California Answers Some of the Graham/Miller Questions, Sort Of

As I discussed in a recent post, the United States Supreme Court left many questions unanswered in its two recent decisions on life without parole for juveniles.  In the first case, Graham v. Florida (2010), the Court banned LWOP for juveniles convicted of nonhomicide offenses.  Then, in Miller v. Alabama (2012), the Court banned mandatory LWOP even for juveniles convicted of homicide.  These were important Eighth Amendment decisions, but the lower courts have been left to implement them without much guidance.

Yesterday, the California Supreme Court began to address some of the unanswered questions in People v. Caballero.  I think Caballero got things right, as far as it went, but the case left much open for future litigation. 

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Gu Kailai Trial and China’s Rule by Law

On Thursday, August 9, 2012, in China’s Anhui province, the murder trial of Gu Kailai, wife of a high-profile former Communist Party official, for the murder of British businessman, Neil Heywood, ended after seven hours. The trial is regarded as the highest profile political trial in decades, Gu Kailai being the wife of disgraced former Communist Party official Bo Xilai.

Heywood, a family friend of Gu and Bo, was found dead in his Chongqing hotel room in November 2011, the morning after dining with Gu. The trial has garnered international attention, with many China law scholars asking what light the proceedings shed on China’s purported pursuit of a law-based society (法治国家).

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Diplomatic Premises Immunity in the Case of Julian Assange

For the past two months, Julian Assange has been staying at Ecuador’s embassy to the United Kingdom to avoid arrest in England, extradition to Sweden on sexual assault charges, and possible extradition from Sweden to the United States for charges connected with Wikileaks’ disclosure of State Department cables in 2010. The UK has demanded that Ecuador hand over Assange, but today Ecuador officially refused. In response, British officials have threatened to suspend the embassy’s diplomatic immunity so that they can enter the embassy grounds and make the arrest.

The dispute raises a question that Britain has encountered before. In 1984, during an anti-Gaddafi demonstration outside the Libyan embassy in London, someone inside the embassy shot and killed a British law enforcement officer who was policing the protest near the embassy grounds. The British government, however, had no legal means of arresting the shooter. The Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations had established that the premises of a diplomatic mission “shall be inviolable,” that “agents of [a] receiving State may not enter them, except with the consent of the head of the mission,” and that the premises “shall be immune from search . . . .” Libya, moreover, refused to allow entry and search. This dissatisfying result eventually led Parliament to pass a law called the Diplomatic and Consular Premises Act of 1987.

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