How bad do your lawyers have to be for you to get a new trial… in a death penalty case?

The New York Times reports a ridiculous case that was heard by the Supreme Court, which seems to come right out of the movie Brazil, in which a combination of events leads to a defendant in a capital murder case losing his rights to appeal in the state of Alabama.  According to the article, a court had sent its ruling to two associates at a firm in New York who had work on behalf of defendant Cory Maples.  The problems started when the associates left.  The firm then returned the judgment to the court marked “returned to sender”.  The court clerk received the envelope and did nothing.  The local counsel of record also failed to follow up with the appeal.  Eventually, the window that defendants have to file appeals elapsed, at which point the prosecutor seemingly gloated directly to Mr. Maples.

The only good news in this case is that the Supreme Court is now hearing it, and at least in oral arguments they seem to have been as incensed at the callous treatment of a defendant as one would hope they should be.

So now my questions, and I have many:

  1. Why is it that this case had to get to the Supreme Court in the first place?  Is administrative incompetence grounds for rushing to kill someone?
  2. Does the current state of law and societal view towards prosecutorial discretion need correction?  Here, in a case where the prosecutor clearly could have weighed in to prevent a travesty, he instead seemingly chose to gloat.  Doesn’t that argue for stronger judicial oversight?
  3. Should there be sanctions against the local lawyer who failed to at all follow up in a death penalty case?
  4. In this case, how broadly should the Court rule?  They could simply state that the confluence of events led to a perverse situation that requires redress, and narrowly rule, or they could require that states shoulder at least some burden to see that defendants are receiving fair treatment.  What would that look like?
  5. If this is what happens in death penalty cases, what sort of miscarriages of justice are taking place in other cases, and how do we know?

What do you think?

 

U.S. Currency War with China?

This short piece is on News Hour introduces us to the politics of currency manipulation. A government who keeps its currency artificially low is in essence dumping their goods and services on every other country, thereby taking jobs from those countries.   The hard part is determining when prices are really artificially low.  While it is in the end a political opinion, we have some hints as to when the price of a currency is really lower than it should be.  One of those is when per-capita income is higher than another country’s and yet there is still a net export of goods and services.  According to the International Monetary Fund, for 2010, the U.S. had the 7th highest per capita income of $46,860, while China came in a distant 94th with $7,544 per person.  China’s trade surplus for that same year was $190 billion.  Were we to attribute all of that to the United States, that would add about $680 to the U.S. per capita income.

On the other hand, Perhaps, on the other hand, the U.S. currency is too high. After all, the U.S. trade deficit for 2010 was $498 billion.  But then what do we do about it? To lower the value of the dollar you simply print more. Of course that risks inflation. And if you do print more, why shouldn’t another country respond by printing more of its own currency?

It’s a messy business, and given the amount of money to be made or lost in speculating on currency, the U.S. Senate should be very careful about the sort of laws they pass, particularly ones that in some way ties the Treasury Department’s arms in dealing with currency crises.  Thar be dragons here.

 

How do electoral math differ from popular votes?

After the 2000 election one might think that everyone in the world understands how an American president is elected.  For those who don’t remember or don’t understand, electors are allocated to each state based on how many congressmen and senators that state has.  For example, South Dakota has one congressman and two senators, and is therefore entitled to 3 electoral votes.  Therefore, with the total number of congressmen being 435 and there being 100 senators, along with three electors allocated by Constitutional amendment to Washington D.C., there are total of 538 electors.

So how far off from the popular vote could an electoral vote get?  To figure this out, you need to know how many voters there are in each state and the number of electors per state.  270 electors can be gotten by winning evenly 50% of the votes in the 11 largest states in the Union.  If the loser were to take 50%-1 vote in those states, plus all the votes in the other states, using 2008 voter information, the winner would need only 43 million votes, while the loser could have over 110 million, or  71% of all the votes.  This is how President Bush won the election 2001 but lost the popular vote.

The electoral system almost always produces less dramatic results that do not mirror the popular vote.  Let’s look at a few percentages:

