*****

Last month, the First Circuit Court of Appeals heard oral argument before a packed en banc courtroom in the case of Jason Wayne Pleau (pronounced “Ploo”).  To be fair, the courtroom was packed for the next case, a challenge to the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act.  It is unsurprising that Pleau wouldn’t be the case that filled the seats.  On its face, the case is about the Interstate Agreement on Detainers and the role of the Supremacy Clause when the federal government binds itself as a party to an inter-governmental compact – not as sexy or politically charged of a legal question as the federal government’s refusal to recognize valid same-sex marriages.

On another level, though, United States v. Pleau raises legal questions that deserve more attention than the case is likely to receive.  Digging down into the facts underlying the dispute between the Justice Department and the Governor of Rhode Island reveals a clash between federal and state criminal justice policy choices, and calls into question the federal government’s choice to put all the weight of the Supremacy Clause behind its decision to prosecute this particular defendant.  The case can actually be seen as being about the location of the primary police power in the American system of constitutional federalism, and it exposes the increasing strain that the modern conception of federal power is placing on the founding era experiment in dual sovereignty.  Looking beyond this case and this defendant, Pleau should challenge progressives to think critically about the desirable scope of the federal government’s power under the Commerce Clause.

The First Circuit announced its en banc opinion in United States v. Pleau on Tuesday.  The court ruled 3-2 that the Interstate Agreement on Detainers (IAD) does not give Rhode Island Governor Lincoln Chafee the power to refuse a federal writ of habeas corpus ad prosequendum (HCAP).  In an opinion by Judge Michael Boudin, the court ruled that the Supremacy Clause gave the federal government the authority to command the transfer of a prisoner through the power of HCAP, and that nothing in the IAD altered that authority.  Any other interpretation of the IAD, said the court, would essentially leave states free to thwart federal prosecutions.  ”Were Pleau and Governor Chafee to prevail, Pleau could be permanently immune from federal prosecution, and the use of the efficient detainer system badly compromised. . . . Instead of a place of confinement, the state prison would become a refuge against federal charges.”

Though Judge Torruella’s dissenting opinion adamantly disagreed with the majority that the Supremacy Clause should be invoked to decide the case, both opinions focused narrowly on the issue of federal authority to compel the transfer of a prisoner and the relative position of the federal government as a party to the IAD.  The only reference to the facts of Pleau’s case in the analysis of the inter-sovereign dispute was the following statement from Judge Torruella in conclusion: “The equities of the case, even if they weighed in favor of the United States (and they do not), cannot justify the majority’s result because this court has no authority to ignore the express terms of the IAD.”  I want to look more closely at the “equities of the case” and the state of the law that allowed this dispute over prosecutorial venue to arise.

According to the federal indictment, on September 20, 2010, Pleau and two others drove to the Shell Station in Woonsocket, Rhode Island at which David Main was the manager.  Pleau was carrying a .38 caliber revolver.  Pleau followed Main from the Shell Station to a Citizens Bank location where Main would make the daily deposit for the gas station.  Wearing a ski mask, Pleau demanded the money from Main at gunpoint.  Main tried to run, and Pleau fired at him multiple times, hitting him in the head and killing him.  Pleau then took the deposit bag from Main, ran to a waiting truck and returned to his residence in Providence, Rhode Island.  Pleau later fled to New York to evade capture by law enforcement.

Jason Wayne Pleau is undoubtedly a career criminal.  His criminal history began with shoplifting, and then graduated to burglary, robbery, and assault with a deadly weapon for beating a prison guard, all before the murder alleged in his current case.  Pleau previously offered to plead guilty to state robbery and murder charges in connection with Main’s death, and would have accepted a sentence of life without the possibility of parole.

Unlike the now dismissed state charges, the charges included in the federal indictment would expose Pleau to a potential death sentence.  Rhode Island, the state in which the crimes were committed, in 1852 became the second state in the country to abolish the death penalty under state law.  Though a narrow capital punishment exception was on the books from 1872 to 1984, Rhode Island has not executed anyone since the initial prohibition was enacted in 1852.  Governor Chafee cited this history of death penalty opposition when he initially refused to surrender Pleau to federal authorities.

