Timely Objections Blog

What the Drone Memo Means

By R. Tamara de Silva

February 7, 2013

[W]e are heirs to a tradition given voice 800 years ago by Magna Carta, which, on the barons' insistence, confined executive power by "the law of the land."  Justice Souter and Justice Ginsburg, Hamdi v. Rumsfeld 542 U.S. 507 (2004)

       On February 5, 2013, a Department of Justice memo ("Drone Memo") was released to NBC justifying the President's killing of Americans by lethal force, such as by drones.[1]  The targeted killing of Americans as justified in this memo gives the Executive Branch a power over American lives that is at once unprecedented and terrifying in scope.   The idea of a government unilaterally assassinating its citizenry is fundamentally at war with America's Constitutional legacy, which was established with separate and equal branches of power specifically to limit the possibility of an abuse of government power or outright tyranny.  The issues presented in the memo have Constitutional implications that cease due process rights based upon what may be unsubstantiated accusations and go against traditions of justice dating back to the Magna Carta.  Americans need to understand what is at stake.  The Drone Memo justifies the assassination of Americans by the Executive Branch based on the equating of terror (a term and concept that is not defined in the memo) with war and making Americans into enemy combatants without any due process of legal proceedings for actions and associations that are similarly ill-defined.  This memo does outline an enlargement of Executive power over due process that is without historical precedent in American history.  It bears note, that the Drone Memo asserts for the first time in American history, the power of a President to assassinate Americans, unchecked and unanswerable to anyone, including the Judiciary and the Legislature.

       The legitimacy of a government that would kill its citizenry has been portrayed and accepted by many Americans as merely a political issue the idea being-if our guy is doing it, we must stand by him because after all he's not the other party's guy.  After all, the same people who once complained bitterly about renditions and enhanced interrogation techniques have no objection to mass killings by unmaned drones-with civilian and child casualties in the hundreds.  But this is not a political issue and looking at it in simplistic tribal terms will prevent the public from understanding its import to them.  It may be an unwritten rule to fall in line behind your party's line, but this is one instance worthy of exception.  According to a senior legal official in President George W. Bush's administration, no other President of any political stripe has ever before authorized the targeted killing of Americans.[2]  The import of this memo, on the heels of the Patriot Act, and the NDAA's striving for a permanent suspension of habeas corpus, among other recent laws, is nothing less than the crossing of a legal Rubicon that would now permanently allow for the suspension of the due process of law.  At a minimum, this memo strips Americans of the protections of Fifth Amendment and in so doing, alters what it means to be an American.  This administration's authorization to use deadly force upon Americans without any legal safeguard of due process has a legal and moral significance that is difficult to comprehend or quite honestly, believe.

       Never before have an American president and his Attorney General openly stated that the Executive Branch can bypass Due Process of law to kill an American-if they (solely at their discretion), think they have a good enough reason because they have invented something called, "Executive Due Process."  It is the Executive Branch, boldly asserting an absolute power to suspend a significant portion of the Bill or Rights, unchecked by any other branch of government and unfettered in the scope or protocols used in the exercise of this new power.

       It is not as I write this that I do not understand first principles.  A nation must exist before it can provide its citizens any rights, liberties or anything.  A nation must also be allowed broad latitude to protect its citizens.  Security was a large part of the bargain described by Hobbes for leaving a state of nature and war to enter into a social contract.  It is the function of the Executive Branch to protect the security of Americans.  Terrorism remains a tremendous threat and after two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it would be naïve to think that the sentiments behind terror groups like Al-Qaeda have diminished because of our war on terror-there is evidence to suggest the opposite case. 

       As the late Allan Bloom often remarked, the first principle of any nation state was no different from that of any individual's-it is and must always be, self-preservation.  With this understood, most Americans have accepted an implicit tradeoff and the loss of some civil liberties and privacy for the sake of national security.   However, what the Drone Memo does is give away two entire Amendments and the bedrock of the freedoms that are uniquely American.  It is as if Americans have become so cowered of terrorists after 9/11 that we would as a country surrender the soul of America and its most deeply held values for the promise of a hope of a bit more security.  

        But in giving absolute authority to kill an American to any one man, President, CIA director or intelligence officer, unfettered by the United States Constitution's prohibition of such, we are making America into a country of rule by the men who would wield this power-no longer is it a country of rule by law.  We cannot just rest on knowing we are protected by a Bill of Rights- we now have to hope for the good characters of those we elect because we have surrendered the laws that would have kept their power over our freedom in check.   In America, the protections of the Bill of Rights were never to be handed over to an elected official with whom we were told to just "trust" them.  This is not America- nor is it consistent with the historical point of the American experiment in the first place.

       In fact, the United States Supreme Court in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld ruled that we are not required to "just trust" the government in matters of indefinite detention either.  The Court in Hamdi reiterated the principle that the Executive Branch cannot detain an American citizen without some form of due process.[3]   Hamdi was a United States citizen arrested in Afghanistan and taken into the custody of a military prison in Virginia.  From there he filed a petition for habeas corpus that ended up in the Court, which ruled that Mr. Hamdi did have a right as an American to be heard before an impartial judge.  President George W. Bush's administration had argued that Mr. Hamdi had no rights as an enemy combatant and that it could dispense with Hamdi as they saw fit.

       Ironically, it is the decision in Hamdi on which much of the Drone Memo relies.  This is a spectacle of legal gymnastics whose logic is ephemeral.  The Obama Administration's lawyers try to make the case that Hamdi is distinguishable because he was detained-that it was feasible to detain him.  The Drone Memo asserts a right to kill an American if he cannot feasibly be detained, because he cannot feasibly be detained.  They are wrong.  If the Supreme Court believes an American has the right to appear before an impartial fact-finder before being deprived of his liberty, then that American should at least have that right before being deprived of his life. 

