I wanted to interrupt our regularly scheduled programming with a request for money this holiday season.

If you read this blog, you're likely interested in how people are treated in our criminal justice system. One organization is doing a lot to improve things for people who have been convicted of a crime.

Our Place DC is a really cool and tremendously effective organization. [FN1] They help women who are getting out of prison reestablish their lives and reconnect with their communities and their families. You can donate to Our Place at this link.

Here's a short movie about Our Place and its work:

Our Place does a lot that's great. One tremendously important program - that I am a huge fan of - are prison trips for families that Our Place makes possible.

Women in DC who are convicted of a crime and sentenced in prison - whether in federal court or the D.C. Superior Court - serve their sentences at the FCI in Danbury Connecticut, the FCI in Hazelton, West Virginia, and in other federal prisons around the country.

Their families are most often unable to visit them, because the prisons are so remote. Our Place organizes trips for family members of incarcerated women to visit these prisons. Without Our Place, a prison sentence for these women could mean that they wouldn't see their kids for years.

I know it's a bad economy and there are a lot of worthy causes asking for your donations. Please consider Our Place. They do great work for a great number of women.

You can donate at this link.

[FN1] - in the interests of full disclosure, I'm on the Our Place board.

As the article starts,

For centuries, a bedrock principle of criminal law has held that people must know they are doing something wrong before they can be found guilty. The concept is known as mens rea, Latin for a "guilty mind." This legal protection is now being eroded as the U.S. federal criminal code dramatically swells. In recent decades, Congress has repeatedly crafted laws that weaken or disregard the notion of criminal intent. Today not only are there thousands more criminal laws than before, but it is easier to fall afoul of them. As a result, what once might have been considered simply a mistake is now sometimes punishable by jail time.

This has me wondering if the problem of overcriminalization (and, yes, if the NACDL and the Heritage Foundation both think something is a problem, then odds are it is) stems from having legislatures, instead of judges, making criminal laws.

If you have a common-law model for when crime is caused, you're much less likely, I think, to have such weak politically-motivated and poorly-conceived crimes for people to run afoul of.

Mr. Black was prosecuted for fraud by the United States government. He's on the last few months of a prison sentence. Here are some of his thoughts:

Before this cataract of horrors began, I had known that there were some dodgy aspects to the U.S. legal system, and feared that the plea bargain system was essentially a bazaar for the exchange of inculpatory perjury for reduced sentences or immunities, a traffic that would lead to the disbarment of prosecutors in most serious jurisdictions.

The United States has six to 12 times as many incarcerated people per capita as other comparable, prosperous and sophisticated democracies: Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom. The Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendment guaranties of due process, the grand jury as assurance against capricious prosecution, no seizure of property without fair compensation, access to counsel, an impartial jury, prompt justice, and reasonable bail, (I enjoyed none of these rights), have all been jettisoned while the Supreme Court has been drinking its own bathwater.

Prosecutors routinely seize and freeze defendants' assets on the basis of false affidavits to prevent engagement of (avaricious) counsel of choice; there are many catch-all charges apart from the Honest Services statute that the Supreme Court rewrote in our case, that are impossible to defend, and prosecutors attack with unfeasible numbers of counts and have the last word before unsophisticated juries that have to rely on their memories of lengthy and complex proceedings and have been pulled from jury pools that have been softened up by an unanswerable prosecution lynching in the media. The public defenders are Judas Goats of the prosecutors rewarded for the number of victims they load on to the conveyor belt to the prison industry, not for the services they perform.

Also, he's publishing a memoir.

Here's the juicy bit:

the government asks to use location data in a new way -- not to collect evidence of a crime, but solely to locate a charged defendant. To some, this use would appear reasonable, even commendable and efficient. To others, this use of location data by law enforcement would appear chillingly invasive and unnecessary in the apprehension of defendants. In any event, there is no precedent for use of location data solely to apprehend a defendant in the absence of evidence of flight to avoid prosecution. The government did not submit, and the court did not find, any sufficient authority for this use of location technology. In light of legitimate privacy concerns and the absence of any emergency or extraordinary considerations here, the Court concludes that approval of use of location data for this purpose is best considered deliberately in the legislature, or in the appellate courts.

The opinion has generated a lot of attention, and rightly so. Cell phones are ubiquitous - if the government can get access to where we are merely because we have a cell phone, we're moving a lot closer to a government monitoring system, albeit a court approved one, than many people are comfortable with.

