Amendment's Prohibition Research Articles

Submission: Inquiry into the Illegal Logging Prohibition Amendment (Strengthening Measures to Prevent Illegal Timber Trade) Bill 2024

Submission: Inquiry into the Illegal Logging Prohibition Amendment (Strengthening Measures to Prevent Illegal Timber Trade) Bill 2024

Technically Not Life: HowDe FactoLife Sentences Condemn Juveniles to Die in Prison

The U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Jones v. Mississippi reignited interest in the constitutionality of lengthy prison sentences for juveniles. A substantial proportion of juveniles convicted of homicide and nonhomicide are currently serving “virtual life” or “ de facto life” sentences. De facto life sentences are lengthy sentences that may be considered the equivalent of a life sentence. This article investigates how states’ statutory schemes and appellate court decisions have allowed for the use of de facto life sentences for juveniles convicted of homicide as well as nonhomicide offenses. By employing content analytical techniques, this article identifies the variation in how de facto life sentences are defined and applied across the states. Nearly every state imposes some type of de facto life sentence on juveniles, suggesting that the time is ripe for courts to determine whether these “virtual life” terms adhere to the Court's Eighth Amendment's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.

Author Response

Author Response

Review: Debating Yoga and Mindfulness in Public Schools: Reforming Secular Education or Reestablishing Religion? by Candy Gunther Brown

Review: <i>Debating Yoga and Mindfulness in Public Schools: Reforming Secular Education or Reestablishing Religion?</i> by Candy Gunther Brown

Disability Rights and Religious Liberty in Education: The Story Behind Zobrest v. Catalina Foothills School District by Bruce J. Dierenfield and David A. Gerber

Reviewed by: Disability Rights and Religious Liberty in Education: The Story Behind Zobrest v. Catalina Foothills School District by Bruce J. Dierenfield and David A. Gerber Gabrielle M. Girgis Disability Rights and Religious Liberty in Education: The Story Behind Zobrest v. Catalina Foothills School District. By Bruce J. Dierenfield and David A. Gerber. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2020. 248 pp. $27.95. This book tells a story that will serve scholarship in many fields. It also resonates with my personal experience. As a hard-of-hearing Catholic, I heard echoes of my life in the story of Jim Zobrest, a deaf young man whose parents fought—all the way to the Supreme Court—to have his interpreter in a Catholic high school funded by the local public school district. Historians Bruce Dierenfield and David Gerber offer a meticulous account of the Zobrests' life. Special attention is paid to a dilemma facing Jim's parents, Sandi and Larry: whether to send him to a school for the deaf or disabled, or enroll him instead in a standard school with accompanying speech therapy and sign-language interpretation. In choosing to "mainstream" Jim, Sandi and Larry departed from a growing capital-D Deaf culture, which sees deafness as a cultural identity, and celebrates its isolation from the hearing world. As the authors show, hard questions about how to raise and teach deaf [End Page 110] children were tragically overshadowed by the Zobrests' legal dispute over the public funding of services for Jim at a religious school. Countless interviews with the Zobrests and others give a moving picture of the challenges facing parents of deaf and hard-of-hearing children then as now. The authors transition seamlessly from the Zobrests' early decisions about Jim's education to the Supreme Court case at the book's center. In Zobrest v. Catalina Foothills School District (1992), the Zobrests argued that under disability rights law and the Constitution's guarantee of the free exercise of religion, the local public school district had to continue paying for Jim's sign-language interpreter even after he began attending a Catholic school. The school district argued that this public funding would amount to an unconstitutional establishment of religion. The Court sided with the Zobrests. Although the authors' work is chiefly historical—an effort to retell the story with accuracy and rich detail—their scholarship raises questions that could bear fruit in law, disability studies, philosophy of education, and political theory. To take one example: Dierenfield and Gerber's careful description of competing perspectives in the litigation highlights a common dispute in establishment-clause cases. The question is about how much a law's incidental effects should matter. The Zobrest majority held that a neutral disability rights law creates no unlawful establishment if it simply aims at equal services for disabled students in secular and religious schools alike. By contrast, the school district, and the Court's dissenting justices, concentrated on the law's effects: if the state is de facto paying for Jim's interpreter to sign the content of all his classes—including doctrinal statements in a theology class (e.g., "Jesus Christ is the Son of God and died for our sins")—then the First Amendment's prohibition of religious establishments has been violated. The authors admirably try, but occasionally fail, to tell the Zobrests' story with impartiality. They are forthright about their interest in the issues raised by the case and remind us that it's nearly impossible for the historian to have no feelings about the outcomes she reports. But a subtle bias against the Zobrests' choice to mainstream their son appears in the authors' language and selections of detail. For example, their account of a conversation between Sandi and a school district representative portrays Sandi as a highly emotional woman prone to outbursts of anger, and the representative as a calm and pleasantly rational male. And in a litany of Jim's school's failures to support him, we hear the implication that Jim's young life in the mainstream is a tragedy, in which he was always the victim, never a protagonist. [End Page 111] The book also presents Jim's parents as...

