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Clayton Cramer's BLOG |
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Clayton's commentary on news and events of the day. Broadly speaking, I'm a conservative with libertarian sympathies (getting more conservative as my children get older).
 Never forget! I ran for Idaho state senate in 2008--didn't win I've written a number of history books, as well as scholarly and popular articles, (see my web page). Relocating to Boise? Use my realtor, neighbor, and friend, Cindy Smith csmith@1realtyone.com.
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Friday, June 30, 2006
Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca's Travel Account I mentioned this in a previous entry because I read it for History of Mexico some years ago. While this account is generally pretty sympathetic to the plight of Indians suffering under Spanish domination, Cabeza de Vaca was not afraid to tell you the miserable conditions under which many Indians far removed from European contact lived. Next time someone starts yammering on (as I have often heard) about how much more in tune the Indians were with Mother Nature, and didn't suffer from the horrible patriarchy of Christianity, consider this account, from pages 89-90: Their principal food are two or three kinds of roots, which they hunt for all over the land; they are very unhealthy, inflating [gas producing], and it takes two days to roast them. Many are very bitter, and with all that they are gathered with difficulty. But those people are so much exposed to starvation that these roots are to them indispensable and they walk two and three leagues to obtain them. Now and they kill deer and at ties get a fish, but this is so little and their hunger so great that they eat spiders and ant eggs, worms, lizards and salamanders and serpents, also vipers the bite of which is deadly. They swallow earth and wood, and all they can get, the dung of deer and more things I do not mention;In the translation that I read, "and things that decency does not permit me to repeat." and I verily believe, from what I saw, that if there were any stones in the country they would eat them also. They preserver the bones of the fish they eat, of snakes and other animals, to pulverize them and eat the powder. American History: Primary Sources If you visit my website regularly (other than my blog), you know that I have a section of primary history sources. Some of these are documents that I have scanned in; others are links to valuable or useful collections. I just found out about another such collection: American Journeys: Eyewitness Accounts of Early American Exploration and Settlement. There are 181 different primary sources, some which are not easy to find when you go to the library. The Saga of Eric the Red, The Journey of Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca (one of the great adventures of the age of exploration), a letter from Hernando de Soto describing his exploration of what is now the United States, voyages of Russians to California in the nineteenth century--really an amazing collection. Thursday, June 29, 2006
Why Should A Non-Profit Be Allowed To Compete With Taxed Businesses? This article by Dennis C. Vacco, former U.S. Attorney and New York State Attorney General, points to an organization that is receiving charitable contributions as a non-profit--yet is operating for-profit businesses and engaging in questionable labor union organizing efforts: he Restaurant Opportunity Center of New York, otherwise known as ROC-NY, has come to represent a curious new strategic model for labor organizers -- one that all small and medium-sized business owners would do well to heed.This disturbs me greatly. My Wife Can Stop Insulting Big Bertha With the adjustments mentioned here, the old girl shows more detail on Jupiter at 222x than I can draw--gobs and gobs of belts, festoons, and detail just below the edge of what I can describe. However: the collimation doesn't stay for long. I think the mirror supports need to be a bit tighter against the mirror, and the diagonal holder needs to be a bit more tightly screwed into the spider. For its inches of aperture, I would agree that the image quality degrades faster than I would expect. But at the same magnification, it shows more detail than smaller scopes. This is expected, since resolution increases linearly with the diameter of the objective. Even a so-so 17.5" mirror should handily outperform even a very good 5" refractor under stable skies (which I have). Labels: telescopes Less Diversity on ACLU Board Stop the ACLU reports on a close election for a seat on the ACLU board--a conflict between those who believe in an open ACLU and those believe in keeping secrets. The ACLU, which doesn't believe in government having secrets of any sort, seems to have a rather different view of secrets for themselves. What A Remarkable Material Acetal Is I've sung the praises of this stuff--a polymerized formaldehyde (also sold under the brand name Delrin)--before, but since I am