       The Fifth Amendment guarantees on all Americans the right to due process of law before the taking of life or liberty.  The taking of an American's life by the government legally, as common-sensically, demands a higher level of due process than being imprisoned or detained--not less. Does the separation of powers doctrine require federal courts to defer to Executive Branch determinations that an American citizen is an "enemy combatant"?   Not according to the Court in Hamdi,

Finally, even if history had spared us the cautionary example of the internments in World War II, even if there had been no Korematsu,  there would be a compelling reason to read §4001(a) to demand manifest authority to detain before detention is authorized. The defining character of American constitutional government is its constant tension between security and liberty, serving both by partial helpings of each. In a government of separated powers, deciding finally on what is a reasonable degree of guaranteed liberty whether in peace or war (or some condition in between) is not well entrusted to the Executive Branch of Government, whose particular responsibility is to maintain security. For reasons of inescapable human nature, the branch of the Government asked to counter a serious threat is not the branch on which to rest the Nation's entire reliance in striking the balance between the will to win and the cost in liberty on the way to victory; the responsibility for security will naturally amplify the claim that security legitimately raises. A reasonable balance is more likely to be reached on the judgment of a different branch, just as Madison said in remarking that "the constant aim is to divide and arrange the several offices in such a manner as that each may be a check on the other-that the private interest of every individual may be a sentinel over the public rights." Hence the need for an assessment by Congress before citizens are subject to lockup, and likewise the need for a clearly expressed congressional resolution of the competing claims.[4]

       Societies have normative values and also ones that are pre-textual--designed to mask far baser values.  Historically, one nation that has effectively used the pretext of danger to the state to imprison all who would criticize it is the Soviet Union.  All societies have normative values and at times some of them are pretextual-designed to mask much baser values.  Security was a value with which the Soviet system used to hide the interests of its leaders from Nikita Khrushchev to Vladimir Putin.  A pretextual interest in security is used to control not only an entire population but also its public opinion.  Vladimir Putin has his own record of repressive psychiatry and the imprisonment of anyone whose only crime appears to be the insult of his vanity.

       America was established to guard against the assertion of pretextual values on the people by any one branch of government.  The American system of government has several ingenuous structural safeguards such as having three branches of government where each is in theory at least powerful enough to keep the other in check.  In writing down what rights a people had and suggesting the existence of many others, unenumerated like the right to privacy or to travel-America's founders established a system of rule by law and not men.  If for example a tyrant came into power, his power would be curtailed at the boundaries of the rights retained by the people, subject of course to Constitutional amendment, within the Constitution and specifically, the Bill of Rights.  In theory, as long as you could freely associate and assemble and speak, and your life and liberty were still protected by due process of law, there would be very real checks on the harm to be caused by any one elected official with pretextual values.  It is specifically because of our legal system and Constitution that we have, within our own borders, enjoyed being the freest people in the world.  The greatness of America and its attraction to so many immigrants has in large part always been its core values, tracing back to the Magna Carta, of human dignity, freedom of expression and individual liberty.

       America was the birthplace of sedition.  Born out of the fury and ideals of those who were then considered religious kooks, fanatics, terrorists and worse.  Not surprisingly, we became a nation, the envy of the world, where unlike everywhere else, you could say anything and not be locked up as a political prisoner because you have annoyed someone in elected office.  The First Amendment protects your speech and the Fifth Amendment guarantees that your life and liberty cannot be dispensed with just on the whim of someone in power.

       Due process of law is the most American of all civil liberties-it is nothing less in the American law to civil liberty than everything.  It is only because of the Fifth Amendment that you have a presumption of innocence.  Governments mean well and are filled with honorable prosecutors who care deeply about civil liberties.  However, they also make mistakes.  We have jailed people for decades only to find them exonerated by DNA evidence-we have even made erroneous executions.  If the justice system, with all the protections of due process intact can make mistakes, what can one man or two do without any check on their judgment and without affording the alleged target, any due process or notice whatsoever?  Is it possible that the Executive Branch can err in declaring someone an enemy combatant?  Why are its determinations unchecked by any other branch of government, as the Drone Memo would have them be?  Is this not in itself for such an enormous power claimed, so obviously at odds with the principle of a separation of powers? 

       Targeted killings of non-Americans have proven themselves to hit wide of their marks.  CIA Director, John O. Brennan once stated that there were no civilian casualties in drone strikes and then admitted that there were casualties but then stated that they were "exceedingly rare."  Many independent sources confirm over 3,000 militants and civilians have been killed by drones. Drone strikes have killed over 176 children in one country alone and unless this was the Administration's intention, how can it be argued that drone strikes do not make mistakes?  

       The Drone Memo also uses terms like "associated forces" and "imminent threat" that are nowhere defined and capable of shifting interpretation depending on who is using them and to fit what purpose.   What constitutes being an associated force?  Is intention required, or mens rea required or is this a crime that can be stumbled into?  For example, if an American is a social acquaintance of someone who looks at a website that is later considered to offer, "material support" (again a term undefined) by expressing opinions, does that American become an associated force of the offending American?  Are his family also in danger?  If they can be killed without any due process, these questions will never be answered.

       What about the shifting definitions of terrorism?  Is it that difficult to envision the power to kill Americans without due process being abused?  If you think so, then you may not be aware of whom the Department of Homeland Security considers a likely terrorist.

       In a study by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism entitled, "Hot Spots of Terrorism and Other Crimes in the United States, 1970-2008," which was funded by the Department of Homeland Security, terrorists are likely people, "reverent of individual liberty...suspicious of centralized federal authority or anti-government," including people who are extremely liberal or extremely conservative.  What about people who belong to the NRA or are against gun control-at what point do their convictions constitute a resistance that is deemed intolerable to their government?[5] 

       The Drone Memo asserts that questions about definitions like enemy combatants and imminent harm are the exclusive province of the Executive Branch, that they are not legal matters and hence not subject to judicial review of the courts.  The Supreme Court made it abundantly clear in Hamdi that the Executive Branch, despite the exigencies of the War on Terror, did not have a blank supra-Constitutional check, nor did get to violate the separation of powers,

In sum, while the full protections that accompany challenges to detentions in other settings may prove unworkable and inappropriate in the enemy-combatant setting, the threats to military operations posed by a basic system of independent review are not so weighty as to trump a citizen's core rights to challenge meaningfully the Government's case and to be heard by an impartial adjudicator.

    In so holding, we necessarily reject the Government's assertion that separation of powers principles mandate a heavily circumscribed role for the courts in such circumstances. Indeed, the position that the courts must forgo any examination of the individual case and focus exclusively on the legality of the broader detention scheme cannot be mandated by any reasonable view of separation of powers, as this approach serves only to condense power into a single branch of government. We have long since made clear that a state of war is not a blank check for the President when it comes to the rights of the Nation's citizens. Youngstown Sheet & Tube. Whatever power the United States Constitution envisions for the Executive in its exchanges with other nations or with enemy organizations in times of conflict, it most assuredly envisions a role for all three branches when individual liberties are at stake.....

