Seventh Circuit Criminal Case of the Week

seventh-circuit1With only one new opinion in a criminal case, there’s not much to choose from.  Unfortunately, United States v. Sainz-Preciado (No. 07-3706) was a fairly routine case that broke no new legal ground.  In its opinion, the Seventh Circuit (per Judge Tinder) affirmed the defendant’s 262-month sentence for cocaine trafficking over various objections to the way the guidelines sentence was calculated and imposed.

One aspect of the case merits at least brief comment.  The defendant was awarded only a two-point, not the possible three-point, reduction in offense level under the sentencing guidelines for “acceptance of responsibility.”  The third point requires a motion from the government, and the government did not make such a motion for Sainz-Preciado.  Normally, defendants who enter a timely guilty plea, as Sainz-Preciadio did, receive the full acceptance benefit.  However, Sainz-Preciado was penalized by the government for contesting his responsibility at the sentencing hearing for drug deals that he was not even charged with.  This is a nice reminder for defense counsel of the perils of challenging “relevant conduct” at sentencing — and, to invoke one of Justice Scalia’s favorite themes, of the extent to which the guidelines system has replaced the common-law values of adversarial testing of evidence with the bureaucratic values of efficient case-processing.

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Sotomayor, Obama, and Ideology

I am among what must be a million or so people who receive e-mail messages from President Obama. They come addressed to “David” and are signed “President Barack Obama.” The most recent concerned the Sotomayor nomination and included an earnest four-minute video in which the President offered his reasons for the nomination.

I found the video impressive for various reasons. The President of course comes across as photogenic, genuine, and articulate. My goodness, he did not muff a single word! He also is a superb ideologue. In discussing the Sotomayor nomination, he skillfully invokes the importance of hard work, the rags-to-riches myth, the notion of a neutral rule of law, and assorted other staples of the dominant ideology. The President also assures us that the nominee herself is not an ideologue. The disavowal of ideology might in itself be the video’s most ideological ploy.

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Women at the Bargaining Table . . . and on the Way to the White House

Andrea Schneider has two fascinating new papers on SSRN.  In different ways, both papers deal with what Andrea and her coauthers label the “double bind” facing women in leadership positions: “The incongruence of the core feminine stereotype with managerial effectiveness can result in women being perceived as competent but unlikable, or as likable but incompetent.”  The first paper, “Negotiating Your Public Identity: Women’s Path to Power,” illustrates the two options using two female politicians with clearly established public images: Hillary Clinton’s persona illustrates “competent but unlikable,” while Sarah Palin’s exemplifies “likable but incompetent.”  (As I suggested in an earlier post, some of the criticisms of Sonia Sotomayor as lacking “judicial temperament” may owe something, à la Hillary, to the “competent but unlikable” stereotype.)

Andrea and her coauthors offer a humorous, but also disheartening, review of media coverage from the 2008 election that typecast Clinton and Palin into their respective roles.  They also discuss social scientific research suggesting that the double bind arises from deeply entrenched gender stereotypes.  They conclude more hopefully, however, with suggested strategies for professional women to minimize the harmful effects of the double bind.

The second paper, “Women at the Bargaining Table: Pitfalls and Prospects,” presents some of these suggestions in more detail, with particular attention to the implications for teachers of negotiation. 

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