Author Archives: Michael Froomkin

Law at the Sharp End

Posted on March 4, 2005 by Michael Froomkin

Jaye Ramsey Sutter (“in a bad mood & telling you about it since 1962”) walks much, much a harder road than I do:

Today the Supreme Court did a good thing, no more death penalty for those who commit crimes when they are juveniles. To hear people discuss it,however, you would think that the Supreme Court took away everyone's Christmas present. For a bunch of Christians, these Americans are strangely pro-death penalty. I am positive that Christ himself would support the execution of juveniles while they are still juveniles. Amen.

I wanted to discuss the opinion with my students. I wanted them to see what an actual opinion looks like. We went up on line in the classroom and saw it. As we talked about what it meant my students opened up about their legal issues and problems.

I was stunned.

One young woman asked about what to do when her boyfriend beat her. Should she call the police from their appartment, should she leave the scene, should she sleep on it and call the next day.

I feel odd discussing the elegance of a Supreme Court decision with its beautiful citations and form when these students experience such violence.

One young man, so full of energy and intelligence asked if his girl friend had a restraining order against him and she walked into their favorite club and he was there, should he leave or should she? I told him bluntly to be a man, don't argue over some childish right to be drinking in their favorite club, and leave. Just walk away. Why don't she have to do that, he begged. Why don't we skip over that part and you be the adult and leave, I replied.

How can we teach the civilization of this Supreme Court decision to people who live with such violence as part of their lives?

I don't think it was a wasted class. I think our textbooks and our curriculum should address the violence that is our students' lives. They asked me who to call if the neighbors are abusing their children. I replied that a call to the police would certainly work and that Child Protective Services would investigate. I told them if they did not call the police they were making the abuse possible because they are aware of it and are doing nothing.

And I'm going to conferences.

Posted in Law: Everything Else | 2 Comments

Whistleblowers Got Blown Off

Posted on March 3, 2005 by Michael Froomkin

AP has the story about the whistleblowing complaint against Scott Bloch, the head of the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, the office that's supposed to protect whistleblowers and investigate their complaints. He's accused of instructing staff to deep-six complaints without even interviewing the complainant. And of refusing to enforce laws protecting gay workers from discrimination.

“While publicly congratulating himself for reducing the caseload … Mr. Bloch has failed to explain just what happened to all of the cases he closed,” said the complaint filed in Washington.

…

Bloch came under fire last year when he moved to deny gay federal workers protection against discrimination based on sexual orientation and removed references to sexual orientation from the agency's Web site and complaint forms.

…

In a letter to Bush, the employees' lawyer, Debra S. Katz, wrote: “Mr. Bloch ignored your express direction that federal agencies enforce” anti-discrimination laws against gays.

What you have to understandis that all these whistleblowers are bad people. Not with the program or they would air dirty linen in public. They're probably Democrats. Which makes them near terrorists. And you expect Mr. Bloch to protect them?

Posted in Politics: The Party of Sleaze | 2 Comments

Brad DeLong is Cranky Today

Posted on March 3, 2005 by Michael Froomkin

Brad DeLong says he is cranky today.

Brad DeLong's Website: Sigh Greg Mankiw: I am cranky, and annoyed. And I am not asking for very much. All I want is:

  • No more claims that we know that carving-out Social Security revenues to fund private accounts will have no damaging effect on national saving. It might work. It might not.
  • No more claims that the U.S. is a small open economy. It isn't.
  • No more claims that there is no reason to think that slower economic growth will carry lower asset returns with it. There are good reasons to fear this.
  • No more claims that the household employment survey is as good a guide to short-term labor market trends as the establishment survey. It isn't.
  • No more claims that an honest forecast of what George W. Bush's policies are sees the deficit cut in half by the end of this decade. It doesn't.

I think Brad should be cranky more often. But then I don't have to live with him.

Posted in Econ & Money | 1 Comment

Waiting for Sunbird

Posted on March 3, 2005 by Michael Froomkin

While waiting for Mozilla Sunbird to at least get to a more advanced beta stage, I'm still relying on my old trusty calendar program, Sidekick 98. And I really rely on my calendar because while I have a head for figures I have no head for dates.

