Tag: law

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crime and punishment national politics & policies

Trump’s Libertarian Promise

Ross Ulbricht, drugs, drug war, prison, law, Silk Road

“If you vote for me,” President-​elect Donald Trump promised the delegates at the Libertarian Party national convention last May, “on Day One, I will commute the sentence of Ross Ulbricht to time served.”

That is eleven years so far. “We’re going to get him home,” insisted Trump. 

Mr. Ulbricht, a libertarian cause célèbre, was sentenced in 2013 to double life terms, without parole, plus 40 years. 

So, who did he kill? 

At 26 years of age, Ulbricht created the Silk Road online platform, “an anonymous e‑commerce website.” Used by some folks, certainly, to trade in drugs and other illegalities.

On a Change​.org petition urging presidential clemency (which I’ve signed), his mother explains: “Ross is a first-​time offender” and “an Eagle Scout, scientist and peaceful entrepreneur,” who faced only “non-​violent charges at trial. He was never prosecuted for causing harm or bodily injury and no victim was named at trial.”

That’s why she and many of us simply cannot stand the idea that now 40-​year-​old “Ross is condemned to die in prison.”

Dudley Do-​Right — no. Trump to the rescue!

Indeed, it was a very smart political move, courting the Libertarian vote both by showing up and, specifically, by pledging to free Ross Ulbricht. Libertarians suddenly had a tangible reason to support Trump.

Will Trump keep his word? “I do think he’s going to free Ross Ulbricht,” Libertarian Party Chair Angela McArdle told Robby Soave on his “Rising” program.

I think so, too. I sure hope so. It would be refreshing to see the awesome power our Constitution gives the president to pardon crimes and commute sentences used for someone deserving of mercy. 

Rather than someone escaping justice.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Fourth Amendment rights media and media people property rights

The Realism of ‘Rebel Ridge’

Rebel Ridge, Civil Asset Forfeiture, law, police, abuse, corruption

Some viewers of the popular Netflix film Rebel Ridge say that it’s unrealistic. But a certain crucial assumption of the story is very realistic indeed.

The movie assumes that some cops are bad cops. More specifically, it assumes that bad cops often have arbitrary legal authority to do bad things. In the movie, what gets the ball rolling is the arbitrary authority conferred by America’s civil forfeiture laws.

These laws permit officers to confiscate cash on your person if they merely have a suspicion, or pretend to, that the cash is ill-​gotten. They needn’t have evidence that it’s drug money or bank-​robbery proceeds. 

The suspicion is enough.

And even if you can show that the money was acquired by your own hard work and withdrawn from your bank account in pursuit of a legitimate end — buying a truck, bailing a cousin out of jail (the reason that the protagonist carries cash in Rebel Ridge) — that’s typically not the end of it. It’s rare that the law-​empowered thugs who violated your property rights just say “Oops!” and hand your property right back.

J. Justin Wilson of the Institute for Justice observes another realistic portrayal of injustice in the movie, “over-​detaining defendants to keep them quiet.” In real life, though, such over-​detention may have as much to do with bureaucratic sloth as with malice directed toward a particular prisoner.

The solution, says Wilson, is not revenge, but the kinds of legal reform IJ fights for. The movie, on the other hand, leaned more on revenge.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment ideological culture

Noncriminal Advice Not a Crime

I have now learned, or relearned, that doing legal things may well be illegal.

A recent example of the legal-​is-​illegal syndrome is the apparent criminalization, ex post facto, of helping your clients legally promote their legally vendible wares.

According to an April 2024 Wall Street Journal report, the consulting firm McKinsey is in trouble with the Justice Department for advising Purdue on how to sell more of its drug OxyContin, which is legal to sell. The Department has criminally opened a criminal investigation into McKinsey’s “role in advising” opioid manufacturers like Purdue “on how to boost sales.”

McKinsey consultants suggested pitching more to doctors who prescribe OxyContin the most, pitching less to docs who don’t prescribe it.

Which part of this shockingly standard advice is the criminal activity?

As economists David Henderson and Charles Hooper note, there is “nothing mysterious or nefarious” about going where the sales are. It’s “economically rational. To do otherwise would be inefficient and wasteful.”

But there’s an Opioid Crisis. 

And whenever there’s a Crisis, lawmakers and launchers of criminal investigations hurtle to ignore subtle distinctions about legal, illegal, etc.