Pleau’s federal prosecution is part of a trend is federal law enforcement.  In 2002, Marvin Gabrion became the first person in the modern era of capital punishment to be sentenced to death in a state that does not authorize capital punishment under state law.  Gabrion’s crime was committed in Michigan, the only state that has a longer-standing prohibition on the death penalty than Rhode Island.  In 2004, Gary Lee Sampson was sentenced to death in federal court in Massachusetts for two counts of carjacking resulting in death, both of which occurred in Massachusetts.  Sampson offered to plead guilty in exchange for a life sentence without the possibility of parole, but the Justice Department rejected his offer and instead decided to pursue the death penalty.  The death penalty has been illegal in Massachusetts state prosecutions since 1984, and no one has been executed for crimes committed in the state since 1947.

Each of these defendants, like all current federal death row inmates, could have been tried for murder in state court.  The choice to pursue federal prosecutions, and particularly the choice of federal prosecutors in the Pleau case to continue in the face of state-level opposition, challenges the historical understanding that federal law enforcement exists to vindicate uniquely federal interests.  Judge Boudin wrote in Pleau that the fact “[t]hat there is an overriding federal interest in prosecuting defendants indicted on federal crimes needs no citation.”  The question should not be, however, whether there is a federal interest in the prosecution itself, but rather whether the criminalization of the behavior that the prosecution seeks to sanction serves a legitimate federal interest.  Occurrences of dual jurisdiction over the same predicate criminal behavior are occurring more frequently because Congress and courts have ceased to take seriously the requirement that a federal criminal statute vindicate a substantial federal interest.

This realization is what turns Pleau from a routine application of the principles of conflict of laws into a politically-charged demonstration of the reach of the federal government’s Commerce Clause authority.  The federal government has the authority to prosecute Pleau under the Hobbs Act, a federal statute that gives federal law enforcement authorities the ability to prosecute any robbery that affects interstate commerce.  Professor Michael Mannheimer, who writes extensively on the federalization of criminal law and the reach of the federal death penalty, noted in a blog post about Pleau that “there is lots of outrage these days over the federal government forcing people to buy health insurance; why is there so little over the fact that the federal government can put me in prison if I steal a Snickers Bar at gunpoint from the local gas station?”

The political history of the past few decades has positioned conservatives as the defenders of states’ rights and state sovereignty, and progressives as advocates of a more expansive vision of federal power.  Legal history has been no different.  Progressives have lamented conservative legal victories such as Morrison and Lopez, which overturned on Commerce Clause grounds federal laws targeting violence against women and guns near schools.  It was the Supreme Court’s conservatives who dissented in United States v. Comstock, with the progressives holding that the federal government’s criminal enforcement authority included the necessary and proper ability to civilly detain sex offenders after they have served their criminal sentences.  Progressives tend to trust the federal government over the governments of the individual states to strike an adequate balance between individual rights and the collective welfare of society.  In the case of the federal death penalty, that balance has clearly been struck in a decidedly conservative direction.

The political system functions as a one-way ratchet for criminal laws and criminal sentences.  It will always be politically efficacious for Congresspeople of all political persuasions to advocate for more federal criminal laws and harsher federal criminal sentences.  When considering the value of a new federal statute, progressive politicians need to see more than the political message portrayed in the sound bite version of the law, and progressive voters need to see the long term effects of shifting the authority to prosecute all criminal activity to the federal government.  Progressive judges and attorneys should recognize that Morrison and Lopez have invited a hard judicial look at the nexus between federal criminal statutes and interstate commerce, and the new scrutiny can applied towards ends much less lamentable than the outcomes actually achieved in those two cases.

The only way to put the decision about appropriate criminal sentencing, and particularly about the application of the death penalty, back into the hands of individual states is to reverse the trend toward the federalization of criminal law.  Before that trend can be reversed, progressives must accept that the Commerce Clause should, in fact, have limits.  Only that acceptance will allow those limits to be the tool that will empower states to once again control the vindication of the rights of their own citizens.  As the jurisdiction of federal criminal law recedes, state authorities like Governor Chafee will be able to stop fighting the will of all powerful federal prosecutors, and can go back to enacting the will of the people of their states.

Noah interviews Professor Ari Ezra Waldman about students’ right to speak affirmingly about sexual orientation, same-sex marriage, and gay identity in schools.  Professor Waldman discusses recent cases in which students have been censored or punished for positive statements about their sexual orientation, and why he thinks current school speech doctrine requires such statements to be treated differently from statements that serve as identity harassment.

Noah and Matt discuss the recent Supreme Court oral arguments in Dorsey v. U.S. and Hill v. U.S.  Both cases ask whether the Fair Sentencing Act, passed to address the disparity between federal sentences for crack and powder cocaine possession, should be applied retroactively to defendants whose crimes were committed before the law was passed, but who had not yet been sentenced.  They look back at how the disparity came about, and whether even the lessened disparity is justified.