    Because we conclude that due process demands some system for a citizen detainee to refute his classification, the proposed "some evidence" standard is inadequate. Any process in which the Executive's factual assertions go wholly unchallenged or are simply presumed correct without any opportunity for the alleged combatant to demonstrate otherwise falls constitutionally short.....[6] 

       The targeted killing of Americans poses an unprecedented threat to due process.   Fortunately, I am convinced the arguments advanced in the Drone Memo would not pass Constitutional muster with the same Supreme Court that ruled in Hamdi.  But it has to get there and if it does not, Congress and the American people must act.  Congress should clarify what this memo means and identify the protocols in which it will be used with enough specificity so that the awesome power it assumes is not abused-and it is at least checked. The argument advanced in the Drone Memo is that the government should be taken at its word that it will be rigorous about identifying terror targets, which are American.  This is not a legally sufficient basis for eliminating due process for American citizens because the Executive Branch is not unbiased and as such it cannot be expected to be an impartial check on itself.  We were established as a nation of laws and not of men.  There is ample historical precedent against trusting any one branch of government or ruler with absolute power to take the lives of its citizenry-by the way, America was established in part to avoid the type of government in which such a power would be exerted unchecked upon its citizenry- remember?@

R. Tamara de Silva

February 7, 2013

A Tale of Two Classes of Defendant and Lanny Breuer

By R Tamara de Silva

January 28, 2013

"swaying power such as has never in the world's history been trusted in the hands of mere private citizens,...after having created a system of quiet but irresistible corruption-will ultimately succeed in directing government itself.  Under the American form of society, there is now no authority capable of effective resistance." 

Henry Adams writing about the corruption of the Erie Railroad for the Westminster Review in 1870, he described corporate influence growing to the point of being uncheckable with political parties that would sacrifice principle for accommodation.

       Last week, the Head of the Department of Justice's Criminal Division, Lanny Breuer, announced his resignation.  His resignation is remarkable only in so far that it draws attention to the enormity of what he would not do.  Under Breuer's watch, leaving aside some high profile and related insider trading prosecutions, not one senior Wall Street executive was prosecuted or even charged (by some accounts- not even investigated) with anything having to do with the worst financial crisis in American history-a crisis that resulted in a bailout of Wall Street banks and the financial sector at a cost to American taxpayers of between $43.32-$59.75 billion.[1]  A day before Lanny Breuer's resignation, PBS' Frontline aired an investigation about the failure of the Justice Department to prosecute a single senior banker involved in the mortgage crisis called, "The Untouchables."  During this same time that the Department of Justice refused to go after a single head of a Wall Street firm, they took a particularly hard line on a torture whistleblower (not the torturers), and many financial criminals responsible for not the billions caused by elite Wall Street firms but between thousands to hundreds of thousands like elderly couples for possible pension fraud, an appraiser in Florida, individuals who committed bank fraud by lying on mortgage applications and other criminals like pot smokers and Aaron Swartz.  It is not that I condone wrong-doing, only a record of selective prosecution on steroids.  Lanny Breuer's Justice Department exposed its full fury to the chubs of the criminal justice systems while systematically saving the titans and whales.

Prosecutorial Discretion and Sympathy for the Titan

       One of the reasons, Lanny Breuer gave for the non-prosecution of a senior Wall Street executive is sympathy for employees and shareholders.  In his interview with Martin Smith of Frontline, Mr. Breuer repeated a specific if selective, empathy, wholly at odds with the charge he had been given by Senator Kaufman to investigate and hold to account all those responsible for the financial crisis.[2]   This selective empathy is also wholly at odds with the unbiased way in which most of us naively think justice is administered and prosecutions are sought.  By the way, after this interview aired, Martin Smith states that he was called by the Justice Department and told that they would never cooperate with PBS again.[3] 

       In September of last year, Mr. Breuer admitted his particular empathy towards the plight of the largest of Wall Street banks when he addressed the New York Bar Association and said,

In my conference room, over the years, I have heard sober predictions that a company or bank might fail if we indict, that innocent employees could lose their jobs, that entire industries may be affected, and even that global markets will feel the effects.  Sometimes - though, let me stress, not always - these presentations are compelling.  In reaching every charging decision, we must take into account the effect of an indictment on innocent employees and shareholders, just as we must take into account the nature of the crimes committed and the pervasiveness of the misconduct.  I personally feel that it's my duty to consider whether individual employees with no responsibility for, or knowledge of, misconduct committed by others in the same company are going to lose their livelihood if we indict the corporation.  In large multi-national companies, the jobs of tens of thousands of employees can be at stake.  And, in some cases, the health of an industry or the markets are a real factor.  Those are the kinds of considerations in white collar crime cases that literally keep me up at night, and which must play a role in responsible enforcement. 

When the only tool we had to use in cases of corporate misconduct was a criminal indictment, prosecutors sometimes had to use a sledgehammer to crack a nut.[4]

       It is odd that this same Justice Department did not take sympathy into account in demanding that Aaron Swartz serve 35 years or for that matter, the plight of all smaller defendants.  The omnibus catchall Computer Fraud and Abuse Act ("CFAA") could make criminals of many of us because it seeks to criminalize the use of a computer without authorization but no where defines what "authorization" means. 

       When the government freezes a defendant's assets or seizes property even before a filing of charges making it impossible for them to pay for a decent lawyer (assuming they can even afford one), does it really care how the defendant (before being proven guilty) manages to eat or live in the interim of years it can take from investigation to sentencing? 

       Where was the sympathy for Senator Ted Stevens?  Was it anything but a sheer lack of empathy that led to the career-ending prosecution of a six term Senator and the deliberate withholding of exculpatory evidence in his case?  What about the many cases where defendants are exonerated by physical evidence that the prosecution possessed but did not reveal at the time?  Where is the sympathy for the years or decades of a life that are lost because exculpatory evidence is not released or DNA evidence kits are not processed?  Or is the empathy that Lanny Breuer refers to, as selectively held as its application under Lanny Breuer's tenor suggests?

Conflicts of Money

       Money influences prosecutions.  Consider the tale of two men performing the identical act in the criminal law Jon Corzine and Russell Wasenfdorf, Sr.  Corzine was one of President Obama's elite bundlers in 2011 and 2012.  He campaigned heavily for the President as governor of New Jersey, and held private fundraisers for President Obama in his home even after MF Global went bankrupt and $1.6 billion of customer funds went missing in October 2011.  The Justice Department announced that they would not prosecute him.