Orin Kerr, over at Volokh, argues that Judge Gauvey is wrong. He also has an odd ad hominem attack on her at the end of the post, of the "I'm not saying something bad, I'm merely quoting other people who say she is." The merits of the issue are probably more interesting than the personal stuff.

Then again, I don't practice in Georgia.

The Eleventh Circuit, today, reversed and remanded a case where a criminal defendant went to trial without a lawyer, because the government opposed him receiving appointed counsel. The case is United States v. Ly. Apparently, in some U.S. Attorney's Offices, they read Gideon narrowly.

Shortly after he was charged with filling prescriptions "outside of the usual course of professional practice and without medical purpose", under 21 U.S.C. 841(a)(1) and 21 C.F.R. section 1306.04, Mr. Ly, asked for appointed counsel. The government opposed his request for a lawyer. A magistrate judge worked with federal probation, and determined that Mr. Ly's wife had significant assets, and that Mr. Ly had shared these assets with his wife. So the court determined that Mr. Ly cannot have an appointed lawyer.

The court's strategy, apparently, was that Mr. Ly would come up with the money if the request for appointed counsel was denied.

Mr. Ly did not come up with the money. He went to trial without a lawyer. The government's case in chief consisted of:

(1) expert testimony about the regulation of controlled substances; (2) expert testimony regarding standard prescription practices and how Ly's actions deviated from those standard practices; (3) testimony from eleven of Ly's patients explaining Ly's prescription practices; (4) testimony from four retail pharmacists who became suspicious of Ly's practices and therefore stopped filling prescriptions written by Ly; (5) evidence that pharmaceutical companies sold large quantities of controlled substances to Ly and that one company stopped selling to Ly because of these purchases; and (6) the results of a lawful search of Ly's house and office.

In response, Mr. Ly tried to call his prior patients to testify that he was a good doctor who provided quality care. The court would not let him. He called a few witnesses, who offered little in support of his cause.

When the rest of Mr. Ly's evidence was in, the judge had this conversation with him:

THE COURT: All right, Dr. Ly, I've heard you say that you have no more witnesses. Do you intend to testify in this case?

DR. LY: No, Your Honor.

THE COURT: Now, do you understand that you have an absolute right to testify in your own behalf?

DR. LY: Yeah, I know, but without counsel, Your Honor, I can't testify.

THE COURT: So it is your personal decision not to testify in this case?

DR. LY: Because I don't have counsel who can ask me questions.

THE COURT: Is it your personal decision not to testify in this case?

DR. LY: What do you mean, Your Honor?

THE COURT: Well, I've told you you have a right to testify. Is it your personal decision not to testify in this case?

DR. LY: No. I decide not to testify because I don't have counsel to ask me questions. I cannot just be cross-examined without my counsel to ask--my own counsel to ask me questions.

THE COURT: So you choose not to testify, then?

DR. LY: If I don't have my own counsel -

THE COURT: - Well, you know you don't have counsel, Dr. Ly. That's not the question. You've not had counsel since this trial started. Now, this is your opportunity to testify or not testify, and I want you to tell me on the record whether you intend to testify or not testify.

DR. LY: That decision I can't make--I can't make it in the split of a second, Your Honor. Could you give me . . .

THE COURT: Well, I'm assuming, then, and I'm taking that as a decision by you not to testify in your own behalf in this case.

DR. LY: I wouldn't agree with that.

THE COURT: Well, we've got a jury sitting in the box, and it is your time to testify. And so you're going to have to make that decision, and you've had months leading up to this trial to make that decision. Now, I'm not going to keep everybody waiting. I'm not going to keep the jury waiting, so you make a decision right now whether you're going to testify or not testify.

DR. LY: I'm not going to testify.

Mr. Ly did not testify, was convicted, and was sentenced to serve 97 months in prison.

The thing about that conversation that the court had with Mr. Ly is that Mr. Ly is actually wrong when he says he can't testify unless he has a lawyer. He can testify, he'd just testify in the narrative - he'd just talk, instead of being asked questions. But the district court judge never corrects that mistake, and allows him to persist in the belief that he's unable to testify because he has no lawyer. Unable to call any witnesses or produce any other evidence, Mr. Ly doesn't testify because he thinks he isn't allowed to.

The Eleventh Circuit today said that violated Mr. Ly's constitutional rights and reversed and remanded.

