Crime & Consequences
Blog Scan
May 27, 2009 1:15 PM | Posted by Lauren Altdoerffer
"Judge Sotomayor's 2008 Criminal Decisions: Yesterday, Corey Rayburn Yung had a post ranking Judge Sotomayor as an "activist judge." Today, his Sex Crimes blog has a postweighing in on her criminal law record based on her 2008 decisions. According to Yung, "Sotomayor is in line with the overall average" of appellate judges. She decides criminal appeals in favor of the defendant 7.25% of the time, but, "[n]otably, she is a bit tougher on the government than other appellate judges with some prosecutor experience." Yung's statistics do not tell the entire story however, he has "specifically exclude[d] habeas cases" from his dataset."
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"Judge Sotomayor Dissents in Prison Disenfranchisement Case: At Bench Memos, Roger Clegg reports on Judge Sotomayor's dissent in Hayden v. Pataki, a case in which both Clegg and the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation participated as Amici. (The brief can be found here.) Clegg writes that Hayden addressed whether prison inmates had the right to vote. The Second Circuit rejected the inmates' argument that New York's "law disenfranchising prison inmates and parolees deprives them of the right to vote on 'account of race,' and [was] contrary to the federal Voting Rights Act." Judge Sotomayor dissented because the Voting Rights Act addressed "voting qualification[s]," and § 2 of the Act subjected felony disenfranchisement to its qualifications. She wrote: "The duty of a judge is to follow the law, not to question its plain terms. I do not believe that Congress wishes us to disregard the plain language of any statute or to invent exceptions to the statutes it has created."
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Crime & Consequences
LWOP Under 18
May 28, 2009 1:14 PM | Posted by Kent Scheidegger
"Criminal defense attorney Daniel Horowitz has this web site opposing California SB399, the attempt to undo life-without-parole sentences for murderers who are already ineligible for the death penalty (in some cases, just barely) because of their age. His intro on the sidebar explains why he is opposed:
On October 15, 2005, my wife Pamela was murdered by a young man who was just shy of 17 years of age.
He was a serial killer by his own design. Pamela's courageous fight for her life marked this killer and created the forensic evidence that led to his conviction. Had she not fought so bravely, he would have escaped and he would have killed again, and again.
SB 399 is a bill that will change California's criminal sentencing system and it will give a chance at parole for all people who killed if they did this before they were 18 years of age.
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I reviewed the Human Rights Watch document. It is filled with errors of law and stories of juveniles wrongfully convicted which read to me like fiction.
I put together a criticism of SB 399 and the Human Rights Watch publicity campaign."
Interesting read. I will have to bookmark it for later.
Posted by: seattle criminal attorney | November 30, 2009 at 03:16 PM