From folktale collections to videogames and beyond, the notion that violent entertainment will turn kids violent seems to live on forever no matter how skimpy the evidence [Trevor Burrus, Cato]
Archive for March, 2018
Ninth Circuit finds public sector contingency fees constitutional
The use of contingency fees by governmental plaintiffs incentivizes sharp practice and overzealous litigation in lawyers charged with representing the general public; it also invites corruption and end runs around democratic legislatures intended at making law through litigation. All these evils manifested themselves in the tobacco and gun rounds of mass litigation, and there are some cases offering precedent for the proposition that their use can violate defendants’ rights to due process. Nonetheless, the Ninth Circuit has lately upheld a California district attorney’s hiring of outside law firms on a contingency basis against such a challenge [Amanda Bronstad, The Recorder] And the Supreme Court last month refused to review a challenge to the New Hampshire attorney general’s use of contingency-fee counsel in an opioids suit against Endo Pharmaceuticals [Peter Hayes and Steven M. Sellers, Bloomberg, in a piece surveying current use of public contingency fees more broadly]
Alabama law enables sheriff to eat well
Under an Alabama law passed before World War II, many county sheriffs can keep what are deemed extra sums allocated for inmate meals but not used for that purpose. Some large counties require the surplus to be turned over to general county funds. Can sheriffs of other counties convert the funds to personal use? In Etowah County (Gadsden), a local resident says he was paid to mow the sheriff’s lawn with checks from from the sheriff’s “Food Provision Account.” [Connor Sheets, Al.com] And in a followup, four days later local police arrested the resident who had told the reporter about being paid for lawn-mowing. The raid, said to have been based on an anonymous call reporting the odor of marijuana issuing from within an apartment, resulted in charges against him later bumped up to felony drug trafficking based on weight: “Once that marijuana was mixed with the butter then the whole butter becomes marijuana, and that’s what we weighed.” [Sheets, Al.com]
Judges under fire in California
On California judicial elections and the Judge Aaron Persky recall, it looks as if Berkeley law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky and I come down on the same side [Maria Dinzeo, Courthouse News]:
“I want judges deciding cases based on the law and the facts, not public opinion,” he said in an interview Thursday.
Chemerinsky, who has denounced the recall effort against Persky as misguided, again came to the judge’s defense and called the move to unseat him [over a sexual assault sentence perceived as lenient] “troubling.”…
Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute’s Robert Levy Center for Constitutional Studies, said situations like Persky’s can be an easy launchpad for agitators looking to whip up voters.
“It’s very common and easy for rulings that other judges of many different stripes and philosophies agree was the correct decision to get turned into something people can rail against, like saying they’re soft on crime or soft on sexual assault,” Olson said. “It’s easy to make judges look bad for doing what may be a good job.
…“We don’t want a judiciary that keeps an eye on popularity polls when deciding guilt or innocence.”
Four incumbent judges on San Francisco Superior Court are also being targeted at the polls for defeat because, although Democrats themselves, they were appointed by former Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Medical roundup
- Burdensome though it is in other ways, HIPAA does not create a private right of action, so no big-ticket damage suits. Connecticut high court rides to rescue by creating new tort for breach of medical confidentiality [Steven Boranian, Drug and Device Law]
- Details of cases aside, once again, should federal law really be requiring healthcare employers to grant religious exemptions to staff unwilling to undergo flu vaccination? [Department of Justice press release on suit against Ozaukee County, Wisconsin; earlier on EEOC settlement against North Carolina hospital]
- First Amendment should come into play when FDA bans drug providers from making truthful statements about their therapies [Henry Miller and Gregory Conko, Reason] And a Cato panel discussion on FDA regulation of speech with former Vascular Solutions CEO Howard Root (author of “Cardiac Arrest”), Christina Sandefur of the Goldwater Institute, and Jessica Flanigan of the University of Richmond, moderated by Cato’s Michael Cannon;
- “Uberizing Nonemergency Medical Transportation” [Ann Marie Marciarille, Prawfsblawg]
- “Protecting Reasonable Physician Choice in Medical Product Cases” [Luther Munford, Drug and Device Law]
- Britain’s National Health Service lurches toward crisis in negligence payouts [BBC, Paul Goldsmith, Centre for Policy Studies]
A tale of targeted property taxes
Congratulations! You may not have realized it was happening, but your municipality has put you in a special revitalization zone which means the property taxes you owe them will quintuple. That’s the message some suburban Maryland business owners got recently, subject of my new Cato piece. Excerpt:
Specialists in local and state government policy are full of ideas for business-by-business and location-by-location tinkering with tax rates, both downward (as part of incentive packages to lure relocating businesses) and upward (to finance special public services provided in some zones, such as downtown revitalization). But there is a distinct value in terms of both public legitimacy and the rule of law in having uniform and consistent taxation that does not depend on whether a property owner or business is on the ins or on the outs with the tax-setting authorities.