Fixing the Johnson Amendment Without Totally Destroying It

The so-called Johnson Amendment is that portion of Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code that prohibits charities from intervening in electoral campaigns. Intervention has long been understood to include both contributing charitable funds to campaign coffers and communicating the charity's views about candidates' qualifications for office. The breadth of the Johnson Amendment potentially brings two important values into conflict: the government's interest in preventing tax-deductible contributions to be used for electoral purposes (called non-subvention) and the speech rights or interests of charities. For many years, the IRS has taken the position that the Johnson Amendment's prohibition on electoral communications includes the content of a religious leader's speech in an official religious service — a minister may not express support or opposition to a candidate from the pulpit. For at least as many years, some commentators and legislators have found this application of the Johnson Amendment especially problematic, since it implicates directly the freedom of houses of worship speech and religious exercise. These Johnson Amendment critics sought to provide some carve-out from the Johnson Amendment's general application to permit speech that includes ministers' pulpit speech without creating a massive loophole for the Johnson Amendment's general prohibition on campaign intervention. Other commentators have long argued that a limited carve-out for certain types of speech is not possible — that permitting any communication of the organization's views, even in pulpit speech, would provide a massive loophole in the overall treatment of campaign contributions and expenditures. This Article reviews the leading proposals to fix the Johnson Amendment, and finds them all lacking. It then proposes four types of modifications that could be used to properly balance the speech interests of charities (especially churches) with the government's interest in a level playing field for campaign expenditures (non-subvention). These proposed modifications include: (i) a non-incremental expenditure tax, (ii) a reporting regime, (iii) a disclosure regime, and (iv) a governance regime. The Article concludes that in order to properly balance non-subvention with speech interests of charities, a modification of the Johnson Amendment should include some version of all four types of interventions.

Term-of-Years Sentences Since Miller v. Alabama.

Since the landmark case of Roper v. Simmons in 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled in a series of cases on sentencing for juvenile criminal offenders. Emphasizing that children are different for the purposes of criminal punishment, the Court has incrementally held that it violates the Eighth Amendment's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment to impose death or life without parole for most juvenile offenders. Although the Supreme Court rulings establish minimum standards, they do not prescribe a clear framework for implementation. States have, accordingly, responded differently in interpreting and implementing the Supreme Court precedent. One area where a split exists between states is in juvenile term-of-years sentences that amount to de facto life sentences without parole. The case of People v. Contreras from California is one of the most recent state cases to address this problem. Reviewed here are Contreras, the historical precedent supporting juvenile justice reform, and jurisdictional responses to the notion of sentencing juveniles to de facto life sentences. Also discussed is a call for meaningful periodic opportunities for juveniles to be considered for release.

