Archive for the ‘Criminal Procedure’ Category

Original Habeas Writ

posted by Danielle Citron

My brilliant colleague Lee Kovarsky is an expert on the theory and practice of habeas corpus.  He’s a wunderkind.  One can find him, in any given week, arguing habeas petitions before an appellate court, working on the first habeas casebook entitled Federal Habeas Corpus: Executive Detention and Post-Conviction Litigation with his co-author Brandon Garrett, and, as I imagine is true this week, grading civil procedure exams.  Professor Kovarsky is also writing ground-breaking articles.  Here is the abstract for his most recent work entitled Original Habeas Redux, published by the Virginia Law Review:

In Original Habeas Redux, I map the modern dimensions of the Supreme Court’s most exotic jurisdiction, the original habeas writ. The Court has not issued such relief since 1925 and, until recently, had not ordered a case transferred pursuant to that authority in over fifty years. In August 2009, by transferring a capital prisoner’s original habeas petition to a federal district court rather than dismissing it outright, In re Davis abruptly thrust this obscure power back into mainstream legal debate over both the death penalty and the Supreme Court’s appellate jurisdiction.

Scrambling to understand how the authority has evolved since its nineteenth-century heyday, commentators have been severely limited by the absence of any data reporting the attributes of the original petitions themselves. I have filled that empirical void by collecting and organizing the only modern original habeas data, and this Article presents those results for the first time. The data shows that the vast majority of original petitioners are criminally confined, but that they are not collaterally challenging that confinement in their initial habeas proceedings. Original writ procedure is now primarily a vehicle for litigating “successive” habeas corpus petitions that are otherwise subject to severe jurisdictional limits in the federal courts.

I argue that, in light of the writ’s history and the data I have compiled, Davis is not a blip in an otherwise constant state of original habeas inactivity. I observe that the availability of original habeas relief has historically exhibited two over-arching characteristics: (1) that the Supreme Court’s Article III appellate power to grant it is basically coextensive with Article III judicial power common to all federal courts; and (2) that the Court does not actually exercise that authority when it may avail itself of jurisdictional alternatives. I also present data confirming that the availability of conventional appellate jurisdiction exerts the dominant influence on the modern original habeas docket’s composition. I ultimately advance what I call the “capital safety valve paradigm”–the idea that original habeas should and likely will emerge as a means to ensure that the death penalty is not erroneously imposed.

  December 25, 2011 at 2:53 pm   Posted in: Capital Punishment, Civil Rights, Constitutional Law, Courts, Criminal Procedure, Law Practice   Print This Post   No Comments

The Phone Booths in Katz v. United States?

posted by Kyle Graham

I’ve chipped away at the K2-esque stack of Crim Pro and Torts exams that sit on my desk. Plus, if I grade another examination right now, my margin comments will consist solely of “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” So, notwithstanding my earlier prediction that grading would prevent further posts, I am allowing myself this entry as a reward and respite.

Here, I want to share an (arguably) interesting video with this blog’s readers.  As background, my Criminal Procedure course reader begins with the seminal Katz v. United States case.   The Katz case involved the government’s warrantless eavesdropping on an occupant of a phone booth situated along Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood.  As those of you who teach Crim Pro, or who took this course in law school already know, Katz is the wellspring of the “reasonable expectation of privacy” standard that has become the touchstone for Fourth Amendment analysis.

I use PowerPoints in my classes, and I’ve been searching fruitlessly for good visuals for the Katz v. United States case for some time. Stock photos of 1950s college-age kids stuffing themselves into telephone booths, movie posters for the Colin Farrell vehicle “Phone Booth,” and my simple line drawings don’t really convey the scene quite as well as I would like.

Toward this purpose, while procrastinating from grading examinations today, I came across a website that hosts several scrolling videos of the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles,  circa the mid-1960s.  I thought that one of these videos might show the fateful bank of phone booths, and in any event, continuing my search for same would provide an extremely valid excuse not to grade more exams.

According to the Ninth Circuit’s opinion below in Katz, the bank of three phone booths that Katz used was on the 8200 block of Sunset Boulevard.  And, sure enough, if one scrolls down to the fourth video on the page—the one that’s 2:48 in length—about 49 seconds in, one can see a bank of three phone booths on the 8200 block. (How do I know which block this is?  The Jay Ward studios—home of Bullwinkle the Moose, and featuring a conspicuous Bullwinkle statue in front—were located at 8217 Sunset Boulevard, quite close to the phone booths.)

I don’t know for certain that these are the phone booths involved in Katz (the caption for the video indicates it was recorded in 1967, whereas the facts in Katz took place in 1965; plus, I don’t know whether there was another set of phone booths on the [unfilmed] north side of the street), but they might well be.  Just thought I’d pass it along; even if these aren’t the same phone booths, the video conveys a nice sense of time and place for the case.

  December 20, 2011 at 8:30 pm   Posted in: Criminal Procedure, History of Law, Teaching   Print This Post   2 Comments

Back for One (or Two) Last Things—An Offer and a Request

posted by Kyle Graham

D’oh. I said that my preceding post would be the last for my guest-blogging stint, but I forgot about two things:

1. Criminal Procedure DVD Offer

First, this spring I hope to get around to an oft-delayed project of mine. I teach Criminal Procedure, and in that class I find it useful to show my students video clips of traffic stops, arrests, and other scenes to help illustrate some of the concepts we cover, and to press students about whether the officers’ actions, as shown, were appropriate under the circumstances.

I mostly rely on television shows (both scripted and reality) and YouTube clips for this purpose. These snippets can be entertaining. (My favorite online clip in this genre can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmnUx_wNqRE. I don’t use this clip, however, because I haven’t quite figured out how to tee it up for students, such that it has significant pedagogical value. Perhaps I should introduce it as the world’s worst search incident to arrest?) Yet the available selection leaves some gaps in my repertoire.

So, I plan on doing some filming of my own this year, to put together a more robust set of video clips to show to students. If any of you out there (1) teach Criminal Procedure and (2) would like a free copy of the DVD I hope to put together, please contact me via e-mail. I’ll put your name on a list and send you a copy once it’s done, which hopefully will occur sometime prior to the start of the fall semester.  (Emphasis here on “hopefully.”)

2. Criminal Procedure < 1965 Interview Subjects Wanted

Fifty years ago, Lawrence Ritter responded to the death of Ty Cobb by traveling around the country to collect oral histories from old-time baseball players before they, too, passed along. The resulting work, The Glory of Their Times, remains among my favorite books.

In the same vein, it recently struck me that we are now losing the last generation of criminal-law attorneys who practiced in the pre-Miranda, pre-exclusionary rule, pre-Gideon era. Someone who was 30 years old in 1960—the year before Mapp v. Ohio—is now 81 years of age. While we have a sense as to what the practice of criminal law was like back before the Rights Revolution of the 1960s, it nevertheless might be useful to speak with some of the remaining practitioners from that period to better understand the similarities and differences between that period, and ours. I’m aware of some oral history projects in a similar vein, but none that ask quite the questions I’d like to ask.