The issue is tricky - as the court explains, normally there's a default position on a constitutional right:

In the right-to-counsel and guilty-plea contexts, the district court must satisfy itself that the defendant has waived his right knowingly and intelligently . . . and if the court is not so satisfied, it forces upon the defendant the constitutional default. In the case of the right to counsel, the default is an appointed attorney [sic - as to the facts of appointing counsel in this case], and in the case of a jury trial, the default is a plea of not guilty, followed by a jury trial.

In a question of whether to testify, there's no default. A criminal defendant has an absolute right not to testify and an absolute right to testify. It's totally his choice either way.

The court notes that this decision is normally informed by counsel. Here, the government went bare-knuckles to keep Mr. Ly from having a lawyer. So a lawyer he was kept from having. When a criminal defendant goes to trial without a lawyer, it is exceptionally hard to make sure his constitutional rights are not violated.

Pro se defendants are, frankly, a problem. It's sad and wrong to have someone go without a lawyer when their freedom is at stake. If the person freely chooses to go it alone, the court has to let him engage in that folly. But here, where a person was asking, repeatedly, for a lawyer, to force him to trial without one is wrong.

If the government's concern was that Mr. Ly was hiding money and trying to avoid paying for counsel, they had another option. The government, instead, could have sought appointed counsel and asked for a contribution order. That way, if Mr. Ly was convicted, at the time of sentencing the court would have conducted an inquiry into what money was available to pay the lawyer for his services from Mr. Ly's funds. And the court could have made then ordered Mr. Ly to pay as much as he was able for his own defense. Here's a link to one way to do the order from the U.S. Court's webpage.

The government did not ask for a contribution order. They asked for a trial without defense counsel. Looks like they may get another one.

I recently took my son to Philadelphia, to the National Constitution Center.  The museum starts with a seventeen minute live action play about our Constitution.  It's hard not to buy into the idea and ideal of American Exceptionalism in Philadelphia.  If there's a reason to think we're different, and better, surely it has it's roots in what happened in that city. (That said, a bit of distance to reflect on the idea of [insert nation here] exceptionalism may simply reveal that it isn't meaningfully different than patriotism).

I do think America is qualitatively different than other countries.  I agree with a form of American Exceptionalism in three ways.  First, I think this country, unique among others, celebrates and encourages people to carve their own path in life.  Americans innovate and rally and strive.  In a deeply unquantitative and unscientific way, I think Americans do that more than other people.  That's to be applauded.

Regrettably, America is exceptional in a second, more numerically verifiable way.  We have more people in prison than any other nation on the planet.  That's not in relative numbers, but in absolute ones.  We have 2.3 million people in prison, compared with China's 1.6 million.  Considering that China is four times the size of the United States, and is not, ahem, freedom loving, that's stunning.

I have close relationships with a number of prosecutors, and, at times, I'll ask them about their work.  The question I come back to is this - If the United States locks up more people than any other country on the planet, what does that same about America?  Are our citizens uniquely inclined toward criminal activity?  Are we, as a people, more deserving of prison time? 

I don't think that's the answer.  I think we can accept that it can be the answer (we're not Australia, after all).  Rather, I think the answer, as David Simon has argued, is that the war on drugs has been a war on poor people.  Though I don't think a prosecutor is allowed to agree (unless he or she thinks it's ok for a country to declare war on poor people, which is a separate problem).

Rather, I think a third kind of American Exceptionalism explains how prosecutors react to our unconscionably high number of prisoners.  Years ago, I went to a talk by then Chief-Justice Rehnquist.  He was explaining that he was in Finland, meeting with the Attorney General of that country.  He asked her if the Supreme Court of Finland has the power to declare an act of parliament against the law in Finland.  The Attorney General consulted with her advisors and said that they could, but never had. 

To Rehnquist, this answer illuminated a key difference between Americans and the rest of the world - it is unthinkable for an American to have power and not test it's limits.  We are, according to our late Chief Justice, a power-hungry people. 

I have talked to a number of prosecutors, and I can see the lure of the position.  One can walk into a lot of opportunities from a U.S. Attorney's Office.  But I don't know one yet who I've heard offer a thoughtful response to how dramatically out of whack our prison population is with the rest of the world.  I can see, though, how Rehnquist could offer an explanation why people who increase our prison population don't stop to think much about its size.

            Suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise re-examined in any Court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.

