Law school blues: Crim Pro and procedural "technicalities"

I'm currently taking a course in criminal procedure. The materials focus on the 4th, 5th, and 6th Amendments.

The further I get into the casebook and CALI exercises, the more depressed I get about the fascist police state we live in. And we're only halfway through our discussion of the 4th Amendment. This week, the prof began a hypothetical situation by saying, "So you're on a bus, and the Gestapo-I-mean-federal-marshals step inside." A later topic on the syllabus is phrased something like "Is there no longer a Miranda right?"

I'm also taking Sentencing Law, where we're learning more than you ever, ever wanted to know about the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, the Pennsylvania guidelines, and policy issues and systemic concerns driving equal justice versus individual justice.

The take-away rule I'm getting from law school this term: stay in your home, draw your blinds, never drive anywhere, and, if you get arrested, just kill yourself while you still can.

I'm not posting this in any special observance of 9/11. It's honestly purely coincidental that I'm taking crim pro right now in the fall, and that I happened to have time today to post this rumination. And a lot of this law was in place well before the USA PATRIOT Act anyway.

Oh, and I heard Juan Williams complaining on NPR yesterday morning that a Freedom Summer conviction was thrown out "on a technicality" on Tuesday. The technicality was the statute of limitations (the time the law allowed to bring the case after the incidents happened had expired). I hate that phrase, "getting off on a technicality." You should love technicalities. If it weren't for technicalities, many of our basic human rights in the courtroom wouldn't exist. For instance, people who don't get properly Mirandized can "get off on a technicality." The case that Williams was talking about involved kidnapping and conspiracy charges; the defendant was not charged -- in this action -- with murder. The "technicality" was that the prosecution dragged their heels and didn't bring charges until long after the 5-year statute had run.

It's terrible that so many murders from the Freedom Summer haven't yet been solved. Of course, it's worse than terrible. It's a national disgrace, and it makes me sick to think about it. There's been a lot of stop-snitchin' going on for almost 50 years now, and the potential snitchers are dying off, hopefully to meet their reward. But you'll never convince me that we should make an exception for kidnapping and conspiracy statutes of limitations to make up for decades of prosecutorial indifference to what could have been easily solvable crimes.

I'll back up. Here's Statute of Limitations 101: You have a limited amount of time to sue someone, or the prosecution has a limited amount of time to bring charges, over a case. The legislature sets this time limit, not the courts. Examples include two years for civil suits over car accidents and no limit for criminal murder charges. The policy behind the rule is that witnesses lose accuracy and become less and less available as time goes by. Injuries heal. Records are purged. Eyewitnesses pass away. So if too much time has gone by, you're likely to get an incorrect result at trial, because the evidence is more apt to be unreliable or even completely gone. It's a stick -- an effective one -- for wronged people to seek their day in court in a timely manner and for prosecutors to bring charges before trails go cold.

In short, the tack to take is to complain that a particular statute was too short, not that someone "got off on a technicality." Williams doesn't help criminal prosecutors nor defendants by using that disparaging phrase, just as it's not useful to fuss that someone was convicted "only circumstantial evidence" or whine that evolution is "just a theory."