Some links related to the topics discussed on this week’s show:

Professor Waldman at Towleroad.com: Identity Harassment and First Amendment Rights at School

California Principal Ejects Gay Student from High School Pageant for Saying He Wants to Get Married

Lambda Legal: Couch v. Wayne Local School District

SCOTUSblog Argument Recap: A Dilemma Over Race

18 U.S.C. 3553 (sentencing factors), 21 U.S.C. 841 (drug quantities)

NYT: Abiding by the Fair Sentencing Act

Washington Post: Unjust Crack Penalties Continue to Plague Defendants

NYT: Supreme Court Weighs Revisions in Cocaine Case Sentences

Please email questions, comments, corrections, or suggestions to CRCLonline@gmail.com.  Thanks for downloading, and enjoy the show!

Episode 11 – Identity-Affirming School Speech and the Crack-Cocaine Sentencing Disparity

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Matt follows up on a post he wrote for HarvardCRCL.org looking at the First Amendment implications of requiring cigarette companies to include new graphic warning labels on their packages.  The doctrines of corporate speech and compelled speech are discussed, as well as the history of regulating cigarette advertising.

Noah and Matt discuss the competing budget plans presented by the Republican and Democratic leaders in Washington.  What would be the real world implications of adopting each plan?  What is the underlying philosophy displayed by the budgets?  What does past experience demonstrate about their likelihood to achieve the goals they claim to pursue?

Some links related to the topics discussed on this week’s show:

Matt Giffin on HarvardCRCL.org – A Roadblock for New Cigarette Warning Labels

The Washington Post – Appeals Court to Consider Cigarette Warning Labels

NPR – Federal Court to Weigh Graphic Cigarette Labels

Reuters – Court: Tobacco Health Labels Constitutional

Ezra Klein on WonkBlog – Welfare Reform Doesn’t Prove Republicans Can Cut Without Consequences

New York Times – Welfare Limits Left Poor Adrift as Recession Hit

Matthew Yglesias on MoneyBox – Romney/Ryan Budget Would Disproportionately Impact Women

Paul Krugman – Ryan in Two Numbers

Please email questions, comments, corrections, or suggestions to CRCLonline@gmail.com.  Thanks for downloading, and enjoy the show!

Episode 10 – Cigarette Warning Labels, the First Amendment, and Competing Federal Budgets

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Florence was released after the state discovered its mistake.  He promptly sued under violations of the 4^th and 14^th Amendments.  The District Court granted Florence summary judgment, banning such strip searches of minor offenders as overly invasive.  This decision was reversed by the 3^rd circuit, and the case eventually made its way to Washington.  Six months after the Supreme Court listened to oral arguments, the conservative majority prevailed in an opinion by Justice Kennedy upholding suspicionless searches as Constitutional.  Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito, while joining the majority in full, each filed concurrences.  Justice Breyer led the dissenters.

Kennedy gave three reasons for justifying suspicionless searches of minor offenders: 1) detecting contagious diseases such as lice, 2) detecting tattoos indicative of gang membership, and 3) detecting drugs and weapons.  Kennedy argued that the prison officials had found “a reasonable balance between inmate privacy and the needs of the institutions.”  The idea is that police don’t know the character of the people they arrest; while some are harmless, some may in fact be quite dangerous to other prisoners.  On the other hand, it mattered to the Court that Florence was kept among the general prison population.  Kennedy was explicit that the decision did not cover the Constitutionality of suspicionless searches of detainees who could be kept apart from other prisoners.  The Roberts and Alito concurrences stressed this point.  The irony, of course, is that Florence was wrongly arrested in the first place—the outdated bench warrant for his arrest should never have remained open in the database.  This set of facts even led Florence to question whether he was targeted because he was black.  But the Court wasn’t focused on the mistaken arrest; it was only concerned with security procedures after the fact.

This was a narrowly divided issue, and not just in terms of the 5-4 vote.  The Court took an unusually long time to produce this decision.  Further, Roberts and Alito filed concurrences to underscore their hesitations with the ruling, stressing that the discretion afforded to law enforcement officials is not sweeping and does not cover situations where prisoners can be kept apart from the general prison population.

