Thomas C. Brandstrader Chicago Criminal Defense Attorney

Make sure you ask the right questions….

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The trial court erroneously failed to ask potential jurors if they understood and accepted four basic constitutional guarantees afforded criminal defendants at trial.
The Illinois Appellate Court, 4th District, has reversed the armed robbery conviction of the defendant, Ahmed A. Yusuf. Champaign County Circuit Judge Thomas J. Difanis presided in the trial court.

In October 2007, Yusuf was convicted of armed robbery. The conviction was affirmed in November 2008. The Illinois Supreme Court denied the defendant’s petition for leave to appeal but issued a supervisory order directing the appeals court to vacate its order affirming the conviction and reconsider the case.

On reconsideration, the defendant argued that the procedure used by the trial court during voir dire failed to allow the venire an opportunity to respond to or be questioned about the juror’s understanding of the four basic constitutional guarantees afforded to criminal defendants at trial.

The appeals court cited a 1984 Supreme Court case, People v. Zehr, 103 Ill.2d 472), holding that a trial court erred during voir dire by refusing defense counsel’s request to ask questions about the state’s burden of proof, the defendant’s right not to testify and the presumption of innocence.

The Supreme Court then amended its Rule 431(b) to assure compliance with its decision in Zehr. The rule provides that a trial judge “shall” ask jurors, “individually or in a group,” if they understand and accept the constitutional guarantees. The rule also provides that the court “shall” provide each juror an opportunity to respond to specific questions about the principles.

During the voir dire in this case, the trial court discussed the constitutional principles but didn’t fully comply with Rule 431(b). “While the court advised the venire en masse of the four Zehr principles, it did not pose the specific questions of whether the jurors understood and accepted all four principles during voir dire,” the appeals court said. “As a result, the court … did not follow the mandate of Rule 431(b) and this failure to comply constituted error.”

The appeals court said the jurors in this case were never asked whether they understood and agreed that the defendant was not required to offer any evidence and that his failure to testify could not be held against him. The appeals court said a defendant’s right not to testify is possibly “the most critical guarantee under our criminal process and is vital to the selection of a fair and impartial jury that a juror understand this concept.”

While the trial court in this case advised the venire en masse or the Zehr principles, it didn’t pose specific questions of whether the jurors understood and accepted any of those principles, the appeals court said.

The appeals court said the trial court’s failure to fully comply with the amended version of Rule 431(b) caused a “complete breakdown of the judicial process that undermines this court’s confidence in the jury’s verdict.” The court’s error was so substantial that it affected the fundamental fairness of the proceeding and denied the defendant a substantial right — a fair trial, the appeals court said.

The appeals court reversed the trial court and remanded the case for a new trial.

People v. Ahmed A. Yusuf, No. 4-08-0034. Justice John T. McCullough wrote the court’s opinion with Justice Sue E. Myerscough and James A. Knecht concurring. Released April 13, 2010.

Maybe someone is listening….

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PHILADELPHIA — The new district attorney in violence-weary Philadelphia had vowed not to get tough on crime but to get “smart on crime.” This month, R. Seth Williams began to make good on his word, downgrading penalties for possessing small amounts of marijuana from jail time to community service and fines.

It was an easy decision, said Mr. Williams, who took office in January promising changes that would reduce prosecutions but increase the conviction rate. Now he also spends hours each week visiting schools, exhorting students to graduate.

Philadelphia, after being battered for years by the worst sort of superlatives — the highest murder rate, the lowest conviction rate — seems ready to give Mr. Williams and his ideas a chance.

“This is like a breath of fresh air,” said Ellen Greenlee, chief of the city’s public defenders, who described the previous district attorney’s approach to charging suspects as “throw everything against the wall and see what sticks.”

Mr. Williams, the first black district attorney in the history of Pennsylvania, is a 10-year veteran of the office he is now shaking up. He looks younger than his 43 years and is happy for junior staff members to call him Seth.

In private and public appearances, Mr. Williams repeats practiced lines from a justice-reform movement that has taken hold in places like New York, San Diego and San Francisco and promotes, for lesser offenders, community courts and drug treatment rather than trial and prison.

“Crime prevention is more important than crime prosecution,” he said repeatedly last week as he rode from one event to another. “We need to be smarter on crime instead of just talking tough.”

“I’ve put my money where my mouth is,” he added in an interview, by redirecting his overstretched resources toward a more careful selection of cases and starting a computerized study of prosecutions to see why they so often fail.

But the real test of public support for Mr. Williams’s new directions, Ms. Greenlee and other legal experts said, may come if there is a surge in high-profile killings or the killing of a police officer by a repeat offender. Violent crime has fallen here in recent years, but of the 10 largest cities in 2009, Philadelphia still had the highest murder rate.

