The Staggering Success of Trump’s Trial Delay Tactics
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2j9nFdprnA
Tag: criminal justice
The Myth of the Migrant Crime Wave
“There’s no question that some undocumented immigrants have committed heinous crimes. But there are many reasons to be doubtful that recent incidents are evidence of a surging migrant crime wave.
For one, crime is down in the cities that received the most migrants as a result of Texas’ busing operations under Operation Lone Star, per an NBC News analysis. “Overall crime is down year over year in Philadelphia, Chicago, Denver, New York and Los Angeles,” NBC News reported.
David J. Bier, associate director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, echoes that finding. “We don’t have real-time data, but the partial crime data that exist for this year show consistent declines in major crimes in major cities,” he says. “The most significant crime spike in recent years occurred in 2020—when illegal immigration was historically low until the end of the year.”
“National crime data, especially pertaining to undocumented immigrants, is notoriously incomplete,” since it “comes in piecemeal and can only be evaluated holistically when the annual data is released,” cautions NBC News. What’s more, “most local police don’t record immigration status when they make arrests.”
However, several analyses conducted at both the state and federal levels find that immigrants—including undocumented ones—are less crime-prone than native-born Americans. Looking at “two decades of research on immigration and crime,” criminologists Graham Ousey and Charis Kubrin found that “communities with more immigration tend to have less crime, especially violent crimes like homicide,” wrote The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler. A 2015 Migration Policy Institute report indicated that undocumented immigrants have a lower rate of felony convictions than the overall U.S. population does.
The Cato Institute’s “research has consistently shown that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes and less likely to end up incarcerated than natives,” Bier continues. An article this week by Alex Nowrasteh, vice president for economic and social policy studies at the Cato Institute, indicated that illegal immigrants have a lower homicide conviction rate in Texas than native-born Americans do, while legal immigrants have a lower conviction rate than both groups.”
https://reason.com/2024/03/01/the-myth-of-the-migrant-crime-wave/
Judge orders Trump to pay $355 million for lying about his wealth in staggering civil fraud ruling
“A New York judge imposed a $364 million penalty Friday on Donald Trump, his companies and some executives, ruling that they engaged in a yearslong scheme to dupe banks and others with financial statements that inflated the former president’s wealth.”
…
“Engoron concluded that Trump and his co-defendants “failed to accept responsibility” for their actions and that expert witnesses who testified for the defense “simply denied reality.”
The judge called the civil fraud at the heart of the trial a “venial sin, not a mortal sin.”
“They did not rob a bank at gunpoint. Donald Trump is not Bernard Madoff. Yet, defendants are incapable of admitting the error of their ways,” wrote Engoron, a Democrat. He said their “complete lack of contrition and remorse borders on pathological.”
“The frauds found here leap off the page and shock the conscience,” the judge added.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/verdict-donald-trump-civil-fraud-051849503.html
Police are solving fewer crimes. Why?
“” the murder clearance rate fell from above 60 percent in 2019 to just 52 percent in 2022.””
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“Asher also points out that 2020 began an exodus of officers leaving law enforcement. “The majority of big cities had fewer officers in 2022 than they did in 2019,” Asher says. “If you have fewer officers, you have fewer resources to dedicate to solving crime, which means lower clearance rates. And we do have lots of research that shows that.””
https://www.vox.com/2023/12/23/24012514/police-crime-data-solve-rate-eddie-garcia-today-explained
This Innocent Woman Is on the Hook for Thousands After a SWAT Team Destroyed Her Home
“it remains unclear if she will receive compensation after the government acted on its error-prone investigation and left her home a shell of what it once was. But one thing is almost certain: There will be more innocent people like her in the future whose lives are upended by the state, only to be told that’s just their tough luck.”
https://reason.com/2023/12/20/this-innocent-woman-is-on-the-hook-for-thousands-after-a-swat-team-destroyed-her-home/
Trump’s Promise to ‘Indemnify’ Cops ‘Against Any and All Liability’ Is Absurd for 2 Reasons
“Schwartz found that cops were not actually on the hook for damages or settlements in civil rights cases even when their employers decided that their conduct warranted discipline or dismissal. They were not on the hook even when prosecutors decided that their conduct warranted criminal charges. Yet Trump claims that cops “avoid any conflict” and are “afraid to do anything” because they worry that frivolous lawsuits will ruin them financially.
