PrawfsBlawg

Changes to Criminal Law course (advice welcome!)

This Fall will be (I think) the 17th time I've taught the first-year Criminal Law course.  (At Notre Dame, the class is sometimes in the Fall, and sometimes in the Spring. For what it's worth, I strongly prefer the Fall.) The course and assignments have evolved over the years (for example, for the first few years, I didn't teach any of the sexual-assault materials) but, at the same time, I cannot pretend to have made any dramatic overhauls for a while.

This year, I've made a few changes to the Download Criminal Law Syllabus (Fall 2024), though, and I'd welcome feedback about them. In particular, I added coverage, in the actual-crimes section, of theft (larceny) and possession (drugs and guns) to criminal homicide and sexual assault (and cut down on necessity and duress). And (with regret), I dropped a requirement I have often used that students read a scholarly monograph on criminal-law-related policy/reform (in addition to the casebook stuff). In the past, I've used books by Rachel Barkow, Stephanos Bibas, John Pfaff, and others. But, I decided this year that this requirement was possibly introducing excessive varation (and workload differences) among our three sections.  Sigh. 

Preemption Procedure: A Comment on the Shugerman-Kovarsky Debate in People v. Trump

Is People v. Donald J. Trump, No. 71543-23 (N.Y. Co. Sup. Ct.) preempted? This question has generated much debate, but is unlikely derail the ongoing state prosecution, at least procedurally.

The defendant is charged with 34 counts of falsifying business records. The offense is raised to the level of a felony, the indictment charges, because the “intent to defraud includes an intent to commit another crime or to aid or conceal the commission thereof.” The issue is that underlying facts may involve a federal election offense. Prof. Jed Shugerman has pointed out that the federal election law has an express preemption provision, and New York State election law has a separate provision acknowledging the primacy of federal law. Accordingly, there is a potential preemption problem which, according to Prof. Shugerman, might mean that “the case is headed to federal court for a year.” Prof. Lee Kovarsky responded with a persuasive argument that states can sometimes use even preempted federal offenses for their own purposes. No one questions, for example, that a New York attorney convicted of an offense within exclusive federal jurisdiction could nevertheless be disbarred. Prof. Kovarsky writes: “To my knowledge, in no case has a court even suggested that a federal crime can't be an element of a different state offense just because the federal crime falls within the scope of preemptive federal authority.” This seems a hard question. If I were in the NY Co. DA's Office, I would strive mightily to elide it and find safe, state crime.

Nevertheless, whatever the ultimate merits, I do not see how the defendant gets an injunction. True, earlier proceedings related to this very matter, namely, a New York grand jury subpoena, were subject to a prolonged stay as the Supreme Court considered the case. On the merits, the Court ultimately allowed the subpoena. Critically, the stay was based on a circumstance no longer present: Trump was then President. The Court explained: “The Supremacy Clause prohibits state judges and prosecutors from interfering with a President's official duties. . . . federal law allows a President to challenge any allegedly unconstitutional influence in a federal forum, as the President has done here.” Trump v. Vance, 140 S. Ct. 2412, 2428–29 (2020). Vance is not precedent for an injunction to protect a private citizen. There was also the stay of enforcement of a House of Representatives subpoena. But there, the question was not preemption, but “whether the subpoenas exceed the authority of the House under the Constitution.” Trump v. Mazars USA, LLP, 140 S. Ct. 2019, 2029 (2020).

Instead, the case now seemingly presents an ordinary claim of preemption in a state prosecution of a private citizen. In that context, 28 U.S.C. § 2283 provides: “A court of the United States may not grant an injunction to stay proceedings in a State court except as expressly authorized by Act of Congress, or where necessary in aid of its jurisdiction, or to protect or effectuate its judgments.”

The possibility that a state prosecution is preempted, standing alone, is not a ticket to federal court:

[A] federal court does not have inherent power to ignore the limitations of § 2283 and to enjoin state court proceedings merely because those proceedings interfere with a protected federal right or invade an area pre-empted by federal law, even when the interference is unmistakably clear. Rather, when a state proceeding presents a federal issue, even a preemption issue, the proper course is to seek resolution of that issue by the state court.

Bess v. Spitzer, 459 F. Supp. 2d 191, 201–02 (E.D.N.Y. 2006), as amended (Jan. 30, 2007) (quoting Chick Kam Choo v. Exxon Corp., 486 U.S. 140, 149–50 (1988)). 

Another judicially recognized exception exists where the defendant proves that a prosecution was “brought in bad faith or is only one of a series of repeated prosecutions,” or that there is otherwise “irreparable injury, above and beyond that associated with the defense of a single prosecution brought in good faith.” Schlagler v. Phillips, 166 F.3d 439, 442 (2d Cir. 1999) (citations omitted). See also Jordan v. Bailey, 570 F. App'x 42, 44 (2d Cir. 2014). “Bad faith” in in this context means “without hope of obtaining a valid conviction.” Perez v. Ledesma, 401 U.S. 82, 85 (1971).

No exception seems to exist. There appears to be no act of Congress providing for federal judicial intervention, and no past or present litigation of these facts for a federal court to protect. Although there is debate about what is required to convict of the offense of falsifying business records, and even more mystery about what the People plan to prove, there is no indication that the prosecution has no chance of success, or is the latest in a series of failed, harassing prosecutions. Accordingly, any preemption issue should be addressed “by the state court.” State rulings would be "subject, of course, to review by . . . [the Supreme] Court or, in a proper case, on federal habeas corpus." 401 U.S. at 85.

One circumstance which neither constitutes bad faith nor tends to support a separate defense is the selective prosecution argument which may be in the offing. Federal constitutional law precedents allow selection of prominent individuals for prosecution. As Wesley Snipes learned to his dismay in a tax case, “[s]ince the government lacks the means to investigate and prosecute every suspected violation of the tax laws, it makes good sense to prosecute those who will receive, or are likely to receive, the attention of the media.” United States v. Snipes, No. 5:06-CR-22-OC-10GRJ, 2007 WL 2572198, at *3 (M.D. Fla. Sept. 5, 2007) (quoting United States v. Catlett, 584 F.2d 864, 868 (8th Cir.1978)). See also United States v. Edenfield, 995 F.2d 197, 200 (11th Cir. 1993) (“For law enforcement officers to choose to investigate prominent offenders is nothing unusual or evil.”)

The limited New York authority on prosecuting celebrities I could find is to the same effect: “assuming the decision to prosecute was based on the fact that the defendants were prominent and newsworthy, this is also not an impermissible basis for selection . . . Publication of the proceedings may enhance the deterrent effect of the prosecution and maintain public faith in the precept that [others] are not above the law.” People v. DiLorenzo, 153 Misc. 2d 1021, 1029–30, 585 N.Y.S.2d 670, 675 (Crim. Ct. Bx. Co.1992) (citing People v. Barnwell, 143 Misc.2d 922, 541 N.Y.S.2d 664 (Crim. Ct. N.Y. Co. 1989)). There is also one lower court case more or less endorsing the the proposition that it is permissible to target individuals for enforcement because they are suspected of other crimes. See People v. Mantel, 88 Misc. 2d 439, 443, 388 N.Y.S.2d 565, 569 (Crim. Ct. N.Y. Co. 1976) (citing United States v. Sacco, 428 F.2d 264, 271 (9th Cir. 1970) (“selection of this defendant for intensive investigation was based on his suspected role in organized crime”) Stuart Green has written thoughtfully about whether prosecuting celebrities and the prominent is consistent with criminal law principles, but the doctrine seems to allow it. Stuart P. Green, Uncovering the Cover-Up Crimes, 42 Am. Crim. L. Rev. 9, 42 (2005).

If the defendant could show that other, similarly-situated offenders who were members of different political parties were not prosecuted by the same office, then that would raise a substantial issue. United States v. Hastings, 126 F.3d 310, 313 (4th Cir. 1997) (citing, inter alia, United States v. Berrios, 501 F.2d 1207, 1211 (2d Cir.1974)). But such claims have historically proved difficult to establish. United States v. Lazzaro, No. 21-CR-0173 (PJS/DTS), 2022 WL 16948157 (D. Minn. Nov. 15, 2022); United States v. Woods, 319 F. Supp. 3d 1124, 1141 (W.D. Ark. 2018), aff'd sub nom. United States v. Paris, 954 F.3d 1069 (8th Cir. 2020), and aff'd, 978 F.3d 554 (8th Cir. 2020); United States v. Young, 231 F. Supp. 3d 33, 43 (M.D. La. 2017); United States v. Cameron, 658 F. Supp. 2d 241, 243 (D. Me. 2009).

Crowd-Litigating The People v. Donald J. Trump (N.Y. Sup. Ct.)

Correct me if I am wrong. But it appears that People v. Donald J. Trump, No. 71543-23 (N.Y. Co. Sup. Ct), will be the first major case in U.S. legal history to be crowd-litigated. Interventions of law professors and litigators with something to say are not coming on appeal. Instead amicus briefs are being filed now, complete with citation to cases and statutes, and factual analysis, on Twitter, blogs, and op-eds. Major examples are the series on JustSecurity, Prof. Lee Kovarsky’s Lawfare post on preemption, and Prof. Jed Shugerman’s New York Times oped to which Prof. Kovarsky is responding. Eric Columbus maintains an indispensable running list on Twitter. It is reasonably apparent that these writings are not only intended to educate the public, but to communicate with the prosecutors and defense attorneys involved in the case. This is entirely appropriate; if the prosecution is defective, it should end promptly; if it is righteous, the best case for it should be made.

This is a case where, as it happens, there is no shortage of genuine expertise. Defender organizations and prosecutor’s offices who work in the state courts in New York are unusually productive of legal scholars. A quick Google search shows that among many others, alumni of the Criminal Defense Division or Criminal Appeals Bureau of Legal Aid Society of New York include Barry Scheck, Sheri Lynn Johnson, and JaneAnne Murray; veterans of the New York County DA’s Office include Deborah Tuerkheimer, Jeannie Suk Gersen, and Sandra Guerra Thompson. Alan Michaels seems to have been a prosecutor in a now-important New York County decision invlolving the statute at issue in the prosecution.

While none of the above are necessarily following the Trump case, for this crowd litigation to occur, it is necessary for there to be a body of lawyers who are expert in New York practice. Although the criminal laws of no two states are identical, New York law is unusually distinctive. Unlike many states, it does not model its laws on the Federal Rules of Evidence or Criminal Procedure, but instead has its own complicated amalgam of evidence and criminal procedure statutes and rules, along, of course, with caselaw.  The New York Penal Law is an early version of the Model Penal Code, but, to keep things interesting, New York courts regularly find dispositive cases decided under the repealed and supplanted codes. Without a background in New York criminal practice, general smartness or criminal law experience elsewhere may well be unhelpful—inaccurate--in commenting on a New York prosecution, unless it is preceded by full research.

I suspect this continuous workshopping of the case will primarily aid the defense. The prosecution had years to prepare the case, and if they did not think hard about the potential roadblocks and defenses, then their reputations will justifiably be marred. For that reason, given their resources, I assume the case was carefully prepared and war-gamed.  The lead defense attorney, Todd Blanche, is richly experienced, but his website suggests he is now a sole practitioner after years of working with large firms and the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of New York.  The scrum of lawyers seen at counsel table at the arraignment may be more in the vein of too-many-cooks rather than a coordinated team.

As a game-theoretic question, I assume the actual prosecutors and defenders will at least glance at these materials. Conceivably, every lawyer or professor comment will be something already spotted and evaluated.  But it would be embarrassing to be surprised, or to lose, on a point which had already been addressed and discussed in the legal community.

Prosecutorial Discretion and the Indictment of Donald Trump

After many days of leaks from the grand jury and anxious speculation, the news broke last night that a Manhattan grand jury indicted Donald Trump.  The indictment remains sealed, and so we do not yet know the precise charges, but the many leaks from the grand jury indicate that the case revolves around payments to Stormy Daniels.

News of the indictment has sparked an outpouring of intense and diametrically different reactions.  On the left, people are delighted that Trump will face criminal charges; they think Trump has been engaged in years of criminal misconduct, and they see this as a moment of reckoning.  On the right, people are outraged by the charges, insisting that they are politically motivated and legally suspect.  Both of these reactions have something in common—they both touch, to some extent on the topic of prosecutorial discretion.  The delight from the left rests on the premise that law enforcement had for years looked the other way, and failed to hold Trump (like other powerful people) accountable.  The outrage on the right is based on the assumption that the Democratic Manhattan DA targeted Trump because he is a popular Republican politician.

I don’t want to wade into the merits and demerits of these opposing views.  Instead, I want to point out that, to the extent that they talk about prosecutorial discretion, both are likely correct.  People on the left are correct that powerful people often do not face consequences for acting illegally.  Prosecutors are loathe to bring charges against wealthy and powerful people because those people have the resources to fight back and because the prosecutor will look bad if the case falls apart.  Examples of such cases publicly falling apart abound—from Cy Vance’s failed prosecution of DSK, to Mike Nifong’s pursuit of the Duke Lacrosse team, and Marilyn Mosby’s repeated failed prosecutions of Baltimore police officers in the death of Freddie Gray.  Examples of prosecutors deciding that the hassle isn’t worth it are more difficult to come by because the public usually doesn’t find out about cases that aren’t brought.  But Alex Acosta’s decision not to bring any federal charges against Jeffrey Epstein gave us a rare public glimpse into that dynamic.

People on the right are correct that prosecutors often make decisions for political reasons.  The failed cases above were likely brought with the expectation that a successful prosecution would be helpful in the DA’s next election.  But even when local prosecutors aren’t thinking about their own political future, they will pursue cases to “send a message” to the public.  Thus, if you are a celebrity whose criminal conduct was very public, you may find yourself treated worse than the average defendant so that the prosecutor can appear tough on crime.  Just ask Martha Stewart and Plaxico Burress. 

As the above paragraphs explain, prosecutorial discretion—like all forms of discretion—inexorably leads to similarly situated people being treated differently.  Although equal treatment is the ideal, our legal system often relies on discretion because it is too difficult to specify ex ante what all of the relevant considerations ought to be.  This is one reason that the Supreme Court has given in stating that judicial review of prosecutors’ charging discretion is inappropriate. 

Because we cannot ensure equal treatment through ex ante rules, one might think that we could attempt to do so ex post.  This is what Jim Comey sought to do when he explained why criminal charges against Hillary Clinton were inappropriate.  He explained that DOJ had combed through the previous cases involving mishandling of classified information, identified the enforcement criteria that were used in those cases, confirmed that those criteria were not present in Clinton’s case, and thus determined charges were not warranted.  (If I recall correctly, the enforcement criteria were large quantities of material and/or dishonesty or obstruction on the part of the defendant.  Fun fact:  While neither of those criteria were present for Clinton, both are present in the Mar-a-Lago documents investigation against Trump.)

It might be possible to conduct the same sort of ex post inquiry in the Manhattan case against Trump.  The folks at Just Security have pulled together a document with a helpful spreadsheet of business records cases, which could allow readers to compare the Trump case to previous cases that have been pursued.  Unfortunately, documents like this are limited—they identify only cases that were pursued; they do not and cannot identify similar cases that the Manhattan DA’s office decided not to pursue.

Ultimately, that illustrates why modern prosecutorial discretion sits uneasily with our commitment to the principle of equal treatment under the law.  As a country, we have enacted broadly written criminal statutes, which delegate enormous enforcement authority to prosecutors.  And we have not created any mechanisms to provide transparency into how that authority is exercised.  We know that prosecutors routinely decline to bring charges when they have probable cause that a crime has been committed, and yet we do not know much of anything about how they use that power.

The indictment of a former president (and current candidate for the office) was always going to be a political firestorm.  But our failure to grapple with the black box of prosecutorial discretion only adds fuel to the fire.

SG to the Court: Originalism Requires Jury Lawfinding

A month ago, the Solicitor General reported to the Court that defendants have been denied the right to the full jury trial intended by the Framers in every case, state and federal, which has been tried at least since the end of the 19th century. Smith v. United States  is a venue case; I wrote about the venue issue at SCOTUSBlog. But in addressing the venue question, the SG revived a controversy with comprehensive implications. The SG explained that one of the “original purpose[s]” of venue, and “one at the center of the Framers’ debates on the issue, was to allow the jurors to serve as the conscience of the community through interpretation of law.” (Br. at 9) Quoting Drew Kershen’s work Vicinage Part II, the SG explained that venue provisions were designed to “enable the jury to ‘serve as the conscience of the community.’ That concept included ‘not simply [the jury’s] interpreting the law’ to apply to the facts, but the jury’s potential ‘to disregard clearly applicable law’ with which it disagreed.” (Br. at 29). The Framers’ juries, in the SG’s view, had not only the raw power of nullification against the law, but the institutional duty and responsibility to mitigate application of laws which would otherwise be unduly harsh. To be sure, as the SG pointed out, the Supreme Court rejected that role for the jury in the 7-2 decision in Sparf & Hansen v. United States, 156 U.S. 51 (1895). But while the majority marshalled much judicial authority, it was the dissent which was most interested in the views of the Framers and the leading authorities at the time the Constitution was adopted. The SG’s brief declared, in effect, that the dissenters were right.

The SG’s position is consistent with the view that many academics have taken in scholarship over the last several decades. Joan Larsen asserts that “the jury of the founding generation had powers and rights that went beyond the fact-finding power of the modern jury. The Founders' jury also had the right to judge the law, a right that criminal juries would not lose until well into the nineteenth century.” Jenia Iontcheva Turner claims that “[t]he authority of the criminal jury to determine law as well as facts was taken as self-evident in many colonies.”  According to Rachel Barkow, “there is evidence that, both before the Framing and for a time thereafter, juries were deciding questions of law.” Darryl Brown claims that “juries at one time explicitly possessed the power to judge the law as well as the facts.”

To be sure, some scholars disagree or find the evidence more mixed: William E. Nelson seems to report variation among colonial jurisdictions, and Stanton Krauss doubts what he calls the “conventional wisdom” about early jury authority. However, the point of originalism as I understand it is not to assess colonial practice, but to ascertain what the Framers intended. The SG has supplied a specific answer to that question.

I am in no position to opine on the ultimate issue. But this is a Court which believes the proper method of interpreting the Constitution is originalism. It is not fanatical about following existing precedent which was, in its view, erroneously decided.  The Court is also willing to dig deep; the Court quite recently rejected the non-unanimous jury based on a careful examination of historical practice. And few would deny the Solicitor General’s insight and influence on the interpretation of the Constitution. Accordingly, every criminal defense attorney in the United States should take this as a command, starting now, to contend that the Solicitor General is absolutely right, and that faithful application of the original public meaning of the jury trial right requires instructing jurors that it is up to them to determine not only what happened, but whether it was wrong. The Solicitor General may recant or the Supreme Court may ultimately read the history differently. But it is difficult to overstate the transformation of the criminal justice system which would ensue if juries were allowed to acquit simply because they, functioning effectively as a legislature for a particular case, did not find that a person should be convicted. The Solicitor General’s brief makes jury law-finding a live issue that must be addressed.

Presidents and Prosecutorial Discretion

News that the Justice Department had obtained a search warrant and seized several boxes of materials from Mar-a-Lago, the residence of former President Donald Trump, shocked the nation last week.  Details about the reason for the search and what was found have slowly trickled out, thanks in part to DOJ’s motion to unseal the warrant, various reports from news outlets, and several public statements from Trump himself.  Although the factual basis for the search is not entirely known, commentary about the search and its implications have dominated the media landscape.

Much of the commentary surrounding the search has focused on whether the search was justified.  The justification commentary hasn’t been confined to whether the search was legally justified—that is, whether there was probable cause to support the search warrant—but rather whether the search can meet some heightened standard given that the target of the search was a former president. 

At it’s core, those arguing for heightened scrutiny (rather than the ordinary legal standard for when a search warrant is justified) seem to be making a political argument—namely, that because the current resident of the White House ran against Trump in 2020 and because Trump might run for president again in 2024, any search warrant needed to be based on more than just probable cause to believe that evidence of a crime would be found in Mar-a-Lago.  Implicit in this argument is the idea the ordinary legal standards do not provide enough protection against politically motivated prosecutions, and so the legitimacy of any criminal investigation or prosecution of President Trump must be judged by a different standard.

As someone who studies criminal justice and politics, I think that there are analytical shortcomings and unappreciated implications that flow from this heightened scrutiny argument, and I want to lay them out here in the hope that they can help shape the discussion about the Mar-a-Lago search within the legal community.

First, it is important to note that the “heightened scrutiny” argument is often made without much information about what such a standard would look like.  Qualitative standards, including probable cause, are notoriously difficult to articulate with any specificity.  But in order for the argument about heightened scrutiny to make any sense, it needs to provide some sort of guidance; otherwise it is useless as an actual yardstick against which to assess DOJ’s actions.  A call for a heightened standard without actually articulating such a standard operates only as a way to criticize DOJ (“this wasn’t enough”) rather than as a standard that DOJ officials could attempt to meet.

How could we go about articulating a “heightened scrutiny” standard?  For one thing, we should be clear about whether this is a question about the amount of evidence that DOJ had to support the warrant application, whether this is a question about the type of crime that Trump is suspected of committing, whether it is some combination of the two, or whether the standard is about some extra-legal consideration.

The idea that DOJ should have a larger amount of evidence than what would amount to probable cause before seeking a search warrant of a former president doesn’t seem like a particularly radical argument to me.  Probable cause is not a difficult threshold to meet.  There is reason to believe that prosecutors and law enforcement already tend to require more than just probable cause in order to search or arrest a high-profile subject; instead, they want overwhelming evidence that a crime was committed or that evidence of that crime is likely to be found.  To be clear, law enforcement likely use this heightened evidentiary standard in cases involving high-profile subjects because they know such cases will garner more public attention, and they don’t want a case to fall apart when the public is paying attention. 

For what it is worth, I don't think that those calling for a heightened standard are saying that a higher evidentiary threshold is needed because the news accounts suggest that the FBI had ample evidence that they would find the documents they sought in the search warrant, and the inventory from the search indicates that they did find such documents.

So that means the call for heightened scrutiny is likely an argument that not all crimes should give rise to an investigation or a search of a former president.  The idea that someone should essentially be immune when it comes to some crimes may seem controversial—at least until people are made aware of how much relatively innocuous behavior is actually criminal.  Congress and state legislatures pass dozens of new criminal laws every year, some of which contain sweeping language.  (If you are curious about how silly some of those laws are, you should check out Crime a Day.)  To the extent that the “heightened scrutiny” argument is merely an objection to overcriminalization in specific circumstances, then it seems unremarkable.  But again, the argument needs to be spelled out in more detail because specifying which crimes should remain unenforced is necessary to assess the argument. Should former presidents be exempt from prosecutions for mishandling classified information?  Tax fraud?  Burglary?  Shooting someone on Fifth Avenue?

The biggest flaw with both the type of crime argument and the amount of evidence argument is that they don't just apply to former presidents:  Why should these heightened standards apply only to Donald Trump and not the rest of us?  Probable cause is an incredibly low standard to meet. So why is that a good enough standard for searching or arresting ordinary citizens?  And why isn’t the overcriminalization critique an argument for stopping all prosecutions of such crimes, not just prosecutions of those who were elected to national office?

Some of the commentators arguing for heightened scrutiny have suggested that their argument is based on a perceived danger that former presidents will be targeted for illegitimate reasons—specifically, they will be targeted in order to help the political fortunes of those who are currently in office.  But personal and political grievances are not limited to former presidents; they exist in communities across the country.  For example, when I was doing research for my book on plea bargaining, I reached out to the lawyers of a man who had been pressured into pleading guilty for a crime he hadn’t committed.  The lawyers told me that their client was scared to talk to me:  Even though he had been exonerated and his conviction reversed, local police had made it known that they still thought him guilty, and so the man was worried about doing anything that would draw their attention and encourage them to use their power to harass him.

