On Tuesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth District upheld Chief Judge Vaughn Walker’s 2010 decision that California’s Proposition 8, banning all same-sex marriages, was unconstitutional. Does this mean that gays and lesbians can go back to San Francisco City Hall now to say their “I do’s?” Not yet. For decades, San Francisco’s City Hall, the building at the epicenter for gay marriage (and itself one of the most beautiful structures in the land) has been alive, from Monday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., with brides floating around San Francisco’s City Hall like ... Read More
Judges’ Decisions More Lenient After Lunch
April 13, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
In addition to showing up on time and not wearing loud ties, criminal defense attorneys would do well to think about the care and feeding of the judges who hear their clients' cases. A hungry, tired judge, it turns out, is much less likely to grant a defendant's request than one who has just eaten or taken a break. At least that's the finding of an ingenious new study looking at the rulings made by Israeli parole board judges in relation to when they had taken a meal break. Overall, prisoners saw a 65 percent success rate if their cases were heard early in the workday or immediately ... Read More
Public Defenders as Effective as Private Attorneys
August 24, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Perhaps it’s time for someone to come to the defense of public defenders. A newly published look at Chicago-area courts finds that, when you consider the actual outcomes of judicial hearings, these underpaid and underappreciated attorneys do just as well as their private-sector counterparts. “This study suggests that there is little difference in the quality of legal defense provided to defendants by private attorneys and public defenders,” a research team led by Richard Hartley of the University of Texas at San Antonio writes in the Journal of Criminal Justice. “The type of ... Read More
‘Courts and Kids’ Argues for Equal School Funding
June 24, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
More than 50 years after the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education, the nation's schools are still plagued by inequalities, yet the High Court today declines to intervene on behalf of equal educational opportunity for all children. In the words of Justice Clarence Thomas, "... this Court does not sit to ... solve the problems of 'troubled inner city schooling.' ... We are not social engineers." The Supreme Court began its long withdrawal from the civil rights fray in the early 1970s, after two decades of activism on racial integration. Now, ... Read More
Court Decision Could Lead FCC to Redefine Internet
April 9, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
A federal appeals court in D.C. earlier this week threw up a roadblock to the Federal Communications Commission's plans for the future of the Internet in America. The details of the case were relatively straight-forward: Comcast was caught interfering with traffic by customers using the cumbersome file-sharing application BitTorrent, flouting a 2005 FCC Internet policy stating that Web users are entitled to access the content and applications of their choice. The FCC tried to sanction Comcast. Comcast sued. And on Tuesday — to the surprise of no one who has been following the case — the ... Read More
A Mind of Crime
February 23, 2010 • By • 8 Comments
Kent Kiehl, a prominent neuroscientist hired to study an admitted murderer named Brian Dugan, had already been under cross-examination in the hushed, wood-paneled suburban Chicago courtroom for more than an hour when a brain diagram, hatched with X's, was projected on a screen. The X's marked areas where Kiehl had discovered abnormally low grey matter density in Dugan's brain. In a curious meeting of law and neuroscience, those X's would help jurors decide whether he should be executed or sentenced to life in prison. Did the way Dugan's brain had developed leave him spring-loaded for violence? ... Read More
Problem-Solving (and Award-Winning) Courts
October 30, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment
"Problem-solving" courts — only a small percentage of the national total — have become increasingly effective due to their ability to rehabilitate low-level offenders (mostly drug offenders) while saving taxpayer money by eschewing traditional incarceration methods. The only problem, it seems, is that the public seems largely unaware of the success of these courts — although readers of Miller-McCune may remember Bernice Yeung's article in our August 2008 issue on the Center for Court Innovation. "You can continue to cycle these people and do nothing with them, or you can try to do ... Read More
The Inside Dope on Snitching
October 23, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment
In Chicago during the late 1980s, the U.S. attorney was prosecuting a ruthless, religiously inspired gang called the El Rukns. Federal prosecutors were so dependent on incarcerated gang leaders to make their case that six informants were permitted to make a hedonistic mockery of the criminal justice system. Henry Leon Harris was one of several who had sex with a visiting wife or girlfriend in the U.S. Attorney's offices — while guarded by Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents. Harry Evans used heroin delivered by his mother, but wasn't penalized when he failed a drug test. Other snitches ... Read More
Why Spy for Cuba?
June 16, 2009 • By • 2 Comments
While watching The News Hour on PBS the other night, I was struck by how perplexed journalists are about the possible motives of Kendall and Gwendolyn Myers, the septuagenarian Washington, D.C., couple arrested June 5 on charges they had worked as spies for Cuba for the past 30 years. "Is there anything in the indictment that tells us why this couple, this upper-middle-class — you know, he's a great-grandson of Alexander Graham Bell — why would they have done this?" The News Hour's Gwen Ifill asked Washington Post reporter Mary Beth Sheridan. Sheridan replied: "I think this is a huge ... Read More
