Recently in Law & Justice Category

Everyone hates red-light traffic cameras, and someone in Arizona decided to do something about them by re-aiming cameras at the ground.

Someone in Tucson isn't happy about the city's red-light cameras.

A vandal re-aimed most of the traffic cameras at collision-prone intersections over the weekend in an apparent attempt to keep them from snapping photos of speeders and red-light runners, an official said.

This doesn't strike me as "vandalism" since there was no damage or defacement. What this looks like to me is civil disobedience.

It would be more efficient, though, to use some sort of spraying device to shoot paint at the camera lens from the ground or from a car. Not that I'd advocate such a thing.

(HT: Instapundit.)

No doubt Barack Obama is poised to announce either a more diplomatic approach or a total withdrawal from his home city:

Fifty-four shootings in two weekends. Shot-up bodies recovered in groups of three and five. Is this Ramadi? Basra? No.

Welcome to Chicago.

After a recent outbreak of gun-related violence, Mayor Richard Daley is now pushed into supporting a plan by new Police Superintendent Jody Weis to arm 13,000 Chicago police officers with assault rifles. Depending on how many weapons are eventually deployed, this may develop into the largest militarization of police patrol officers in United States history. If the department arms 10,000 of their officers with M4s, the police will have 9,900 more assault rifles in Chicago than the U.S. Marines presently have in Fallujah, Iraq.

Advice to Senator Obama as he aspires to run a whole country: Physician, heal thyself.

(HT: Instapundit.)

BBC North American editor Justin Webb reports from Missouri on the tranquility and safety of gun-toting America:

Wait till you get to London Texas, or Glasgow Montana, or Oxford Mississippi or Virgin Utah, for that matter, where every household is required by local ordinance to possess a gun.

Folks will have guns in all of these places and if you break into their homes they will probably kill you.

They will occasionally kill each other in anger or by mistake, but you never feel as unsafe as you can feel in south London.

It is a paradox. Along with the guns there is a tranquility and civility about American life of which most British people can only dream.

What surprises the British tourists is that, in areas of the US that look and feel like suburban Britain, there is simply less crime and much less violent crime.

Doors are left unlocked, public telephones unbroken.

One reason - perhaps the overriding reason - is that there is no public drunkenness in polite America, simply none.

I have never seen a group of drunk young people in the entire six years I have lived here. I travel a lot and not always to the better parts of town.

It is an odd fact that a nation we associate - quite properly - with violence is also so serene, so unscarred by petty crime, so innocent of brawling.

That's the difference between American citizens and British subjects. A free and armed population can police itself.

(HT: Instapundit.)

The FBI sure seem to have a loose definition of "terrorism":

The car was reported stolen last week. After the theft, the car’s owner was fueling his motorcycle when he spotted his stolen car.

“While he was refueling his motorcycle, low and behold, the vehicle that he had reported stolen that belongs to him happened to pull into the gas station area also,” said Los Lunas Police Captain Charles Nuanes.

The car’s owner pulled the keys out of the ignition of his stolen car and the people in the car fled.

When police arrived, they found the explosive device and less than $1,000 worth of Iraqi cash.

“We don’t know what their intentions were,” said Nuanes. “We don’t know what they were planning on doing with any of this.” ...

FBI agents say that they have ruled out terrorism.

Uh... I can't imagine how the FBI managed to rule out terrorism. Explosives... Iraqi money... stolen vehicle... there's nowhere to go from there except terrorism. Maybe the FBI and/or the reporter meant that there's no indication of terrorism, or that there's no indication of a connection to al Qaeda, but a claim to have ruled terrorism completely out begs credulity.

Furthermore, does anyone want to hazard a guess about how the Iraqi cash and explosives got to Los Lunas, New Mexico? Maybe over our porous southern border?

(HT: GatewayPundit.)

I like this mom's determination to punish her son for sabotaging the vacuum to get out of doing chores, but I'm not sure her method was optimal.

For your consideration: a 13-year-old boy in Virginia decided that it was a good idea to break the family vacuum cleaner in order to get out of his chores around the house and play video games. Not so fast whippersnapper. It looks like your mom won this round.

She has decided to sell her kid's Xbox 360 on eBay. But the story continues. It turns out that while his mom was going through his computer, she checked out the cookies and found that her innocent little boy was frequently checking out porn sites. So she decided to hack into his My Space page. The mom talks about the incident and states:

"My 13 year old managed to break the vacuum....thinking it would release him from that duty. He also has a list of other chores that were TYPED up for him to do Friday afternoon....one thing on the list was done...mind you these are simple things...empty the trash, clean your room, etc.

