When Battered Women Kill . . .

Do feminist concerns regarding violence against women justify expanding the self-protection defense in criminal law?  This was the topic of the second annual George and Margaret Barrock Lecture on Criminal Law, which was delivered Thursday afternoon by Professor Joshua Dressler of Ohio State.  Dressler left no doubt about where he stands on the issue: whether motivated by domestic-violence concerns or otherwise, recent proposals to expand the right to use deadly force are inconsistent with a due regard for the value of human life.  To be clear, Dressler would not deny the right to use deadly force when a woman is actually being attacked or threatened — his focus is more on cases in which a sleeping or otherwise nonthreatening batterer is killed. 

The webcast of Dressler’s provocative lecture is available here.   The lecture will also be published later this year in the Marquette Law Review.

Continue ReadingWhen Battered Women Kill . . .

Judging Friday’s SCOWIS Decisions

On Friday, the Wisconsin Supreme Court released two opinions that reflect the court’s new jurisprudential direction. Allow me to focus on the opinion with a much greater discussion of jurisprudence. (The other is State v. Wood, a due process challenge to forced administration of medication in a state-administered facility to a person who had been found not guilty of a crime by reason of mental disease or defect.)

In State v. Smith, the Supreme Court upheld the state’s sex offender registration law for crimes which, in the particular instance, did not have an obvious sexual component. Smith had been convicted of false imprisonment of a minor, which is one of the crimes leading to sex offender registration. Smith brought as-applied equal protection and substantive due process challenges because his act of false imprisonment had no sexual motive or activity. 

Continue ReadingJudging Friday’s SCOWIS Decisions

A Chemistry Lesson from the Seventh Circuit

seventh-circuit51Under the federal sentencing guidelines, sentences in drug-trafficking cases turn largely on weight — that is, how much of each type of drug was sold by the defendant — which can cause all sorts of problems in sentencing long-time dealers who were not considerate enough to keep meticulous records of their sales for the police.  Witness the case of crack dealer Joshua Hines, who admitted acquiring 1.531 kilograms of powder cocaine.  The district judge assumed that Hines cooked this powder into an equivalent weight of crack for resale, which resulted in a sentence of 168 months in prison.  Given much harsher treatment of crack than powder, the guidelines would not have resulted in nearly so long a sentence on the basis of the 1.531 kg of powder alone.  So, is it fair to assume that a crack dealer who possessed a certain weight of powder also possessed the same weight of crack?

No, said the Seventh Circuit in United States v. Hines (No. 08-3255).  Writing for the court, Judge Posner offered a little chemistry lesson, explaining that the process of cooking powder into crack removes hydrochloride from the drug.  Under ideal conditions, cooking results in an eleven-percent weight loss.  But, given the potential for careless waste during cooking, it is not clear that even the eleven-percent loss should be assumed.  The court concluded, “[If] the government wants the sentencing judge to infer the weight of the crack from the weight of the powder from which the crack was manufactured, it has to present evidence, concerning the cooking process, that would enable a conversion ratio to be estimated” (3).  (Judging by the mess on my kitchen counter most mornings, I am guessing that the “conversion ratio” when my six-year-old cooks oatmeal into hot cereal is about 2:1.  Fortunately, and notwithstanding its cholesterol-lowering benefits, the street value of oatmeal remains a lot less than cocaine.)

Continue ReadingA Chemistry Lesson from the Seventh Circuit