DSK and the Pernicious ‘Perp Walk’
My column at the Washington Examiner (and Reason.com) this week uses the collapse of the Dominique Strauss-Kahn case to argue against the “perp walk,” which has become a form of pretrial punishment and a way for spotlight-hungry prosecutors to grab attention—whether the ‘perp’ turns out to be guilty or not:
Back in May, when New York law enforcement paraded DSK before the cameras, hands cuffed behind his back, the French were outraged. “Incredibly brutal, violent and cruel,” France’s former justice minister gasped.
Irritating as it might be to admit it, the French have a point. The “perp walk”—in which suspects are ritually displayed to the media, trussed up like a hunter’s kill—has become common practice among prosecutors. But it’s a practice any country devoted to the rule of law should reject.
Of course, DSK isn’t the most sympathetic victim of the perp walk ever, nor, given paramilitary policing and “no knock” raids, is the perp walk the most abusive police/prosecutorial practice out there. But it’s at best a pointless indignity, and at worst a threat to due process—which is why it should be reined in. For Cato work on police tactics and misconduct, go here; and also see Reason’s recent “criminal justice” issue.
More on AEP v. Connecticut: Sue the Butterflies or Regulate Them?
During Tuesday’s oral arguments in American Electric Power v. Connecticut—the global warming lawsuit that Walter Olson recently discussed here and Ilya Shapiro here, and in which Cato filed amicus briefs at both the certiorari stage and the merits stage—the justices concentrated their inquiries on a few technical legal doctrines in order to answer one question: should states even be allowed to sue power companies for the damage that global warming has allegedly done to their lands and citizens?
There are multiple ways this question could be answered, and how it is answered in the final opinion could have important ramifications for future environmental litigation.
Connecticut and five other states, plus New York City and three land trusts, brought the suit against five power companies. Their claim is based on the age-old tort of nuisance, the same ground that lets you sue your neighbor if his contaminated water seeps onto your land. Essentially, the states argued that if courts can solve that kind of dispute, then a dispute over global warming is only slightly different—bigger in scope, certainly, but not different in kind.
But at oral argument, the justices did not seem persuaded. Arguing against the states, Acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal opened by pointing out that “[i]n the 222 years that this Court has been sitting, it has never heard a case with so many potential perpetrators and so many potential victims…[T]he very name of the alleged nuisance, ‘global warming,’ itself tells you much of what you need to know.” Chief Justice John Roberts later asked the states’ attorney, New York solicitor general Barbara Underwood, if she had any rebuttal to Katyal’s claim—if there was “any case where it has been as broad as it is here?” Her answer? “Well, of course it depends on what you call broad.”
Indeed.
But how much broader could it be? Taking the scientists at their word, we’d have to include at least every car owner, every coal power plant, every natural gas power plant, every cement producer, every forester, and the fabled effects of bovine flatulence. And not just every one of these in America, but every one in the world. The scope of this case and the numerous trade-offs involved make it utterly inappropriate for judicial resolution.
The supposed link between the power companies’ emissions and the alleged global warming harms resembles a Rube Goldberg device of conjectures that stretches back millions of years. In our brief we analogized this to the famous “butterfly effect”: a butterfly flaps its wings in Brazil and causes a tornado in Texas.
A few theories were offered as to why the case should not go any further. The most far reaching of these theories, the political question doctrine, is one we advanced in our amicus briefs. The political question doctrine directs courts to stay out of disputes that are better left to the other branches of government. A decision along those lines would go far in the future toward keeping such suits out of courts.
But many environmental lawyers are hoping, and predicting, that the states will “lose well”—that is, the suit will be dismissed because it has been “displaced” by the “regulatory cascade” underway at the EPA, not because it is a fundamentally impossible and illegitimate lawsuit. Dismissing the suit on these grounds would leave the door open for large-scale suits to be brought whenever an agency is thought to be shirking its regulatory duties. Such suits are already a problem for administrative agencies, particularly those brought by environmental advocacy groups trying to force agencies to live up to the groups’ idea of sound environmental policy. The NY Times, for example, reported recently on the “barrage [that] has paralyzed the listing process” for the Endangered Species Act.
