A libertarian take on procedure

This is an interesting short interview with libertarian Radley Balko on police practices and prosecutors. All of it is worth reading, but I would draw your attention particularly to this:

DIA: You've written about the creeping militarisation of law enforcement in America. How has this trend manifested itself and what are the consequences for the quality of policing?

Mr Balko: The most obvious way it has manifested itself is in the explosion in the use of SWAT teams and similar paramilitary police units over the last 25 years. The criminologist Peter Kraska has surveyed their use over that time. He's found that the total number of SWAT-team deployments in the 1970s was a few hundred times per year, over the entire country. By the 1980s, it was a few thousand times per year. And by around 2005, Mr Kraska estimates around 50,000 times per year. The surge has been driven entirely by the drug war, with the vast majority of SWAT deployments being used to serve drug-related search warrants.

This has led to a militaristic mindset among America's police departments, beyond just SWAT teams. Driven by "war on crime" and "war on drugs" rhetoric set by political leaders, police officers have increasingly taken on the psyche of soldiers. There's a pervasive and troubling "us versus them" attitude in policing today. Policing has become more reactionary, more aggressive, and it's poisoning the relationship between the police and the communities they serve.

I should add that I don't think police officers themselves are to blame for this, nor, obviously, are all police officers guilty of it. These are problems spawned by 35 years or so of bad policies set by politicians. That's really where any reform would need to start.

Right / Left cooperation on criminal justice reform

While the political rhetoric of "law and order" often separates liberals and conservatives, the question of the substantive effects of criminal procedure have always suggested room for common cause between liberal critics of police procedures and sentencing and conservative/libertarian concerns with expanding state power. Today's New York Times has an interesting piece previewing 6 upcoming Supreme Court cases that deal with criminal justice issues and includes many quotes from across the political spectrum advocating for significant reform in this area. This is all quite relevant to yesterday's class discussion of law and order and the questions we will discuss next week as well.

Dog sniff lineups

Should an identification of a suspect's scent by a dog in a "scent lineup" be enough to imprison someone? Enough to convince a suspect to agree to a plea bargain?

In several of the cases that were based on Deputy Pikett’s dogs, however, the scent lineups appear to have provided the primary evidence, even when contradictory evidence was readily available. Mr. Bickham spent eight months in jail after being identified in a scent lineup by Deputy Pikett’s dogs, until another man confessed to the killings. In an interview, Mr. Bickham scoffed at the accusation that he had taken part in three murders, noting that he has been hobbled by bone spurs and diabetes and is partially blind.

Ronald Curtis, another Houston man jailed on the basis of Deputy Pikett’s dogs, was released from jail nine months after being accused of a string of burglaries. Store videos showed that the burglar did not resemble him. “Nobody was listening,” Mr. Curtis said.

The plea: follow up

We are left hanging at the end of The Plea as to what will happen to two of the documentary's subjects. A quick google gave me this 2005 New York Times profile of the filmaker Ofra Bikel which talks about several of the cases. Gampero and Jarrett each received parole after the airing of the documentary which appears to have had significant effect on their cases.

Did Texas execute an innocent man?

In the case of Cameron Todd Willingham, it looks like they did. Texas's governor Rick Perry has done quite a bit to obstruct an investigation into the case, and recent statements by Willingham's lawyer raise many questions about whether Willingham received competent legal advice during his trial. Note also that Willingham refused a plea bargain that would have resulted in life imprisonment.

Link dump

Ok, ok, I have been totally remiss in keeping up the blog, for the 3 of you who check once in a while. Here are some recent events, articles, or cases of note.

The Supreme Court has accepted Kiyemba v Obama which will determine whether or not federal courts have the authority to order the release of detainees following Boumediene.

Is the rate of violent crime determined by levels of lead poisoning? Economist Rick Nevin argues that the drop in violent crime in the 1990s can be explained by bans on leaded gasoline and reductions in lead paint, and finds similar results in 9 different countries tied directly to the timing of lead reductions. While this may be similar to the widely publicized, and criticized, argument in Freakanomics that legalized abortion lead to the drop in violent crime, the fact that Nevin finds these results in 9 different countries, and the medical evidence on the effects of lead as a powerful neurotoxin, makes a strong case for his findings. If Nevin is correct, then it would seem we should divert as much money as possible from prisons to lead abatement programs. How likely is that?

Americans' perceptions of the crime rate used to correlate pretty closely with actual crime rates. When crime rates went up, people thought they were going up, and when they went down, people thought crime was going down. But since 2001, perceptions and reality no longer correlate. Why? No one seems to know.

The Supreme Court is hard to study due to all the secrecy surrounding the justices and their deliberations. Very little material ever becomes public, and even when it does it may or may not shed much light on key cases. When Justice Stevens retires, the papers of Justice Potter Stewart, who retired in 1981, will finally become available. While there may be some new information about deliberations over key cases during his tenure, we won't know until we see them. Maybe your grandchildren will get drive their flying cars to New Hampshire to study Justice Souter's notes on Bush v Gore sometime during the Malia Obama presidency because they won't be opened to the public until 2059.

The Supreme Court will be hearing a lot of business cases this term, and it may be interesting because there is speculation that Justice Sotomayor may be the first economic progressive on the court in a long time (Clinton's nominees are considered business friendly moderates) although no one is really sure how she will vote in these business cases. She has already asked some searching questions about the practice of treating corporations as artificial persons having the same rights as actual human people.

Republicans in the Senate have pretty much shut down the judicial confirmation process.

Medical malpractice & torts

There is a great article in today's New York Times on medical malpractice costs and the research related to them. Please read the story right away as it is directly relevant to what we have been talking about in class and our other reading assignments.

The direct costs of malpractice lawsuits — jury awards, settlements and the like — are such a minuscule part of health spending that they barely merit discussion, economists say. But that doesn’t mean the malpractice system is working.

The fear of lawsuits among doctors does seem to lead to a noticeable amount of wasteful treatment. Amitabh Chandra — a Harvard economist whose research is cited by both the American Medical Association and the trial lawyers’ association — says $60 billion a year, or about 3 percent of overall medical spending, is a reasonable upper-end estimate. If a new policy could eliminate close to that much waste without causing other problems, it would be a no-brainer.

At the same time, though, the current system appears to treat actual malpractice too lightly. Trials may get a lot of attention, but they are the exception. Far more common are errors that never lead to any action.

After reviewing thousands of patient records, medical researchers have estimated that only 2 to 3 percent of cases of medical negligence lead to a malpractice claim. For every notorious error — the teenager who died in North Carolina after being given the wrong blood type, the 39-year-old Massachusetts mother killed by a chemotherapy overdose, the newborn twins (children of the actor Dennis Quaid) given too much blood thinner — there are dozens more. You never hear about these other cases.

As they say, read the rest.