I already have started to identify these practitioners, but here, I ask for your help. If any of you know someone who used to practice criminal law back in the 1950s and early 1960s—be it a prosecutor or defense attorney (or judge)—who wouldn’t mind speaking with me, I would greatly appreciate it if you would e-mail me with their contact information. Better yet, if you are such a person yourself, please feel free to e-mail me directly.

In any event, happy holidays to you all.

  December 17, 2011 at 4:44 pm   Posted in: Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure, History of Law, Teaching   Print This Post   One Comment

The Other Face of Torture

posted by Kyle Graham

Earlier this week, I discussed a “pleading crime,” misprision of a felony.  Pleading crimes are offenses that parties rely upon to terminate criminal cases by way of plea deals.  Today, prompted by the recent acquittal of a California man on charges that he tortured and murdered a former adult film actress, I’ll talk about another, arguably more troubling class of criminal offenses within the criminal-code “ecosystem”—“charging crimes.”

Charging crimes are offenses that prosecutors commonly rely upon to persuade a defendant that a plea to lesser or other charges is in their best interests.  Charging crimes are often peripheral to the gravamen of a defendant’s misconduct, such that a prosecutor may not insist on convictions on these counts, on top of convictions of the “core” charge or charges.  Nevertheless, charging crimes raise the prospect of a stiffer sentence upon conviction, which gives the defendant an incentive to come to terms with the prosecution, and thus, an incentive for the prosecutor to include these counts in the initial charging mix.

OK, but what does all this have to do with torture?  Well, while I haven’t done much research on the existence of charging crimes within state codes (most of my work on this point involves federal offenses that may amount to charging crimes, like use of fire or explosives in the commission of a federal felony [18 U.S.C. § 844(h)], witness tampering [18 U.S.C. § 1512(a)], and hostage taking [18 U.S.C. § 1203]), I suspect that under California law, torture may represent such an offense.

Here in California, the crime of torture (Penal Code, § 206) occurs when an individual, acting “with the intent to cause cruel or extreme pain and suffering for the purpose of revenge, extortion, persuasion, or for any sadistic purpose, inflicts great bodily injury” on the person of another.  Torture is punishable by a life term in prison (a defendant sentenced to life in California may be eligible for parole in as little as seven years, however).

Torture is broadly worded, such that it’s not that hard to prove; it overlaps with several other crimes; and it carries severe sentencing consequences.  These circumstances make torture susceptible to charging by those prosecutors who may, in the final analysis, care less about what particular crimes a specific defendant is convicted of than about the defendant receiving a particular dollop of custody time. Toward this purpose, the in terrorem effect of a torture count may encourage a defendant charged with this offense to plead guilty to lesser crimes, such as assault, that carry shorter sentences than the torture offense—but enough time to satisfy the prosecution (and judge).  In return, the torture count will be dismissed, and its life term averted.

These situations aren’t merely theoretical.  Recently, in San Jose, two brothers accepted plea deals to lesser charges that carry sentences of (respectively) two to seven and two to eight years in prison, after they were charged with torture for assaulting a former friend whom they suspected of molesting an eight-year-old girl (the stepdaughter of one of the two defendants).  In matters such as these, a torture charge effectively creates a high-stakes game of chicken between the prosecution and the defense, except that the prosecution is driving an 18-wheeler; the defendant, a subcompact.

All this is not to say that defendants charged with torture or related offenses are not accused of serious crimes—they are; nor that these defendants, if convicted, should not be held accountable for their actions—they should be; nor that the torture charges are somehow unsupported by the evidence in these cases—they are, which is the very problem. Instead, the point is simply that by creating such a broad crime that carries such a severe sentence, California voters (torture having been enacted by initiative in 1990) have provided prosecutors with a very substantial bargaining chip, and they can’t be too surprised when, as in the San Jose case, it’s used to win some pots that one might wish had gone unclaimed.

  December 15, 2011 at 1:58 am   Posted in: Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure   Print This Post   3 Comments

Speedy Justice

posted by Gerard Magliocca

I was doing some research on the assassination of William McKinley, and I was struck by how different the process given to his murderer, Leon Czolgosz, was from modern practice.  Consider this timeline:

Sept. 6, 1901:  Czolgosz shoots McKinley in Buffalo.

Sept. 14, 1901:  McKinley dies.

Sept. 16, 1901:  Czolgosz is indicted for murder.

Sept. 23, 1901:  His trial begins.

Sept. 24, 1901:  He is convicted.

Sept. 26, 1901:  He is sentenced to death.

Oct. 29, 1901:  He is executed.

Seven weeks from act to execution!

  December 14, 2011 at 8:19 am   Posted in: Criminal Procedure   Print This Post   5 Comments

Criminal Codes as Ecosystems: The Curious Case of Misprision of a Felony

posted by Kyle Graham

Criminal codes sometimes remind me of ecosystems. Like organisms in an ecosystem, crimes within a code can be connected to one another in interesting and unexpected ways.

I’ll explain this analogy by describing a federal crime that doesn’t get much attention: misprision of a felony (18 U.S.C. § 4). Misprision of a felony occurs when a person, “having knowledge of the actual commission of a felony cognizable by a court of the United States, conceals and does not as soon as possible make known the same to some judge or other person in civil or military authority under the United States.”

This crime seems pretty banal; it’s kind of like the algae of the federal criminal code.  You never hear about a complex, multi-agency investigation into misprision of a felony.  But, like algae, misprision of a felony serves very important purposes within its environment. It is what I call a “pleading crime,” used to resolve a wide range of matters in which a federal prosecutor, for one reason or another, either (1) doesn’t want to charge a potential defendant with the “concealed” substantive crime (even though there might be sufficient evidence to charge the person with, and convict them of, this offense), but does want to charge them with a lesser, related crime; or (2) wants to resolve, via a plea bargain, a case in which the substantive crime was originally alleged, but as to which evidentiary problems or other reasons for compromise exist.

Misprision of a felony fills these roles because of its malleable nature (it applies to the concealment of any felony) and because of the sentence that adheres to the crime.  The United States Sentencing Guidelines prescribe a sentence for misprision that’s indexed to, but somewhat below, that of the concealed offense. This placement tees up misprision of a felony as a (to use Ronald Wright and Rodney Engen’s phrase) “landing point” for compromises in plea deals.

Federal charging and plea-bargaining data underscore this crime’s role as a case closer.  In federal criminal cases that terminated by plea between October 2002 and September 2007, misprision of a felony was the most serious charge at the time of initial filing in only around 600 cases (virtually all of which resulted in a guilty plea to the misprision charge, suggesting a pre-filing deal between the prosecution and defense).  Misprision was most serious charge at the time of case termination much more often, claiming this status in more than 2,300 matters.  The almost 1:4 ratio bespeaks the frequent utilization of misprision of a felony as a pleading crime.