Owning Oneself in a World of Others: Towards a Paid-For First Amendment

Can the right of publicity (a state law right) be reconciled (in a legitimate and non-arbitrary way) with the First Amendment's prohibition against state laws that “suppress” speech? Ever since the Supreme Court said that commercial speech deserves First Amendment protection, people sued for misappropriating celebrity fame for profit have claimed that they have a First Amendment right to do so. The defense has morphed in the case law to the point that the controlling issue seems to be whether the challenged use is “sufficiently transformative” to justify the taking. The use of a transformation construct to manage the conflict has been dubious at best, and misleading at worst. It has spawned an inconsistent and increasingly arbitrary body of law. This Article argues that the courts' conceptualization of the conflict — as a property right against a speech right — is askew. We argue that the conflict is about allocating competing economic claims: the right of the plaintiff to prevent commercial use of her image versus the right of the defendant to make commercial use of her image. The use of the transformation test essentially turns the inquiry into an attempt, albeit not transparent, to allocate the economic value created or attributable to the celebrity plaintiff against the add-on value created by the person who took the celebrity image and allegedly transformed it into a new product with new economic value attributable to work or creativity of the unauthorized user. This article concludes that in order to save both of these important rights, we must allow judges to honestly deal with the underlying economic issues. We can only accomplish this by transitioning to a compulsory licensing system with forced apportionment. In order to satisfy the First Amendment, censorship must be taken off the table as a plaintiff tool. But to satisfy the right of publicity, mandatory profit sharing mechanisms must be implemented.

Lisa M. F. Andersen. The Politics of Prohibition: American Governance and the Prohibition Party, 1869–1933.

Lisa M. F. Andersen’s primary challenge is most starkly presented in the appendix to her The Politics of Prohibition: American Governance and the Prohibition Party, 1869–1933; namely that her subject—the Prohibition Party—never received over 2.25 percent of the national vote, even at the pinnacle of its power in 1892. How does one make the case that a minor footnote to history actually matters? Answer: by relating it either to the larger history of American alcohol prohibition or to the literature on small parties in American political development. Andersen does a much better job at the former than the latter. The Politics of Prohibition investigates the rise and fall of the Prohibition Party, “led by temperance advocates, women, and former abolitionists—and how its members harnessed moral aspirations to politics and partisan strategies during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries” (2). The “big-P” Prohibitionists viewed both the Democrats and the Republicans as hopelessly corrupted by liquor interests that stymied any attempts at true reform. While cognizant of the entrenched two-party duopoly, Prohibitionists believed their incorruptibility, purity, and ambition would allow them to become the “new Republicans” within that system. Well before the passage of a suffrage amendment, the Prohibitionists became the first American political party to welcome women into their ranks, affording them new opportunities, but also opening fissures within the party. They confronted challenges to small parties, such as state ballot laws and registration procedures, and lost support to a non-partisan pressure group—the Anti-Saloon League of America (ASLA)—which is ultimately credited with pushing through the Eighteenth Amendment. In the end, a worn-out Prohibition Party leadership even bitterly refused to endorse the campaign for the national prohibition amendment. Ultimately, “Prohibitionists’ fears about the implications of Democratic and Republican dominance over the party system failed to rouse many of their fellow Americans to action; most voters continued to vote for the same parties that they had supported for decades and therefore did not sense a loss in their political agency when minor parties struggled” (5).

The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State

Lisa McGirr has penned a history of a topic that most historians have neglected or consigned to the picaresque. Standard narratives treat the Eighteenth Amendment—the prohibition amendment—as a quixotic and mercifully brief episode of state repression. But McGirr's reinterpretation no longer allows scholars to give the story short shrift. A longtime student of American politics whose first book pioneered a community history of American conservatives, McGirr leaps to the national level, offering a kaleidoscopic social, cultural, and political tale of the “dry” years. The War on Alcohol tugs prohibition from the margins of U.S. history to the center, making a convincing case that the 1919 Volstead Act played a vital role in shaping the long history of the twentieth century. McGirr recovers the “dry decade” as a pivotal moment in American state building. While standard narratives emphasize liberal periods of social welfare construction and economic regulation, the new state apparatus of the 1920s fostered conservative repression. Like other scholars of conservative state building surrounding war, religious conservatism, and labor repression, McGirr unearths a panoply of coercive new laws and administrative functions. The Volstead Act inspired the creation of the entirely new Prohibition Bureau, “four times the size” of the also recently formed Bureau of Investigation (later renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation) (p. 208). The legislation expanded the U.S. Border Patrol, the U.S. Coast Guard, and state and local police forces. It also produced strict mandatory-sentencing laws, the imposition and collection of millions of dollars in fines, and the expansion of federal criminal courts.

