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Criminal Law

Z the Monthly Blog and Legal Newsletter

Politics of crime (criminal politics) and prison legal issues. Associated with Prison Innocence Project.
By 'Major' Mori Goodbar, Esq.

Post Frequency: 0.8/day

Last Entry: August 23, 2011 at 06:52:00

Criminal Justice Symposium

Posted on July 10, 2008
A criminal justice Symposium! The press release is at the link: "Alternatives to Incarceration" Here's the meat: Presenters at the symposium include federal and state judges, congressional staff, professors of law and the social sciences, corrections and alternative sentencing practitioners and specialists, federal and state prosecutors and defense attorneys, prisons officials, and others

Texas Justice Re-redux

Posted on July 01, 2008
One more instance of a Texas exoneration, and how bad laws make everybody less safe, and life more miserable for the accused and wrongly convicted by making it easier to be wrongly convicted, at the link. Having identified the problem, let's put a stop to it...

Scotus Term Summary, 2007-08

Posted on June 29, 2008
New York Times summarizes here, the most important decisions of the Supreme Court term just ended, leading with the Guantanamo Bay habeas/access to courts decision, Boumediene v. Bush, No. 06-1195, (the guarantee of habeas corpus applies at the Navy base in Cuba, the court said, and the truncated alternative procedure that Congress set up was not an adequate substitute...

Risk Assessment and Prison

Posted on June 27, 2008
In this post, titled "Examining the School to Prison Pipeline, readers of Doug's blog respond with interesting comments on the topic of the overincarceration and undereducation of our nation's citizenry. It leads naturally to ask not why are so many low risk offenders being locked up, but how can you tell the low risk offender apart from the truly dangerous, and habitual...

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Texas Justice Redux

Posted on June 25, 2008
Here is some more recent "Texas Justice" from the Fifth Circuit. Read that together with this from UK judges remarking on efforts to install an federal style sentencing "grid" system across the pond. Wow, Professor Berman, good work. If you thought judges should curb excesses of the legislature that have proven to be very, very foolish you'd be wrong respecting the Fifth...

Religion and The Family

Posted on June 24, 2008
This book, The Family, by Jeff Sharlet, (his blog here) promises to be a must read for anybody who cares about religion and the future of our nation.

Texas Justice

Posted on June 19, 2008
Here is more new evidence from Grits that Texas justice means lock 'em up, actually innocent, accused, and falsely convicted. Just don't become accused, and you're alright if in Texas. Got enemies? Tuff. Stay out of Texas. UPDATE: More on Texas "yo yo" justice as applied to - well, matters of life and death, here.

A FAMMGRAM!

Posted on June 19, 2008
A Famm (Families Against Mandatory Minimums (Sentences)) Gram, at this link, tells about the Second Chance Act, and more. Again, thanks Doc Berman.

Federalism Run Amok

Posted on June 17, 2008
Here is a ruling on SORNA, striking provisions. When I have a chance to read the entire decision I'll post on it further. Thanks to Doug, of course.

Choosing to Allow so much Crime in America?

Posted on June 13, 2008
The following is a comment from Doug's blog (link to post, about James Q. Wilson guest blogging about crime, here). Of the fifty or so comments, and during the two years I've been reading his blog, I've yet to see someone actually make this point so well...

The Texas Hold'em Decision

Posted on June 10, 2008
More on the FLDS Children decision, with many comments here, at Talkleft. Also, here is Sen. Cornyn of Texas regarding children, and how to protect them, from an op ed in Southeast Texas Record. Two points, Senator, with respect. One. The following is old fashioned fear mongering: "Local, state and federal government must be vigilant as technology makes some crimes easier;" and, in "Texas

World Oil Production Stuck: Conspiracy, or All Down Hill?

Posted on June 08, 2008
Just in case you were not sinking deeper and deeper into depression already due to the subject matter of this blog, here's something else to think about. It's called "All for the low, low price of ..." and in the comments, a trivial fact if indeed it is true, that world oil production has been stuck at the same level for the last three years...

Booker Update

Posted on June 04, 2008
Yale Law Journal article on Federal Sentencing and Booker promises to be a great read.

More From Grits on the Texas Mormon Children

Posted on May 31, 2008
If you have been Walthered, I would like to know about it. Please contact me through comments on this site or email me. If you want to know more about what this new verb, Walthered, means (and how it originated), link to Grits, Scott Henson's great Texas blog...

Prison Conditions and Other Petitions to Watch

Posted on May 29, 2008
You won't appreciate the facts alleged in this Bivens (Sec. 1983) case (on the list of petitions to watch at SCOTUSBLOG) unless you have seen the insides of our prisons. At this link is the tail end of at least one more interesting action making it onto the list, involving removal of children from families and parental rights, that has been ongoing for ten years in Illinois (Dupuy, et al...

