Legal

Cyber crime….

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The Minneapolis Star Tribune:

William Melchert-Dinkel, 47 …. was charged … with two counts of aiding suicide…. [He] allegedly used Internet correspondence to prod [two people] into killing themselves…. Like most other states, Minnesota has a law that punishes anyone who “intentionally advises, encourages, or assists” others with suicide….

According to authorities, Melchert-Dinkel advised and encouraged Mark Drybrough, 32, of Britain, and Nadia Kajouji, 18, of Ottawa, before they took their own lives….

Melchert-Dinkel used online aliases “Li Dao” and “Falcon Girl” and presented himself as an expert in suicide techniques.

He suggested to others in the chat rooms that he could die at the same time they did, and he twice watched through his webcam as they took their own lives….

Hit the delete button…..because….

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Ari B. Fontecchio has posted Suspicionless Laptop Searches Under the Border Search Doctrine: The Fourth Amendment Exception that Swallows Your Laptop on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

The Department of Homeland Security recently set forth a new policy allowing suspicionless searches of the data inside the laptops of international travelers upon entry into the United States. The government has justified these searches under the border search and special needs doctrines, which render constitutional any “routine” search performed at the international border. The logic behind the special needs doctrine is that the government can operate outside the traditional confines of the Fourth Amendment because there is something “special” about the border. However, where data is concerned, the special needs and border search doctrines do not apply, because data travels electronically via cyberspace, not through the United States’ physical borders such as airports and highways. Therefore, the government has no special need to search data at these physical borders separate and apart from searching data in computers already inside the country. In fact, suspicionless data searches compromise border security by allowing officers to engage in time-consuming data searches instead of preventing the entry of weapons that can cause immediate harm. Since such data searches hurt rather than help to achieve border security, the government’s interest in performing suspicionless data searches at the border does not outweigh an individual’s interest in privacy. On balance, an individual’s privacy interests should prevail. Consequently, the Policy allowing suspicionless searches of laptop data violates the Fourth Amendment.

April 20, 2010 | Permalink

Only in America…

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This issue will be argued this week in Supreme Court…..

City of Ontario v. Quon: (1) Whether a SWAT team member has a reasonable expectation of privacy in text messages transmitted on his SWAT pager, where the police department has an official no-privacy policy but a non-policymaking lieutenant announced an informal policy of allowing some personal use of the pagers; (2) Whether individuals who send text messages to a SWAT team member’s SWAT pager have a reasonable expectation that their messages will be free from review by the recipient’s government employer.

ON Justice Ginsburg…

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Slobogin on Justice Ginsburg’s Gradualism in Criminal Procedure
Christopher Slobogin (Vanderbilt University – School of Law) has posted Justice Ginsburg’s Gradualism in Criminal Procedure (Ohio State Law Journal, Vol. 70, No. 4, p. 870, 2009) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

This article, written for a symposium analyzing Justice Ginsburg’s jurisprudence on the 15th anniversary of her tenure on the Supreme Court, is the first sustained look at her views on criminal procedure issues (search and seizure, interrogation, the right to counsel, trial rights, sentencing procedures, and the criminal appeals and collateral review processes). Not surprisingly, given her ACLU background, she tends to vote in favor of criminal defendants’ positions more often than most other justices, and she is the most likely to do so since Chief Justice Roberts joined the Court. At the same time, the gradualist tendencies that she has exhibited in other areas of the law – involving incremental steps rather than sweeping pronouncements – is apparent in this area as well. After describing in some detail the major trends in Justice Ginsburg’s voting patterns in criminal procedure cases, the article investigates the effects of this gradualist approach in the Fourth Amendment area, focusing in particular on her decision-making in drug testing and car stop cases.

Do what I say not what I do….

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Notable comment on sentencing from Chief Justice of the United States ……Tony Mauro in this post at The BLT has this remarkable sentencing-significant snippet from Chief Justice Roberts’ comments yesterday when speaking to a law school crowd in Indiana

Trial judging: Asked by a trial judge in
the audience if he would consider presiding
over a trial in federal court, Roberts said
flatly, but with a smile, “I wouldn’t do it
in a million years.” Roberts explained that
his predecessor William Rehnquist once
presided over a trial in Virginia while a
justice, only to have the U.S. Court of
Appeals for the 4th Circuit reverse him in
an unsigned opinion. Roberts added that
from his appellate experience with
sentencing issues and mandatory minimum
sentences, he would find sentencing in a
criminal case particularly distasteful. “I
wouldn’t like doing it,” he said with a
frown.

April 8, 2010 in Who Sentences? | Permalink |
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Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens retiring
By MARK SHERMAN
Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) — Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, the court’s oldest member and leader of its liberal bloc, is retiring. President Barack Obama now has his second high court opening to fill.
Stevens said Friday he will step down when the court finishes its work for the summer in late June or early July. He said he hopes his successor is confirmed “well in advance of the commencement of the court’s next term.”

Stevens’ announcement leaves ample time for the White House to settle on a successor and for Senate Democrats, who control a 59-vote majority, to hold confirmation hearings and a vote before the court’s next term begins in October. Republicans have not ruled out attempts to delay confirmation.

