A few of days ago, defense lawyer Mark Bennett tweeted an interesting thread about how loss aversion bias could affect a criminal defendant's decision to take a plea deal:https://twitter.com/NoLongerBennett/status/1057661072579223552(If you're interested, read the whole thread.)For as long as I've been following criminal defense lawyers on the web, they've … [Read more...] about Model Justice — Part 1
Crime and Punishment
Why I Can’t Enjoy the Cohen and Manafort News
I'm not a Trump fan, so I really enjoy it when Trump is having a bad day, but there are things about the convictions of Cohen and Manafort that bother me.Political campaigns are mostly free speech, which should be well-protected by the First Amendment, but campaign finance laws attempt to control the money that pays for producing or disseminating this speech. This requires … [Read more...] about Why I Can’t Enjoy the Cohen and Manafort News
The Unknown Reason for the Vegas Shooting
Like everybody else, I've been trying to make sense of the Las Vegas shooting, in which a 64-year-old guy named Stephen Paddock apparently opened fire on a crowd of 22,000 country music festival attendees from his 32nd-floor room in the Mandalay Bay hotel, killing 59 people and injuring hundreds more.One of the confusing things about this horrible incident is that from what … [Read more...] about The Unknown Reason for the Vegas Shooting
The Dominatrix and the Sheriff
I've been watching the reaction on Twitter to President Trump's pardoning of former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio. Arpaio is a despicable authoritarian bigot, who I've written about several times previously. He is famous, and famously proud, of how tough he was on the prisoners in his custody. He liked seeing them mistreated and humiliated, often in very unpleasant ways. I … [Read more...] about The Dominatrix and the Sheriff
Possession Is Such a Strange Crime
A hypothetical question for my criminal law readers (or anyone else who has ideas): What should I do if I inadvertently come into possession of contraband?To make it more concrete, suppose I'm walking down the street, minding my own business, when a stranger confronts me, thrusts a duffle bag into my hands, and runs away. When I open a duffle bag, I find a tightly wrapped … [Read more...] about Possession Is Such a Strange Crime