The Grim Result Of The Jodi Arias Trial

I can understand why people get interested in criminal trials intellectually, and even why some of those trials can become “sensational”, appealing to baser interests.  It’s the same reason people like murder mysteries or whodunnits.  Sherlock Holmes could not have become a popular series unless there were something inside of us, or in the way our minds work, that such fictional stories appeal to.  So the real life versions understandably command attention.

I can also understand the satisfaction of being proven right, and having that acknowledged, with the caveat that prudence and wisdom would counsel that this feeling is not to be over-indulged.  It’s a matter of manners, mostly, a concept that has undergone a sea change in the internet age:  a deplorable lack of manners has been unleashed, as any trip to any message board on virtually any topic will reveal immediately.  The unmannerly have found so much company that they are no longer ashamed and are dragging much of our popular culture down.  I don’t think the bottom is in, either.

In any case, what I can never understand is how some people feel glee or exuberance at a guilty verdict in a criminal trial.  To me a guilty verdict is always a sad occurrence, even when I believe it is justified.  And the more serious the crime, the sadder it is.

So Jodi Arias was found guilty of first degree murder and now a death sentence is on the table.  The mob, led by the execrable Nancy Grace, is already foaming at the mouth and looking for blood.  A friend of the victim weighs in:

“It just feels so good … to finally have the truth and be vindicated,” said Dave Hall, choking back tears.

Don’t forget how close “vindicated” is to “vindictive”, David.

The big crowd outside the courthouse “erupted in cheers” at the verdict.  Ugh.

By any sane measure this was a horrible incident and a tragedy for all concerned, Jodi Arias included.  I indicated elsewhere (near the end of this post) that it was hard for me to see an acquittal on all possible homicide convictions, since self-defense seemed to be belied by the nature of the victim’s wounds.  But my opinion, although it is soft since I didn’t follow this one closely, is that although murder with premeditation had some support, it wasn’t enough for a conviction.  In other words I think the jury got it wrong here, but I would probably not be able to quarrel with a lesser murder or manslaughter conviction.

I do not think the death penalty is appropriate here under any circumstances, and I’ll venture a guess that the jury will not authorize it.

I’m worried, and I think lawyers and judges should be especially worried, that the unremitting scorn heaped upon juries who acquitted in high profile cases like Casey Anthony’s and OJ Simpson’s has distorted the jury pool nation wide.  And it’s yet another failure of the legal profession and lawyers that, far from alleviating this problem, lawyers have often aggravated it.  And not only have they suffered no professional consequences, they have ridden their ethically challenged behavior to fame and fortune.  And there are more wannabes waiting in the wings.

Lawyers are important for so many reasons, but maintaining perspective and, yes, dignity in the middle of adjudicating some of the worst things human beings can do is among the most important.  If the profession as a whole was more introspective, somber and grim on occasions such as these people would be ashamed to engage in their unseemly revelry.  Nancy Grace would probably be disbarred and running a psychic hotline, where she belongs.

And we’d all be better off.

Central Park Five – Evasion And Vindictiveness

Here’s how official New York is dealing with the lawsuit brought by the wrongly convicted five, via Huffington Post:

Meanwhile, the New York City government is actively fighting a $250 million civil suit that the Central Park Five and their family members filed in 2003, accusing the city as well as the individual police officers and prosecutors who worked on the case of violating their civil rights.  In September, the city also began waging a legal war with the filmmakers, asking a court to force Burns’ company, Florentine Films, to turn over all notes and outtakes not included in the final documentary for city review, saying it could use the material to defend itself. Earlier this month, city lawyers filed additional documents claiming that Ken Burns and his colleagues are not journalists and therefore aren’t entitled to invoke legal privileges to protect their work product.

Lawyers for Florentine have moved to quash the city’s subpoena on the grounds that they do indeed consider themselves journalists, and that reporters in New York cannot be compelled to share their work product with government officials.

