Broward criminal attorney William Moore has been researching the prominent criminal cases Judge Sonia Sotomayor, who was nominated yesterday by President Obama to serve as Justice Souter’s replacement on the United States Supreme Court, has ruled on in her years as a federal judge in the Southern District of New York and the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. Although Judge Sotomayor is perhaps best known for her ruling in the 1994 Major League Baseball strike, she has also decided several important criminal cases.
Fort Lauderdale criminal attorney Moore is particularly interested in her record on search and seizure issues. She held that a New York City ordinance which impounded the vehicles driven by people who were suspected of driving under the influence was unconstitutional, because it did not allow a procedure to challenge the impoundment – even after many months had elapsed and even when the charges had been reduced.
Judge Sotomayor dissented from the majority in a case dealing with the use of strip searches. Teenaged girls who were being held in a juvenile detention center ... Read more..
Archive for May, 2009
Police have a new tool to track criminals, and privacy advocates and criminal defense attorneys are crying foul.
Across the nation, police are attaching GPS devices to suspects’ cars to track their movements and possibly get incriminating evidence against them.
In Madison, Wis., police attached GPS to a car borrowed by a habitual methamphetamine dealer, and discovered he made frequent trips to an area of northwest Wisconsin, according to The Associate Press.
Police found a meth lab there, and were there to arrest him on his next visit.
Whether or not police need a search warrant to attach a GPS device to a suspect’s car is a question of great debate.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1983 that a warrant is not needed to install so-called beeper devices that tracked a suspect’s movements. However, the technological advances of the last two-and-a-half decades allow police to be more evasive in their surveillance.
Earlier this month, the New York Supreme Court ruled that a warrant is necessary to install GPS on a suspect’s vehicle, but just a week before, the Wisconsin courts ruled that GPS tracking was ... Read more..
Andrea Schneider has two fascinating new papers on SSRN. In different ways, both papers deal with what Andrea and her coauthers label the “double bind” facing women in leadership positions: “The incongruence of the core feminine stereotype with managerial effectiveness can result in women being perceived as competent but unlikable, or as likable but incompetent.” The first paper, “Negotiating Your Public Identity: Women’s Path to Power,” illustrates the two options using two female politicians with clearly established public images: Hillary Clinton’s persona illustrates “competent but unlikable,” while Sarah Palin’s exemplifies “likable but incompetent.” (As I suggested in an earlier post, some of the criticisms of Sonia Sotomayor as lacking “judicial temperament” may owe something, à la Hillary, to the ”competent but unlikable” stereotype.)
Andrea and her coauthors offer a humorous, but also disheartening, review of media coverage from the 2008 election that typecast Clinton and Palin into their respective roles. They also discuss social scientific research suggesting that the double bind arises from deeply entrenched gender stereotypes. They conclude more hopefully, however, with suggested strategies for professional women to minimize the harmful effects of the ... Read more..
At a press conference today in Eisenberg Hall, featuring Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen and Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, the Law School announced today the creation of a program that will provide mediation between lenders and residential borrowers facing foreclosure. This program responds to the final report and recommendations of the Milwaukee Foreclosure Partnership Initiative issued in February 2009. It is underwritten by $100,000 in grant funding allocated by the City of Milwaukee and $310,000 in grant funding from the Attorney General made possible by the recent settlement of the state’s lawsuit against Countrywide Financial Corporation. The mediation program is described in this press release and represents an instance of the Law School’s seeking to use its particular expertise (in this case, with respect to dispute resolution) to address a pressing problem facing this region. Particular kudos to Dan Idzikowski, Assistant Dean for Public Service, for his work in leading the Law School to this moment.
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This strikes me as a good description of President Obama’s nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the United States Supreme Court. Like all of us, I am still learning about Judge Sotomayor and have probably revised even those thoughts I expressed this morning on the Charlie Sykes show or those that you can see this evening on the six o’clock news on Channel 12 (in a “dueling” segment with Ed Fallone in which the “duel,” if there was one, mostly found the cutting room floor).
But I do believe that Obama’s selection contrasts sharply with those of President Bush and the differences are instructive and fodder for debate about the role of the judiciary. It isn’t that I am prepared to say that Judge Sotomayor is an extraordinarily liberal nominee (although she may be), but we can say that she has made at least one extraordinary statement. Although one should only let a single statement bear so much weight, we are, after all, blogging here and relative immediacy has its virtues.
In a lecture at Berkeley, she said the following:
Whether born ... Read more..