This is troubling for three reasons.  First, most cases plead, and don't result in an appeal.  So, if there are 700 cases where misconduct can be recognized in an appellate court, that radically understates the amount of prosecutorial misconduct out there.

Second, only six prosecutors were disciplined out of the 700 cases; which is incredibly low.

Third, the post only says that they were disciplined.  It doesn't say how they were disciplined.  A discipline can include something like an admonishment; it doesn't necessarily mean that anything actually happened to the prosecutors to prevent them from continuing to engage in misconduct in the future.

This looks a lot like the kind of behavior that one finds in, say, the mortgage industry.  People are put in jobs where misconduct isn't punished, where racking up completed cases (either of mortgages sold or convictions obtained) is rewarded, and where there are few other checks on the actions of the people in the system.  Of course, folks will look into what happens at Enron.  Why won't they investigate prosecutorial misconduct?  Oh, right, because the people who would do that investigation are prosecutors.

First, a bit of background.  Miley Cyrus is 17, and she appears to be trying to present herself as an adult (in at least two senses of the word).  As a part of this campaign, she apparently emerged from a car in a short skirt without any underwear on.  Perez Hilton snapped a picture up her skirt that revealed what would have been hidden if she'd been wearing underwear.

Here's the interesting point.  Assume the image is pornographic (I haven't seen it, so don't have an opinion).  If Miley Cyrus were, say 19, and this had happened, the interesting question would be whether Perez Hilton's photograph was pornography, and, then, whether there was any redeeming social value to the image.  Because Miley Cyrus has been spending a lot of time in the public eye displaying a more provocative image of herself, Perez Hilton could argue that his photograph was somehow a comment on that, and could probably argue successfully that it was a further conversation about Miley Cyrus and how provocative she is.

Here, though, Miley Cyrus is under 18, and the Supreme Court has held that a pornographic depiction of a minor is per se obscene.  Which means that it doesn't matter if Perez Hilton took the picture in order to comment on a pressing social issue; it can be banned based on the fact that it's pornography and that she's under 18 alone.  Her status as a public figure is completely irrelevant to the analysis.

The interesting question is this - does that comport with our current understanding of how protective we should be of someone like Miley Cyrus?  She's already in the public realm in a pretty explicit way.  At some point, when someone is so close to the age of majority, and is already a public figure, can they lose the protection that the Supreme Court clearly intends?  

Recent reports of a drop in crime got me wondering, what happens to law enforcement if the crime rate drops? If, for example, there were a 50% decrease in people using drugs in the country, would half the DEA agents get fired? What if it were a 10% drop?

Or, instead, would law enforcement just push for prosecution of more marginal cases? Perhaps folks who they would have decided aren't appropriate for prosecution would now be thought of as public enemies.

Law enforcement is a competitive business. Federal agents can reasonably fear losing funding for their jobs if they don't bring in the statistics to justify their positions. Would they push for more marginal prosecutions to keep bread on their table? Would you?

This is, perhaps, a little fanciful, but I wonder, is there a single example of a prosecutor's office or law enforcement department losing staff because of a drop in the crime rate? If not, why not?

Click here if you'd like to here the interview.

My basic point was that Mr. Arenas is likely going to be able to work out a plea to a no-jail misdemeanor when you look at how he's handled this and who his lawyer is. But, hey, I could be wrong.

Why does there have to be a criminal enforcement response to every macroeconomic change that negatively effects people? Are there any serious economists who think that recessions are caused by white collar crime?

More plausible, is that members of the Senate stand a better chance of being reelected if they badger DOJ into trying to put people in prison.

That's change we can believe in.

I suspect that's excellent advice, and not just for a personal injury practice.

It presents unique challenges for a criminal practice though. On one hand, I know that the best results I've achieved for clients have come when I take their case completely to heart. Cases tend to go better than I think they will when I wake up at 3 a.m. thinking about what I'll say at a hearing, or I find myself thinking of an argument to make to a prosecutor when I should be listening to one of my kids tell me about his day. Clients deserve to have a lawyer who is thinking about their cases obsessively. I know if I, or a member of my family, need a lawyer, I'd want that lawyer to be thinking about the case often.

