Criminal Law

342. From the mouths of babes

Posted on February 10, 2008
Not real babies, of course.  They never say anything deserving of scorn.  But recently the Kansas appellate courts have ingenuously revealed things that more worldly-wise judges have learned to cloak in wordy euphemism.  The first case is officially "unpublished" and Kansas is one of those states that continue to hide their unpublished opinions, presumably because their authors have something to hide...

341.1 Judge Harry Pregerson Memorial Frontage Road

Posted on February 09, 2008
Good ol' Anonymous posted a comment to the main road of this post explaining the origin of the Judge Pregerson Memorial MixMaster, even supplying a link to a New York Times article explaining the judge's deep involvement in the development of the project...

341. Judge Harry Pregerson Memorial Interchange

Posted on February 04, 2008
When I was in Los Angeles this past week, I had occasion to drive the rental car through the Harbor Freeway / I-105  interchange.  Curiously enough, I-105 seems to have acquired at least three nicknames: the Century Freeway, the Glenn Anderson Freeway (distinctly Chicagoish, that one) and the airport freeway...

340. Intellectual dishonesty epic (finale)

Posted on February 03, 2008
(Here's part 1 of this epic.)How can you tell when a judge is up to something?  One sure giveaway is the emotive adjective or adverb.  I always tell my students that the strongest argument is the quietest: "The Supreme Court just decided this issue last week...

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339. Intellectual dishonesty epic (pt. 3)

Posted on January 25, 2008
Caminito, Bonino and Noia all confessed to murdering Murray Hameroff.  They were tried together, and the jury found their confessions voluntary.  Noia chose not to appeal.  But after 14 years, Caminito got a federal judge to vacate his conviction, based on the judge's finding that the police acted "satanically" by questioning him "almost continuously" for 27 hours, leaving him alone in an unheated cell for 7 of them...

338. Intellectual dishonesty epic, pt. 2

Posted on January 17, 2008
In its May 23, 1955 edition, Time Magazine ran this story:Just about dinnertime, on May 11, 1941, a garment worker named Santo Caminito was picked up by New York police for the holdup-murder of Coney Island Merchant Murray Hameroff. Although Caminito had never been arrested before, the cops were sure they had their man...

337. Intellectual dishonesty epic, pt. 1

Posted on January 12, 2008
On February 15, 1941, Murray Hameroff was shot and killed in front of his home on Stillwell Avenue in Coney Island.  Charles Noia confessed to police he was the triggerman.  His two accessories, Santo Caminito and Frank Bonino, separately confessed...

336. "A judge's sinful but legal conduct"

Posted on January 09, 2008
It's rare that a story about a judge manages to be both too bizarre and too vague for inclusion in this Judges' Hall of Fame, but the celebrated story of Cleveland, Tennessee's Judge John B. Hagler is very nearly disqualified on both counts.  The newly-exed ex-judge did something very, very, you know ...

335. Crime stats

Posted on December 28, 2007
The year's end always brings stories about crime stats.  The New York Daily News has a story headlined "New York started with 8 murders in 1887."  If you're tempted to believe that number reflects the real homicide rate that year, they were building a bridge for your purchase...

334. Better for whom?

Posted on December 20, 2007
Ronald Dworkin's work is routinely described with such daunting superlatives as "the most important systematic contribution to Anglo-American legal philosophy made since the mid-1960s" (hard to tell if that's intended as a compliment, and you have to pay money to view the concluding paragraph online, so I guess we'll never know), although it seems strangely unphilosophical to dye one's hair, as he appears to have done in this official photo...

333. The next justice

Posted on December 16, 2007
Christopher L. Eisgruber (I don't mean to be rude, but with a last name like that, is the middle initial really necessary?) has written The Next Justice: Repairing the Supreme Court Appointments Process, a well-meaning, mildly interesting and thoroughly exasperating book...

332. Law, the anti-science

Posted on December 15, 2007
The scientist and science writer Bob Park recently published a column in the New Scientist containing this passage:Richard Feynman described science as "what we have learned about how not to fool ourselves". Science depends on openness: we expose our scientific findings, including the details of how they were obtained, to the scrutiny of the scientific community...

331. Judicial indiscretion

Posted on December 14, 2007
In Delaware, it's pretty big news that the state Supreme Court upheld the murder conviction of Michael Jones.  Shortly after a warrant was issued for Jones' arrest for homicide, he got into a car with a couple friends, one of them named Cedric Reinford:While the three were in Reinford’s car, Jones killed Reinford by shooting him three times in the head...

330. Dead professor driving

Posted on December 13, 2007
I've long thought that one of the reasons judges are so concerned about traffic stops is the potential of a traffic stop to wreck a judge's career.  Just look at Ohio's Justice Resnick (see post 33), Arkansas's Judge Davis (see post 36) and New Mexico's own Judge Brennan...

329. Law in aspic

Posted on December 11, 2007
Imagine a history professor who built his career on the study of presidential press releases, viewing them not as eruptions of public mendacity or even as examples of public relations technique but as the true measure of each administration's achievements...

328. A great judge, except for that

Posted on December 02, 2007
I was reminded of Daniel J. Martinez (see post 327) by the case of Judge Restaino (see post 326).  Soon after Martinez was acquitted of two extraordinarily brutal crimes that he almost certainly committed, setting off an entirely justified uproar, a friend of the Martinez family wrote a letter to the editor of the Santa Fe Reporter, the alternative weekly...

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