Who Is a “Supervisor”? We Know One When We See One

Justice Potter Stewart famously eschewed a formal legal definition of pornography, and instead embraced the “I know it when I see it” test. Based on his opinion yesterday in United States v. Figueroa (No. 11-2594), Judge Posner seems to have a similar approach in mind for determining whether a drug trafficker is a “manager” or “supervisor.”

Under § 3B1.1 of the federal sentencing guidelines, a manager or supervisor of criminal activity receives a substantial sentence enhancement. An even larger enhancement is contemplated for some defendants who qualify as a “leader” or “organizer.” The guidelines suggest a seven-factor test for determining whether a defendant is a leader or organizer, but are silent on the meaning of manager and supervisor. However, in the Seventh Circuit and elsewhere, it has been common for courts also to look to the seven factors when making manager/supervisor determinations.

Writing for the panel in Figueroa, Judge Posner seemed to scoff at this approach: 

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Florence v. Board: With Proactive Policing at Issue, Supreme Court Backs Discretion

I’ve been working through my backlog of reading from the academic year, including the Supreme Court’s April decision in Florence v. Board of Chosen Freeholders of County of Burlington. This is the decision in which the Court upheld the use of routine, suspicionless strip searches of individuals arrested and jailed for minor offenses.

It strikes me that part of what was really at issue in the case went unmentioned by both the majority and the dissent. The case is framed on both sides as being about corrections administration, but it is perhaps just as much about policing – how much discretion are we going to give police to detain citizens and impose on them the humiliation, stigma, and danger of incarceration with a general jail population. This discretion seems a powerful tool in support of proactive, crime-preventive policing, but it is also prone to abuse and seems hard to reconcile with ideals like checks and balances and “innocent until proven guilty.”

Writing for the Florence majority, Justice Kennedy presented the case as a conventional prisoner rights case. 

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Another Habeas Slap-Down From the Supreme Court; Where Is Habeas Law Heading?

The Supreme Court summarily overturned yet another habeas grant earlier this week in Coleman v. Johnson (No. 11-1053).  Johnson was convicted in Pennsylvania state court as an accomplice and co-conspirator in a murder.  Without getting into all of the details, let’s just say that the state’s case against Johnson was circumstantial and something less than airtight.  Johnson thus sought to have his conviction overturned in state court on the ground that the evidence was insufficient to support the jury’s verdict, invoking Jackson v. Virginia, 443 U.S. 307 (1979).  The state courts rejected this claim, as did a federal district court, but the Third Circuit reversed.

The Supreme Court overturned the Third Circuit’s decision in a brusque per curiam opinion.

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