Tag: law

Categories
crime and punishment ideological culture media and media people

Why Criminals Commit Crimes

criminal mind, crime, incentives

Is it a mystery?

“I really think if we can identify the ‘why,’ especially amongst the juveniles, we might be able to change our approach on how to slow this down,” says Carlos Heraud, an assistant chief at the DC police department.

Along with other crime in Washington. D.C., carjackings are up. Why?

Some people choose to be criminals. And some policymakers choose to aid and abet them.

It’s a matter of incentives and disincentives, but also choices and character. 

Since different people react differently to being born into poverty — or being disrespected, being peer-​pressured, being bored, being fired — we cannot simply say that criminals are created by difficult circumstances.

Most do not become thugs and hoodlums.

Some who make criminal choices pull back and determine to do better. Others commit offenses forever. Chief Heraud and D.C. mayors and lawmakers should heed the insights of Stanton Samenow’s Inside the Criminal Mind. Although criminals make excuses for themselves and latch onto the excuses made for them by others, they know they’re responsible for their actions.

But while circumstances don’t create the criminal mind, circumstances can abet crime. For example, if you make it easier for criminals to get away with assault and theft, they’ll likely commit more assaults and thefts.

The government of our imperial capital makes it hard for potential victims to arm themselves, easy for criminals who are “caught” to walk away. If you’re a criminal operating in a town like that, it’d have to be encouraging to receive by this kind of encouragement?

After all, it’s not a question of bad incentives incentivizing all to be wicked. The effects can be seen on the margin, among those most likely to be induced by corrupt incentives, or to not be dissuaded from criminal action by reduced disincentives.

No great mystery.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with PicFinder​.ai

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Categories
insider corruption national politics & policies partisanship

A Very Special Prosecutor

Hunter Biden, swamp, Washington DC, investigation, law, crime

You don’t send a salamander to put out a fire or a leech to drain a swamp. Similarly, you don’t appoint David Weiss as a special counsel to “investigate” the Hunter Biden case. 

Not if you want justice.

Weiss, who has been on the case since 2017, was responsible for the cushy plea deal that fell apart last month, in court. It was a novel, first-​of-​its-​kind offering of immunity to all future prosecutions for unspecified charges. When pressed in court, the prosecutors had to admit it was “unprecedented.”

And the judge had to throw it out.

Now, with U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland appointing Weiss as special counsel, the questions mount:

  • Why Weiss — considering his track record?
  • What additional powers does he have — considering the AG’s past assurances that Weiss had everything he needed?
  • And why now?

To answer that last query, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D‑Md.) admitted on ABC’s This Week — amidst many accusations against former President Donald Trump — that Hunter Biden “did a lot of really unlawful and wrong things” and that Mr. Weiss, “with the collapse of the plea agreement that he had apparently worked out with Hunter Biden,” now “wants to be certain that he’s got the authority to go bring charges wherever he wants.”

Which only further begs the question. Weiss says he didn’t ask for it. And if he in fact lacked what was needed, why didn’t Garland give it before?

What’s really going on?

“The Biden Justice Department is trying to stonewall congressional oversight,” explains House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R‑Ky.), “as we have presented evidence to the American people about the Biden family’s corruption.”

And as Jonathan Turley, the renowned George Washington University law professor, adds, “The initial impact is to insulate Weiss from calls for testimony before Congress.”

Republicans are looking this Democrat gift horse in the mouth. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with PicFinder​.ai and DALL-E2

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Categories
crime and punishment property rights

It’s a Crime

property rights, rental

Somebody forces his way into your home and insists on hanging around. You can’t eject him yourself, but you manage to contact the police. The police arrive. You prove you’re the owner. The police arrest the intruder and you resume full use of your property.

Patti Peeples and Dawn Tiura want intruders to be treated this same way — as criminals to be thwarted immediately — if owners are away when intruders intrude.

The pair co-​own a Jacksonville, Florida, house that they rent out. After the last tenant moved out, two squatters moved in. They were discovered by a handyman.

To evict the squatters, Peeples and Tiura had to go to court to start justice’s slow wheels turning. It took more than a month.

The squatters told police that they’d been conned by a rental scam. But they had recently told the same story to explain their occupancy of another home in the neighborhood. 

Also, they threw a brick and feces at the owners’ car as the owners were driving past the house. 

And after the squatters were finally evicted, the owners discovered massive damage: missing appliances, holes punched in walls.

So, not innocent. Much less sanitary.

“Squatters are nothing more than criminals who are breaking and entering into a house,” Peeples says. “They should not be handled in civil court. They should be treated within the criminal court system.”

There’s certainly no reason to let them linger and wreak revenge for having suffered the inconvenience of being caught.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with PicFinder​.ai and DALL-E2

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Categories
crime and punishment general freedom insider corruption

If It Can Happen to Trump

freedom, law, justice

If it can happen to former President Donald Trump — something like the politically motivated ham-​sandwich indictment issuing from an avid Trump-​hating Democratic DA — can it happen to you and me?