"Then I go thru the cookies on his computer and find out he has been checking out porn sites. Now there is a password so he can't even get on and his my-space page has a picture of snoopy on it now. Apparently I'm the meanest mom in the world, were his words.

"I'm a single mom. I can't let them walk over me or I might never get up ."

The mom could really maximize her own economic interests here by taking the Xbox and games and forcing the kid to buy them back from her at retail price... she'd get more than via an eBay auction, unless she really needs the cash immediately for a vacuum.

Still, that's all nitpicky (my specialty!). Good for mom! Video games are obviously corrupting our youth.

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa thinks Immigration and Customs Enforcement should spend its time protecting illegal immigrants rather than deporting them.

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is asking federal officials to rethink their policy on workplace immigration crackdowns that involve established businesses and to focus on employers that mistreat workers instead. ...

He said ICE should spend its limited resources targeting employers who exploit wage and hour laws.

Unless I'm mistaken, labor law enforcement isn't under ICE's purview.

Chertoff has not responded to the mayor's letter, but Homeland Security spokeswoman Laura Keehner said the department believes its priorities are correct.

She said work-site investigations focus on national security and public safety and that the agency also investigates companies it believes may have committed visa fraud, money laundering, and other violations.

It's obvious that you can't deport all of the tens of millions of illegal immigrants that are in America, but this sort of work-site enforcement is a critical component of the attrition strategy that is most likely to make a dent in the problem. When you punish one employer and deport a dozen of his employees, hundreds of other people are put on notice. Other employers will tighten their employment practices, and illegal immigrants will self-deport when the environment is no longer conducive to their presence.

Black Los Angeleans made a scene at this morning's City Council meeting demanding the reversal of Special Order 40 -- the rule that prohibits law enforcement officers from inquiring about an arrestee's legal residency status.

Woo-whee, the testimony was riveting this morning before the Los Angeles City Council when a group of black residents pleaded with the 15 elected council members to rescind Special Order 40, the longtime local rule protecting illegal immigrants from arrest by the LAPD.

The black residents are seeking a decision by the council to enact the so-called Jamiel's Law, named after Jamiel Shaw, a promising and law-abiding 17-year-old high school student allegedly shot by an illegal immigrant, 18th Street Gang member Pedro Espinoza. The noxious Espinoza, who has a massively long rap sheet, was arrested by cops in Culver City, and then released by Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department jailers, shortly before he allegedly murdered Jamiel.

Jamiel's family members cried openly in the ornate Council Chambers, asking the council to allow cops to check on the illegal status of people like Espinoza so they can be deported rather than released.

Council President Eric Garcetti couldn't change the subject fast enough -- to a plan to force even more obnoxious billboards on Angelenos.

Leftist racial politics coming home to roost. (My thoughts on Special Order 40.)

(HT: Mockey Kaus.)

Several years ago I wrote a short series of posts about our society's despicable tolerance of prison rape, and this editorial by Ezra Klein presents a good opportunity to raise the matter again: "There's nothing funny about prison rape".

These hearings are held annually. This year's transcripts aren't online yet, but in 2006 you could have heard a man named Clinton explain, "I had no choice but to enter into a relationship with another inmate in my dorm in order to keep the rest of them off of me. In exchange for his protection from other inmates, I had to be with him sexually any time he demanded it. It was so humiliating, and I often cried silently at night in my bed ... but dealing with one is better than having 10 or more men demanding sex from you at any given time."

Clinton's testimony wasn't very funny, and it wasn't for entertainment. Nor was the 2001 report by Human Rights Watch, "No Escape," which included a letter from an inmate confessing that "I have no more feelings physically. I have been raped by up to five black men and two white men at a time. I've had knifes at my head and throat. I had fought and been beat so hard that I didn't ever think I'd see straight again."

Prison rape occupies a fairly odd space in our culture. It is, all at once, a cherished source of humor, a tacitly accepted form of punishment and a broadly understood human rights abuse. We pass legislation called the Prison Rape Elimination Act at the same time that we produce films meant to explore the funny side of inmate sexual brutality.

If we as a culture really want to subject our criminals to this sort of torture then let's do it explicitly, not with a wink and a nudge. I'm abstractly in favor of corporal punishment, but this sort of sexual abuse is clearly beyond the pale and should be loudly condemned and quickly eliminated.

NPR has an interesting take on why burglaries have been declining for decades:

"I was a salesman. I could sell anything," Mathis says, as he waits to see his probation officer at a city building in Washington, D.C. "Go get me some toilet paper, and I could sell it."

