This may not be stimulus spending, but Ginny Sloan makes the case that the federal government needs to stimulate justice by investing in criminal justice reforms. Underfunded public defender offices, inadequate crime labs, and untrained police officers all contribute to wrongful convictions. And wrongful convictions are enormously costly.

Wrongful convictions are tragic for all involved, and they are expensive. Taxpayers pay for police investigations and criminal prosecutions that ensnare the wrong person. They pay the costs of incarcerating that person, and they may face substantial damages in wrongful conviction civil suits. All the while, the actual perpetrator is still on the street, able to prey on others.

Not to mention the economic loss society incurs when it incarcerates innocent people who could be working, supporting their families, contributing to the economy, and paying taxes. As Sloan writes: [more ...]

If you care about the quality of the forensic evidence that police and prosecutors use to obtain criminal convictions, you'll want to get your hands on a report that the National Academy of Sciences will be releasing later this month. The science practiced in crime labs isn't as miraculous as CSI makes it out to be.

People who have seen it say it is a sweeping critique of many forensic methods that the police and prosecutors rely on, including fingerprinting, firearms identification and analysis of bite marks, blood spatter, hair and handwriting. The report says such analyses are often handled by poorly trained technicians who then exaggerate the accuracy of their methods in court. It concludes that Congress should create a federal agency to guarantee the independence of the field, which has been dominated by law enforcement agencies, say forensic professionals, scholars and scientists who have seen review copies of the study.

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Finally, we get an answer from President Obama on the recent DEA medical marijuana raids in California. And, it's the right answer.

The White House said it expects those kinds of raids to end once Mr. Obama nominates someone to take charge of DEA, which is still run by Bush administration holdovers.

“The president believes that federal resources should not be used to circumvent state laws, and as he continues to appoint senior leadership to fill out the ranks of the federal government, he expects them to review their policies with that in mind," White House spokesman Nick Shapiro said.

It's good to know President Obama will keep his campaign promise. Now, the question I have is, will AG Eric Holder file federal criminal cases against those busted after Obama's inauguration? The DEA's first post-inaugural raids were reported here.

A couple of state attorneys general are "appalled" that 90,000 registered sex offenders had MySpace pages before MySpace booted them off the site. Never mind that a task force created by the state attorneys general recently concluded that the online sexual solicitation of children isn't a significant problem (sensationalized television shows like "To Catch a Predator" notwithstanding).

The task force, led by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, looked at scientific data on online sexual predators and found that children and teenagers were unlikely to be propositioned by adults online.

Among those who disagreed with this reality because it contradicted his practice of fear-mongering was Connecticut's AG Richard Blumenthal, who complained that the report "downplayed the predator threat." Blumenthal failed to appreciate the difference between "downplaying" a threat and recognizing that the threat isn't significant. [more ...]

Despite assurances it repeatedly gave to Congress, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has not used its increased funding to capture the "most threatening" immigrants who have outstanding deportation orders -- immigrants ICE characterized as criminals or terrorists. ICE instead pursued easier targets.

A vast majority of those arrested had no criminal record, and many had no deportation orders against them, either.

In 2007, only 9 percent of those arrested had criminal records, and 40 percent had no outstanding deportation order. Over 5 years, ICE spent $625 million to arrest 96,000 people, three-quarters of whom had no criminal record.

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For those who hoped for a stop to the escalation of the war on drugs, this isn't your year. During 2008, Congress snuck a few new laws in, and today the Sentencing Commission released its proposed guideline amendments for 2009 (pdf), adding the new offenses and increased penalties. They will appear in tomorrow's federal register and there are 60 days to provide comments.

What's new?

• Ryan Haight Online Pharmacy Consumer Protection Act of 2008. (starts at page 25)
• Drug Trafficking Vessel Interdiction Act of 2008 (starts at page 30)

The first prohibits controlled substance sales and advertising over the internet. The second prohibits drug sales on submarines (ok submersible vessels, and the difference is explained here.)

This is an amazing story. Frank Pignatelli was a criminal defense attorney representing drug defendants in Akron Ohio. He got busted for helping his clients buy stash houses and faced a criminal indictment.

According to court records, Pignatelli was facing his own indictment as a co-conspirator when he agreed to work undercover for federal drug investigators more than three years ago.

With Pignatelli's help, federal agents have arrested 30 people from Akron and Cleveland, and seized hundreds of pounds of marijuana and cocaine, along with cash and property totaling more than $3 million.

He turned informant, and made 30 cases for the Government, including some against his clients. The latest defendant, a former client of his, got 15 years in prison.

Pignatelli got his own case dismissed in exchange for his cooperation. He's still got a law license. He moved his practice to, of all places, Denver (I've never heard of him before today.) In fact, he's representing defendants in federal court, including those charged in drug cases. [More...]

President Obama said during the campaign he would not authorize the DEA to continue medical marijuana raids in states that had legalized it.

The DEA is still raiding, since Bush's people are still leading the agency and we don't have an Obama Attorney General.

Question: Will Obama put a stop to this?

Law Prof Glenn Reynolds, aka Instapundit, has a policy proposal for President Obama in the Wall St. Journal: lowering the drinking age to 18.

I will make one policy proposal. Some of my fellow libertarians hope that the Obama administration will put an end to the drug war. I hope so too, but I'm not too optimistic. Instead, I propose a smaller step toward freedom -- eliminating the federally mandated drinking age of 21. This mandate was a creature of Elizabeth Dole (who is no longer in the Senate to complain at its abolition), and it has unnecessarily limited the freedom of legal adults, old enough to fight for their country, to drink adult beverages.

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Campus police at the Fort Wayne (TX) Independent School District are miffed that school administrators would not let them search a teacher's SUV after a high school parking attendant claimed to smell "the odor of marijuana" coming from the SUV, and after the police, responding to that information, had two drug dogs sniff around the SUV, resulting in "alerts" from both dogs. The police claim this gave them probable cause to search the SUV, but school district administrators ordered them not to search it because "there was no evidence of workplace misconduct."

The police have a point. They apparently search students' cars routinely when drug dogs alert, even in the absence of "school misconduct" by the students. Why should a different policy apply to teachers?

Unsurprisingly, however, the larger question has eluded the police, the school district administration, and the reporter who covered this story. [more ...]

Over the weekend a much beloved bartender named Wendy Burns was murdered on a French Quarter street. Wendy was apparently shot to death during an armed robbery.

The murder occurred in the Lower Quarter, a mostly residential section of the French Quarter that has been beset by a staggering number of armed robberies in the past couple of years.

I just recently moved from the Lower Quarter after living there for about one year and a half. I moved in part because I was very weary of constantly feeling like a target, no matter the time of day. [More...]

If Barack Obama and Eric Holder really believe in change, they should change the Justice Department's reliance on assembly line justice. To obtain quick guilty pleas from immigrants who have entered the country illegally, federal prosecutors threaten felony convictions if the immigrants fail to enter prompt guilty pleas to misdemeanor charges.

Every day, of the 1,000 migrants apprehended by immigration agents in Arizona, 70 are "randomly" selected and processed like cattle through Tucson's federal court. The objective is to criminalize these migrants and have them spend time in the private Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), thereby serving as a disincentive for other would-be migrants.

Eliminating reliance on private prisons is another change the new administration should implement. CCA "receives $11 million per month from the federal government." That's $11 million that could be spend on something more productive than warehousing poor people who enter our country to find work.