How much punishment is enough? More than thirty years ago a jury convicted Junior Allen, a day laborer, of second-degree burglary “for stealing a $140 television set from a home in Johnston County. Judge James Pou Bailey sent Allen to prison for life.” He’s still serving that sentence, after a disciplinary record in prison that officials describe as about average for a maximum security inmate. Earlier this month, for the 26th year in a row, a parole board denied him parole. (“Justice Served? Man Serving Life Sentence For Stealing TV”, WRAL.com, Nov. 25; “Man Serving Life Sentence For Theft Of TV Seeks Freedom”, Nov. 28; “Junior Allen Denied Parole For 26th Straight Year”, Feb. 6) See TalkLeft, Feb. 16; Rooftop Report, Feb. 16.
Posts Tagged ‘crime and punishment’
“No damage award for shot burglar”
Connecticut: “A Superior Court jury has rejected a burglar’s bid for damages for being shot when he broke into a house five years ago. Clarence Wiggins of Waterbury had sued Louis Steponaitis Jr. of Torrington for shooting him in the right arm with a shotgun on Dec. 16, 1998.” (AP/WFSB (Hartford), Feb. 12).
Fricassee of Martha
Prof. Bainbridge, who has followed the Martha Stewart prosecution (see Oct. 14) and is now following the trial, reports that a series of pro-prosecution rulings by the judge is going to tie the hands of the domestic diva’s defense team, barring them, for example, from pointing out to the jury the novelty of the charges. (Jan. 26). Plus: the Washington Post has more (Brooke A. Masters, “Judge Limits Martha Stewart Defense Tactics”, Jan. 27)
Asbestos: send in the prosecutors?
Prof. Lester Brickman of Yeshiva University’s Cardozo School of Law, a noted legal ethicist and the leading academic critic of the asbestos litigation, has a devastating new 137-page article out in the Pepperdine Law Review. His contention: mass attorney solicitation of claimants has combined with willfully unreliable medical screening and witness-coaching by law firms to generate hundreds of thousands of fundamentally fraudulent claims which are obtaining unjustified payouts in the billions and even tens of billions of dollars. The only likely catalyst for reform at this point, he argues, would be a full investigation by a grand jury armed with subpoena powers. (Stuart Taylor, Jr., Dec. 31; Paul Hampel, “Many asbestos suits are fraudulent, professor says”, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Jan. 13). The article, not online but available to those with LEXIS access or in law libraries, is Lester Brickman, “On the Theory Class’s Theories of Asbestos Litigation: The Disconnect Between Scholarship and Reality”, 31 Pepp. L. Rev. 33. For our coverage of asbestos, see, e.g., Nov. 12, Oct. 24, Sept. 25, and earlier posts.
Spitzer vs. the SEC
Mike O’Sullivan at Corp Law Blog says he’s not so sure it’s a bad thing for the SEC to have a reputation as “legalistic” rather than creative in its approach to fighting market misconduct: “The SEC has a great deal of authority over the U.S. capital markets. If the SEC does not act within the four corners of the law, the SEC would inject a great deal of uncertainty into the capital markets. …
“This is one of the reasons why I think it’s inappropriate to compare the SEC to Eliot Spitzer’s operation. Spitzer feels free to use New York’s Martin Act to attack anything that strikes him as abusive, regardless of whether it’s clearly illegal. The SEC has in its arsenal nothing as open-ended as the Martin Act, and that’s a good thing for US markets. The Martin Act is, as one commentator called it (PDF), a ‘fierce sword’ of uncertainty, permitting prosecutors to stretch the definition of crimes and then engage in extensive discovery to compel their targets to capitulate. This makes the Martin Act a very useful tool for a prosecutor looking to make his mark, and a nearly useless guide to a person looking to avoid becoming the target of a prosecutor looking to make his mark.
“Beyond creating uncertainty, another interesting consequence of open-ended criminal statutes like the Martin Act is the freedom they give prosecutors to legislate on the fly.” (Dec. 29). Plus: welcome National Law Journal readers (Andrew Harris, “Waging war against Wall St. corruption”, NLJ, Dec. 22, not online, quotes me suggesting that Spitzer is “imposing a different regulatory scheme nationwide than the one imposed by the federal government,” not necessarily a good idea given that he isn’t answerable to a nationwide electorate).
Homeless sue against closure of crime-plagued park
In Bakersfield, California, a group of homeless persons are suing to prevent the city from closing International Square Park, which municipal authorities say has become a magnet for alcohol, drugs and crime. The complainants, who are being assisted by a lawyer from the federally funded Legal Services Corporation affiliate Greater Bakersfield Legal Assistance, point out that the park has provided shade and comfort to many homeless people. (“Homeless Files Suit To Prevent Park’s Closure”, KERO-TV, Dec. 19).
Dallas police fake-drug scandal
Hair-raising and, as Mark A.R. Kleiman (Dec. 16) points out, strangely underpublicized: “Dallas police paid their drug informants based on the quantity of drugs seized. So some informants decided to manufacture cases by planting fake ‘cocaine’ — variously described as the powder used to chalk billiard cues and as ground-up gypsum wallboard — on about 80 Mexican immigrants.” The bounty had been set at $1,000 per kilogram.
Main Street’s financial spies
Among its other provisions, the USA Patriot Act enacted into law sweeping authorization for the federal government to require “financial institutions” — which, it turns out, can include auto dealers, jewelry stores and other retailers — to file confidential law enforcement reports when customers display buying patterns that might suggest them to be in possession of illicit funds. (The businesses are also forbidden from telling their customers that they have informed on them to the feds.) “Know your customer” rules, rationalized as part of the ever-widening fight against money-laundering, had previously been highly controversial — see our Mar. 1999 piece in Reason — but after Sept. 11 were dusted off and enacted with an antiterrorism rationale. Recently (Dec. 1) Michael Isikoff reported in Newsweek that in two-thirds of federal law enforcement searches using the confidential reports, there has been no evident connection with terrorism at all. John Berlau has the details, in Reason Online (“Dangerous Deputies”, Dec. 5; “Show Us Your Money”, Nov.).
Tough on mushroom crime
“Stephen Fletcher II tried to grow some psychedelic mushrooms in his Lawrence apartment. Tremain V. Scott shot and killed a man at close range during an armed confrontation, then, according to an eyewitness, took the victim’s gun and shot him with it as he lay on the ground. An autopsy showed the victim had been shot 18 times.
“Both Fletcher and Scott are in their early 20s and have little or no criminal-conviction record, their attorneys say. So who’s facing the stiffer sentence? Fletcher, by double.” (Eric Weslander, “Mushrooms v. murder: Sentences in Kansas don’t all fit the crime”, Lawrence (Kan.) Journal-World, Nov. 30) (via Free-Market.net)
Pooh balloon ticket
NYC’s Finest continue their ticketing campaign said to be aimed at improving “quality of life” (if you call that living): “Police wrote Queens hospital worker George Pulido a summons for making unreasonable noise because his son Christopher’s Winnie the Pooh balloon popped on the street.” (Leo Standora, “The most un-pop-ular bust of all?”, New York Daily News, Dec. 4)(via Hill-Kleerup, which comments, “Just keep telling yourself, ‘They don?t have ticket quotas ? they don?t have ticket quotas ? they don?t have ticket quotas ? right?'”)