Seventh Circuit Decides That Reckless Injury and Statutory Rape Are Not “Crimes of Violence”

seventh-circuit51In a series of posts (e.g., here and here), I have been tracking the fallout in the Seventh Circuit of the Supreme Court’s decision in Begay v. United States, 128 S. Ct. 1581 (2008).  Begay adopted a new approach for deciding when former convictions count as “crimes of violence” that trigger the fifteen-year mandatory minimum sentence of the Armed Career Criminal Act.

Earlier this week, the Seventh Circuit had another in its increasingly long line of post-Begay decisions holding that this or that specific offense does not fit the new definition of “crime of violence.”  More specifically, in United States v. McDonald (No. 08-2703) (Sykes, J.), the court held that first-degree reckless injury (in violation of Wis. Stat. § 940.23) and second-degree sexual assault of a child (what would be colloquially called “statutory rape,” in violation of Wis. Stat. § 948.02(2)) do not count as crimes of violence. 

Continue ReadingSeventh Circuit Decides That Reckless Injury and Statutory Rape Are Not “Crimes of Violence”

Chocolate Cake v. Fruit – Or Why We Get Emotional During “Rational” Negotiations

I was listening to a great story earlier this week on NPR which described an interesting experiment:

In his book How We Decide, and in a recent Wall Street Journal article, Jonah Lehrer writes about an experiment by Stanford University professor Baba Shiv, who collected several dozen undergraduates and divided them into two groups.

In the WSJ article, Jonah writes: “One group was given a two-digit number to remember, while the second group was given a seven-digit number. Then they were told to walk down the hall, where they were presented with two different snack options: a slice of chocolate cake or a bowl of fruit salad.”

And then he writes:

“Here’s where the results get weird.

Continue ReadingChocolate Cake v. Fruit – Or Why We Get Emotional During “Rational” Negotiations

Asking the Right Questions About Justifying War

If you think of “just war” theory as something associated with pacifism or as a path for justifying not using military tactics in many world situations, you’re looking at the subject from the wrong perspective, Catholic commentator George Weigel said Tuesday in a talk at Marquette Law School.

You’re looking at it the way President Barack Obama does – which is “almost entirely inside out and upside down,” Weigel said in a lecture sponsored by the student chapters of the Federalist Society and St. Thomas More Society.

Weigel, a distinguished senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., is author of a widely read biography of Pope John Paul II and other books and a commentator on NBC on Catholic news.

He gave Obama credit for using Nobel Peace Prize speech recently to discuss the need to go to war against evil that exists in the world, but he said the underpinning of Obama’s justification of war was built too heavily on factors that were of lower priority than the main pillars of the subject in thought going back to St. Augustine. 

Continue ReadingAsking the Right Questions About Justifying War