Habeas and Sentencing

Posted on May 25, 2008
For those who haven't yet discovered the world of habeas, here is a brief intro: The quintessential example of a claim within the core of habeas is a challenge to the validity of the prisoner?s conviction or sentence, that is, a claim that the police, the prosecutor, the defense lawyer, the jury, or the court made a constitutional error resulting in an unlawful conviction or sentence...

Grits on the FLDS Children,Takings and Prosecutions

Posted on May 18, 2008
Just a sample from Texas of the FLDS case(s), by Grits: I have no idea what's being said in those interviews, but IMO CPS is overreaching tremendously to assume law enforcement will get to use that information in any criminal proceedings. By wholesale ignoring the right to counsel for people openly asking for their attorneys, combined with the flimsy totality of the premise of the state's action

How Ideas Happen

Posted on May 17, 2008
In 1999, when Nathan Myhrvold now of Intellectual Ventures, left Microsoft and struck out on his own, he set himself an unusual goal. He wanted to see whether the kind of insight that leads to invention could be engineered. He formed a company called Intellectual Ventures...

A Review

Posted on May 16, 2008
A new site, a new book.

Against the Grain

Posted on May 16, 2008
At this link is an opinion being appealed to the Supreme Court by Major League Baseball, and a bunch of other hippo size bodies with brains of peas (I take that back y'all---go ahead and spend money however you want to---I would do the same thing---or maybe not---maybe I grew up---maybe I don't like throwing money into the toilet---who knows...

More Common Sense

Posted on May 16, 2008
Link here for this study, thanks to Doc Berman. Laws based on actual fact as opposed to imagined fictions could make the world a better place. Does Residential Proximity Matter? A Geographic Analysis of Sex Offense Recidivism Grant Duwe Minnesota Department of Corrections, GDuwe@co...

Common Sense

Posted on May 11, 2008
Our power and authority is eroding because of the amounts we are sending abroad for energy?." Link here (NYT) and here (Mother Jones). The full quote by Sen. Bayh of Indiana: ?In the short run, that they are investing here is good,? Senator Bayh said...

Convicting Innocents: Numbers

Posted on May 09, 2008
You have got to admit that the Death Penalty, questions of life and death and fairness bring out the extremes in a man. The passion never fails to surprise me, with terms: bloodlust, police state, medieval, and limited government bandied about dripping with sarcasm...

Age of Regression?

Posted on May 09, 2008
In this curious ruling Judge Brownback relies upon the Last in Time Rule, dating from Chinese Exclusion Cases, 1889, to support MCA jurisdiction to try Kadr, a child soldier from Afghanistan pressed into service by AQ. The defense, and forces of the enlightenment, argue that current treaty and international law obligations prevent such jurisdiction over juveniles (brief available at link, thanks

Moral Panic

Posted on May 05, 2008
Over at Doug's blog, the latest in the saga of sex offender panic, and extra reading about this puritanical phenomenon: "Moral Panic," by Philip Jenkins. Essentially a history of sex offenders in modern America. Also Carl Sagan's "The Demon-Haunted World," which has excellent chapters on the "satanic ritual abuse" fever that gripped the nation for a decade or more...

Wrongful Convictions: Sixty Minutes

Posted on May 05, 2008
Here is something to catch up on, if you missed it (I was at my daughter's swim club banquet--could not miss the good prime and mousse): The Sixty Minutes special on Texas's exonerations investigations.

Unconstitutional Tool: Terrorism Again

Posted on May 04, 2008
Designations (Annals of Surveillance, New Yorker) amount to a kind of economic embargo: anyone who does business with a designated person risks criminal or civil penalties. The Treasury Department can act more quickly than the police or the F.B.I., who may take action only after an investigation...

Politicized, Corrupted, Justice

Posted on April 29, 2008
How far does the political influence reach? Infinitely. Read the rest of this one, from WP, which begins: GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba, April 28 -- The Defense Department's former chief prosecutor for terrorism cases appeared Monday at the controversial U...

Wrongly Convicted Struggle: Solution -- Revive Section 1983

Posted on April 28, 2008
Here is one from WP, Exonerated Struggle. And from Reason, Suing the DA, Should prosecutors be immune from civil lawsuits?(Radley Balko | April 24, 2008) Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear the case of Thomas Goldstein, an ex-marine who was convicted of murdering his neighbor...

Prison Nation

Posted on April 23, 2008
Here is another Times piece on the topic of what I call American Gulag: Prison Nation. Thank you Doc!

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