Municipalities that are unwilling to pay competitive salaries to attract qualified law enforcement officers are too often willing to overlook evidence that a candidate can't be trusted to use good judgment. This is the "spotty record" that Kevin Freibott brought with him when he applied for a position with Jersey City:

Officer Freibott was fired from the department [in Middletown, NJ] in 2001 after a car accident outside a bar and grill in Atlantic Highlands in which he was driving with an expired license. Although he was reinstated after petitioning the state, he received a six-month suspension. ... Officer Freibott’s history included seven accidents, six moving violations and three license suspensions, including a drunken-driving violation in 1988 and the revocation of his license for failure to comply with a drug and alcohol program.

Is this the kind of guy who should be trusted with a badge and a gun? Jersey City thought so. Its police department hired Friebott to work a midnight shift. On January 23, he spent the evening partying in New York City, got tanked, and rear-ended a Grand Am, killing two of its occupants. At least Freibott wasn't on his way to report for duty: he was out on sick leave.

Residents of New York City should question whether the NYPD is spending their tax dollars wisely. A woman who had been severely beaten was discovered outside a Hell's Angels Clubhouse in the East Village. Witnesses said she was thrown out of the building, so the police obtained a warrant to search for evidence of an assault. So far, so good, but before knocking and seeking entry, the police assembled a "heavily armed Emergency Service Unit."

Police helicopters circled overhead, sharpshooters were stationed on nearby roofs and officers were armed for a siege ... After several hours, as police prepared to raid the club, a Hells Angels official arrived, examined the warrant and invited them inside.

An attorney for the Hells Angels said police overreacted. "The helicopters, the SWAT teams, the boys and all the toys, the armored personnel carrier -- I think it's a little much," said Ron Kuby, the attorney.

Law Prof Doug Berman of Sentencing Law and Policy has a post up today asking readers to rate the following injustices:

1.  The federal sentences for two border patrol agents, Ignacio Ramos and Jose Alonso Compean, who each got more than 10 years' in prison for the shooting of a suspected Mexican drug dealer in Texas (details here).

2.  The state sentence for Genarlow Wilson, who got 10 years' in prison for having consensual oral sex with a fellow teenager (details here).

3.  The possible (but not certain) limited period of extreme pain that a convicted and condemned murderer might feel in the course of an execution.

I'll go with number 2, the sentence with Genarlow Wilson. But, I'd have given another example, one of the many defendants serving life in prison for crack offenses due to the sentencing disparity in powder and crack cocaine penalties.

The U.S. Sentencing Commission is calling for public response (pdf) to various guidelines, including those for crack and powder cocaine offenses.

Kudos to TalkLeft contributer Last Night in Little Rock (aka John Wesley Hall of Little Rock, AR) for filing a motion challenging Alberto Gonzales' firing of U.S. Attorneys across the country and replacing them with political "appointees" who do not have to be confirmed by the Senate.

Hall was appointed by the court to represent a death penalty defendant last week and filed this motion (pdf) today. He argues that the "appointment" of U.S. Attorney Tim Griffin violates Art. II of the Constitution and Sec. 541 of Title 28 of the U.S. Code.

Why did Gonzales replace U.S. Attorney Bud Cummins with Griffin?

So far, seven U.S. Attorneys around the country have been fired and replaced by political appointees without confirmation by the Senate. The requirement was abolished by a provision in the Patriot Act that allows recess appointments.

The DEA busted 11 medical marijuana clubs in Los Angeles yesterday, without telling local authorities of their plan until 30 minutes beforehand.

City spokeswoman Helen Goss said West Hollywood has a "long-standing commitment" to the use of medical marijuana for people suffering from illnesses like HIV and AIDS, and city officials said they were taken by surprise, learning of the raid as it was going on.

California voters approved Proposition 215, the Compassionate Use Act in 1996, which made marijuana available by prescription for medicinal uses.

The feds refuse to recognize the state law, and say the clubs made so much money there had to be a front for "high-tech drug dealing."

This is pot we're talking about, that goes to those whom it medically helps. For some of these patients, being without it is a form of torture.

Don't the feds have better things to do with their time?

Via Raw Story, the Detroit Free Press has this unsettling report:

Michigan's second-highest court says that anyone involved in an extramarital fling can be prosecuted for first-degree criminal sexual conduct, a felony punishable by up to life in prison.