>Year Who Winner Electoral Votes Loser Electoral Votes Percentage Electoral Win/Loss Winner Popular Votes Loser Popular Votes Percentage Popular Win/Loss
1904 Roosevelt v. Parker 336 140 70.6%/39.4 7,630,457 5,083,880 56.4%/37.6%
1908 Taft v. Bryan 321 162 66%/34% 7,678,395 6,408,984 51.6%/43.0%
1912 Wilson v. Roosevelt 435 88 82%/17% 6,296,284 4,122,721 41.8%/27.4%
1916 Wilson v. Hughes 277 254 52%/48% 9,126,868 8,548,728 49.2%/46.1%
1920 Harding v. Cox 404 127 76%/24% 16,144,093 9,139,661 60.3%/34.1%
1924 Collidge v. Davis/Follette 382 149 72%/28% 15,723,789 13,217,948 54%/45.4
1928 Hoover v. Smith 444 87 84%/16% 21,427,123 15,015,464 58.2%/40.8%
1932 Roosevelt v. Hoover 472 59 89%/11% 22,281,277 15,761,254 57.4%/39.7%
1936 Roosevelt v. Landon 523 8 98%/2% 27,752,648 16,681,862 61%/37%
1940 Roosevelt v. Wilkie 449 82 85%/15% 27,313,945 22,347,744 54.7%/44.7%
1944 Roosevelt v. Dewey 432 99 81%/19% 25,612,916 22,017,929 53.4%/45.9%
1948 Truman v. Dewey/Thurmond 303 228 57%/43% 24,179,347 23,167,222 49.6%/47.5%
1952 Eisenhauer v. Stevenson 442 89 83%/17% 34,075,529 27,375,090 55%/44%
1956 Eisenhauer v. Stevenson 457 73 86%/14% 35,579,180 26,028,028 57%/24%
1960 Kennedy v. Nixon 303 219 56.5%/40.9% 34,220,911 34,108,157 49.7%/49.6%
1964 Johnson v. Goldwater 486 52 90%/10% 43,127,041 27,175,754 61%/39%
1968 Nixon v. Humphrey/Wallace 301 191 + 96 56%/36%/18% 31,783,783 41,172,957 (total) 43.4%/56.2%
1972 Nixon v. McGovern 520 17 97%/3% 47,168,710 29,173,222 61%/38%
1976 Carter v. Ford 297 240 55%/45% 40,831,881 39,148,634 50.1%/48.0%
1980 Reagan v. Carter 489 49 91%/9% 43,903,230 35,480,115 50.7%/41.0%
1984 Reagan v. Mondale 525 13 98%/2% 54,455,472 37,577,352 59%/41%
1988 Bush v. Dukakis 426 111 79%/21% 48,886,597 41,809,476 53.4%/45.7%
1992 Clinton v. Bush 370 168 69%/31% 44,909,806 39,104,550 43%/37.5%
1996 Clinton v. Dole 379 159 70%/30% 47,401,185 39,197,469 49.2%/40.7%
2000 Bush v. Gore 271 266 50.4%/49.6% 50,456,002 50,999,897 47.9%/48.4%
2004 Bush v. Kerry 286 251 53%/47% 62,040,610 59,028,444 50.7%/48.3%
2008 Obama v. McCain 365 173 68%/32% 69,456,897 59,934,814[ 53%/46%

In this table, the closest the popular and electoral votes come together is in 1916, although Bush v. Kerry comes close.

So what do we learn from all of this? I see two key messages:

  • The nature of the electoral voting system wildly distorts popular will in favor of each state getting at least some voice.  This was, after all, the reason for its design.
  • National polls are, at best, a finger in the wind, and may be entirely misleading.

What do you think of the electoral system?

View Results

Loading ... Loading ...

As if On Queue: Google accounts attacked from China

The BBC reports today how China is rejecting Google’s statement that attacks on its users originated from China.  It’s very fair for China to call into question from whence attacks originate.  The best Google can really authoritatively say is that they saw attacks coming from a particular set of IP addresses that happen to be registered to a network that resides in a particular location, in this case Jinan.

However, the attacks targeted individuals said to be Chinese dissidents or adversaries.  In this case, as the BBC writes, while it is very difficult to state with assurance that the attacks were made by the Chinese government, the technique used, spear phishing, leads one to believe that this attack was in fact paid for, in some way, by a government.  Spear phishing involves learning about a particular individual, and then crafting a message that that person would think came from someone they knew, and convincing that person to view an attachment that itself contains a virus.  That virus must be relatively unknown, or virus checkers will pick it up.  The cost of spear phishing is high, and the monetary pay-off tends to be low.  Therefore, it is a good fit for an intelligence organization.

In addition, as I wrote not long ago, Cambridge University investigated a break-in of the Office of His Holiness, The Dalai Lama.  Those attacks also seemed to originate from China, they were also targeted against an adversary, and worst of all, China apparently acted upon the information stolen by applying diplomatic pressure against those countries who invited the Dalai Lama.

At the very least, China bears some culpability for allowing the attack.  Here we have a government that does not believe in the free flow of information, and so they are known for monitoring everything.  How, then, did this attack escape their notice?

Is hacking Skype a human rights violation?

Not twenty four hours ago did I write about how the Pentagon is going to announce how cyber-attacks could be casus belli.  Now the Wall Street Journal reports that an Egyptian intelligence agency was monitoring Skype communications of dissidents.  Let’s first agree on a truth.  No one’s right to privacy is absolute or ever assured.  However, plotting the peaceful overthrow of a government (in America we call that an election) should not be subject to snooping.  If we can go to war over hacking, should we not then also stand up for people’s human rights to peacefully and privately express their views?  Ronald Reagan used to rail on how the Soviet Union wasn’t free.  He was right.  Now here we are in age of the Internet.  What do his words mean in today’s context?  The free flow of information is  a human right.  It’s not absolute if, for instance, you’re talking about robbing a bank.

By the way, the Egyptians did not break Skype’s encryption, but instead seem to have infected the system of the dissidents.  That’s something Skype can only partially control- that is, if the infection was spread by Skype’s Instant Messaging capability, then they do bear some responsibility.  But if it was spread by other means, then there’s really not much they can do.