The Yin Blog

Has Huckabee now killed his 2012 ambitions?

As is now well-known, Maurice Clemmons, the alleged killer of four police officers in Washington state, was once serving a 90+ year sentence in Arkansas, when Governor Mike Huckabee commuted his sentence.  Today, Huckabee had this to say:

"I take full responsibility for my actions of nine years ago. I acted on the facts presented to me in 2000. If I could have possibly known what Clemmons would do nine years later, I obviously would have made a different decision. But if the same file was presented to me today, I would have likely made the same decision."

The first part of the statement seems quite defensible to me.  In 2000, he believed that Clemmons warranted a second chance, so Huckabee gave it.  He's acknowledging that he's not omniscent.

However, I'm more skeptical of the last part of the statement.  If the same file were presented today, why would he likely make the same decision?  This suggests to me a serious problem in Huckabee's thinking, because the original decision to commute Clemmons' sentence, given his prior violent felony convictions, was something of a leap of faith.

Of course, Huckabee pardoned or commuted lots of sentences while he was Governor, and presumably few if any of the others have gone on a cop-killing spree.  But the relevant pool of comparison is with repeat violent offenders.  Youth and criminal history are in fact predictors of future criminal behavior, so Huckabee must think that he can spot those criminals worth a second chance.  Yet, apparently not.

To be clear, I'm not suggesting that he needed to be perfect in his assessment.  But given the horrendous result here, I would think that a reflective person would think about whether his ability to make such assessments needs readjustment.

US to prosecute KSM in federal court

Not all Guantanamo detainees are going to face trial in an Article III (federal) court, but September 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his key associate Ramzi Binalshibh will.  President Obama's statement was:

“I’m absolutely convinced that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed will be subject to the most exacting demands of justice,” Mr. Obama said. “The American people insist on it, and my administration insists on it.”

I have to admit, I'm not altogether certain what it means that KSM "will be subject to the most exacting demands of justice."  Does that mean that he will get the highest level of due process rights?  That would seem to be the sentiment behind trying him in a civilian court, as opposed to a military commission.  Yet, if that's the intent, "subject" is a strange way of putting it.  Subjecting someone to something connotes a negative, not a positive; otherwise, you'd say that the person was entitled to whatever it is.  Plus, is it fair to say that the American people want the highest level of due process for KSM?  I'm sure some do, but I'd be surprised if it's a majority, or even close to a majority.

So, if subjecting him to the most exacting demands of justice is meant to convey that, if guilty, he'll be treated harshly enough by the civilian criminal justice system, does it follow that this is "better" (more efficient, etc.) than a military commission?  I have a hard time seeing that the punishment will be more severe here.  KSM could get the death penalty in either forum.

The only thing that jumps out is that, because of the greater procedural protections and greater openness about Article III court trials, a conviction and death sentence in federal court will carry more legitimacy than the same verdict and sentence in a military court, notwithstanding President Obama's efforts to increase the procedural protections in the latter.

This suggests in turn that the Obama Justice Department believes that it can convict KSM and others despite the fact that KSM's initial confession was obtained through seriously coercive interrogation (i.e., 180+ instances of waterboarding) -- a fact that defense counsel will no doubt highlight.  It seems like the Obama lawyers may believe that KSM's subsequent re-confession, obtained at Guantanamo by new government lawyers without any coercion, is valid because he could have, but did not repudiate his prior confession.  We shall see.

We're #3 (but we should be #1)!

Forbes has ranked the 40 biggest U.S. metropolitan areas in terms of safety, and Portland comes in at #3.  The top five are Minneapolis-St. Paul, Milwaukee, Portland, Boston, and Seattle. 

While MSP certainly has a good claim to the top spot, Forbes uses a pretty weird methodology.  All of the metro areas are ranked ordinally in four categories (violent crime rate, traffic fatality rate, workplace fatality rate, and natural disaster risk).  The ordinal rankings are then added together, and the lower the overall score, the better.

So, first of all, the ordinal ranking can obscure big differences between seemingly close metro areas.  In crime rate, for example, what if the per capital crime rates (per 1000) are something like #1 (1.1), #2 (2.5), and #3 (2.6)?  The simple ordinal ranking doesn't take into account how much better #1 is than #2, and how trivial the difference between #2 and #3 is.

