The former prosecutors and white-collar lawyers interviewed for this article predict that Martha Stewart's guidelines will be 10 to 16 months--a level 12, which is in Zone C of the Federal Sentencing Guidelines. Here's how we initially calculate Martha's guidelines:

Presidential brother Neil Bush got remarried Saturday night. There were some notable absentees: The President, Florida Governor and other brother Jeb Bush; and Neil Bush's eldest daughter, Lauren Bush.

by TChris

A.M. was eleven years old in 1993 when Anna Gilvis, 84, was murdered in her Chicago apartment.

None of the boy's fingerprints were found in the home and a bloody palm print and a bloody shoe print could not be matched to the boy. No physical evidence linked him to the crime.

A.M. was charged with the murder a year later even though a blood trail suggested the 173-pound victim had been dragged from the kitchen to the bathroom. The boy was about 5 foot 1 and weighed 88 pounds at the time.

With no physical evidence connecting A.M. to a crime he probably couldn't have committed, why was he charged? Because he confessed, or so said Chicago Detective James Cassidy.

According to A.M., Cassidy yelled and swore at him, then promised that he could go home to his brother's birthday party if he would just tell the truth. Cassidy claimed that A.M. wasn't in custody, even though he was questioned in a police interrogation room, and that A.M. "spontaneously confessed" during the questioning.

The Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit -- ordinarily no friend to the accused -- concluded that an eleven year old with no prior criminal justice experience is "in custody" when he's questioned for two hours in a closed interrogation room with no access to a parent, lawyer, or way home. The court of appeals ordered expungement of A.M.'s conviction if he isn't given a new trial within 120 days.

The court was critical of the appellate courts in Illinois for failing to question Cassidy's account of the interrogation that led to A.M.'s alleged confession. Cassidy has a track record of getting innocent kids to confess.

In 1998, four years after Cassidy said A.M. had confessed, Cassidy said he obtained similar confessions from two boys, ages 7 and 8, in the investigation of the murder of 11-year-old Ryan Harris.

The boys were later exonerated by DNA tests that were linked to Floyd Durr, who was charged with the murder and is awaiting trial.

In 2001, a Tribune review of 10 years of homicide cases in Cook County spotlighted numerous cases of alleged confessions improperly obtained from juveniles. Several of those cases involved Cassidy, who testified that juveniles spontaneously confessed to him outside the presence of a youth officer or parent.

Congratulations to Northwestern law professor Steve Drizin, who represented A.M. in the Seventh Circuit. Drizin hopes the decision will send a message to the police that children should not be interviewed as if they were adults.

Here's an open thread for The Sopranos, which has its season premiere tonight, 9pm ET, on HBO.

Update: Maxspeak details the show.

by TChris

Firing 50,000 volts of electricity into a person's body is an extreme measure, but at least it's better than a bullet. That may be the ultimate lesson to draw from the experiences of police departments that have issued Taser guns to their officers.

The number of people killed by police in Seattle, Miami, Phoenix, and other cities has fallen dramatically, in part, it seems, because officers in those cities have been relying on Taser guns when, in the past, they might have used deadly force.

But as the Taser spreads rapidly, it is raising questions about whether the weapon, which can also be applied directly to the skin as a stun gun, could be abused by the police. The Taser zaps suspects with 50,000 volts of electricity, disabling them for five seconds at a time. Critics say the weapon is ripe for abuse because the shock leaves no obvious mark, other than what looks like a small bee sting. Human rights groups in the United States and abroad have called Tasers potential instruments of torture.

Incidents of abuse are not unknown. A man in Las Vegas died last month after being shot with a Taser four or five times. Here's what his cousin saw:

"He was on the ground," Ms. Bell said in a telephone interview. "He had two pairs of handcuffs on him, and I didn't know the Taser was being used until I heard him screaming. He kept screaming and screaming, saying, `Oh God, Jesus, please no.' He was screaming in pain, he was hurt and he didn't resist."

The long term effects of being zapped with 50,000 volts are unknown, and the possible lethality of the weapon is open to debate. Still, if the alternative is the use of a gun that will almost certainly cause serious injury or death, police departments should seriously consider training officers in the use of a Taser.

Police departments should vigilantly guard against the abusive use of Taser guns, just as they should guard against abuse of any kind. Policies limiting the use of Taser guns should be strictly enforced, so that officers are held accountable if they resort to a Taser gun when safer and less painful methods can safely be used to obtain an offender's compliance.

by TChris

Did the Justice Department single out Martha Stewart for prosecution because she's a celebrity? Or because she's a high profile supporter of Democrats? A news analysis in the New York Times poses these questions in the aftermath of Stewart's conviction.

