand-your-ground might be more complicated than you think [Eugene Volokh]
  • The trial penalty “is among the most important features of America’s criminal justice system, and yet there is no reference to it in the Constitution” [Clark Neily, Cato]

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4 Comments

  • Back in the bad old days you were at the most risk when attempting to disengage / retreat. Fighting retreats were required, all out flight lead to slaughter. Now tell me again about this duty-to-retreat?

    • By cecil

    • I have the same opinion of the duty to retreat. It’s absurd on two fronts.

      1. Reasonably assessed, safe retreat would almost never be viable.

      2. The law for cops, who are supposed to be trained professionals, is that it’s patently unreasonable to subject cops to an objective assessment of the reasonableness of the use of force. But that’s exactly what the duty to retreat does to untrained civilians.

      • By MattS

  • A long time ago I was an armed security guard. Every two years we had to do refresher training. Part of that training was about the laws governing shoot don’t shoot situations. As the law was written then (early 90’s) if somebody started shooting at me and the only available cover was in their direction (think nearly empty parking lot), if I used that cover and then returned fire killing the person shooting at me, I was going to jail. Think that one through.

    • Where?

      • By MattS