The Judiciary

A.B Stoddard talks with Chirs Kofinis and John Feehery about the GOP's witnesses for Judge Sotomayor's Supreme Court confirmation hearing, and how Democrats should handle investigating the Bush administration's role in CIA briefings on the use of torture as an interrogation tactic.

At a sentencing hearing in Toronto last week, the lawyer for two theater producers, both convicted of forgery and a $400 million fraud, made a provocative plea to the sentencing judge. Rather than imprisoning the two felons, he proposed, the judge should send them on a lecture tour of 65 Canadian schools to teach theatre students about their craft, and — I’m not making this up — "avoidance of unethical conduct." They would do the latter at six universities that teach business ethics. The judge will decide in August whether to agree to this proposal, or impose the legally circumscribed 10 years of imprisonment for fraud and 14 for forgery. Read more...

A.B. Stoddard delves into Gov. Sarah Palin's resignation news and answers viewer questions about how Senate Democrats will fare with their 60 seat super majority.

OK. I am not, nor have I ever been, a lawyer. I took Constitutional Law in college just a few short years ago — 40, maybe — and I don’t devour Supreme Court cases, judiciously reading the footnotes and the footnotes to the footnotes.

So, you ask, why do I feel compelled to comment on the latest Ricci case? I am not going to discuss Title VII or the lower-court rulings or the effect on Judge Sotomayor’s appointment to the Supreme Court. Rather, I have another angle. Read more...

It may be one of the dumber Supreme Court rationales in quite some time. Writing for the 5-4 majority which ruled in favor of New Haven’s white firefighters and effectively against anti-discrimination in employment, Justice Anthony Kennedy said: “Fear of litigation alone cannot justify an employer’s reliance on race to the detriment of individuals who passed the examinations and qualified for promotions.”

Is he kidding? The “fear of litigation” is possibly the strongest motivation there is when any individual or institution decides on a course of action. Why else are the nation’s doctors braying, after all these decades, over the malpractice lawsuits that have forced them into P-Y-A medical decisions? Why else have corporations funneled so much money toward politicians to try and achieve “tort reform,” which really means severely limiting someone’s chances of righting some wrong in court. Right you are: It’s the “fear of litigation” that Justice Kennedy so cavalierly dismisses. Read more...

A.B. Stoddard spoke with Chris Kofinis & John Feehery about how the Supreme Court reversal on Ricci v. DeStefano will effect the outcome of Judge Sotomayor's confirmation hearings.

I tried a class action lawsuit against the District of Columbia Jail years ago, questioning (successfully) whether the conditions of overcrowding and isolation of prisoners constituted cruel and unusual punishment. Experts — John Calhoun of NIH; Robert Ardrey, author of The Territorial Imperative; psychiatrists Karl Menninger and Hans Esser; an architect and others — visited the jail and testified in the federal court that conditions at the jail were likely to cause aggression, suicide and rape. They could have been describing conditions at most prisons and jails in America, then and now.

So it comes as no surprise that Congress’s National Prison Rape Elimination Commission reported last week that over 60,000 prisoners reported they were sexually assaulted in 2007, a likely lower figure than the actual one since these horrible events are underreported for fear of reprisals and embarrassment, and often involved repeated acts of violence. The victims include women, young offenders, people in jail (not convicted but awaiting trial), and in community programs. The perpetrators are predatory fellow prisoners and exploitative correctional officers. Youngsters (under 16) and women are victims more than adults and men, and the women are more likely to be abused by staff than peers. Even immigrants in detention facilities are abused, vulnerable as they are by the remote and exploitative conditions of their detention. Read more...

The following appears originally in The Washington Times of Monday, June 15.

By now, most people have heard — negatively — about the 2006 case Ricci v. DeStefano, in which 18 New Haven firefighters (17 white and one Hispanic) were not promoted after passing the required tests because there were no blacks whose test scores were high enough to qualify them for promotion. Read more...

Long a believer in and advocate of alternative sentencing, I am bemused by the recent creativity of one federal trial judge.

District of Columbia Judge Ricardo Urbina ordered a pharmaceutical executive convicted of making a false statement to government investigators about his company’s actions in a patent dispute to write a book in lieu of being sentenced to prison. Read more...

Sometimes they have all the right ingredients: By that I mean news stories that combine Twitter's vacuity, with parochial political pandering (known as a "3-P") and media desperate for news on a slow day.

I refer, of course, to the short outbursts from Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), who used Twitter to dump on the first family for having the audacity to vacation somewhere "over there": "Pres Obama," he Tweeted, "You got nerve while u sightseeing in Paris to tell us‘time to deliver’ on healthcare. We still on skedul/even workinWKEND.” Read more...