"We cannot help but question whether the Legislature actually intended the result we reach here today," Judge William Murphy wrote in November for a unanimous Court of Appeals panel, "but we are curtailed by the language of the statute from reaching any other conclusion."

Residing in the United States without proper immigration papers isn't usually a crime. Local police have enough actual crime on their hands without worrying about undocumented immigrants. Expecting local police to enforce federal immigration laws is a waste of resources, so it isn't surprising that the Governor of Massachusetts rescinded his predecessor's agreement to use state police to arrest violators of federal immigration laws.

Mr. Patrick said doing away with the arrangement negotiated by Mr. Romney would allow state troopers to maintain a focus on gun-, drug- and gang-related crime. “The wisest and most practical course,” he said, “is for state troopers to focus on enforcing Massachusetts laws.”

The governor was joined at the news conference by the Massachusetts secretary of public safety, Kevin M. Burke, who said state police officials had expressed concern that the increased responsibilities would overburden their officers. “It would definitely have affected, according to their analysis, their ability to deal with their core mission” of enforcing state law, Mr. Burke said.

Kudos to Gov. Patrick for resisting the federalization of local law enforcement.

Congress has decimated the U.S. asparagus industry by waiving tariffs for Peruvian asparagus. It's a backwards attempt to buffer coca eradication with crop substitution.

Notwithstanding divergent views on free trade among our readership, I'm sure we can all agree that tariffs shouldn't be arbitrarily lifted in support of a failed drug war policy in Peru.

The new Congress can fix this. The Seattle Times has more.

Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton has unveiled a new approach to fighting gang crime.

The strategy is to concentrate on the gangs causing the most violence, to have the courts impose "stay away" orders as conditions of probation to make it easier to return violators to jail and to use the abatement and nuisance laws that allow the state to close and seize properties where gang members congregate.

Thoughts?

This is absolutely astonishing.

The chief judge in the city’s juvenile courts had a top public defender arrested Tuesday in a bizarre escalation of a fight over changes in the city’s troubled program for representing indigent defendants.

The judge, David Bell, was upset that no public defender was in his courtroom when he was ready to start this morning, and he drove to the defender’s office and waited outside for Stephen Singer, the chief of trials, to arrive.

The judge took Mr. Singer to his courtroom, where he found him in contempt for not being prepared to provide representation and ordered him jailed for 36 days, three days for each of the 12 items on Tuesday’s docket. Mr. Singer then spent about five hours in jail before a state appeals court stayed the order.

The New Orleans criminal justice system has been in a heightened state of crisis since Katrina. If there aren't enough public defenders to go around, the state needs to increase the funding to hire more of them -- not blame the already overworked, overburdened current defenders who are doing more than their fair share of the work.

For fear of appearing soft on crime, Democrats have raised little objection over the years to draconian sentencing laws. This NY Times article gives us reason to hope that sentencing reform might be a priority in the new Congress.

Among those eagerly awaiting signs of change are federal judges, including many conservatives appointed by Republican presidents. They say the automatic sentences, determined by Congress, strip judges of individual discretion and result in ineffective, excessive penalties, often for low-level offenders.

Starting with the crack-powder cocaine sentencing disparity and moving to senselessly harsh mandatory minimums, Congress will have plenty to consider.

The House Judiciary Committee, under the new leadership of Representative John Conyers Jr., Democrat of Michigan, is planning hearings on the laws, starting later this month or in early February.

Punishing for the crime proved at trial, not for additional crimes imagined at sentencing, should also be high on the reform agenda.

The results of a study of Denver's felony criminal convictions have been published. Denver District Judge Morris Hoffman explains in a New York Times op-ed today, Free-Market Justice.

When two economists from Emory University, Paul Rubin and Joanna Shepherd, agreed last year to collaborate with me on an econometric study of how effective public defenders really are, I had to guard against confirmation bias. I was positive that public defenders would prove more effective than their private counterparts. Mr. Rubin and Ms. Shepherd, with their occupational faith in markets, were equally positive of just the opposite. In the end, the economists were right, though with an interesting twist. (The full study has been published in the Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law.)

....The results were surprising. The average sentence for clients of public defenders was almost three years longer than the average for clients of private lawyers.