And of course no one is responsible because they were just doing their jobs:

Some of the people involved with the arrests and prosecution of the Central Park Five continue to maintain they did nothing wrong or that the teenagers were, in fact, somehow connected to the crime. A New York Police Department-commissioned review, which was made public in 2003, asserted that the police officers involved did nothing wrong.

The Huffington Post attempted to contact the prosecutors, and police at the center of the Central Park Five convictions. Most did not respond to requests for comment or declined interview requests pointing to the ongoing civil suit. The New York Police Department did not respond to a request for information about the status of the detectives involved in the investigation or interrogations at the center of the case and the vacated convictions. Linda Fairstein, head of the sex crimes unit in the district attorney’s office during the case, left in 2002 to write crime novels that feature a female prosecutor as the heroine. Elizabeth Lederer, the prosecutor who handled the Central Park jogger trials, today leads a unit in the district attorney’s office that investigates labor corruption, and teaches at Columbia University’s Law School. Detective Mike Sheehan, one of the officers involved in securing the teenagers’ confessions, left the police force in 1993 to become a crime reporter for New York television stations. After hitting a police horse and getting fired from his last job, Sheehan began writing and consulting on an NBC crime drama.  None of the three responded to requests for comment.

What on earth is the basis to continue to maintain that “…the teenagers were, in fact, somehow connected to the crime?”  I mean, besides a pathological desire to evade responsibility?

We talked a little about who, and whether, and how, and to what extent any of these people should be held accountable for what happened in that case.  But we can’t even get to that discussion.  In a real sense, the crime against the Central Park Five is ongoing, almost a quarter of a century later.  We don’t know yet the full extent of what it is that the guilty people should be held accountable for.

You would think that maybe the prosecutors could at least stop stonewalling their victims, or at least answer media questions, but they close ranks just like bad cops protecting each other.  But what really irks you is that they’re doing this when they are in the far more powerful position and always have been.  This is like a king who wants for nothing stealing a loaf of bread from a poor peasant and then using his royal position to quash the peasant’s plea to get his bread back not to mention silencing and intimidating anyone who takes up the poor peasant’s plight.  And where is the media coverage?  How dare they ignore this profoundly corrupt abuse of power.

There are no words.  It’s unspeakable.  I don’t know what we’ve become when we spend so much time and attention on the next frivolity while something like this goes unaddressed.  And what saddens me most is that the prosecutors are supposedly lawyers, screened for character and fitness.

Maybe that’s where a lot of problems are.  We have no concept of character and fitness.

Casey Anthony’s Judge Belvin Perry

He reveals himself, once again, and shows why juries are so essential.

He’s playing every establishment card.  The prosecution “proved its case”.  He was “shocked” at the verdict.  The government had “better lawyers”.  How come they lost, then?  Oh, yes.  Baez won because he was like a “used car salesman”.

If he’s being honest, he should be disbarred for incompetence.  His “analysis” of the evidence isn’t just wrong, it’s breathtakingly ridiculous.  The prosecution didn’t prove its case and there was nothing shocking about the verdict, except that the jury managed to overcome Perry’s herculean efforts to browbeat everyone into convicting Casey Anthony.

If he’s not being honest but just playing to the crowd in the hopes of landing one of those lucrative reality TV contracts for tough judges, he should be disbarred for bringing the profession and the judiciary so low in pursuit of personal gain.

Just disgusting.  Ugh.

Amanda Knox – Another Disturbing Parable; The Indelible Stain Of Accusation

I hadn’t weighed in on the Amanda Knox matter, not having familiarized myself with it beyond a passing news article here and there.  Also because all the Italian procedures are confusing, to say the least, for an American lawyer.

But I did make quite a study of this Italian appeals court decision recently.  It’s long, the translation is awkward and it’s not in the least bit light reading anyway, but if you’re so inclined go ahead and read.  Plan on spending a couple of hours, though.