You would think that judges could stop police and prosecutors who use silly laws or low evidentiary threshholds to harass people.  But when faced with evidence that law enforcement used their powers to arrest and search as a pretext, or have used the powers to punish individuals for extralegal reasons (like exercising their right to free speech), courts have refused to intervene.  But those pushing for heightened scrutiny either don’t know or don’t care that overcriminalization and weak evidentiary thresholds allow abuse of ordinary citizens.  They only seem concerned that people who have held positions of immense power are shielded from possible abuse of the criminal justice system.

Of course, the people who are arguing for heightened scrutiny don’t frame their argument in those normative terms.  Indeed, some don’t even say that former presidents should have additional protection.  Instead, they suggest that such protections are necessary for political reasons—e.g., that without heightened standards the political allies of former president Trump will see DOJ's actions as illegitimate political persecution, and they may even resort to violence.

I’m not sure that it is wrong to say that public officials must think about politics when it comes to criminal investigations and prosecutions.  After all, our criminal justice system gives enormous amounts of discretion to law enforcement and to prosecutors, and it largely regulates that discretion through direct elections or political appointments and removals.  In other words, despite repeated claims to the contrary, investigations and prosecutions are—on some fundamental level—political.

But I don’t think that the people who are making the heightened scrutiny argument fully appreciate the implications of adopting an explicitly political approach to investigations and prosecutions.  Specifically, I don’t think they appreciate that this principle—that political considerations should drive the exercise of criminal justice powers—also legitimates efforts by progressive prosecutors to stop enforcing low-level crimes, to stop cycling people of color and people from low-income communities through jails and prisons, and to refuse to enforce highly-politicized offenses such as abortion-related laws.  The prosecutors who have pursued such policies have done so with significant political support from within their communities, but with great pushback from outside of those communities.  For example, earlier this month, Ron DeSantis removed a local prosecutor from office on the basis of statements that the prosecutor wouldn’t prosecute people for abortion-related crimes.  DeSantis claims that these statements are evidence of neglect of duty and malfeasance.  Would an explicit policy of eschewing criminal investigations and prosecutions of former presidents also be neglect of duty or malfeasance?  And if not, why not?

I also don’t think it is a good idea for those arguing in favor of heightened scrutiny to focus on the violence that President Trump’s followers might wreak on this country.  For one thing, I think that some Trump supporters will resort to violence no matter what happens (e.g., if their candidate loses a fair election).  In addition, I think that argument tells people that being seen as unpredictably violent is the way to get preferential treatment from law enforcement. Think, for example, about the violence and property damage that occurred during the racial justice protests of 2020.  The logical conclusion of the heightened scrutiny argument is that, if there is enough violence of that sort, then police and prosecutors will have to change their practices and stop relying on low evidentiary thresholds and bloated criminal codes when policing poor communities of color.  Maybe the people who are arguing for a heightened standard for former presidents would also endorse a public and explicit change to what crimes are enforced and the evidentiary thresholds being used in poor communities out of fear that more violence or property damage could occur—but I’d like to see them say so if it is true.

The truth is, the search at Mar-a-Lago has forced people who usually think about politics and presidential power to grapple with the fact that we don’t require much from law enforcement before they can search and arrest members of the public.  The former is the stuff of nationally syndicated pundits and constitutional law professors; the latter is the territory of criminal justice practitioners, advocates, and crim law professors.  Now that the country is paying attention to how much power and discretion is given to officials in the criminal justice system, perhaps it is time to address that enormous and largely unchecked power on its own terms rather than just worrying about whether that power will be directed at a former president.

Walen on Ahmaud Arbery

The following post is by Alec Walen (Rutgers).

The killing of Ahmaud Arbery was a horrific tragedy. It is natural to want justice for him. And perhaps the evidence will show, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the three men who chased him down and eventually killed him had no legal right to do what they did. But from what I can see, it seems plausible that they did have a legal right to do what they did. If so, then convicting them of murder, assault, and kidnapping—the three basic charges they face in an 8-count indictment—would turn them into sacrificial lambs, punished to make up for our collective guilt as a racist society. That might make some people feel better, but it would not do justice.

The killing of Ahmaud Arbery was a horrific tragedy. It is natural to want justice for him. And perhaps the evidence will show, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the three men who chased him down and eventually killed him had no legal right to do what they did. But from what I can see, it seems plausible that they did have a legal right to do what they did. If so, then convicting them of murder, assault, and kidnapping—the three basic charges they face in an 8-count indictment—would turn them into sacrificial lambs, punished to make up for our collective guilt as a racist society. That might make some people feel better, but it would not do justice.

By way of background: On Feb. 23, 2020, Mr. Arbery was jogging through the Satilla Shores neighborhood, about 2 miles from his home. As video from the scene indicates, he took a detour to peek into a house under construction, as he had done several times before. The New York Times reports that:

Gregory McMichael, a former investigator in the local prosecutor’s office, saw Mr. Arbery in the house and thought he looked like a man suspected of several break-ins in the area. He called to Travis, his son, a Navy veteran and boat-tour operator. The elder Mr. McMichael grabbed a handgun; his son, a shotgun. The two jumped into a truck and gave chase and were eventually joined by Mr. Bryan, who drove his own truck. Mr. Arbery, a former high school football player, tried to run from them.

Eventually, the pursuers had Mr. Arbery caught between them. Travis McMichael got out of his truck and stood near its door with his shotgun. Mr. Arbery ran around the truck and then at him. They wrestled over the shotgun and it went off three times, killing Mr. Arbery.

It’s not hard to see how this was fundamentally a tragic, racially tinged, misunderstanding. Think of it, first, from Mr. Arbery’s point of view. He went out for a jog and was curious to see how things were coming in this house under construction. I have been that sort of trespasser before, peeking into houses under construction. It’s fascinating to see how they come together. I never stay long, I never touch anything; I’m just looking. It seems this was the case for Mr. Arbery too.

After spending about four minutes in the house, Mr. Arbery left and continued jogging on his way. But a few minutes later he saw that he was being followed by some white guys in a pickup truck, and by another white guy in a car. Now we don’t know what the McMichaels or Mr. Bryan might have said to Mr. Arbery, but it’s easy to imagine that he was afraid that they were aiming to harm him. 

He did what anyone might do: he tried to escape danger. He changed directions and then changed directions again, trying to escape pursuit. Finally, finding himself between the two vehicles, he saw the driver of the truck get out and presumably he saw that he was armed with a shotgun. He heard the word “STOP” but presumably—and we’ll never know—it occurred to him that the best chance he had to avoid being shot by these lunatics was to try to disarm the guy with the shotgun. So, he ran towards him to try to wrestle it away. But he failed to wrest the gun free, got shot in the chest, and died.

Now view the same situation from the point of view of the McMichaels. There have been break-ins in the area, and they see this Black guy emerge from a house where he was trespassing, and he looks like the guy suspected of burglaries in the area. They called the police. But they did more. They knew the law—Gregory was an investigator and had worked in the prosecutor’s office. They knew that the law allows them to make a citizen’s arrest and so they proceeded to do that, to ensure that this trespasser and suspected burglar would not get away before the police came.

Here’s exactly what the law said (it has since been repealed): “A private person may arrest an offender if the offense is committed in his presence or within his immediate knowledge. If the offense is a felony and the offender is escaping or attempting to escape, a private person may arrest him upon reasonable and probable grounds of suspicion.”

The McMichaels presumably thought that they had immediate knowledge that this Black guy was trespassing. It’s a misdemeanor in Georgia to enter “upon the land or premises of another person … for an unlawful purpose.” They can’t know his purpose, but what lawful purpose could he have had? Moreover, if he is a burglar, then maybe he was engaged in more than trespassing; maybe entered the property with the intent to take something. Burglary is a felony and he was fleeing. They only needed “reasonable and probable grounds of suspicion”—in other words, they only needed to reasonably suspect—that he entered the building without authority and “with the intent to commit a felony or theft therein” to arrest him.

It’s not that they did nothing wrong. But to appreciate what they did wrong, and how it is significant, you need to take seriously the idea that citizens in Georgia were supposed to act, essentially, like the police in making arrests. Imagine, then, that you are a police officer and you are chasing a fleeing felon. You see a man running from a house and you have reasonable suspicion that he was not only engaged in criminal trespass, but that he was engaged in a burglary. You give chase. You see that he’s faster than you and so you pull your gun and yell STOP.

What you’ve done is exercise your “constructive authority” as a police officer. You’ve also done so wrongly. You know that under Supreme Court precedent (Tennessee vs. Garner) you have no right to shoot a fleeing felon unless you have probable cause to believe that he poses a significant threat of death or serious injury to yourself or others. You have no probable cause to believe that, but you think you’re still operating within the law because you pulled your gun to intimidate, not to shoot. In New Jersey—where I teach and where retired Police Captain Brian Donnelly, with whom I consulted, also teaches—that sort of act runs counter to policy issued by the Attorney General. It also was stupid, because it risked escalating the conflict. And indeed, that’s what happened.

So, to continue with the case, suppose the suspect you were chasing sees your gun and turns on you and tries to disarm you. You would have a right to shoot in self-defense. It was, in a way, your fault that the situation reached that point. You never should have pulled your gun. But having made that mistake, it’s not your fault that you need to use lethal force to defend yourself. Your provocation of a conflict would not cause you to lose the right of self-defense because you had the authority to arrest him, and your misuse of your firearm to threaten does not cause you to forfeit that authority.

In Georgia, the McMichaels and Mr. Bryan can say that they likewise had the authority to arrest Mr. Arbery. Moreover, even if it was stupid to brandish a shotgun to try to intimidate Mr. Arbery and cause him to submit himself to their authority, that by itself did not cause them to forfeit the right to arrest him, and it did not cause them to lose the right to use lethal force if necessary to act in self-defense.

Both sets of actors, in other words, plausibly had perfectly understandable reasons to act as they did. If this is how the jury sees it at the end of the presentation of evidence, then they must acquit the McMichaels and Mr. Bryan of the charges brought against them.

Indeed, if this is how the prosecution sees the case, then the prosecutor has violated basic prosecutorial ethics by bringing this case. It would then be a cowardly act of putting the burden of doing the right thing on the jury because the prosecution doesn’t want to stand up to the political pressure to bring the case.

But one can ask: Is there nothing that can be done? Well, what was done was important: the citizen’s arrest law was repealed. That’s good because police and citizens have a different impact on others. If Mr. Arbery had seen police officers telling him to stop, it is likely that he would have obeyed rather than going for one of their guns. He would likely have presumed that they had the authority to arrest him and were exercising that authority rather than coming to harm him. Without an obvious sign of authority, citizens who seek to wield authority may instead seem to be merely trying to assault a fellow citizen. And in an area beset by racial mistrust, there is all the more reason to think someone would react as Mr. Arbery did in his situation.

In the longer term, we need to address our racist culture. I have no doubt that if I, a middle-aged white guy, had been seen peeking into the house, no one would have called the police on me. I might have been approached to see what I was up to if I wasn’t from that neighborhood. But I would have been approached politely. Even if I resembled someone suspected of burglary in the neighborhood, I presume the encounter would have gone more smoothly; I would have explained who I was and that I was indulging my idle curiosity, and no one would end up dead. Likewise, as a white guy, if I had been pursued by other white guys in a truck flagging me down, I’d be less likely to assume that the intent was hostile. I’d be more likely to stop, and talk, and resolve the matter peacefully. Racism creates fear and misunderstanding on both sides, and it was fear and misunderstanding that seems most likely to have led to Mr. Arbery’s death.

If this is right, the jury should acquit. That will be problematic. Many will think that racism caused the death of Mr. Arbery and then caused his killers to go free. But if they committed no crime, they may not be punished. They may not be sacrificed for our collective, racist past. We need, rather, to work, collectively, on doing the hard work of coping with tragedy, fixing bad laws that encourage citizens to pull guns on each other, and trying to get people to understand that all people, no matter their race, deserve respect.

Cosby, justice, and what we teach our students

The following is by my FIU colleague Scott Fingerhut, who is Assistant Director of the Trial Advocacy Program and practices criminal defense.

 

 

The call of my summer criminal procedure class is for each student to come to terms with what justice looks like to them. 

Not an easy task, particularly in America today.

But in the two weeks since Bill Cosby was freed, I sense a reckoning, something of what Dr. Cornel West must have meant when he said,  “justice is what love looks like in public.”

For all his wretchedness, give America’s Dad credit: He confessed when he said he would.

Sure, maybe not in full.  And yes, only when his liberty was no longer at stake.

Yet still, he kept his word.  And so, then, should the prosecutors have kept theirs, as the Pennsylvania Supreme Court held. 

A matter of pure contract – reliance, to his detriment, upon an offer for consideration, and then, estoppel.

Justice. 

And not a bitter pill to swallow at all.

For as we continue on our mutual journey to repurpose America, in this season of accountability and rethinking lusts for power in quests for liberty, Cosby delivers yet another powerful teaching moment – on how sacred is honor.

Promises made, promises kept, in court and out.

And make no mistake: for many, too many, this is a message that can and must indeed be taught.

Honor, like humility, is an elusive quality, to be sure, but one that is, in fact, possible to define, able to be told, and capable of being understood, all deference to Justice Jackson.

Honor is the soul of our profession, and a core of criminal justice.  This the Court spoke, in Santobello and Brady: “When a plea rests in any significant degree on a promise or agreement of the prosecutor, so that it can be said to be part of the inducement or consideration, such promise must be fulfilled.”

And that our students must really know.  That it will be up to them to do justice.  And to do justice, they must know justice, feel it, in their bones.

That the iron in their word is their bond. 

And that (the wisdom of all prosecutorial decision-making in this case aside) means celebrating, not lamenting, Cosby’s release.

For without honor, what is there left to be taught?

Six months before his death, upon accepting the Liberty Medal at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, Thurgood Marshall continued to impress that “[t]he legal system can force open doors and sometimes even knock down walls.  But it cannot build bridges.  That job,” he said, “belongs to you and me.”

Lawyer as bridge-builder. 

Law student as constructor-in-residence. 

So, thanks for the lesson, Mr. Cosby.

Contrary to most of the press, your case has nothing to do with celebrity, and everything to do with honor.  As much, if not more, about process than outcome.  The spirit of American crim pro.  And the essence of justice.  Even for, especially for, the least, last, lost, left out, and looked over. 

And that’s the point.

How a society treats its outcasts, the least among it, says perhaps the most about the type of society it is, and yearns to become.

Some thoughts on Cosby

I do not do criminal procedure, so I cannot pass on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision in Cosby. I want to raise some issues that touch on what I do study.

• Could Pennsylvania seek review in SCOTUS? That is, did the majority rely on federal or Pennsylvania principles of due process and estoppel? It cites state and federal cases and discusses both sources of law, moving between them. In an unclear case, Michigan v. Long requires the conclusion that the state court relied on federal law rather than independent-and-adequate state grounds, giving SCOTUS jurisdiction (although I doubt SCOTUS will touch this case). I think the better reading is that this is a decision on federal due process, but it requires parsing.

• Accepting that a constitutional violation occurred, I agree with the two-justice concurring-and-dissenting opinion that the proper remedy is a retrial without his deposition statements rather than dismissal of the case and a bar on a new trial. The former DA promised not to prosecute and the breach of the promise was the violation, but Cosby was injured only because he answered deposition questions rather than asserting his Fifth Amendment privilege (which the court accepts as the purpose behind the promise) and those statements were used against him. Imagine the former DA had made the promise and the current DA ignored the promise, but Cosby had never testified in the civil action or the new prosecution had not used his statements--in other words, had Cosby not relied. Would the court have found a violation? Reading the opinion, it does not appear so, specially since the former DA likely lacked authority to make this binding promise in this form. If a prosecution would have been allowed ab initio, then the remedy for the violation should be to allow a re-prosecution as if Cosby had not testified (i.e., without his statements).

• The majority is unclear as to who violated Cosby's rights--the former DA who made the promise or the current DA who brought the prosecution? The court is inconsistent about that, although at the end of the day seems to define it as the promise that induced Cosby to waive his Fifth Amendment privilege in the civil action (which would seem to suggest that Castor committed the violation).

If that is the violation, how does that affect the underlying civil case against Cosby? It settled for more than $ 3 million and was dismissed, after Cosby sat for multiple depositions and made inculpatory statements. It does not appear that any judgment was entered. Could Cosby attempt to open the settlement, arguing that it was a product of the DA's constitutional violation--he settled because negative information came out in his depositions, but he would not have made those inculpatory statements (and thus would not have settled) had he not been stripped of his Fifth Amendment rights by Castor's promise? That might be an equitable "other reason" to reopen a judgment; not sure it does the same for a settlement.

• Might Cosby sue the current and/or former prosecutors, claiming a due process violation and seeking to recover some or all of the $ 3 million settlement that resulted from the violation? We will not find out because it seems pretty clear that decisions to prosecutor or not are protected by prosecutorial immunity.

Supreme Court Weighs Whether to Hear Possible Sentencing Law Blockbuster

This Friday, the Supreme Court will decide whether to grant certiorari in Demma v. United States.  Demma raises two questions under the Supreme Court’s Sixth Amendment sentencing doctrine: (1) the extent to which judges can sentence outside of the Federal Sentencing Guidelines based only on a policy disagreement with the Guidelines, and (2) how much appellate courts must defer to the substantive sentencing decisions of district court judges.

These are two incredibly important questions that arise because of how the Supreme Court decided United States v. Booker.  Previous cases had said that mandatory sentencing systems violate the Sixth Amendment if they require judges to make factual findings before increasing a sentence.  The Federal Sentencing Guidelines required such factual findings, and so the Booker Court held that they were unconstitutional.  But then something unusual happened—although she formed part of the 5-4 majority that found the Guidelines unconstitutional, Justice Ginsburg joined the four dissenting Justices who then fashioned a strange remedy.  Rather than saying that mandatory sentencing facts have to be proven to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt, the remedial majority said that the Guidelines would no longer be mandatory, they would instead be “advisory.”

Since Booker was decided in 2005, the Supreme Court has heard a whole bunch of cases that seek to clarify this remedy.  It is clear that judges still have to find facts and calculate a sentence under the Federal Sentencing Guidelines.  It is also clear that judges have at least some authority to give a non-Guidelines sentences.  And it is clear that appellate courts are supposed to review sentences to make sure that they are both procedurally and substantively reasonable.  But it is entirely unclear how much authority district court judges have to sentence outside of the Guidelines, and it is also unclear what the appellate review of those non-Guidelines sentences is supposed to look like.

Just last week, the North Carolina Law Review hosted a symposium on the Supreme Court’s Sixth Amendment sentencing doctrine.  The first of the Court’s Sixth Amendment sentencing cases, Apprendi v. New Jersey, was decided in the year 2000, and so the symposium marked the 20^th anniversary of the doctrine.  We had an amazing group of speakers at the symposium—Judge Stephanos Bibas, Doug Berman, Will Berry, Frank Bowman, Judge Nancy Gertner, Nancy King, Susan Klein, Kate Stith, and yours truly.  The law review will be publishing papers from the symposium.

Coincidentally, my paper (which is not quite in shape to be shared right now!) addresses both of the questions that are before the Supreme Court in Demma.  I argue that two Supreme Court cases—Blakely v. Washington and Cunningham v. California—require allowing district court judges to impose sentences based only on policy disagreements.  Blakely contained the following explanation of its holding:

“Whether the judge’s authority to impose an enhanced sentence depends on finding a specified fact (as in Apprendi), one of several specified facts (as in Ring), or any aggravating fact (as here), it remains the case that the jury’s verdict alone does not authorize the sentence. The judge acquires that authority only upon finding some additional fact.” 

If district court judges may not base their sentences on policy reasons alone, then they will have to base sentencing decisions on facts.  The Blakely Court told us that those facts, if necessary, have to be submitted to a jury.  If judges have to point to particular facts or circumstances in a case that justify a non-Guidelines sentence, rather than being able to simply articulate a policy disagreement, then the Supreme Court will have to overrule Blakely.

The appellate review question arises from some contradictory language in Gall v. United States.  Gall instructed the courts of appeals to “take into account the totality of the circumstances” when reviewing sentencing decisions, and it also suggested that this review should be conducted no differently for sentences inside the Guidelines range and outside of the range.   But this even-handed language was undercut elsewhere in the opinion.  In stating that appellate courts should consider the totality of the circumstances, the Gall Court mentioned only a single circumstance—“the extent of any variance from the Guidelines range.”   It also said “it uncontroversial that a major departure should be supported by a more significant justification than a minor one.”

Both of the legal questions raised by the Demma petition are important.  And frankly, I am surprised that the Supreme Court has yet to resolve them in favor of district court discretion to sentence outside of the Guidelines.  I suspect that the Court hasn’t clarified these issues because it wants judges to impose Guidelines sentences in most cases.  And while the Court’s Sixth Amendment sentencing doctrine doesn’t allow the Court to accomplish that directly, it has tried to do so indirectly through allowing the courts of appeals to take different approaches on these questions.

But I find that decision—the decision to allow different legal standards for sentencing—troubling.  The Supreme Court ordinarily prides itself on resolving legal disagreements between the circuits.  And it seems especially ironic to allow different courts of appeals to have different legal standards when it comes to sentencing.  After all, the remedial majority in Booker said that it was creating an advisory Guidelines system because it wanted to promote uniformity in sentencing.  Different legal standards in different circuits is hardly likely to lead to uniformity.

And we don’t have sentencing uniformity right now.  Instead we have sentencing practices that vary wildly depending on the circuit.  Because different circuits have different sentencing case law, judges in some circuits are far more likely to sentence outside of the Guidelines than judges in other circuits. 

For example, according to 2018 U.S. Sentencing Commission data, judges in the Fifth Circuit follow the Guidelines when imposing sentence 84.3% of the time.  In contrast, judges in the Second circuit follow the Guidelines only 55.3% of the time.  It should come as no surprise that these two circuits take different legal approaches to the questions presented in the Demma petition.

The chances that the Court will grant cert in Demma look pretty good.  The Court called for a response from the Solicitor General (who had initially waived response).  The Court also relisted the petition after an earlier conference.

I really hope that the Justice vote to grant cert in this case.  And I hope that they resolve these questions in a way that vindicates the Sixth Amendment right that they first acknowledged in Apprendi.

How to Cover Protests and Crime (*slightly updated)

I just finished reading this thought-provoking article from Arc Digital about media coverage of protests and political implications.  It is a good reminder that media have to make substantive decisions about which stories to cover.   But it also is basically a microcosm of a lot of coverage that I've seen about how the lawlessness at protests and crime more generally is likely to play out in the presidential election.

Implicit (and sometime explicit) in this article is the idea that, although the political arguments about crime and the protests that are being leveled against the Biden/Harris ticket are wrong a a matter of fact and as a matter of logic, the arguments might still succeed.  The author notes that conservative media outlets and prominent Republicans keep saying that Biden and Harris haven't condemned looting and violence at the protests.  But of course they both have.  The author also seems to acknowledge that it's illogical to blame Joe Biden for things that are happening while Trump is president or to say that crime will get worse if Biden is elected.  Even if we think presidents are responsible for crime--which is a silly thing to assume--crime rates dropped when Biden was vice president, and similar protests and violence in Ferguson were handled much more effectively when Obama was president.  Yet this author is quick to tell Biden and Harris that they need to do more to reassure voters that they don't support violence, and that they have to be careful not to be more forceful in condemning vigilantes than antifa because that might give voters the wrong impression.