Stevens’ announcement had been hinted at for months. It comes 11 days before his 90th birthday.

Throughout his tenure, which began after President Gerald Ford nominated him in 1975, Stevens usually sided with the court’s liberal bloc in the most contentious cases – those involving abortion, criminal law, civil rights and church-state relations. He led the dissenters as well in the case of Bush v. Gore that sealed President George W. Bush’s election in 2000.

Stevens began signaling a possible retirement last summer when he hired just one of his usual complement of four law clerks for the next court term. He acknowledged in several interviews that he was contemplating stepping down and would certainly do so during Obama’s presidency.

Obama planned to address Stevens’ retirement with a 1:20 p.m. EDT statement in the Rose Garden.

Chief Justice John Roberts said in a written statement that Stevens “has enriched the lives of everyone at the Court through his intellect, independence, and warm grace.”

Senate confirmations of Supreme Court justices have increasingly become political battles and this one will come amid the added heat of congressional election campaigns.

Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, appealed for civility. “I hope that senators on both sides of the aisle will make this process a thoughtful and civil discourse,” Leahy said.

Looking toward those hearings, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said, “Americans can expect Senate Republicans to make a sustained and vigorous case for judicial restraint and the fundamental importance of an evenhanded reading of the law.”

Stevens informed Obama in a one-paragraph letter addressed to “My dear Mr. President.” It was delivered to the White House by court messenger at 10:30 a.m. EDT, two minutes before the court’s public announcement. The news came on a day when the court wasn’t in session.

White House counsel Bob Bauer telephoned the news to Obama on Air Force One, as he returned from a trip to Prague.

The leading candidates to replace Stevens are Solicitor General Elena Kagan, 49, and federal appellate Judges Merrick Garland, 57, in Washington and Diane Wood, 59, in Chicago.

Stevens’ departure will not change the court’s conservative-liberal split because Obama is certain to name a liberal-leaning replacement, as he did with his first nominee, Justice Sonia Sotomayor. But the new justice is not likely to be able to match Stevens’ ability to marshal narrow majorities in big cases.

Stevens was able to draw the support of the court’s swing votes, now-retired Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and Justice Anthony Kennedy, to rein in or block some Bush administration policies, including the detention of suspected terrorists following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, its tilt toward protecting businesses from some lawsuits and its refusal to act against global warming.

But after the arrival of Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, President George W. Bush’s appointees, Stevens more often was among the four liberal justices in dissent.

Stevens’ recent dissent in a major case involving campaign finance laws showed both the eloquence of his writing and, in his stumbling reading of his opinion in the courtroom, signs that his age might at long last be affecting him, though he remains an active tennis player and swimmer.

He is the court’s last World War II veteran and that experience sometimes finds its way into his writings, recently in a reference to Tokyo Rose, the English-speaking Japanese radio announcer who addressed U.S. soldiers in the Pacific.

Stevens had a reputation as a bright and independent federal appeals court judge when Ford, acting on a recommendation by Attorney General Edward Levi, nominated him to the Supreme Court.

His friendly manner of questioning lawyers who appeared before the court could not hide Stevens’ keen mind. His questions often zero in on the most telling weaknesses of a lawyer’s argument and the case’s practical effect on everyday people.

A pleasant, unassuming man, Stevens has been a prolific and lucid writer. For many years, he wrote more opinions each court term than any other justice.

Most justices let their law clerks write the first drafts of opinions, but Stevens has used his clerks as editors.

He’d write the first draft and submit it to the clerks for comment. “That’s when the real fun begins,” Stevens once told a visitor. “The give and take can get pretty fierce.”

As a result, his opinions have reflected his personal writing style – a conversational one that contrasted sharply with the dry, dull efforts of some other justices.

He had said that one sign of his time to retire would be an inability to churn out those first drafts. But he insisted in recent days that he was still writing them.

A member of a prominent and wealthy Chicago family, Stevens spoke proudly of being a Cubs fan who was at Wrigley Field for the 1932 World Series game when Babe Ruth supposedly pointed to the spot where he would hit a home run. He met many celebrities of the day when they stayed at his family’s hotel in Chicago, including aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart.

Stevens graduated from the University of Chicago. After serving in the Navy during World War II, he earned a law degree from Northwestern University, finishing first in his class. He later taught antitrust law at both schools.

In 1979, Stevens became only the second justice to divorce while serving on the court. Stevens and his first wife, Elizabeth Jane Sheeren, had four children. He later married a former Chicago neighbor, Maryan Mulholland Simon.

An avid bridge and tennis player, Stevens also is a licensed pilot. From autumn through spring, he and his wife routinely travel to his condominium in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

“I lead an average life, just like anybody else,” Stevens once told an acquaintance. “I play bridge, play tennis, try to play better golf. I’m very comfortable here.”

Even in his late 80s, Stevens said he swam every day and continued playing tennis several times a week. He described reading legal briefs on the beach, noting his colleagues’ jealousy when in court one day he opened a brief and grains of sand spilled out.

A Collateral Consequence?