To be sure, being stripped naked and visually inspected by strangers is a violation of basic dignity and personal privacy, especially in the absence of any suspicion of risk.  Kennedy’s “balance” of privacy and security needs sure seems like more of a complete sacrifice of one for the other.  However, while Florence is a setback from the perspective of individual rights, it may not be all bad for future prisoners, for three reasons.  First, Kennedy’s opinion did not mandate any kind of search, but rather deferred to the discretion of prison officials to decide when one is necessary.  Second, searches involving physical contact with the detainee were not sanctioned.  Third, the majority was splintered, delivering a somewhat limited decision that fell short of a sweeping approval of strip searches in all situations.  Nonetheless, Florence is a controversial decision reflecting the post-9/11 era in which the interests of state security often supersede civil liberties.

Matt fills us in on the recent Supreme Court decision in Florence v. Board of Freeholders and the potential impact of a blanket rule allowing strip searches for jail intake even for minor offenses.  Andrew discusses the recent concern over Google’s unified privacy policy, the Consumer Online Privacy Bill of Rights, and efforts in Europe to establish a right to be forgotten.

Some links related to the topics discussed on this week’s show:

SCOTUSblog case page for Florence v. Board of Freeholders of Burlington County

Professor Noah Feldman responding to Florence at BloombergView

FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz in the Washington Post

FTC Report on Protection Consumer Online Privacy

The Atlantic on Online Tracking

Andrew Mamo of this blog on the Right to Be Forgotten 

Andrew Mamo on the Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights

From the news round-up: Emily Bazelon on the commutation of the sentence of Shirley Ree Smith

Please email questions, comments, corrections, or suggestions to CRCLonline@gmail.com.  Thanks for downloading, and enjoy the show!

Episode 9 - Jail Strip Searches, Online Privacy, and the Right to Be Forgotten

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I was a member of a fraternity that asked pledges, in order to become a brother, to: swim in a . . . pool full of vomit, urine, fecal matter, semen[,] and rotten food products; eat omelets made of vomit; chug cups of vinegar, which in one case caused a pledge to vomit blood; drink beers poured down fellow pledges’ ass cracks; and vomit on other pledges, among other abuses. . . .  As a pledge, I ceased to be a human being; instead, I became “whale shit.”  In the process, I, my fellow pledges[,] and all pledges since . . . have been implicitly encouraged to treat Dartmouth women with about the same respect with which we treated each other in our social spaces: none.  Fraternity life is at the core of [Dartmouth’s] human and cultural dysfunctions.

Lohse went on to censure Dartmouth administrators for failing to take action to reign in the school’s fraternities, reminding his readers that Dartmouth’s Greek system is in need of “extensive oversight and restructuring.”  He also named names and took aim at Dartmouth’s president, Jim Yong Kim.

After several students attacked Lohse on The Dartmouth’s website, his story attracted the attention of Rolling Stone, which gave him an opportunity to elaborate on his experiences as a fraternity brother turned social reformer.  In the course of telling Lohse’s story, Rolling Stone made three assertions: first, that irresponsible fraternity brothers exert significant influence over the tenor of social life at Dartmouth; second, that the aforementioned fraternity brothers are supported in their endeavors by a large network of equally irresponsible Dartmouth alums, many of whom work in the financial sector, where they perpetuate the modes of thought instilled in them by their fraternities; and third, that many of Dartmouth’s students and administrators are in denial about the ways in which Greek life degrades higher education at Dartmouth.

There is nothing surprising about Lohse’s claims; social fraternities have long been known to rely on cheap bear, and on the insecurities of young men (and women) desperate for social acceptance, to bring out the lowest instincts in American college students.  If there is anything interesting about Lohse’s story, it is the fact that it has elicited so much resentment from the young man’s classmates.  The simplest explanation for the backlash is that Dartmouth’s undergraduates are angry to see their laundry aired in public.  But there is also the fact that many Dartmouth students see Lohse as the physician who won’t heal himself, for he was at one point suspended from Dartmouth for cocaine possession, and he appears to have begun his reformist efforts only after the drug bust and his subsequent disillusionment with Dartmouth.  As Rolling Stone took pains to point out, moreover, Lohse studied Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise before coming to college and, upon arriving at Dartmouth, made it his business to establish himself on the campus social scene as quickly as possible, a goal that led him to curry favor with the fraternity he would eventually join and later expose.  If Rolling Stone painted a negative portrait of Dartmouth, it drew an equally unappealing picture of Lohse.

