The Vancouver radio station lists us as one of its “Geek of the Week” sites (Jul. 25). First-time visitors often enjoy our personal responsibility items, and we’ve got a section for items from Canada.
Archive for July, 2004
Racial Profiling
Should the police use race as one of the characteristics upon which they make decisions about stopping and searching motorists or pedestrians? (The question assumes, of course, that the police are not operating from a description of a specific individual believed to be involved in a crime.) Among those who have answered “no” to a question of this sort is our nation’s Attorney General. Others think that the practice is OK, as long as it is consistent with efficient policing: after all, you wouldn’t want to focus lots of law enforcement on groups that are rare offenders, such as elderly women. But is it right that a black driver on I-95 in Maryland in the late 1990s was five times more likely to be subject to a search than was a white driver?
Those who take the “efficient policing” position often say that the disproportionate number of stops is OK, as long as the probability that a searched motorist is carrying contraband (in the case of anti-drug enforcement, the aim of most of the highway searches) is about the same for blacks as for whites. (This probability is sometimes called the “hit rate.”) By this reckoning, if only 5 percent of the blacks who are searched are found to be carrying drugs, while 20 percent of the whites searched are carrying, then the racial disparities in searches are not consistent with efficient policing and should be curtailed, eliminated, or reversed. On the other hand, if the hit rate for searches is about 20 percent for both groups, then the use of race as an indicator might be acceptable.
But I and my co-author, Michael Alexeev of Indiana University, think that this standard “efficient policing” story is mistaken, for reasons that I will mention after the “Continue reading…” link.
Brazil Hoping To Shoot Down Suspected Drug Planes
Starting in late October, Brazil intends to shoot down planes flying within its airspace that it suspects of drug trafficking. The story began to receive publicity about a week ago, and today’s New York Times has an article. Brazil’s decision stirs memories of the tragic killing of a US missionary and her child under a similar policy in Peru in 2001.
The Times article includes a couple of quotes from “Gen. Mauro Jos? Miranda Gandra, a former chief of the air force who is now director of the Air Institute at Est?cio de S? University in Rio de Janeiro.” Gen. Gandra is concerned, it seems, that the shootdown policy will not be applied to any planes with children in them:”‘This really left me perplexed, because it practically undermines the very purpose of the decree,’ General Gandra said. ‘What you’re doing is creating a safe-conduct pass for drug-smuggling aircraft carrying kids and creating the possibility that children will be kidnapped and used as human shields.'”
Yes, drugs are so evil that you have to be willing to shoot down planes with children in them to combat drug trafficking. Anything short of that is a dangerous half-measure.
Update: Microsoft fee-ing frenzy
“A group of national law firms that failed to recover significant damages in federal antitrust suits against Microsoft is demanding a cut of the $15.5 million in fees awarded to plaintiffs lawyers in a Florida class action suit against the software giant.” Cohen, Milstein, Hausfeld & Toll and thirty other firms that prosecuted a mostly unsuccessful federal class action say the lawyers in the Florida case used information they developed and, although they never signed an agreement to share fees, should cough up a quantum meruit. “The federal lawyers were spectacularly unsuccessful and only got one small class certified,” said Daryl Libow of Sullivan & Cromwell, who represents Microsoft. “They weren’t satisfied with the fees, so they started roaming the country to see if they could get more.” (Laurie Cunningham, “Lawyers in U.S. Microsoft Case Want Cut of Fees in Miami Suit”, Miami Daily Business Review, Jul. 23). More on Microsoft cases: Jul. 9, Mar. 31 and links from there.
Attractive Nuisance and Drug Laws
Now I am no lawyer (we are overlawyered anyway, right?), so don’t rely upon this information, but I don’t think you can legally set up a clown mannequin on your property near the street and booby trap it in such a way that if a little kid walks up to the clown, he will, say, fall into a deep ditch. It’s called an attractive nuisance, and your argument that you should not get in trouble, that the kid was himself behaving illegally by trespassing, is likely to fall upon deaf ears.