considering replacing some crudely made wooden parts on Big Bertha with machined plastic, I thought I would see how much lighter it is than aluminum. Aluminum is 2.768 g/cc; Delrin is 1.41 g/cc. Aluminum's ultimate tensile strength is 90 MPa (megapascals, if the abbreviation is new to you); Delrin is 75.8 MPa. That means that aluminum is twice as dense and only 19% stronger. (There are several other measures of strength, but as a rough approximation, ultimate tensile strength is a good start.) If you can make something of a sheet of aluminum that is an inch thick, you can make it of Delrin of the same size, and end up with something about 20% stronger, and half the weight. Now, compared to wood, this is a bit more complex, but it appears that woods like pine have about 35% of the tensile strength of aluminum, and about 21% of the density, so pine still has its virtues as a structural material. But pine's strength to density ratio is pretty close to Delrin--and Delrin is less likely to have the defects common to natural materials. UPDATE: A reader points out something that I should have checked--the modulus of elasticity of aluminum is about 20x that of Delrin, so that for the same size, aluminum is far stiffer, and less prone to bending under load. There are still places where Delrin works well, but for anything where you need a surface to not bend, aluminum is still the better choice. Weird Question of the Day: Reimporting A Handgun From Canada My father-in-law had movers pack all of his stuff (including two handguns) in anticipation of moving to Idaho from California. Instead, he died shortly after arriving. His widow moved to Canada with her sons. All of their stuff has now arrived, and the RCMP is graciously allowing the handguns to be shipped back to the United States. (One of the handguns seems to have "disappeared," perhaps when the movers packed it, I fear. The sons in Canada are doing another search of the boxes.) I am sure that the RCMP has to ship the handgun (maybe both) to an FFL in Idaho for me to take possession and sell them. Do we have to use an ATF Permit to Import form? The handguns were sold in the U.S., and have only been in Canada for a few days. Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (2006) I've been reading the Court's decision, and the dissenting opinions by Scalia and Thomas. I can see why Thomas was so upset. There are several different issues in play here. 1. Did Congress's passage of the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, which purported to strip the federal courts of jurisdiction over the questions involving prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay, remove the Supreme Court's authority to decide this case? 2. Did President Bush have authority to order military commissions to try Hamdan, who was Osama bin Laden's driver? 3. Do al-Qaeda members captured in Afghanistan enjoy the protections of the Geneva Conventions on prisoners of war? 4. Do the military commissions ordered by Bush provide sufficient protections for the rights of the accused to be Constitutional? 5. Are the crimes Hamdan is accused of, such as joining al-Qaeda at a time when it had started to engage in unlawful warfare agains the United States, serious enough to justify trial by military commission? These are all important and interesting questions, and reading both Justice Stevens decision and the dissents by Justices Scalia and Thomas are worthwhile. Stevens' arguments seemed to have some substantial merit when I first read them--but Scalia, and especially Thomas, demolish most of these arguments quite thoroughly--enough so that I can't really consider Stevens' arguments to be legitimate differences of opinion about the legal questions. I don't claim to any particular expertise on any of these areas, but I can recognize dodging and weaving of the issues by Stevens, and I can recognize when Scalia and Thomas punch big holes in Stevens' claims. Jurisdiction Stripping There's a long history of Congress telling the federal courts that they lack jurisdiction to hear certain matters. Contrary to what some people might want to believe, it used to be liberals who passed such laws. The Norris-LaGuardia Act of 1932, for example (29 USC 101), stripped federal courts of jurisdiction over a number of labor relations matters: No court of the United States, as defined in this chapter, shall have jurisdiction to issue any restraining order or temporary or permanent injunction in a case involving or growing out of a labor dispute, except in a strict conformity with the provisions of this chapter; nor shall any such restraining order or temporary or permanent injunction be issued contrary to the public policy declared in this chapter.Stevens knows better than to pretend otherwise; instead, he argues that the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 did not apply to the Hamdan case because this question of pre-existing suits was not explicitly addressed in the text. Justice Scalia points out that the statute is actually pretty clear: The DTA provides: “[N]o