Brand New District, Same Old Fight: The Bankhead–Hobson Campaign of 1916

Brand New District, Same Old Fight: The Bankhead–Hobson Campaign of 1916 Kari Frederickson (bio) Spanish–american war hero and prohibition crusader Richmond Pearson Hobson defeated ten-term Congressman John Hollis Bankhead in 1906 in a spirited and nasty campaign of ideological and temperamental opposites.1 His victory over Bankhead was equal parts political triumph and personal vendetta. For Hobson, Bankhead had become a personal nemesis determined to block the rise of a younger, more dynamic foe. Despite his victory over John Bankhead, Hobson remained especially sensitive to the Bankhead influence in the state and to what he regarded as politically imperious behavior by the family. When Hobson was defeated in a race for the U.S. Senate in 1914, most political observers believed his political career over. They were wrong. Hobson’s suspicion of all political moves by the Bankheads within the state of Alabama, in addition to his desire to usher a prohibition amendment through Congress, prompted him to make a fateful political decision. In 1916, Hobson challenged John Bankhead’s forty-two-year-old son William for the newly created Tenth Congressional District. But the son was not the father; Will Bankhead was better able to counter Hobson’s claims to the prerogative of political leadership by drawing on some of the same masculine conventions that had powered Hobson to victory over the senior Bankhead in 1906. The charismatic younger Bankhead and Hobson’s political missteps proved impossible for the war hero [End Page 267] to overcome. The results of the 1916 election set the combatants on opposing tracks: Hobson would never again hold political office while Bankhead’s victory would be the first of many that would bring him to the pinnacle of power in the nation’s capital. Richmond Hobson took his seat in Congress as the representative of Alabama’s Sixth Congressional District when that body convened in December 1907. For the next seven years, Hobson proved himself to be a staunch advocate of a strong navy. He spoke frequently of his concern about Japan’s growing power and urged his fellow Congressmen to support generous naval appropriations and general military preparedness. Hobson also became a reliable advocate of progressive reforms. He opposed protective tariffs, which he believed hurt rural folks and promoted “an abnormal growth of city life,” and supported additional federal aid for education, constitutional amendments instituting the graduated income tax and for the direct election of U.S senators, as well as the Clayton Anti-Trust and Federal Trade Commission Acts. Though popular with his constituents, Hobson was not well liked by his fellow congressmen, particularly those from his own state. While in Congress, he developed a reputation as something of a maverick and was not considered a reliable southern Democrat. For example, Hobson supported New Jersey governor Woodrow Wilson for the Democratic Party’s nomination for president in 1912, breaking with Alabama’s Congressional delegation, which supported favorite-son candidate Representative Oscar Underwood.2 Hobson stood apart from his southern colleagues on a number of critical issues. Viewing women as natural allies in the progressive reform battle, Hobson was one of the few southern representatives to actively support women’s suffrage. Of the value of women’s political participation, Hobson argued, “We find ample provisions of law for dealing with cholera in hogs or foot-and-mouth disease in cattle, but [End Page 268] there is nothing to reach infant mortality and little to reach child labor, debauchery, and moral obliquity.” Giving women the vote would make it more likely that political solutions would be found for these problems. When the National American Woman Suffrage Association staged the first suffrage parade in Washington D.C., in 1913, it named Congressman Hobson as a parade leader. Some political observers spoke of his potential as a vice presidential and perhaps even a presidential candidate.3 More conspicuous than his support of women’s suffrage was his response to what became known as the Brownsville Affair. In late 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt ordered a dishonorable discharge of 167 African-American soldiers of the 25th Infantry Regiment stationed at Fort Brown in Texas. The presence of the black troops had exacerbated racial tensions...

Fourth Amendment Rights for Nonresident Aliens

AbstractThe U.S. National Security Agency has nearly unlimited authority to spy upon citizens of foreign countries while they are outside the United States. It goes almost without saying that such targeting of U.S. citizens, without any hint of individualized suspicion either of criminal wrongdoing or of being a threat to national security, would be constitutionally prohibited under the Fourth Amendment. However, the dominant view in the American legal community is that there is nothing constitutionally wrong, or even suspect, about such targeting of nonresident aliens.This article argues that the dominant view of the law is wrong both descriptively and normatively. It is wrong with regard to the proper interpretation of the relevant constitutional case law, because that case law is more open ended and unclear than the dominant view represents it as being. And it is wrong with regard to the underlying legal and moral principles that should guide the interpretation and development of constitutional law. Those principles call for recognizing that nonresident aliens enjoy constitutional protection against unjust harms—a point argued for in a companion paper, “Constitutional Rights for Nonresident Aliens.” And those same principles imply that nonresident aliens enjoy the Fourth Amendment's prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures.