But if we are the government, what can we do? We can make it illegal to traffic in a commodity that many people want to consume. Then, a black market will develop, and of course it will develop primarily in bad neighborhoods where schools are rotten and legal earning prospects are poor. Then, we will occasionally police the black markets, and any young men who actually are tempted to sell the verboten commodity we label as reviled “drug pushers” or maybe even “drug kingpins,” and we put them away for a long, long, time. And the penalties applied to adults will be so significant, in fact, that 12 and 13 and 14-year old kids in these poor neighborhoods will have a comparative advantage in working in the trade, so we will have to arrest them, too, even if we can’t lock them up for quite so long. And we will shake our heads at the immorality of those folks in the bad neighborhoods who allow their youngsters to become drug pushers.
And while we are at it, we can set up ongoing integrity tests for the police, too. As drug transactions are voluntary, they generally don’t involve a direct victim who has incentives to go to the cops (especially if the transaction is not creating a public nuisance). A less-than-vigilant drug enforcement officer will not have complaints piling up on his sergeant’s desk, as he might if he neglected to investigate robberies, say. Anti-drug officers will quickly learn that their own efforts aren’t going to alter much of anything, that people will still buy and sell drugs, anyway, and that the drug use in and of itself only directly harms the user. And the officers also see that they can earn a lot of money, maybe thousands of dollars a month, by turning their heads at the appropriate times. Some of them do, and some of those get caught, and we are happy to label them “corrupt cops” and “bad apples,” and ship them off to prison, too, shaking our heads at their immoral acts that have brought shame upon our nation’s finest.
Now I am no lawyer, but maybe we should think about extending this notion of attractive nuisance to some of our drug laws, too.
More Victories in the War on Drugs
Singapore executed a man last week after he was caught with 6 pounds of marijuana. In the more enlightened US of A, he would have been unlikely to receive more than 20 years in prison.
Surely, if marijauna use would have been widespread during the Scottish enlightenment, Adam Smith would never have written about a smuggler in the terms that he actually did use in 1776: “a person, who, though no doubt highly blameable for violating the laws of his country, is frequently incapable of violating those of natural justice, and would have been, in every respect, an excellent citizen, had not the laws of his country made that a crime which nature never meant to be so.”
Update: Mich. high court throws out Chrysler harassment award
It won’t come as much surprise to readers of our May 31, 2001 item (“Fieger’s firecrackers frequently fizzle”) that the Michigan Supreme Court has thrown out controversial attorney Geoffrey Fieger’s $20 million jury win on behalf of Linda Gilbert, a female millwright harassed by co-workers at a Chrysler assembly plant in Detroit. “The jury verdict is so excessive and so clearly the product of passion and prejudice that there can be no justification for the trial court’s denial of defendant’s motion for a new trial,” wrote Justice Robert Young Jr. in the majority opinion. Three dissenting justices on the seven-member court thought that reducing the award would be adequate remedy for the problems with the trial. (David Eggert, “Michigan Supreme Court Overturns $21 Million Verdict Against DaimlerChrysler”, AP/Law.com, Jul. 23). More: Dawson Bell, “Harassment verdict is overturned”, Detroit Free Press, Jul. 23; Ernie the Attorney.
Questions for Sen. Edwards
More on Alcohol Taxation
My initial Overlawyered guest post calling for higher excise taxes on alcohol in the US motivated a particularly thoughtful and lengthy reply from Radley Balko over at The Agitator, and his post has been followed by a fair number of comments. While I agree with many of the arguments that Radley and his commentators raise, there are a few points of contention. I will make a couple of remarks here, and then move any further discussion on my part to Vice Squad. If you are already tired of this, do not click on the ?Continue reading?? link.
Beach blanket bankruptcies
The meter in the Enron bankruptcy just hit $700 million (Brendan I. Koerner, “Explainer: Who Pays Enron’s Legal Bills?”, Slate, Jul. 15)(see Dec. 6 and links from there). And it’s not as if the execs in the Pacific Gas & Electric bankruptcy are doing too shabbily for themselves either (David Lazarus, “Bankruptcy has its rewards for PG&E execs”, San Francisco Chronicle, Jul. 23).