court, justice, or judge shall have jurisdiction to hear or consider an application for a writ of habeas corpus filed by or on behalf of an alien detained by the Department of Defense at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.”Clear enough? Scalia also points to previous decisions that require some explicit provision of the statute to allow existing cases to move forward: This statute narrowing the jurisdiction of the district courts “became effective” while the case was pending before us, ibid., and made no explicit reference to pending cases. Because the statute “did not reserve jurisdiction over pending cases,” id., at 115, we held that it clearly ousted jurisdiction over them. Summarizing centuries of practice, we said: “This rule—that, when a law conferring jurisdiction is repealed without any reservation as to pending cases, all cases fall with the law—has been adhered to consistently by this Court.” Id., at 116–117.Mischevious sort that Scalia is, he also quotes from a decision written some years ago by...Justice Stevens: We have regularly applied intervening statutes conferring or ousting jurisdiction, whether or not jurisdiction lay when the underlying conduct occurred or when the suit was filed.I'm not sure that Scalia's use of this quote from Stevens' decision in Landgraf v. USI Film Products (1994) works quite as well as Scalia thinks. In Landgraf, the plaintiff was asking for the courts to apply a procedural change in federal discrimination law that took place after her suit went to trial. Justice Stevens' decided that the statute in Landgraf was ambiguous as whether it applied to suits already in the system, and therefore refused to apply the change to Landgraf's suit. DTA, however, seems pretty unambiguous that it would preclude any habeas corpus claims by those locked up at Gitmo; Stevens relies on what seem to be the statements by the losing side in Congress to decide that DTA was also ambiguous as whether it applied retroactively. Landgraf also makes some distinctions between purely procedural issues and substantive rights, although it is written in the sort of obscuring and convoluted language that I have come to expect from liberals when they are trying to play a shell game with the law. One area that really irritates me with the dishonesty of Stevens' argument is that there is apparently a well-established set of precedents that civilian courts will leave courts-martial alone while they are going through the process. In short, appeals from military courts to civilian courts take place after the military courts are finished with their process. Stevens' argument is that Schlesinger v. Councilman (1975) does not apply to Hamdan, because: First, the assertion that military discipline and, therefore, the Armed Forces’ efficient operation, are best served if the military justice system acts without regular interference from civilian courts, see id., at 752, is inapt because Hamdan is not a service member.Hmmmm. A non-citizen, arrested in a war zone outside the United States, who is still not in the United States, who is accused of conspiring in mass murder of civilians deserves more protection from our courts than a soldier accused of possession and sale of marijuana in the United States, in actions that took place outside a military base. Gee, if military discipline and efficiency are sufficient reasons to tell Councilman that he couldn't appeal to civilian courts until military courts were done with him, why isn't preventing more mass murders a sufficient reason to tell Hamdan to wait for the military courts to finish with him? Yes, Stevens has another argument on this, that the military commissions are not part of the normal military justice system, and there's probably some truth to that, but is there some reason (other than making sure that al-Qaeda wins this war) why Hamdan gets protections that Captain Councilman didn't? The genuine secrecy arguments for the military commission approach seem far more compelling to me than "military discipline" and "effiency" used to justify the results for Captain Councilman. Presidential Authority For Military Commissions This is an area where I confess that my eyes glaze over quickly when reading both sides. Stevens seems to be arguing that Congress granted no statutory authority for the President to establish military comissions. One little problem: the Quirin decision recognized that the President was authorized to use military tribunals (outside the normal military justice system) to try and execute German spies during World War II. Stevens little excuse for distinguishing that situation and Hamdan's claim is that the German spies had violated the laws of war--and that the charges again Hamdan aren't violations of the laws of war: The charge against Hamdan, described in detail in Part I, supra, alleges a conspiracy extending over a number of years, from 1996 to November 2001. All but two months of that more than 5-year-long period preceded the attacksof September 11, 2001, and the enactment of the AUMF—the Act of Congress