For almost 20 years, Mathis burglarized homes to support a drug habit. He only got caught a few times. Mathis says he stopped breaking into homes because there's just no money in it anymore.

"If you're going to do a burglary, you need to have some buyers," Mathis says. "Everybody has everything now."

Mathis says there's just too much on the street already. Everyone he knows already has a digital camera, iPod knockoffs and pirated DVDs shipped in from China.

"And if it's not new, a lot of people don't even want to fool with it," Mathis says.

Forget about last year's video games and old laptops, Mathis says. And don't even bring a VCR or boxy TV to the street.

"You can get a TV for nothing almost," he says. "People are giving them away now."

How's this for a definition of what it means to be a "wealthy" nation: legal commerce puts the black market out of business.

Perhaps most interesting is that private enterprise isn't just attacking burglaries from beneath, but also from above.

The program and the street economy may have turned Mathis' life around, but criminologists say there are other reasons behind the 30-year drop in burglaries — such as the 1 million private police and security guards at work in residential communities.

Two years ago, Steve Southworth, a private police investigator for the Wintergreen Resort in central Virginia, spent six months tracking the movements of a burglar who traveled along the Appalachian trail. ...

In the past, remote communities like this one were ripe for thieves. But since residents started paying for their own private officers, crime has dropped 70 percent.

Maybe a wealthy free market can provide solutions to problems that even many libertarians often believe require government intervention?

Of course, the flip side is that gadget robberies are up.

(HT: Marginal Revolution.)

The title above is controversial in many ways. Defense attorneys didn't step forward to exonerate an innocent man sentenced to live in prison for the crime they knew their client committed. Outrageous on the face, but the issue is more complex than it may appear at first glance. (I'll try to excerpt the important points, but you may want to read the whole thing.)

Alton Logan was convicted of killing a security guard at a McDonald's in Chicago in 1982. Police arrested him after a tip and got three eyewitnesses to identify him. Logan, his mother and brother all testified he was at home asleep when the murder occurred. But a jury found him guilty of first degree murder. ...

Logan, who maintains he didn't commit the murder, thought they were "crazy" when he was arrested for the crime.

Attorneys Dale Coventry and Jamie Kunz knew Logan had good reason to think that, because they knew he was innocent. And they knew that because their client, Andrew Wilson, who they were defending for killing two policemen, confessed to them that he had also killed the security guard at McDonald's - the crime Logan was charged with committing. ...

The problem was the killer was their client. So, legally, they had to keep his secret even though an innocent man was about to be tried for murder.

"I know a lot of people who would say, 'Hey if the guy's innocent you've got to say so. You can't let him rot because of that,'" Simon remarked.

"Well, the vast majority of the public apparently believes that, but if you check with attorneys or ethics committees or you know anybody who knows the rules of conduct for attorneys, it’s very, very clear-it's not morally clear-but we're in a position to where we have to maintain client confidentiality, just as a priest would or a doctor would. It's just a requirement of the law. The system wouldn't work without it," Coventry explained.

Even if Coventry and Simon had been willing to betray their client, their testimony would not have been admissible in court. The attorney-client privilege belongs to the client, and even if the attorneys published a book their information could never be considered at trial. Coventry and Simon could probably have found some way to exonerate Logan, but they took their duty to their own client very seriously.

Were they right to? Is a system that requires these kinds of decisions really interested in "justice"? In the end, I think so. Commenter Malvolio at The Volokh Conspiracy has the most significant point in my opinion:

If you pay attention, you'll notice that attorney-client confidentiality didn't make the unfortunate Mr Logan any worse off. If no confidentiality existed, Wilson would simply not have confessed to his lawyers. Wilson would have gotten a worse defense, but Logan would not have gotten a better one.

If attorneys were allowed to break privilege (or did anyway) when the stakes were "high enough", then their clients simply wouldn't share their secrets. The clients would lose the benefits of expert legal advice, and the "victims" of the secrets would still suffer.

Additionally, in a world without attorney-client privilege it's non-lawyers who would suffer the most. Lawyers who go on trial would be able to represent themselves and hold all their secrets in their minds, but non-lawyers would be forced to rely on another person who could not be trusted to the degree one trusts oneself.

As difficult as the situation is to reconcile with simple morality, I believe it is true that the legal system as a whole is more fair and ethical than it would otherwise be precisely because some of its participants are allowed/required to behave in a way that would be considered immoral in another context.

A Missouri man was threatened with jail for not paying a red-light camera ticket, but when he got a lawyer the city of Arnold dropped the ticket.