In short, the article adds to the pile of commentary that seems to assume the current violence in American cities will hurt Democrats, and thus focuses on how the Biden/Harris response could be *better* while largely ignoring that the Trump/Pence response has been pretty awful. 

That same double standard appears in the discussion of media coverage.  The article notes how the mainstream media has ignored some stories that gained traction in the conservative media.  And it argues that these omissions could make people think that Democrats support rioting.  But there’s no similar critique of the conservative media.  There is no detailed catalogue of what stories didn’t get coverage on Fox News or in the National Review.  There’s no concern about stories from these outlets that seem to support vigilantism or turn a blind eye to police violence.  Nor is there an explanation about why alienating voters is only something for mainstream media or left-leaning outlets to worry about.

Don't get me wrong.  I think that the concern and the critique offered in this article are based in good faith.  The author seems to support Biden/Harris and I suspect she wrote this story because she is worried that they might lose.  But I worry about the cumulative effect of stories such as this on criminal justice politics in this country—stories that focus on whether law & order issues will hurt Democrats and that assume they will help Republicans.  This country has only recently started to recover from decades of the two parties trying to out-do each other as tough on crime.  Framing "law & order" as something that Democrats always need to be afraid of could undermine the small reforms that have been made.

My biggest criticism of this reporting and lots of other commentary that I’ve seen is that it doesn’t attempt to put questions about crime and disorder at the protests into a larger context that includes actual empirical evidence about what’s happening (rather than just anecdotes).  For example, I’ve seen dozens of commenters talk about the “sense” or “perception” that the protests are not peaceful, but are instead riots filled with lawlessness and violence.  Isn’t that something that could actually be tested?  How many protests do we see across the country every day where there is no looting or burning of buildings?  A political commentor who is tempted to write another "crime is bad for Biden/Harris" story could do some independent research to provide additional factual context to whatever "there's a sense" conjecture that she wants to write.

For example, I haven't seen very much in-depth reporting about what arrests police are making at these protests.  A quick glance at the Portland Sheriff’s booking database showed me that law enforcement in Portland are still arresting a significant number of people for not following police orders.  That information about arrests in Portland is especially newsworthy given the wide spread coverage about the Portland DA refusing to prosecute people arrested at protests unless they were looting or engaged in violent behavior.  It’s fair to ask why the police are continuing to arrest these people who are literally protesting police aggression.  Similarly, a sheriff from just outside Portland* recently released a statement saying that judges are contributing to the lawlessness in Portland by releasing protestors on their own recognizance, claiming that police are arresting the same people over and over again.  This statement is gaining tons of traction on Twitter, but local reporting makes clear that the statement is factually incorrect:  "Court and jail records show that few people have been arrested multiple times at protests and that the majority of arrests have been for non-violent crimes."**

Finally, it would be nice if critiques of media coverage about crime during these protests seemed to have some appreciation about the ordinary problems associated with media coverage of crime—the disproportionate coverage of serious crime, the uncritical repetition of law enforcement statements, the effects of the availability heuristic on the public.  This article, for example, chides the media for not giving complete accounts of the criminal history of Jacob Blake.  Is that really what we want the media to do?  Do we really think that the fact a person has been accused of a crime makes it more likely that they were violent towards the police? And if so, where is the outrage that the media doesn’t have access to the disciplinary records of the officer who shot Blake?  Or do we assume prior bad acts are only relevant for people who police are shooting and not for the police themselves.

In any event, the article is worth reading because it does a good job highlighting questions about content decisions that those in the media have to make.  But this author had to make similar decisions for this very article, and it’s far from clear that her decisions are more evenhanded or less biased than the decisions she is criticizing.

* Previous version of this post mistakenly said that it was the sheriff of the country that includes Portland.

** This paragraph has been updated to include the information from local media contradicting the sheriff's statement

CrimFest in the Time of Corona

For obvious reasons, CrimFest--the annual workshop and gathering of criminal law professors--will not be held in person this summer.

Instead, of trying to move a 150+ person conference online, we are going to facilitate a semi-structured paper swap.  While the swap is obviously not a substitute for the conference itself, my hope is that it will help provide at least some of the benefits of CrimFest --- namely,  giving us a mid-summer us a writing deadline, letting us learn about what others are writing, and allowing us to get feedback from others who are writing and researching similar topics. 

Everyone who signs up for the swap will be expected to send their draft to others no later than July 1; and they will also be expected to return comments to others no later than July 15.  People can swap with as many or as few people as they'd like.  And the two week turnaround for comments should be flexible enough to allow all of us to balance our other responsibilities. 

If you are interested in participating, please email me at [email protected] no later than April 24.  Please put "CrimFest Swap" in the subject line of your email, and I will reply with more details.

Notice, Vagueness, and Trump’s Anti-Impeachment Argument

On Monday, the President’s lawyers filed a memorandum with the Senate that lays out his response to the House’s impeachment case. One argument in the memo stood out to me—the idea that President Trump cannot be impeached because he did not violate a specific criminal law.  The President’s lawyers are making this argument in response to the first article of impeachment—the one that alleges an abuse of power. 

This argument has gotten a lot of attention because Alan Dershowitz, who recently joined the President’s legal team, has argued that, as a historical matter, impeachment and removal are only constitutionally permitted if Congress proves the President committed a crime.  There is ample evidence that contradicts Dershowitz’s historical argument—evidence that constitutional experts across the country have been quick to identify. 

Importantly, the President’s lawyers have framed the argument in terms that are not purely historical.  They have also argued that, as a substantive legal matter, a President may only be impeached and removed for conduct that is clearly forbidden by law.  That substantive argument is not receiving the same level of attention as Dershowitz’s historical argument. (Though I do recommend this great essay from Ilya Somin over at the Volokh Conspiracy.)  Because the substantive argument is intuitively appealing, I think that it is important to highlight what is wrong with it.

The President’s substantive argument, in a nutshell, is that he cannot be impeached for abuse of power because there is no clear, legal definition of “abuse of power.”  In the absence of a clear definition, the argument goes, it would be unfair to impeach the President because, at the time he acted, President Trump did not know that conduct was forbidden.  It would also give Congress too much power because Congress could use the nebulous charge of “abuse of power” to impeach and remove future presidents based on legitimate policy disagreements.  If these sound familiar to you, it may be because they are similar to an argument that Josh Blackman made several weeks ago.

These may also seem like familiar arguments because they are based on due process principles.  In particular, they rely on arguments that justify the rule of lenity and the void-for-vagueness doctrine—due process limitations that many of us learned about in our first year criminal law classes.  Personally, I love teaching these topics to my students, and I have also used those principles in my scholarship to repeatedly argue for more narrow and more specific criminal laws.  But here is the rub:  I make these arguments because this is not the current law in this country.  We routinely punish people without making clear beforehand what people can and cannot do.  We have done so since this country was founded nearly 250 years ago.  We do this despite the fact that it isn’t fair to the people we punish.  And we do it despite the fact that it gives police and prosecutors enormous amounts of power.

For example, we routinely criminalize certain conduct only if it is “unreasonable.”  That term appears in literally hundreds of criminal laws in all fifty states.  What distinguishes reasonable conduct from unreasonable conduct?  The answer to that question probably changes from person to person.  And so criminal laws that forbid “unreasonable” conduct require people to guess whether prosecutors or jurors will think that their actions were reasonable or unreasonable.  Yet, the Supreme Court confirmed as recently as 2015 that those laws are constitutional.  We’ve used that same malleable standard for literally centuries.  As Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once said: “[T]he  law  is  full  of  instances  where  a  man’s  fate  depends  on  his estimating  rightly,  that  is,  as  the  jury  subsequently  estimates  it,  some matter of degree.  If his judgment is wrong, not only may he incur a fine or a short imprisonment, as here; he may incur the penalty of death.”

To be sure, the Supreme Court has, on a small number of occasions, said that a criminal law can be so vague that it violates the Constitution’s guarantee of due process.  But those decisions have either involved laws that appeared to impinge on other important constitutional rights, like the right to free speech, or they have come in the wake of repeated unsuccessful attempts by courts to make sense of confusing or conflicting statutory language. 

But “abuse of power” doesn’t fit into either of those categories.  Instead, it looks quite similar to other phrases that the Court has allowed stand, relying on courts to give meaning to them over time.  The Sherman Act’s prohibition on any “contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy in restraint of trade or commerce” provides an example.  The cases decided since the passage of the statute have confirmed that Congress essentially delegated to the federal courts the task of creating a criminal common law of antitrust.  When it comes to “abuse of power,” it isn’t as though there is no guidance about what the phrase means.  As Harvard Law Professor Niko Bowie recently pointed out, abuse of power was considered a common law crime in this country, which means that there are cases and treatises that give real content to the concept.  It is precisely this sort of case law that has insulated similar legal phrases against vagueness attacks in the past.

President Trump’s own administration houses some of the strongest advocates for imposing punishment for violations of vague laws. Lawyers in Trump’s Justice Department have argued that statutes with vague language should be enforced against individual Americans.  This doesn’t really distinguish President Trump from the presidents that proceeded him—the Department of Justice has historically defended federal laws against vagueness challenges.  But it does seem ironic that Trump’s lawyers would claim constitutional protections in an impeachment trial while his administration works to deny those same protections to people in criminal trials. 

To the extent that people want to see more robust protections against imprecise criminal laws—and I assure you that I do—it makes no sense that we would first adopt those protections in a legal proceeding involving the most powerful person in the country where the only consequence he’d suffer is removal from office.  In fact, it would stand due process on its head to say that the President would be entitled to more protections in an impeachment trial than we are willing to give to criminal defendants who are facing the possibility of lengthy sentences of imprisonment.

It is also worth noting that the President’s substantive argument—even if it is appealing in the abstract—doesn’t make any sense in this particular factual situation.  The vast majority of Americans disapprove of the President’s decision to withhold military funding from Ukraine in order to get a public announcement about an investigation into a political rival.  So even if people might disagree about how, precisely, to define a presidential abuse of power, there is a lot of agreement that these particular actions qualify.  It is also incredibly difficult to argue that President Trump didn’t know that it was an illegal abuse of power to withhold military funding from Ukraine when he made the decision to do so.  As President Trump was refusing to release the money that Congress had appropriated, career officials were sending the message to him and his advisors that this course of action was not legally permissible. 

Finally, it is hard to ignore how President’s own actions.  He has previously said that Article II gives him unlimited power.  And since his actions became public, President Trump has insisted that he did nothing wrong and that his phone call with the Ukrainian president was “perfect.”  This behavior is hardly what we would expect from someone who is merely uncertain about the limits of his power.  To the contrary, President Trump appears to believe that his presidential powers include the ability to put this sort of pressure on a foreign nation.  And he likely will see an acquittal in the Senate of a confirmation of such sweeping power.

Criminal Law syllabus / course aims and goals

Over the years, I've revised, tweaked, abandoned, and cobbled together a few pages, at the front of the syllabus, about the aims and goals of my first-year Criminal Law course. To avoid exam-grading obligations, I'm messing around with them again. And, if anyone else needs an avoidance-behavior opportunity, I'd welcome reactions and suggestions!  Below the jump . . .

Course Description and (Some) Goals:

            In this introductory course, we will read, talk, learn, and think about the Criminal Law. Our focus will be, for the most part, on what is often called “the general part” of Criminal Law rather than on specific offenses in particular jurisdictions. We will cover technical matters and traditional doctrines as well as the theoretical, philosophical, and moral assumptions, commitments, and goals that shape the ways we define, prosecute, and punish crimes. The study of Criminal Law can and should be challenging and unsettling – and also fascinating and fun. I look forward to working with you.

            A goal for this class, and for the entire first year of law school, is to learn how – and to push ourselves – to read carefully, write clearly, and think rigorously, “like a lawyer.” More specifically, my hope for each one of you is that you will acquire and develop:

(1) The ability to read and the habit of reading legal materials – cases, statutes, constitutions, etc. – in a careful and disciplined way. In many contexts, skimming texts for the “general idea” works fine. In the Criminal Law and law-school contexts, though, it usually doesn’t. As you’ll see, words matter: they can make the difference between going home and going to prison.

(2) The ability to draw relevant and instructive comparisons and similarly relevant and instructive distinctions. This is a big part of what “legal reasoning” is all about. You should be able to pull general principles and rules from one case and apply them to another – or, to explain why they should not be applied and others should be instead. In your law-school classes, when your teachers push you with hypotheticals and changed facts, this kind of reasoning is what we are aiming for.

(3) An appreciation for the fact – and, to be clear, it is a fact – that legal doctrines, rules, tests, and standards reflect and are shaped by underlying premises, assumptions, values, and commitments. You should be able to think critically about these doctrines and identify the premises they reflect and their likely implications. The doctrines and definitions you will study are what they are for certain reasons and because of certain arguments.

(4) A familiarity with a range of traditional and contemporary Criminal Law terms and doctrines and also with certain notable features of the Model Penal Code. Because Notre Dame Law School students come from, and go to, a wide array of jurisdictions, it does not make sense to limit ourselves to any particular jurisdiction’s criminal statutes. It does make sense, though, to notice and appreciate the fact that, sometimes, different jurisdictions take different approaches, employ different definitions, and apply different rules.

(5) The ability to listen carefully and sympathetically to others’ arguments – especially arguments with which you think you disagree, or which irritate or offend you, or which challenge or unsettle you – and to reflect upon them, to engage them, and to respond thoughtfully and civilly to them. To teach, and to study, Criminal Law appropriately requires engaging with a number of difficult and controversial questions and topics.

(6) A genuine and abiding enthusiasm for lawyering and the legal enterprise, and a happy resolution to live your life in the profession – in this vocation – as a “different kind of lawyer.”

            Now, at some point, you will almost certainly ask yourself “why isn’t this class more like Law & Order . . . or Sherlock, or Suits, or Better Call Saul?” The truth is, in the “real world,” there is much, much more to “criminal law” than you will encounter in this course. This course is not (directly) about search-and-seizure rules, policing and profiling, interrogation practices, trial procedures, evidence, post-conviction review, prison conditions, criminology, or the death penalty. Our subject – substantive Criminal Law – is only one part of (what is often, but misleadingly, called) the criminal-justice “system.” The criminal-law process, as it plays out in the trenches, involves and is influenced by bureaucracy, procedural rules, personalities, choices, evidence, case-specific facts, race, budgets, poverty, wealth, politics, fear, prejudice, bravery, and evil. Those of you who decide to practice criminal law (or who really like crime dramas) will want to explore, during your law-school career, a wide variety of other courses. (When the time comes, I’ll be happy to offer suggestions.)

        That said, relatively few of you will actually practice criminal law. So . . .  why is Criminal Law a required course? Here are a few reasons: First, the first-year Criminal Law course is intended to continue your introduction to statutes and to the very important, lawyerly task of interpreting and applying them. You’ll need this skill in many upper-level courses and almost all of you will need it in practice as well. Second, it lays a foundation for understanding and thinking critically about the fairness, rationality, efficiency, and morality of the criminal process and you ought to be able to do these things as a lawyer – especially as a Notre Dame lawyer – and, even more importantly, as a citizen. Third, this course raises fundamental “big questions” about the law. For example: Why do we punish? What justifies punishment? What counts as a harm? When are people responsible and/or culpable for their actions or for the harms they cause? What are the limits on the coercive power of the state? These questions will arise in different forms in many other classes, in many areas of practice, and in any “examined life.” Our hope is that “Notre Dame Lawyers” will take them particularly seriously.

Bribery, Impeachment, and the Common Law

Earlier this morning I published an online essay with The Atlantic about how the crime of bribery fits into impeachment. The editors at The Atlantic made me take out a lot of nerdy stuff about legal treatises.  And while I totally understand why that level of detail probably isn’t appropriate for a general audience, I wanted to offer that level of detail to the other law professors and lawyers out there who care about how we ought to understand bribery as it relates to impeachment.

The Constitution specifically lists bribery as grounds for impeachment.  Article II, section 4 says: “The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”  I’m intrigued by the use of the word “shall” in that Clause.  (Does that mean it's mandatory rather than a matter of discretion?!)  But I’m a criminal law professor, not a constitutional law expert, and so I want to try and stay within my area of expertise.

Because there is a credible argument that President Trump committed bribery when he withheld military aid to Ukraine in return for announcements of political investigations, the public obviously cares what the word bribery means in the Constitution.  I’ve seen a number of people offer opinions on the issue. And while I do not think that there are clear cut answers here, I think that the opinions that are being bandied about are insufficiently nuanced, if not wrong.  So here is my more nuanced take.

First, let’s be crystal clear that current federal bribery statute does not tell us what the word bribery means in the Constitution itself.  The current federal bribery statute, 18 U.S.C. 201, wasn’t enacted until well after the Constitution was adopted. That doesn’t mean that whether Trump committed statutory bribery is irrelevant to impeachment. It could most certainly establish that Trump committed a high crime or misdemeanor.  But it doesn’t tell us whether he committed constitutional bribery.

So what is constitutional bribery?  Ben Wittes said on Twitter a couple of days ago that the House of Representatives gets to define the term.

I have a ton of respect for Ben. But I don’t think that, as a legal matter, the House gets to adopt its own definition of bribery.  To be clear, Ben’s point may be that the House has the de facto power to define bribery. But if we are talking about what the Constitution *means*, then we should care about legal definition, not de facto power.  And it makes me a little queasy every time that I hear people say that impeachment is a purely political issue.  Maybe it is as a practical matter.  But as a law professor, I’m unwilling to accept that law has no role to play in Constitutional moments, such as impeachment.

So what does bribery mean in the Constitution as a legal matter?  After all, the Constitution specifically defines the only other crime that it lists as grounds for impeachment—treason.  Yet it doesn’t define bribery. 

Even though it isn’t defined in the Constitution, we still know what the people who wrote and ratified the Constitution meant by the word bribery.  As Justice Story said in his influential Commentaries on the Constitution, they meant the common law crime of bribery.  “For the definition of treason, resort may be had to the Constitution itself; but for the definition of bribery, resort is naturally and necessarily had to the common law; for that, as the common basis of our jurisprudences, can along furnish the proper exposition of the nature and limits of this offence.” 

So what was the common law crime of bribery at the time the Constitution was written?  In particular, does it include a President who solicits a bribe from a foreign official but never receives it?  Well, that’s complicated.  And, unfortunately, there are a few takes floating around out there right now suggesting that it is cut and dry.  It is not.

Here is the Wall Street Journal saying that the President’s behavior doesn’t qualify as common law bribery.  Apparently the folks at WSJ who wrote this relied on a “friend” to help them with the historical argument. But I don’t think that friend did them any favors.  More important, because these authors apparently aren’t lawyers, there are some real ambiguities in the two arguments they make.

One of their arguments is that this isn’t bribery unless President Trump sought something “specific and tangible” like money.  It’s a little unclear if the WSJ editors are making a statutory argument here, or if they are making a common law argument.  As a matter of statutory law, they are definitely wrong.  As Randall Eliason has explained the “thing of value” that the official tries to obtain in a bribery case is very broad:

It encompasses anything of subjective value to the official that would have the potential to influence his or her behavior. Offers of future contracts or employment, sexual favors, companionship, and other intangibles all have been held to be things of value for purposes of the bribery statute. Publicly-announced investigations that would benefit Trump politically would certainly qualify. Trump’s actions in seeking the investigations, both personally and through intermediaries such as his lawyer Rudy Giuliani, amply demonstrate how personally valuable he thought Ukraine’s actions could be.

As a question of common law, the WSJ doesn’t provide any historical support for the idea that bribery has to involve something “specific and tangible” like money.  In fact, the historical sources that the WSJ editors do provide—Blackstone and Jacob’s Law Dictionary—seem to undercut their argument.  Both of those sources talk about “any undue reward.”  The most obvious reading of that phrase is much broader than just money.

The Wall Street Journal op ed also argues that this isn’t bribery because the exchange never happened.  Trump released the aid, and the Ukrainian President never announced the investigation.  Of course, as a matter of statutory law, no exchange is required.  It is enough for someone to solicit a bribe or to offer one.  But what about as a matter of common law?

Well, that’s not entirely clear.  Ben Berwick and Justin Florence have an essay over at Lawfare that explains this in some detail why the common law probably did not require an exchange to have occurred. They cite a number of treatises which include the mere offer of a bribe in the definition of bribery.

However, I have some concerns about the Berwick/Florence essay.  I agree with them that the majority of relevant treatises include the *offering* of a bribe in the definition of bribery.  But the treatises don’t include the solicitation of or demand for a bribe in their definitions.  They speak in terms of the official accepting or receiving a bribe.

To be clear, it was still illegal for officials to solicit or demand bribes.  But if an exchange didn’t actually occur, then the official may have been charged with a different crime—like attempted bribery or extortion—rather than bribery itself.  As an old Harvard Law Review development explains: “At common law the distinction between bribery and an attempt to bribe was largely academic; both were misdemeanors, and equally punishable.”

So where does that leave us?  Is Laura Ingraham correct (at least as a constitutional matter) that this is only “attempted bribery”?

I don’t think so—especially not if we look at the fact that Trump’s actions could be seen not only as an official *seeking* a bribe, but also as someone who offered a bribe.

Think about this from Ukraine’s perspective.  Trump offered them hundreds of millions of dollars in return for the official act of launching an investigation.  Nobody is really talking about this because the federal bribery statute is concerned with bribing officials here in the U.S.  But common law bribery didn’t have jurisdictional limits. 

Looking at Trump as the person who offered the bribe, the common law case against him is incredibly hard to dismiss.  It fits in the definitions provided by Blackstone and other treatises. It’s also consistent with the actus reus of a bribery crime that Congress adopted in 1790.

So where does that leave us as a constitutional matter?  As I said in the Atlantic essay—it’s not entirely clear cut.  But the weight of the historical record is against the President’s defenders who are trying to say that this behavior doesn’t fall within the Constitution’s use of the word bribery.

Leavenworth, ep. 4: Perspectives

The following is from my FIU colleague Eric Carpenter.

The timing of this episode is perfect. It covers pardons and the far-right’s efforts to get one for Lorance. The director shows how the right-wing media (primarily Sean Hannity) and Lorance’s supporters in Congress (primarily, Duncan Hunter—yes, the one under indictment) got the facts wrong and repeated these misrepresentations over and over and over again. And remember, this is where President Trump gets his information. The director includes a clip where Duncan Hunter says as much.

When Trump first floated the idea of these pardons before last Memorial Day, the response was overwhelmingly negative and he backed off. This time, when he floated it before Veterans Day, the media did not immediately pick up on the story. After a few days, several outlets did report that the Secretary of Defense went in to talk to Trump, advised him not to grant the pardons, and then told the President that he would send up files for the President to review so the President could get his facts straight.

Really. He expected the President to read about the cases. Surprise. That didn’t work.

This episode starts to approach the question that interests me the most: why did the far-right decide that Lorance (and Golsteyn and Gallagher) are heroes? Some of the talking heads in this episode made a good point: the “support the troops” reasoning that the far-right uses is perverse. Hannity was not supporting the troops in that platoon that were doing the right thing before Lorance came along. Many of them suffered long-term negative consequences because of this incident, and seeing the facts continually misrepresented in the media did not help. Hannity was not supporting all of the honorable service members who have deployed, followed the rules of engagement, and helped advance our missions. Instead, he supported a soldier who violated the rules of engagement and single-handedly lost that particular battle space in Afghanistan to the Taliban.

The producers still don’t give us a firm answer to that question. The author of this New York Times article approaches it (he appears in the episode), and we get some sense that the far right is really just at odds with counter-insurgency doctrine. Maybe we will get more in the finale.

