By Carlyn Kolker
Sentence structure
5/24/12
Is Tom Corbett, the Republican governor of Pennsylvania,
following in the path blazed by Georgia's Republican governor
Nathan Deal? Earlier this month, Deal signed into law a sweeping criminal justice reform bill that encouraged more non-prison sentences for non-violent offenders and set lighter sentences
for non-violent criminals. Now Corbett too is moving forward on
a plan for prison reform that also focuses on shortening
sentences. He justifies the move in economic terms, estimating
that the law could save the state about $260 million over five
years, the Harrisburg Patriot-News reports. (Hat tip: The Crime Report.)
Urban renewal
5/24/12
It used to be a sacrosanct principle of city management:
Cities may suffer, but filing for bankruptcy is off-limits. As
my Reuters colleagues who cover bankruptcy have explored,
bankruptcy filings among U.S. cities are fairly rare. Now the
Washington Post looks at the relative success that Vallejo,California, has enjoyed since its 2008 bankruptcy filing. "The
first couple of years were ugly," the Post writes, but then the
city began to "reinvent" itself. It relied on volunteer labor,
cut city salaries and raised sales taxes. With California cities
such as Stockton, Mammoth Lakes and Montebello continuing to
struggle, bankruptcy may offer "an opportunity to start over
with a clean slate," the Post writes.
Status update
5/24/12
Ted Kaczynski won't be attending his 50th Harvard reunion,
but his submission to the school's alumni book is causing quite
a stir. Kaczynski, better known to Americans as the Unabomber,
submitted a "bizarre" entry to the 1962 alumni report, the
Boston Globe reports, listing his occupation as "prisoner" and
his awards as "eight life sentences, issued by the United States
District Court for the Eastern District of California." The
entry has already proven to be fodder on the Internet, with CNET quipping "one (reunion) absentee still wants everyone to know
what he's been up to, just in case anyone missed it." Douglas Berman, the well-regarded scholar on sentencing laws and trends,
wonders on his blog whether it is "inappropriate" to find the
entry "amusing."
One of a kind
5/24/12
With all due respect to Chief Justice John Roberts, they
just don't seem to make chief justices like John Marshall any
more. The fourth chief justice of the United States, a Virginia
native who served as an officer for the Continental army, later
went on to author the landmark Marbury v. Madison decision which
defined judicial review. He was also an important water surveyor
as the United States began exploring its western boundaries at
the beginning of the 19th Century. In 1812, Marshall served as
the head of a 22-man commission to survey the James River and
find a way to connect the eastern and western sections of
Virginia, according to a state historical record. The momentous
trip has not been forgotten: On its 200th anniversary, a group
of six Virginians is re-creating the expedition, the Associated
Press reports (hat tip: How Appealing), crossing rapids in a
replica of the justice's boat, the Mary Marshall.
The help
5/24/12
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the pro-business group, is
trumpeting a new Mississippi law defining how the state's
attorney general assigns legal business to outside law firms.
Under the law the state attorney general must appoint outside
lawyers in two circumstances -- if he doesn't want to represent
a state agency in a lawsuit or if he has a "significant
disagreement" with an agency official -- reports the Associated Press. The law also puts a $50 million cap on the fees earned by
private law firms working on the attorney general's behalf.
"Mississippi today took a significant step to rein in the
troublesome practice of awarding contingency fee contracts to
plaintiffs' lawyers who are also major campaign contributors to
the state attorney general," the chamber's Institute for Legal
Reform, its legal arm, crowed in a press release.
Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood, a Democrat in a sea
of Republican officials and the very person at the center of the
debate about the attorney general's hiring practices, labels the
law unconstitutional. "Beyond an act of blatant partisanship,
this legislation takes a constitutionally empowered attorney
general and attempts to replace him with a barrel full of
hand-picked lawyers doing the bidding of a few politically
minded individuals," said Hood. As for restricting the fees of
any hired law firms, Hood noted that outside firms had helped
the attorney general's office recover $600 million in eight
years "without costing the taxpayers one dime."
The issue of plaintiffs' firms scoring big fees for work
they do for states has long been in a point of contention for
the tort reformer types like the Chamber of Commerce and the
attorneys general and firms themselves. In the late 1990s, after
Mississippi hired Richard Scruggs to pursue its case against the
tobacco industry, Scruggs and his compatriots reaped an
estimated $1.6 billion in fees. (Scruggs, you may recall,
subsequently wound up in prison after pleading guilty to trying
to shake down a judge in connection with litigation related to
Hurricane Katrina.)
Hood said he may challenge the new law in court. We just
wonder if he'll be hiring any outside lawyers to do that.
Summary Judgments for May 23
Summary Judgments for May 22
Summary Judgments for May 21
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