       It was discovered in June 2012 that Peregrine Financial Group CEO, Russell Wasendorf Sr., like Corzine at MF Global, had tapped into customer segregated funds to the tune of $215 million.  Russell Wasendorf Sr was arrested and criminally charged later same that month.   Same act-missing customer funds that were by law not to touched-but a far disparate prosecution.[5] 

       Under Lanny Breuer, the Justice Department announced it would not go after Goldman Sachs. Goldman Sachs' employees were the second largest single contributor to President Obama in 2008 contributing $1,013,091.[6] Goldman Sachs is also one of the largest clients of Mr. Eric Holder's lawyer firm Covington & Burling.

       Speaking of Covington & Burling, Lanny Breuer worked at Covington along with Attorney General Eric Holder.  Their firm's largest clients were many of the Wall Street banks that were involved in the securitization of mortgage debt that contributed to the financial crisis.

       According to Reuters, Attorney General Holder and Lanny Breuer were expected to recuse themselves (a functional impossibility) under federal conflict of interest laws from Department of Justice decisions related to many of Wall Street's largest banks.  Of course they have not admitted to doing so in any instance of which I am aware.[7] 

Abacus and Such

       Goldman's Abacus scheme would fit into the most selective definitions of fraud. Goldman invented Abacus, according to an SEC civil complaint and an investor, to fail so that one of its largest hedge fund clients, Paulson & Co, could short it.[8]  In the meantime, Goldman sold Abacus bonds to many other investors all the while allowing Goldman to take in large investment banking fees from the sale and from the purchase. The problem is, the investors were not aware that Goldman's largest hedge fund client along with Goldman Sachs was betting against them and that as such Goldman Sachs may have a conflict of interest in designing what went into Abacus.  Goldman claimed that somewhere within all the disclosure statements was a reference to all this.   The Department of Justice announced it would not seek any criminal fraud charges against Goldman.  Goldman Sachs settled the civil suit for $550 million, which is not a lot for a company that earns billions of dollars per quarter.

       On November 28, 2011, Judge Jed S. Rakoff rejected what would have been the sixth civil settlement agreement between Citigroup Global Markets Inc. and the SEC since 2003 for $285 million.  Citigroup had sold $1 billion in mortgage-bonds through a vehicle called Class V Funding III, without disclosing that it was betting against $500 million of those assets-in essence offering something to its customers and not disclosing that it would be betting against its customers.  The Department of Justice was not about to seek criminal fraud charges against Citigroup either.

       Civil settlements between the SEC and other parties are alternatively called consent decrees and they are a far cry from criminal prosecution. Nor do they deter misconduct because no admission of wrong-doing is required and the fines are pin money to the banks. 

       It is in the public's interest to prevent fraud upon the market and to prevent the type of financial engineering solely for the sake of fees that can lead to catastrophic losses ultimately borne by society as a whole.  The type of hyperleveraged machinations, not understood by the banks themselves that wind up privatizing profit and publicizing loss. The problem with selective prosecution of financial crime or any crime, is that it undermines the very idea of justice, whose force and majesty lie in its fair and unbiased application.  When the Executive branch's justice department seeks fines from banks which fees are so small as to be written off as a rational and good cost of doing business, while simultaneously pursuing prosecutions against smaller parties and the comparatively disenfranchised, it is no longer dealing out justice.  It is selectively doling out punishments to those not in its favor.@

R. Tamara de Silva

Prosecutorial Discretion, Cambyses and Aaron Swartz

By R Tamara de Silva

January 15, 2013

The Optimist thinks this is the best of all worlds.  The pessimist fears it is true

J. Robert Oppenheimer

       The prosecutor of the late Aaron Swartz and Sisamnes have something to tell us about the purpose of those who have the awesome task of administering justice. The power of the prosecutor in modern times is absolute and as such unlike in the case of King Cambyses and judge Sisamnes, unchecked when it is abused.   All the more reason to ask at these times, what is the purpose of prosecution?  Is prosecution in all instances moral?  And is prosecution the same as justice?  In answer to the latter, in the case of Aaron Swartz, the answer is resoundingly in the negative.  The prosecution of Aaron Swartz may have followed the letter of the law and fit an omnibus catchall federal charge like wire-fraud, but it makes mincemeat out of Justice.  Aaron Swartz's prosecution also highlights some of the many problems with our criminal justice system.

       One of the more memorable stories in the fifth book of Herodotus' Histories takes place in the sixth century BC and it tells the fate of judge Sisamnes.  The Persian King Cambyses discovered that Sisamnes had diverted justice and rendered a verdict in a case based upon his acceptance of a bribe.  King Cambyses understood the majesty and power of justice and his retribution for Sisamnes' abuse of it is unforgettable in its brutality.  King Cambyses had Sisamnes stripped of his flesh, while alive and used the strips of flesh to upholster the court's judge's chair.  But Cambyses' retribution for the abuse of justice did not end there for he made Sisamnes' son Otanes sit on the grisly judge's chair as he was made the replacement justice with the lesson that he must always remember his father's fate when administering justice.

       There is no King Cambysis to check the power of the Executive Branch's Department of Justice. The criminal law and the office of the prosecutor was originally meant to punish actual wrongdoing that would harm society and in so doing deter conduct, intentionally and severely harmful to civil society- like murder, theft, burglary, treason.  The Executive Branch and its Department of Justice is given wide latitude and immunity to bring about justice.

       Prosecutors have an immense amount of power-nothing less than the full force and power of the federal government and all its resources.  The power of the prosecutor to charge and the power to offer plea bargain sets the course of justice in America.  Most people indicted by federal prosecutors are convicted and most take plea bargains.   But it is not a fair fight, not even if you can afford the best lawyers money can buy because after all, a federal prosecutor has a theoretically unlimited budget.

       Most people who take plea bargains are poor and contrary to what those ignorant of the legal system would more comfortably believe, they are not necessarily guilty.   Prosecutors use varying degrees of coercion and intimidation in the process of plea bargains.  They can threaten to increase the counts in an indictment, demand higher sentences, or as in the Giuliani's prosecution of Michael Milken, intimidate Milken's 92 year old grandmother, threaten to indict your spouse, keep you locked up before trial, and add obstruction of justice if your defense is anything other than continual and literal silence by invocation of the Fifth Amendment.  We have come along way from Torquemada and yet if you look closely enough, not exactly far enough.

       Aaron Swartz took his life on Friday January 11, 2013.  In the fall of 2011, his lawyer had tried to work out a plea bargain with Assistant United States Attorney Stephen Heymann but was told that Swartz would have to plead guilty to all 13 indictments and would also have to do jail time.  On Wednesday January 9, 2013, his lawyer tried again to work out some deal on the eve of trial and as Swartz worried about the costs of his defense and having his friends be made to testify- the prosecutor refused to budge. 