The feature of the military justice system that is in focus in this episode is the appellate process. In the military, almost every court-martial gets an automatic appeal to a service-level appellate court. These courts are made up of three-judge panels, where the judges are judge advocates with three-year tenures. Lorance and others make it seem like these courts aren’t independent but that just isn’t the case. (Lorance and his team also skip over the fact that a panel composed of combat-veterans, not left-leaning hippies, heard his case and convicted him. Those members were independent, too.)

Above the service-level courts is the Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces (CAAF). With a couple of minor exceptions, CAAF is a discretionary court. This court has five civilian judges that serve fifteen-year terms. The service level courts and CAAF are Article I courts.

By statute, the Supreme Court can review CAAF decisions except for CAAF’s denials of petitions for review. One of the commentators in this episode thought that was the biggest defect in the military justice system. I’m not so sure that it is. Once CAAF denies a petition for review, the appellant can file a writ in a federal district court. The case can make its way up the Article III channels that way. And, practically speaking, military cases are not high on SCOTUS’s priority list. The Supreme Court rarely grants cert for decided CAAF cases.

Then there is this wrinkle. Remember, CAAF is an Article I court. In 1989, Congress granted the Supreme Court jurisdiction over CAAF decisions (10 USC §867a). The problem is that the Constitution does not grant the Supreme Court original jurisdiction over these cases, just appellate jurisdiction. All of the cases coming out of CAAF should have to go to another lesser Art. III court first (Congress could have sent them to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, for example). That is a pretty straightforward argument, but it wasn’t raised until nearly thirty years after the statute was passed, via an amicus brief in Ortiz v. United States. The Supreme Court did some head-scratching, and in some not particularly persuasive reasoning, said there is nothing to see here and affirmed that it had jurisdiction over direct appeals from CAAF.

 

Leavenworth, Breaking News

The following is by my FIU colleague Eric Carpenter, who has been live-blogging the Starz documentary.

Yesterday, President Trump pardoned Clint Lorance, along with Major Matthew Golsteyn (charged with the summary execution of a detainee). He also ordered the promotion of Special Warfare Operator First Class Edward Gallagher to the grade of E-7, the rank he held before he was court-martialed for murdering a detainee (he was acquitted of that charge but convicted of another charge, and the grade reduction was punishment for that other charge).

This was a terrible decision. He basically ignored the advice of his military counselors and followed the advice of Sean Hannity, thereby politicizing a justice system that already has issues with public confidence. The current coverage (and the coverage from when he thought about doing this earlier in the year but backed down) lays out many of the reasons why this was a bad decision. Further, by taking these actions, Trump may have committed a war crime.

All that aside, the press release announcing this decision shows that those giving Trump advice don’t really understand the military justice system. When the test balloon for the pardons was floated last week, the first idea was that Trump would disapprove the findings in Lorance’s and Gallagher’s courts-martial. An odd feature of the courts-martial is that the authority who convenes the court-martial must later approve the findings. This is a vestige from when a court-martial provided non-binding advice to convening authorities. The convening authorities would then approve or disapprove of those findings. Until 1916, commanders could send back acquittals or light sentences for a retrial. All of that has now gone away and the act is largely ceremonial. Here, the convening authorities had already approved these findings. The President could not undo that.

Someone must have figured that out because Trump looked to other presidential powers so that he could act on these cases. The President can pardon, and what he did with Lorance was within that power.

I am in the camp that the President can only pardon those who have been convicted, and so what he did with Golsteyn was not within that power. (This is one of those exercises in mental gymnastics, as we will never know the answer until a later administration tries to prosecute someone that an earlier administration has granted a pre-emptive pardon.)

He has another legitimate source of authority, though. Golsteyn’s case was still active. The President, as commander-in-chief, can withhold and dismiss any court-martial charges. Unlike what we see with the Department of Justice where the President is supposed to stay hands-off, there is no norm that the President should not get involved in court-martial proceedings. He is the commander-in-chief, and courts-martial are a tool of discipline. He is not allowed to unlawfully influence a court-martial or otherwise violate a service-member right to due process (for example, he is not allowed to tell subordinate commanders to take harsh action in a case or tell panel members to return a verdict of guilt), but anytime he disagrees with how a case is being handled, he withhold the case to himself and take whatever action he feels is appropriate.

He could have done that here. He could have then discharged Golsteyn, thereby ending the military’s jurisdiction over Golsteyn, which would prevent a subsequent president from reinstating the charges.

Turning to Gallagher, the President can grant clemency to Gallagher and reinstate his rank that way. Why he thought he had to order that Gallagher be promoted is beyond me, and Congress may have limited his authority to do that, anyway.

I think that is what happens when you ignore the advice of the experts and instead rely on talking heads to solve these problems.

 

Leavenworth Ep. 3, Judgment

The latest from Eric Carpenter of FIU on the series. Episode 3 featured Eric and his Military Justice class.

After you are convicted of an offense, one option is to blame your defense attorney for that result instead of the facts. Another is to come up with conspiracy theories to explain what happened. In this episode, we see Lorance use both options. I’ll talk about some issues related to those options and comment on some of the unusual features of the military justice system (why wasn’t Lorance in pretrial confinement leading up to the court-martial? why did he have a civilian defense counsel?) that come up in that context.

First, the ineffective assistance of counsel (IAC) claim. To start, every military accused, indigent or not, gets a military defense counsel. Military defense counsel work for a stove-piped, independent defense organization, are licensed members of a state or federal bar, and are well-trained and supervised. I was a military defense counsel for four years, and I have full confidence that military defense counsel, even though they are often junior attorneys, provide extraordinary service to their clients.

An accused also has the right to hire a civilian defense counsel (CDC) at his own expense. Here, Lorance did that. Many people in the system do not trust the system, and if they or their families have money (usually a court-martial defense costs $10-20k), they often hire a CDC.

After the conviction, Lorance filed an IAC claim on appeal, asserting (among other things) that his CDC did not meet with him frequently and didn’t show up to Fort Bragg, NC, until the day before the court-martial. One thing that did not come out in the episode is that Lorance also had several military defense counsel working for him who were doing a ton of work.

When someone hires a CDC, the military counsel stay on the case but take on a second-chair role. Often, the CDC will do the opening statement and closing argument and will handle a lot of the guilt-phase witnesses. The military counsel will do the sentencing case (in the military, the sentencing case is as intensive as the merits case). Even with this division of labor, the military counsel meet frequently with the client and do a lot of the prep work for the guilt-phase witnesses. Lorance’s defense team divided up labor along those lines. Viewers should not come away with the impression that Lorance did not have an active defense team.

The producers interviewed Lorance’s defense counsel for this project (I am going to assume he got a waiver from his client—the Army has rules of professional conduct that are essentially the same as the ABA’s). His attorney said that he thought he made a mistake by not asking for instructions on lesser included offenses to specific intent murder, like manslaughter. However, under the facts of this case, that was not a mistake.

The military does not have degrees of murder. It just has murder, but six types: premediated, specific intent to kill, intent to inflict great bodily harm, wanton disregard (the same thing as abandoned and malignant heart or implied malice, akin to super-recklessness), and felony. Premediated and felony are capital-eligible. Lorance was charged with specific intent murder, and the facts are that he intended to kill the men on the motorcycle when he ordered a soldier to shoot at them.

Like most jurisdictions, murder can be mitigated to voluntary manslaughter if the killer acted under adequate provocation. The provocation must have been adequate to excite an uncontrollable passion in a reasonable person. Words alone are not enough. Here, the problem is that there was no provocation. The men on the motorcycle did not do anything to Lorance or his unit. Even if the CDC asked for this instruction, the military judge should not have read it—the defense did not raise sufficient evidence of that issue. Failing to ask for it was not a mistake.

The military also has involuntary manslaughter (culpable negligence) and negligent homicide (simple negligence). Neither of those mental states (examples of unintentional homicide caused by risk-taking or failing to recognize a risk) occurred here. It is uncontroverted that Lorance intended to kill those villagers. The military judge should not have read an instruction on these offenses, either.

The only thing the CDC could have hoped for was that the military judge would read one of these instructions and then possibly the panel would have compromised on something that is legally illogical—basically, hoping nullification would trump reason.  Failing to do something that relies only on jury nullification to work is not IAC.

I went through the trial transcript in preparation for my interviews, and I am confident that his CDC did a competent job. His cross-examinations of the witnesses were pretty good. Lorance just had bad facts.

Now to the conspiracy theories. The director exposes us to some of these, but my sense is that he does that to show their absurdity rather than to give them validity. Here are some of them: the CDC was in cahoots with the Army; the Army knew what the result was going to be all along; the Army was doing this to appease the Afghan government in partial response to another mass murder than was committed by an American soldier; and, senior officers were doing this to protect their careers.

Of these, only one holds any reflection of the truth. One of the reasons we prosecute soldiers who commit crimes within the host country is to show the people of that country that we hold our soldiers accountable. That is a legitimate reason (among other reasons) for prosecuting soldiers who commit crimes.

There were a couple of facts that need some explanation. First, the names of the dead men were initially written on the charge sheet, then prosecutors lined through those names and wrote in something like “adult male.” The conspiracy theory is that had to do with a cover-up or hiding the fact that they may have been enemy combatants. The better explanation is, things like that happen all the time in the military on charge sheets and it is allowed, provided the defense gets proper notice.

Proving the name of an Afghan is difficult. For most Afghans, there are no birth records or death records. But proving that two men died was easy: there were aerial photographs of their bodies. The names were not legally required to be on the charge sheet. By crossing through the names, the government did not have to try to prove the names. They just needed to prove two dead bodies, and they can point to the photos for that. 

The other fact is that one of the people on the motorcycle may have had some contact with the Taliban. The government did not disclose this to the defense ahead of trial. The conspiracy theory is basically the same: the government knew Lorance did the right thing but scapegoated him to appease the Afghan government.

The defense raised this on appeal as a Brady issue. Under Brady, the government must disclose evidence that is favorable to the defense. If they don’t, the error is tested for prejudice: if the evidence was material to the defense (essentially hyper-relative), then the error requires reversal.

Here, there was no error. The only way this information could be favorable is if Lorance knew about it before the shooting. If he knew that information, then it could factor into the self-defense reasoning. But he didn’t. It was irrelevant to his decision making. (The Army appellate court decided this issue the same way).

Further, even if the men on the motorcycle had been known Taliban, under the Rules of Engagement (ROE) Lorance was operating under, he would not have been able to shoot them on sight. He would still have had to have perceived a hostile act or imminent threat. (Under the laws of war, you can shoot the enemy on sight, even if they are not shooting at you. Those were not the ROE in effect in Afghanistan, though).

One side note. Viewers may have been surprised to see that Lorance was not in jail pending the trial or during the trial. He rode to the courthouse every day in a van with this family.

For the most part, service members do not go to jail before trial. There is no bail in the military. You either go into pretrial confinement, or you don’t. The unit commander makes that decision, but the rules are weighted heavily in favor of not putting soldiers into pretrial confinement.

To do so, there must be probable cause that the service member committed the offense (this is usually apparent). Next, confinement must be necessary because it is foreseeable that (1) the accused is a flight risk OR will engage in future serious criminal misconduct, AND (2) less severe forms of restraint are inadequate. Here, Lorance was not a flight risk and there is no indication that he would commit a violent crime or engage in obstruction of justice. Like many accused, he spent his time before trial doing productive work in his unit.

Leavenworth, Ep. 2: Casualties, part 2

The following is by my FIU colleague Eric Carpenter, who is blogging this show. Episode 3, airing Sunday, features talking-head interviews with Eric and footage of his Military Justice class mooting the case.

The Lorance fact pattern isn’t a classic “following orders” case. Lorance was not following any orders when he ordered the shooting. The fact pattern does set up interesting issues with the soldiers in his platoon, though. Some followed illegal orders (like shooting harassing fire at the village) and some refused illegal orders (like reporting false information to the higher headquarters). It looks like the soldiers were granted immunity for those actions so that they would testify, and I expect that the defense will tie this into the idea that the whole platoon had a motive to lie. By saying Lorance was 100% at fault, they could get the immunity they needed.

Here is the basic quandary. We want soldiers to follow orders immediately. If they don’t, they can be prosecuted for failing to follow an order. However, if they do follow the order, and it turns out that the underlying action is unlawful, they can be prosecuted for doing that unlawful action. When put in a sketchy circumstance, it looks like they are damned if they do, damned if they don’t. Should they risk being prosecuted for refusing the order, or risk being prosecuted for doing something that might be illegal?

In 1621, Gustavus Adolphus included a section in his Code that dealt with this problem. Article 46 says that no officers may order anyone to do anything unlawful. Article 45 tells soldiers to follow orders, but if an order is unlawful, to disobey the order and report the problem to higher.

Current American military law is not too far off from that. The law is weighted toward having the service member follow the order. Service members should infer that the order is lawful and they assume the risk of not following the order. They should only refuse patently illegal orders. Usually, this issue comes up when soldiers refuse to follow an order to deploy somewhere, arguing that the war is illegal. This issue is litigated before trial, where the military judge decides whether the order was lawful or not. If lawful, then the soldier has a tough case ahead (it is pretty clear that they did not follow an order). If the military judge says that the order was unlawful, then the government has failed to state an offense (it is not against the law to refuse to do something illegal).

If service members do follow the order, and it turns out that the underlying action was illegal, then they can raise the defense of following orders. Under that defense, they are excused unless they know or should have known that the order was illegal (which is the same thing as the order being patently illegal). Once raised, the government must disprove the defense beyond a reasonable doubt.

Returning to the Lorance facts, the soldiers who fired the harassing fire into the village followed an order, it turns out that underlying action was unlawful, and if they had been prosecuted, they could have raised a defense. They would likely lose on that defense, though, because everyone knows you can’t shoot harassing fire. The order was patently illegal.

The soldiers who refused to make false reports could have been prosecuted for that (that would be very unlikely). They would have argued before trial that the order was unlawful, and a military judge would certainly agree with that.

How about the soldiers who shot at the men on the motorcycle? Again, they followed orders. If they were prosecuted, they could raise the defense of following orders. I think they would win on that. They had no idea what Lorance might have known. Lorance could have received intelligence from higher that the men were about to threaten the unit, for example. Further, the soldier in the gun truck was separated from the rest of the unit. He didn’t know what Lorance might have seen that he did not. The government would have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that they knew or should have known that the order was illegal, and I don’t think the government would be able to meet that burden.

These issues should come up in the next episode, but with more of a focus on the granting of immunity. The soldiers who fired the harassing shots needed immunity and maybe they would have the potential for bias. I don’t think anyone else needed immunity so I can’t see why they would be biased.

Leavenworth, Ep. 2: Casualties, part 1.

The following is by Eric Carpenter (FIU), who is live-blogging the show

We get to the actual shooting in this episode. I think the facts in the case, as I have learned them, convincingly show that Lorance is guilty of specific intent murder. I was wondering how the director was going to portray the facts, and it appears the director thinks so, too. Again, this is basically a self-defense case. In this post, I’ll go over a few of those facts and discuss an issue with the investigation that came up in the show. In the next post, I’ll give a quick discussion on how military law deals with the problem of when a superior gives an illegal order to a subordinate.

The director left out a couple of facts and didn’t emphasize the significance of another event. To start, right when Lorance took over his platoon, he threatened a villager and his child. That farmer came up to the observation post and, understandably, asked Lorance if he would move a role of barbed wire that was making it difficult to work his field. Lorance’s response was to threaten the kill the man and his family.

The next day, Lorance ordered his men to shoot harassing fire at the village (think of a scene from a Western movie where an outlaw shoots within feet of someone to make that person dance). That was clearly illegal and beyond the bounds of the Rules of Engagement (ROE). Lorance did this to get the villagers to show up to a meeting later in the week where he would apparently start building a good relationship with them. Some villagers came up to the observation post the next day to complain about the harassing fire and then Lorance threated to kill them, too. The day after that was when the patrol killed the two villagers. All of that in three days.

The director does a pretty good job describing the actual shooting, and the facts show that the unit was not facing a hostile act or hostile intent from the men on the motorcycle. As the motorcycle was approaching at a moderate pace on a washed-out road, Lorance had a soldier shoot at it. The soldier missed (maybe intentionally). The motorcycle kept going down the road, and afterwards Lorance said that because it kept going, it showed a hostile intent. The problem with that is that after those rounds were fired, the villagers stopped, dismounted, and went over to talk to members of the Afghan National Army who were part of the patrol. They then went to wait by their motorcycle. That is when Lorance ordered the shooting.

Those Afghan soldiers knew that the villagers did not pose a threat. So did the members of the American platoon. A fact I did not know about before I watched this episode is that another sergeant in the platoon, the one responsible for the gun truck, had told his soldiers earlier not to fire unless he told them to because he was concerned about some things that Lorance had said. In the moments leading to the shooting, he and Lorance were arguing on the radio, with Lorance telling the soldiers in the gun truck to fire and the sergeant telling those soldiers not to. The soldiers in the gun truck followed Lorance’s order and opened up with a medium-weight machine gun, killing two of the villagers.

Add to that a bunch of evidence of consciousness of guilt and the case seems pretty tight. Lorance told a soldier who was specially trained on gathering intelligence from dead combatants not to do the assessment and instead had two untrained soldiers do it. When they did not find any evidence that the villagers were Taliban, Lorance ordered some soldiers to report to headquarters that the bodies were dragged away before they could be searched. Those soldiers refused that order so Lorance made the report false himself.

The facts were pretty bad for Lorance, and his defense team had to have been in a tough spot. We get a hint of the defense strategy at the end of the episode. After the shooting, the company commander called the platoon back to the company area, put the soldiers in a tent, and had them fill out sworn statements about what they had seen. (The statements were all consistent.) The defense counsel suggests that they spent their time getting their stories straight.

That process may seem a little odd. Usually law enforcement (and not a commander) would do the investigation from the start. In the military, though, commanders are supposed to do an initial investigation. Rule for Courts-Martial 303 says that when commanders receive a report of misconduct, the immediate commander shall conduct a preliminary inquiry. The discussion to the rule says that these investigations are often informal, but also says that in complex cases, the commander should seek the assistance of law enforcement.

Here, it looks like the commander wanted to quickly find out what happened, brought the soldiers in, and had them give statements. That is what the rule contemplates. The commander then brought in formal law enforcement once he had a sense that something bad really had happened. The facts suggest that the soldiers sat quietly filling out the statements and were not getting their stories straight.

This rule can cause problems. Commanders can sometimes get wind of misconduct (say, drug use), do a preliminary inquiry, and then mess up a larger, undercover investigation that law enforcement is conducting. Or commanders might interview potential suspects without giving proper rights warnings. Or, the initial witness statements might be sparse or off-point and those statements can later be used to impeach those witnesses. Of those, maybe the last one will be implicated in this case.

Here, the director implies that the defense will be saying that the platoon got together to tell a story so that they could get rid of this new platoon leader they did not like. And I think he will say, they did not like him because he was gay.

The first part of the episode discusses how Lorance came to terms with his sexual identity, and how his parents could not come to terms with it (adopting the, “Hate the sin, love the sinner” approach). We also learn that even though Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell had been formally appealed, Lorance tried to keep his identity secret. This appears to have caused some issues in his relationship with his partner. While Lorance was deployed, his partner went on a family support group Facebook page to post a message to Lorance. Lorance was able to keep the post from going live, but the page manager appears to have spread a rumor that he was gay. That rumor made it to the headquarters unit he was serving with; however, it does not appear to have reached the platoon. We may find out in the next episode if that rumor become relevant.

Leavenworth, Ep. 1: Soldiers.

This post is by my FIU colleague Eric Carpenter, a retired Ranger and JAG attorney. He is covering the HBO documentary for us. Episode 1 aired last Sunday; Episode 2 premieres tomorrow.

If Clint Lorance had not deployed to Afghanistan, he would have never committed a crime like murder. By all accounts, he was a productive member of society and joined the military for honorable purposes. In Episode 1 of Leavenworth, the director appears to start his argument for why a law-abiding, disciplined soldier would commit a crime like this. His basic thesis will be, I think, that Lorance was overcompensating for several factors and felt he had to quickly establish himself as a tough leader who would impose his will on the enemy. Ignoring the rules of engagement (or creating his own) fit that image.

One of these factors is that Lorance was tasked mid-tour, on short notice, to replace the battle-seasoned platoon leader of a battle-seasoned platoon. The original platoon leader—the one who led the unit through the preparations for combat and the initial part of the deployment—was wounded in an improvised explosive device (IED) explosion. This platoon leader appears to have been well-respected by his soldiers and was Ranger-qualified.  

The platoon was battle-seasoned, too. The platoon had already been in firefights and, presumably, had already been awarded the coveted Combat Infantryman Badge (CIB). Two other members of the platoon were also seriously wounded in combat. And the director brings in a social psychologist to explain how people bond in situations like these.

Replacing that platoon leader in that platoon would be a tough leadership task for anyone to undertake. Lorance had some strikes against him.

To start, he did not graduate from Ranger School. In the Army, having bells and whistles on your uniform matters. Lorance walked into the unit without a Ranger Tab and without a CIB.

After new lieutenants graduate from Infantry Basic Officer Leadership Course, they go to Ranger School. If they graduate from Ranger School, they can expect to be a platoon leader in a light infantry unit. If they do not, they often go to a mechanized infantry unit, or go to a light infantry unit but serve in a headquarters element. Lorance did not graduate from Ranger School and so was serving in a headquarters unit. When I deployed, I was a judge advocate and served in a headquarters unit. An anacronym exists for people in headquarters elements: REMF. Rear-echelon . . . 

So not only did Lorance show up without the right bells and whistles, he had been, up to that point, a REMF. He may have thought that he had something to prove.

Plus another factor. I have been following this case for a while, and I did not know about it.

Lorance is gay. He grew up within a conservative family, as a Pentecostalist, in Hobart, Oklahoma, itself a very conservative area. The director leads us to believe that his family was not accepting of his sexual orientation. As I think through how that fact might be relevant to the story, I expect the director will argue that he felt he had to overcompensate within what many would consider to be a hyper-masculine society.

Congress repealed Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT) on September 20, 2011. The repeal was supported by a large number of senior military leaders. I was a student at the Command and General Staff College in the period leading up to the repeal. We routinely heard from senior leaders in government as they talked about complex problems. One of the best comments I heard was from Admiral Mike Mullen, then the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He said that his turning point was when he recognized that the policy ran contrary to one of the military’s key values: integrity. His point was, “How can we say that we value integrity, and then turn around and tell a service member that they have to lie about who they are?”

Those who opposed the repeal warned of dire consequences (primarily, that unit cohesion will fall apart), but in the part of the Army where I served, none of the dire consequences came about. From the perspective of many straight service members, nothing really changed. (I was against the policy and glad for the symbolic meaning of repeal.) There were LGBTQ service members in the military during DADT, everyone knew it, and most people did not care. People cared about whether you were good at your job.

I recognize that those in the LGBTQ community must have had a completely different experience under DADT, and even if 95 out of 100 service people treated them with dignity and respect (I am making that number up), they would still have to constantly deal with the 5 out of 100 who didn’t.

Lorance took over his platoon in 2012. DADT was only a year in the grave, and I don’t know what the experience during this period was like for members of the LGBTQ community. Further, I don’t know what the culture was like in infantry units at the time. I expect the director will fill us in.

Leavenworth: Prologue

The following is by my FIU colleague Eric Carpenter. It is the first in a series of regular posts blogging the new Starz documentary "Leavenworth." Eric teaches Crim, Evidence, and Military Justice at FIU and served in Army JAG before coming to law teaching. He covered the second season (Bergdahl) of "Serial."