As the Times points out, Stewart was essentially convicted of lying about a stock trade that saved her about $45,000. Small potatoes compared to the allegations made against Tyco's Dennis Kozlowski, Enron's Jeffrey Skilling or WorldCom's Bernard Ebbers, who reportedly "defrauded investors, stole tens of millions of dollars or drove their companies into the ground, or some combination of the three."

With so many sharks to catch, why go after a goldfish?

Ms. Stewart has long been a lightning rod because she has been politically active, female, powerful and rich, and perhaps because she has managed to straddle class lines in her dual roles as a celebrity and an adviser on taste.

Ms. Stewart's supporters have contended that the decision to prosecute her was motivated by the desire to take down a popular and very public female chief executive. Some say she became a target for prosecution because she supported members of the Democratic Party; others say she simply was not part of an old-boy network.

Mary Becker, a law professor at DePaul, says Stewart was "a wonderful target to show that the administration is serious about fraud. ... Lots of publicity doesn't disturb any of the old boys or anybody who made a significant amount of money."

Yet the case can be made that charges were brought quickly against Stewart because there was so little evidence against her to sift through, while the more complex charges of corporate fraud that prosecutors are beginning to bring take more time to prepare. Others argue that there is value in making an example of celebrities in light of the common observation that the affluent often escape justice while the powerless lose their liberty for less serious transgressions.

The easy (if naive) answer is that the criminal justice system should treat celebrities -- whether Martha Stewart or Rush Limbaugh -- in the same way it treats the poorest offender. That's what equal protection of the law is all about. By the same token, an accused's position on the political spectrum should not influence decisions about prosecution or sentencing.

The solution to inequality is not to make examples of celebrities by treating them more harshly. The solution is to improve the way the criminal justice system treats everyone else.

We're just about ready to resume blogging. Today is our first "outing" since our wrist surgery--we're going to Colorado Springs to visit a client in jail. Thankfully, we're not driving. Then we will rest our wrist, watch the Sopranos and log back in here.

We can't thank TChris enough--he did such an outstanding job of blogging here this week, what a great writer he is. TChris, thanks, and check your mail in a few days for a nice present from us.

A note regarding our newsfeed: We can't resume it just yet, it requires too many short wrist movements, so we're going to an automated news feed for a few weeks. We figure it's better than no newsfeed. So the article selection won't be quite as relevant as it is when we manually pick them, but it'll have to do for now.

We get our stitches out Wednesday, and then we should have an idea as to whether the surgery was successful. Thanks to all of you for making your comments pleasant this week--it takes a lot of wrist movement to go in and delete words and comments and then rebuild, and even to read 400 comments a day.

Here's an open thread, choose your own topics, just remember to put urls in html format as per the instructions in the comments box.

by TChris

Did John Ashcoft tell a fib to the Federal Election Commission?

By renting out a political mailing list, Ashcroft's Spirit of America PAC made $165,000 in 1999 and 2000. It transferred $112,000 of those funds to Ashcroft's 2000 Senate reelection campaign committee. But the PAC had already donated the maximum permitted by law, so the FEC wondered whether the transfer was illegal. Ashcroft's campaign committee insisted that Ashcroft owned the mailing list that generated the funds, exempting the fund transfers from contribution limits. After a two year investigation, the FEC disageed.

[T]he FEC last year rejected that assertion because Ashcroft did not disclose his ownership or the rental income in his 1998 and 1999 Senate financial disclosures. He has also not listed the mailing list as an asset in his required filings as attorney general.

Oops.

Ashcroft's spokesman at the Justice Department is calling all of this old news. Last year, the PAC and the campaign committee raised $100,000 to pay fines and costs resulting from the campaign finance violations. Case closed, says Ashcroft's man. But some of that money again came from renting out the mailing list.

The way the fines were paid disturbs John Bonifaz, general counsel of the Massachusetts-based National Voting Rights Institute (NVRI), which filed the original FEC complaint against Ashcroft and his committees.

"It is unseemly for the nation's chief law enforcement officer, whose committees are under investigation, to use those very committees to raise funds from campaign contributors as a means for defending against possible criminal charges and paying civil fines," Bonifaz said. "Ashcroft is very powerful, and people who get called are going to feel pressure to make such contributions."

The NVRI is one of several organizations asserting that Ashcroft violated the law, either by failing to disclose the mailing list as an asset in his financial disclosure statements as attorney general, or by conspiring to defraud the FEC by claiming ownership of a list he did not own. Last week, the NVRI asked Justice Department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine to investigate "potential civil and criminal violations of federal law" by the two committees and Ashcroft while he has been attorney general.

by TChris

Justice Department personnel are heading to Iraq, where they will begin to build evidence for a war crimes prosecution of Saddam Hussein. While the administration envisions a trial conducted by Iraqi prosecutors, Condoleezza Rice authorized the Justice Department to take the lead in preparing the case.