And so, just like species in an ecosystem, even the most humble crimes may serve important functions.   Though I’m still searching for the big-picture purposes of crimes such as acting or attempting to modify the weather without proper authorization (15 U.S.C. § 330a);  the misuse of the Swiss Confederation Coat of Arms (18 U.S.C. § 708); use of the United States Army or Air Force as a posse comitatus (18 U.S.C. § 1385); and the transportation of illegal dentures (18 U.S.C. § 1821).

  December 13, 2011 at 5:00 am   Posted in: Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure   Print This Post   5 Comments

Arizona v. Gant and Inventory Searches: A Good Subject of Empirical Study, Or Not

posted by Kyle Graham

A little while back, I was considering whether to undertake an empirical study into whether law enforcement officers were relying on the inventory-search exception to the warrant requirement more often after the United States Supreme Court’s 2009 decision in Arizona v. Gant, which pared back the search-incident-to-arrest exception to the warrant requirement insofar as it applies to vehicle searches.

Some have suggested that, given the number of exceptions to the warrant requirement that exist, the diminution of one exception will simply lead to the expansion of another. I thought that the post-Gant scenario would provide as good a setting as any to test this hypothesis, especially since it’s been said that officers are relying on the inventory-search exception to the warrant requirement more often in the wake of the Gant decision.

I decided not to perform the study, however, after a casual conversation with a local police officer. After I described the proposed inquiry to him, he said, in essence, “Don’t bother.” When I asked why, he told me that the numbers would almost certainly be skewed by the fact that the post-Gant era has coincided with substantial layoffs at local law enforcement agencies, due to the recession.

These layoffs would affect my results, the officer added, not only because they resulted in fewer officers, but also because (given last-hired, first-fired seniority rules) more recently hired officers were disproportionately affected by these cuts, and more recent additions to the force tend to be more eager than senior officers are to impound vehicles and perform inventory searches on them. And so, if the data reflected fewer inventory searches, or about the same number of searches, these totals might represent the recession-affected demographics of local police departments, as much as anything else.

I don’t know if what the officer told me was correct in every particular, but I thought it was interesting, and worth passing along as another reminder of how empirical studies can sometimes run into unexpected impediments.

  December 12, 2011 at 7:07 pm   Posted in: Criminal Procedure   Print This Post   No Comments

More “Strikes”: An Unintended Consequence of Realignment?

posted by Kyle Graham

California’s counties are still figuring out how to adjust to “realignment,” the name given to the state’s efforts to comply with the judicial decree, upheld in Plata v. Schwarzenegger, that demands a reduction in the number of prisoners incarcerated in state prison.

Under one prong of this adjustment effort, many yet-to-be-sentenced convicts who once would have gone to state prison will serve their time in local jails, instead. As a general rule, defendants convicted of “serious” or “violent” felonies—also known as “strikes”—remain eligible for prison. (So do most sex offenders.) This dynamic begs the question: might realignment result in more “strike” convictions?

Here’s why this might occur:

1) While the state is footing some of the costs associated with realignment, no one knows if these payments will fully offset the costs of housing a prisoner in local jail. Meanwhile, the state is guaranteed to foot the bill if a defendant goes to state prison.

2) Furthermore, local judges and district attorneys might be loathe to clog up their jails with prisoners who will be taking up space there for several years, as might be the case post-realignment. Among the reasons why, a substantial body of long-term occupants may make it more difficult to accommodate the daily ebb and tide of short-term detainees.  Plus, some judges and district attorneys may have a lingering sense that some defendants who historically would have gone to prison should still go to prison, which now may occur only if the defendant is convicted of a strike.

3) In many cases, district attorneys have substantial discretion whether to allege, and insist upon a conviction for, a “strike.” For example, under California law, assault with force likely to produce great bodily injury is not, by itself, a strike. However, assault with force likely to produce great bodily injury that does produce great bodily injury is a strike. The threshold that caselaw and legislative history set for “great bodily injury” is not as high as one might think; on the right (or, depending on your perspective, wrong) facts, a broken jaw may suffice. Appreciating that the low bar for this “strike” may lead to disproportionate punishment, district attorneys sometimes choose not to allege a great bodily injury enhancement even when it would be justified. In other cases, prosecutors agree to dismiss the enhancement as part of a plea deal.

Put these facts together, and it seems at least possible that realignment will spur local district attorneys’ offices to charge “strikes” more often, and to insist upon more “strike” convictions in plea negotiations.  (Somewhat similar dynamics also may cause local judges to “strike” [which essentially means to remove, for sentencing purposes] prior strikes less often.)  I don’t know that this will occur, but it seems like a conceivable, if unintended, outcome.

If this result obtains, one response might be to think harder about requiring counties to foot at least some of the bill for the incarceration of the defendants they send to state prison. My colleague David Ball suggests as much in his recent paper Tough on Crime (on the State’s Dime): How Violent Crime Does Not Drive California Counties’ Incarceration Rates —And Why it Should, which provides an interesting take on the subject.

  December 11, 2011 at 11:39 am   Posted in: Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure, Current Events   Print This Post   No Comments

Barry Bonds: The Likely Sentence

posted by Kyle Graham

Yesterday, federal prosecutors asked that Barry Bonds be sentenced to 15 months in prison, following his conviction on one charge of obstruction of justice (18 U.S.C. § 1503). A probation officer has recommended that Bonds receive only probation, and Bonds himself (understandably) agrees with the officer’s assessment.  How realistic are these respective sentencing requests?

We’ll start with the relevant Sentencing Guideline for obstruction of justice (USSG § 2J1.2), which recommends a sentence of 15-21 months for a first offender, such as Bonds.  These Guidelines are only advisory (though extremely important), of course; ultimately, the governing text is 18 U.S.C. § 3553(a), which enumerates the factors to be considered in the formulation of a criminal sentence.

I won’t go through those factors here. Instead, I’ll relate what other defendants, arguably similarly situated to Bonds, have received in recent cases. Here, I sifted through data collected by the Administrative Office of the United States Courts for FY 2003 – FY 2007, which I compiled into a single database for another project a while back. (For full citations of these datasets, please go to footnote 119 here.)

The AOUSC data capture any and all criminal cases that terminated in federal district court between October 2002 and September 2007, providing a wealth of information regarding each matter. I separated out from this mass of data the handful of cases that entailed a single conviction under 18 U.S.C. § 1503, without any convictions for other offenses. The data do not relate whether the defendant in each of these cases was sentenced as a first offender, or not; nor do they indicate whether any departures or enhancements applied in a particular case. But they do reveal the sentence that was imposed in each matter.

What I found was that 30 of the 83 defendants whose cases terminated within this time frame and who were arguably similarly situated to Bonds, in that they were convicted upon plea or guilty verdict at trial of a single count under 18 U.S.C. § 1503, received only probation (and, in some cases, a fine) as their sentences. The remaining defendants received prison time, with the median term being 24 months (again, some of these defendants were almost assuredly not first offenders, accounting for the longer sentences). The prison sentences were quite spread out, such that they did not form a bell curve; no more than five defendants received any specific term. Of these, five defendants received five-month terms, five received 12-month terms, and another five received 18-months terms.