Thank you, Howard, for the opportunity to provide some running commentary on another true-crime docuseries that covers a military justice case. Leavenworth follows the story of Lieutenant Clint Lorance, an American infantry platoon leader who ordered his soldiers to open fire on three Aghans who were riding a motorcycle, resulting in two deaths. In this blog series, I hope to explain some of the peculiarities of the military justice system that will pop up. As I expect the director will offer criticisms of the system, I will give my thoughts on those, too.

I also hope to discuss some of the bigger themes that this case raises. First, this case is nested among several others where service members allegedly committed or did commit crimes against host-nation nationals (Navy SEAL Special Operations Chief Edward Gallagher, Major Matthew Golsteyn, for example) and then had their causes championed by Sean Hannity and others. Trump had considered stopping the prosecutions or granting pardons last Memorial Day but changed his mind after facing significant criticism.  One of my questions is, what explains that support?

Are we placing service members in complex situations where the enemy looks like the local population and does not play by the rules, and then forcing our troops to choose being buried by six or tried by twelve? If so, that might explain it. It is just not fair to prosecute them. Or are servicemembers well-trained on the rules and counter-insurgency operations, and Lorance (and the others) just ignored the rules? If the second is true, why are some still championing their cause?

A related theme is that there is nothing new under the sun. The problem of using force in counter-insurgency warfare is not new. I start my military justice class by playing the movie Breaker Morant, a true story from the Second Boar War in South Africa in 1902 (available for free in Kanopy and well-worth the watch). The basic issues in Lorance are the same as those faced by those British and Australian soldiers. U.S. service members dealt with these problems in Vietnam. While the Lorance shooting cannot be equated to the My Lai massacre (where several hundred civilians were killed), the facts leading into both are similar. Nothing is new. We just forget.

Several years into the war in Iraq, the American military finally recognized that it was fighting a counter-insurgency. David Petraeus (featured in Leavenworth) then wrote a manual on counter-insurgency operations that rejected the colonial “use force to get them to do what we want” approach and instead recognized that we need to provide the local population with security from insurgents. He put that doctrine into action while commanding forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. But adopting that strategy involves having soldiers assume risk that they did not have to before. And that is the world that Lorance worked within. Perhaps his champions’ real issue is with that assumption of risk and the rejection of the colonial approach.

The main legal issue will feel familiar: did Lorance act in self-defense of his unit? While he was deployed to Afghanistan, the rules of engagement were basically the same as the elements of common law self-defense. These rules are unclassified. The force has to be necessary: if unit commanders are on the receiving end of a hostile act, they can fight back; if they are moments away from facing a hostile act (they see a hostile intent), they can engage before the other side has a chance to act on that intent. The force used must be proportional, and if unit commanders can de-escalate the situation without using force, they should.

There are some interesting side issues. Lorance didn’t pull the trigger. Someone else did. If that soldier—the one who pulled the trigger—were put on trial, would he have a defense of obedience to orders? If he refused the order, could he be tried for failing to obey an order? I use the Lorance appellate case when teaching that defense and that crime to my military justice students. I hope to unpack those along the way. It turns out that some soldiers refused his orders to commit crimes and others did not. (Most were granted immunity to testify.)

Last, and in keeping with Prawfs origin story, I hope to share some lessons I learned while participating in this project. I gave a four-hour interview and the producer filmed my criminal law class and evidence class as they discussed issues in the case. I have no idea how the director put these scenes together, though. We’ll learn together.

"Leavenworth" on Starz

This Sunday, Starz airs the first episode of the 5-hour documentary series Leavenworth, directed by Steven Soderburgh and telling the story of Lt. Clint Lorance. Episodes 3 and 5 feature FIU and my colleague Eric Carpenter (a former JAG officer); Eric is interviewed and the program includes footage of students mooting the case in his Military Justice class.

Declination Decisions and Privacy

In response to my post from yesterday about the Special Counsel’s decision not to prosecute Don Jr. a few people have remarked that the need to protect individual privacy counsels against publicizing nonprosecution decisions. If prosecutors were to declare that someone committed a crime but not actually bring charges, so the argument goes, then the defendant would be unable to clear her name through the adversarial process. 

This argument has been around for quite some time.  Courts have used a variation on this argument to state that prosecutors may not identify unindicted coconspirators by name in indictments.  And it was famously part of the reason that Rod Rosenstein offered in his infamous letter suggesting that James Comey ought to be fired as Director of the FBI. 

I want to take the argument seriously, but I have some reservations about the argument, not only in this particular case, but also more generally.  First, to the extent that Don Jr.’s privacy needed to be protected in the Special Counsel’s report, I’d note that the relevant facts to support a CFAA prosecution were *not* redacted from the report---all that was redacted was the reasoning behind the decision not to prosecute.  I find it difficult to see how the redaction of the analysis, but not the facts, protects Don Jr.’s privacy.  I can think of at least two responses to this point: (a) that the factual discussion also should have been redacted, and (b) that a declaration by prosecutors that Don Jr.’s conduct constituted a crime is far more damaging than the recitation of facts, most of which had been previously reported in the media.  I don’t really have a rebuttal to counterargument (a).  But I’m not thoroughly persuaded by (b).  If nothing else, the harm to Don Jr. at that point seems to be one of reputation, not privacy.  Also, if we were truly committed to the idea that we need to protect individual privacy in all cases that do not result in formal charges, we would have to seriously alter how police publicize arrests of suspects before prosecutors have decided whether to file charges. 

In any event, if the real concern with nonprosecution decisions is that they might invade the privacy or harm the reputation of a particular individual, it seems to me that prosecutors could articulate their decisions in a way that minimized the privacy and reputational harms.  For example, in the Special Counsel’s report, Don Jr.’s name and identifying information could have been redacted, but the substantive analysis on which the declination decision was based could have been left in.  That would allow the public to have more information about when DOJ pursues charges under overly broad statutes---information that, as I’ll explain in more detail below, is extremely important for the public to have.

But before turning to that argument, I wanted to address a comment by Orin Kerr, namely that he didn’t think that the Mueller report needed to “offer a broader explanation when to enforce the law” because “DOJ policy docs already have that for those interested.”

Assuming that Orin is correct that DOJ policies offer sufficient detail on this issue for those who seek it out, I think it is important to note that the general public knows very little about nonprosecution decisions.  I have seen many nonlawyers (and some noncriminal lawyers) repeatedly express the view that prosecutors must bring charges in cases where the defendant has broken the law.  It is not only that these criminal justice outsiders think that prosecutors *should not* decline to prosecute for policy reasons, but rather that they are *entirely unaware* of how often prosecutors decline to prosecute on policy grounds.  This ignorance is understandable because even those of us who know that nonprosecution is common have a hard time obtaining information about how frequently it occurs and under what circumstances.  Put differently, even if Orin is correct that interested parties could learn more about DOJ nonprosecution policies, a great number of Americans don’t even know that such things happen, so they are unlikely to seek out additional information on the topic.

But even assuming everyone knew about nonprosecution as a policy, how much could we learn from reading DOJ public policies? In my opinion, not very much.  Let’s look at the full list of factors listed in 9-27.230, the section cited in the CFAA analysis in the Mueller report:

In determining whether a prosecution would serve a substantial federal interest, the attorney for the government should weigh all relevant considerations, including:

1. 1. Federal law enforcement priorities, including any federal law enforcement initiatives or operations aimed at accomplishing those priorities;
   2. The nature and seriousness of the offense;
   3. The deterrent effect of prosecution;
   4. The person's culpability in connection with the offense;
   5. The person's history with respect to criminal activity;
   6. The person's willingness to cooperate in the investigation or prosecution of others;
   7. The person’s personal circumstances;
   8. The interests of any victims; and
   9. The probable sentence or other consequences if the person is convicted.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t think that this list allows me to make any educated predictions about when prosecutors will pursue charges and when they will not.  For example, the list does not include the aggravating factors that James Comey identified as necessary in order for DOJ to bring charges for mishandling classified information.  Nor am I able to determine based on this list whether the decision not to charge Don Jr. was made because of some unique facts in his case or because DOJ, as a general matter, does not bring CFAA charges for unauthorized password sharing unless there are other aggravating circumstances present.  (There is commentary to this policy, but it also does not provide that sort of substantive information.)

Perhaps those law professors who served as federal prosecutors think that DOJ policies gave enough guidance about when nonprosecution was appropriate---I’d be interested to hear from them.  But as a member of the public, I don’t think that these policies give us enough information about how prosecutors choose to enforce overly broad laws.  In my opinion, that is a serious problem because it means that the public doesn’t have sufficient notice about what will be treated as illegal.  It can also allow for arbitrary and discriminatory enforcement.  And it doesn’t allow the public to serve as a democratic check on prosecutorial decisionmaking.  (I discuss the problem in some detail in Part III of this forthcoming article.)

The ability of the public to serve as a democratic check on prosecutorial discretion may seem less important in the federal system, where the Attorney General and the U.S. Attorneys are appointed by the President.  After all, criminal justice issues likely play a very small role in who people vote for in presidential elections.  But the vast majority of state prosecutors are elected.  How elected prosecutors choose to exercise their discretion—including when they decide not to prosecute--is probably the most important information that voters need (and almost never get).

Anyway, these are just some preliminary thoughts.  I definitely need to reflect further on how to balance these concerns that I’ve identified against the need to protect individual privacy and reputations.  Nonprosecution decisions raise complicated questions, which a number of law profs address in various very thoughtful articles.

As for the topic of democratic accountability and prosecutors, that’s an area where I hope to spend more time and effort. 

The Special Counsel’s Decision Not To Prosecute Donald Trump Jr.

Since Robert Mueller’s report was released on April 18, a number of people have commented on the Special Counsel’s decision not to make a “traditional prosecutorial judgment” about whether President Trump obstructed justice and thus committed a crime.  But the Mueller Report contains other decisions not to prosecute.  And I’d like to focus on one of them here.

Mueller decided not to prosecute a person who violated 18 U.S.C. 1030, a section of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.  Although the person’s name has been redacted for “personal privacy,” it seems obvious to me that the person in question is the President’s son, Donald Trump, Jr.  The portion of the report that describes Don Jr.’s conduct is not redacted (it is described on page 60 of the Mueller Report), and Orin Kerr published this helpful article over at LawFare last year explaining how Don Jr.’s conduct falls within the criminal prohibition in section 1030(a)(2).  The partially redacted declination decision appears at pages 179-80.

I assume that the decision to redact Don Jr.’s name from the declination analysis is grounded in the same “fairness concerns” that prompted Mueller not to reach a judgment on whether the President obstructed justice:

The ordinary means for an individual to respond to an accusation is through a speedy and public trial, with all the procedural protections that surround a criminal case. An individual who believes he was wrongly accused can use that process to seek to clear his name. In contrast, a prosecutor's judgment that crimes were committed, but that no charges will be brought, affords no such adversarial opportunity for public name-clearing before an impartial adjudicator.

It isn’t immediately clear to me why those fairness considerations would shield only a legal determination of guilt and not a recounting of underlying facts.  But that appears to be what happened here.  (Those who are interested in the law and norms surrounding decisions not to identify people who aren’t being charged might be interested in this essay by Ryan Goodman on unindicted coconspirators.)

I am less interested in the decision to redact than I am the decision not to prosecute.  Although much of the text is redacted, it appears that the decision not to bring charges against Don Jr. was not a decision about weak facts or uncertain law.  Instead it appears to have been a policy decision—specifically a decision that the crime was not serious enough to warrant prosecution.  Here is the key passage:

Applying the Principles of Federal Prosecution, however, the Office determined that prosecution of this potential violation was not warranted. Those Principles instruct prosecutors to consider, among other things, the nature and seriousness of the offense, the person's culpability in connection with the offense, and the probable sentence to be imposed if the prosecution is successful. Justice Manual 9-27.230.

I don’t disagree with the decision not to prosecute Don Jr.  The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act is, in my opinion, an overly broad statute.  That is to say, I believe that the text of the statute sweeps in far more conduct than it ought to.  In particular, it includes unauthorized password sharing.  So if, for example, I were to allow my friend to use my Netflix password so that she did not have to pay for her own, separate account, I have likely committed a crime under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

The CFAA is far from the only overly broad criminal statute on the books.  There are plenty of overly broad federal and state crimes.  We allow our representatives to pass these laws because we rely on the good judgment of prosecutors not to bring charges in all cases that fit within the language of these statutes.  But there are many problems with this state of affairs.  For one thing, we rarely know what criteria prosecutors use in deciding when not to bring charges.  So long as we do not know what criteria prosecutors are using, we do not know the real content of the criminal law.  For another thing, there is no requirement that prosecutors adopt generally applicable criteria to decline prosecutions or that they use the same criteria in all cases.  To the extent that declination decisions are made on an ad hoc basis, people are not getting equal treatment, and prosecutors may make prosecution decisions for arbitrary or discriminatory reasons.

Finally, the fact that we allow prosecutors to decline prosecution under overly broad statutes doesn’t mean that they are under any obligation not to bring charges in trivial cases.  There are plenty of cases in which prosecutors have decided to file charges against defendants whose conduct does not resemble harm that the legislature was trying to prevent when it enacted a criminal law.  But, as I argue in a forthcoming paper, the modern embrace of textualism leaves defendants with essentially no recourse if their behavior fits within the incredibly broad statutory language.

While I agree with the decision not to charge Don Jr., I wish that the report had redacted less of the analysis associated with the declination decision.  We do not know whether the Department of Justice has adopted an internal policy not to charge all defendants in these sorts of cases, or whether this was a one-off decision based on the unique facts and circumstances surrounding this case.  What is more, because most of the analysis is redacted, we do not have a statement from a respected group of federal lawyers – including not only Robert Mueller, but also Deputy Solicitor General Michael Dreeben – explaining why such a case is so trivial that it does not warrant prosecution.  Such a statement could have potentially helped defendants who have been threatened with charges for similar conduct.  It also could have prompted a national conversation about whether we should rewrite the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

CrimFest! 2019 at Brooklyn Law -- Registration still open!

As many of you know, Dan Markel did an amazing job creating a community for law professors.  One of the many things that he did to create that community was to start CrimFest!  CrimFest is an informal, annual conference where those of us who study criminal law, criminal procedure, and related criminal justice topics meet to workshop papers.  

Even though Danny is gone, CrimFest continues.  This year’s conference will be held at Brooklyn Law School in New York.  The conference will open with an informal dinner on the evening of Sunday, July 14.  Then we will have two full days of panels on Monday July 15 and Tuesday July 16.  Attendees are responsible for their own travel and hotel expenses. The conference will provide breakfast and lunch, and will subsidize a happy hour on Monday evening.  The registration fee will be $65.00.

If you would like attend, please add your information to this spreadsheet:  https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1DbYmO7GXCZZF7ABzZx7LcuB7MDUU7QgemvrxDihy-rA/edit?usp=sharing

As you will see, this is an open access document.  So please be very careful when adding your own information not to delete or otherwise alter any information that has been added by others.

Registration will remain open until May 31.  So you need not complete all registration information at this time, including whether you intend to workshop a paper, or the topic of the paper you intend to workshop.  But please be advised that, as in years past, we are limiting presentations to true works in progress.  You are welcome to present as little as a 3-page sketch of a project idea, a fully written draft, or anything in between.  But papers that have already been submitted for publication are not eligible.

Finally, CrimFest is intended to be a very inclusive conference:  It is not limited to those who have tenure or tenure-track positions.  In fact, we usually have a good crowd of fellows and VAPs who are planning to go on the market.  So please feel free to share this email with your colleagues.  Anyone who has the link to the spreadsheet can register!

I look forward to seeing many of you in Brooklyn this summer!

Transparency as a Sword

As a general matter, I support transparency in the criminal justice system.  It is difficult to obtain reliable data about crime and criminal prosecutions --- especially data from state and local systems.  Because we elect many state and local criminal justice officials, this lack of data and transparency is troubling.  If the public is unable to discover what criminal justice actors are doing, then they will find it difficult to hold those actors accountable.

And so, I was surprised to hear a number of people here in the state of North Carolina complaining about a state law that requires the gathering and dissemination of criminal justice data.  The law requires the collection and reporting of information about when judges waive the collection of court fees in criminal cases.  Here’s the full text of the relevant statute:

The Administrative Office of the Courts shall maintain records of all cases in which a judge makes a finding of just cause to grant a waiver of criminal court costs under G.S. 7A-304(a) and shall report on those waivers to the chairs of the House of Representatives and Senate Appropriations Committees on Justice and Public Safety and the chairs of the Joint Legislative Oversight Committee on Justice and Public Safety by February 1 of each year. The report shall aggregate the waivers by the district in which the waiver or waivers were granted and by the name of each judge granting a waiver or waivers.

The people who are complaining about this law argue that it creates pressure for North Carolina judges not to grant waivers to criminal defendants.  To be clear, the legislature can’t prohibit judges from granting all waivers---if defendants are indigent, then the Constitution forbids the state from imposing these court fees. 

Since I learned about this law, I’ve been wondering:  Is there a way to square my desire for more readily available criminal justice data with the idea that these reports are a bad idea?  After all, for those of us who wish to study the criminal justice system, more data is better than less data.  And if voters need transparency in order to hold their official accountable, then shouldn’t they have this information about their judges?  After all, judges are elected here in North Carolina.

After some reflection, I think that this sort of information could be very valuable.  But it would depend on the nature of the information that was gathered and how much of that information was disseminated.

For example, I could imagine a world in which the Administrative Office of the Courts were asked to gather information that would allow us to put these waiver decisions in context.  For example, the office could also collect information about the annual income or net worth of every defendant.  And then it could present the waiver information in the context of the assets that defendants have or the salaries that they earn.  That information might allow us to assess whether judges are granting waivers only to those defendants who are actually indigent.  If the report tells me that the judges in my county are only granting waivers to people with incomes below $25,000, then I can feel pretty comfortable that waivers are being granted properly.

But the current reports do not provide any relevant context.  Instead, the report consists only of the number of cases in which these fees were waived and those in which they were not waived.* Those numbers are presented both by county and by individual judge, just as the statute requires.  (You can see a copy of the report here.)  So if a judge gives a waiver to a person who has no assets and an annual income of $0, that waiver will be recorded (and reported) no differently than a waiver for a person making $40,000 per year.

It is hard to see the value of a report in which the number of waivers and the proportion of waivers are the only information being provided.  Why should I care about the number of waivers being granted without any further context about the waiver?  That number, without context, is relevant only if people think that waivers ought to generally be granted or generally be refused.  And because I doubt that many voters think that waivers should generally be granted, the reports seem to be a way to try and pressure judges to keep the number of waivers that they grant as low as possible. **

In other words, it seems as though transparency here is being used as a sword against judges.  And the result may well be judges failing to grant waivers to defendants whom they might otherwise consider to be indigent.

 

* There are a few additional columns with information about partial waivers, civil judgments, and other similar data.

** As others have noted, the North Carolina legislature seems to be trying pretty hard to make it difficult for judges to grant waivers, even to those who are truly indigent.

Michael Cohen and Prosecutorial Overreach

As the House Oversight Committee hearing this week reminded us, Donald Trump has given special counsel Robert Mueller and the Department of Justice plenty of reason to investigate him and his aides for misconduct. The Trump campaign’s ties with Russia may have compromised the integrity of our elections. Trump’s business dealings in Russia may have led him to sacrifice U.S. foreign policy interests in favor of his personal financial interests. And Trump’s efforts to hide all of this may constitute obstruction of justice.

But while we should welcome efforts to hold the President accountable for his misdeeds, we should reject the prosecutorial overreach that has occurred in the plea agreement with Michael Cohen. It was wrong for federal prosecutors to use campaign finance law to bring charges over the “hush money” payments to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal. And it would be wrong to go after the President because of the payments.

The prosecutors’ campaign finance allegations are dubious. Indeed, similar charges were unsuccessful when filed against John Edwards after his failed bid for the presidency in 2008.

Under the prosecutors’ theory of the case, Trump should have made the payments directly to Daniels and McDougal and disclosed the payments on his campaign finance reports. That would have been legal.

But if Trump had taken that path, it would have become clear very quickly that he paid the two women not to reveal his affairs with them. Trump needed to funnel his payments through Cohen to keep his intimate relationships private. So while the charges against Cohen alleged violations of campaign contribution limits, the charges ultimately boiled down to the idea that Trump could not maintain his privacy about his sex life once he announced his candidacy.

Prosecutors should not interpret election law in a way that requires candidates to open for public scrutiny their consensual, intimate relationships. Candidates lose much of their privacy when they run for office. Their financial status and their health status are fair game. But hiding Trump’s affairs did not deny voters any information that was a legitimate matter of public concern during the 2016 presidential campaign. Neither Daniels nor McDougal has alleged sexual harassment, sexual assault, or other abuse by Trump. This was not a #MeToo moment. Voters do not have a meaningful interest in knowing about a candidate’s consensual, intimate relationships.

Some observers have argued that we were entitled to know whether Trump cheated on his spouses because it spoke to his fitness to serve. But there is no good evidence connecting marital infidelity with quality of service. Jimmy Carter was faithful, JFK was not.

In any event, we do not have to worry that the public was misinformed about Trump regarding his sex life. Anyone who cared about his marital infidelity already knew he cheated on his spouses. They also already knew he engaged in much worse sexual conduct—the sexual assaults that he described in the Access Hollywood tapes. Voters who cared about marital fidelity knew what they were getting in Trump, and they either voted against him for that and other reasons, or they voted for him because they felt the advantages of a Trump presidency outweighed his personal failings.

There are serious downsides to prosecuting candidates who try to hide information about consensual, intimate relationships. When the government starts policing the bedroom, it does more harm than good. Suppose a candidate for office is running in a community unfriendly to the LGTBQ community, and the candidate is secretly gay. A former lover threatens to disclose their relationship, and the candidate pays hush money. Is it a good idea to bring criminal charges against the candidate for violating campaign finance laws?

These kinds of charges may discourage many desirable candidates from running. It is already true that many worthy candidates do not run for office because of the intrusive scrutiny on their personal lives. Potential candidates with an adulterous affair in the past may decide against a campaign to spare their spouses and children of the publicity that will ensue.

We should know lots more information about President Trump’s relationships with Russia and how their ties may have influenced our elections and our foreign policies. But we should not turn consensual intimate relationships into criminal violations.

A question for crim pro types

A federal court ruled last week that federal prosecutors (namely, then S.D. Fla. US attorney, now-Secretary of Labor Alex Acosta) violated the Crime Victims Rights Act in entering a plea agreement and non-prosecution agreement with Jeffrey Epstein over sex-trafficking and related charges. The victims want the court to invalidate the plea agreement and NPA.

My question for learned crim pro type: How is such a remedy possible? The US Attorney agreed to the NPA in exchange for Epstein pleading to, and serving time on, the state charges.* Epstein now has served that sentence (although he remains under its collateral consequences, such as being a registered sex offender).

[*] At his confirmation hearing, Acosta defended the deal by arguing that it is a good result when the agreement to drop the difficult federal charges could produce some jail time.

Wouldn't invalidating the federal plea agreement implicate his state conviction and sentence? And would that create some Double Jeopardy or Due Process problems? Obviously there is no true Double Jeopardy problem if the federal government now prosecutes him regardless of what happened in state court. But does it change when the federal and state charges were enmeshed and agreements as to one implicated agreements as to the other?

Fast food justice

One of my professional regrets is that I was unable to place this piece in any law review, although it remains my most-downloaded piece on SSRN. It was too early in the days of online supplements, I was entering only my third year, and I could not find any place for it.