“We need to focus on the people who are shooting people,” Mr. Williams said of the newly lenient penalties for marijuana. Senior court officials said the shift would avoid 4,000 costly trials a year.

The only public condemnation came from Mr. Williams’s predecessor, Lynne M. Abraham, who during 18 years as district attorney sounded an increasingly hard line on crime. Ms. Abraham criticized the new marijuana policy, saying that “the drug cartels who import pot from Mexico are thrilled.”

While the drug shift caught the public eye, legal experts said the changes Mr. Williams was making, especially in the unit that decides what charges to file against those who are arrested, are far more important.

Previously, the charging unit included five lawyers, usually junior lawyers who were encouraged to file the widest and harshest charges they could, Mr. Williams said. Now the unit has 18 more experienced lawyers, who spend time considering what charges can realistically succeed. The office is also offering plea bargains earlier in the process, again to clear the courts for more serious cases.

“The new D.A. is one part of a sea change that is occurring in criminal justice in Philadelphia,” said Seamus P. McCaffery, a State Supreme Court justice.

The drive to streamline the justice system became easier, Mr. Williams and Justice McCaffery said, after an investigative series by The Philadelphia Inquirer last December found that the city had failed to obtain convictions in two-thirds of cases involving violent crimes, and that thousands of cases were dismissed because prosecutors were not prepared or witnesses did not appear.

Ms. Abraham, the former district attorney, who is now in private practice, called the articles misleading and said it was wrong to “do justice by the numbers.”

On one recent morning, Mr. Williams spoke to loud applause at the high school graduation at Freire Charter School.

“Why am I spending time here?” he asked. “Of the 75,000 people arrested each year for crimes in Philadelphia, what is the one thing they have in common? They didn’t graduate from high school.”

He described his own origins, saying they could easily have left him a street thug. When he was born in 1967, he went from the hospital to an orphanage; he does not know anything about his biological mother and said he was not interested in learning.

He spent time in two foster homes before being adopted, at 18 months old, by a middle-class black couple whom he credits with instilling a sense of civic duty. His father was a schoolteacher who also worked evenings at a recreation center, and his mother was a secretary.

As he congratulated the graduating seniors, he told them about a personal failure: He got into West Point, but had to leave in his first year when he failed math and chemistry.

He switched to Pennsylvania State University, where he was elected head of the Black Caucus and then the student government. He attended Georgetown Law School and started as an assistant district attorney under Ms. Abraham. Chafing at what he saw as a dysfunctional system, he resigned to run against her, unsuccessfully, in 2005.

The Philadelphia district attorney’s office was a stepping stone for the likes of Senator Arlen Specter and Gov. Edward G. Rendell, but Mr. Williams declined to speculate about his future.

Eugene J. Richardson Jr., one of the legendary Tuskegee airmen of World War II and a retired school principal, said he hoped the changes sought by Mr. Williams would pan out, adding, “So often the new broom comes in and then gets stuck in a corner.”

Parents beware…..

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Condoning Bad Behavior

William Damon is a professor of education and director of the Center on Adolescence at Stanford University. His books include “The Moral Child,” “The Youth Charter” and, most recently, “The Path to Purpose.”

Parents who sanction teenage drinking parties are making a huge mistake. These parents are encouraging the very behavior they are attempting to control. Even worse, they are communicating disrespect for legal authority to young people who are just forming their attitudes about how to behave in society.

A parent’s first message must be that we are obliged to obey the law.
Laws on underage drinking in this country are clear. A parent certainly has the right to disagree with these laws; and discussions about such disagreements with children can foster critical thinking and civic awareness. But the parent’s first message to a child must be that we are obliged to obey our society’s laws even when we disagree with them.

At the same time, legal enforcement of social host laws should be used sparingly as a last resort. It’s heavy-handed, intrusive, and risks undermining relations between parents and children.

Read more…

Stolen property….

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Green on Possession of Stolen Property

Stuart P. Green (Rutgers Law School-Newark) has posted Thieving and Receiving: (Over)Criminalizing the Possession of Stolen Property (New Criminal Law Review, Forthcoming) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