Bottom line is, unless there is something wrong to the point of being nefarious going on in that appeals court, I would say it couldn’t be much clearer that there was no case against Knox or her boyfriend (Sollecito), and the “evidence” supporting the prosecution was a classic product of police and prosecutors deciding guilt first and then ’finding’ evidence to confirm their decision, no matter how weak or implausible – or indeed non-existent – the evidence is.

Here are the highlights, in my view, that pretty much dismantle any idea that there was any genuine proof that Knox or her boyfriend were involved:

1.  The knife.  This was extremely important evidence for the prosecution who argued that a knife found not at the murder scene but at Sollecito’s apartment had Knox’s DNA on the handle and Meredith Kercher’s (the victim’s) DNA on the blade.  This would support a conclusion that the knife was the murder weapon and would be very damning to Knox because her DNA was on it and to Sollecito because of where it was found and whose knife it was.  Problem is, turns out Meredith Kercher’s DNA was not on the knife at all.  That changes everything.  Indeed, if that is true there is no reason to believe that it is ‘the knife’ - as in the murder weapon - at all.

2. The bra clasp. The prosecution alleged that Sollecito’s DNA was found on the victim’s bra clasp, and she had been wearing that bra prior to being fatally attacked.  Again, very damning evidence if true, it being hard to imagine an innocent reason why Sollecito’s DNA would have been there.  The problems?  First, the clasp wasn’t collected for over a month, crime scene investigators and maybe lots of others had been all over the scene and for some reason when the clasp was finally collected as evidence it was in a different location from where it was first observed, and there was no explanation for that.  On the usual chain of custody type requirements for evidence of this nature, well, let’s just say that on that basis alone this is a massive fail as evidence.  And keep in mind that chain of custody requirements are imposed precisely to avoid and/or expose contamination and/or tampering with evidence.  The second problem is that even if you didn’t have a massive fail on chain of custody grounds, the appellate court’s independent experts concluded that there was and could have been no valid determination that Sollecito’s DNA was on the clasp anyway.

3. A bloody bare footprint on a mat in the bathroom.  The prosecution argued, and the trial court found that this footprint belonged to Sollecito.  The other possibility was Rudy Guede, whom everyone pretty much agrees was the murderer, the only question being whether Sollecito and Knox were also there and participating.  Now, the truth of the matter is quite simply that standing alone, based on visual inspection and analysis of the footprint, either conclusion is nothing more than a guess.  You get your expert I get mine kind of thing. But the real problem is that you have to throw in a few other undisputed facts:  first, it is a print of a bare right foot; second that there are shoe prints in blood elsewhere in the crime scene that were initially declared by police and prosecutors to match Sollecito’s shoes but were then later conceded to match Rudy Guede’s shoes; third – and this is crucial – all of these shoe prints were of the left shoe, strongly implying that for some reason Guede’s right shoe was off, which in turn strongly implies that the bare footprint on the mat was from Guede because it’s consistent with everything else that is known and not disputed.

Now, these three things were the cornerstones – the ‘solid proof’ type stuff – of the prosecution’s narrative, the rest of the case being witnesses who claimed to have seen this or that, and questionable assertions of incriminating statements, odd  – and in the cop mind therefore incriminating – behavior and whatnot in the aftermath of the crime, and lots of smearing of Knox’s moral character.

In other words, it was the kind of case that any sensible person would think was utterly bogus unless there was some ‘solid proof’ type stuff, and the solid proof type stuff that was in fact offered all turns out to be bogus.

But there is another hard truth here.  Bogus though the case was, Amanda Knox will live under a pall of suspicion the rest of her life, involving a lurid and tawdry and indeed excruciating tale that many will believe – and judging from twitter traffic many do believe – even though in the end the tale is nothing but the product of some prosecutors’ fertile and febrile imagination with virtually no reliable evidence to support it.

So that’s my take on the Knox matter, if anyone is interested.

