Legal briefs

Separation of powers

A week ago, the FBI arrested a Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge, Hannah Dugan, on charges of Obstruction of Justice and Concealing an Individual to Prevent Arrest. Judge Dugan is alleged to have interfered with the arrest of an illegal immigrant by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which was set to occur in her courtroom. Many people opposed to the Trump Administration’s deportation actions have flipped out over the arrest of a sitting judge, calling it dictatorial and a violation of the separation of powers. Well, lets consider the details. You can read the criminal complaint here.

Eduardo Flores-Ruiz was in the U.S. unlawfully. He was issued a Notice and Order of Expedited Removal on January 16, 2013 and was deported soon thereafter. He subsequently, illegally reentered the U.S.

A couple of weeks ago, Flores-Ruiz was charged with Battery and Domestic Battery in Milwaukee County, Wisconsin. He is alleged to have beaten his roommates. When he was arrested, his fingerprints were taken, and ICE identified him as being subject to removal and an immigration court official found probable cause for that. ICE and DHS then made a plan to take Flores-Ruiz into custody at his upcoming court date. It is common for arrests to be effectuated in courthouses like this because they are safe—usually.

When ICE and DHS officers arrived at the Milwaukee courthouse, they checked in with the courthouse security. Word got around that they were there. Judge Dugan was on the bench conducting hearings unrelated to Flores-Ruiz, though Flores-Ruiz was present in the courtroom along with his attorney, the prosecutor and the alleged victims. When Judge Dugan learned that agents were there to arrest Flores-Ruiz, she left the bench, went into the hallway, and angrily confronted the officers. They showed her a copy of the arrest warrant. Judge Dugan then demanded that the officers report to the Chief Judge’s office down the hall. They did. While the agents were away at the Chief Judge’s office, Judge Dugan reentered her courtroom, gathered Flores-Ruiz and his attorney and ushered them through a back, non-public door in the courtroom. The prosecutor and the victims witnessed Judge Dugan take Flores-Ruiz out of the courtroom but were never informed by the Judge what was happening.

Flores-Ruiz and his attorney, with the assistance of Judge Dugan, then began exiting the courthouse via a route designed to evade the agents. Flores-Ruiz made it outside and began to run away. Agents were ultimately able to chase him down and arrest him.

If these allegations turn out to be true, then Judge Dugan deserves to face consequences for what she did. It is not a violation of the separation of powers to arrest a judge who commits criminal acts. It is not dictatorial. It is, in fact, the opposite. It is, if true, right to punish a judge for breaking the law she is sworn to uphold.

Crime

From 1995 to 2022, THC content in the average cannabis plant increased by 307 percent. Compared with nonusers, cannabis users faced an 11-fold increase in the risk of developing a psychotic disorder. These things are related. See the data here.

More crime

And the 2024 Radzinowicz Prize awarded by the British Journal of Criminology to the year’s most outstanding criminology research paper goes to: Michael Fiddler, Travis Linnemann and Theo Kindynis for their paper entitled, Ghost Criminology: A framework for the Discipline’s Spectral Turn.

Wut?

I don’t know, but here’s what the abstract says it’s about:

Drawing upon recent criminological scholarship examining spectrality, as well as Jacques Derrida’s notion of hauntology, this article sets out a framework to explore harms experienced as ‘out of joint’. We propose a new sub-discipline of ‘ghost criminology’ as a means to explore and reckon with these afterlives. We identify three strands of the (in)visible, the (in)corporeal and dead space with which to capture phenomena hovering between presence and absence. In doing so, we provide examples of justice being achieved within this sense of time being ‘off its hinges’. A ‘ghost criminology’ provides a means of listening to the voices of the discipline’s dead, as well as the ghosts of its future.

You can’t read the whole thing without paying for a subscription to the academic journal. You shouldn’t do that because it would be a poor use of your time and money. With the amount of real crime we have to deal with, maybe ghost crime doesn’t deserve such attention.

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