Legal briefs

Crime

After the bombs burst in the air and the rockets glared red on Independence Day in our Nation’s Capital, as the night of July fourth moved into the early morning of July fifth, eighteen-year-old Kentrell Flowers jacked a Toyota minivan. He drove the minivan to a neighborhood in the northwest section of Washington D.C. There, he saw another car. A nicer car. In all likelihood a black Tahoe. He decided to take this car at gunpoint as well. Not a bad plan. It had worked before, and carjackers barely get prosecuted in Washington D.C. anyway, so why not? This car, though, wasn’t occupied by some helpless bystander. It was occupied by two Deputy United States Marshals.

Unfortunately for Flowers, the Marshals were working security for United States Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. They were parked on the street outside her home when Flowers approached the driver’s side window with his gun drawn. He intended to force the occupants from the car, or worse, so he could steal it. Instead, one of the Marshals shot him right square in the face.

Flowers lived, is in the hospital, and has been charged with the carjacking. Sadly, seventy-nine percent of adults arrested with illegal guns in D.C. walk away without a felony conviction according to the latest D.C. Sentencing Report. In 2023, the D.C. U.S. Attorney’s office declined to prosecute 33% of the arrests for felony gun possession. Of the remaining 77% of arrests that were charged, 37% of those were later dismissed. Over half of the few remaining cases were pled down to misdemeanors. Thus, only 21% of armed felony arrests result in a felony conviction. Given that Flowers’s second crime that night took place outside a U.S. Supreme Court Justice’s home, perhaps the minivan victim will have a chance at justice.      

More crime

109 people were shot in Chicago over the July Fourth weekend. (wgntv.com). 19 of them died, including an eight-year-old who was killed when shots were fired into his home. Our urban areas will either get more aggressive on crime, or there will be more weekends like this.

Separation of powers

This past Wednesday, I published a piece praising the end of Chevron deference as recently decided in the U.S. Supreme Court’s Loper Bright case. You can read it here. Concurrent with Loper Bright, another case, Jarkesy v. SEC, was handed down that similarly impacts the administrative state and the separation of powers.

George Jarkesy once operated a couple of hedge funds. In 2011, the SEC began an investigation of Jarkesy and determined that he had violated the Securities Act of 1933 by misrepresenting the identity of his funds’ auditor and the value in the funds. The SEC charged Jarkesy administratively and tried him in the SEC’s in-house administrative law tribunal. The tribunal found Jarkesy in violation, fined him, and banned him from future trading. Jarkesy then sought judicial review arguing that the SEC in-house process violated his Seventh Amendment right to a trial by jury. The case made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which decided recently that, in fact, Jarkesy was entitled to a jury trial. Justice Roberts wrote the 6 – 3 opinion. The Court found that the fines and banishment were effectively punishment, triggering a right to trial by jury.

This case, along with Loper Bright, deals a blow to the power of the administrative state. As I said in my Chevron article, the separate branches of government have encroached on one another’s constitutional territory. The executive branch perhaps most egregiously. Agencies have been writing, enforcing, and interpreting laws, which is an unconstitutional accumulation of powers. It was a big week for this boring but important stuff.   

Free speech

I’m sure you all remember the pro-Palestinian, anti-Jewish protests on college campuses that erupted a few months ago. I have written about them here. The National Review is reporting this week, based on a release of information by the U.S. Director of National Intelligence, that the Iranian government is providing financial support for the protests. Certainly, most protestors do not know they are doing the bidding of a terrorist regime, but some do. University administrators should know better, though. Amid the protests, administrators disingenuously and wrongly asserted that free speech rights prevented them from shutting down protestors calling for the genocide of Jews. This, even though they had no problem cancelling conservative speakers for potential microaggressions. If the Ayatollah Khamenei is throwing money at your cause, you should reconsider the righteousness of your cause.

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