A Defense of Privacy as the Central Value Protected by the Fourth Amendment's Prohibition on Unreasonable Searches

Katz v. United States and the accompanying turn to privacy as the lodestar of Fourth Amendment analysis have been the target of heavy criticism. The privacy standard is said to be contrary to Fourth Amendment language, history and precedent, overly elastic and thus conducive to judicial activism in either direction, and inadequate at capturing what the Fourth Amendment is really about. But the proposed alternatives to the privacy standard — ranging from a focus on property, dignity, liberty or information control to a right to security from government coercion — all have their own flaws, and in any event can almost all fit comfortably within the privacy rubric. Privacy’s capaciousness, together with its alienability, its amenability to measurement, and its scalar nature, can maximize the Fourth Amendment’s flexibility in dealing with the regulatory challenges posed by both traditional and modern law enforcement practices.

Race and Selective Enforcement in Public Housing

Drugs, crime, and public housing are closely linked in policy and politics, and their nexus has animated several intensive drug enforcement programs targeted at public housing residents. In New York City, police systematically conduct “vertical patrols” in public housing buildings, making tens of thousands of Terry stops each year. During these patrols, both uniformed and undercover officers systematically move through the buildings, temporarily detaining and questioning residents and visitors, often at a low threshold of suspicion, and usually alleging trespass to justify the stop. We use a case‐control design to identify the effects of living in one of New York City's 330 public housing developments on the probability of stop, frisk, and arrest from 2004–2011. We find that the incidence rate ratio for trespass stops and arrests is more than two times greater in public housing than in the immediate surrounding neighborhoods. We decompose these effects using first differences models and find that the difference in percent black and Hispanic populations in public housing compared to the surrounding area predicts the disparity in trespass enforcement and enforcement of other criminal law violations. The pattern of racially selective enforcement suggests the potential for systemic violations of the Fourteenth Amendment's prohibition on racial discrimination.

Ties That Bind: Walter Rauschenbusch, Reinhold Niebuhr, and the Quest for Economic Justice

Ties That Bind: Walter Rauschenbusch, Reinhold Niebuhr, and the Quest for Economic Justice