on which the Government relies for exercise of its war powers and thus for its authority to convene military commissions.In short, just because al-Qaeda was at war with us--and we were too stupid to acknowledge it--Hamdan and friends get a free ride for any violations of the law of war committed before September 11, 2001. If we arrest Osama bin Laden one of these days, according to Justice Stevens, we can't use a military commission to try him for the planning that he put into organizing that attack--because we hadn't declared war on him yet. As Justice Thomas points out: Moreover, the allegations specify thatHamdan joined and maintained his relationship with al Qaeda even though he “believed that Usama bin Laden and his associates were involved in the attacks on the U. S. Embassies in Kenya and Tazania in August 1998, the attack on the USS COLE in October 2000, and the attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001.” App. to Pet. for Cert. 65a. These allegations, against a confirmed unlawful combatant, are alone sufficient to sustain the jurisdiction of Hamdan’s military commission.Now, these allegations might be true or false, but they are sufficient to establish that a military commission has authority to prosecute Hamdan under the law of war--the same argument that Stevens thinks is okay when used in Quirin. I'm not sure that I have the energy to pursue the other claims. What is clear that Stevens and the other liberals on the Court lack the integrity to sit there. Stevens weaves and dodges to avoid confronting the big issue. Perhaps he would prefer that U.S. forces take no prisoners, so we don't have to confront these questions. Or perhaps he is hoping that the Supreme Court building won't be the target when Hamdan and friends are released, and receive $10 billion in compensation for their mistreatment at Gitmo. Wednesday, June 28, 2006
Wandering In On A Burglary In Progress This is a tremendously dangerous situation. Unlike a burglar who is trying to enter your home--and often has the good sense to leave when he realizes that there is someone home, and can at least call the police, a burglar who is already in your home may feel trapped--and use deadly force to make his escape. This news story from the June 26, 2006 Detroit News, concerning an incident in Oak Park, Michigan (which I have also blogged over at the Civilian Gun Self-Defense Blog) is one of the reasons that I rather like being armed when I return to an empty house: Shots were traded this morning when a man returning to his home in Oak Park surprised an intruder in his home.Had the resident walked in on this guy unarmed, the results might have been much worse. The Future Is Telecommuting I am now driving into work about one or two days a week, so even with the longer commute, my commuting expenses haven't gone up terribly much. Most days, I work from home. This is having some interesting results. It used to be that I was only actually busy at work about six hours a day--I spent lots of time waiting for either tests to complete, or for people to respond to emails. Unfortunately, because these wasted intervals were usually about five to twenty minutes long, it was difficult to do much with that time--any task worth doing usually has significant time spent remembering, "What was I doing here?" When I worked in the office, my day ended at 4:30 PM or 5:00 PM, I went home. Now, if I have a test running, I can check how it is doing late in the evening several times, or over the weekend. I think that I am getting about as much actual work done as I did before--but because it isn't nailed down to just the 8:00 AM to 4:30 PM slot, I have a bit more flexibility about doing things that interest me while I am waiting. For example, if my neck starts to bug me in the middle of the day, I can soak in the jetted tub for a while. This isn't anywhere near as good as getting massaged, but it does relax some of the knotted up muscles. The News Media's Curious Lack of Curiosity Bubblehead asks this question: There have been lots of unconfirmed reports about the torture that American soldiers PFC Thomas Tucker and PFC Kristian Menchaca endured after being taken prisoner by jihadis in Iraq earlier this month. Now, I don't want to see pictures of what happened to them come out -- for one thing, it would be tough on their families. I do wonder, though, about the double standard being shown by the American media here -- they're more than willing to go to court to get pictures of Iraqi prisoners with panties on their heads released to the public, where they can inflame the passions of the "Arab street", or to get pictures of flag-draped coffins released. Why aren't they trying as hard to get pictures of these two dead American heroes released? Is it because they don't want to inflame the "American street" -- to remind the American public of exactly the kind of animals we're fighting against?I'm afraid that is exactly it. Much of the news media isn't interested in a vigorous pursuit of knowledge (much less truth). If that were the case, they would be as interested in the savagery committed by al-Qaeda as a matter of policy as they are interested in criminal acts by U.S. soldiers who are acting against orders. The mainstream media aren't interested in inflammatory pictures so that they can sell advertising revenue. If so, they would be clamoring for all the lurid details of this torture. The mainstream media are interested in "getting" Bush--and they don't care that groups that make America's Religious Right seem like ACLU liberals might end up getting the upper hand as a result. Tuesday, June 27, 2006