The lawsuit by Fenton residents James and Kara Hoekstra alleges that the ticketing process is illegal and unconstitutional, collecting fines through fraud and extortion to benefit the city and its red-light camera contractor. It seeks unspecified damages from the city, several city officials, and the contractor, American Traffic Solutions Inc.

The couple received a ticket in the mail from Arnold on Aug. 15, accusing them of running a red light in a 2005 Jeep on July 29. It demanded a payment of $94.50. City records show it was one of 13,921 citations issued between October 2005 and Jan. 24, 2008.

The lawsuit said James Hoekstra was threatened with arrest when he refused to pay, but that the city dropped the ticket after he got a lawyer.

There's a possibility that the red-light cameras violate state law, and the allegation is that the city dropped the ticket so it wouldn't have to defend its cameras in court and risk losing the system entirely.

Former LAPD detective Mark Fuhrman is at it again, this time trying to frame The Juice for beating up on his girlfriend.

O.J. Simpson's girlfriend, Christie Prody, was hospitalized with head injuries this week and those injuries are consistent with assault, not a fall, the National Enquirer is reporting. They were the ones that first broke the news of the hospitalization.

Simpson contends that Prody was drunk and fell, causing her injuries, but cops aren't convinced and insiders are saying otherwise.

Christie may be facing brain surgery.

The cops "aren't convinced" because they're trying to set OJ up again! They'll never be happy as long as The Juice is loose.

(HT: The Wife.)

Everyone knows the Congressional "investigation" into steroid use in baseball is a ridiculous joke. However, I'm in favor of it! In fact, I think every Congressional committee should spend the rest of the year holding hearings, getting autographs, and investigating whether or not grown men are cheating at a ball game.

Why? Because Congress is largely incompetent. They're like an anti-King Midas: everything they touch turns to crap. Sure, there are hundreds of problems in our country with vastly more import than whether or not ball players cheat, but that's all the more reason to keep Congress distracted by celebrities and inanity. Every day they spend investigating baseball is a day they aren't raising taxes, writing earmarks, wasting money on social engineering, restricting our liberties, humiliating us in the eyes of our enemies, and undermining the War on Terror.

So I say, on with the hearings! This way, our prosecutors and judges can spend their valuable time pursuing important crimes.

Despite recent cries by at least one Missouri state legislator for a repeal of our state's liberal concealed-carry law, it's pretty obvious that concealed weapons would have saved lives at Kirkwood City Hall last week.

Thornton fired all six rounds from the revolver and an unspecified number of shots from the .40-caliber semiautomatic pistol he took after killing police Sgt. William Biggs near City Hall, Panus said. There were some shots still left in the police weapon.

Thorton killed the two police officers on the scene first, because he knew they had guns. They were carrying their guns in plain view, so he knew they were threats. If any of the other people present had been carrying a concealed weapon, Thorton likely could have been stopped long before he killed half-a-dozen more people.

St. Louis County police Officer Tracy Panus said Wednesday that it remained unclear whether Thornton owned the large-caliber revolver he took to the scene. "If it had been stolen, I bet we would have heard by now," she said.

There was no indication whether Thornton had a concealed-carry permit, which is not a public record in Missouri.

I'll bet you $100 that Thorton didn't have a CCW. CCW holders are 300 times less likely to commit crimes than people without permits. Not 300% less likely, 300 times less likely. That's 30,000%. Repealing the CCW law wouldn't have stopped Thorton, but it would guarantee that the would-be victims of such massacres will be unable to defend themselves.

Citizens, except for the council-members themselves, are prohibited from carrying concealed weapons in city government buildings by state law, and that regulation set the stage for this tragedy. The recent Tinley Park shootings could also have been stopped if one or more of the five murdered women had been carrying a concealed weapon. The only people stopped by gun restrictions are law-abiding citizens. The psychos manage to get weapons despite the laws. "Gun-free zones" seem to be some of the most dangerous places.

(HT: St. Louis CofCC Blog.)

Here's a lawsuit that could create a form of school vouchers through tax deductions if the plaintiffs are successful.

A Jewish couple's bid to take a tax deduction they say the IRS reserves only for members of the Church of Scientology is getting a friendly reception from a federal appeals court, increasing the possibility of a ruling that could create a tax break for taxpayers of many religions who pay tuition to religious schools.

During arguments on the case this week, three judges who ride the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals expressed deep skepticism of the IRS's position that the way the agency treats Scientologists is irrelevant to the deductions the Orthodox Jews, Michael and Marla Sklar, took for part of their children's day school tuition and for after-school classes in Jewish law.

"The view of the IRS is it can unconstitutionally violate the Constitution by establishing religion, by treating one religion more favorably than other religions in terms of what is allowed as deductions, and there can never be any judicial review of that?" Judge Kim Wardlaw asked at the court session Monday in Pasadena, Calif.