This case would make a wonderful addition to the sequel (H/T: Peter Oh of Pitt): A Connecticut man is challenging a $ 300 traffic ticket for distracted driving by arguing that what the officer believed was his cellphone was a McDonald's hash brown that he was eating for breakfast while driving.* He was convicted by a magistrate, appealed to a trial judge, and is awaiting ruling.

[*] Query how eating while driving does not distract a driver.

"Two Weeks In": thoughts for first-year students

For about 15 (!) years now, I've imposed on the students in my first-year classes (Constitutional Law and Criminal Law) a version of the meandering and sprawling e-mail that's pasted below the jump.  It's meant to be an evolving reflection on legal education and formation, and the legal enterprise more generally, for (again) people who are still pretty near the starting gate.  I'd welcome (off-line or in the comments) any thoughts or suggestions for improvement!

Dear all,

We're two weeks into the new semester.  For what they're worth, here are a few reflections of mine, both about these first two weeks and about what's ahead.  You've probably heard a lot of this, from me or from others, before. Usually, I impose these thoughts -- which change every year! -- on first-semester students and, obviously, you all are more experienced than that.  Still, I thought it might be helpful to you to have a sense of how (for what it's worth) I think about what we're doing.

My view, as you've probably guessed, is that legal education is not primarily about memorizing rules, and “being a lawyer” involves more than being paid to apply clear “black letter” doctrines to clear facts.  As I see it, there is not always a clear “right answer”:  Life in the law is far more complicated -- and far more interesting -- than this, in several ways.

As I've mentioned a few times in class, we lawyers are, in many ways, story-tellers.  We investigate the facts, select our witnesses, find our evidence, ask our questions, and make our arguments.  We are, of course, both honest and creative. We try to convince the courts, and our opponents, about “the law” that applies to the case – i.e., the rules by which our “story” will be judged. We make arguments.  We draw analogies to some cases and we distinguish others.  After all, it is not always clear what the law is or what the law means.  And, we try convince our audience that “the law”, applied to “the facts”, yields the result for which we are advocating.  And, of course, we do all this mindful of the fact that we have an obligation to the truth. 

None of these three aspects of the drama of practicing law has anything to do with memorizing “black letter” rules or case-names.

You are all students at a good law school.  What does that mean?  Some think that law students are, essentially, consumers, and that “the law” is a neatly packaged product that law schools and teachers hand over, in small chunks, in exchange for huge tuition payments.  Some think that law school is a three-year bar review course, the purpose of which consists entirely in preparing one to take and pass the dreaded bar exam.   Still others might think that law-school classes can be neatly divided into “law,” which one needs to know, and “policy” and “theory,” which the professors care about but is really irrelevant.

As you might imagine, I believe these views are mistaken.  The truth is, we don’t really have a “product” for you to consume.  Instead, what we've been doing this year is inviting you into a profession and into a way of thinking about the problem of ordering the life of the community (which is the problem that law is supposed to solve).  And the study and teaching of law does not consist of me handing over, and you memorizing, briefly retaining, and then regurgitating on an exam, a set of rules called “the law.”  Legal education – if done right – is not about memorizing facts, data, and rules; it is not only about “technique.”  It is about learning to think, write, and reason – critically, carefully, and creatively.

In my view, if we are doing our jobs right, my colleagues and I are teaching and encouraging you to write clearly and persuasively; to craft sound arguments by drawing analogies and making distinctions; to abstract general principles from specific situations, to analyze complicated scenarios, and to apply the appropriate principles to the given facts and circumstances; to appreciate, when presented with a problem, which facts matter, and which facts do not; to recognize the moral dilemmas that so often arise in law (and in life), to have the strength of character to do the right thing, and to encourage others to do likewise; to think critically about legal rules and practices, and to evaluate them in light of the transcendent demands of justice and human dignity; to communicate to others, to your friends and families, to your clients, and to your communities the value and importance of the rule of law (in other words, part of what you are learning here is how to be a law teacher); and, perhaps most important, we want to encourage you to regard “being a lawyer” as “more than a job,” but a vocation.

Well, now you might be thinking, “this sounds fine, but is it practical?”  For starters, in law, theory and practice are always connected, and cannot be separated.  The practice of law is the application of theory and principles.  For example, the various “punishment theory” readings might seem abstract and theoretical; in fact, they explore ideas and arguments that play an essential role in shaping the “black letter” law.  In addition – I cannot emphasize this enough – you’ll find that when you practice law, your stock in trade will not be your memorized storehouse of legal formulas.  You’ll forget most of them pretty quickly after you graduate, if not before.

 Our stock in trade as lawyers is judgment, persuasiveness, reason, and wit.  No one is ever going to come to your office and say, “Mr. Smith, can you tell me the Rule Against Perpetuities?”  Instead, they are going to come to you with complicated problems and they will want your counsel and advice.  The solutions to these problems will rarely be clear; in fact, the problems themselves will rarely be clear.  This is why law is fun.  It is fun, challenging, and creative to identify and solve problems.  That’s what we do.

I think that an important aspect of legal education is learning to deal with uncertainty.  It's learning to deal with the fact that, sometimes, my colleagues and I won’t give you “the answer” to your question and will instead work through the competing arguments with you.   This under-determinacy can be frustrating.  But, there’s no escaping it.  If we make the law and its applications “black and white”, then we are lying to you.  To be clear:  I’m not saying that “there is no truth” or that “right and wrong are all subjective and relative.”  I’m simply saying that, in the law, there are often good arguments on both sides of a question.

I think that all this is true not only for Criminal Law, but also for your other courses, last semester and now.  In a way, the label on the book or the title of the class doesn’t matter all that much.  In all of these classes, you are learning pretty much the same thing:  How to think and write like a lawyer.  Think of it this way:  Every law-school subject has three “levels.”:  The subject’s particular rules and doctrines; the history and public-policy justifications for those rules and doctrines; and the meaning of life.  To be a good lawyer -- to deserve the name -- you have to think about law on all three levels.  In my view, no lawyer worthy of the name can be ignorant about where the principles she applies come from, or indifferent about whether they can be justified.

Finally, a favor to ask:  please do your best during your time here to build an intellectual culture here that is consistent with all this.  Allow yourself, and encourage each other, to be intrigued by and curious about the law.  Care and argue about the law.  Not every law student thinks this way, but a Notre Dame lawyer should.

Sincerely,

RG

District Attorney Elections in 2019

Most district attorneys are elected in either a presidential election year or a congressional election year.  But some states hold elections for DA in off-cycle years.  By my count, there are 183 local prosecutors up for election in 2019.  

The jurisdictions whose prosecutors who are up for election are included after the break:

A Bit of History on the Presumption of Regularity

Several years ago, when I was writing a paper about prosecutorial discretion, I ended up doing a bunch of research on the presumption of regularity.  As you may know, the presumption of regularity is a presumption that executive officials have properly discharged their official duties.  It has become a hot topic during the Trump administration.  But I was interested in the presumption because it forms the basis of a few cases that I find troubling --- most notably, the Supreme Court’s ruling in United States v. Armstrong, which denied criminal defendants discovery in support of their selective prosecution claim unless they could first “produce some evidence that similarly situated defendants could have been prosecuted, but were not.”  The Armstrong Court justified setting the standard to obtain discovery so high (thus creating a barrier to obtaining discovery), in part, on the presumption of regularity.  It also indicated that the presumption of regularity is a justification for the broad discretion that the Court affords to prosecutors.

The paper ended up going in another direction, and so the research on the presumption of regularity never saw that light of day.  But I thought I’d go ahead and share it now, given how many people I see talking about the presumption.  People might think it is interesting because the research shows that the presumption has expanded well beyond the cases that have been used to justify it.

Armstrong cites United States v. Chemical Foundation, a 1926 Supreme Court case, as support for the presumption of regularity.  But that case doesn’t seem to provide a particularly sound foundation for the presumption—at least not for the presumption as it is currently invoked by the Court.

In Chemical Foundation, the United States sued to invalidate the sale of foreign patents to Chemical Foundation.  The government had seized the patents pursuant to the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917, and the President had delegated the power to sell the patents to Frank Polk, who was a counselor for the Department of State.  Polk then ordered the sale of various patents to the Chemical Foundation.  The United States subsequently sought to invalidate the sale, alleging that Polk’s decision to sell was “induced by misrepresentation and [was] made without knowledge of the material facts.”  The government lost at trial, with the lower court finding that the U.S. had “failed to establish any conspiracy, fraud or deception alleged.”  The Supreme Court declined to disturb the factual findings of the lower court, because they were not clearly erroneous.

I assume the Supreme Court could have disposed of Chemical Foundation on this limited ground—namely, that the government had failed to meet its factual burden.  But the Supreme Court went on to state:

The presumption of regularity supports the official acts of public officers, and, in the absence of clear evidence to the contrary, courts presume that they have properly discharged their official duties. Under that presumption, it will be taken that Mr. Polk acted upon knowledge of the material facts. The validity of the reasons stated in the orders, or the basis of fact on which they rest will not be reviewed by the courts.

The Chemical Foundation Court cited three other cases in support of the presumption.  None of those cases referenced a presumption of regularity.  Nor do any of those cases reveal where the Chemical Foundation Court located authority for the presumption or what it thought the contours of that presumption to be.  And, most important, none supports the presumption as it was expressed and applied in Armstrong.

The first of these cases, The Confiscation Cases, involved a seizure that the President was authorized by Congress to make, but was actually made by a marshal acting on directions by the district attorney, who was in turn acting at the request of the Attorney General.  The cited portion of the opinion states that, because the statute authorized only the President to make the seizure, “a direction given by the Attorney-General to seize property liable to confiscation under the act of Congress must be regarded as a direction given by the President.”  The Court suggested that this holding was related to a previous decision that “the President speaks and acts through the heads of the several departments in relation to subjects which appertain to their respective duties.”  It is possible that the Chemical Foundation Court relied on The Confiscation Cases for the proposition that the Attorney General is presumed to act at the request of the President.  But the Chemical Foundation Court did not provide this (or any other) explanation.

The second case cited by Chemical Foundation is United States v. Page. That case involved a requirement that the result of all court-martial proceedings were to be signed by the President.  In Page, that requirement had not been technically satisfied.  The Secretary of War testified that he had forwarded the proceedings to the President, but the Secretary, rather than the President, had signed the copy of the proceedings. Nevertheless, the Court refused to dismiss the court-martial charge.  It stated that “where the record discloses that the proceedings have been laid before the president for his orders in the case, the orders subsequently issued thereon are presumed to be his, and not those of the secretary by whom they are authenticated: and this must be the result here.”  It is possible that the Chemical Foundation Court relied on this case for the proposition that, if the Secretary of War said he forwarded something to the President for approval, that statement ought to be presumed correct.  But that is hardly the only possible way to read this case.

The final case, United States v. Nix, involved a dispute over the travel fees of a marshal to serve arrest warrants.  The marshal claimed travel not only for miles that he traveled, but also for miles traveled by his deputies.  The deputies were not available for testimony or depositions to verify the miles they traveled.  But the marshal was able to show that “his accounts” of the miles traveled by his deputies “had been allowed by the district judge.”  The Court deemed this decision by the district judge “prima facie evidence of the correctness of the items of that account” that “was sufficient to place upon the government the burden of showing any error of fact in his account.”  It is possible that the Chemical Foundation Court relied on this case for the proposition that the official accounting of the marshal ought to be presumed correct.  But it is difficult to tell what, precisely, was entitled to the presumption—the representation of the marshal, or the fact that the lower court found the representation credible.  In short, this line of precedent hardly provides a solid foundation for the presumption.

Although Armstrong was a criminal case, the presumption is not limited to criminal prosecutors.  Many Supreme Court cases discussing the presumption are unrelated to the criminal justice system.  For example, in National Archives and Records Administartion v. Favish, the Court referenced the presumption in creating a higher threshold showing for disclosure in certain FOIA cases.  The Court stated: “[T]here is a presumption of legitimacy accorded to the Government’s official conduct. The presumption perhaps is less a rule of evidence than a general working principle. However the rule is characterized, where the presumption is applicable, clear evidence is usually required to displace it.”

But, as with the cases applying the presumption to decisions by prosecutors, these other cases tend to make only brief reference to the presumption, sometimes including little more than citations to previous cases, which themselves made only brief reference to the presumption.  Indeed, a case that has long been associated with the presumption of regularity afforded to administrative agencies—Citizens to Preserve Overton Park v. Volpe—states only: “Certainly, the Secretary’s decision is entitled to a presumption of regularity. But that presumption is not to shield his action from a thorough, probing, in-depth review.”

Although the Supreme Court has not made the connection explicit, one suspects that the presumption of regularity afforded to prosecutors is related to the ancient maxim “Omnia praesumuntur rite esse acta,” which roughly translated means “All things are presumed to have been done rightly.”  The maxim is sometimes recounted as “Omnia praesumuntur rite et solemniter esse acta donee probetur in contrarium”—that is, “All things are presumed to have been done rightly and with due formality unless it is proved to the contrary.”  Recent cases involving the presumption of regularity do not invoke the maxim, but some older opinions do.  Justice Story invoked the maxim in Bank of U.S. v. Dandridge, stating:

[The law] presumes that every man, in his private and official character, does his duty, until the contrary is proved; it will presume that all things are rightly done, unless the circumstances of the case overturn this presumption, according to the maxim, omnia presumuntur rite et solemnitur esse acta, donec probetur in contrarium. Thus, it will presume that a man acting in a public office has been rightly appointed; that entries found in public books have been made by the proper officer; that, upon proof of title, matters collateral to that title shall be deemed to have been done; as, for instance, if a grant or feoffment has been declared on, attornment will be intended, and that deeds and grants have been accepted, which are manifestly for the benefit of the party. The books on evidence abound with instances of this kind, and many of them will be found collected in Mr. Starkie’s late valuable Treatise on Evidence.

As the excerpt from Justice Story’s opinion indicates, the presumption had a number of iterations.  But it also indicates that the presumption of regularity is not limited to executive officials—or even public officials; instead, it applies to everyone.  It is an evidentiary presumption that people act appropriately—an presumption that the party claiming otherwise bears the burden to disprove.

So how on earth did a presumption that applies to everyone and merely sets a burden of proof transform to shield prosecutors from discovery?  I’m not sure.  But I imagine that it is attributable, at least in part, to the fact that the courts do not want to be inundated with cases challenging executive action.  And I imagine that it is also related to the fact that the post-Warren Court has (at least at times) made a big show out of not interfering in the business of the political branches.

In any event, I think that it is worth noting the shaky foundations of the modern presumption of regularity.  History shows that it is an evidentiary presumption that applied to public and private actors alike; it was used to allocate burdens of proof, not to prevent discovery or to insulate executive action from judicial review. 

Guest Post: Come On, Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh! Doctrinal (and Intemperate) Error in the Timbs v. Indiana Oral Argument

The following post is from Rory Little (UC-Hastings and SCOTUSBlog).

It’s bad enough when a Supreme Court Justice expresses sarcastic impatience with an advocate; even experienced advocates are on edge when they appear in the nation’s highest court. Perhaps even worse when the advocate is a sovereign state’s Solicitor General.  But it really is inexcusable when the sarcasm is based on doctrinal error and thus wrong.  Here’s why that happened in last week’s oral argument in Timbs v. Indiana.

Background on the Timbs case and the Doctrine of Incorporation

The State of Indiana sought to forfeit Tyson Timbs’ $42,000 Land Rover after Timbs use it to transport small amounts of heroin to drug deals.  The Indiana Supreme Court declined to consider whether this violated the Eighth Amendment’s “no Excessive Fines” clause, because the U.S. Supreme Court has never definitively said that that clause is “incorporated” against the states (via the Fourteenth Amendment’s “no state shall” deny Due Process clause).  Whether or not Timbs should lose his vehicle, the Question presented in Timbs may seem easy: the doctrine of incorporation, developed only in the 20^th Century, is well-accepted. Most recently the Court ruled in 2010 in McDonald that the Second Amendment’s “right … to keep and bear arms” is incorporated and thereby governs state as well is federal actions.  Although it is surprising to many, the Bill of Rights was originally intended to apply only against the federal government, and for our first 100 years or more it was said to have no application to state actions.  However, after a century of litigation, all rights that are found to be “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition,” “so as to be ranked as fundamental,” are now said (McDonald) to be “incorporated” against state action as part of due process.  This includes most – but see below, not all – of the Bill of Rights provisions.

The “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and traditions” test might be well-satisfied by the Eighth Amendment’s command that “excessive fines” shall not be “imposed” -- although the common practice in the early days of our Union of forfeiting entire ships used to run contraband might give an Originalist pause regarding whether a rule against the forfeiture of vessels of crime is in fact so “deeply rooted.”  (As Chief Justice Roberts noted at the Timbs argument “I certainly understand the argument that … with respect to forfeiting instrumentalities of the crime, … [i]t’s always proportionate since it’s the way the crime is accomplished.”)

But one thing is doctrinally clear: not all the rights specified in the Bill of Rights have been incorporated against the States.  For some rights, like the “no Excessive Fines” clause, this might merely be an accident of history.  (One can find a good discussion of “why hasn’t the excessive fines clause already been incorporated?” in the November 26 episode of “First Mondays” with Professors Beth Colgan and Dan Epps”)

The Fifth Amendment’s Grand Jury right has, and for good reason, not been incorporated

But for one Bill of Rights provision in particular – the Fifth Amendment’s right to be charged by a Grand Jury for any “capital or otherwise infamous crime” – the decision to not incorporate is long-standing and quite considered.  Every student and professor of Constitutional Criminal Procedure understands this intentional anomaly.  Yet, as recounted below, it appears to be a “blank spot” in the doctrinal understanding of the Court’s two newest Justices, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh.

By way of quick summary, in 1884 in Hurtado v. California, the Supreme Court ruled in no uncertain terms that the Fifth Amendment’s grand jury provision need not bind the states.  The progressive 1879 Constitution of the young state of California had provided a new system, one viewed as more protective than the old grand jury system, permitting the charging of criminal defendants by a prosecutorial “information.”  California’s then-new Penal Code -- unlike secret, non-judicial, one-sided grand jury proceedings -- permitted the prosecution’s information to be immediately tested by a preliminary hearing, presided over by a judge, providing counsel for the defendant and allowing for cross-examination.  When Joseph Hurtado was charged with murder (and ultimately sentenced to death) based upon an information rather than grand jury indictment, the U.S. Supreme Court viewed it as a “question … of grave and serious import” whether the Fifth Amendment’s grand jury rule should be required, under the Fourteenth Amendment, to apply against the state.  In a thorough opinion (while certainly sounding different in some ways from today), the Court ruled that “progress [and] improvement” is not forbidden by the Fourteenth Amendment, and that California’s information system, with all its additional protections for a defendant, was at least as protective of “principles of liberty and justice” as the grand jury system.

Hurtado has well stood the test of time.  Critics of the federal grand jury system are many.  Meanwhile, over half the states allow criminal charging by information rather than grand jury; and two states (Pennsylvania and Connecticut) have abolished the use of criminal charging grand juries entirely.)  Thus the respected NACDL (National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers), which has filed amicus on Timbs’ behalf regarding Excessive Fines, would surely oppose (as would others on all sides of the criminal justice aisle) incorporation of the Grand Jury clause.

Intemperate Doctrinal Error at the Timbs oral argument

This brings us, finally, to Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh at the Timbs oral argument (transcript is here).  Justice Gorsuch lit into Indian’s Solicitor General Thomas Fisher (who I do not know) from the start.  He demanded agreement that “the Excessive Fines Clause is incorporated against the states.”  When Fisher resisted (unsurprisingly, since that is the Question Presented), Justice Gorsuch persisted:

 I mean, most of the incorporation cases took place in like the 1940s.” [– this is an erroneous account in itself as virtually all the criminal procedure incorporation case were products of the 1960s Warren Court –]  And here we are in 2018 still litigating incorporation of the Bill of Rights.  Really?  Come on, General.

The audio on this last statement (audio of the argument is here) is undeniably harsh: Justice Gorsuch’s tone is, frankly, unbecoming.

Fisher politely stood his ground, and Justice Kavanaugh took up Gorsuch’s point -- although he at least had the courtesy to pose his view as questions, a fortunate method since in fact he and Justice Gorsuch were wrong:        

Isn’t it too late in the day to argue that any of the Bill of Rights is not incorporated? … [A]ren’t all the Bill of Rights at this point in our conception of what they stand for, the history of each of them, incorporated?

As you now know, these rhetorical questions and accusations – “Come on, General” -- are flatly, doctrinally, incorrect.  Hurtado stands in their way, fully and after 134 years of careful consideration. 

Conclusion

Why does any other this matter, you may wonder?  Errors must happen all the time even in Supreme Court arguments, right?  Why single these four pages of transcript out?

Two reasons.  First, my perhaps old-fashioned view is that a little bit of humility is a good thing for at least new Supreme Court Justices, especially regarding areas of the law in which they may not have deep experience.  Neither Justice Gorsuch or Kavanaugh has any substantial background in criminal law, and at the D.C. Circuit at least Justice Kavanaugh’s criminal law exposure was not extensive.

Second, and far more important, one must point out doctrinal errors if one can before they leak into published Supreme Court opinions, not after.  It would be a grave error to say, sarcastically or otherwise, that all the rights in the Bill of Rights have been incorporated.  And it would be a far more serious error to suggest that a carefully considered procedure such as criminal information-followed-by-preliminary-hearing charging is somehow in danger of being wiped out by slapdash dicta in a Supreme Court case not even presenting the question.  It is for that reason, and with all respect for the understandably challenging task of being elevated to the Nation’s highest court, that the foregoing is published.

"Volunteering for Execution" (again)

Reading and thinking about this Bloomberg news-item ("In Unusual Capital Fight, Inmate Gets His Wish and Gets Executed") took me back to a Prawfsblawg post of mine from more than ten (!) years ago.  Reacting to a then-recent decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, I wrote: 

The term "death-row volunteer" probably sounds strange -- do people really "volunteer" to be on death-row? -- but, nonetheless, it describes reasonably accurately a not-insubstantial number of those convicted murderers who have been executed in the United States since 1976.  (For more detail on the death-row-volunteer issue, see this paper of minefrom a few years ago.) 

Today, the indefatigable Howard Bashman reports, the en banc United States Court of Appeals ruled that Robert Charles Comer, who was sentenced to death in Arizona, was "competent" to waive further proceedings relating to his federal habeas corpus petition and that he had, in fact, "voluntarily" waived those proceedings.  In a nutshell, the Ninth Circuit ruled that, notwithstanding the possibility that legal errors had infected his capital-sentencing proceedings, Comer could prevent judicial correction of those errors by "volunteering" to be executed, in accord with his death sentence.  (The court rejected the argument, advanced by Comer's counsel -- who were arguing, obviously, against Comer's stated wish to volunteer -- that Comer's "volunteering" was the product of harsh prison conditions.)

What should we think about this case?  How should we think about death-row volunteers generally?

Perhaps the most famous death-row "volunteer" was Gary Gilmore, who imagined himself something of a romantic outlaw-hero.  As is described at (great) length in The Executioner's Song, he fought, bitterly and publicly -- with the help of some publicity-hungry lawyers -- the efforts by the ACLU, his own mother, and others to prevent his execution.  Gilmore insisted, in an open letter to the ACLU, "I know what I did. . . .  I know the . . . effect it had on the lives of two families.  I'm wiling to pay ultimately.  Let me!"  "Butt out of my life," he demanded.  To which the ACLU responded, "We don't think the world is obliged to be governed by your preference. . . .  We are not imposing our wants and attitude on you.  We are seeking to impose humanity and decency upon the state of Utah."

