If you’re high-ranking figures in a federal prosecutor’s office, don’t resort to pseudonymous rants on comment boards to settle scores, especially not if it means commenting on open cases that your office is handling [three now-resigned officials from the U.S. Attorney’s office in New Orleans; WWL, Gambit, Daily Mail]
Posts Tagged ‘prosecution’
The Right rethinks prisons
How a seemingly unlikely assortment of libertarians, religious conservatives and small-government advocates have been helping to turn around the debate on incarceration. [David Dagan and Steven Teles, Washington Monthly]
Economic incentives and the Aqueduct horse deaths
In the New York Daily News, Lawrence Cunningham argues that skewed economic incentives — some of them advanced by the actions of federal prosecutors, who applied muscle in a tax-fraud settlement to press for the casino-ization of Aqueduct Race Track — contributed to the deaths of 21 racehorses, most of whom were entered in races with purses artificially inflated so as far to exceed their own economic worth. “Politicians and prosecutors should not direct business changes without understanding their significance. What’s happening to the horses at Aqueduct could have been prevented.”
The terrible things that can happen in drug labs
And we’re not just talking the amateur meth kind. [Scott Greenfield]
Prosecutors lend letterhead to debt collectors
The letters to persons who have written bad checks, which threaten jail, “bear the seal and signature of the local district attorney’s office. But there is a catch: the letters are from debt-collection companies, which the prosecutors allow to use their letterhead. In return, the companies try to collect not only the unpaid check, but also high fees from debtors for a class on budgeting and financial responsibility, some of which goes back to the district attorneys’ offices.” Moreover, “the ultimatum comes with the imprimatur of law enforcement itself — though it is made before any prosecutor has determined a crime has been committed.” [New York Times; commentary, Scott Greenfield, BoingBoing]
August 20 roundup
- Former county prosecutor convicted of theft is still prosecutor in another county [Nebraska Watchdog]
- Epstein vs. Posner on patents [via Josh Wright, TotM] “Congress Takes Aim at ‘Patent Trolls’ With SHIELD Act” [Lisa Shuchman, Corporate Counsel]
- “Guest Post: The Bucky Balls Ban” [Free-Range Kids, earlier]
- Preacher Bill Keller threatens defamation suit against SPLC unless it removes his ministry from “hate group” list [Ed Kilgore, Washington Monthly, earlier on SPLC vs. critics]
- Both sides of the law: “Shon Hopwood robbed five banks. Now he’s a budding attorney with a pair of U.S. Supreme Court cases under his belt.” [Lincoln, Neb. Journal Star]
- “New Mexico Supreme Court Will Hear the Elane Photography Case” [Volokh, earlier here, here]
- James Huffman on tort law: “How modern law promotes victimhood over liberty.” [Hoover “Defining Ideas”]
On the Gibson Guitar raid
Gibson CEO Henry Juszkiewicz, WSJ, excerpted at PoliceMisconduct.net:
In America alone, there are over 4,000 federal criminal offenses. Under the Lacey Act, for instance, citizens and business owners also need to know – and predict how the U.S. federal government will interpret – the laws of nearly 200 other countries on the globe as well. Many business owners have inadvertently broken obscure and highly technical foreign laws, landing them in prison for things like importing lobster tails in plastic rather than cardboard packaging (the violation of that Honduran law earned one man an eight-year prison sentence). Cases like this make it clear that the justice system has strayed from its constitutional purpose like stopping the real bad guys from bringing harm.
Harvey Silverglate says that while Juszkiewicz is right as far as he goes, he’s seeing only part of the picture. Earlier on the Gibson raid and Lacey Act here, here, etc.
Prosecution and police roundup
- Appalling: localities partner with tax-farming “probation” firms to run up routine misdemeanor fines into crushing debts for citizenry [NYT, Tuccille/Reason] “Pay Up: Criminal Justice Debt in Philadelphia” [Penn Law/YouTube, Brennan Center]
- “The institute estimates a wrongful conviction rate in sex assault cases of between 8-15%” [Richmond Times-Dispatch; Urban Institute via Balko] For the guilty, marginalization may worsen recidivism: “Do Sex Offender Registries Make Us Less Safe?” [Prescott, Regulation mag, PDF] Sex-offense detention for dollars [Greenfield]
- Majority of Florida voters support Stand Your Ground [Quinnipiac; Glyn/NRO; earlier, Sun-Sentinel] Collection of cases in which Florida SYG defense was asserted [Tampa Bay Times; Ta-Nehisi Coates; Jacob Sullum on TBT’s slant, related by Sullum here and here] Bipartisan origins of Florida SYG statute differ greatly from what you may have heard [Daily Caller, auto-plays video] “Two studies on Stand Your Ground” [Robert VerBruggen/NRO] Florida lawyer Troy Webber’s analysis of law [Hussein & Webber] Related: Jeralyn Merritt.
- Problems with police dogs as evidence [Balko, Greenfield]
- Tennessee: “Mom jailed for letting kids play at park” [Lenore Skenazy, Free-Range Kids, related]
- Tenth Circuit adopts broad view of already-broad federal wire fraud statute [Paul Enzinna/PoL]
- New Gotham law will fine taxi drivers up to $10K for giving ride to a prostitute, drivers will have to take a course on recognizing what hookers look like [Amy Alkon]
Did Maryland farmer pay a price for criticizing federal prosecutors?
Readers will remember from this series of posts in April and May how the U.S. Attorney’s Office for Maryland brought and then settled charges against Randy and Karen Sowers of Middletown, Md., over “structuring” of bank deposits, that is, the conscious holding of transactions under $10,000 to avoid triggering paperwork and federal scrutiny. Now Van Jones of the Baltimore City Paper, who has led the coverage of the story, has some unsettling new allegations:
Randy Sowers is not the only Maryland farmer recently targeted by federal money-laundering investigators for illegally depositing cash his business earns in increments of $10,000 or less, in order to avoid triggering bank-reporting requirements. But Sowers, whose South Mountain Creamery (SMC) dairy farm in Middletown, near Frederick, is a popular fixture at Baltimore-area farmers markets, is the only one to exercise his First Amendment rights and talk to the press about it.
For that, Sowers’ lawyers say, the Maryland U.S. Attorney’s Office (USAO-MD) has made him pay—an assertion that U.S. Attorney Rod Rosenstein denies, despite an e-mail sent to Sowers’ attorney by the chief of Rosenstein’s asset forfeiture and money laundering section, Stefan Cassella, that appears to state exactly that.
David Watt and Paul Kamenar, attorneys for Sowers, say during negotiations over a deal to settle the charges, Watt asked Cassella why the government was insisting on particular concessionary language it had not obtained in the settlement of similar charges against a farmer named Taylor on the Eastern Shore. Cassella sent back a one-line email that read: “Mr. Taylor did not give an interview to the press.” In an e-mail to U.S. Attorney Rod Rosenstein, Cassella has stated that the Sowers settlement was “not a punishment for exercising his First Amendment rights.”
“NY gives prosecutors too much power”
And some pols want to make it worse, broadening the already dangerously broad Martin Act [Jim Copland, NY Post] My take on the Martin Act here.