As a brief aside, on the somewhat more topical matter of Jodi Arias I don’t know a lot about it and haven’t followed it besides a passing glance to news reports here and there, but from what I know the jury is out deliberating.  With the caveat that I am thus largely ignorant in the matter, I can offer that it’s hard for me to see her escaping criminal liability entirely.  There is some evidence supporting pre-meditation but nowhere near enough, I think.  There is some evidence consistent with defending herself to some extent, but not to the point where she can justify killing the man after he was already down.  I’m not aware of any self-defense or ‘justification’ defense that will countenance a throat slitting coup de grace, which I understand must have occurred even under the defense version of events.  The prosecution, from what I read, thinks the coup de grace was administered by gunshot.  Either way, I’d be surprised if she was not convicted at least of manslaughter, if not a lesser murder charge.

But the Jodi Arias stuff is not really a firm or well informed opinion of mine, I just thought I’d say something about it since the jury is deliberating and as of this writing I don’t know the verdict.

 

 

“Mistakes Were Made” In The Central Park Jogger Case?

That’s it?  That’s where the paper of record thinks this should all end up?

How forgiving we are prepared to be when the wrongdoer is a prosecutor:

The petition against Ms. Lederer, in part, reduces her life in public service to a single moment, the jogger case. In fact, she has a lengthy résumé of unchallenged convictions in cold cases, having pursued investigations of forgotten crimes. No one lives without error. And designating a single villain completely misses the point and power of the documentary. The jogger case belongs to a historical moment, not any one prosecutor or detective; it grew in the soils of a rancid, angry, fearful time.

Well, I’m not sure either that going after the prosecutor “completely misses the point and power of the documentary” or that it “reduces her life in public service to a single moment” any more than her victims have had their lives reduced to a single moment, the difference being that her victims didn’t do anything wrong whereas she did.

My God this is a curious viewpoint being expressed here.  There’s a lot of blame to go around?  No doubt:

Politicians called for blood. Donald Trump campaigned for the return of the death penalty. Much of the news media failed to note the vast inconsistencies in the case. Among the skeptics, people like me had mumbled, rather than shouted, our doubts.

Advocates for the accused were undercut by demonstrators who marched outside the courthouse in 1990, and chanted that the attack had been a hoax or that the jogger’s boyfriend had done it. At least two defense lawyers dozed through parts of the trials. At parole hearings, the boys denied having any contact with the jogger, but acknowledged having been in the park that night with a mob that had hassled or hurt others.

Ms. Lederer wrongly told the jury that hair found in the clothing of one of the boys “matched” hair from the victim, a seeming corroboration of the confused, rambling confessions. Even at the time, that overstated the evidence. More than a decade later, DNA tests would show that the hair did not come from the jogger.

Mistakes were made. But not just by Elizabeth Lederer, who is not discussing the matter in public.

So let me get this straight.  Ms. Lederer is to be let off the hook so completely that even at this late date she is to be given a pass on even so much as publicly expressing contrition?  Really?  And until she was recently called out on it in the wake of the Burns documentary, she was still listing the jogger case as one of her big professional accomplishments?

I don’t agree.  She can at least apologize for her role in ruining five lives.  For Chrissakes.

Beyond that if there are no consequences for her or the media or the other players in the drama, well, truth be told I don’t care.  It wouldn’t bother me to see everyone professionally diminished, for example, but it wouldn’t bother me if they aren’t, either.  I’ll agree that perhaps the cycle of retribution should be curtailed.  As a matter of prudence.

But the five victims have had a lawsuit pending for ten years.  The powers that be have apparently stonewalled it.  For the love of God that has to stop.  Give them all a lot of money.  Not a little; a lot.  That’s the only thing that can be done – if we’re not going to have retribution, that is – and it provides a measure of accountability as well as a remedy for the harm inflicted, the only kind of remedy that can actually help balance things out a bit.

And before we leave this topic for now, let’s also note that whereas the defense lawyers are faulted for “dozing” during the trial – although I’m sure it wasn’t during any important parts – and even the media, and even the writer, come in for some criticism here, along with the public at large, judges are conspicuously absent from the critique and so are jurors, which merely confirms that a jury is never blamed for a wrongful conviction but are viciously blamed for a ‘wrongful acquittal’, such as OJ Simpson or Casey Anthony.