So, again, how should we think about Gilmore's or Comer's case?  On the one hand, we might follow a commitment to "autonomy" where it (appears to) lead, and say, something like, "we don't approve of the death penalty, but it's legally authorized, and it's your choice."  As it happens, though, most lawyers for death-row inmates who flirt with volunteering -- and many do -- are willing to contest their own clients' efforts to volunteer and to contest, if necessary, their own client's decision-making capacity.  Here is a question:  If one opposes capital punishment on the ground that it is inconsistent with a commitment to human dignity, is that commitment undermined or impeached by efforts to paint one's client as "incompetent" in order to prevent him from pursuing a course that one believes will result in immoral state action?

I once represented a man who was living -- like Comer -- on Arizona's death row.  He twice "volunteered" -- or started to -- but was dissuaded.  If he had not changed his mind, though, what should I -- or another lawyer who opposed the death penalty but also knew that the inmate was not delusional, just tired, lonely, and remorseful -- have done?

By way of an update:  A few years I posted the above, the person I represented had his death sentence vacated (thanks to the hard work of other lawyers).

Elected Prosecutors and Non-Prosecution Policies

Rachel Rollins is likely to be the next district attorney in Suffolk County, Massachusetts.  She recently won the democratic primary, and she is not facing a Republican challenger in the general election.  Rollins is a reform-minded candidate, and so her win has caused a bit of a stir.  Rollins is also causing a stir because she recently released a list of crimes that she says she will decline to prosecute if elected.  The list includes larceny under $250, receiving stolen property, disorderly conduct, and other charges.

If you had asked me ten years ago what I thought about a prosecutor making a public announcement about all of the crimes she would not prosecute, I would have been extremely critical.  In particular, I would have said that prosecutors have a duty is to enforce the laws, and policies of non-enforcement conflict with that duty.  Just as decisions about what to criminalize belong to legislatures, I would have said, so too do decriminalization decisions belong to legislatures, not prosecutors.  But having spent time studying the relationship between criminal justice institutions, I am much less critical of Rollins’ announcement.  In particular, I no longer think that decriminalization decisions are reserved for the legislature.

To be clear, my point about decriminalization is a descriptive one, not necessarily a normative one.  Legislatures have—to a significant extent—delegated the scope of criminal law to prosecutors.  Legislatures have done so by writing overly broad criminal laws.  Legislatures write overly broad laws knowing that prosecutors will not prosecute all behavior that falls within the statutory text.  Prosecutors will make their own decisions about the circumstances under which to prosecute crimes.  In other words, prosecutors are free to decide what conduct to treat as legal and what to treat as permissible.  We got a glimpse of that decision-making when James Comey explained to Congress that, even if Hillary Clinton’s behavior fell within the text of a federal criminal statute, it did not meet the criteria that DOJ uses for actually bringing charges in such cases.

The sheer number of crimes also delegates questions about the scope of criminal law to prosecutors.  Resource constraints make it impossible for prosecutors to bring charges against everyone who commits a crime.  As a result, district attorneys have to make decisions about which crimes to prioritize and which crimes to deprioritize.

Some might respond that there is a difference between making enforcement decisions in the context of individual cases and making enforcement decisions ex ante about an entire category of cases.  But I don’t see the appeal of that argument.  The elected district attorney is the individual who has been empowered to make these important decisions.  So one hopes that she is making those decisions in the context of a general office-wide policy, rather than leaving the decision to line prosecutors in individual cases.  Line prosecutors may have different priorities, and case-by-case decisions would doubtlessly lead to inconsistent decisions.

Some might also object that, even if an elected prosecutor has formal policies about what charges not to bring, she should not announce those policies to the public.  If I know, for example, that my district attorney is not going to prosecute larceny of goods under $250, then (so the argument goes) I will feel free to steal items that cost less.  (Meir Dan-Cohen fans will recognize that argument as one of acoustic separation.)

Even assuming that such public announcements decrease deterrence—and I am uncertain whether they do—public announcements have a significant benefits  :  For example, public announcements can help ensure that law enforcement won’t enforce these laws in an arbitrary or discriminatory fashion.  One major problem with overly broad laws or rarely enforced laws is that they can be used as a pretext for racial discrimination or other animus.  In this respect, overly broad laws and rarely enforced laws are similar to vague laws. 

Most importantly, public announcements make prosecutors democratically accountable for their enforcement policies.  Unannounced policies do not allow the public to make informed voting decisions or to give feedback to elected prosecutors about how they have chosen to enforce the criminal laws.  But in announcing this list of crimes, Rollins has ensured some measure of legitimacy and accountability for her decisions. 

I am sure that at least some people will read this post and think that it has failed to fully justify or defend a practice of categorical non-enforcement.  There are very intelligent people who have argued against categorical non-enforcement.   In an ideal world, I would probably agree that legislatures should make all criminalization and decriminalization decisions.  In such a world, legislatures would write narrowly targeted criminal laws and would not criminalize more behavior than the system could reasonably prosecute and punish.  But that is not the world we live in.  Since legislatures have decided to delegate significant questions about the scope of criminal law to prosecutors, prosecutors should answer those questions in a transparent and accountable fashion.  That is what Rachel Rollins has done here.

Big Little Lies--Crim Law Question

My wife and I just finished Season One of Big Little Lies. We enjoyed the show. But we were not fans of how it ended, specifically how the police resolved the investigation and why, why the women told the story they did, and what criminal law has to say about it.

SPOILERS after the jump. Substantive crim law people, please help us out.

Assuming what was shown on the screen is accurate, here is what happened:

Perry, Celeste's abusive husband, begins attacking and beating her on the patio, in front of a stairwell that has caution tape across it. Celeste's three friends try to pull him off and he beats them off. Celeste is on the ground and Perry stands over her and kicks her multiple times. The other three women are helpless to stop the attack, which appears that it could continue and result in serious injuries. A fifth woman, Bonnie, runs from the far end of the patio towards Perry and shoves him with two hands towards the open stairwell; he breaks through the tape and falls down the steps, dying in the fall.

The woman all agree to tell the story that as Perry was kicking her, he fell backwards through the tape and down the stairs. One detective dismisses that as bullshit, because the women's stories and language line up too perfectly. Her partner asks why they would lie. He suggests that this clearly was self-defense, that the pusher (the police do not know who that was, although the partner assumes it was Celeste) would be guilty of at most involuntary manslaughter, and would get at most a year of community service, likely cut in half. (Put aside that community service does not work that way).

Here are my questions:

• Is that right under the law? What we see on-screen looks like defense-of-others and was a two-hand shove to stop a large man from severely beating a smaller and prone woman. It was a tame physical act, calculated to try to stop the ongoing assault. Does his falling down the stairs, in a defense-of-other situation, turn that into a crime? Would any prosecutor charge that, in these circumstances?

• If it is a crime, then having the police be confused over the women lying is stupid. They are lying because the truth would result in someone being convicted of a violent felony for coming to an abused woman's aide. Even if her sentence is relatively light, it is still a conviction for a violent crime and still a felony with all the collateral consequences that follow. Given the choice between the truth and a conviction or a lie that cannot be proven otherwise, of course they will choose the lie.

• Perhaps the story is trying to set-up the impossible situation for abused women, that attempting to fight back costs more. And perhaps that will be the theme of Season Two. But I did not see the groundwork laid for that.

Tribute(s) to Prof. Joshua Dressler

The latest issue of the consistently excellent Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law includes a bunch of tribute-essays from the field's heaviest hitters about CrimProf extraordinaire Joshua Dressler and his work.  I don't think it's a stretch to say that Dressler is a legal-education treasure.  I've been using his casebook (now a joint project with Stephen Garvey) since 2000 and I know that hundreds of my former students are more-than-grateful to his Understanding Criminal Law for cutting through the fog created by my lectures!   Take a look a the volume, and raise a glass to Joshua!       

Pragmatism and Compliance

One of the reasons I enjoy working in the compliance area is its pragmatism, which I think is reflected in two important ways. 

First, compliance is a pragmatic area of study for students.  I have seen this with both my actual compliance students and my research assistants.  For example, one of my former students went on to apply for a position with the SEC Student Honors Program and was eventually placed with the Office of the Whistleblower.  She emailed me shortly after starting the program to explain how she felt prepared for the placement, because we had covered the SEC whistleblower program during class.  Similarly, my summer research assistants often email me after on-campus interviewing to explain how their summer working for me was helpful to them during the process.  Because much of the “law” I rely upon is not available on Westlaw/Lexis, I tend to conduct specialized training for my research assistants where we cover what an enforcement action is and different methods of identifying and analyzing information that is not available in case law databases.  For those students who end up in a regulatory or white collar practice for the summer or after graduation, they tend to have a bit of a leg up on their counterparts who may have little to no awareness of these sorts of enforcement documents.

Second, compliance is an area that has huge applicability and ramifications for practicing attorneys.  I love that each of my projects tackles a concrete problem confronting practitioners and leaders within industry and attempts to help them sort through potential solutions or considerations they should take into account.  When I send out my reprints, I probably send about 20% to people in practice at law firms, in-house at corporations, or senior government officials.  To my delight, I often get a response back, which allows me to have informal conversations that help me get a better understanding of the challenges and struggles faced by those within industry.  These conversations almost always help me to sharpen my ideas.  And I am hopeful that these interactions will aid me when I eventually transition to some qualitative projects, which I plan to start working on in a couple years.

There are, of course, other ways in which working in the compliance space is pragmatic; just as there are other scholarly areas with similarly pragmatic attributes.  But the pragmatism—for both my students and my scholarship—associated with compliance work is one of the things I enjoy about working in the area.

Something New, Something Old, and Something Borrowed

Writing in the compliance space has been extremely rewarding for many reasons, but today I will highlight the new, the old, and the borrowed. 

Something New

Compliance is still considered new within legal scholarship.  Its newness makes it an extremely fun area to write in, because it is often the case that you are one of the first, or one of very few, academics who have written on a particular topic.  For me this has been most true, I think, with my work on corporate monitors (here, here, and here). There were certainly excellent articles (e.g., here, here, and here) written prior to my own work, but because there weren’t a large number or articles on the topic, I have been able to carve out a scholarly niche for myself.  As a result, when it comes time to have an academic speak or write on the topic of monitors, I often get asked.  I can’t always take on the opportunity, but it is fun to have something you are known for, and there is still quite a bit of room for that in the compliance area.

Something Old

And yet, many of the issues important for compliance today aren’t at all new.  A great deal of compliance scholarship is rooted in more established areas, like corporate law, corporate governance, and corporate criminal law.  The iconic Caremark decision is a case about compliance (see this symposium).  Within industry, compliance is an established field with a variety of “professional” organizations with hundreds of members.  This is nice, because while compliance is “new” within legal scholarship, it is also “old” in a way that provides a strong foundation for the scholarly work being done.  In one of my forthcoming articles, I use classic BA cases to serve as the basis for a new argument related to identifying the root-cause of compliance failures within organizations.  All that to say, you aren’t starting from scratch when you identify a problem to write about.

Something Borrowed   

Finally, because compliance is inherently interdisciplinary, it lends itself well to borrowing concepts from other fields.  For example, many compliance scholars spend a fair amount of time drawing on behavioral ethics research (e.g. here and here), which is a literature primarily found within business schools.  Additionally, I often find that when I present a paper someone in the audience from another discipline will suggest I read something that I have not come across, which turns out to be completely applicable to what I am writing about.  A couple summers ago, for instance, someone made a relatively offhand remark about how I should look at interagency coordination literature, which is in the administrative law area, and that literature ended up serving as the theoretical basis for my paper.

* * *

All that to say, part of what I like about writing in the compliance space is that it is new, but not too new, while allowing the flexibility to learn about a number of topics from other areas of law. 

Colb on the presumption of innocence

This post by Sherry Colb is outstanding, helping to explain away a trap that I have fallen into in thinking about sexual-assault accusations, specifically acquaintance sexual assault.

Her explanation of presumption of innocence matches how I teach it in Evidence, as the assignment of the initial burden of production. The default conclusion is innocence, unless and until the party opposing innocence (the prosecution) introduces sufficient evidence of not innocent. And the competing stories of the victim and the defendant are two bits of evidence to be considered. Then, having carried that burden, the jury must be strongly convinced.

Colb is right that sexual assault is not the only type of so-called he-said/she-said; she gives the example of a mugging in which the evidence is competing testimony between the victim and the defendant's mother, but argues that we never would deride such a case as he-said/she-said. The difference is the underlying misogyny that Colb says permeates sexual-assault cases. Because that misogyny bad a particular evidentiary consequence--the allowance of evidence of victim character. We do not, and never have, allowed such evidence in the mugging case. And despite recent efforts such as rape-shield statutes, the use of such character evidence has not gone away.

Teaching Compliance

During bar study, July 4th is a big “you don’t have much time left” marker, and that is how I feel about the academic summer.  As soon as the fireworks have died down, I start thinking about teaching.  I love teaching.  I love teaching Contracts to 1Ls, in part, because it is hard to imagine a greater privilege than being able to help introduce the law to a brand new set of students.  But I also love teaching my Compliance course, because it allows the students to confront legal issues that are still being debated and determined.

Developing my Corporate Compliance & Ethics Seminar was both exciting and challenging.  At the time I started teaching it there was one compliance casebook (it is excellent), but I wanted to use a different set of materials for a seminar.  As many of you know, coming up with a set of materials for a course from scratch is time intensive, but it is also very rewarding, particularly when it overlaps with your scholarly interests. 

I decided to break my course up into modules and to use case studies as a vehicle for learning each concept covered.  Module I covers introductory materials like the Organizational Sentencing Guidelines, the importance of self-policing, as well as some background reading in behavioral ethics.  In Module II, we go through different actors within compliance efforts, like regulators, gatekeepers, and whistleblowers.  In Module III, we cover substantive compliance areas.  I have traditionally covered the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, Antitrust, the False Claims Act, and Title IX.  In Module IV, I merge the theoretical concepts we have learned in class with some more practical concerns.  This latter module has changed each year I’ve taught it, with last year focusing on conflicts of interest and sanctions for compliance officers.  Finally, I weave in coverage of applicable Model Rules of Professional Conduct throughout the course.  

In other words, there is a whole lot of information crammed into a 14 week course, but it has generally been quite successful.  I use some classic exemplars for case studies—like Enron and Siemens—but I also use current events when I can.  For example, during last year’s whistleblowers class, I put together materials from the Wells Fargo scandal.  The mix of (i) case studies, (ii) theoretical background reading, and (iii) Model Rules has sparked intensive discussions about the role lawyers play within compliance efforts and where the boundaries should be when defining the scope of responsibility that lawyers should have for ensuring successful compliance programs are created and developed.  It is fun to teach, and the students seem to enjoy the concepts learned.  And because this is a class where the law is still quite dynamic, I’m looking forward to amending my antitrust and whistleblowers sections next week!

Compliance

Many thanks to Howard for arranging to have me contribute as a guest blogger this month!    

A few months before I began my tenure-track position in 2014, I was nervous that my seemingly diverse research interests were going to create problems for me down the line.  I had interests in professional responsibility, corporate governance, workplace law, and organizational misconduct, which meant I did not feel like I “fit” neatly within a field of legal research. I knew that my research was all connected, but I felt like conveying that connection to others was sometimes a bit difficult.  Thankfully, I had a wonderful conversation with a senior scholar who said something to the effect of:  “You just research compliance.  It is kind of new, so people may not realize it, but that is what you are doing.”  These words were instantly clarifying and gratifying.  I suppose I knew I was researching compliance issues, but not having met many scholars who defined themselves in that way at that time, I did not realize it was legitimate to actually use the compliance title to describe my work. 

Today, compliance has developed into its own, albeit some might still say new, field.  There are several law schools with centers, programs, or areas of study in compliance.  The ALI is working on a set of Principles of the Law in Compliance, Enforcement, and Risk Management.  And there are a variety of compliance-specific conferences that I can attend.  Compliance is, however, an interdisciplinary field.  Some people writing in the space describe themselves as corporate law scholars, some as criminal law scholars, and there is quite a bit of very good work being done by business school professors.  Personally, while I self-identify as a compliance scholar, I do so with the caveat that I draw on research from several areas within legal scholarship and organizational behavior.  More specifically, the underlying research question that motivates my scholarship asks how one might address dysfunctions within organizations in an effort to create more productive, healthy, and ethical environments within firms.     

This month I’ll be blogging a bit about my compliance research, but also about the experience of working within a field that is (i) still emerging and (ii) interdisciplinary in scope.  For me this has been a really exciting endeavor, but it does have its own set of challenges to work through.  But for now, I will just wish you all an early Happy July 4th. 

SCOTUS Term: Chavez-Mesa and Sentencing Appeals

Yesterday, Supreme Court decided another federal sentencing case, Chavez-Meza v. United States. In 2013, the defendant pleaded guilty to possession of methamphetamine with the intent to distribute and he was sentenced to 135 months in prison.  That sentence was at the very bottom of the relevant Federal Sentencing Guideline range.  After the defendant’s sentencing, the U.S. Sentencing Commission reduced the relevant sentencing guideline range from 135-168 months to 108-135 months.  The defendant sought a resentencing under the new, lower range.  The judge agreed to lower his range, but imposed a sentence of 114 months, rather than the 108 month sentence the defendant had requested.  The judge did not provide any explanation for the new sentence.  Instead, the judge merely checked a box granting the motion for a sentencing reduction on a form that stated that the judge had considered the defendant’s motion and taking into account the relevant Guideline’s policy statement and statutory sentencing factors.  (A copy of the form can be found at the end of the opinion.)

The defendant was entitled to appeal his new sentence, and he did.  Sentencing decisions are subject to abuse of discretion review on appeal, and so one might wonder how the appellate court was supposed to review the defendant’s sentence without any explanation for the judge’s decision.  As Judge Posner put this point in United States v. Cunningham, 429 F.3d 673 (7th Cir. 2005)

[W]henever a district judge is required to make a discretionary ruling that is subject to appellate review, we have to satisfy ourselves, before we can conclude that the judge did not abuse his discretion, that he exercised his discretion, that is, that he considered the factors relevant to that exercise. A rote statement that the judge considered all relevant factors will not always suffice; the temptation to a busy judge to impose the guidelines sentence and be done with it, without wading into the vague and prolix statutory factors, cannot be ignored.

But in a 5-3 decision, the Supreme Court Justices nonetheless affirmed the sentence in this case.  Writing for the majority, Justice Breyer failed to explain how an appellate court is supposed to conduct abuse of discretion review if there is no explanation of a lower court’s decision.  Instead, he pointed to the Court’s decision in a prior case which had affirmed a sentence that was supported by nothing more than the sentencing judge’s statement that the within-Guidelines sentence it imposed was “appropriate.”

I have no doubt that if this sentence had been outside of the Guidelines, then a majority of the Court would have said that an explanation was absolutely required. But instead we see this from the majority:

[T]he Guidelines ranges reflect to some degree what many, perhaps most, judges believed in the pre-Guidelines era was a proper sentence based upon the criminal behavior at issue and the characteristics of the offender. Thus, a judge's choice among points on a range will often simply reflect the judge's belief that the chosen sentence is the “right” sentence (or as close as possible to the “right” sentence) based on various factors, including those found in § 3553(a). Insofar as that is so, it is unsurprising that changing the applicable range may lead a judge to choose a nonproportional point on the new range. We see nothing that favors the one or the other. So, as is true of most Guidelines sentences, the judge need not provide a lengthy explanation if the “context and the record” make clear that the judge had “a reasoned basis” for reducing the defendant's sentence.

I think this may be the most blatant statement from the Court that we need only subject non-Guidelines sentences to appellate review.  Previous decisions had been more circumspect about the idea that within-Guidelines sentences ought to receive essentially no appellate scrutiny.  The Court’s decision to overtly embrace the idea in Chavez-Meza was not accompanied by any real attempt to reconcile differential appellate review with the holding in United States v. Booker, which rendered the Federal Sentencing Guidelines “advisory” in order to protect them from Sixth Amendment challenge.

What is more, the idea that the Federal Sentencing Guidelines represent what most judges think is an appropriate sentence is demonstrably false.  (See pages 1490-91 of this article and pages 6-14 of this article for thorough explanations of why that statement is false.)  As one of the original members of the U.S. Sentencing Commission, Justice Breyer knows that this statement is false.  And he knows that the statement is especially untrue when it comes to sentencing ranges for drug crimes.

Chavez-Meza v. United States is yet another demonstration that the Supreme Court has utterly abandoned appellate review principles in its post-Booker sentencing cases. 

SCOTUS Term: Hughes v. United States and Federal Sentencing

On June 4, the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Hughes v. United States.  Many law professors were watching Hughes because it promised to revisit the rule from Marks v. United States about how lower courts ought to treat fractured decisions from the Court.  Even though Hughes proved to be a disappointment to those who are interested in Marks and fractured opinions, it is still interesting for those of us who follow federal sentencing.  That is because Hughes marks another episode in the continuing saga about how to treat the Federal Sentencing Guidelines.

As many of you know, Congress adopted the Federal Sentencing Guidelines in the mid-1980s in an effort to make sentencing more uniform and less lenient.  Although called “guidelines,” the Federal Sentencing Guidelines imposed mandatory rules on federal judges about the sentences that they could imposed based on various facts involving particular defendants and their crimes.  This mandatory system endured for decades until 2005, when the Court decided in Booker v. United States that the factfinding in the Federal Sentencing Guidelines violated the Sixth Amendment jury trial right.  Although Booker concluded that the mandatory federal guidelines violated the Sixth Amendment, five members of the Court attempted to retain some role for Guidelines by declaring that they could continue to operate as “advisory Guidelines.”  In the decade since Booker, the Supreme Court has failed to articulate clearly what it means for sentencing law to be “advisory.”  Instead, it has delivered a series of opinions that alternatively venerate the Guidelines as fundamental features of every federal sentencing proceeding, and insist that the Guidelines are nothing more than advice that district courts are free to disregard.

For example, in Peugh v. United States the government had argued that the prohibition on ex post facto laws ought not apply to the advisory federal guidelines.  According to the government, after Booker, federal guidelines “are just one among many persuasive sources a sentencing court can consult, no different from a ‘policy paper.’”  But the Peugh Court rejected this characterization of the guidelines.  It characterized the Guidelines as “framework for sentencing,” and it said that the post-Booker system is “intended to make the Guidelines the lodestone of sentencing” by “impos[ing] a series of requirements on sentencing courts that cabin the exercise of [their sentencing] discretion.”

The Court made a series of pro-Guidelines statements in Molina-Martinez v. United States as well. Specifically it suggested that trial judges need not make an independent judgment about the appropriate sentence, but rather may impose Guideline sentences without reflection.  "District courts, as a matter of course, use the Guidelines range to instruct them regarding the appropriate balance of the relevant federal sentencing factors."  This language seems inconsistent with a 2009 case, Nelson v. United States, the Supreme Court held that a district court may not presume that a Guidelines sentence is reasonable, but instead court must engage in their own independent balancing of the § 3553(a) factors. 

While Peugh and Molina-Martinez suggest that the Federal Sentencing Guidelines are more than merely “advice,” last Term, the Court suggested the opposite.  In Beckles v. United States, the Court addressed whether the post-Booker Guidelines are subject to challenge under the void-for-vagueness doctrine.  In an opinion by Justice Thomas, the Court said they were not, in part because:

The Guidelines thus continue to guide district courts in exercising their discretion by serving as “the framework for sentencing,” Peugh v. United States, 569 U.S. ––––, ––––, 133 S.Ct. 2072, 2083, 186 L.Ed.2d 84 (2013), but they “do not constrain th[at] discretion,” id., at ––––, 133 S.Ct., at 2089 (THOMAS, J., dissenting).