Rolling Stone’s willingness to highlight Lohse’s checkered past means that the young man has struck many readers as a hypocritical figure, a fact that might explain why several individuals have penned articles criticizing the Rolling Stone article.  The attacks leveled against the article are precisely the ones one would expect, namely, that it overstates the extent to which the Dartmouth social scene is shaped by fraternities, that it relies on the recollections of a former fraternity brother who is equal parts disgruntled and vengeful, and that it draws a tenuous link between fraternity life and American corporate culture in order to sell magazines to an audience upset with Wall Street.  The problem with these lines of attack is that they do nothing to undermine the veracity of the article’s claims.  Lohse is not an ideal whistleblower, but the fact that he might have an axe to grind does not mean that his account is fallacious.  Those who accuse Lohse of exaggerating or lying ought to be prepared to document his dishonesty.  Indeed, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that many of the story’s detractors are unable to tolerate even a small amount of criticism of the institutions they hold dear.

By depicting the social fraternity as a kind of preparatory school for social climbers hoping to succeed in American corporate culture, Rolling Stone unabashedly politicized the conversation about Greek letter organizations.  It will be no surprise, then, if the debate over the article—and over the accuracy of Lohse’s account—comes to reflect a larger disagreement about the values that college-bound Americans ought to embrace, as well as about the character of the American corporate world.

At this early point in the Dartmouth hazing controversy, a number of questions have yet to be answered.  It is hard to tell what motivated Lohse to cooperate with Rolling Stone, and it is equally difficult to discern the motives of the Dartmouth fraternity brothers and officials who have tried to discredit him.  It is also hard to speculate about what exactly happened among the drunken blokes Lohse described in his op-ed; there are no photographs or video recordings to give the lie to anyone’s account.  Thus far, however, no one has refuted Lohse’s story, and no evidence has surfaced to discredit his account.  Moreover, Rolling Stone has provided college students with an excellent opportunity to have a conversation about how a university’s social life should be organized, and about the ways in which students ought to interact with one another.  There thus arises a simple question: why do some readers feel threatened by Lohse and the article about him?  And why do some students grow so nervous when a journalist highlights a few of the negative aspects of their school?

Though all of the facts have yet to surface, the Rolling Stone story is entirely plausible, at least in the sense that it is easy to imagine fraternity brothers force-feeding beer to one another, as well as engaging in all of the rituals that Lohse has depicted.  Whatever happened at Dartmouth’s fraternities, it is clear that, as an institution, the social fraternity is outmoded and embarrassing.  To say that fraternities are an embarrassment to American higher education is not to say that all fraternities are alike, or that they are all incapable of playing a constructive role on college campuses.  The claim is simply that, by their very design, social fraternities tend to degrade the environments in which they exist, as well as the people who associate with them.  There are at least three reasons why fraternities are more than likely to debase the colleges at which they are allowed to function (much of what follows can and should be applied to social sororities as well).

First, fraternities are powered by the insecurities of college students, many of whom are profoundly worried about the prospect of ending up without friends, of being left to navigate college without a social support network of some kind.  The fraternity promises young men that they won’t have to worry about being alone, and it draws them in by offering a half-baked sense of belonging, a steady supply of interchangeable acquaintances, and boilerplate rhetoric about the importance of concepts like virtue and character and unity.  What the fraternities peddle isn’t especially pretty, but in moments of fear, college students take whatever they can get.  The problem with social fraternities, then, is that they exploit and reify the self-doubt of those who aspire to join them.  Our university system should be encouraging young people to cultivate confidence, insight, and repose by learning about their own mental and emotional dispositions, and by forming distinctive friendships based on their unique interests.  The fraternities have nothing to offer in this regard.  Indeed, they tend to discourage development and maturation, for their fundamental message is that, as long as one is part of some large group, everything will be all right.

Second, because Greek life tends to attract certain types of individuals—often, those who value conformism and want to be part of a group with distinct and recognizable boundaries—fraternities are bound to develop a particular bias: they are bound to develop into institutions that discourage independence, imagination, and innovation.  In its present form, at least, the fraternity can function only if it embraces a series of lowest common denominators, a series of activities so basic that nearly everyone can engage in them without difficulty.  Hence the fraternity’s tendency to organize itself around endeavors like drinking alcohol, watching ESPN, and throwing multi-colored ping-pong balls into plastic cups.

