IN 2004, STEVEN ALM, a state trial judge in Hawaii, was frustrated with the cases on his docket. Nearly half of the people appearing before him were convicted offenders with drug problems who had been sentenced to probation rather than prison and then repeatedly violated the terms of that probation by missing appointments or testing positive for drugs. Whether out of neglect or leniency, probation officers would tend to overlook a probationer's first 5 or 10 violations, giving the offender the impression that he could ignore the rules. [continues 2944 words]
IF Barack Obama wins in November, we could have not only our first president who is an African-American, but also our first president who is a civil libertarian. Throughout his career, Mr. Obama has been more consistent than Hillary Clinton on issues from the Patriot Act to bans on flag burning. At the same time, he has reached out to Republicans and independents to build support for his views. Mrs. Clinton, by contrast, has embraced some of the instrumental tacking of Bill Clinton, whose presidency disappointed liberal and conservative civil libertarians on issue after issue. [continues 801 words]
Justice Antonin Scalia is not ordinarily celebrated by liberals for his devotion to the right to privacy. But last week, he wrote a Supreme Court opinion that is an occasion for all friends of privacy to dance in the streets. In Kyllo vs. U.S., Justice Scalia held that the government acted unreasonably when it aimed a thermal imaging device at a suspect's house and surmised, from the high levels of heat on the exterior walls, that he was using heat lamps to grow marijuana inside. For a 5-4 majority, Justice Scalia declared that when government agents use surveillance technology that isn't ordinarily used by the general public to explore details of the home, the surveillance is presumptively unreasonable without a search warrant. [continues 1057 words]
THE CONCEPT is an artificial one--no police force can arrest all lawbreakers. But that's not the only thing wrong with the way some police forces are applying a once-innovative idea, the author argues. At the end of March, Baltimore's police commissioner resigned after a group of New York consultants urged him to adopt a "zero tolerance" crime-fighting strategy similar to the one New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani had implemented there. The dispute in Baltimore casts light on a national debate about how to police inner-city crime. Mayor Martin O'Malley promptly named as acting commissioner Edward Norris, a former New York City police officer who had risen through the ranks by promoting zero tolerance. "There's a crisis going on here," Norris told a radio call-in show. "The mayor won the election with a zero tolerance program. That tells me a lot of people are tired of having people standing in the neighborhood selling drugs openly." With that, Norris committed himself to reducing the city's crime rate by using a method of policing that advocates arrest for nearly every crime and has become particularly controversial since the recent deaths in New York City police shootings of two unarmed men, Amadou Diallo and Patrick Dorismond. [continues 2066 words]