I’m not quite sure what we do in light of this information, that all the legal-​to-​do things are now subject to senseless investigations by Justice Department hacks, bored or maniacal.

I guess the safest thing would be to stop doing things. All the things. Well, you can’t really live by pursuing safety — or a mirage of safety — at all costs.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment judiciary regulation

The Court v. the Power Grabbers

bureaucrats, regulations, deep state, law

The U.S. Supreme Court giveth and the U.S. Supreme Court taketh away.

A slew of Supreme Court decisions is keeping us off balance. While we were still reeling from the blow delivered by Murthy v. Missouri’s go-​ahead for federal suppression of social-​media speech, the court also acted to rein in runaway bureaucrats.

The decision, which some call a “major blow to big government”  — let’s see how it plays out before echoing this — is Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo. In this 6 – 3 ruling to limit the administrative state’s power to expand its power, the court reversed its own 1984 ruling, Chevron USA v. NRDC.

According to Stanford Law professor Michael McConnell, Chevron meant that when the actions of a federal agency — to stop you from cleaning up a pond (“wetland”) on your own property or whatever — end up being litigated, courts must “defer to the agency’s own construction of its operating statute” unless that construction is too wildly unreasonable.

Agencies consequently enjoyed “considerable leeway in determining the scope” of what they can do to us. 

Guess what. They typically prefer more power to less, less constitutional restraint to more.

“Chevron is overruled,” the new ruling states. Courts must “exercise their independent judgment in deciding whether an agency has acted within its statutory authority, and courts may not defer to an agency interpretation of the law simply because a statute is ambiguous.”

Maybe more courts will now more often stop runaway bureaucrats in their tracks.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment ideological culture judiciary

Violent Double Standard

law, justice, crime, double standard

Trying to find justice in the justice system is sometimes like panning for gold in a dry river. But what ho, hey, we’ve found some.

Victoria Taft points us to “a federal judge who believes in justice” … or a reasonable facsimile thereof.

Recently, California District Court Judge Cormac Carney chastised a purportedly anti-​crime department of the Department of Justice for prosecuting two men who “became members of a group characterized as ‘white supremacist’” for alleged violence while carefully ignoring the often worse conduct of Antifa and BAMN members.

Carney dismissed the federal charges against the two men.

He argued that “prosecuting only members of the far right and ignoring members of the far left leads to the troubling conclusion that the government believes it is permissible to physically assault and injure Trump supporters to silence speech.…

“At the same Trump rallies that form the basis for Defendants’ prosecution, members of Antifa and related far-​left groups engaged in organized violence to stifle protected speech.”

There’s something wrong when people who had been holding a peaceful event full of speeches and flag-​waving are prosecuted — not just prosecuted, but selectively prosecuted — for defending themselves when violent leftists show up and act violently.

If a speaker commits an actual crime, sure, he should be punished, in a proportionate way and without regard to the ideology of the speaker. Equal justice under the law, that’s all.

How about it, Justice Department? Care to earn your name?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Crime: Police or Re-define?

crime, definition, tax

Can crime be defined out of existence?

“Attorney Ben Crump proposed a solution to the issue of high crime that is plaguing the black community,” YouTube commentator Anthony Brian Logan reports on a story that an aging white fellow like myself was not apt to spot. “He said it is easy to identify criminals if laws that target specific groups of people are created. Crump brought up Eric Garner, who lost his life after struggling with police outside of a store when he was accused of selling loose cigarettes.”

Crump says crimes have been defined into existence targeting black communities.

Mr. Logan urges us to understand the context for Crump’s theorizing: the African-​American lawyer “was speaking to a group of black men for an MSNBC special called ‘Black Men in America, Road To 2024.’ The purpose of the special is to rein black men back in and stop them from straying away from the Democratic Party.”

Logan is skeptical that this sort of half-​cleverness is going to cut it with black men, who in increasing numbers are bolting from the ranks of the party created by Martin Van Buren. 

Many of us, of all colors, were extremely sympathetic to Eric Garner, who died at the hands of New York City police trying to block Garner’s unlicensed entrepreneurial effort enabled by high taxes on cigarettes. Yet, the real problem with Crump’s notion is that the worst crime in black neighborhoods is rampant theft and violence, the kind of activity that common sense dictates as criminal no matter who legislates, or why.

Defining crime into existence is not the current cause of increased black crime, Logan says, it’s decreased policing and punishment.

Crump’s argument, counters Anthony Brian Logan point blank, “is stupid.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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