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Opinion on duty to advise on immigration consequences of guilty plea
The opinion in Padilla v. Kentucky is here. Here is the syllabus:

Petitioner Padilla, a lawful permanent resident of the United States for over 40 years, faces deportation after pleading guilty to drug-distribution charges in Kentucky. In postconviction proceedings, he claims that his counsel not only failed to advise him of this consequence before he entered the plea, but also told him not to worry about deportation since he had lived in this country so long. He alleges that he would have gone to trial had he not received this incorrect advice. The Kentucky Supreme Court denied Padilla postconviction relief on the ground that the Sixth Amendment’s effective-assistance-of-counsel guarantee does not protect defendants from erroneous deportation advice because deportation is merely a “collateral” consequence of a conviction.

Held: Because counsel must inform a client whether his plea carries a risk of deportation, Padilla has sufficiently alleged that his counsel was constitutionally deficient. Whether he is entitled to relief depends on whether he has been prejudiced, a matter not addressed here. Pp. 2–18.

(a) Changes to immigration law have dramatically raised the stakes of a noncitizen’s criminal conviction. While once there was only a narrow class of deportable offenses and judges wielded broad discretionary authority to prevent deportation, immigration reforms have expanded the class of deportable offenses and limited judges’ authority to alleviate deportation’s harsh consequences. Because the drastic measure of deportation or removal is now virtually inevitable for a vast number of noncitizens convicted of crimes, the importance of accurate legal advice for noncitizens accused of crimes has never been more important. Thus, as a matter of federal law, deportation is an integral part of the penalty that may be imposed on noncitizen defendants who plead guilty to specified crimes. Pp. 2–6.

(b) Strickland v. Washington, 466 U. S. 668, applies to Padilla’s claim. Before deciding whether to plead guilty, a defendant is entitled to “the effective assistance of competent counsel.” McMann v. Richardson, 397 U. S. 759, 771. The Supreme Court of Kentucky rejected Padilla’s ineffectiveness claim on the ground that the advice he sought about deportation concerned only collateral matters. However, this Court has never distinguished between direct and collateral consequences in defining the scope of constitutionally “reason-able professional assistance” required under Strickland, 466 U. S., at 689. The question whether that distinction is appropriate need not be considered in this case because of the unique nature of deportation. Although removal proceedings are civil, deportation is intimately related to the criminal process, which makes it uniquely difficult to classify as either a direct or a collateral consequence. Because that distinction is thus ill-suited to evaluating a Strickland claim concerning the specific risk of deportation, advice regarding deportation is not categorically removed from the ambit of the Sixth Amendment right to counsel. Pp. 7–9.

(c) To satisfy Strickland’s two-prong inquiry, counsel’s representation must fall “below an objective standard of reasonableness,” 466 U.S., at 688, and there must be “a reasonable probability that, but for counsel’s unprofessional errors, the result of the proceeding would have been different,” id., at 694. The first, constitutional deficiency, is necessarily linked to the legal community’s practice and expectations. Id., at 688. The weight of prevailing professional norms supports the view that counsel must advise her client regarding the deportation risk. And this Court has recognized the importance to the client of “ ‘[p]reserving the . . . right to remain in the United States’ ”and “preserving the possibility of” discretionary relief from deportation. INS v. St. Cyr, 533 U. S. 289, 323. Thus, this is not a hard case in which to find deficiency: The consequences of Padilla’s plea could easily be determined from reading the removal statute, his deportation was presumptively mandatory, and his counsel’s advice was incorrect. There will, however, undoubtedly be numerous situations in which the deportation consequences of a plea are unclear. In those cases, a criminal defense attorney need do no more than advise a noncitizen client that pending criminal charges may carry adverse immigration consequences. But when the deportation consequence is truly clear, as it was here, the duty to give correct advice is equally clear. Accepting Padilla’s allegations as true, he has sufficiently alleged constitutional deficiency to satisfy Strickland’s first prong.Whether he can satisfy the second prong, prejudice, is left for the Kentucky courts to consider in the first instance. Pp. 9–12.

(d) The Solicitor General’s proposed rule—that Strickland should be applied to Padilla’s claim only to the extent that he has alleged affirmative misadvice—is unpersuasive. And though this Court must be careful about recognizing new grounds for attacking the validity of guilty pleas, the 25 years since Strickland was first applied to ineffective-assistance claims at the plea stage have shown that pleas are less frequently the subject of collateral challenges than convictions after a trial. Also, informed consideration of possible deportation can benefit both the State and noncitizen defendants, who may be able to reach agreements that better satisfy the interests of both parties.This decision will not open the floodgates to challenges of convictions obtained through plea bargains. Cf. Hill v. Lockhart, 474 U. S. 52, 58. Pp. 12–16.

253 S. W. 3d 482, reversed and remanded.

STEVENS, J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which KENNEDY, GINSBURG, BREYER, and SOTOMAYOR, JJ., joined. ALITO, J., filed an opin-ion concurring in the judgment, in which ROBERTS, C. J., joined. SCALIA, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which THOMAS, J., joined.

March 31, 2010 | Permalink