Congratulations to the Marquette National Appellate Advocacy Competition Team

Congratulations to the Marquette National Appellate Advocacy Competition (NAAC) team!  On Saturday, our students distinguished themselves at the Boston regional NAAC competition.  Stephen Boyett, Carrie Devitt, and Jessie Franklin won each of their five rounds of competition, and they will be advancing to the National Finals in April.  Elizabeth Champeau and Thomas Worsfold advanced to the semifinal round.  The students also distinguished themselves in obtaining high scores on their briefs. 

Approximately 190 teams entered the competition and are participating in six regional competitions.  Only the top four teams from each regional round advance to the National Finals in Chicago.

Both teams have worked hard to prepare for competition.  The students put many hours into preparing their briefs and oral arguments.  We appreciate the assistance that many local practitioners and law faculty gave us in preparing for the oral arguments.  We are especially grateful to Attorney Michael Cerjak, a 2008 law alum and former NAAC competitor, who organized and attended numerous practice rounds.  Michael surprised the team by flying out for the final rounds on Saturday. 

Congratulations, Team!  I’m proud of you!!

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Justice Involves Communities

This past week, the 2009 Marquette Law School Public Service Conference focused on the efforts of communities across the nation to rethink criminal justice policy with a greater emphasis on community involvement in both planning and implementation.  Over the past two decades, Wisconsin has more than quintupled its public expenditures for corrections. At the same time, local communities have struggled with increasing jail populations and declining resources for treatment and reentry services.  At the core of this challenge is the desire to keep communities safe while providing more effective alternatives to long term incarceration.

These challenges are not unique to Wisconsin.  As keynote speaker Jeremy Travis pointed out,

As our nation has reacted to rising crime rates over the years, the response of many elected officials has been to turn to the funnel [arrest, prosecution and incarceration,] as a crime control strategy. . . . We have invested enormous sums of money in these crime control strategies, with profound consequences. . . . Most strikingly, the national rate of incarceration has more than quadrupled over the past generation so that America now has the highest rate of incarceration in the world.

This approach has been accompanied by a drop in the crime rate.  It also has had other sociological consequences which are not as easily quantifiable. 

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Seventh Circuit Week in Review: More on the Elusive Meaning of “Crack”

With just two new opinions, there was not much criminal action in the Seventh Circuit last week.  One of the two, United States v. Dunson (No. 08-1691), was a very brief per curiam holding that the Indiana crime of fleeing a police officer in a vehicle is a “crime of violence” for purposes of applying § 2K2.1(a)(2) of the Federal Sentencing Guidelines.

The second, and much meatier, opinion was United States v. Bryant (No. 07-3608), in which the court (per Judge Ripple) affirmed the defendant’s conviction for drug trafficking, but nonetheless remanded for resentencing.  A central issue in the case was whether the defendant was dealing crack cocaine, as opposed to some other form of cocaine that would result in a lesser sentence under the Federal Sentencing Guidelnes.  Coincidentally, the court dealt with the same issue the previous week in United States v. Stephenson, which I blogged about here.  In both cases, the court underscored that “crack” is not defined by some particular chemical composition, but by the understanding of drug users and sellers — in a sense, “crack” is what the market calls “crack.” 

Bryant is interesting for the way that it shines a light on the fallibility of crime labs. 

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