The administration acknowledges the difficulty of "helping" the Iraqis without dominating the process and destroying the "independence" of the Iraqi authorities. But too much independence might prove inconvenient for a president hoping to capitalize on news coverage of Hussein's atrocities, allowing Bush to justify the war on that ground while shifting attention away from WMD's and the missing link to Osama bin Laden. To maximize its political value, the trial must take place before the election.

Salem Chalabi, the Iraqi lawyer in charge of the war crimes issue, said in a recent interview that while he understood the administration's political needs, the trials might not occur until late in the year, after the American elections, and that Mr. Hussein might not even be the first defendant.

Don't count on that kind of "independent" thinking prevailing after the Justice Department swarms in. The administration wants to put on a show as soon as it can.

M. Cherif Bassiouni, an Egyptian-born international lawyer who is an authority on the Arab legal world, said he believed that the United States was interested in orchestrating a wide-ranging Nuremberg-style war crimes trial against Mr. Hussein. "The administration is looking to have a political vindication of why the U.S. went into Iraq," he said. "With no weapons of mass destruction to be found, the next best thing is to show how bad Saddam was, how his regime was like the Nazis'."

Bassiouni and others worry that the approach may backfire by giving Hussein the opportunity to put on a show of his own, calling witnesses (Donald Rumsfeld?) to testify about U.S. support for Hussein at the time many of the atrocities were committed.

by TChris

In their quest for ratings, it has become popular for TV news programs to use reporters posing as teenage girls in internet chatrooms to lure men to locations with the promise of sex, only to embarrass them on camera with the news that they haven't been chatting with a teenager (or even a girl) at all. These televised "sting" operations copy a procedure that law enforcement agencies have been using for some time. But the law enforcement agencies point out that good TV isn't necessarily good policy.

FBI spokeswoman Linda Vizi said the stings don't help law enforcement because evidence isn't collected in a legal way. Other law enforcement officials have said the "stings" can compromise real investigations.

Tom Bivins, a University of Oregon professor of media ethics, asks whether it is "necessary to entrap these people to get the story" rather than simply reporting that a problem exists. Bivins says, "Once you get involved, you become part of the story instead of reporting the story."

Courts have upheld convictions of attempted sexual assault of a child even when the "child" is a middle aged, balding FBI agent. Using that same dubious logic, isn't a TV station guilty of aiding and abetting an attempt to sexually assault a "child" when it invites a man to have sex with one?

by TChris

According to John Ashcroft's Justice Department, medical patients "no longer possess a reasonable expectation that their histories will remain completely confidential." That's news to patients, who consider their medical records private. It may also be news to President Bush, who promised in April 2001 to protect "the right of every American to have confidence that his or her personal medical records will remain private."

The Justice Department wants access to the medical records of women who have received abortions to further its defense of a federal law banning a procedure known as intact dilation and extraction, termed "partial birth abortion" by anti-abortion activists. Challengers of the federal ban contend that it impairs the ability of doctors to protect a woman's life or health. The Justice Department apparently hopes that the records will prove that the banned abortions are never medically necessary and that the procedure is risky.

The Justice Department did not limit its subpoenas to records involving the recently banned procedure, but also sought records of certain other second and third trimester abortions, and the names of doctors who perform any kind of abortion.

The co-chair of the Congressional Privacy Caucus, Rep. Edward J. Markey, wonders "How many hundreds of women, or thousands, will have the frightening experience of their medical records being handed over to the Justice Department as part of a fishing expedition?" Rep. Nita M. Lowey shares Markey's criticism of the Justice Department's disregard of privacy interests:

"This administration claims to have taken great pride in adopting regulations aimed at ensuring the sanctity and privacy of medical records. But in an attempt to defend the so-called partial-birth abortion ban, it seems to have lost sight of its promises."

Fortunately, the judge hearing the challenge to the ban has quashed the Justice Department's subpoenas.

by TChris

Monday morning quarterbacking begins on Saturday as analysts dissect Martha Stewart's defense, sometimes harshly.

"She should get her money back from her lawyers," said Thomas Ajamie, a veteran Houston securities attorney. "How this even went to trial in the first place, I have no idea."

Keep in mind that the decisions to go to trial and to testify (or not) belong to the accused, not to the lawyer. Martha Stewart made those decisions. It's easy to understand why she wanted to exercise her right to a trial. She faced financial and reputational disaster, as well as the risk of incarceration. We don't know what (if any) deal the prosecution was willing to offer her. Without having all of the information that Stewart assessed, it isn't fair to second guess her decision, and it certainly isn't fair to criticize her lawyer.