Burglary, Violence, and the Armed Career Criminal Act

The U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics has issued a new report on victimization during household burglary, which might have important implications for the application of the Armed Career Criminal Act.  First, here are the report’s highlights on the burglary-violence connection:

  • A household member is present in about one-quarter of residential burlgaries.
  • A household member is violently vicitmized in about seven percent of residential burglaries (or about one-quarter of the burglaries in which a household member is present).
  • In residential burglaries, simple asault is the most common violent crime (3.7 percent of all burlgaries), while more serious violent crimes like rape (0.6 percent) and aggravated assault (1.3 percent) are far less frequent.
  • In a majority of even the “violent” burglaries, the victim indicates there is no injury; a “serious injury” is sustained in only 8.5 percent of the violent burglaries.
  • In the violent burglaries, fewer than forty percent of the offenders are armed.

Now, for the ACCA link. 

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New Criminal Law Blog

I’ve recently launched Life Sentences Blog (http://www.lifesentencesblog.com/), in which I intend to track new legal developments and research relating to long prison sentences.  Here’s how I explain my interests in the “About” page:

I am using this blog as a way to organize new information and ideas about sentencing and related topics, and to do a little “thinking out loud.” If the blog is also helpful to others, then so much the better. Since there are already a number of outstanding blogs that track sentencing and criminal law, the reader may be interested to know my particular areas of focus: federal sentencing law (especially Seventh Circuit), Wisconsin sentencing law, life without parole, post-conviction remedies, prisoner rights, victim rights, prisoner reentry, restorative justice, punishment theory, drug crime, history of crime and punishment, and the psychology of punishment and blaming. The questions that most interest me right now relate to the use of long prison terms (say, twenty years and up)–why do we use this type of punishment, when is it appropriate, how is its use structured by the law, how is long-term imprisonment experienced by inmates, and so forth.

I hope to have fresh posts up most days — at least until final exam season rolls around.

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Best of the Blogs: Clerkship Edition

This week, two posts on federal judicial clerkships particularly caught my eye.  First, at Concurring Opinions, David Hoffman reported on the “quickly unraveling clerkship market.”  Under the “Federal Judges Law Clerk Hiring Plan,” law schools are not supposed to send supporting materials for student clerkship applicants, and judges are not supposed to interview student applicants, before September of the students’ third year.  This is intended to stop a race to the bottom among the judges, who might otherwise move their hiring processes ever earlier in order to snag the most promising clerkship candidates.  (When I was a law student in the mid-1990’s, the norm was hiring midway through the 2L year.  This seemed truly absurd at my law school because the first semester was ungraded, and third-semester grades were not yet available when clerks were hired; judges were thus selecting clerks based on only a single semester of grades.)

According to Hoffman, the “dam is about to burst,” as more and more judges and law schools are violating or circumventing the Plan.  I was particularly intrigued by his observation that judges are circumventing the Plan by hiring practicing lawyers instead of law students.  This is certainly nothing new — I had several classmates who moved from practice to clerkship and back again over our first few years out of school — but I wonder if it has become more common in response to restrictions on hiring law students.

I also wonder if judges tend to get better clerks when they hire practitioners.  

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