So, if these numbers are any guide (which, I concede, they may not be), it looks like Bonds has a pretty good argument for probation.

  December 9, 2011 at 1:14 pm   Posted in: Courts, Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure, Current Events   Print This Post   No Comments

Ye Olde Professor’s Guide to Building an Exam Curve

posted by Kyle Graham

Shortly after I joined the faculty at Santa Clara Law, I wandered into the area of our library dedicated to a collection of Arcana and Occult texts. (Disclaimer: This section of the library does not, in fact, exist.) My goal: to find advice for drafting my first set of law-school examinations. I was concerned about making my exams too easy, and wanted some tips on how to construct tough, but fair, tests.

There was no one else about; the hour was late, the staff and students had left. As I wandered about the stacks, one tome caught my eye. The gold lettering on its spine twinkled in the candlelight. I reached out for it – or did it reach out for me? – and, I swear to this day, it leapt off the shelf and sprung open in my hand.

The page that revealed itself bore the image of a man dressed in ancient professor’s garb; of what precise vintage I could not tell, and there was no caption to disclose his identity. Instead, next to the portrait on the yellowed, crumbling page lay this text, written in what I hoped beyond hope was simply reddish-brown ink: “Ye Olde Professor’s Guide to Building an Exam Curve.”

Eureka! This was precisely what I had been looking for, so I read on. I will spare the reader a full recitation of the text that followed, save to say that H.P. Lovecraft himself might have claimed its contents. To ensure that my eyes, and my eyes alone, are the only ones scarred by what these pages revealed, I will simply summarize the advice it conferred, for professors and students to do with what they will. Much of this counsel concerned the concoction of Torts examinations, but may cast its dark shadow elsewhere.

The Guide related five tips:

1. Divide and Conquer

First, the accursed manual advised me to space the facts pertinent to a given issue far apart in a fact pattern. Are you a Torts professor, testing negligence per se? If so, relate the statute or ordinance in question at the very start or very end of the fact pattern, several paragraphs away from your discussion of the conduct that might implicate the measure. Or are you a Criminal Procedure professor, testing the good-faith exception to the exclusionary rule? Reference the date of the incident―say, November 2008―in passing in your introductory sentence, along with several other foundational facts; hold back on mentioning any search of the passenger compartment of a vehicle incident to arrest until a few paragraphs later; and, a few paragraphs after that, finally mention, in as offhand a manner as possible, that the resulting case is being tried in December 2011.  Voila—only the most careful exam connoisseurs will detect that you have laced their drink with a Belton/Gant/Davis good-faith issue.

2. Overlapping Theories, and Peripheral Plaintiffs and Defendants

Here, the guide recommended that I incorporate multiple theories of liability against a potential defendant; students may lock in on only one, and neglect the others. Likewise, defendants such as retailers in a strict products liability hypothetical, employers in a respondeat superior fact pattern, and landowners when intentional tortfeasors are afoot often prove difficult for students to spot, if only because their culpability seems so much less than that of other potential parties.  In the same vein, in a passage I cannot help but quote directly (for I could not have written it myself), the Guide advised, ”You will find that passing references to husbands and wives, who might have easily-overlooked wrongful-death or consortium claims, will oil the slope of your curve with student tears.”

3. Dogs that Don’t Bark

The Guide instructed that the best issues, from the standpoint of creating a curve, are those that do not require extensive factual build-up, or peculiar words or phrases that will blow their “disguise” (cf. any reference to “dynamiting” in a Torts examination), but which have a huge impact on the correct answer nevertheless. With Criminal Procedure, standing (in a situation involving multiple defendants) is just this sort of issue; with Torts, but-for causation can have a similar effect―so long as one avoids the word “caused.”

4. Sleight of Hand

Here, the Guide told me, begin by writing your fact pattern such that a particular issue looks like a slam-dunk, with a particular party getting his or her just desserts. Have a drunk driver blow through a stop sign and mow down a nun; he’s guilty of negligence, at least, of course. Or, notwithstanding Rule Three, supra, use variants of the word “conspiracy” to describe a cabal, e.g., “A and B conspired to rob a bank”; they’re clearly guilty, right? Feel free to employ adverbs liberally toward this purpose, e.g., “C cruelly drove drunk and cruelly blew through a stop sign and cruelly mowed down a nun.”

Then, Step Two: Subtly structure the facts such that A, B, and C in fact cannot be found liable. Maybe the nun was pushed in front of the drunk driver, such that even a sober driver who obeyed all traffic laws would have struck her. You get the idea. This way, a student’s moral intuition may cause them to overlook the more subtle reason why, in fact, the defendant can’t be found liable, or successfully prosecuted for a crime.

5. The Ghost

Perhaps most diabolically, the Guide advised me that the best cause of action is sometimes no cause of action at all. Students, it instructed, want to find causes of action, crimes, or other violations of the law within an issue-spotter; an exam that implicates innumerable theories, all of which fail for some reason or another, will prove especially vexing to all but the most confident students.

***

The reader will have to accept my account of this text’s existence, for as soon as I read the last words above the book shuddered and shook in my hands, then crumbled into dust.  Whether the text yielded wisdom, or only heartbreak, I cannot say; I recount this story solely for posterity, and desire not to be seen as an advocate of its mayhap baleful words.

  December 9, 2011 at 12:01 am   Posted in: Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure, Humor, Teaching, Tort Law   Print This Post   One Comment

Sandusky’s Law

posted by Kyle Graham

In the wake of the Penn State child-abuse scandal, authorities in several states have considered toughened and broader mandatory-reporting laws. These laws impose criminal penalties on certain adults, such as teachers and social workers, who fail to report known or suspected child abuse to the police.

I don’t have data on the number of prosecutions under existing mandatory-reporting laws, but others have written that these cases are relatively rare.   (And, if anything, toughening the laws by converting what are now misdemeanors into felonies will make prosecutions even less common.)  I’ve discussed elsewhere why prosecutors are often apathetic about new crimes. Here, I’ll simply point out that crimes like the mandatory-reporting offenses are quite peripheral to the everyday work of the criminal justice system.

Indeed, you might be surprised by how small a portion of any criminal code drives a very large percentage of the overall criminal docket.  To illustrate this point, a while back, in connection with some other research I am pursuing, I performed a back-of-the-envelope exercise using charging data collected from the Executive Office for United States Attorneys (EOUSA) Central Charge file for federal criminal cases that terminated in Fiscal Year 2009 (October 1, 2008 to September 30, 2009). I wanted to see (1) how many different crimes were encompassed within this dataset and (2) the number of crimes that accounted for 50,75, 90, 95 and 99 percent of these charges. (Here, keep in mind that, at least according to one source, as of 2008 there were an estimated 4,450 crimes across the federal criminal “code.” Though, in truth, no one really knows for sure, and much depends on how you go about identifying distinct “crimes.”)

Overall, the EOUSA data for federal criminal cases terminating in FY 2009 identify 1,547 distinct crimes as having been alleged in these cases.  This sounds like a lot, but keep in mind the 4,450-crime figure cited earlier; even acknowledging the apples-to-oranges comparison issue, it’s obvious that many—almost certainly most—federal crimes were not alleged in even a single one of these cases.

