Over at the WSJ’s Law Blog, Ashby Jones has posted an interesting piece called “Is Law an ‘Elitist’ Profession? Discuss.” Ashby saw an article on “The Lawyer,” a British website, reporting that there is little social mobility of lower classes into the legal profession. And he wonders if we...
If you are charged with a crime, the stakes couldn’t be higher. Unlike civil lawsuits, which are merely about money, criminal prosecutions are the real deal. You can lose your liberty, rights, reputation, and opportunities down the road. You can lose your life, or a substantial part of it. So...
So Marc Dreier was sentenced today to 20 years in prison, plus forfeiture of $746 million and restitution of nearly $388 million (that’s more than a billion dollars, with a “b”). That’s his punishment for his guilty plea to conspiracy, securities fraud, money laundering and wire fraud. The feds had...
Remember the Lori Drew case? She’s the mom who was convicted last Thanksgiving for creating a fake MySpace persona, which she then used to harass a teenaged girl until the girl committed suicide. After she was convicted, we argued that her conviction stretched the meaning of the statute too...
Amir Efrati has an interesting article in today’s Wall Street Journal, headlined “Cultural Background Gains Traction as a Legal Defense.” It’s a well-known fact that some things that are criminal in one society are perfectly acceptable in another. Some lawyers are starting to claim that it should be a defense...
When we started law school back in ’93, we felt that white-collar criminals just weren’t punished that harshly in this country. The Dilbert strip above, from about the same time, shows that we were not alone in thinking this. It seems that this was a common perception going at least...
The geniuses over at Cracked.com rescued their “Mad Magazine” ripoff from the dustbin of history, when they went digital and found a unique voice, focusing more on the oddities of real life than on satire. A typical headline will bear the words “badass” or “retarded,” which sums up their worldview....
The Supreme Court this morning ruled that it’s a violation of the Sixth Amendment’s Confrontation Clause for the prosecution in a drug case to simply admit a sworn lab report, without the chemist’s testimony, to prove that the drugs were controlled substances. This is what we predicted, of course, making...
In a groundbreaking unanimous decision this morning, the Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional for school officials to perform a strip search of a student suspected of possessing prohibited drugs. And school officials who do this in the future will have to pay damages. Writing for the Court in...
No time to post on this yesterday or today, but it’s pretty clear we were 100% wrong with our prediction for the Osborne case. It wasn’t unanimous or a big majority — it was 5-4. It wasn’t in favor of the defense — got that wrong, too. And the Supremes...
With only two more decision dates remaining in this Supreme Court term, we’ve got our eyes on four criminal cases yet to be decided. Either next Monday (June 22) or the following Monday (June 29), we should expect to hear from the Supremes. We’re going to make a prediction right...
I love reading Scott Greenfield’s blog Simple Justice. He posted a good one the other day called “Another Prosecutor Loses Her Virginity,” about a former prosecutor, Rochelle Berliner, now a defense attorney, who just came to the realization that cops sometimes lie. Her epiphany was published in Saturday’s New York...
In a solid 7-2 decision this morning, the Supreme Court ruled that jurors in a RICO case can infer the existence of a racketeering enterprise simply based on its activity, and don’t need evidence of any separate structure or hierarchy. This clears up some misconceptions that have been floating around...
The Washington Post has a nice article on Sonia Sotomayor’s early years as a lawyer in the Manhattan D.A.’s office. The article, online here is more substantial than your typical puff piece, giving a fairly accurate gloss on what life might have been like for the young prosecutor. We spent...
In a unanimous decision today, the Supreme Court held that the Double Jeopardy Clause doesn’t prevent Ohio from re-litigating a capital defendant’s mental retardation, after the state’s highest court had opined that he had “mild to borderline” mental retardation. The case is unique, in that the defendant was sentenced to...
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