       Unceremoniously on January 14, 2014, the United States Attorney who had brought charges against Swartz (Case: 11-cr-10260), Carmen M. Ortiz, dismissed them citing his death as the reason for her doing so.[1]  Carmen Ortiz had filed a 13 count superceding indictment of Aaron Swartz on September 12, 2012 charging him with wire fraud, computer fraud, theft of information from a computer, recklessly damaging a computer, forfeiture and aiding and abetting.[2] 

       Aaron Swartz accomplished a lot in 26 years and one gets the impression he would have done a great deal more.  He was only 14 when he developed RSS and later co-founded Reddit.  He was a powerful force in the fight to keep the Internet free and free of government censorship.  In 2008, he wrote a program that extracted twenty percent of the court documents (all public records), on the government's PACER system and put them online so that they would be available to the public for free.  His death is a real loss and a sad commentary on overzealous prosecutors who not once considered the importance of their obtaining a win against the value of young Aaron's life and the actual harm he had done. 

       While the indictment appears facially solid, the charges are less so.  The indictment charges theft because it states that Swartz stole, "a major portion of JSTOR's archive of digitized academic journal articles" through MIT's computer network.  Yet, Swartz was a fellow at Harvard's Safra Center for Ethics and in this capacity allowed to access MIT's computer network-at least as a guest.  If he was allowed to access the network as a guest, then the allegation of computer fraud and theft in using the network become vulnerable.  Also, JSTOR had settled with Swartz and did not want any part in prosecuting him criminally especially after they had recovered their files from Swartz.  JSTOR has also stated it would not have been a complaining witness in this case.

       The government was able to allege wire fraud because JSTOR's computers were not in Massachusetts-this fact is less meaningful considering that JSTOR did not want to prosecute Swartz.  Moreover, wire-fraud does not translate well in the age of cloud computing because information does not exist merely within a state line-its locations are generally closely guarded and sometimes outside the jurisdiction of the United States calling into question, which laws even apply.

Prosecutorial Discretion in the Backdrop of Burgeoning Laws

       Unfortunately, the practice of administering justice has systemic fragility-at least from the perspective of the Bill of Rights.  Lawmakers hurriedly make new laws and federal agencies invent new regulations that taken together give prosecutors more ways to prosecute Americans. 

       Prosecutors in turn are given an expanding arsenal of tools for use in prosecution on top of their already unfettered and unchecked authority.  Some prosecutions are entered into because they are high profile.  Many prosecutors like Giuliani and Spitzer used high profile cases as stepping-stones for their political ambitions.[3] Congress and many states, cave to political and media pressures to "do something" about virtually any adverse event, and in the process invent new criminal statutes and environmental regulations at a relatively breakneck speed.  This of course results not just in a stunning enlargement of the government's power over the individual (there is no commensurate enlargement in a person's Constitutional rights), but a dilution of Federal power to enforce important criminal laws.  Another consequence is the invitation to abuse the power of the prosecutor to select which criminal statutes to enforce and on whom to enforce them.   The power of the prosecutor in America has never been greater than it is today because of the greater resources of the federal government and the sheer volume of criminal statutes and criminal offenses, which is greater than it has ever been.

       In an actual case, I came across a multi-state drug dealer, who had been well represented by an experienced defense lawyer and who had trafficked in kilograms of cocaine never even got indicted.  He walks free without being indicted because a prosecutor allowed him to escape decades of federal jail time in exchange for ratting out his co-conspirators.   He even went on to be awarded multi-million dollar contracts with the City of Chicago. Arguably, it is alright that the drug dealer walks away free because the government was able to prosecute at least two of his colleagues.  

       A crime is a crime is a crime-or as Carmen Ortiz was once said about her indictment of Swartz, "Stealing is stealing whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data or dollars...It is equally harmful to the victim whether you sell what you have stolen or give it away."   Or is it?

       When a drug dealer peddles pounds of cocaine from New York to Chicago and never gets indicted, can anyone argue that no one was harmed?  By contrast, who was actually harmed in the case of Aaron Swartz?  Why was it so much more important to make him a felon and place him in jail for 35 years? 

       What content from JSTOR did Aaron Swartz give away for free much less sell?

       All guarantees of individual liberty and freedom protected by the United States Constitution under due process, equal protection and the presumption of innocence have remained as they were written by the Constitution's drafters in the first fourteen amendments, yet the reasons the Government may use to exercise it power to deprive its citizens of their liberty have grown several hundred thousand fold.   This would be as if instead of every side getting one chance at bat in a baseball game, one team would get ten thousand chances at bat for every single time the other team went to bat. 

       The Government has hundreds of thousands of ways to deprive an American of his life and liberty, and yet the number of amendments protecting your civil liberty have remained the same.

       If you think that following the law is simple and you will never run afoul of it and all this I write is pablum, you do not know the law.  Keep in mind that federal law touches upon every facet of an American's everyday life.   All Americans engage in conduct, which falls under the penumbra of use of the United States wire or mails.  Americans are regulated by a myriad of laws, at times obscure, and yet their ignorance of them offers no protection. 

       The federal government spends billions of dollars on prosecutions based upon theories of strict liability for obscure crimes honored more in their breach than by their rule because the crimes lack definition.  There are many examples of obscure but actual and costly prosecutions based upon relatively new criminal statutes: Prosecution of four men for bringing lobsters back that were not packed properly according to a foreign law (Lacey Act); prosecution of handicapped elderly woman who had not trimmed her garden hedges that abutted a side street to the required level of under two feet; criminal prosecutions of manufacturing companies for not being able to label their products for uses, wholly unintended by the manufacturer and not capable of being foreseen; growing orchids according to laws of another country (Lacey Act); registering under false name on Facebook or Myspace; filling out any federal form and making a mistake; running out of gas in a blizzard and abandoning your snowmobile, the list of actual prosecutions is much longer.

       To put this in perspective, in 1790 there were about 6 crimes in America, treason, piracy, murder, maiming, robbery and counterfeiting.  In 2011, there were over 4,500 Federal crimes and hundreds of thousands of regulations whose breach would incur criminal penalties.  Congress invents a new crime on average every week for every week of the year.[4]  Congress is not however, simultaneously repealing existing bad, redundant or conflicting criminal laws.  Basic crimes like murder, robbery and theft are regurgitated into new forms, but what is far more worrisome than the explosion of Federal legislation, whose reach touches every aspect of everyday life, is the invention of crimes lacking any wrongful intent-this phenomenon is called, overcriminalization. 

