Facebook Image Prompts NJ Raid by Cops and Child Services Take an overreaching child and family services agency add in an overly aggressive police department, and you have the ingredients for a disaster. When Shawn Moore took a photo of his 11-year old son holding his birthday present, a .22 caliber tactical rifle, he never […]
READ MORENE Georgia Men Accused Ricin Plot Convicted
We had previously cited the trial of Samuel Crump and Ray Adams in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia in Gainesville on charges relating to a plot to attack government facilities and officials with the toxin ricin. As reported in the Gwinnett Daily Post and elsewhere, on Friday Crump and Adams were convicted […]
READ MOREChicago police chief: Law-abiding gun owners corrupt, endanger public safety
Do Stricter Gun Laws Help In March 2013, Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy said, “Law abiding gun owners to lobby elected officials through the NRA and the Illinois State Rifle Association (ISRA) are corrupt and endanger people’s security.” McCarthy continued and said justices and lawmakers need to lean on public sentiment surveys when rendering the […]
READ MORELimits on Fiduciary Duties: Wherefore Art Thou?
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, sitting en banc, recently decided a fraud case holding that a person may commit federal fraud and face imprisonment for breaching a broadly-defined fiduciary duty to a contractual business partner. This holding arises under the “honest services” fraud statute, presuming the breaching party also has a specific intent to […]
READ MORECalifornia Attorney General Releases Medical Marijuana “Guidelines”
The California Attorney General has issued a strange and interesting set of “guidelines” (pdf) around medical marijuana, a document whose legal significance would seem to be totally unclear. These guidelines are actually required by statute (H& S 11362.81 but they are coming at a time when the medical marijuana law is real, seriously unsettled as […]
READ MOREDecriminalization: End of War on Drugs?
An even question might be, have we actually lost the very expensive war on drugs which started way back in 1971 when Nixon was still President. Two states, Washington and Colorado, have made it legal to use recreational marijuana. Not all of the supporters of these laws were stoners and dealers, actually even some in […]
READ MORECardinal Egan Under Fire
Secret court documents reveal that New York Cardinal Edward Egan, while serving as bishop of the Bridgeport Roman Catholic Diocese, allowed several priests facing multiple accusations of sexual abuse to continue working for years. Egan failed to investigate aggressively some abuse allegations, did not refer complaints to criminal authorities and, during closed testimony in 1999, […]
READ MOREThe Forbidden Zone The Nature and Prevalence of Clergy Sexual Abuse
A Long Island foster care house of horrors is in the spotlight now. An accused predator took in boys, over the course of two decades, and subjected many of them to abuse. The spotlight has shone elsewhere — many elsewheres. Maybe nowhere is the tsunami felt more than when exploitation is discovered within the religious […]
READ MOREWhy Winning at All Costs Compromises Justice
There’s an old “joke” among prosecutors that anyone can convict the guilty, but it takes a really exceptional prosecutor to convict the innocent. Not very funny, is it? The recent U.S. Supreme Court decision in Smith v. Cain, 132 S.Ct. 627 (2012), demonstrates that there are still criminal prosecutors out there who either don’t understand […]
READ MOREFrom Broken Windows to Broken Policies: On James Q. Wilson’s Analysis of “The Benefit of Prisons”
Note: I first wrote this post back in March when James Q. Wilson published an op-ed in several major American newspapers defending America’s intense use of prisons. I decided not to publish it at the time, but today I see that Wilson is guest blogging at the Volokh Conspiracy and making the same argument all […]
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