Court to Decide if States Can Abolish Insanity Defense

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Legal NewsFull AccessCourt to Decide if States Can Abolish Insanity DefenseJonathan WolfeJonathan WolfeSearch for more papers by this authorPublished Online:5 Oct 2012https://doi.org/10.1176/pn.47.19.psychnews_47_19_14-aAbstractFour U.S. states disallow use of the insanity defense in criminal cases. Idaho is one of those states, and John Joseph Delling is currently being held in solitary confinement at Idaho’s Maximum Security Institution for a murderous crime spree committed while he was experiencing delusions associated with paranoid schizophrenia.In July, APA and the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law (AAPL) filed an amicus brief supporting Delling’s request that the U.S. Supreme Court hear his case and reject Idaho’s abolition of the insanity defense. He contends that disallowing him the option of an insanity defense is incompatible with fundamental principles of criminal law. (The other states to have rejected the insanity defense are Kansas, Montana, and Utah.)“This case presents the question, not before resolved by [the Supreme Court], whether the Constitution permits criminal conviction and punishment of a defendant who, by reason of mental disease or defect, could not appreciate the wrongfulness of his conduct at the time of the offense,” APA and AAPL maintained in their brief.In 2007, at age 21, Delling shot and killed two men in Idaho and seriously wounded another in Arizona. According to a July 22 article in the Washington Post, Delling initially said he acted in self-defense against the men, two of whom were former classmates, because they were “stealing his ‘energy.’ ”Delling was charged with two counts of second-degree murder, for which he was not deemed fit to stand trial until one year later.After an unsuccessful effort to convince Idaho’s Fourth Judicial District Court to declare the state’s insanity defense law unconstitutional, Delling entered a conditional guilty plea. At sentencing, the district court recognized that Delling “unquestionably suffers from a very serious mental illness” and lacked “the ability to appreciate the wrongfulness of his conduct.”However, the court ultimately sentenced Delling to life in prison on the grounds that he poses a “risk to society,” maintaining that his “ability to plan intelligently and rationally is not … impaired” and that his “prognosis for improvement or rehabilitation is at best speculative.”In December 2011, the Idaho Supreme Court affirmed the lower court’s conviction, rejecting Delling’s argument that abolition of the insanity defense violates due process and abridges the Sixth Amendment right of those on trial to present evidence in their own defense. The court also rejected the argument that Idaho’s stance on the insanity defense violates the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.Stanford Law School Professor Jeffrey Fisher subsequently filed a petition on Delling’s behalf requesting that the U.S. Supreme Court hear the case and make a definitive ruling on the constitutionality of the insanity defense.“For hundreds of years, Anglo-American law has recognized that it is unfair to punish people whose offending behavior was driven by their severe mental illness,” said Paul Appelbaum, M.D., the Dollard Professor of Psychiatry, Medicine, and Law at Columbia University, chair of the APA Committee on Judicial Action, and a past APA president, in an interview with Psychiatric News. “The moral basis of punishment is premised on notions of individual responsibility and culpability that simply do not apply when, for example, crimes are based on a person’s delusional view of the world.”Separate amicus briefs in support of Delling’s petition were filed by the Constitutional Accountability Center (CAC) and a coalition of 52 criminal law and mental health law professors.The CAC’s brief echoes Delling’s argument that disallowing the insanity defense violates due process and Eighth Amendment rights. The law professors’ brief similarly invokes the right to due process, as well as emphasizes the “moral necessity” of the insanity defense. The professors also dismiss as insubstantial several commonly raised objections to the defense, including concerns that acquittal of “insane” defendants endangers public safety and that “sane” individuals may use the defense to beat the system.[John Joseph Delling v. Idaho, U.S. Supreme Court 11-1515] APA’s amicus brief is posted at www.psych.org/File%20Library/Learn/Archives/amicus_2012_Delling.pdf. CAC’s amicus brief is posted at http://theusconstitution.org/cases/briefs/delling-v-idaho/cert-stage-amicus-brief-delling-v-idaho. The brief filed by the law professors’ coalition is posted at http://prawfsblawg.blogs.com/files/26715-pdf-morse.pdf. ISSUES NewArchived

Constitutional Rights of Parents and Children in Child Protective and Juvenile Delinquency Investigations

This report addresses the balance between the authority of the child protective system to investigate allegations of child abuse and the constitutional rights of parents and children to family privacy and autonomy. It also discusses rights of parents and children in the juvenile delinquency context, where the child is a suspected perpetrator of a crime rather than a victim. In the principal case discussed, Camreta v. Greene, the Supreme Court was asked to decide whether, absent exigent circumstances, the 4th Amendment prohibition of unreasonable searches and seizures is violated when a child protective services investigator accompanied by a police officer interviews a suspected child victim at school, without first obtaining a judicial warrant or parental permission. While it remains to be seen whether the Court will reach the merits of the case, the oral arguments and outpouring of friend of the court briefs illustrate the difficulty of balancing values of child protection, public safety and family autonomy. Note: In an opinion issued on March 26, 2011, the Court dismissed the Camreta case as moot leaving the controversial 4th Amendment issues unresolved.