       There are steep economic costs in overcriminalization but the injustice of criminalizing and prosecuting innocuous conduct is far more disconcerting. This said, the economic costs are staggeringly immense in terms of the growth in the Federal prison population and the tens of millions of dollars per case for the cost of high profile prosecutions based upon amorphous statutes, as in the trial of a Martha Stewart, Roger Clemens or even a Lord Conrad Black.  

       There is a culture of prosecution that regards conviction as a benchmark for success to be rewarded with re-election and advancement, even to the Judiciary.  Along with plea-bargainning (something never envisioned by the Constitution's drafters) we seem to be more concerned with securing convictions than making sure the actual guilty are punished and that the innocent and disenfranchised are never placed behind bars in an already over-crowded and expanding prison population.

       Prosecutors often play to the media and the media affects high profile cases to the point of driving prosecutions and hastening indictments-making a circus side-show of the justice system.  If they get it wrong and destroy lives in the process, as so often happens in the prosecution of vague statutes, prosecutors are never held accountable because of absolute and qualified immunity.  There is effectively no check or balance on the powers of the prosecution.

        Things like the presumption of innocence are tossed aside for ratings or marketing for prosecutors with political ambitions.  Very much akin to the idea that there is no such thing as a bad arrest or a bad conviction, the culture of prosecution measures success by the number of convictions-it is very much a numbers game-unless of course a very high profile defendant comes along.  What suffers in all of this the equal administration of justice.  And let us make no mistake about it Aaron Swartz was a high profile defendant.

       Another contrast to Aaron Swartz's prosecution within the same year is a notable non-prosecution and also of an high profile figure- Jon Corzine.   Corzine engineered the eighth largest bankruptcy in United States history and caused over $1.2 billion in customer funds to go missing when MF Global was supposed to keep their customer funds safeguarded, segregated and not touch them.  Mr. Corzine, like the drug dealer, was never indicted and never will be.  He did not fight against government censorship or control of the Internet, he was not unlike Swartz determined to change the world-he was one of the largest campaign donors to a sitting President and a close friend of the Chairman of the SEC. 

       At the same time that the Department of Justice began its indictment of Aaron Swartz, it announced it would not prosecute Jon Corzine.  You must also keep in mind that prosecutorial discretion is not always discrete.@

R. Tamara de Silva

January 15, 2013

Chicago, Illinois

The First Amendment of Brandon Raub

By R Tamara de Silva

August 22, 2012

       The point of demarcation between political expression and dangerous dissent is being discerned in much the same manner the Romans augured the future by looking at the entrails of birds.  Enter social media, which has been flexing its muscles on the topic even managing to draw the somnolent Media to bring national attention to the odd arrest and detention of a 26 year old former combat Marine, Brandon J. Raub.  Brandon, who had served his country in Iraq and Afghanistan from 2005-2011, was taken from his home by this same government in the form of the FBI, Secret Service and police agents for what looks to the outside world as his expression of his First Amendment right to criticize his government and his President. Is he the first known victim of the National Defense Authorization Act or Virginia's involuntary commitment statute? 

       One of my favorite people at the University of Chicago was the late Allan Bloom.  He once suggested that the First Amendment was a grand waste- no longer needed in America.  He said this because he observed that most people simply have nothing to say.  Most people may have opinions about many things but they are merely repeating what someone told them seeming to be incapable of forming a worthwhile thought on their own.  He was right in that as he went on to say, peoples' opinions are about as distinct and undifferentiated as the individual Kleenex are in a tissue box. 

       Social media bears this ought.  Except Brandon Raub was not using his Facebook account to post the perfunctory braggadocio or a travel itinerary.  Or the equally common antipode of the plea of a starving third world child- a picture of a full plate of food with an introduction about how good it is.  Brandon's posts were not so excruciatingly dull, as to be entirely devoted to self aggrandizement or the scatological- but they have all the marks of seditiousness in a Soviet Russia or Hussein's Iraq.  But in America, Brandon, like many Americans was expressing his discontent at the state of his country and its government.  Like many other of his countrymen, intellectually engaged in matters of governance, Brandon Raub used Facebook for what is inarguably its highest use-a gargantuan virtual public square.   Used this way, Facebook is not an ode to the elevation of the miniscule and mundane but a truly interesting and potentially important phenomenon.  Important because it is perhaps also a guardian of liberty in every way the Fourth Estate has been. 

       Opinions expressed in a public square can be diverse and some may even be out there.  However, were the American Revolutionaries alive today and speaking of sedition as they did then, they would not be called Patriots as history has called them-they would today be called terrorists.    This country was the birthplace of sedition and the refuge of many people the Crown considered way too "out there"-a remote place across a vast ocean fitting for the lunatic fringe. 

       The concerns of many about young Brandon are that free speech must be protected especially when what rights we were given by the Constitution have come under an onslaught of multiple new assaults like the monitoring of online computer searches, indefinite detention, indefinite detention without any due process of law [Mr. Eric Holder's invention of something called "Executive due process," which provides for a kind of due process and judgment but with no lawyer, no court of law and no trial] regular warrantless taping and tapping of all cellphone calls, the tracking and sale of customer information via credit card use, and the Department of Homeland Security's tracking of social media and all use of the internet,  tracking of all online activity, tracking of all financial transactions, the National Defense Authorization Act ("NDAA"), etc.-with all this, the willingness to still speak at all is a singularly brave but crucial act.  The law has not kept up with technology and most people are unaware of what their rights are in its wake.  The First Amendment safeguards that one act, speech, which may be one of the few gossamer threads that yet binds together our fragile and aging civil liberties. 

       Admittedly, some of Raub's postings were outside of mainstream thought in that he cited conspiracy theories related to 9/11 being an inside job and appeared to post a threat when he wrote that he would, "Sharpen up my axe; I'm here to sever heads"-repeating the words of a song called, "Bring Me Down."[1] 

       Were his posting lyrics to this song tantamount to a national security threat?  After the Colorado shootings and the shootings at Virginia Tech, many would argue it makes sense to preemptively lock people up for communications that are even ambiguously threatening.   The problem with this line of thought is that it is a slippery slope and it vests a dangerous amount of discretion in the hands of the government that can easily be abused.   It is also profoundly un-American. 