It already happened to me. Fifteen years ago.

Handcuffs and leg-​irons. Paul Jacob, Rick Carpenter, Susan Johnson.

The Oklahoma Three. Indicted by an arch enemy of citizen initiative, Oklahoma Apparatchik and Attorney General Drew Edmondson.

No, we hadn’t robbed a bank or gunned down the sheriff.

We were accused of not following all regulations in conducting a 2006 petition drive in Oklahoma. The fictional charge: “conspiracy to defraud the state of Oklahoma.”

The possibility of ten years in prison hung over our heads for a year and a half. In all that time, the AG started but never completed a preliminary hearing after which a judge could decide whether the indictment had enough evidence to warrant a trial. (Because it didn’t.) Then, the federal 10th Circuit declared unconstitutional the law we had allegedly violated, residency requirements for signature gatherers. 

Gritting his teeth and with smoke pouring out of his ears, Drew Edmondson dismissed the charges.

If somebody with official power like Edmondson or New York County District Attorney Alvin Bragg wants to wield it against you and is indifferent to the requirements of justice, he might just do that.

Can it happen to you? Maybe not. Keep your head down, never say anything somebody somewhere could dispute, don’t leave the house, always wear a disguise, never exercise your political rights in a way that might draw the attention of thin-​skinned and scared denizens of the political establishment.

Do all this, and you’ll probably almost certainly be fine. Maybe.

Or just fight them anyway.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with Midjourney

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Categories
First Amendment rights judiciary partisanship

Disbar the Disbarrers?

Texas State Bar, politics, censorship, corruption

After Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton legally challenged how several states conducted the 2020 election, dozens of lawyers submitted complaints. 

To the state bar. 

Their idea: disbar the Republican officeholder for daring to oppose the current Democratic narrative about “election denialism.” 

The Office of Chief Disciplinary Counsel dismissed those initial complaints as “not demonstrat[ing] Professional Misconduct,” but several attorneys appealed the decision, including a friend of Paxton’s Democratic opponent in the 2022 election for attorney general. The Texas State Board reversed the dismissal. Now a judge has allowed the case against Paxton to go forward.

The threat of disbarment is increasingly being wielded as an ideological weapon and without regard to whether targeted individuals have committed any wrongdoing worthy of disbarment. It’s the lawyers’ version of cancel culture.

This is demonstrated in a lengthy report by Margot Cleveland in The Federalist, who details many other instances as well as Paxton’s. 

These include the DC Bar’s pursuit of former Assistant Attorney General Jeff Clark and the California Bar’s pursuit of John Eastman, among a “barrage of politicized bar complaints pursued against Republican lawyers who provided legal advice or litigated various issues in the aftermath of the November 2020 general election.”

The purpose, then, is not to combat corruption but to corruptly intimidate any lawyers inclined to represent Republicans in challenges of dubious election results. One malefactor is a group called 65 Project, targeting more than a hundred Republican-​aligned attorneys but no Democrat-​aligned attorneys. Seems partisan.

Should lawyers who seek to disbar lawyers solely because of political disagreements be disbarred themselves?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with PicFinder​.ai

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Categories
crime and punishment general freedom national politics & policies

The Middle of the Beginning of the End

Presidential powers, pardons, marijuana

President Biden’s decision to pardon everyone federally convicted for a simple marijuana possession is not the true beginning of the end of the federal war on drug-​taking people.

In 2018, the federal government legalized certain products with cannabinoids derived from hemp. That’s something, even if the feds still ban buying and selling marijuana.

On the other hand, for years many states have been legalizing pot, inspiring the federal government to somewhat slacken enforcement of its own pot ban — sometimes.

These developments constitute the beginning of the end for the federal war on drug-​taking people.

Call Biden’s gesture the middle of the beginning. That it won’t be rapidly followed by full federal legalization of unapproved drugs or even marijuana is shown by the objections of other politicians.

Senator Tom Cotton laments that Biden is “giving blanket pardons to pot heads — many of whom pled down from more serious charges.”*

The argument would be equally valid if it were illegal to blow soap bubbles and some people had pled down from a charge of smashing windows to a charge of blowing soap bubbles. Granted, plea deals are often horrible, wrongly abetting the guilty and hurting the innocent. So reform the plea-​deal regime. 

But don’t criminalize non-crimes.

The real impact? The White House admits that “while no-​one is currently in prison for ‘simple possession,’ a pardon for those who have convictions could allow better access to housing or employment.”

Call it a half-​start at the middle of the beginning of the end.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Another lament is that Biden’s pardon is just cynical election-​eve politics. Well … let’s have more such pandering to the people; it seems the only way to get good policy from bad politicians. 

PDF for printing

Illustration created with DALL‑E

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts