Deposition Weirdness

Photocopiers

If you haven’t yet watched this reenactment of a deposition segment about the meaning of the word “photocopier” on the New York Times website, you should.  The New York Times summarizes the lawsuit in which the deposition was taken as follows:

In 2010, the Cuyahoga County Recorder’s Office in Ohio changed their policy about copying records. Digital files would no longer be available, and the public would have to make hard copies of documents for $2 per page.  This would prove to be prohibitively expensive for Data Trace Information Services and Property Insight, companies that collect hundreds of pages of this public information each week.  They sued the Recorder’s Office for access to digital versions of the documents on a CD.  In the middle of the case, a lawyer representing them questioned the IT administrator of the Recorder’s Office, which led to a 10-page argument over the semantics of photocopiers.

The deposition segment starts with a question about whether the Recorder’s Office used “photocopying machines – any photocopying machine?”  The deponent attempts to turn the table: “When you say photocopying machine, what do you mean?”  The ensuing dialogue would not be out of place in an absurdist play.

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Which States Have Reduced Their Prison Populations in the Past Decade?

By 2002, in the wake of a recession that caused difficult fiscal challenges in many states, there was an increasingly widespread recognition that the American imprisonment boom of the 1980s and 1990s was not economically sustainable. Dozens of states adopted new sentencing and corrections policies that were intended to restrain further growth in imprisonment. These reforms seem to have had some success, as imprisonment rates finally stabilized after so many years of explosive growth. However, very little progress has been made toward bringing U.S. imprisonment rates back down to historic and international norms. The “if you build it, they will come” principle seems in evidence — after so much prison capacity was built in the boom years, we’ve found ways to keep using it even as crime rates have tumbled down.

Notwithstanding the overall national picture, a few states have had success in downsizing their prison populations. Here are the ten states whose prison populations dropped between December 2002 and December 2012:

New York             -19%
New Jersey          -17%
California             -16%
Connecticut         -15%
Michigan              -14%
Maryland             -9%
South Carolina    -5%
Wisconsin            -5%
Rhode Island       -2%
Hawaii                  -1%

Even the largest decreases on the list are rather small compared with the size of the pre-2002 increases. Nonetheless, some might wonder whether reduced imprisonment has resulted in more crime. With that concern in mind, I gathered data on violent crime in the five states that experienced double-digit drops in imprisonment.  

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Federal Courts App

The Federal Courts app provides access to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, Federal Rules of Bankruptcy Procedure, Federal Rules of Evidence, and all the local rules, as well as PACER.  The app is now available for Android, iPhone, and iPad from KosInteractive, which also has state court apps (but not yet apparently for Wisconsin).

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