       When faced with any crisis or a 24 hour news-media human interest story, we seem to think it best to make more laws and invest the government with even more authority to "fix it" -never fully understanding that powers so eagerly bestowed can be abused and turned against their bestower.  As Benjamin Franklin famously wrote and anyone with even a cursory reading of history will understand, "those who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty not safety."

       One nation that has effectively used the pretext of danger to the state to imprison all who would criticize it is the Soviet Union.  All societies have normative values and at times some of them are pretextual-designed to mask much baser values.  Security is a value of the Soviet system used to hide the interests of its leaders from Nikita Krushchev to Vladimir Putin, to control the population and public opinion.  Putin's record of repressive psychiatry and the imprisonment of anyone who would insult his distastefully enormous opinion of himself belies any claim that he has divested himself fully of Khrushchev's repressive regime.  Police psychiatry allows for the routine imprisonment of dissidents in mental health institutions effectively silencing all dissidents and protestors from Garry Kasparov and Andrei Sakharov to current human rights lawyers.   Before we magnanimously proffer up parts of the First Amendment on the altar of security, we should imagine living in any one of the many parts of the world where the expression of dissent is met with death, a Soviet labor camp or more typically imprisonment in an asylum.  America must never strive to be a Soviet Union.

       There is little evidence if any, to suggest that Brandon Raub is being detained or was taken into custody for violation of the NDAA.   By all appearances Brandon Raub was involuntarily taken into custody and detained under Virginia's civil commitment law.[2]  Most states have some variant of this law by which on the word of someone in the mental health profession, or a doctor, a nurse or even a social worker, a person can be locked up if they are deemed either a threat to themselves or others.  The standard of proof the person wishing to have someone else locked up under must meet is the presence of "clear and convincing evidence" at an hearing before a magistrate at which the accused is not provided an opportunity to have an independent mental health expert rebut or evaluate the evidence offered.  

       The problems with this are numerous.  Judges and lawyers are ill equipped to evaluate mental illness.   The concept of mental illness itself is a bit like ether, "[M]ental disorder is such a vacuous phrase that the law should consider dispensing with it as an independent criterion for intervention and instead simply identify as precisely as possible the types of mental dysfunction it wants to treat specially."[3]  Social workers and mental health professionals may have no basis by which to discern the difference between sincere political protest and the condition of "dangerousness to society."   Unfortunately for those involuntarily committed by other people, the clear and convincing standard is not difficult to overcome because it is not objective when applied to cases of civil commitment. 

       The Diagnostic and Statistical Manuel of Mental Disorders ("DSM") is used to categorize mental disorders but its categorizations are constantly being revised and subject to debate within the mental health field.   The authors of the DSM themselves warn against using the DSM for legal proceedings because of the danger that the diagnostic descriptions contained within it will be misunderstood and misused.   Of course, I do not mean to presume that the social worker or health care person calling for involuntary commitment has read the DSM.

       The Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments of the United States Constitution prohibit the government from taking from taking away a person's "life, liberty or property" without due process of law.   Civil commitment hearings perform an end run around due process-taking away liberty without the protections given to a criminal defendant.

       This all begs the question what was it about Brandon Raub's Facebook posts that the FBI and Secret Service considered a threat?   Several of Brandon's posts expressed concern about an elite ruling class, the Federal Reserve, and the enormity of the Federal government.  He must be insane for being critical of the government in the following post written on his Facebook wall on November 11, 2011,

The Truth 
by Brandon J Raub on Friday, November 11, 2011 at 10:00 am

America has lost itself. We have lost who we truly are. This is the land of the free and the home of the brave.

This is the land of Thomas Jefferson.

This is the land of Benjamin Franklin.

This is the land of Fredrick Douglas.

This is the land of Smedley Butler.

This is the land John F. Kennedy.

This is the land of Martin Luther King.

This is the land where the cowboy wins. This is the land where you can start from the bottom and get to the top. This is the land where regardless of you race and ethnicity you can succeed and build a better life for you and your family. This is the land where every race coexists peacefully. This is the land where justice wins. This is the land where liberty dwells. This is the land where freedom reigns. This is the land where we help the poor, and people help each other. This is land where people beat racism.

The Federal Reserve is wrong. They have designed a system based off of greed and fear. They designed a system to crush the middle class between taxes and inflation. This is wrong, and it is unjust. It is wrong.

We have allowed ourselves to be deceived and seduced by the powers of the printing press. It is not a good system. It discourages saving: the foundation for all stable economic activity. The Federal Reserve is artificially manipulating interest rates and creating phony economic data.

This thing has deceived our entire nation.

They created it in 1913. They also created the income tax in 1913. They encouraged the growth of debt so they can tax you on it. There is interest on the debt. Your government is in bed with these people. They want to enslave you to the government so that they can control every aspect of your lives. It is an empire based on lies. They operate of greed and fear.

There is a better way. It's called freedom. Freedom is called a lot of things. But there is a true meaning. It means very simply that you have the right to do whatever you want as long as you are not infringing on the freedoms of other people.

I firmly believe that God set America apart from the other nations of the world. He saved a place where people could come to to escape bad systems of goverment. This system we have created works. It really works.

There is evil going on all around the world. The United States was meant to lead the charge against injustice, but through our example not our force. People do not respond to having liberty and freedom forced on them.

Men and Women follow courage. They follow leadership, and courage. Our example has paved the way for people all around the world to change their forms of government.

Force is not the way because liberty is a powerful concept. The idea that men can govern themselves is the basis for every just form of government.

We can govern ourselves. We do not need to be governed by men who want to install a one world banking system. These men have machine hearts. Machine and unnatural hearts.

They have blocked out the possibility of a better world. They fear human progress. They have monopolies on everything.

This life can be free and beautiful. There are enough resources on this earth to support the world's population. There are enough resources on this earth to feed everyone. There is enough land for everyone to own their own land and farm, and produce their own energy.

These people have been hiding technology. There are ways to create power easily. There is technology that can provide free cheap power for everyone. There are farming techniques that can feed the entire world.

The Bill of Rights is being systematically dismantled. Men have spilled their blood for those rights.

Your sons and daughters, your brothers and sisters, and Americas best young men and women are losing their limbs. They are losing their lives. They are losing the hearts. They do not know why they are fighting. They are killing. And they do not know why.

They have done some extraordinary acts. Their deeds go before them. But these wars are lies. They are lies. They deceived our entire nation with terrorism. They have gotten us to hand them our rights. Our Rights! Men died for those rights!

September Eleventh was an inside job. They blew up a third building in broad daylight. Building 7.