Of the crimes that were charged, just 14 accounted for 50.6 percent of the 191,884 counts in the FY 2009 dataset. They are, in descending order of frequency, 21 U.S.C. § 841(a)(1); 21 U.S.C. § 846; 8 U.S.C. § 1326; 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(1); 8 U.S.C. § 1326(a); 18 U.S.C. § 1343; 18 U.S.C. § 1341; 21 U.S.C. § 841; 18 U.S.C. § 1344; 18 U.S.C. § 371; 8 U.S.C. § 1324(a)(1)(A)(ii); 18 U.S.C. § 924(c); 8 U.S.C. § 1324(a)(1)(A)(iv); and 18 U.S.C. § 1347. Few surprises here; drug crimes, felony re-entry, gun crimes, and fraud offenses represent federal prosecutors’ bread and butter.  (The fraud crimes are over-represented in this dataset relative to the number of defendants charged with these offenses, since a given case many involve dozens of fraud counts.) Meanwhile, just 61 crimes accounted for 75 percent of all counts; 164 crimes, 90 percent of all counts; 291 crimes, 95 percent of all counts, and 699 crimes, 99 percent of all counts.

I appreciate that this is a very rough exercise, to be viewed with a hefty pinch of salt.  To repeat, what may represent a single crime to one observer may constitute multiple offenses to another, and I did not review the dataset carefully to grasp the logic behind its crime-coding system (thus, for example, I don’t know why the EOUSA database distinguishes between 21 U.S.C. § 841(a)(1) and 21 U.S.C. § 841), or the accuracy of the data presented.

Nevertheless, even this simplistic inquiry underscores an important, and I believe incontestable, point: Vast portions of any criminal code are effectively inert.  My guess is that any new Sandusky’s Laws will join this moribund lot.

(This exercise used the following dataset: United States Department of Justice, Office of Justice Statistics, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Federal Justice Statistics Program: Charges Filed Against Defendants in Criminal Cases in District Court – 2009 (Study 30789).)

  December 5, 2011 at 1:38 pm   Posted in: Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure   Print This Post   No Comments

AALS “Hot Topics” Program: Russia’s “Dictatorship of Law”

posted by Jeffrey Kahn

I am glad to announce that the AALS Committee on Special Programs selected my proposal as a “Hot Topics” panel for the 2012 AALS Annual Meeting in Washington D.C. next month.  The program is called: “The Dictatorship of Law: The Khodorkovsky Case, Human Rights, and the Rule of Law in Russia.”  William Pomeranz, Deputy Director of the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, will chair a panel that includes Kim Lane Scheppele (the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton), Bruce Bean (Michigan State University), Christopher Bruner (Washington and Lee University), Alexei Trochev (Nazarbayev University) and me.  The program will begin at 10:30 on Friday morning, January 6. 

Below is a description of the panel, which will occur (as perhaps a “hot topic” should) between two central events on the Russian calendar: the surprising results of yesterday’s parliamentary elections in Russia and presidential elections scheduled for March 4 that (at least until yesterday) everyone was saying would be certain to return now Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to the presidency currently held by his protégé, Dmitrii Medvedev.

During his first campaign for President of Russia in February 2000, Vladimir Putin defined democracy as a “dictatorship of law.”  This was meant to signal a shift away from the perceived lawlessness of his immediate predecessor’s governance, and to feed the nostalgia for Soviet-era stability.  As Putin starts his gambit to return to the Russian presidency, this panel examines which half of that slogan will dominate the other.  Recent developments in the most well-known case in the courts of both Russia and the Council of Europe present an opportunity to do so at a pivotal moment not only in that case but for the future of the rule of law in Russia.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky was the CEO of the Yukos Oil Company and the richest man in Russia when in 2003 he and his business partner, Platon Lebedev, were arrested and charged with crimes connected to Yukos, Russia’s most profitable and well-known private corporation.  They were convicted of fraud, causing property damage by deceit or breach of trust, and tax evasion and sentenced to eight years in prison.  Yukos was seized and sold to state-controlled companies.  In December 2010, as their sentences drew to a close, Khodorkovsky and Lebedev were convicted by another court of embezzlement and money-laundering, charges arising out of the same time period and concerning the same corporate activities that were the basis for the first conviction.  On the eve of that verdict, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin informed a nationwide television audience that “a thief should sit in jail,” a reference to a well-known Soviet mini-series that would have been quite familiar to viewers (the quote continues: “… and people don’t care how I put him away.”).  In midsummer 2011, a Russian court upheld the verdict, extending the defendants’ sentences until 2016. 

A bit more on the tension this case embodies for Russian law and human rights after the break …

Read the rest of this post »

  December 5, 2011 at 11:33 am   Posted in: Corporate Law, Corruption, Courts, Criminal Procedure, Current Events, Law School, Uncategorized   Print This Post   3 Comments

Messerschmidt v. Millender: What’s Next, After the Supreme Court Rules?

posted by Kyle Graham

The United States Supreme Court will hear oral argument tomorrow in Messerschmidt v. Millender.  In this § 1983 case, the Court will consider the circumstances in which a law enforcement officer who prepares or executes an overbroad and/or insufficiently particularized search warrant is entitled to qualified immunity from damages.

Orin Kerr has posted an analysis of the case over on SCOTUSblog; I have little to add to his thoughtful commentary. As Professor Kerr appears to, I anticipate that the Supreme Court will find that on the facts before it, the police officers in question are entitled to qualified immunity, and reverse the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

But what if it doesn’t?  The case will return to the district court, and that’s when the really interesting (and under-examined) legal issues will arise. A very large share of the appellate caselaw that involves claims brought under § 1983 concentrates upon whether a defendant or defendants are entitled to qualified immunity. There is a relative dearth of precedent concerning matters such as damages and, especially, causation.  On any remand in Messerschmidt, however, possible causation and damages problems with the plaintiffs’ case may loom large, as they did in the last warrant case decided by the Supreme Court, Groh v. Ramirez.

In Groh, as some of you may recall, a law enforcement officer (an ATF agent, to be precise) goofed by failing to list the items to be seized in the search warrant itself (in the space on the warrant reserved for identification of these items, he simply typed in the premises to be searched). These items were identified in the affidavit, however, which also stated probable cause for the search. On these facts, the Groh majority held that qualified immunity was not available to the officer.

Once the case was remanded back to the district court, the United States (Groh was a Bivens case) emphasized that the error in question really wasn’t the cause of significant damages.  To understand this argument, recall that in tort law, a plaintiff must show that the defendant’s negligence was a “but for” cause (also known as a “cause-in-fact”) of the plaintiff’s injury. The key word is “negligence,” to be distinguished from “conduct.” The Third Restatement of Torts illustrates this point using a hypothetical driver who hits a pedestrian while driving 57 miles per hour in a 50-mile-per-hour zone. According to the Restatement, if the pedestrian sues the driver for negligence, her claim will falter for lack of causation, unless the driver would not have hit the pedestrian (or would have caused less damage) if he had been driving at the 50-mile-per-hour speed limit. (Significantly, in the Restatement’s ‘non-negligent’ counterfactual, the driver is operating his vehicle at a speed that’s at the very cusp of negligence.)