Poor Access to MH Care Cited in High Court's Prison Ruling

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Professional NewsFull AccessPoor Access to MH Care Cited in High Court's Prison RulingMark MoranMark MoranSearch for more papers by this authorPublished Online:1 Jul 2011https://doi.org/10.1176/pn.46.13.psychnews_46_13_1_2AbstractThe Supreme Court ruled that the state of California must reduce its prison population by some 33,000 inmates in the next two years, declaring that the extremely overcrowded conditions in California prisons and the resulting substandard state of general and mental health care violate the Eighth Amendment's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. In the justices' majority opinion, Justice Anthony Kennedy noted that "prisoners in California with serious mental illness do not receive minimal, adequate care," and that "inmates awaiting care may be held for months in administrative segregation, where they endure harsh and isolated conditions and receive only limited mental health services. Wait times for mental health care range as high as 12 months." The decision requires the state to reduce its prison population to 110,000, approximately 137.5 percent of the system's capacity. Although the decision technically applies only to California's prison system, its impact may be felt more broadly. Late last year, APA submitted, along with several other mental health organizations, an amicus brief in support of the inmates' suit, which claimed that the conditions in which they were housed meant that they had inadequate access to mental health and general medical care. "In the wake of deinstitutionalization and closure of state hospitals, a growing number of persons with severe mental illnesses have been incarcerated in U.S. jails and prisons, where mental health care is often deficient or lacking altogether," said APA President John Oldham, M.D., in response to the ruling. "By upholding the lower court's ruling in this case, the Supreme Court is signaling that it takes the mental health and other medical needs of prisoners seriously—a matter of constitutional law. APA also believes that creating constitutionally adequate medical and mental health services as ordered in this case is in the interests of all people in the state of California." Howard Zonana, M.D., an expert in forensic psychiatry, told Psychiatric News that the Supreme Court was attentive to concerns about public safety, emphasizing that the court-ordered reduction in the prison population could be achieved by means that did not require the release of violent criminals into the community. "The state has a variety of options, but it has to do something," he said. "It can pay to transfer people out of state to other facilities or it can move them into county jails and prisons." The decision comes after a decades-long fight over the state of health care in California prisons, and Zonana noted that the state has the highest rate of incarceration of any in the country. He added that the prison population, being a literally captive population with no options for receiving general health or mental health care outside of the prison, is the only group that has a constitutional right to state-provided care. The Court's 5-4 ruling states that "For years the medical and mental health care provided by California's prisons has fallen short of minimum constitutional requirements and has failed to meet prisoners' basic health needs. Needless suffering and death have been the well-documented result. Over the whole course of years during which this litigation has been pending, no other remedies have been found to be sufficient." ISSUES NewArchived

Capital punishment on trial: Furman v. Georgia and the death penalty in modern America

In his first book since the Pulitzer Prize - winning Polio: An American Story, renowned historian David Oshinsky takes a new and closer look at the Supreme Court's controversial and much-debated stances on capital punishment - in the landmark case of Furman v. Georgia. Career criminal William Furman shot and killed a homeowner during a 1967 burglary in Savannah, Georgia. Because it was a 'black-on-white' crime in the racially troubled South, it also was an open-and-shut case. The trial took less than a day, and the nearly all-white jury rendered a death sentence. Aided by the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund, Furman's African-American attorney, Bobby Mayfield, doggedly appealed the verdict all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which in 1972 overturned Furman's sentence by a narrow 5-4 vote, ruling that Georgia's capital punishment statute, and by implication all other state death-penalty laws, was so arbitrary and capricious as to violate the Eighth Amendment's prohibition against 'cruel and unusual punishment'. Furman effectively, if temporarily, halted capital punishment in the United States. Every death row inmate across the nation was resentenced to life in prison. The decision, however, did not rule the death penalty per se to be unconstitutional; rather, it struck down the laws that currently governed its application, leaving the states free to devise new ones that the Court might find acceptable. And this is exactly what happened. In the coming years, the Supreme Court would uphold an avalanche of state legislation endorsing the death penalty. Capital punishment would return stronger than ever, with many more defendants sentenced to death and eventually executed. Oshinsky demonstrates the troubling roles played by race and class and region in capital punishment. And he concludes by considering the most recent Supreme Court death-penalty cases involving minors and the mentally ill, as well as the impact of international opinion. Compact and engaging, Oshinsky's masterful study reflects a gift for empathy, an eye for the telling anecdote and portrait, and a talent for clarifying the complex and often confusing legal issues surrounding capital punishment.

How Successful Criminal Defense Attorneys Suppress Evidence

This 13-page 2010 CLE (continuing legal education) brochure is titled “How Successful Criminal Defense Attorneys Suppress Evidence.” It examines, from the defense perspective, how to successfully suppress evidence that was obtained in violation of the Fourth Amendment prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures and/or in violation of the Fifth Amendment privilege against compelled self-incrimination.