Because they merely guide the district courts' discretion, the Guidelines are not amenable to a vagueness challenge.

(You’ll note that Justice Thomas had to rely from language in one of his own dissents for the idea that the “advisory” Guidelines don’t constrain judges’ sentencing discretion.)

I had been waiting to see whether the Court would take that language from Beckles seriously.  Hughes answers that question.  This is Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion in Hughes:

[T]his Court's precedents since Freeman have further confirmed that the Guidelines remain the foundation of federal sentencing decisions. In Peugh v. United States, 569 U.S. 530, 133 S.Ct. 2072, 186 L.Ed.2d 84 (2013), for example, the Court held that the Ex Post Facto Clause prohibits retroactive application of amended Guidelines that increase a defendant's sentencing range. Id., at 544, 133 S.Ct. 2072. The Court reasoned that, Booker notwithstanding, the Guidelines remain “the lodestone of sentencing.” 569 U.S., at 544, 133 S.Ct. 2072. And in Molina–Martinez, the Court held that in the ordinary case a defendant suffers prejudice from a Guidelines error because of “the systemic function of the selected Guidelines range.” 578 U.S., at ––––, 136 S.Ct., at 1346.

Not only did Hughes ignore the inconsistency between Peugh/Molina-Martinez and Beckles, it ignored Beckles altogether.  Beckles isn’t mentioned at all in the majority opinion.

One irony of the opinion in Hughes is that it said the decision was necessary to resolve a split in the circuits.  Because the Guidelines exist in order to promote uniformity, the Court did not want inconsistent circuit court decisions to result in non-uniform treatment of defendants who had pleaded guilty.  But the retreat to Peugh/Molina-Martinez and refusal to acknowledge Beckles are symptoms of a bigger problem that has caused far more sentencing inconsistency across the country.  By failing to explain what “advisory” Guidelines actually are, and by making inconsistent statements about the role of the Guidelines at sentencing, the Court has left sentencing law ambiguous.  As a result, there are some circuits that routinely affirm sentences outside the Guidelines, and others that police them closely.  It is ironic that the Court wants to keep some role for the Federal Sentencing Guidelines in order to promote sentencing uniformity, but in failing to explain what that role is, the Court has created pervasive inconsistencies in sentencing law across the country.

Redefining Strickland Prejudice after Weaver v. Massachusetts

At the Harvard Law Review Blog, Eve Brensike Primus and I posted a short piece about the Sixth Amendment right to effective assistance of counsel under Strickland v. Washington focusing, in particular, on some interesting things the Supreme Court had to say about Strickland's prejudice requirement last term in Weaver v. Massachusetts. I've copied the intro below. For the entire post, click here.

"Obtaining postconviction relief based on a defense attorney’s ineffective trial performance is notoriously difficult, but the U.S. Supreme Court may have just made it a little easier. In this post, we explain how the Supreme Court’s decision last term in Weaver v. Massachusetts offers a little-noticed but potentially powerful new way for criminal defendants to show they were prejudiced by their attorneys’ ineffectiveness. After Weaver, criminal defendants should argue, and courts should recognize, that an attorney’s deficient performance is prejudicial when counsel’s errors rendered the trial process fundamentally unfair—even if those errors did not have a probable effect on the trial outcome."

Prejudice, Legal Realism, and the Right/Remedy Relationship

Last week, I sketched the contours of a criminal procedure puzzle that’s been on my mind lately. To briefly recap, the puzzle I’m exploring has to do with the unusual way in which courts conceptualize prejudice in two of criminal procedure’s most important doctrinal areas: (1) the Brady rule, which requires prosecutors to disclose (some) exculpatory evidence to the defense as a matter of Due Process, and (2) the Sixth Amendment right to effective assistance of counsel. For both of these rules, the Supreme Court has held that prejudice is an element of the defendant’s constitutional entitlement, which means that if no prejudice ensues from a prosecutor’s failure to disclose exculpatory evidence or from ineffective assistance of counsel (“IAC”), then no constitutional error occurs. By contrast, in most other areas of criminal procedure, courts consider prejudice only in specific remedial contexts—typically as part of harmless error review in appellate or postconviction proceedings—and do not characterize it as an element that restricts the scope of the underlying procedural rights.

Does this distinction make any practical difference? In The Path of the Law, Holmes famously defined law as “prophecies of what the courts will do in fact, and nothing more pretentious.” Inspired by this conception of law, one might dismiss the distinction I’ve identified as unintelligible or, at best, unimportant. After all, when applying any of the doctrines discussed here—Brady, IAC, and harmless error—appellate and postconviction courts will deny a remedy for alleged criminal procedure errors that are not prejudicial. Because our “prophecies” about how these courts will act does not vary across all three doctrines, it is tempting to conclude—as does Dan Epps in a provocative forthcoming article—that they are “functionally indistinguishable” from one another.

I respectfully disagree—with Holmes as to the nature of the right/remedy relationship, and with Epps regarding prejudice law. The grounds for my disagreement with each of them are intertwined. My concern with Holmes’ theory of rights and remedies—at least when applied to constitutional law (as Daryl Levinson and others have done)—is that it is unduly court-centric. By reducing the import of law to remedies supplied by courts, Holmesian legal theory obscures the fact that nonjudicial actors often make important contributions to rights enforcement. Likewise, I worry that Epps overlooks or underestimates the value of criminal procedure enforcement by nonjudicial actors when he equates the denial of appellate and postconviction remedies for nonprejudicial errors (via harmless error review) with the idea, reflected in Brady and IAC law, that nonprejudicial “errors” are not true legal errors at all. Relatedly, Epps also neglects the fact that trial judges often enforce rights that—unlike Brady and IAC, but like most criminal procedure rules—lack a prejudice element even when nonenforcement of those rights at the trial level would not prejudice the defendant and thus would not result in a remedy on appeal.

That’s my theory, anyway—what does the evidence show? In future posts I will show that, for Brady and IAC, (1) there are a number of potentially valuable enforcement mechanisms besides appellate and postconviction remedies, but (2) the prejudice element that the Supreme Court built into the definition of both rights has compromised the efficacy of these alternative enforcement strategies. Specifically, the built-in prejudice rule for Brady undermines, either directly or indirectly, (1) the scope of pretrial disclosure required of prosecutors by the Constitution, (2) the scope of disclosure required by professional ethics rules for prosecutors, and (3) efforts by trial judges to order prosecutors to fully disclose all exculpatory evidence without regard to prejudice. And for IAC, the Supreme Court’s prejudice requirement stands in the way of (1) prospective actions challenging chronically underfunded indigent defense systems through class actions or other devices and (2) attorney malpractice suits by criminal defendants.

Stay tuned as I build my case for these claims in later posts. In the meantime, please send your comments if you think I might have missed other potential lines of argument or would otherwise like to share your thoughts. And thanks to those of you who previously commented on the first installment!

Prejudice Rules and Criminal Procedure Enforcement

Hello! As Howard mentioned, I’ll be contributing to the blog this month as a guest. Thanks to Howard and Richard (Re) for the opportunity.

By way of introduction, my research focuses mainly on constitutional remedies and other mechanisms for enforcing constitutional rights. As a former public defender, I’m especially interested in constitutional criminal procedure and the various regulatory systems it has produced to bring about compliance with its strictures. These regulatory systems have failed in many different domains of criminal procedure. But few have failed as spectacularly as those pertaining to prosecutors’ evidentiary disclosure obligations under Brady and the right to counsel, as recent work by Jason Kreag, Eve Primus, and others has shown. Through a series of posts over the course of the month, I will ask why these two enforcement regimes have fared so badly, how we can make them better, and what broader implications this analysis may have for constitutional law and theory.

In particular, I’d like to explore the possibility that the failure of these regimes stems in part from an anomalous legal premise that the Supreme Court has embraced in relation to Brady and the right to counsel but that courts have rejected in virtually every other area of criminal procedure. In its cases involving Brady and the right to counsel (more specifically, the right to effective assistance of counsel), the Supreme Court has held that no constitutional violation occurs unless the defendant proves that the alleged error prejudiced the defendant in the sense that it may have altered the outcome of the proceeding. Simply put, the Court has held that no harm means no foul—no matter how extensively the prosecutor suppressed exculpatory evidence or how egregiously defense counsel performed in representing the defendant—for these two rights. No other significant area of constitutional criminal procedure works this way. To be sure, appellate and postconviction courts generally can (and routinely do) consider prejudice when applying the harmless error doctrine to decide whether criminal procedure errors justify setting aside the defendant’s conviction or sentence. But the harmless error doctrine presupposes that an error occurred regardless of whether that error caused prejudice. By contrast, no prejudice means no error under the Supreme Court’s Brady and effective assistance precedents.

Is this a distinction without a difference? If the defendant is going to lose on appeal anyhow, due to her inability to show prejudice, does it really matter whether the court rejects the defendant’s claim on the theory that the lack of prejudice (1) means that no constitutional error occurred (as the Brady and effective assistance doctrines hold) or (2) disentitles the defendant to the remedy of reversal (as the harmless error doctrine holds)?

I think it matters a great deal, for reasons I’ll describe in future posts. I will also touch on some larger theoretical implications—regarding the nature of the right/remedy relationship, departmentalism, and other topics—that I hope will interest readers who do not ordinarily follow doctrinal debates in criminal procedure. Please share your initial thoughts in the comments section. And stay tuned!

(Note: this post was edited on 5/7/2018 to fix the URL for the last source cited.)

Judicial Impartiality at Sentencing

The internet is awash in disagreement over some comments made by Michigan Judge Rosemarie Aquilina, who presided over the Larry Nassar case.  Nassar, a doctor who treated gymnasts for the U.S. Olympic team and at Michigan State University, pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting seven young gymnasts, and it is apparent that he assaulted many more. The judge ultimately imposed a 175-year sentence on Nassar, who had already been sentenced to 60 years on federal child pornography charges.

Judge Aquilina made some very strong statements about Nassar when she announced his sentence. But it is a comment that she made on a previous day—one of the days when Nassar’s many victims spoke at his sentencing hearing—that has led to a heated debate:

“Our Constitution does not allow for cruel and unusual punishment," she said. "If it did, I have to say, I might allow what he did to all of these beautiful souls -- these young women in their childhood -- I would allow someone or many people to do to him what he did to others."

This is a remarkable statement by a judge, but this is also a remarkable case. And so a number of people are saying that the judge should not have made this statement, while others are saying they are glad the judge said this.

First, let me say that I haven't seen a transcript of the judge's entire remarks, and so I can't say whether the comment might seem to have a different meaning in context. But, at least out of context, the judge is suggesting that prison is not a severe enough penalty for Nassar, and that the judge would be tempted, if she could, to sentence Nassar to be sexually assaulted.  I both understand the feeling that a prison sentence doesn't seem to acknowledge the enormity of what Nassar did (especially given how cavalierly those sentences are handed out nowadays) and think that the judge should not have given voice to her personal revulsion here.

To illustrate why, let me tell you about another judge. My friend used to be a criminal defense attorney in Tennessee. One Tennessee judge he practiced in front of used to always give the maximum sentences in drug cases.  When imposing those sentences, the judge would also give a speech saying that he would give the death penalty for drug dealers if he could.  My friend used to tell the story as a colorful anecdote about Tennessee that would outrage his new Northeaster friends.  We were all outraged by that speech because of course drug dealers shouldn't get the death penalty. And the judge's speech suggests that the maximum sentences he was imposing were based on his idiosyncratically harsh views about drugs.

Now, the difference between that judge and the judge in Nassar's case is that many people actually agree with the idea that prison is too light of a sentence for those who molest kids.  In fact, not too long ago, there was a movement in this country to make child rape a capital crime--a popular movement that was succeeding until the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional in Kennedy v. Louisiana (2008).

But even though we, as members of the public are free to indulge our disgust and anger at Nassar for the awful things he did, his sentencing judge isn't. She is supposed to be a neutral arbiter who can weigh the awful things Nassar did against any mitigating evidence.  This comment suggests Judge Aquilina can't be that neutral arbiter. And that's a problem in every case, including the cases where we couldn't imagine being such an arbiter ourselves.

Now, I’ve made this point about being a “neutral arbiter” on Twitter (in fact, this blog post is drawn from a number of tweets from earlier today), and a number of people disagree.  They’ve noted that, when announcing a sentence, a judge’s role is different than her role at trial; and that at sentencing, a judge is supposed to explain the reasons for her sentence, and that it is completely appropriate for that explanation of sentence to reflect the magnitude and awfulness of a defendant’s crime.  Both of these statements are true, but they don’t necessarily justify Judge Aquilina’s statements here. Just because judges can act differently at sentencing than at trial does not mean that there are no constraints on their sentencing behavior.  This statement happened before all of the sentencing evidence had been submitted, and it goes beyond merely explaining a harsh sentence.

Some have gone even further to say judges are not expected to be impartial overseers at sentencing; instead the judge represents “the people” at sentencing, and it is appropriate for the judge to give voice to “the people’s outrage.”  I disagree. The judge never represents the people in a criminal case; the prosecutor does.  A judge’s duty to act fairly and impartially applies to “all duties of judicial office.”  And, at least taken out of context, I think that Judge Aquilina’s statement fails to be sufficiently impartial.

So, assuming that Judge Aquilina’s statements were insufficiently impartial, what does that mean? It probably does not mean that Nassar will have his sentence reversed on appeal.  Michigan courts have not been particularly hospitable to such claims in the past. And appellate courts are generally loathe to overturn trial judges’ sentencing decisions unless they violated a relevant statute, imposed a sentence based on materially false information, or if the judge based the sentence on the defendant’s race or gender.

It *could* mean that Judge Aquilina will be subject to professional discipline for violating her duty of impartiality.  There are several examples of judge being disciplined on that basis when their sentencing comments were critical of victims or minimized the harm victims suffered.  But I’m not sure that judicial disciplinary committees will have the stomach to impose discipline where the judge’s impartiality favored victims and disadvantaged the defendant. Our current moment seems to be one where judicial leniency prompts backlash, but judicial harshness does not. And I think that asymmetry is troubling.  Impartiality requires fair treatment for both sides, not merely for victims—even victims in a case as horrifying as this one.

Carpenter – Post-Oral Argument Thoughts

The following guest post is by past guest-Prawf Andrew Ferguson (UDC).

Today, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments on the much awaited Fourth Amendment case of the term – Carpenter v. United States.  Fourth Amendment nerds from all over the country flocked to the Supreme Court like it was a constitutional solar eclipse. 

Carpenter involves the warrantless collection of historic cell phone records for location information covering 127 days.  Suspected of being involved in a series of armed robberies (ironically enough of cell phone stores), police used Timothy Carpenter’s cell phone location data to tie him to the crimes and obtain a conviction.  Carpenter appealed arguing that obtaining this information without a warrant violated his Fourth Amendment rights.

The reason for the buzz of interest is because the case presents a real legal puzzle.  In a world where almost all of our digital devices work through third parties, the idea that law enforcement can simply obtain the data from our smart devices without a warrant means that our modern culture of self-surveillance has also potentially created a governmental surveillance state.  At the same time, the third party records in Carpenter were owned, controlled, and used by the phone companies, raising questions of who owns this data, who controls it, and does sharing it for one purpose also mean sharing it for all other purposes including government investigation? 

Much (almost instant) commentary has already been posted on this case, but two things are clear: first, the stakes for the future of the Fourth Amendment are quite high and demand an answer; and second, no Justice or advocate has a completely coherent answer to how the third party doctrine should apply in the digital age.

As to the stakes – almost any digital device you can imagine connects to third party providers (and creates third party records) in order to make the magic of “smart” devices happen.  In an interconnected world filled with smartphones, smart cars, smart homes, and smart medical devices, ubiquitous communication by email, text, Tweet, or chat, you share your data with private companies.   In a world of data trails, you are a potential police target at all times.  Your smartphone, your smart car, your fitness band provide exact geo-locational clues to your whereabouts.  Your location is being tracked, and police have recognized the utility of this information to prove criminal acts and patterns.  Data trails provide a wealth of clues to past and present criminal activity. 

As to the debate in the high court, the Supreme Court was, perhaps not surprisingly, divided.  Questions of how to distinguish decades old precedent mixed with questions about new future-oriented technology.  Hypotheticals about modern subpoena power mixed with queries about the Writs of Assistance.  John Adams got a shout out.  So did Stephen Henderson’s idea of a Fourth Amendment time machine.  So did the empiricists’ amicus brief.  Again, for Fourth Amendment nerds it was a party. 

At least from the questions at oral argument, it can be intuited that some Justices wish to rethink the existing third party records doctrine, and others wish to see how to make it fit a digital age.  (As a disclosure, I helped author one of the amicus briefs on behalf of Mr. Carpenter).  Theories abounded, with no clear resolution of how the Justices would decide. 

But one question – signaling perhaps a new way of thinking about the Fourth Amendment – seemed to trouble at least a few members of the Court – namely what rights (property based or otherwise) do the consumers of smart devices have over their own data.  This is a huge question in the digital age.  How does the Fourth Amendment protect smart data?  How do we conceptualize who owns or controls the location data coming from Carpenter’s cell phone?  

Here is how Justice Gorsuch framed the question to Carpenter’s lawyer Nathan Wessler of the ACLU:

JUSTICE GORSUCH: Mr. Wessler, I'm sorry, one quick question. Focusing on the property-based approach, putting aside reasonable expectation for just a moment, what do we know about what state law would say about this information? So say -- say a thief broke into T Mobile, stole this information and sought to make economic value of it. Would you have a conversion -- would your client have a conversion claim, for example, under state law? Have you explored that at all?

Similar questions were put to the government’s advocate, Michael Dreeben:

JUSTICE GORSUCH: Mr. Dreeben, I'd like to -- I'd like to drill down on that and return to Justice Kagan's question. You know, the facts here wind up looking a lot like Jones.

One thing Jones taught us is -- and reminded us, really, is that the property-based approach to privacy also has to be considered, not just the reasonable expectation approach.

So, if we put aside the reasonable expectation approach for just a moment, Katz, Miller, Smith, and ask what is the property right here, let's say there is a property right. Let's say I have a property right in the conversion case I posited with your colleague. So that if someone were to steal my location information from T-Mobile I'd have a conversion claim, for example, against them for the economic value that was stolen.

Wouldn't that, therefore, be a search of my paper or effect under the property-based approach approved and reminded us in Jones?

            The question likely arises from a law review article written by William Baude and James Stern in the Harvard Law Review called The Positive Law Model of the Fourth Amendment and in Richard Re’s response essay, The Positive law Floor.  Both articles were cited in Carpenter’s brief and apparently caught the attention of the Court.  But, as anyone who has read those thoughtful pieces knows, positive law when it comes to the Fourth Amendment gets confusing and contested pretty quickly in practice.  It is not that the Positive Law model doesn’t offer some helpful ways to conceptualize the possible future rules, but it is hard to operationalize because positive law is messy. 

So, in the spirit of the ongoing debate, I offer my own thoughts to the intuition that Justice Gorsuch was reaching for – that there is some property-like element to our smart data – but with a different conceptual hook.  

My argument is not about positive law, but about the ownership/security interests we have in the data we create.  Smart data (including location data) is partially ours, and because it comes from our effects, we can claim some control over it.  The argument turns on the simple principle that the Fourth Amendment protects not simply the physical integrity of “persons, papers, homes, and effects” but also the information that comes from those constitutional derived sources (which would include Timothy Carpenter’s cell phone – as an effect – and its smart data).  As I wrote in The “Smart” Fourth Amendment:

The Fourth Amendment--at its core--protects “informational security” …. Underlying the protection of persons, papers, homes, and effects and behind the expectation of privacy lies a desire to guard personal information from government intrusion.

In other words, it is not the corporal person, alone, that deserves protection, but also the information about the person. It is not the sheaf of papers, but the revealing personal details in those words that matter. It is not the physical home that is as important as what happens in the home. …

In this longer work on how the Fourth Amendment should adapt to new “smart” technologies, I developed the idea of “informational security” the principle of why the Fourth Amendment should protect smart data, again similar to Justice Gorsuch’s intuition that there is some property/security right to control the locational information created by individuals through the use of smartphones.  [In the following excerpt from the article, I deleted the footnotes for easier reading.]

 

[I]nformational security is not an abstract concept, but arises from those particular constitutionally referenced sources. The Fourth Amendment secures someone, something, or somewhere. Information obtained from a constitutionally recognized source--effects, houses, persons, papers--gains derivative protection due to the source of the information. Focusing attention on a derivative constitutional source provides a useful and relatively easy guidepost to identify which types of information deserve constitutional protection.

Such derivative protection also covers information at some remove from the actual constitutionally protected interest. Charlie Katz's voice exited the closed glass door and was captured by the microphone taped on top of the phone booth. Antoine Jones's travel coordinates left the car and was captured by satellite technology. David Riley's smartphone communications data existed both on the phone and outside of it (in the cloud). Yet, the protections of the Constitution carried to these intangible, invisible, separate pieces of personal information. The constitutional protections of persons, houses, papers, and effects might, thus, be better characterized as protections of the information emanating from those constitutionally protected interests.

 

As laid out in more detail in the article, one can trace through the history of the Fourth Amendment and see this emphasis on protecting informational details arising from constitutionally protected sources (effects, homes, persons, papers).  For questions about whether we have any property rights in our own smart data, this can be an important consideration. 

            For example, in terms of effects:

Central to the protection granted effects has been securing personal information about those effects. The sparse Founding Era literature suggests a focus on protecting objects which revealed something about the owner--religion, culture, status, or family associations. Searching and seizing a colonist's religious objects was not offensive simply because it interfered with property rights, but because searching revealed personal information about family and faith. Rummaging through bedroom drawers was not solely about the inviolate nature of property but, as the early history suggested, also about revealing information that might be contained in those drawers. Interpreted one way, the protection of effects has largely been the protection of what the personal effects revealed or contained.

Similarly, while Justice Scalia attempted to ground his Jones argument in property rights, the harm of affixing the GPS device was not in any real sense to physical property (the car was undamaged). The real harm was exposing the revealing personal data about the effect (car). Placing the device on the car might have been a seizure, but what made it a search was collecting the locational data intercepted by police (the “use of that device to monitor the vehicle's movements”). The “use” in that case was the capturing of data trails via satellite transmissions communicated by cell phone to a government computer. By using the car to track its owner, the government invaded the informational security of the effect. Justice Scalia's Jones analysis requires both parts--trespass plus use--and as Justice Alito argues in his concurrence, neither alone should constitute a search under Scalia's reasoning. In holding that this interception/collection was a Fourth Amendment search, Justice Scalia implicitly acknowledged the centrality of informational security. What mattered was securing the information coming from the effect, not just securing the effect itself.

The concurring Justices in Jones also focused on the personal information revealed from the GPS device. The reason a twenty-eight-day tracking of locational data became a search rested solely on the informational exposure that resulted. Such collection of personal data points (touching on associational, health, and other private travels) became of constitutional significance when the data trails could be revealing of private, personal actions. The expectation of privacy was not about expectations from the effect (the car) itself, but the information to be inferred about the travels of the car. This personal information essentially radiating off the car is what created the constitutional harm.

The article goes on to discuss the other constitutionally protected terms and the quirks and problems with the theory of informational security, but at its core the article offers a way to get to a property-oriented approach to data protection without diving into positive law.  (Although, candidly, there are 84 pages of my article not excerpted that add a whole host of complexity to it). 

So, if the Supreme Court is looking for a reason to protect smart data under the Fourth Amendment, it offers a starting point for debate.  And, the best thing about the Carpenter argument day was that for one shining moment, everyone was focused on thinking about the Fourth Amendment and how it should apply to the digital age.  Can’t wait for the decision.