The Media and Dominique Strauss-Kahn

Last month I was contacted by the Italian newspaper Il Foglio and interviewed regarding criminal proceedings against Dominique Strauss-Kahn.  A French banker and head of the International Monetary Fund, Strauss-Kahn has been charged with sexually assaulting a maid for the $3000-a- night hotel suite in which he was staying in New York City.  To my surprise, the reporter was not interested in the legal proceedings themselves but rather in the way the case was being presented in the American mass media.

The case is still another example of the way the prosecution of a rich and/or famous person can be and frequently is presented to the public as a type of contemporary morality play, that is, as a dramatic allegory about temptation, sin, and – in the end – either damnation of salvation.  Comparable media packaging of cases involving O.J. Simpson, Michael Jackson, and Eliot Spitzer spring to mind.

The added twist in the Strauss-Kahn drama is that the featured player in the morality play is a wealthy and worldly European who found out the hard way about down-to-earth American norms and values.  The best comparison might be to the mass media’s packaging of the attempt to extradite the Polish filmmaker Roman Polansky, who allegedly raped a teenager in California.  Lionized by the French artistic community, Polansky squirreled himself away in Switzerland and in the end avoided the grasp of the American authorities.  Strauss-Kahn, meanwhile is under house arrest in Manhattan and waiting trial.  Might Attica be his hellish fate?

The Il Foglio article appears on the front page of the “Martedo, 24 Maggio 2011” edition, but since the article is in Italian, most of us will require the good services of colleague Irene Calboli in order to read it . . . .

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Defendant Can Raise Tenth-Amendment Challenge to Her Conviction, SCOTUS Rules

Earlier today, in Bond v. United States (No. 09-1227), the Supreme Court ruled that the defendant should have been permitted to raise a Tenth-Amendment challenge to the chemical-weapons statute that she was convicted of violating.  In response to her indictment for violating 18 U.S.C. § 229, Bond had argued

that the conduct with which she is charged is “local in nature” and “should be left to local authorities to prosecute” and that congressional regulation of that conduct “signals a massive and unjustifiable expansion of federal law enforcement into state-regulated domain.” Record in No. 2:07-cr-00528-JG-1 (ED Pa.), Doc. 27, pp. 6, 19. The public policy of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, enacted in its capacity as sovereign, has been displaced by that of the National Government. The law to which petitioner is subject, the prosecution she seeks to counter, and the punishment she must face might not have come about if the matter were left for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to decide. Indeed, petitioner argues that under Pennsylvania law the expected maximum term of imprisonment she could have received for the same conduct was barely more than a third of her federal sentence.

The Third Circuit, however, ruled that Bond lacked standing to raise her constitutional objections.

In reversing this decision, the Court did not address the merits of the objections.  As a result, it’s hard to say whether there is any sympathy on the Court for the basic claim that the Tenth Amendment may be violated when a federal law criminalizes conduct that is “local in nature.”  Still, it is interesting to put Bond alongside last month’s decision in Fowler, in which the Court cited similar federalism concerns in rejecting an expansive interpretation of a different federal criminal statute.  Perhaps the Court is entering a new phase of heightened concern over the federalization of criminal law.

Cross posted at Life Sentences Blog.

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Sentencing Judge May Not Lengthen Prison Term in Order to Promote Rehabilitation

Earlier today, the United State Supreme Court ruled that federal judges may not impose or lengthen a defendant’s sentence in order to promote rehabilitation.  In Tapia v. United States (No. 10-5400), the district judge apparently selected a sentence at the very top of the recommended guidelines range in order to give Tapia time to complete the Bureau of Prison’s Residential Drug Abuse Program (a/k/a the 500 Hour Drug Program).  The Supreme Court rejected this reasoning as a straightforward matter of statutory interpretation: 18 U.S.C. § 3582(a) instructs sentencing judges to “recogniz[e] that imprisonment is not an appropriate means of promoting correction and rehabilitation.”

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