Historically, Anglo-American law has treated the offense of receiving stolen property in a surprisingly diverse number of ways, including treating it as no crime at all, subjecting it to accessory-after- the-fact liability, and treating it as a free-standing offense, subject, depending on the jurisdiction, to less punishment than theft, the same punishment as theft, and greater punishment than theft. In order to develop an analytical framework for determining which of these various approaches makes the most sense, we need to ask exactly what receiving statutes are meant to censure and deter. From a backward-looking perspective, receivers can be said to perpetuate the wrongful deprivation of the victim owner’s property rights, effected in the first instance by the thief. From a forward-looking perspective, the act of receiving can, at least in some cases, be said to encourage the commission of future thefts by helping to create a ready market for stolen goods. The problem is that the offense in its current statutory formulation reflects only the backward-looking perspective, requiring nothing more than that the offender possess or receive stolen property (knowing that it is stolen), and saying nothing about the future effects of his act. And because perpetuating an owner’s loss of property is a lesser wrong than causing him to lose his property to begin with (or so it will be argued), the receiver deserves less blame and punishment than the thief. In order to avoid such disproportionality in punishment, various reforms in the law of receiving are recommended.
June 17, 2010 | Permalink

Another reason to stay out of Arizona…

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“Governor Rebuffs Clemency Board in Murder Case”

Adam Liptak’s column in the New York Times is here. In part:

Mr. Kempfert is now certain that his father, William Macumber, is innocent. Arizona’s clemency board, citing Mr. Kempfert’s “very moving testimony” and saying there had been “a miscarriage of justice,” unanimously recommended last year that Mr. Macumber be freed. But Mr. Macumber remains in prison, and Gov. Jan Brewer has refused to explain why.

So you want to be a writer…..

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Robbins on Ghostwriting for Pro Se Prisoners

Ira P. Robbins (American University – Washington College of Law) has posted Ghostwriting: Filling in the Gaps of Pro Se Prisoners’ Access to the Courts (Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics, Vol. 23, No. 2, pp. 271-321, 2010) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Compared with other litigants, pro se prisoners are at an inherent disadvantage when they try to vindicate their rights. They lack many of the resources enjoyed by non-prisoner litigants. They have limited finances and limited access to legal-research materials. Even if they had such access, their illiteracy would lessen its effectiveness. Moreover, many attorneys are unwilling or unable to undertake full representation of prisoner litigants. As a result, pro se prisoners struggle to navigate the complex legal system, often losing their cases on procedural grounds before ever reaching a decision on the merits.

This Article argues that, in order to provide pro se prisoners with the access to the courts that law and justice require, attorneys (and sometimes non-attorneys) should be permitted to ghostwrite pleadings for them – that is, to draft pleadings that prisoners will then file pro se. Attorneys who may otherwise be reluctant to represent prisoner litigants as counsel of record might still be amenable to providing services in this limited way. Limited-scope representation – or “unbundled legal services” – is not an anomaly. Indeed, most states accept the practice in at least some contexts, and the American Bar Association recently gave its stamp of approval to ghostwriting. Nevertheless, many courts and commentators contend that ghostwriting by attorneys is unethical, that it gives pro se litigants an unfair advantage (because their pleadings are entitled to judicial benevolence), and that it encourages the unauthorized practice of law. Addressing these concerns, this Article considers the various forms that ghostwriting could take – i.e., whether ghostwriting attorneys should be required to disclose their names, the fact of their assistance, or the nature of their assistance – and concludes that ghostwriting should be allowed without any disclosure of attorney assistance at all. Indeed, disclosing such assistance may, in some instances, actually violate ethical rules. While ghostwriting likely constitutes the practice of law and might justifiably be rejected in other contexts, this Article recommends that courts and bar associations endorse the practice of ghostwriting for pro se prisoners, to give these disadvantaged litigants a more even playing field on which to challenge alleged violations of their constitutional rights.

Right to silence…

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Dov Fox has posted The Right to Silence Protects Mental Control (LAW AND NEUROSCIENCE, CURRENT LEGAL ISSUES, Vol. 13, M. Freeman, ed., Oxford University Press, 2010) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
This chapter argues that a right of mental control prohibits the state either from extracting a suspect’s thoughts without her meaningful consent or from making use of a suspect’s compelled recall or recognition to lay criminal blame upon her. Existing accounts of the constitutional privilege against self-incrimination are ill-equipped to address the doctrinal implications of safe and reliable forensic neuroscience. Brain imaging is importantly different, for Fifth Amendment purposes, from all other forms of evidence, because it enables state officials to obtain information directly from a suspect’s brain, in a way that affords her no opportunity to control the transmission of that information. The physical/testimonial distinction in right-to-silence jurisprudence presupposes a flawed conception of mind/body dualism. Exposing this dualism reveals that the normative significance we confer to a suspect’s control over his thoughts against unwanted use by the government. The use of compelled neuroscientific evidence is illegitimate when it deprives the accused of control over her mental life. Prosecutors may not comment on a suspect’s decision to decline the testing, and judges should instruct jurors not to draw adverse inferences from a choice to decline testing. Instructions against drawing adverse inferences are likely to be effective, however, only if jurors come to recognize legitimate reasons to decline testing.
June 5, 2010 | Permalink