Posts Tagged ‘crime and punishment’
Obstruction-of-justice charges
They can serve prosecutors as a versatile weapon, notes Harvey Silverglate, guestblogging at Volokh.
December 16 roundup
- Depiction of violence? School said to require psychiatric evaluation of eight year old over drawing of crucifix [Taunton, Mass. Daily Gazette] Update: More complicated than that? School officials call report inaccurate [Boston Globe, Michael Graham]
- “US games company sues British blogger” [Evony, in Australia, Guardian; our earlier coverage here and here]
- Blawg Review #242, on a Chanukah theme, is by Ron Coleman at Likelihood of Confusion;
- Repetitive head injury: “Assumption of risk and football” [Magliocca, ConcurOp]
- If you like CPSIA you may love proposed new chemical regulation law, TSCA [Deputy Headmistress]
- If we had to adopt the Precautionary Principle consistently, well, odds are we wouldn’t [Somin/Volokh]
- “Sex Offender Law Nabs Man Shooting Hoops in His Driveway” [Radley Balko, The Agitator]
- Funny: “How Not To Go From Banking To Law School” [Helen Coster, McSweeney’s via John Carney]
On overcriminalization
My Manhattan Institute colleague Marie Gryphon has a new paper out on the subject (“It’s a Crime: Flaws in Federal Statutes That Punish Standard Business Practice”, while James Copland has some comments (“Vague law is bad law”) on the “honest services fraud” cases before the U.S. Supreme Court.
Best face forward
A Florida judge OKs the use of a cosmetologist’s makeup services at taxpayer expense to cover up a capital defendant’s hateful tattoos at trial — at least the tattoos acquired after his arrest. [Obscure Store, BoingBoing]
Annals of attorney endorsements
The Yelp! website is better known for restaurant and hotel reviews, but is branching into reviews of attorneys, which generates from me a reaction mirroring the site’s exclamation point. Facebook friend M.F.B. found one that was tellingly revealing, and can be paraphrased as “I was guilty as Tiger Woods in a Las Vegas cocktail lounge, but ‘[t]hanks to Mr. _____ I have my license back and was not found guilty for a DUI.'”
U.K.: Find discarded gun, bring it in to cops, get convicted for possession
Could such a sequence of events actually happen? It seems to have happened to Paul Clerke of Merstham, England. [ThisIsSurreyToday via Coyote]
Great moments in drug enforcement law
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.
On the lam, and on the dole
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.
October 12 roundup
- 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]