On the other hand, criminal defense lawyers, particularly in the federal system, lose. And when you lose and you've taken your client's pain to heart, it becomes your pain. There's a tremendous amount of burnout among criminal defense lawyers; worse, too often defense lawyers prevent themselves from burning out by just not caring about their clients in the first place. The lawyer who yells at his client at the initial consultation, or doesn't explain to his client what will happen if he pleads or goes to trial, or browbeats his client into a quick plea, is the worst of our profession, and may just be keeping himself from feeling how desparate his client's situation is.

Which is not to say that this is excusable. There's an important difference between a defense and an argument you make at sentencing.

The hard part, I find, is striking a balance between being too close and too distant to how my clients. Too close and you lose perspective and can't function. And, while it hurts to see a guy who has robbed a bank go to prison, you're not going to be able to prevent that from happening in most cases. Whether or not you feel the guy's pain, he's likely going to BOP. But if you don't feel what he's going through at all, I don't know why you'd bother to do this work.

Which is why I was very excited to see this article, Researchers Expose a Pattern for White Collar Crime. The article reports on a study that found a pattern for what allows white collar crime to happen at a company or other institution. Basically, like the stages of grief, the researchers believe that every big white collar case works through the following 12 steps:

1. Perpetrator is hired into a position of power
2. Perpetrator develops a sense of superiority and engages in illegal activity
3. Co-workers recognize perpetrator's misconduct and become passive participants
4. Passive participants recognize opportunity
5. Passive participants reluctantly follow the perpetrator
6. Perpetrator distrusts followers and feels the need for control
7. Perpetrator senses his power over followers and is emboldened
8. Perpetrator bullies followers and relishes his hold on them
9. Perpetrator intensifies white-collar crimes as followers feel increasingly trapped
10. Followers struggle with the conflict between their values and actions
11. Perpetrator loses control as a whistle-blower steps forward
12. Perpetrator denies or admits to wrongdoing and shows lack of remorse

I'm not sure what I think of this. On one hand, it looks like it may be a relatively useful way of explaining how people at institutions respond to the one bad actor at the top. I could see this being used as a meaningful argument for mitigation of a lower-level employee.

On the other hand, this study kind of looks like it might be junk (as a guy whose only read an article about it, not the actual study). Who counts as a perpetrator? Take Enron for example, is Ken Lay the perpetrator? Skilling? Fastow? It seems like the model would be slightly different (or squishy enough to be vacuous) depending on which of these players you choose as the "perpetrator."

Moreover, look at step two. Isn't that kind of quick? Perpetrator develops a sense of superiority and engages in illegal activity? That's it? That's the explanation for why there's crime? No look into what else was going on in the lives of the "perpetrators?" No look at whether the "perpetrator" even thought his conduct was criminal to begin with, particularly in this age of regulation of business through the Bureau of Prisons.

White collar crime happens because of a sense of superiority. Huh. I guess that's good to know.

She didn't have anyone with her to watch her daughter, so she brought her up to counsel table for her hearing. When she got to counsel's table, the judge asked her where her lawyer was. She said she didn't have one. As it turned out, she had already plead guilty to felony theft. She was coming back for her sentencing hearing.

The judge asked her why she didn't have a lawyer. From looking at the docket for her case and his notes, he told her that he could see that they had continued the trial date twice for her. Each time the judge inquired about her eligibility for a public defender, and concluded that she was eligible. Each time he told her to go to the public defender's office. He also told her to go get a public defender after her plea hearing.

The judge was clearly frustrated. The woman rambled a little bit about how she didn't commit the crime (!), then told the judge that she didn't know, but she thought she might be depressed, and that she knew she was supposed to go to the public defender but she just couldn't make herself do it.

It was an incredibly sad, and all too familiar, moment. I find that too many of my clients are overwhelmed by the charges pending against them and can't really function to work on their case. It's hard to watch that happen, both as a person and as a lawyer. I've seen it hurt people badly. The criminal justice system is not forgiving of people who don't act in their own defense.

I find that when my rapport with my client is strong I can get through some of that depression to help the client focus on the case a little. When the rapport isn't strong, well, it's just a lot harder. I'd be very eager to hear from any readers about how they handle depression in their clients; it's a problem that I don't think gets enough attention in the criminal defense bar.

Perhaps the only solution is the one that came to the woman I saw in court that day. A lawyer in the courtroom, moved by the scene that she was watching, stood up and asked the judge if she could talk to the woman for a minute in the hallway. She didn't know if she would get paid (she may, in fact, have known that she wouldn't), but she was willing to help.