Sidekick 98 has been temperamental lately, especially on my office computer, and I've wondered if that might be because that machine has less memory than my home machine, I run lots of things at once including memory hog wordperfect, and my calendar file must be enormous. If that's right, possible solutions are to start a new file with less data (but that means a lot of manual copying of annual events and all of my life for the next N months) or move to the still-pretty-beta Sunbird (ditto on the copying) before it feels robust and full-featured enough to rely on.

Posted in Software | 2 Comments

The Future is Here and Your DNA Has Been Subpoenaed

Posted on March 3, 2005 by Michael Froomkin

Declan McCullagh has finally fixed the RSS for his Politechbot list so I guess I'm reading it again. Here's a fascinating item originating from an email from Ethan Ackerman that I'm taking the liberty of quoting in full because it raises so many issues.

Cops covertly acquired tissue of BTK suspect's relative — from medical lab: In developments straight out of GATTACA's handshake scene, A Kansas City Star report indicates that the suspected “BTK” killer was tentatively linked to crime scene evidence by acquiring genetic material from the suspect's daughter's medical records – the tissue samples being taken without her knowledge.

http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/news/nation/11035826.htm

The article goes on to give a brief but factually accurate explanation of how a request for “medical records” is entirely within the framework of the federal medical privacy laws (HIPAA), and also gives a likely source of the tissue – a routine pap smear. The article suggests that a judge issued a secret order for the records, though the article does not state if it was a formal 4th Amendment “probable cause” warrant, or some lesser standard subpoena, or even go into whether the police were required to acquire an order under HIPAA (there are circumstances where agents can just the recordholder.)

BUT the article also doesn't raise the fact that what was apparently requested was NOT “health information” – what HIPAA protects – but actual tissue from the suspect's daughter's file samples.

I'm operating on a few words from one article here, so the facts aren't definitive, but this seems quite an interesting breach of privacy expectations, independent of how it may legally turn out.

On one hand, court-compelled physical examinations have been ruled Constitutionally sound (thus, you can be compelled to give a tissue sample, or even forcibly sampled.) On the other hand, how many American women even know labs keep pap smear samples, much less would think it reasonable that their pap smears would one day be turned over to police to tentatively connect their sons or daughters to crimes?

Posted in Law: Privacy | 2 Comments

YATA (Froze to Death in Detention)

Posted on March 3, 2005 by Michael Froomkin

Yet Another Torture Allegation: Dana Priest, CIA Avoids Scrutiny of Detainee Treatment.

In November 2002, a newly minted CIA case officer in charge of a secret prison just north of Kabul allegedly ordered guards to strip naked an uncooperative young Afghan detainee, chain him to the concrete floor and leave him there overnight without blankets, according to four U.S. government officials aware of the case.

The Afghan guards — paid by the CIA and working under CIA supervision in an abandoned warehouse code-named the Salt Pit — dragged their captive around on the concrete floor, bruising and scraping his skin, before putting him in his cell, two of the officials said.

As night fell, so, predictably, did the temperature.

By morning, the Afghan man had frozen to death.

The CIA says it's investigating — two years after the fact. Which is an odd claim, since the first reaction was coverup,

[The victim] is on no one's registry of captives, not even as a “ghost detainee,” the term for CIA captives held in military prisons but not registered on the books, they said.

And the second reaction was just as predictable with this crew:

The CIA case officer, meanwhile, has been promoted.

Of course the whole thing was rotten from the start as the CIA took the official view that US rules didn't apply to what it called an Afghan facility. Never mind that the CIA paid for it, paid all the salaries, decided who would be held there, and pretty much ran it. The CIA still claimed it was a “foreign facility”. Deniability and all that (including deniability towards Congress).

The only vaguely good news here is that apparently torture is considered a low-status activity in the CIA.

“A first-tour officer was put in charge because there were not enough senior-level volunteers,” said one intelligence officer familiar with the case. “It's not a job just anyone would want. More senior people said, 'I don't want to do that.'

Posted in Torture | 1 Comment