There’s a long way to go in the examination of conscience that a lot of people should be doing as a result of this case.  And the New York Times article demonstrates that most of what went wrong here is so intractably embedded in the players’ subconscious minds that it isn’t going to go well, if it gets done at all.

I’ll say it one last time, though, for emphasis.  Pay these guys.  And apologize.  Now.

h/t Scott Greenfield

Another One For The Home Team

You might think that the undisputed facts here cry out for a jury determination, not just a judge’s.

But then a jury might get carried away by the whole dead, unarmed teenager thing, and find liability, and make a substantial monetary award. Then an appellate court would have to do the dirty work of throwing it all out after the fact.  As they usually do.

Better to never let the jury decide it at all.  Seventh amendment? Pshaw.  Judge Klausner knows better:

The video footage shows that Arian turned towards officers on three separate occasions and extended his arms outward towards them. … In each instance, Arian held a small, dark object in his hands and pointed it in the direction of officers. … Based on this footage, the court determines that no reasonable juror could find that Arian’s stance did not resemble that of an individual preparing to fire a gun.”

“Here, the undisputed evidence shows that Arian, in the process of fleeing from officers, took a shooting stance and pointed his cell phone at officers three times in a span of only 19 seconds

Yes, you read that right.  The deceased was “pointing” a cell phone.  Kind of hard to take pictures if you don’t point the camera at the subject.

The Court “determines” all right.

There should be a lawyers’ strike in LA over this, not that there will be.  Pity.

Rogoff & Reinhart Redux

They’re baaack.

Nicely done, I have to say.  Full disclosure: Ken Rogoff was a childhood neighbor of mine in Rochester, New York.

But, see here.  What R&R are really advocating is a kind of soft austerity.  They actually bring up the subject of “debt write-downs”, which maybe, I guess, would take the form of some across the board percentage. But if it doesn’t, then how exactly do R&R hope to accomplish debt write downs? The central bank will strong-arm certain players to do that? What if they won’t? What about the others, the ones the central bank doesn’t strong-arm? Who gets the strong arm and who doesn’t?

A lot more to that, methinks.  Again, the law is involved, and it’s kind of amazing to see these very smart people at Harvard walk right up to that door and then leave it closed as if they’re terrified of what’s inside the next room.

If you’re not going to be “dismissive” of debt then to the extent you’re not writing debt down you’re advocating some version of austerity. This is what it means to be economically austere.  Then again, aren’t R&R being dismissive of debt when they advocate that it should be increased?

A higher borrowing trajectory is warranted, given weak demand and low  interest rates, where governments can identify high-return infrastructure  projects. Borrowing to finance productive infrastructure raises long-run  potential growth, ultimately pulling debt ratios lower. We have argued this  consistently since the outset of the crisis.

And then there is this concern, and it has to do with interest rates:

No one fully understands why rates have fallen so far so fast, and therefore no one can be sure for how long their current low level will be sustained…Economists simply have little idea how long it will be until rates begin to  rise. If one accepts that maybe, just maybe, a significant rise in interest  rates in the next decade might be a possibility, then plans for an unlimited  open-ended surge in debt should give one pause.

Why should it give us pause, R&R?  Why shouldn’t people just be snapping up all the “free money”?  This is a revealing quote. The concern, the “pause” is the risk to lenders from a rising interest rate environment. Their portfolio of low interest receivables gets decimated.

Why did rates fall “so far so fast”? It’s quite simple, really. The parasite has killed the host. The potential borrowers are all tapped out, they can’t borrow anymore, so there’s no demand for loans and rates descend in an effort to lure borrowers who no longer exist. The parasitical financial “industry” makes its money by making loans and they’ve made all the money they’re going to make. At least that way. At least from the same pool of borrowers anyway.

How long can it all go on? It’s been going on in Japan for nearly a quarter century. No reason to think we can’t meet or exceed that mark.

H/T my friend from across the pond, Frances Coppola.