Should This Man Go Free?

Today’s New York Times Sunday magazine contains a fascinating article about Greg Ousley, a 33-year-old Indiana man who is in prison for killing his parents when he was 14 years old.  Journalist Scott Anderson reports that Greg is serving a 60-year sentence, with no possibility of parole until 2019. However, Greg’s appeals lawyer is pursuing a sentence modification procedure, which could potentially allow him to be released early if none of the victims’ next of kin object. Of the seven relatives in question – his two sisters and five aunts and uncles – only one aunt objects to the early parole. This is enough to derail the process for now, despite the fact that prison officials think Greg has been rehabilitated since he has been a model prisoner for years and has earned both a high school equivalency certificate and a college degree (magna cum laude) while in prison.

As Anderson points out in his article, parricide is a fairly rare crime, and the killing of both parents is rarer still. Most of the cases seem to involve severe physical or sexual abuse of the child-turned-killer. Greg Ousley’s case is more nuanced. He appears not to have been severely abused, although his parents clearly had issues and few would nominate them for parents of the year – at least if Greg’s version is to be believed. Greg’s dad had a fairly serious drinking problem, his mother (who had been orphaned at a young age) had abandonment issues and was prone to rages in which she verbally abused her children. Apparently neither parent was good at verbally expressing either love or empathy. Greg was angry at his parents for the way they treated him, and he was especially angry at his mother after he found her in the garage kissing his father’s best friend. Greg was also severely depressed. Both a middle school teacher and Greg’s mother seem to have recognized this, but their somewhat modest efforts to address the issue with Greg were rebuffed, and they did not pursue the conversation further. At some point Greg decided to kill his parents, he wrote about it in his journal, he told his friends that he would kill his parents, and ultimately he shot both his father and mother at point-blank range with a 12-gauge shotgun. Ironically, he did it on a night that he now remembers as a night when his parents reached out to him in a positive way, and the three had spent the evening playing guitar and singing at home.

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The Public Frequently Disagrees With the Supreme Court

An article in Thursday’s New York Times by reporters Adam Liptak and Allison Kopicki examined the public response to the United States Supreme Court’s recent decision in the Affordable Health Care case. Based on public opinion polling shortly after the decision was handed down, only 46% of those surveyed agreed that the case had been correctly decided.

In a sidebar, the story also noted that public reactions of this nature were not unusual.

Using past public opinion polls to determine the immediate popular reaction to landmark Supreme Court decisions, the story reported that in 17 controversial cases decided between 1954 and 2011, majority support from the American public was the exception rather than the rule.

In only 4 of the cases did as many as 51% of respondents support the Supreme Court’s decision.

Two of the four cases were, perhaps surprisingly, the highly controversial opinions in Brown v. Board of Education (54%) and Roe v. Wade (52%). In both cases, a slight majority of Americans felt at the time that the cases were correctly decided.

The other two cases that evoked the support of the majority of Americans were Boy Scouts v. Dale (56%) (allowing the Boy Scouts to exclude homosexuals) and Clinton v. Jones (59%) (allowing Paula Jones to file a sexual harassment suit against the sitting president).

If we assume that the failure to agree with a decision represents a belief that the Constitution, properly interpreted, would have produced a different result, the polls suggest that the American people as a whole have instinctively embraced the following viewpoints:

(1) Race should never be a factor in assigning students to schools. (Brown v. Board of education and Parents Involved v. Seattle)

(2) Affirmative action, on the basis of either race or gender, is wrong. (Johnson v. Santa Clara and Grutter v. Bollinger)

(3) Women have a right to an abortion if they want one. (Roe v. Wade and Gonzales v. Carhart)

(4) It is okay for a private citizen or organization to discriminate against homosexuals, and gay sex acts can be treated as crimes. (Boy Scouts v. Dale and Lawrence v. Texas)

(5) Governmental security concerns trump the First Amendment. (New York Times v. U.S.)

(6) Foreign terrorists can claim no protection under the U.S. Constitution. (Boumediene v. Bush)

(7) The amount of money spent on political campaigns can be limited. (Buckley v. Valeo and Citizens United v FEC)

(8) Politically motivated U. S. flag burning should be a crime. (Texas v. Johnson)

(9) Prayer should be allowed in public schools. (Engle v. Vitale and Santa Fe v. Doe)

(10) The president can be sued for sexual harassment while in office. (Clinton v. Jones)

(11) No one really knows who should have won the 2000 presidential election. (Bush v. Gore)

Like it or not, this is popular constitutionalism.

Thanks to Scott Idleman for calling this article to my attention.

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The Law and Pastries

In law school, we learn to “think like a lawyer.” As the fictional Professor Kingsfield put it, we develop “the ability to analyze that vast complex of facts that constitute the relationships of members within a given society.” We learn the rules under which those relationships operate, and the theory and reasons behind how we handle things when those relationships go sour. We begin to see the world around us in a different light – the light of the law.

Torts got me first. I was seeing standards of care, the illusive reasonable man, and potential negligence wherever I went – except at my house, where we always behave reasonably and prudently. Contracts are no longer something I quickly sign and shove back across the counter. Don’t get me wrong, I only read them for entertainment value before signing. After all, I want my iPhone, and there is a reason they’re called adhesion contracts. Property’s spell struck when I encountered a private driveway, which crossed a county bike trail, which ran along a We-Energies right of way. I’ll leave constitutional law and criminal law to your imaginations, but I will say that I haven’t had to invoke any of my rights, nor has anyone had to read them to me. Finally, although I didn’t encounter it in real life, civil procedure did haunt my dreams for a while. Fortunately, new areas of the law from my summer session courses have started to edge out the 1L voices in my head.

One course, intellectual property, has me seeing trademarks and copyright disputes all over the place. Like everyone else, I had been seeing trademarks everywhere for my whole life, I just didn’t know what a trademark was. As I learned trademark law, I remembered a story from my hometown’s recent past. It was big news at the time, but it is likely unfamiliar to people who are not from Racine, Wisconsin. (For those of you not familiar with Racine, it is a lovely city located about 30 minutes south of Milwaukee. Among other things, Racine features an award-winning beach, excellent local government, and kringle.) I’ll have more on the local government in a future posting. For now, I want to talk about pastries.

The story begins long ago, when a wave of Danish immigrants settled in Racine. Like other immigrant waves throughout our history, the Danes brought their food here. In this case, they brought kringle, a large, tasty, pretzel-shaped pastry. At some point, Racine bakers swapped the pretzel shape for an oval shape and the Racine kringle was born. For decades, Larsen’s, Lehmann’s, O & H, and Bendtsen’s bakeries prepared and sold delicious Racine kringles. There was plenty of room in the market for all of the competitors to do well, and the good people of Racine, and many lucky visitors, ate their fill of these tasty treats. All was well in kringle-land.

Then, in the 1990’s, as the rise of online sales was taking kringle beyond our borders, a new player emerged on the scene: Racine Danish Kringles (RDK). 

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