The deadlocked Supreme Court couldn’t issue an opinion, but still left in place the block on President Obama’s immigration actions. The lower courts had correctly found that the executive actions implementing DAPA violated both administrative law and immigration statutes so, for practical purposes, it wouldn’t have mattered if Justice Scalia had still been on the bench to make this a 5–4 decision against the government. In any case, DAPA is now dead and so is any chance for immigration reform until the next president. That’s why those of us favoring reform in this area counseled against the president’s attempt to rewrite the law via executive action. This country’s immigration system is a mess — not serving anyone’s interests, let alone national security — but changing the law requires a new law. 

The Supreme Court’s 4–3 ruling upholding UT-Austin’s use of racial preferences in admissions was surprising and disappointing. Justice Alito does well to call out the majority’s imperial opinion as having no clothes. “Something strange has happened since our prior decision in this case,” he begins in his magisterial dissent — referring to the Court’s 2013 ruling directing the lower court to scrutinize university officials’ self-serving justifications for their policy.

“Even though UT has never provided any coherent explanation for its asserted need to discriminate on the basis of race,” Alito concludes in a way I can’t improve upon, “and even though UT’s position relies on a series of unsupported and noxious racial assumptions, the majority concludes that UT has met its heavy burden.” (He cites Cato’s two amicus briefs for the proposition that UT’s misleading legal arguments can’t be trusted.)

The best that can be said about this decision is that it’s limited to the weird affirmative action program that UT-Austin uses, which is unique in the country. Future lawsuits are still possible, and will depend on the type of racial preferences challenged and, of course, the composition of the Supreme Court. 

Yesterday, the Supreme Court decided the case of Utah v. Strieff, which involved the power of the police to detain and search citizens, and what the courts should do when the police break the law in the course of their investigations. Washington Post reporter, Robert Barnes, writes, “the low profile case more likely will be remembered for a fierce and personal dissent from Justice Sotomayor, who said the ruling would exacerbate illegal stops of minorities.” He’s right.

Here’s an excerpt from Sotomayor’s dissenting opinion:

[T]his case tells everyone, white and black, guilty and innocent, that an officer can verify your legal status at any time. It says that your body is subject to invasion while courts excuse the violation of your rights. It implies that you are not a citizen of a democracy but the subject of a carceral state, just waiting to be cataloged. We must not pretend that the countless people who are routinely targeted by police are “isolated.” They are the canaries in the coal mine whose deaths, civil and literal, warn us that no one can breathe in this atmosphere. See L. Guinier & G. Torres, The Miner’s Canary 274–283 (2002). They are the ones who recognize that unlawful police stops corrode all our civil liberties and threaten all our lives. Until their voices matter too, our justice system will continue to be anything but.

Regular visitors to the Cato web site will already be very familiar with many of the points Sotomayor made in her opinion. We have been trying to draw more attention to the problem of confrontational police stops since the death of Amadou Diallo in 2000. Sotomayor cites several scholars that have presented their research findings at Cato. Last year, Professor James Jacobs discussed his book, The Eternal Criminal Record. In 2014, Professor Alice Goffman, discussed her book, On the Run, at a Cato forum titled Lessons from Ferguson.

To stay ahead of the news, keep following Cato’s work. 

Related items, here, here, and here.

The latest issue of Regulation magazine has been released on the Cato website.

The cover article, by Christopher Robertson and Jamie Cox Robertson of the University of Arizona, examines the extent of over incarceration in the U.S. Why are so many innocent people convicted of crimes? They review recent scholarship that concludes that many types of evidence introduced by prosecutors to convince jurors of guilt, such as bite mark, fingerprint, and bullet analysis, are not scientifically reliable. The authors suggest various remedies to the wasteful incarceration problem including public rewards for attorneys who demonstrate that a prisoner should be released.

Researchers John Lott and Gary Mauser explore empirical research on firearms. They found that the findings of such research vary systematically with the disciplinary orientation of the authors. A large majority of articles written by economists find that expanded legal access to firearms reduces crime and does not increase the suicide rate, and that gun owners who are approved for concealed-carry are less likely to commit crimes than ordinary Americans. In contrast Criminologists were more evenly divided on these questions.

Two articles critique regulatory rationales rooted in behavioral economics. In Infantilization by Regulation law professors Jonathan Klick and Greg Mitchell argue that protecting people from the effects of their choices reduces their ability to think critically about them. Georgetown ethics professor John Hasnas explores how much liberty is preserved under modern “libertarian paternalism.” He then asks whether the insights of behavioral economics apply to public decisions, argues yes, and concludes that U.S. Constitution is an excellent example of choice architecture.

One of the most discussed topics in higher education policy is the rate of inflation in university tuition. Top William and Mary economists find empirical evidence that highly selective schools reduce financial aid to students who receive federal tuition support.

