US Supreme Court Review: Crime and Causation

US Supreme Court logo(This is the first post in our series, Looking Back at the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2013 Term. Other posts, when they appear, can be found here.) The Court’s criminal docket this term included two interesting causation cases that came to somewhat different conclusions. The cases were Burrage v. United States, 134 S. Ct. 881, which dealt with criminal responsibility for a drug-related death, and Paroline v. United States, 134 S. Ct. 1710, which dealt with restitution for a child pornography victim. In both cases, the Court had to grapple with tensions between traditional, narrow understandings of causal responsibility in the law and a natural human desire to hold bad actors accountable for tragic harms with which they seem to have some connection, even if that connection is a tenuous or uncertain one.

Burrage nicely illustrates the tension.  

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Bond v. United States: SCOTUS Interprets Criminal Statute Narrowly to Preserve Federal-State Balance

In an opinion sure to be cited by many federal criminal defendants for years to come, the Supreme Court yesterday overturned the conviction of Carol Anne Bond under the Chemical Weapons Convention Implementation Act. Although few defendants are prosecuted under this statute, the Court’s decision in Bond is noteworthy for its approach to the interpretation of federal criminal statutes. The Court adopted a narrow interpretation of the Implementation Act in order to preserve what it called the “usual constitutional balance of federal and state power.” (12) This interpretive principle is not a new one, but the Court applied it in an unusually aggressive fashion in Bond. The opinion is sure to be a favorite of defendants who find themselves prosecuted in federal court for offenses traditionally and routinely handled in state courts.

The underlying facts in Bond were a mix of the mundane and the bizarre.  

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SCOTUS Strengthens 8th Amendment Protections for Intellectually Disabled

In 2002, in Atkins v. Virginia, the Supreme Court prohibited capital punishment for defendants who suffered from what the Court then called “mental retardation.” However, the Court did not prescribe any particular process or standards for determining which defendants qualify. Florida adopted a particularly restrictive approach, refusing even to consider the full spectrum of evidence of intellectual limitations if a defendant’s IQ had not been scored 70 or lower. Earlier this week, in Hall v. Florida, the Supreme Court rejected this test for failing to take into account the standard error of measurement (SEM) of IQ tests. “This rigid rule,” Justice Kennedy wrote for a narrow 5-4 majority, “creates an unacceptable risk that persons with intellectual disability will be executed, and thus is unconstitutional.” (Along the way, the Court expressly changed its preferred terminology from “mental retardation” to “intellectual disability.”)

Kennedy’s reference to “unacceptable risk” goes to the heart of the disagreement between the majority and the dissenters.  

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