Similarly, on remand in Groh, after pointing out that conventional tort rules regarding causation apply in  § 1983 cases, the United States argued that in a perfect world that resembled what actually happened—except that there was no drafting error with the warrant—a search warrant for the premises still could and would have been issued and executed, in precisely the same way that the flawed warrant was. Therefore, according to the United States, the plaintiff in Groh should receive only nominal damages, since the agent’s error, properly isolated, did not cause any actual damages.

Groh settled prior to trial, so we don’t know how that argument worked out for the United States. Nevertheless, it seems likely that if the Supreme Court affirms the Ninth Circuit in Messerschmidt, the defense will make a similar argument on remand. The principal damage item in Messerschmidt appears to be the alleged emotional distress associated with the officers’ entry. (Here, keep in mind that the warrant was executed at around 5:00 a.m.) As in Groh, the defense will stress that the same entry presumably would have occurred pursuant to a properly tailored warrant, meaning that the plaintiffs’ primary damage item wasn’t really caused by the problem with the warrant.

This argument has its strengths and weaknesses (or at least, limitations), which I will avoid for now. Perhaps the more important point is that while we all focus a great deal on qualified immunity, other elements of a § 1983 cause of action remain precedential terra incognita, or nearly so, as to many of the different types of claims catalyzed by the statute.  It takes time to “fill in” the law surrounding a legal theory, and there simply haven’t been enough published decisions regarding many § 1983 theories for this to have occurred.

Moreover, certain attributes of a cause of action tend to be “filled in” faster than others.  My suspicion is that but-for causation is typically either the last, or one of the last elements of a claim to develop a substantial body of useful caselaw-created rules.  The delay owes to the fact that but-for causation is doubly shielded from appellate review.   A jury normally determines the “cut-off” line between negligence (or otherwise improper conduct) and non-negligent behavior; and as the Restatement hypothetical illustrates, it is this cut-off that serves as the baseline for their subsequent causation determination.  In effect, an appellate court tasked to review a but-for causation determination by a jury must peer inside a black box that is itself hidden inside another black box.  Little wonder, then, that there exist few useful but-for causation guideposts in the caselaw.

  December 4, 2011 at 6:02 pm   Posted in: Civil Rights, Criminal Procedure, Supreme Court, Tort Law   Print This Post   2 Comments

Pretext, the Rule of Law, and the Good Official

posted by Jeffrey Kahn

How should citizens in a republic bound by the rule of law regard the pretextual use of law by state officials?  If the United States Supreme Court is any indicator of the answer in our own republic, we are pretty ambivalent about pretext. 

Sometimes we don’t care very much.  In its most well-known case on the subject, Whren v. United States (1996), the Court upheld the pretextual use of the traffic code (which was prolix enough to be violated sooner or later by just about any car on the road).  Whren’s car was stopped by a vice squad cop who had a hunch (but not probable cause to believe) that Whren had drugs in his car.  One lesson of this case is that you should always signal before making a turn.  Justice Scalia, writing for a unanimous Court, had another one: the police are free to do “under the guise of enforcing the traffic code what they would like to do for different reasons.”  In other words, a green light to pretextual traffic stops.

Sometimes, we care a great deal.  In Kelo v. City of New London (2005), the Supreme Court categorically rejected the idea that government officials may “be allowed to take property under the mere pretext of a public purpose, when [their] actual purpose was to bestow a private benefit.”  Likewise, interpreting Title VII in their concurrence in Ricci v. DeStefano (2009) (which concerned a city fire department), Justices Alito, Scalia, and Thomas highlighted the subjective component of liability in a civil suit for employment discrimination in a disparate-treatment case: the employer is liable if its facially legitimate reason for a decision turns out to be “just a pretext for discrimination.”  Justice Frankfurter long ago chastised the Court for sustaining a law “because Congress wrapped the legislation in the verbal cellophane of a revenue measure.”  The concept of limited and enumerated powers seems to suggest a general disapproval of pretext.

Does repeated pretextualism — whether one is making or enforcing the law — weaken the rule of law?  When tempted to use a law for an unintended purpose, how should the “good” official (read the adjective however you like) distinguish an innovative use from a destructive one?  My own motivation for this research stems from concern that using law to achieve an objective that the law was clearly unintended to achieve might do something destructive to the rule of law itself.  Maybe it does some harm to the official who wields power in that pretextual way, too, an official who may be the worst-placed government agent to exercise the sort of discretion that creative administration of the law demands.  Pretextualism may be habit-forming and, like cigarettes, unhealthy.

After the break, I’ll share my working definition of pretext and two cases separated by more than fifty years, but adopting the same pretextual technique to evade restrictions on government action.  One involves a Soviet spy whose case troubled the Supreme Court so much that the Court heard oral argument twice.  Surprisingly, that case foretold and influenced the “easy” Whren case.  The other involves a former college football player caught up in the current “War on Terror.”  That case, Ashcroft v. al-Kidd, was decided in May, also referencing Whren, but this time without such unanimity and with a lot more unease about pretext.

Read the rest of this post »

  November 29, 2011 at 3:15 pm   Posted in: Administrative Law, Civil Rights, Constitutional Law, Criminal Procedure, Immigration, Supreme Court, Uncategorized   Print This Post   No Comments

United States v. Jones and GPS Surveillance

posted by Daniel Solove

Over at the American Constitution Society blog, I have written a post about my latest thoughts on United States v. Jones, the GPS surveillance case being heard by the U.S. Supreme Court.

My earlier post about the case is here.

  November 7, 2011 at 2:24 pm   Posted in: Criminal Procedure, Privacy, Privacy (Law Enforcement), Privacy (National Security), Supreme Court   Print This Post   No Comments

The Month Ahead: Spies, Lies, Russia, and Terrorist Watchlists

posted by Jeffrey Kahn

It’s great to be back at Concurring Opinions (and thanks to Danielle for the generous (re)introduction last week).  This month, I plan to blog on a few ongoing projects and some upcoming news events.  Here are two topics soon to come, with two more after the break.

(1)  Spies.  Immigration authorities seize a suspected spy in Manhattan on the grounds that he entered the country unlawfully.  Rather than process him through the immigration system, or transfer him to the criminal justice system, he is secretly flown more than a thousand miles away, interrogated without a lawyer, and kept virtually incommunicado for almost seven weeks in a government facility on the Texas-Mexican border.  When he doesn’t break, he is transferred back to New York to be tried in federal court for a capital offense.  The evidence from his warrantless arrest and secret detention helps to convict him. 

When did this happen?