Second, what exactly is "natural risk disaster"?  The West Coast areas get slaughtered in this category, with Portland the least bad at #25, then San Diego (#26), and everything else in the 30s.  Presumably, this is anticipating major earthquakes or something, as well as wildfires and mudslides in southern California, I guess.  But it seems awfully weird to be making 1/4 of the ranking based on something that you can't really estimate with precision.

Even if you could, what's the death toll from earthquakes?  Focusing just on the Los Angeles & San Diego areas in the last 50 years, the only quakes with fatalities were the 1994 Northridge earthquake, which caused 72 deaths, the 1987 Whittier Narrows quake, which killed three people, and 1971 Sylmar temblor, which killed 65 people.  (I'm not counting ones like the 1992 Landers quake, which did kill three people, but none in the L.A. or San Diego metro areas.)  So, that's 140 people over 50 years, or less than 3 per year.

Granted, ~3 per year on average is greater than that you'd expect from, say, tornados, but the risks posed by natural disasters like earthquakes seem miniscule compared to traffic fatalities and violent crime.  In Los Angeles County, there were 168 murders, 233 rapes, 1910 robberies, and 5148 assaults reported in 2008.  Granted, L.A. County is not the same thing as L.A. metro area, but that only means that we'd expect even more violent crimes in the latter.  In short, the number of deaths via violent crime in L.A. dwarfs that caused on average by earthquakes.

And it's not as if L.A.'s violent crime rate is off the charts -- it's ranked #21, so just one spot above average.  Yet, the ~3 earthquake deaths (on average) per year is weighted the same as the 168 murders in 2008 in terms of significance, even though violent crime actually carries more than 50 times the numerical weight in reality.

I think the same criticism could be made about workplace fatalities.  The number of people who die in workplace fatalities can't be that high compared to violent crime or traffic, so equating the ranking in this category with that in any other is also silly.

Now, if you focus on the two categories that seem most significant to me -- violent crime and traffic -- and re-rank using Forbes' criteria (in other words, still summed ordinal rankings), the new top 5 looks like this:

1. Portland (#1 in crime, #5 in traffic); total 6

2. San Jose, CA (#2 in crime, #6 in traffic); total 8

3. Seattle (#3 in crime, #8 in traffic); total 11

3. Boston (#10 in crime, #1 in traffic); total 11

5. New York (#11 in crime, #2 in traffic); total 13

I have to admit, I am quite surprised to see Boston and New York do so well, but I guess my impressions of Boston are colored by a 1987 visit where I nearly got run over 5 times in 30 minutes as a pedestrian, before I learned that the drivers didn't think pedestrians had the right of way.  And my impression of New York is pretty much colored by the movie "Escape from New York" . . . .  Anyway, seeing the relatively smaller Pacific Northwest cities and San Jose atop the list does make some sense to me!

That's some love!

Wow, this is some love that the husband has for his wife, enlisting in the Army so that he can make sure she has health coverage for her cancer treatment!

Overweight at 5'10" and 120 lbs?

This is pretty weird -- the model who was picture in the supposedly Photoshopped Ralph Lauren ad is 5'10" and 120 lbs, and she says she was fired for being "too fat."  Wha???

It just happens that when I started college, I was 5'10" and 120 lbs.  No one considered me overweight.  I was extremely skinny, and stayed that way the entire year in part because I ran cross-country.  No freshman 15 for me, which means someone else gained 30 lbs to balance me out!   

Now, I realize that weight for males versus females isn't directly translatable, because men are supposed to have more heavy muscle mass.  Still, I gained that mythical 15 pounds over the next four years so that I was 5'10" and 135 lbs when I graduated.  I was still considered very skinny.  By the time I started law school four years after college, I was 5'10" and 150 lbs.  I'm pretty sure that my law school classmates would remember that I was still skinny back then.  So even if you can't compare men and women directly, I gained 30 lbs between my weight at the beginning of college to when I went to law school, and I was skinny the whole time.  I just can't see how a woman could possibly be considered fat at 5'10" and 120 lbs.  I think maybe the term we are looking for is "too skinny"?

Roman Polanski, a flight risk?

Hmm, the Swiss Justice Ministry has denied Roman Polanski's request for bail, apparently because he's a "high flight risk."

Why, there's no reason to believe that he would ever flee a jurisdiction . . . oh wait. . . .

Winning by losing, Olympic bid edition

My good friend Nick Johnson has a funny and insightful post arguing that Chicago is better off for not having won the bid to host the 2016 Olympic Games, because cities that host the Olympics usually end up paying for the privilege, rather than making money on tourism, etc.  