Third, fraternities serve an unfortunate expressive function.  The fraternities brandish a crudeness and a vulgarity that credulous freshmen often mistake for strength and confidence.  What follows from this is familiar: young men flock to fraternities because they don’t see organized displays of what they take to be confidence anywhere else on campus.  The fraternities appear to young men to monopolize the concept of manhood, and anxious college kids—who long to be seen as strong and manly and self-assured—are led to believe that the fraternity is the only zone in which self-confidence can be found.  All of this points, of course, to a more fundamental problem.  Because American culture has been unable to offer anything resembling a meaningful picture of manhood, young men often mistake the hoggish conformism of the fraternities for masculinity.  The failure of our culture to provide a constructive vision of what young men ought to be has created a void that the fraternities have managed to fill.  The problem is that, if there is such a thing as a conception of masculinity worth striving for, it’s certainly not the one advertised by the fraternities.

Time might help to sift fact from fiction in the Lohse saga.  But there is no need for universities to wait before they do what needs to be done: push the social fraternities and sororities off of their campuses.

Some links related to the individual mandate and the health care oral argument:

Complete SCOTUSblog coverage of the week’s argument

The Nation – Obamacare: Not Dead Yet

Charles Fried says there is a “limiting principle”

Noah Feldman – Broccoli-Bungling Defense Hurts Health Care

Jeffrey Toobin says the law will most likely be struck down

Politico – If the law fails, what’s next?

Please email questions, comments, corrections, or suggestions to CRCLonline@gmail.com.  Thanks for downloading, and enjoy the show!

Episode 8 – The Individual Mandate and Juvenile Constitutional Rights

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While the fallout of Jones remains to be seen, the ACLU’s proposal that law enforcement agencies acquire warrants before tracking cell phones seems quite reasonable, particularly since several agencies already do so and do not seem to have any particular problems with such a requirement.

In terms of thinking through how privacy, police practices, and information technology intersect, it would help to know what a cell phone is. These are no longer devices that are primarily intended to make and receive telephone calls. As smart phones become increasingly powerful, sophisticated, and ubiquitous, our expectations about our privacy, and about our relationships to our devices, must necessarily undergo a substantial change. But while the early transition of the telephone from a party line to personal line increased expectations of privacy and notions of ownership, the move to smart phones might be pushing the other way.

Consider the ways in which geolocation is used as a feature in phones. Whether GPS is involved, triangulation from cell towers, local wireless networks, or a combination, not only can smart phones determine a user’s location, but users value this feature as a way to get information geared towards that location or to socialize. At some point, it stops being an issue of tracking a user’s location and becomes one of the user broadcasting his or her location. We value these devices for their ability to communicate a large amount of information instantaneously. But, having commanded them to speak, we now find that we cannot stop their digital logorrhea.

There are clear differences between the GPS device of Jones and the cell phone tracking in the ACLU report: one involves physically attaching a device to property, the other involves making a call to the phone company; one involves triangulating from cell towers, the other involves triangulating from satellites; the list could go on. These seem to be beside the point, as noted in Alito’s concurrence in Jones, which leaned on Katz’s reasonable expectations of privacy. But the rapidly changing nature of cell phones is but one example of the problem we face in ascertaining what reasonable expectations of privacy we actually can or should have in a world of social media.

There is something different about privacy rights in a world where we are constantly leaking our own personal information and storing the information of others. While privacy rights are not coterminous with property rights, there remains an important connection between the two. The ACLU is right to insist that the tracking of cell phones be subject to the scrutiny of the courts and the basic requirement of search warrants and establishing probable cause. But we cannot stop there, because the technology will not stop there either. Our attempts to protect civil liberties amidst communications technologies will remain ad hoc and inconsistent unless and until we can clarify property rights over information.

A draft of Sultany’s article and scholarly responses to the article can be found here.  Video from the event will be available here.

Some links mentioned in or related to this week’s episode:

The Atlantic – Travyon Martin’s Killer Was Looking for Trouble – and Found It

Fox News Opinion – Trayvon Martin’s Killer Not Covered Under the Law I Wrote

Slate – Why Trayvon Martin’s Killer Remains Free

NPR – Was Trayvon Martin’s Killing a Hate Crime?

NYT – Emily Bazelon on the Dharun Ravi verdict

Daily Beast – Michael Medved on NJ Hate Crimes law

Anti-Defamation League Table of State Hate Crimes Laws

Wisconsin v. Mitchell

FBI Hate Crimes Statistics

Please email questions, comments, corrections, or suggestions to CRCLonline@gmail.com.  Thanks for downloading, and enjoy the show!

Episode 7 – Stand Your Ground, Self Defense, and Hate Crimes

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