No surprise that the story resonates with our national security debates today.  But it all happened during the Eisenhower Administration.  Rudolf Abel was the top Soviet spy in North America before he was convicted of atomic espionage.  Thanks to his lawyer, his life was spared (and he was later exchanged for U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers).  I think that there are lessons to be learned from this history today, but mine seems to be the minority view.

(2)  Lies.  Okay, not lies exactly, but pretext.  (You try rhyming pretext with anything.  You’ll wind up perplexed, if not vexed, with the text that comes next.)  Pretextual use of the law is all around us.  The most common example is the law governing arrests.  In Whren v. United States, the Supreme Court unanimously agreed that the police were free to do “under the guise of enforcing the traffic code what they would like to do for different reasons,” namely, stop and search Whren’s car for drugs.  Abel’s case (referenced in Whren) presented another classic instance of pretext: his detention for an immigration violation was used for the unintended purpose of counterespionage, neatly skirting in the process constitutional protections against warrantless searches and seizures, not to mention official disappearances.  When Abel’s able lawyer argued pretext, however, the Supreme Court sustained the conviction.

Sometimes the law abhors pretext.  For example, in Kelo v. City of New London, the Supreme Court categorically rejected the idea that the state may take property under the pretext of a public purpose.  How should citizens regard the pretextual use of the law by state officials?  Does such use tend to weaken the rule of law in ways that should matter to us as individuals or as a society?  When tempted to use a law for an unintended purpose, how should the “good” official distinguish an innovative pretextual use from a destructive one?  The Supreme Court dodged these questions just last term in Ashcroft v. Al-Kidd and I’d like to think hard about why.

Read the rest of this post »

  November 6, 2011 at 1:17 pm   Posted in: Articles and Books, Civil Rights, Constitutional Law, Criminal Procedure, Government Secrecy, Uncategorized   Print This Post   3 Comments

Privacy, Police, and Public Duties: Some Interesting Developments

posted by Danielle Citron

Suppose a Federal Express employee rings your doorbell.  While standing outside on your doorstep and advising you on where to sign for your package, the employee does something unexpected and disturbing, such as threaten you.  As it turns out, you have a tiny camcorder hidden on your clothing.  Does the Fed Ex employee have a reasonable expectation of privacy during your interaction?  Your immediate reaction might be no–what a silly question.  Now, let’s suppose our Fed Ex employee is a police officer and you are in a public place, say a nightclub, and law enforcement enters and begins arresting people.  Do the police officers have a reasonable expectation of privacy as they interact with people in the nightclub?  What if the nightclub attendees use their cell phones to tape the officers as they arrest night club attendees?  Have they violated those officers’ right to privacy and should they face arrest for doing so?  Again, you might scoff at my question–are you kidding?  The latter example is not entirely of my imagination. According to the Yale Daily News, on October 2, 2010, New Haven police officers raided a downtown nightclub at 1 a.m. after receiving reports of a Yale College party of underage students.  According to witnesses, “students who tried to text or photograph the scene were told that they would be handcuffed or arrested if they did not desist.”  The raid took an hour to complete; the night ended with the arrest of five students and the Tasering of an “uncooperative student.”  The arrests weren’t outliers.  For instance, in March 2010, Maryland State Police gave a ticket to Anthony Graber, a staff sergeant for the Maryland Air National Guard, for speeding while driving his motorcycle.  Graber recorded his interaction with the officer–he had a camera on his helmet–and posted the video on YouTube.  Soon thereafter, Graber was jailed briefly after being charged with violating the state’s wiretapping law and with “possessing a device primarily used for the purpose of the surreptitious interception of oral communication.”

As in other jurisdictions, the charges did not stick.  In September 2010, a Harford County Circuit Court judge dismissed the wiretapping charges against Anthony Graber on the grounds that police can have no such expectation in their public, on-the-job communications.  The judge explained: “Those of us who are public officials and are entrusted with the power of the state are ultimately accountable to the public. When we exercise that power in public fora, we should not expect our actions to be shielded from public observation. ‘Sed quis custodiet ipsos cutodes’ (“Who watches the watchmen?”).”   The judge refused to find Graber’s use of the helmet cam illegal, noting that the state’s argument would render illegal “almost every cell phone, Blackberry, and every similar device, not to mention dictation equipment and other types of recording devices.”  (Similarly, in the Yale matter, the Chief of Police publicly stated that the students had the right to tape the officers).

Fast forward to September 2011.  Government Technology reports that the U.S. Department of Justice has granted $500,000 to the Phoenix Police Department and the Arizona State University College of Public Programs to buy 50 video camera systems that police officers will wear on their uniforms.  In exchange for this “Smart Policing” grant, the Phoenix Police Department and ASU will study how the video cameras impact policing effectiveness and the public’s satisfaction with officers’ performance.  Last year, the Community Engagement and Outreach Task Force recommended that city police pilot the wearable cameras to improve the department’s relationship with the public and to encourage a higher level of professionalism.  (Just after the Yale nightclub fiasco, the New Haven Police Chief noted his interest in having his officers wear cameras on the grounds that there’s always two sides to a story and a citizen’s camera may not “tell the entire story”).  One way to view this story is that Phoenix PD recognized its problematic relationship with the public, which might prompt citizens to use their mobile devices to tape officers engaged in bad practices, and went on the offensive.  It’s a panoptic turn perhaps designed to answer the Maryland Judge’s question of “Who watches the watchmen?”  The Phoenix PD shows the public that it is willing to stand behind its promise to protect and adopts a strategy to deter police misconduct.  It gets a serious unacknowledged “benefit”–the surveillance of the public wherever the police officer goes including a suspect’s home, business, etc.  I put “benefits” in quotes because there’s an important trade-off in the public’s privacy interests.  Those feeds could potentially be monitored by state-federal partnerships known as fusion centers, which my co-blogger Frank Pasquale and I tackle in our piece “Network Accountability for the Domestic Intelligence Apparatus” recently published in the Hastings Law Journal.  There’s another concern too.  The “on-camera all of the time” feeling may make police officers jittery and less willing to trust their instincts in an emergency.  That’s speculative but surely possible.  So responding to the possibility that the public might, on occasion, tape police officers in the line of duty with persistent surveillance of the public seems troubling.

  September 27, 2011 at 11:23 am   Posted in: Criminal Procedure, Privacy, Privacy (Law Enforcement)   Print This Post   3 Comments

GPS Surveillance and the Fourth Amendment: Thoughts on United States v. Jones

posted by Daniel Solove

In United States v. Jones, FBI agents installed a GPS tracking device on Jones’ car and monitored where he drove for a month without a warrant.  Jones challenged the warrantless GPS surveillance as a violation of the Fourth Amendment.  The D.C. Circuit agreed with Jones.

On its face, the D.C. Circuit opinion appears to clash with the Supreme Court’s decision in United States v. Knotts, 460 U.S. 276 (1983), where the police installed a much simpler tracking device (referred to as a “beeper”) to a person’s car.  The Court concluded that the Fourth Amendment did not apply to the beeper because a “person traveling in an automobile on public thoroughfares has no reasonable expectation of privacy in his movements.”