In a vaguely analogous way, it kind of reminds me of what happened in Los Angeles after both professional football teams left -- the Raiders to Oakland and the Rams to St. Louis.  Instantly, Sunday football improved tenfold!  Instead of blacked out games (because neither team sold out), we were treated to the *best* games of the day.  Good riddance, I came to see.

Just when I thought the Polanski saga couldn't get more disgusting

It's bad enough that there are people -- including French government officials -- who are jumping to defend Roman Polanski the fugitive.  It's bad enough that his underlying crime, to which he pled guilty, is pretty heinous.  What's even worse is that, per this news story, that (1) Polanski agreed to pay his rape victim $150,000 but then apparently never actually paid her; and (2) that he fled the U.S. because he didn't want to serve an additional 48 days in jail:

Polanski pleaded guilty to unlawful sexual intercourse and a judge sent him to prison for a 90-day psychiatric evaluation. However, he was released after 42 days by an evaluator who deemed him mentally sound and unlikely to offend again.

The judge responded by saying he was going to send Polanski back to jail for the remainder of the 90 days and that afterward he would ask Polanski to agree to a "voluntary deportation." Polanski then fled the country the night before he was scheduled to be sentenced, Feb. 1, 1978.

That's why he fled the country?!?  He was so spoiled that seven additional weeks of prison was too much for him to bear?

And you have to love this -- when his lawyer was asked about whether Polanski had ever paid the victim the amount he agreed to to settle her case, the lawyer apparently responded like this:

Polanski's attorney, David Finkle, said he couldn't remember details of the case and declined comment.

"It's ancient," Finkle said.

You can't remember whether your client ever paid off a settlement that he agreed to?!?

Last one standing?

I'm the last one standing in the house. . . .

Last Friday, my older son woke up with a fever and threw up four times that morning by the time he saw the doctor.  He had pneumonia in one lung, a severe asthma attack, and what we later learned was type A influenza (which means it's almost certainly H1N1 "swine" flu).  He spent three nights in the hospital with an IV drip and an oxygen feed.  My wife stayed with him the whole time, while I stayed at home with our younger son -- though we did go visit twice daily.

By Monday, when he was released from the hospital, he was doing much better, though not cleared to return to school.  Of course, my wife had a fever and headache and other flu symptoms by then(!).  I did my best to keep our younger son away, but by Wednesday night, he too developed a fever, and last night he ended up in the emergency room with croup, probably brought on by the flu.

I feel kind of silly wearing a hospital mask when I'm around them, sleeping in a different room, and so on.  I haven't really felt any different, so I'm hoping it's not inevitable that I'll get sick too. . . .

Democracy -- does it mean what the NY Times thinks it means?

The New York Times has an editorial today against the death penalty that reiterates what seems to me to be the best argument against capital punishment: its cost.  As the Times notes:

Perhaps the most extreme example is California, whose death row costs taxpayers $114 million a year beyond the cost of imprisoning convicts for life. The state has executed 13 people since 1976 for a total of about $250 million per execution. This is a state whose prisons are filled to bursting (unconstitutionally so, the courts say) and whose government has imposed doomsday-level cuts to social services, health care, schools and parks.

I find the fiscal argument quite compelling.  But why does it cost so much to try to execute someone?  There are penalty phase trials (to decide whether the sentence should be life imprisonment or death), there are statutory rights to appeals and post-conviction relief, and there are rights to counsel.  What I found puzzling in the Times editorial was this observation:

There is also a 15-to-20-year appeals process, but simply getting rid of it would be undemocratic and would increase the number of innocent people put to death.

Did the Times mean that it would be undemocratic for a state government to abolish the right to appeal death sentences by fiat?  Or that it abolishing the right to appeal would be undemocratic no matter who decides to do it?

Neither possibility fits "democratic" very well.  If duly elected state legislators abolish the right to appeal (putting aside whether that's constitutional), why isn't that democratic?  I don't imagine the Times means that it's not democratic because it wasn't the product of direct democracy.  I mean, technically, it would be true that if the legislature did it, it would not be democratic so much as "democratic republican" . . . but that distinction doesn't make sense in the context of the anti-death penalty argument that the paper is advancing.

And if the right to appeal death sentences were abolished by, say, a voter initiative, what could be more democratic than that?  (Note: I don't mean to suggest that voter initiative democracy is necessarily a good thing.)

So what does the Times mean by "democratic"?  Does it mean "humane," "moral," or "appropriate"?