Yesterday, I was raptly following the sentencing of Matthew Keys as it was live-tweeted by Sarah Jeong. If you haven’t read the dozens of articles about it today, the short story is Mr. Keys was sentenced to 2 years in federal prison, for sharing his login info online — info...
Over lunch today, the head of one of the NYPD’s powerful police unions* emailed a shrill “open letter” to the press, blaming the “armchair rhetoric” of columnists and pundits for the worsening relations between the police and the communities they serve. Here’s the email: To all arm-chair judges: If you have...
Yesterday, the New York Senate voted to pass “Brittany’s Law,” to create a new public registry of offenders. Think “sex offender” registry, only for anyone convicted of any violent felony. People with a conviction in their past would have to register for ten years or more (under penalty of another...
So I saw this opinion piece in USA Today by Glenn Harlan Reynolds, titled “You Are Probably Breaking the Law Right Now: When lawmakers don’t even know how many laws exist, how can citizens be expected to follow them?” It joins a growing tide of public awareness about overcriminalization in the U.S....
The Fourth Amendment established one of our most important protections against government power: if the police search you or your stuff for evidence, their search must be ‘reasonable’; and if they do get a warrant then it has to be specific, and they’ll need probable cause. In writing, it couldn’t be more straightforward. In practice, however,...
Everyone knows that drunk drivers cause deadly car accidents. This is because alcohol impairs one’s ability to drive safely. So it is against the law to drive under the influence of alcohol. Everyone knows that texting while driving causes deadly car accidents. This is because texting distracts your attention from...
A lot of the law is extremely formulaic. True, human intelligence is required to spot issues, devise strategies, and (most importantly) persuade decisionmakers. But in its actual application, the law is often little more than a series of IF-THEN decisions. A computer could be programmed to do it. This is...
Yale Law School has announced that it will now offer a PhD in Law — apparently the first time a doctoral program in law has been offered in the United States. One can only ask “what for?” Ostensibly, the purpose of a PhD is to advance human knowledge. You get that...
Judgment is the criminal lawyer’s stock-in-trade. The ability to assess the risks of a situation, and choose the better course of action, is the value that lawyers bring to the criminal justice system. It doesn’t matter if they’re defense attorneys negotiating a deal or fighting it out at trial, or...
Almost from our first post, we’ve written here about developments in brain-scan technology and its applicability to criminal law (see here, here, here and here, for example). So needless to say, the past nine days have been of great interest, as the research behind neuroimaging’s claims has come into hot...
The Facebook post above was posted to Reddit earlier today. We don’t know if this is an accurate copy or not, the internet being what it is, but it’s close enough to what we’ve heard actual officers say that it is useful to illustrate a couple of points. First, the...
The decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court often have important repercussions around the world, so it’s perhaps not surprising that is studied by lawyers and academics far beyond the Court’s jurisdiction. The results of such studies are often more useful for their insights into how others see us, than for...
Last week, the prosecution and the defense filed their sentencing memoranda in the Rajaratnam case. Raj was convicted of 14 counts in all — 9 counts of securities fraud, and 5 conspiracy counts. So what do the parties think that’s worth? The feds asked Judge Holwell to sentence Raj...
Everyone knows that eyewitness identifications are completely reliable — that is, you can count on them to be wrong. (Everyone does know this, right?) If the person being identified is a stranger, the chances of a correct I.D. are slim to none. There are lots of reasons for this. Eyewitnesses...
As our first bureau chief, a wise and gifted man, would often say to us: “Oy.” Last Friday, we blogged about how this Rakofsky fellow had done something very foolish. After being reported to have done some pretty bad lawyering, and being roundly disparaged by the blawgosphere as a result,...
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