Felony Convictions and the Right to Vote

On April 23, Marc Mauer, Executive Director of the Sentencing Project, will be on campus to speak on “Losing the Vote: Felony Disenfranchisement and American Democracy.”  Mauer has been a national leader in drawing public attention to the ever-expanding body of “collateral consequences” suffered by convicted felons, including loss of the right of vote.  I look forward to hearing Mauer’s talk, which is part of the McGee Lecture series sponsored by Marquette’e Department of Social and Cultural Sciences.  The talk will begin at 7:00 in Room 001 of Cudahy Hall.

Continue ReadingFelony Convictions and the Right to Vote

Seventh Circuit Week in Review: Corporate Criminal Liability, Reconsideration of Suppression Rulings, and More

The Seventh Circuit had four new opinions in criminal cases this week.  The cases addressed the mens rea requirements for corporate criminal liability, procedural aspects of suppression hearings, child pornography sentencing, and conditional guilty pleas.  Taking the cases in that order:

In United States v. L.E. Myers Co. (No. 07-2464), the defendant corporation was convicted of criminal OSHA violations in connection with the electrocution death of one its employees.  The Seventh Circuit (per Judge Sykes) reversed and remanded for a new trial in light of erroneous jury instructions.  The errors related to mens rea issues.  Myers was convicted under a statute that bases liability on the knowing creation of a hazardous condition in knowing violation of an OSHA requirement. 

The problem is that a corporation, as a legal construct, cannot really know anything; the only way a corporation knows something is to the extent the law is willing to impute the knowledge of particular employees to the corporation.  Seventh Circuit precedent indicated that “corporations ‘know’ what their employees who are responsible for an aspect of the business know.”  More specifically, the corporation was said to know what an employee knows if the employee has a duty to report that knowledge to someone higher up in the corporation.

Continue ReadingSeventh Circuit Week in Review: Corporate Criminal Liability, Reconsideration of Suppression Rulings, and More

Virtual Book Club: Tribe on the Invisible Constitution

As announced earlier this semester, several faculty members have been reading Laurence Tribe’s The Invisible Constitution.  I hope that we will be having a series of posts and comments on the book.  I have just finished reading it.  A few very general reactions will be offered here.

Tribe’s interest is in a set of principles that have come to be accepted as constitutional in nature, but that appear nowhere in the Constitution’s written text.  He lists as examples:

  • Courts must not automatically defer to what elected officials decide the Constitution means.
  • Government may not torture people to force information out of them.
  • In each person’s intimate private life, there are limits to what government may control.
  • Congress may not commandeer the states as though they were agencies or departments of the federal government.
  • No state may secede from the Union.  (28)

In developing his thesis that the Constitution contains such invisible “dark matter,” Tribe implicitly situates himself in opposition to the formalist school of constitutional interpretation, which emphasizes the written text of the Constitution and historical documents from the framing era that shed light on the meaning of the text.  Tribe instead understands the content of the Constitution to evolve over time, even without formal amendment of the text. 

Continue ReadingVirtual Book Club: Tribe on the Invisible Constitution