The D.C. Circuit distinguished Knotts because there, the Supreme Court noted that the surveillance was limited and explicitly noted that more pervasive surveillance might be treated differently.   As the Court in Knotts stated that “if such dragnet-type law enforcement practices as respondent envisions should eventually occur, there will be time enough then to determine whether different constitutional principles may be applicable.”

The Supreme Court will determine if it agrees with this theory.   The Court has long held that there is no expectation of privacy in public.  This view has been frequently criticized as failing to recognize that people enjoy much practical obscurity in public and pervasive monitoring will dramatically undermine this obscurity.  Will the Court revisit its view about the lack of privacy in public given the changing capabilities of technology?

If the Court were to conclude that the Fourth Amendment required a warrant for GPS surveillance, it would have to define a coherent line between when a person in public has an expectation of privacy and when a person lacks such an expectation.  Such a line would be challenging to draw.

If extreme enough, quantitative differences can become qualitative differences.  But how does one articulate this into a workable approach in the law that isn’t too vague and mushy?

I was speaking with Peter Swire recently, who said that in order to convince the Court to draw such a line, it would be helpful for scholars to propose a workable test or approach for the Court to use.  I think he’s right.  So here’s my stab at it.

The Fourth Amendment applies to a surveillance technology used in public if the surveillance technology: (1)  extends significantly beyond human capabilities; and (2) is used in a manner beyond its ordinary use by the general public.

Let’s see how this might work with a few examples:

Read the rest of this post »

  September 24, 2011 at 2:43 pm   Posted in: Criminal Procedure, Privacy, Privacy (Electronic Surveillance), Privacy (Law Enforcement), Privacy (National Security), Supreme Court, Technology   Print This Post   18 Comments

Racial Profiling & Surveillance

posted by Frank Pasquale

You may have heard about “multiple passengers holed up in the bathroom” of a plane flying on Sunday, which “led to F-16s shadowing . . . it [as it] neared Detroit.” Turns out that the false alarm was sparked by a “half-Arab and half-Jewish” woman who sat between two South Asian passengers:

[O]n this flight she was sitting by chance in a row with two Indian-looking passengers, neither of whom knew the other or knew her. But collectively they aroused the suspicion of other passengers or crew, and when the plane landed, heavily armed troops stormed aboard, handcuffed the three of them, and took them off for extensive questioning. After which they were eventually released with “no charges filed.” Which is fair enough, considering that like everyone else on the plane they were simply trying to travel from Denver to Detroit and had done absolutely nothing wrong except to have “suspicious” looks.

Here is her first-hand account:

Someone shouted for us to place our hands on the seats in front of us, heads down. The cops ran down the aisle, stopped at my row and yelled at the three of us to get up. “Can I bring my phone?” I asked, of course. What a cliffhanger for my Twitter followers! No, one of the cops said, grabbing my arm a little harder than I would have liked. He slapped metal cuffs on my wrists and pushed me off the plane. The three of us, two Indian men living in the Detroit metro area, and me, a half-Arab, half-Jewish housewife living in suburban Ohio, were being detained.

The cops brought us to a parked squad car next to the plane, had us spread our legs and arms. Mine asked me if I was wearing any explosives. “No,” I said, holding my tongue to not let out a snarky response. I wasn’t sure what I could and could not say, and all that came out was “What’s going on?”. . . .

What is the likelihood that two Indian men who didn’t know each other and a dark-skinned woman of Arab/Jewish heritage would be on the same flight from Denver to Detroit? Was that suspicion enough? Even considering that we didn’t say a word to each other until it became clear there were cops following our plane? Perhaps it was two Indian man going to the bathroom in succession?

Combine this with Vance Gilbert’s “flying while black” story, and any number of others, and you do have to wonder about how easily the racialized paranoia of a few can be given the full backing of the government (if only for a few hours of fright for the victim while he or she is cleared). Having recently looked into some aspects of the surveillance state, I have to wonder: do these incidents generate secret “Suspcious Activity Reports” for the publicly vindicated victims? Are they a mark against them in some undisclosed TSA or fusion center databases? The FBI justified its Detroit action by stating “The public would rather us err on the side of caution than not.” Is there any way for targeted minorities to assure that the public’s irrational discrimination is not empowered and advanced by law enforcers who are willing to “see something” when anyone “says something?”

  September 13, 2011 at 10:41 pm   Posted in: Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure, Culture, Current Events, Privacy (Law Enforcement), Privacy (National Security)   Print This Post   10 Comments

Identifying Those Responsible for a “Living Horror” and Its Signficance for Proposed Federal Law

posted by Danielle Citron

In what can only be described as the worst side of humanity, the bulletin board Dreamboard hosted a members-only sharing of child pornography, particularly of children under 12.  New members could join the board only if they posted child pornography.  Members had to continue to post images of child porn every 50 days or face removal.  The rules of the board, printed in English, Russian, Japanese, and Spanish, included: (1) “Keep the girls under 13, in fact, I really need to see 12 or younger to know your[sic] a brother,” (2) “don’t avoid nudity in previews. I will NOT accept you if there’s no nudity.  And my definition of nudity is pussy or anal in the shot.  You just waste your own time if you don’t do this.  Because you will not get in, if you don’t follow the rules.”  One section of Dreamboard was titled “Super Hardcore,” and the rules required images and videos of “very young kids, getting fucked, and preteens in distress, and or crying. . . . If a girl looks totally comfortable, she’s not in distress, and it does NOT belong in this section.”  This part of the site featured images of adults having violent sexual intercourse with very young children, including infants.  One file was entitled “2yo assfuck she cries for mommy nasty pthc pedo 1 yo 3 yo 4 yo.”  The board amassed over 120 terabytes of violent sexual rape and abuse of children.

According to the rules of the site, members were to use encryption technologies to prevent detection.  The rules specified precisely which encryption technologies and proxy servers should be used and which should be avoided.  Members did not use their real names, but instead screen names to conceal their identities.  All of this suggests that the board went to great lengths to secure their anonymity.

Early this month, Attorney General Eric Holder, Jr. announced that federal investigators has charged 72 people for violating child pornography laws and more than 50 people have been arrested in the United States.  The defendants included doctors, lawyers, police officers, and a Navy commander, according to the Ellis County Observer.  Thirteen of those charged have pled guilty, and four members have been sentenced between 20 and 30 years.  Around 600 people from around the world were members of the bulletin board, which has been shut down.  The bulletin board used a server in Atlanta.  As Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer explained, the site “was a living horror.”  John Morton, director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, declined to say how investigators overcame the technological precautions used by some of the members.  He did tell the New York Times: “To those inclined to abuse small children, know this: this isn’t a place on the Internet or the planet in which you are truly safe.  It may take us some time, it may take us some effort, but we will find you regardless of a screen name, a proxy server or an encryption effort, period.” Read the rest of this post »

  August 18, 2011 at 11:48 am   Posted in: Anonymity, Architecture, Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure, Cyber Civil Rights, Privacy, Privacy (Law Enforcement), Social Network Websites   Print This Post   7 Comments

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