Human Experimentation at the University of Washington Different River is furious that a study conducted at the University of Washington failed to adequately warn test subjects of the risks they were taking: It seem like the old concept of “donating your body to science” for medical research has taken a whole new turn.Since the risks associated with HPV include cervical cancer and death, this is not a trivial concern. Different River points out that the standards for informed consent that this study seems to violate are those that were created after the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study was exposed--by a friend of mine, who worked for the Centers for Disease Control. At least the Tuskegee Syphilis Study only studied black men who were already infected, at a time when there was no cure. This University of Washington study seems to have encouraged women to put themselves at risk without giving adequate warning. How To Make The Clouds Arrive I mentioned a couple of days ago about looking at M51 (the Whirlpool Galaxy) though Big Bertha, and how it wasn't looking quite as good as I had hoped--perhaps because the collimation was a bit off. Indeed, one of the frustrations of Big Bertha is that it doesn't have a mirror cell in the conventional sense. Instead, at the back of the tube is a big flat piece of wood mounted on a hinge. The collimation screws go through that piece of wood. The hinge allows you to drop the back in order to remove the mirror--absolutely necessary if you are going to move this behemoth. Well, one problem of the hinge is that at the far side of this square of wood is a gate hasp, to keep it from flopping down in use. Necessarily, that gate hasp means that there as much as one-sixteenth of an inch of play--and that means that, depending on the angle of the telescope relative to the ground, you could have quite a bit of variation in where the mirror is sitting relative to the rest of the optical train. Since collimation involves moving different sides of the mirror thousandths of an inch, this means that collimation has never been spectacular. You can collimate in one position--and as soon as you move the tube across the sky, that collimation is now worthless. So I got fed up this slop, and sank two 1/4"-20 threaded studs into the back of the tube assembly, on the side of the big flopping square where the gate hasp is. Now there are two nuts that, once tightened down, reduce the slop to something I can't immediately see. Collimation seemed easier and more precise--and since I now have probably increased the optical precision of Big Bertha by a couple orders of magnitude--the clouds came in! Labels: telescopes Half Full? Or Half Empty? Alan K. Henderson linked to my earlier posting expressing some skepticism about how solid the conclusions that can be drawn from Bogaert's recent work about male birth order and homosexuality, and suggests that: Researchers such as Bogaert seem unwilling to address the fact that each of the twin studies has found sets of identical twins who have the same genes and the same prenatal physical environment but different sexual orientations.I did a little digging around, and I think a more accurate description is that twin studies suggest a significant genetic predisposition towards homosexuality. According to this dissertation apparently done at Cambridge University as part of an Experimental Psychology degree, there were (as on 1992) several twins studies of homosexuality. The earliest study found, done in 1952, found 100% concordance for monozygotic (MZ) male twins. Translated out of biospeak, this means that for 100% of the identical twins where one was homosexual, so was the other. Rates for dizygotic (DZ) male twins (fraternal twins) were much lower--53.8% concordance. This is what you would expect if homosexuality was genetic, since identical twins are, well, identical, while fraternal twins, while usually closer than siblings, still have significant genetic differences. However: if Bogaert's hypothesis that homosexuality is some sort of response to maternal hormonal actions, you would expect DZ concordance rates to be quite close to MZ concordance rates. This 1952 study, however, is by far the highest concordance rates--and there's a hint that perhaps it was not a terribly random sample. A 1968 study found MZ concordance of 43%, and DZ concordance of 14%. A 1991 study found 52% and 22%. These are much lower, but still hint that homosexuality could be a genetic