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 at Vox.com, Dara Lind has posted the shocking “One chart that puts mass incarceration in historical context.” Lind painstakingly sifted through Bureau of Justice Statistics reports to create a graph of U.S. prisoners per 100,000 of population, from 1880 to 2013. Focusing on those sentenced to prison (i.e., for more...
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...
Interesting concurring opinion by Posner the other day in U.S. v. Craig. Basically, the defendant pled to four counts of creating child porn — which he created in an awful and horrifying way. He could have gotten 30 years for each count, but the judge gave him 50 (30 on...
Google analytics is a great tool. Among other things, it shows the search engine queries people use to find this blog. Which is a good way of figuring out who its audience is, and what they need to know. The queries aren’t as entertaining as they are over at Popehat,...
With a hat tip to our Uncle Ralph, here’s a link to yet another fMRI study bearing on criminal law. Makiko Yamada and colleagues have published in Nature Communications their study “Neural Circuits in the Brain that are Activated when Mitigating Criminal Sentences.” The researchers asked people to review the...
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...
The January 30 issue of the New Yorker has an intriguing article by Adam Gopnik, “The Caging of America: Why do we lock up so many people?” Perhaps we’ve grown a bit cynical, but we expected yet another inane media whine about increasing rates of imprisonment “despite” fewer crimes being...
There seems to be a growing recognition that there’s a lot more law to deal with these days than there used to be. But when you say “more law,” what does your audience think you’re talking about? Are you addressing policy makers and the sociologists who influence their thought? If...
One of our favorite topics here at the Criminal Lawyer has been the interaction of brain science and criminal law. So it’s with a pleased tip of the hat to Mark Bennett that we have the video linked above, an excellent summary of modern neuroscience as it applies to...
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...
Real nice, Google. Because we were bored out of our skull this afternoon, we checked this blog’s stats on Google Analytics. Browsing through the various keywords people have used to find this blog over the past year, all we can say is “The hell is wrong with you people?” Leaving...
Bill Otis, a former AUSA and now an adjunct at Georgetown Law, had a piece earlier this month in the Federalist Society’s magazine Engage titled “The Slow, Sad Swoon of the Sentencing Suggestions.” His article opens with the sentence “The Guidelines are a lost cause.” We were in total agreement...
Too many people are in jail. The rate of incarceration is just going up and up. Is it doing any good? If you look at the two graphs above, you’ll see that the prison population in the United States has soared, while the amount of violent crime has plummeted. The...
We rag on Attorney General Eric Holder from time to time on this blog. For good reason — he’s been something of an idiot on profiling, miranda, terrorism, etc.. But today he did something praiseworthy, and we’d be out of line if we didn’t say so. Last August, Obama...
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