In our Briefly Noted articles economist Ike Brannon argues that cities harm transit riders by over-providing subsidized parking near street corners. Brannon and the American Action Forum’s Sam Batkins question whether expanded family leave policies would harm workers. University of California, Irvine emeritus professor Richard McKenzie shares the results of his survey that found servers at fast-casual restaurants would not support substituting higher hourly wages for the current tipped-wage system. Finally, University of Michigan professor Thomas Hemphill lays out a practical approach to reforming occupational licensing laws.

Book reviews include Free Market Environmentalism reviewed by Timothy Brennan, Robert Reich’s Saving Capitalism and Robert Gordon’s The Rise and Fall of American Growth reviewed by David R. Henderson, and Phil Murray’s review of Dani Rodrik’s Economics Rules.

My Working Papers column describes papers on cigarette taxes and food stamps, e‑cigarettes and adolescent smoking, corporate inversions, and public housing and crime.

Today, the Supreme Court struck yet another blow against the Fourth Amendment and the exclusionary rule. The case, Utah v. Strieff, involved a man who was illegally stopped outside of a suspected drug house and investigated for possible criminal activity. Mr. Strieff had an outstanding warrant for a minor traffic offense and was arrested. The search that resulted from the arrest turned up drugs. The question at issue was whether the undisputed illegality of the stop would render the drugs found inadmissible as evidence because of the exclusionary rule. In a 5–3 decision written by Justice Clarence Thomas, the Court decided that the “discovery of the arrest warrant attenuated the connection between the unlawful stop and the evidence seized” and thus the drug evidence could be used against Mr. Strieff.

In short, this case incentivizes police officers to break the law to make stops looking for drugs and contraband. As the late William Stuntz discussed in his book, The Collapse of American Criminal Justice, the way police read Supreme Court decisions is similar to a How-To blueprint to get around individuals’ constitutional rights. As Justice Elena Kagan ably notes in her dissent, today’s decision says that so long as there is an arrest on a warrant made from a bad stop, anything officers find as a result of that stop is fair game for prosecution.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor writes in her dissent:

Do not be soothed by the opinion’s technical language: This case allows the police to stop you on the street, demand your identification, and check it for outstanding traffic warrants—even if you are doing nothing wrong. If the officer discovers a warrant for a fine you forgot to pay, courts will now excuse his illegal stop and will admit into evidence anything he happens to find by searching you after arresting you on the warrant. 

This practice isn’t a minor issue affecting a small population. Justice Sotomayor points out that between the federal government and the states, there are over 7.8 million outstanding warrants, a large portion of which appear to be for minor infractions such as unpaid parking tickets or civil fines. It certain areas, the outstanding municipal warrants engulf more than half of the local population. For example, she cited the Department of Justice’s report on Ferguson, Missouri that found 16,000 of the city’s 22,000 residents had outstanding warrants. Justice Sotomayor’s dissent is an impassioned and practical argument against the racial profiling this case will almost certainly encourage across the country. 

Justice Kagan’s dissent is no less damning, though she gives a more technical analysis of the relevant jurisprudence that allows for exceptions to the exclusionary rule. To be kind, she finds the majority opinion wanting. In fact, she goes through the argument with the metaphor of a baseball player at bat, and the majority strikes out under the three-part inquiry in Brown v. Illinois, 422 U.S. 590 (1975). Although the Strieff opinion was written by Justice Thomas, perhaps the metaphor was a thinly veiled jab at the Chief Justice’s famous quip about justices calling balls and strikes in cases rather than, say, going to bat for the team in blue.

Justice Kagan writes:

“The majority chalks up [Officer] Fackrell’s Fourth Amendment violation to a couple of innocent “mistakes.” But far from a Barney Fife-type mishap, Fackrell’s seizure of Strieff was a calculated decision, taken with so little justification that the State has never tried to defend its legality. At the suppression hearing, Fackrell acknowledged that the stop was designed for investigatory purposes—i.e., to “find out what was going on [in] the house” he had been watching, and to figure out “what [Strieff] was doing there.” And Fackrell frankly admitted that he had no basis for his action except that Strieff “was coming out of the house.” [Citations removed]

The upshot of this case will be an increased reliance on the already overused and intrusive investigatory stops. As I recently published in the Case Western Reserve Law Review, such aggressive and inherently antagonistic policing will likely undermine police legitimacy, making policing harder and communities less safe. More people will be arrested and searched because police have been granted a Court-sanctioned way to get into people’s pockets.

You can read the opinion and both dissents here. My law review article, “Thin Blue Lies: How Pretextual Stops Undermine Police Legitimacy” can be read here (PDF).

I and others have repeatedly questioned the U.S. Department of Justice’s adventurous decision to charge Federal Express with crimes for, in essence, refusing to snoop into its customers’ packages and business. From my post at Overlawyered two years ago:

The federal government has prevailed on a grand jury to indict Federal Express for servicing what it should have known were illicit online pharmacy operations. FedEx says it repeatedly asked the government to supply a list of shippers it considered illicit so that it could cut off service, but that the government refused; the Department of Justice contends that circumstantial evidence should have been enough to alert the package shipment company. …

And last month, quoting Washington Legal Foundation’s Cory Andrews:

“Federal prosecutors have accused FedEx of knowingly shipping illegal drugs in interstate commerce and laundering money by merely doing its job: delivering packages (in this case, from online Internet pharmacies) to their intended recipients and getting paid for the service. …To avoid the very sort of ‘gotcha’ prosecution at issue here, Congress inserted exceptions for common carriers in each of the relevant statutes” authorizing shipment of prescription medications and controlled substances when done in the usual course of business….