In reality, even meritorious lawsuits often do not get far enough that the defendants need the indemnification they would virtually always receive. Under 42 USC 1983, victims of police abuse theoretically can seek damages for violations of their constitutional rights. But thanks to qualified immunity, a restriction that the Supreme Court grafted onto that statute, such lawsuits cannot proceed unless they allege conduct that violated “clearly established” law. In practice, that means plaintiffs must locate precedents with closely similar facts, a requirement that can block lawsuits when police behave in ways that even Donald Trump might consider beyond the pale.”
https://reason.com/2023/12/22/trumps-promise-to-indemnify-cops-against-any-and-all-liability-is-absurd-for-2-reasons/
Want To Challenge Your Speed Camera Ticket? That’ll Be $100.
“Motorists caught speeding in Peninsula, Ohio, have options: They can pay with Visa, Mastercard, Discover, or PayPal. But if they want to dispute a ticket, the flexibility ends.
Before vehicle owners can appear in municipal court to defend themselves, they must pay a $100 “filing fee.” No exceptions. No discounts. No deferrals. It’s the cost of admission—roughly the same as a one-day ticket to Disneyland.
Many drivers skip the expense and plead guilty, which works well for Peninsula. In just the first five months after launching a handheld photo radar program in April 2023, this village south of Cleveland generated 8,900 citations and $560,000 in revenue. That’s an average of about 1,800 citations and $110,000 in revenue per month.”
https://reason.com/2023/12/05/want-to-challenge-your-speed-camera-ticket-thatll-be-100/
FBI Seized $86 Million From People Not Suspected of Any Crime. A Federal Court Will Decide if That’s Legal.
“If the Ninth Circuit applies that same reasoning after it hears the case this week, it would deal a serious blow to the Fourth Amendment’s privacy protections in other contexts. In effect, that would say that as long as law enforcement has at least one legitimate reason for cracking open the safe deposit boxes, agents of the state are free to engage in all manner of rights violations without the targets having any legal recourse. It would be equivalent to saying that if the owner of a parking garage is suspected of a crime, all the cars (and the contents of those cars) stored there could be forfeited by the government.
“If the FBI can get away with this here, it’s a green light for the government to try the same ruse again throughout the country,” warns Johnson. “And it’s not just safe deposit boxes. The government could pull the same trick with storage lockers, hotels, even apartment buildings.””
https://reason.com/2023/12/06/the-fbi-seized-their-safe-deposit-boxes-now-a-federal-court-will-hear-the-case/
Hunter Biden’s Multiplying Charges Exemplify a Profound Threat to Trial by Jury
“contrary to the impression left by movies and TV shows, criminal cases almost never go to trial. In the United States, nearly 98 percent of criminal convictions result from guilty pleas”
https://reason.com/2023/12/13/the-multiplying-charges-against-hunter-biden-exemplify-a-profound-threat-to-trial-by-jury/
The Backpage Defendants Never Stood a Chance
“The Department of Justice claimed this was about “keeping women and children across America safe” from sex trafficking. But behind that bravado, the government’s actual case was clearly something less noble. A performance of protection. A publicity stunt. A massive scapegoating set against the backdrop of a moral panic. And a politicized prosecution against people who engaged in and defended the most dangerous thing to any government: free speech.
Ultimately, the Backpage prosecution was a small-scale tragedy that upended individual lives as well as something much bigger. Its effects were wide-reaching and devastating for many sex workers. And yet—it wasn’t ultimately about sexual commerce or sexual crimes, not at its core. This was a warning shot fired at entities that enable all sorts of digital communication and a test bed for further legal attacks on tech companies that won’t suppress speech as politicians see fit.
That Lacey was convicted of “international concealment money laundering” is bizarre, since the money transfer was not concealed: His lawyer informed the IRS about it, as required by law. And it was not made for nefarious purposes, according to Scottsdale lawyer John Becker’s trial testimony. Lacey had needed some place to park his savings after U.S. banks, scared by a years-long propaganda crusade against Backpage, had decided doing business with the company or its associates was a reputational risk. So Becker and another lawyer advised Lacey to deposit the money—$17 million, on which taxes had been paid—with a foreign bank.
It’s hard to see how Lacey conducted a financial transaction “to conceal or disguise the nature, the location, the source, the ownership, or the control of the proceeds of specified unlawful activity,” even if you accept the government’s premise that this money was derived from unlawful activity. And, to be clear, I don’t accept that premise, since Backpage’s business should have been protected by the First Amendment (not to mention Section 230 of federal communications law).
But Backpage made money from adult ads, and the government alleges that some of those ads were illegal enticements to prostitution. Therefore, the case alleged, anything done with money made from Backpage was de facto illegal. That’s how Lacey—and former Backpage executives Jed Brunst and Scott Spear—wound up facing money laundering charges for merely moving money around.”
https://reason.com/2023/11/29/the-backpage-defendants-never-stood-a-chance/