Not wanting to totally foreclose the possibility of large-scale suits being brought in the future, at least three justices, Kagan, Breyer, and Ginsburg, seemed partial to the displacement theory. One hopes that the other five justices will rule, on either prudential standing or political question grounds, that no amount of regulatory action or inaction can make these suits justiciable. If regulation is called for here — a dubious proposition — it should be undertaken by the political branches, not the courts.
The Unrelenting Battle over Campaign Finance
Following on the heels of November’s gubernatorial elections in Virginia and New Jersey, the loss of Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat in Massachusetts two weeks ago was a devastating blow to Democratic Party hopes. But it must have been especially devastating to President Obama, who promised an adoring University of Missouri crowd, just before he was elected, that “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” Yet it would appear, judging from the unrelenting commentary and from the president’s own behavior last week, that those losses pale in comparison to the government’s loss before the Supreme Court two days after the polls closed in Massachusetts. For 11 days now the wailing over the Court’s Citizens United decision has not ceased. Indeed, campaign finance regulation, intimately connected to incumbency protection, is a bedrock principle of modern liberalism.
Exhibit A is E.J. Dionne’s column today in the Washington Post — his second in a week on the subject. Last week, railing against the “reckless decision by Chief Justice John Roberts’s Supreme Court and the greed of the nation’s financial barons,” he charged the Court with “an astonishing display of judicial arrogance, overreach and unjustified activism” and urged “a new populist-progressive alliance” to demand “legislation to turn back the Supreme Court’s effort to undermine American democracy” — including a bill prohibiting political spending by corporations who hire lobbyists, no less.
Today, however, Dionne has last Wednesday’s unseemly episode of Obama rebuking a silent Supreme Court to work with. And, like the immortal Daniel Schorr on yesterday’s NPR Sunday Morning, he puts all the blame on Justice Samuel Alito for seeming to mouth, silently, “Not true” when Obama, before all assembled and a watching nation, tendentiously misstated the holding in Citizens United. But Dionne doesn’t stop there, of course. No, he thanks Alito. You see, “Alito’s inability to restrain himself” brought a long-ignored truth to the nation: “The Supreme Court is now dominated by a highly politicized conservative majority intent on working its will, even if that means ignoring precedents and the wishes of the elected branches of government.” Likening Obama’s behavior to President Reagan’s writing a 1983 article criticizing Roe v. Wade — I didn’t make that up – Dionne chastises conservatives for their double standard: “Reagan had every right to say what he did. But why do conservatives deny the same right to Obama?” Where does one begin?
Turning finally to “the specifics of Obama’s indictment,” Dionne tries to defend the president’s misstatements, but unfortunately the precision ordinarily expected of such a wordsmith seems to have deserted him. Citing Obama’s claim that the Court had reversed “a century of law” and also opened “the floodgates for special interests — including foreign corporations,” Dionne writes that ”Obama was not simply referring to court precedents but also to the 1907 Tillman Act, which banned corporate money in electoral campaigns.” That’s not what the Tillman Act did: It banned direct corporate contributions to campaigns. Only in 1947 were independent campaign expenditures by corporations (and unions) banned — and more clearly so only in 1990, which is the ban the Court overturned. Moreover, pace Obama, foreign corporations are still specifically banned from contributing anything of value “in connection with a Federal, State or local election.” Thus, in claiming, without more, ”that the ruling opens a loophole for domestic corporations under foreign control to make unlimited campaign expenditures,” Dionne seems simply to be passing along what he’s read or heard from others. Nothing in the Court’s opinion warrants that conclusion.
But it’s Dionne’s larger claim that most demands an answer — that an “activist” Roberts Court, exercising “raw judicial power,” is ”ignoring precedents and the wishes of the elected branches of government.” That’s hardly the definition of “activism.” That’s what the Court should be doing, where it’s warranted by the Constitution, whether the Court is defending the rights of blacks to attend unsegregated schools or of gays to sexual freedom or of corporate owners, the shareholders, to engage in political speech through their corporation consistent with their articles of incorporation and by-laws. The claim that corporations aren’t people is a red herring. Corporate owners are people, and their right to speak can take many forms. Fortunately, we have a First Amendment, which protects not only corporate owners but E.J. himself from all but the error of his ways.
[Cross-posted at Politico Arena]
Cato on Facebook
Cato on Twitter
Cato on Google+
Cato on YouTube