Now out: Radley Balko and Tucker Carrington on Mississippi forensics scandal
On Thursday I attended a Cato forum with Radley Balko and Tucker Carrington on their new book on the extraordinary Mississippi forensics scandal, “The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist: A True Story of Injustice in the American South.” Excerpt of blurb from event:
Over the past 25 years, more than 2,000 individuals have been exonerated in the United States after being wrongfully convicted of crimes they did not commit. There is good reason to believe that tens or even hundreds of thousands more languish in American prisons today.
How this can happen unfolds in the riveting new book from Radley Balko and Tucker Carrington. The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist recounts the story of two Mississippi doctors—Dr. Steven Hayne, a medical examiner, and Dr. Michael West, a dentist—who built successful careers as the go-to experts for prosecutors and whose actions led many innocent defendants to land in prison. Some of the convictions then began to fall apart, including those of two innocent men who spent a combined 30 years in prison before being exonerated in 2008.
Balko and Carrington reveal how Mississippi officials propelled West and Hayne to the top of the state’s criminal justice apparatus and then, through institutional failures and structural racism, empowered these two “experts” to produce countless flawed convictions on bad evidence and bogus science….
The book recounts in detail the unlikely claims that can be put across for supposed autopsy and bite-mark evidence, especially when no well-informed lawyer appears on the other side to push back. In addition to an exceedingly high volume of autopsy reports for police, Hayne was also available for medical expert witness testimony in civil litigation. We’ve been on the story for ten years: see links here, here, here, here, and here.
Related: The dubious forensics of “shaken baby syndrome” have been known for years. This Mississippi man remains on Death Row for it. [excerpt from book in Reason]
Claim: government should regulate YouTube recommendations
There is some evidence that algorithms employed by YouTube to suggest next videos can foster rabbit holing, in which curious newcomers are drawn into ever more extreme and outrageous content, including fever-swamp ideology. That’s a legitimate concern, for sure, but in this instance it’s melded with blithe urgings that the state get in and impose its ideological will on content, as if that wouldn’t raise dangers of its own [Zeynep Tufekci, New York Times] Note also a body of research contrary to the notion that social media encourages the formation of ideological bubbles and reinforcement [John Samples, Cato; Michael A. Beam, Myiah J. Hutchens and Jay D. Hmielowski, Information, Communication & Society (“Facebook news use was related to a modest over-time spiral of depolarization.”)]
Dan Lewis on the unlucky past of Vernon, Florida
A small town in the Florida Panhandle has long tried to live down its special place in the history of insurance fraud. “By the time the early 1960s rolled around, according to the Tampa Bay Times, Vernon, Florida was responsible for roughly two-thirds of all loss-of-limb-related insurance claims in the United States.” I’ve written on the story a number of times, and Dan Lewis of the oft-recommended-here Now I Know website penned this account in 2012 which I seem to have overlooked at the time, an omission I remedy herewith.
“Tread Carefully on Mental-Health Reform”
Compulsory civil commitment under a lighter burden of proof, or with less advance process? Government lists of those who have sought help with mental health problems? “Conservatives who are understandably concerned about the potential slippery slope of gun control [should] recognize a similar slickness when it comes to mental illness.” [Mike Tanner, National Review/Cato]