Now, this big news from federal court in San Francisco:

A criminal trial nearly two years in the making alleging FedEx knowingly delivered illegal prescription drugs to dealers and addicts ended suddenly Friday when prosecutors moved to dismiss all charges against the shipping giant.

U.S. District Court Judge Charles Breyer, who had been highly critical of the government’s positions as the trial unfolded, granted the motion to dismiss: on Friday he called FedEx “factually innocent” and said the withdrawal of charges was “in the court’s view, entirely consistent with the government’s overarching obligation to seek justice even at the expense of some embarrassment.”

FedEx spokesman Patrick Fitzgerald said in a statement Friday that the company has always been innocent and the case should never have been brought.

“The government should take a very hard look at how they made the tremendously poor decision to file these charges,” he said. “Many companies would not have had the courage or the resources to defend themselves against false charges.”

Many in the field of white-collar legal defense have warned large corporations, particularly those with businesses built upon relationships of public trust, to cut a deal with the federal government rather than try to withstand the full force it can bring to bear in a prosecution. But FedEx, for one, has shown that it is still possible to defy the authorities and win. Mike Koehler at FCPA Professor says that might help lay to rest what has been called the “Arthur Andersen effect” in which indictment is itself seen as tantamount to corporate death.

P.S.: Our friend James Copland of the Manhattan Institute has this observation (via email):

What’s remarkable here is that UPS agreed to a $40 million non-prosecution agreement — and to hire a new corporate officer and an independent auditor looking over their shoulder and reporting to the U.S. Attorney — for the same alleged conduct.

(cross-posted from Overlawyered). 

The feds are yet again trying to have their cake and eat it too, this time regarding constitutional criminal procedure. The Double Jeopardy Clause prevents the government from using its immense resources to prosecute criminal defendants twice for the same crime. Still, if a defendant’s first trial results in a hung jury, or the conviction is reversed on appeal, the trial is a legal “non-event” and the government can seek a new trial. If the defendant is acquitted, however, then no new trial is possible; the acquittal precludes a second try because that would be “double jeopardy.”

In a new case out of Puerto Rico, the government is trying to claim that acquittals can also be “non-events” that allow retrial. Juan Bravo-Fernandez and Hector Martinez-Maldonado received a mixed verdict at trial: they were acquitted on two charges—conspiring and travelling to bribe a member of the Puerto Rican Senate—but convicted of the actual bribery. But the two acquittals necessarily depended on a finding that neither defendant violated the bribery statute. Indeed, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit vacated the bribery conviction because the jury’s verdict was improperly based on invalid instructions from the trial judge.

That left one vacated conviction and two acquittals that logically required a finding of “not guilty” on the bribery charge. At that point, double jeopardy should have kicked in; the acquittals precluded a retrial regarding the underlying bribery. As the Supreme Court said in Yeager v. United States (2009), any “apparent inconsistency between a jury’s verdict of acquittal on some counts and its failure to return a verdict on other counts” does not “affect[] the preclusive force of the acquittals under the Double Jeopardy Clause.”

But the trial and appeals courts found that this precedent did not prevent retrial here. The Supreme Court has now taken up the case and Cato has filed an amicus brief supporting the defendants. We argue that the government’s position is contrary to the common law of double jeopardy and misunderstands the effect of a court’s having vacated a conviction that cannot stand given other acquittals.

When a court vacates a ruling in the double-jeopardy context, the effect is to wipe it out as if it never existed. Going back to Sir William Blackstone and English common law, if a “judgment, pronounced upon conviction, [wa]s falsified or reversed, all former proceedings [we]re absolutely set aside, and the party st[ood] as if he had never been at all accused,” for better and for worse: He was “restored in his credit, his capacity, his blood, and his estates,” but he was also “liable to another prosecution for the same offense.” Yet here the government seeks to have the vacated conviction stop the preclusive effect of acquittal.

The government simply should not be able to benefit from the vacating “non-event” that enables a retrial while at the same time arguing that it is also an “event” such that the acquittals don’t count in the double-jeopardy calculus.

Moreover, allowing the First Circuit’s decision to stand would give prosecutors more incentive to overcharge the same underlying conduct with multiple counts, forgive them for pursuing dubious theories of criminality, and permit them to use trials as dress rehearsals for future successive prosecutions—as well as impugning the inviolate nature of jury acquittals.

These concerns strike at the heart of the Double Jeopardy Clause. That’s why the Supreme Court should prevent the government’s attempt to overreach its prosecutorial authority by eviscerating a well-established, logical set of legal doctrines.

The Supreme Court will hear argument in Bravo-Fernandez v. United States this fall at the start of its next term.