In Elonis v. United States, the court rejected a conviction for threats allegedly made on Facebook in the form of rap lyrics... In Yates v. United States, the court curbed a massive prosecutorial overreach, ruling that the Sarbanes-Oxley Act was not violated when a fisherman tossed undersized grouper overboard in an effort to skirt federal commercial fishing regulations. In Henderson v. United States, a unanimous court reversed a lower court ruling that had barred a man who could no longer possess firearms after pleading guilty to a felony from transferring his weapons to a friend.... In another unanimous case, McFadden v. the United States, the court held that defendants could not be prosecuted for dealing “controlled substance analogues” — drugs regulated as equivalent to Schedule I or II drugs — unless it could show that the person had a very high level of criminal intent and knew those drugs were illegal....The 7th case, the one the government won, was the one you're most likely to have noticed, Glossip v. Gross, upholding the 3-drug lethal injection against a cruel-and-unusual-punishment claim.
In a decision with large ramifications, the court sharply limited the use of dog sniffs at traffic stops, finding that they violated the Fourth Amendment. This decision followed the court’s unanimous Riley v. California decision last year, which barred police from searching smartphones when they arrest someone without a warrant....
So deep was the shadow cast by the social issue cases this year that virtually no one paid attention to Johnson v. United States, in which the court struck down a much-debated part of the Armed Career Criminal Act. The court concluded that a provision of the law that increased sentences for violent offenders was too vague because it didn’t let people know which crimes were covered....
July 3, 2015
"Though hardly anyone appears to have noticed, the court sided with federal criminal defendants in a whopping 6 of 7 cases this term."
"As the United States moves toward consensus on matters of marriage, it is also coming together on the dangers of overcriminalization," writes Neal Katyal.
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"the court sharply limited the use of dog sniffs at traffic stops, finding that they violated the Fourth Amendment. "
I have a small personal experience with this one. I described it here.
The short version is that we were driving to Tucson for Thanksgiving when my daughter was 16 and had got a late start because the girls (my daughter and her friend) had school that day. We were stopped at a Border Patrol checkpoint in Arizona that was taken over < i guess by DEA and a drug sniffing dog "signaled" our car. The result was a failed search that obviously disappointed the rather stupid appearing drug warriors. They questioned the girls individually telling them they knew there were drugs in the car. My other daughter, an FBI agent, told me later that was against all regulations.
I'm happy to see this result and I am concerned about abuse of prosecutorial discretion, as well as aggressive police behavior in situations where they are obviously in no danger.
"The 7th case, the one the government won, was the one you're most likely to have noticed, Glossip v. Gross, upholding the 3-drug lethal injection against a cruel-and-unusual-punishment claim."
The Sheol Cocktail...even convicted criminals have "the right" to "one more for the road".
You could argue that the majority of the criminal cases decided were based on prosecutorial overreach, mainly the misapplication of statute to behavior not properly proscribed by the specific statute. In that sense, who knows if they will actually change much in the mentality of charging decisions.
In Elonis, there was a faulty jury instruction and a decision that seemed to avoid answering the actual issue.
Both the dog-sniff case and Riley, however, do set new limits on law enforcement behavior, and are probably the 2 precedents that will meaningly affect future (police) operations. Unfortunately, both also seem crafted in a way that invite the cops to articulate inventive after-the-fact bases instead of actually getting with the spirit of the decisions.
As the United States moves toward consensus on matters of marriage
That's the media blitz.
Anti-consensus lawn sign, July 1 pic, newly erected.
I was aware of the Henderson case. (Mainly because Dave Hardy was following it.)
The case hung on a somewhat-unimpressive argument by the Government that blurred the distinction between "possession of a firearm" and "ownership of a firearm."
The Supremes disagreed, voting 9-to-0 to allow the felon to designate that the firearms be transferred to an innocent third party.
I'll believe it's a trend when some prosecutors start getting fired, jailed or disbarred.
I agree with JCC above. Both prosecutors and police routinely overreach. It has long been the case, but it seems to be getting worse. My solution would be to greatly limit their qualified immunity. That way, they would have skin in the game. Currently, they don't, and, indeed,sometimes even profit financially from crossing the line.
The criminal cases Kaytal is talking about are all dealing with the criminal justice system at the margins. What's striking about them is how small bore they are -- focusing on the equivalent of midnight basketball. Some were pure odd-ball cases that will have little real-world impact (Yates), others were important only in the context of drug offenses (the dog sniff case, e.g.), even as the gov't has started to scale back the hopeless war on drugs. Even Glossip was mostly about whether the death penalty will be outlawed by judicial subterfuge -- Alito's emphasis on the requirement that a prisoner challenging a method of execution must show that there is an available alternative method that could be used was clearly aimed at that. Glossip was important only to the small number of prisoners on death row facing execution. But none of those decisions will change much in the way justice is administered in American courts.
Elonis has the potential to be more than that, but time will tell. Even that decision only impacts the relatively small number of cases alleging that speech on the internet was a crime that the Gov't chooses to indict, because that is the only situation in which the Gov't has to prove that a crime occurred. The Gov't has many more ways to intimidate people into silence without having to go to the bother of actually proving anything. The John Doe "investigations" in Wisconsin, with their SWAT style raids, are a prime example, but hardly the only one. For example, the US Atty for the SDNY has recently been issuing grand jury subpoenas to Reason seeking all manner of information about commenters who had the temerity to say some sharply critical things about various governmental officials.
In contrast, Judge Kozinski had an interesting article in a Georgetown journal (linked at Instapundit) that focused on the many, far more serious problems with the criminal justice system. The key problems are doctrines like absolute prosecutorial immunity (Imbler v. Pachtman), almost limitless prosecutorial discretion in the investigation phase (grand jury subpoenas especially), no judicial review of an exercise of prosecutorial discretion, mandatory minimums, and the overreliance on evidence known to be unreliable (eyewitness testimony, junk forensic science, the kinds of prosecutorial witness coaching that would be deemed witness tampering if done by the defense, and the like). With the exception of mandatory minimums, most of those issues are amenable to a judicial solution. But the courts invented the doctrine of prosecutorial immunity, as well as the many doctrines used to keep any exercise of prosecutorial discretion immune from review. What would be remarkable would be a case in which SCOTUS revisited one of the key judicially created, doctrinal foundations of the American justice system as it has come to be.
Don't hold your breath.
The primary link in this piece is broken.
Thanks, Alexander. I fixed it.
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