Basically the IRS has been allowing scientolgists to deduct the cost of their "education" from their taxes since at least 1994, but refusing to treat Christians, Jews, Muslims, or any other religion the same way. Apparently there's quite a history between the IRS and Scientology, and the IRS agreed to this special treatment in exchange for the Church of Scientology dropping thousands of lawsuits against the agency in 1993.

A policy of tax-deductible private school tuition would be superior to any form of distributivist school voucher scheme I've yet seen. Let's hope this case continues to play out favorably.

(HT: TaxProf Blog.)

It's sad that police detective Jarrod Shivers was killed during a drug raid, but the responsibility for his death lays with his police department and not with the man who shot him.

Portlock residents who saw a deadly police shooting unfold on their “quiet street” are finding it difficult to return to normalcy. The man accused of killing Detective Jarrod Shivers said he had no idea the man he shot was a police officer until it was too late. ...

Shivers, a 34-year-old father, was shot as was trying to enter at the house in the street’s 900 block around 8:30 p.m. He and several other officers were there with a search warrant as part of a drug investigation, police said. ...

Police arrested 28-year-old Ryan David Frederick, who lived at the home, and charged him with first-degree murder and use of a firearm in the commission of a felony. He is being held in the Chesapeake City Jail.

Frederick said in a jailhouse interview Friday he had no idea a police officer was on the other side of the door when he opened fire.

“No, sir,” he told WAVY-TV. “I just wish I knew who they were,” he said. “I didn’t want any trouble.”

Frederick said he was in bed when he heard someone trying to come into the home.

“I thought it was the person who had broken into my house the other day,” he said.

Frederick said his home had been burglarized two or three days earlier.

Frederick has no criminal record, and the police won't reveal any information about the investigation that led to this drug raid.

Police did not say whom they were investigating when they executed the search warrant. Other than a few misdemeanor traffic violations, Frederick has not been convicted of any felony crimes in Chesapeake, according to online court records.

Chesapeake police spokeswoman Christi Golden said she could not comment on specifics of the incident, including whether the officers who tried to serve the narcotics warrant were in uniform.

Sounds to me like the police screwed up and one of their officers is the victim. The tragedy will only get worse if Ryan David Frederick is prosecuted for this killing, apparently done in self-defense in his own home in the middle of the night.

(HT: The Agitator.)

In addition to the excitement of the election season, I'm also very keen to observe how Arizona's plan to punish the employers of illegal immigrants works out for the state. One of the great benefits of our federal system of government is that one state can try out a concept before the rest of us buy into it.

As you know, I'm a strong advocate for controlled and reduced immigration. A lot of people claim that it's impossible to stem the tide of illegal immigrants to our country without mass deportations, and that even if we could reduce the flow it would destroy our economy. Well, Arizona is poised to find out.

The law, passed days after a federal immigration overhaul died in the U.S. Senate in June, punishes first-time violators who knowingly hire undocumented workers with a 10-day suspension of their business licenses.

A second offense means they lose it.

The measure also requires employers to use an online federal database, dubbed "E-Verify," to check the employment eligibility of new hires in the border state, which is home to an estimated 500,000 illegal immigrants.

Many employers like Bailey say they are pruning their workforce of illegal immigrants to avoid prosecution, or have outsourced some operations to neighboring states and even over the border to Mexico.

Other businesses have put a freeze on expansion in Arizona out of fear they will face prosecution should they inadvertently hire an illegal immigrant.

That's the main wrinkle in Arizona's plan: going off illegal immigrant labor cold-turkey might reduce the state's competitiveness in relation to other American states. National enforcement of immigration laws would ensure that all states are playing on an even field. This factor might distort the results of this experiment, but there's still a lot we will learn despite this headwind.

For example, not mentioned in the article is the enormous amount of money that Arizonans will save by not having to educate and care for illegal immigrants and their children. The theory is that though illegal immigrants do provide some benefits for an economy, they're a net drain and Arizona should reap benefits from their disappearance. If the theory is wrong, we should be able to see it in the Arizona data in a few years.

In either event, the most significant result of this experiment can already be seen: illegal immigrants are already leaving the state. If it turns out that Arizona needs their cheap labor to survive, then the solution isn't to re-enable illegal immigration, but to set up a tightly controlled framework for legal immigration and temporary workers. We might be willing to trust the federal government with this responsibility once it demonstrates to us that it's serious about ejecting the people who are already here illegally and opening our doors to aspiring immigrants in a fair and controllable manner.