issue. Now, there's another possibility, and that is that twins are usually raised in the same environments. Perhaps the reason that one twin turns gay (weak father, strong mother; sexual abuse; watching Liberace play piano too much) is the same reason the other twin turns gay. Still, if that were the case, you wouldn't expect MZ concordance rates to be so dramatically higher than DZ concordance rates. The Minnesota Twins Raised Apart Study produced data that might well solve this question, because these are MZ twins separated at birth--but the total number of homosexuals in this sample is really small. Just to show how different people read the same data, this article by Neil Whitehead, Ph.D., at the NARTH website uses the concordance data to argue that it shows that homosexuality isn't genetically determined: Identical twins have identical genes. If homosexuality was a biological condition produced inescapably by the genes (e.g. eye color), then if one identical twin was homosexual, in 100% of the cases his brother would be too. But we know that only about 38% of the time is the identical twin brother homosexual. Genes are responsible for an indirect influence, but on average, they do not force people into homosexuality. This conclusion has been well known in the scientific community for a few decades (e.g. 6) but has not reached the general public. Indeed, the public increasingly believes the opposite.I would agree--but it may well be that there are genetic tendencies towards homosexuality. When I mentioned to my wife some of Bogaert's work showing that homosexual men entered puberty at an earlier age, she suggested that early puberty might well have put them at higher risk of sexual abuse by adult men. She was thinking of a few gals she has known over the years who matured too early--and were attracting what turned out to be destructive attention from adult men when they were in sixth grade. Labels: child sexual abuse A Friend Went For An Airplane Flight Recently No big deal--but when was the last time someone you knew flew in a B-24, and photographed P-51s?  Click to enlarge  Click to enlarge Male Homosexuality & In Utero Influences This BBC report says that a recent study suggests that the odds of a man being homosexual increase as the number of older brothers increase: A man's sexual orientation may be determined by conditions in the womb, according to a study.This is an interesting claim, but I do find myself asking some questions. Bogaert controlled for older brothers with the same biological mother--but I can't tell from this study if he controlled for the presence of the biological father or not. The absence of biological fathers increases the risk for both boys and girls of molestation, for a complex set of reasons, partly because biological fathers seldom molest their own kids, partly because the same taboos that discourage this are not operating with stepfathers and live-in boyfriend of the week, and partly because children looking for father figures are more likely to look for approval from adult men--and are thus subject to inappropriate advances. We had a babysitter in Irvine whose father was long gone--and this approval seeking from adult men led into a van with a 45 year old who did maintenance work around the complex. This being California, the creep received two years weekend jail time for sexual intercourse with a 13 year old. Since family size has fallen so dramatically in the last forty years, there are relatively few traditional families anymore that have more than two boys in them. I would suspect that families that have more than two boys in them are disproportionately "blended" families. It is possible that Bogaerts' study is seeing the consequences of increased molestation because of the presence of non-biological fathers in the household. This previous paper by Bogaert indicates that the male birth order effect is correlated with older brothers only; not the number of siblings, nor with older sisters. Bogaert's other work doesn't seem very PC. This paper's abstract of which Bogaert is an author shows that there is a correlation between men who go after little boys and men who are interested in other men: We investigated whether late fraternal birth positions also occur in homosexuals attracted to children or pubescents. Probands were 710 sex offenders from Gebhard et al.''s (1965) study of sexual offending. Homosexual offenders against adults and pubescents had later fraternal birth positions than heterosexual offenders against adults and pubescents, respectively; there was no difference between the homosexual and heterosexual offenders against children. Results provide some evidence that homosexuality in men attracted to immature males is etiologically related to homosexuality in men attracted to mature males.This other paper's abstract by Bogaert also suggests that homosexuality isn't so different, regardless of whether the intended partner is adult or immature: The subject's relative attraction to male and female children was assessed by phallometric testing in one analysis, and by his offense history in another. Both methods showed that fraternal birth order correlates with homosexuality in pedophiles, just as it does in men attracted to physically mature partners. Results suggest that fraternal birth order (or the underlying variable it represents) may prove the first identified universal factor in homosexual development. Results also argue against a previous explanation of the high prevalence of homosexuality in pedophiles (25% in this study), namely, that the factors that determine sexual preference in pedophiles are different from those that determine sexual preference in men attracted to adults. An alternative explanation in terms of canalization of development is suggested.Interesting: 25% of pedophiles are homosexual in the study. Hmmm. Homosexual men are about 3-4% of the population. It does appear that there is a disproportionate number of homosexuals among pedophiles. There's actually a lot of interesting research this guy Bogaert has published that suggests the possibility that male homosexuality is fundamentally different in its causes than female homosexuality. Male homosexuality may a form of maternal immune system defect that causes the damage and confusion, leading to early puberty and enlarged genitals. A Graduation Picture That You Won't See Often How rough of a neighborhood is this graduation taking place in? Monday, June 26, 2006
UC Santa Cruz Chancellor Commits Suicide I had linked to a Victor Davis Hanson article about her last year. She was hired to be UC Santa Cruz's new chancellor--at $300,000 a year--and then the university hired her "partner" for what sounded like a makework job at $200,000 a year. This article mentions the stresses that she had been under--and it struck me how careful this article is when discussing the threats of violence that she was having to deal with: Unions that have been in negotiations with the university have had a field day with comparisons of the low pay some of their members receive, compared to the salaries of top administrators. And the result has been a steady wave of articles, protests and mocking editorial cartoons.I think it is safe to say that if these "protesters" and people smashing in the windows were doing so because she was a lesbian, they would have been identified as such. But since they were almost certainly fellow leftists (this is Santa Cruz), they are just anonymous, unidentifiable troublemakers. Labels: homosexuality Who Is More Likely To Convict? Judges or Juries? Interesting paper here that Volokh Conspiracy guest-blogger Andy Leipold discusses here. Professor Leipold discusses the conventional wisdom that you are always better off being tried by a jury rather than in a "bench trial." In case you don't know what this means, a "bench trial" is once where there is no jury. You are guaranteed a right to a jury trial for most serious crimes, but you aren't required to have a jury. The judge can be both the decider of law and the decider of fact. Now, I am inclined to think that you are almost always better off with a jury. If they wrongly convict you, and the injustice is severe and obvious enough, a judge can issue a directed verdict that overturns the jury. (Only if the jury gives an inconsistent verdict (as happened with the Waco defendants, who were found guilty of one charge but innocent of several others that the guilty charge necessarily required) can a judge overturn an innocent verdict; this is extraordinarily rare.) In practice, having both judge and jury deciding the matter is redundancy for the defendant; if the jury convicts, the judge might overrule them. If the jury finds you innocent on all charges, the judge practically speaking can't overrule them. What Professor Leipold found is that federal judges used to be somewhat more likely than juries to convict defendants--but starting in the very late 1980s, this reversed--and now, juries convict in 84% of jury trials, while judges convict in only 55% of bench trials. Why? At least part of the explanation is that "public order" offenses--which includes traffic and weapons violations that are under federal jurisdiction (military bases, national parks, for example) have among the largest discrepancies between bench and jury conviction rates--and these are largely misdemeanors, not felonies. It appears that judges are less likely to convict than juries for these sort of crimes. But this isn't the entire explanation. Across the board, for all categories of crimes, federal judges are less likely to convict than juries. The smallest difference (87% jury conviction; 80% bench conviction) is in immigration-related offenses; the large difference is the public order offenses (83% jury conviction; 47% bench conviction), but the category that I thought would be the biggest gap--drug cases--turned out to be right in the middle (87% jury conviction; 62% bench conviction). Leipold does suggest a number of explanations for this startling gap, and also points out the flaws in these explanations as well. Well worth reading. |