Your leaders betrayed you.

You elected an aristocracy. They are beholden to special interests. They were brainwashed through the Council on Foreign Relations. Your leaders are planning to merge the United States into a one world banking system. They want to put computer chips in you.

These men have evil hearts. They have tricked you into supporting corporate fascism. We gave them the keys to our country. We were not vigilant with our republic.

There is hope. BUT WE MUST TAKE OUR REPUBLIC BACK.[4]

       President Andrew Jackson was also critical of the central bank and would most certainly be detained as a lunatic or worse were he alive today by both political parties and the pundit class,   

"Gentlemen, I have had men watching you for a long time and I am convinced that you have used the funds of the bank to speculate in the breadstuffs of the country. When you won, you divided the profits amongst you, and when you lost, you charged it to the bank. You tell me that if I take the deposits from the bank and annul its charter, I shall ruin ten thousand families. That may be true, gentlemen, but that is your sin! Should I let you go on, you will ruin fifty thousand families, and that would be my sin! You are a den of vipers and thieves."

       The Department of Homeland Security would consider Brandon a potential terrorist as they would also consider most of the people that express views critical of the government as potential terrorists.   According to a study by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism entitled, "Hot Spots of Terrorism and Other Crimes in the United States, 1970-2008," funded by the Department of Homeland Security, terrorists are likely people, "reverent of individual liberty...suspicious of centralized federal authority or anti-government," including people who are extremely conservative or extremely liberal.[5] 

       Do not depend on some judge or lawyer to protect your First Amendment rights.  Too often I have observed judges and lawyers slavishly reciting precedence and statute with the Constitution being but a tertiary concern.  Law review articles about involuntary civil commitment regurgitate a parade of judicial affronts on due process.   Given this way or reasoning, which is the absence of reasoning but mere recitation of the past as authority binding on the future, un-Constitutional decisions have a theoretically infinite half-life.  We need to pay attention to Brandon Raub's fate just as much as John Bradford observed the fate of fellow going to the scaffold from the Tower of London and remarked, "there but for the grace of God, goes John Bradford."  The scaffold is still there and the tower remains claiming many inhabitants who thought they would certainly never reside there.@

R. Tamara de Silva

Chicago, Illinois

August 22, 2012

R. Tamara de Silva is a securities lawyer and independent trader

Today the United States Supreme Court ruled unanimously in Sackett v. EPA (10-1062)[1] that Chantall and Michael Sackett may bring a Federal civil action under the Administrative Procedure Act ("APA") to challenge the issuance of an EPA compliance order that had prevented them from building a home on their land. The importance of this ruling is that it constitutes a victory for due process for all Americans confronted by the EPA with crime.

Congress invents a new crime on average every week for every week of the year.[2] Departments of the Executive Branch have established regulations and rulings that further criminalize innocuous crime (what I mean here by innocuous is "crime" lacking the existence of any wrongful or criminal intent on the part of the alleged wrong-doer). These often esoteric regulations number in the hundreds of thousands. There are steep economic costs to all this rule making and quite often they are borne by ordinary Americans with limited resources-unable to fight a government with comparatively unlimited prosecutorial and administrative budgets. A case that illustrates this well is that of that of the Sacketts.

Keep in mind, the Federal government spends billions of dollars on prosecutions based upon theories of strict liability for obscure crimes honored more in their breach than by their rule often because the crimes lack definition. On example, which is at the heart of the Sacketts case is the Clean Water Act. The Clean Water Act prohibits, "the discharge of any pollutant by any person," without a permit, into the "navigable waters." The term "navigable waters" is defined in the Clean Water Act as, "the waters of the United States," §1362(7). The problem, identified by the Court in its ruling today, but has been obvious to so many of us for decades is that no where is the meaning of "the waters of the United States" defined or made clear. Not anywhere.

While ignorance of the law is never a defense for its violation, no American can be apprised of or know, not even the most seasoned and ancient criminal defense lawyer, all the hundreds of thousands of statutes and regulations any American must prescribe his conduct by at all times so as not to run afoul of the law.

In the Sacketts case, a couple in rural Idaho in 2008 were days away from clearing away their land (land which is close to Priest Lake but landlocked), in order to build their home. They had obtained all requisite local licenses and permits. The EPA visited them and announced that they were to cease and desist building or in any way doing anything with their land because it was on Federal wetlands and their affecting their land in any manner would constitute a violation of the Clean Water Act. The Sacketts asked for proof. The EPA pointed them to National Fish and Wildlife Wetlands Inventory. When the Sacketts showed the EPA that their property was not listed as a wetland according to the National Fish and Wildlife Wetlands Inventory, the EPA simply declined to provide any further rationale for its decision. It did however, issue an administrative compliance order stating that the Sackett's failure to cease and desist doing anything on their land would result in penalties of up to $75,000 per day for violations of the Clean Water Act plus possible criminal prosecution. The Order also required that the Sacketts fence off their property after replacing all the landfill they had cleared, replacing all the vegetation that had been removed, and that they monitor their now fenced in land, that they were not to otherwise touch, for a period of three years. The Sacketts asked the EPA for a hearing on the order but the EPA refused.

Due process would have required that the Sacketts receive some opportunity to be heard by the EPA or some reviewing entity. The Sacketts filed a complaint in Federal court for a review of the EPA's order under the APA. The Federal court dismissed the Sackett's complaint (the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals subsequently affirmed the dismissal) on the grounds that they could not review the order because it was not a "final action" from EPA.

The Supreme Court's opinion written by Justice Scalia found that the Sacketts did have a right to judicial review of the Administrative Compliance Order because the Order "has all the hallmarks of APA finality" because it imposes legal obligations, states the penalties and other repercussions of non-compliance, and according to the EPA, final in that the EPA did not think it was subject to any further EPA review. Other than coming to Federal Court, the Sacketts had no other means of redress.

The Government argued that allowing judicial review of EPA actions would impede the EPA's ability to regulate land as efficiently. This is almost like saying that were there a judicial review (a actual check and balance on the EPA), of the EPA's compliance orders, the EPA would not be able to act with as much unbridled power. Justice Scalia was not impressed by the Government's logic when he replied that the APA's presumption of judicial review applies to other agencies and it,

is a repudiation of the principle that efficiency of regulation conquers all. And there is no reason to think that the Clean Water Act was uniquely designed to enable the strong-arming of regulated parties into "voluntary compliance" without the opportunity for judicial review--even judicial review of the question whether the regulated party is within the EPA's jurisdiction

My favorite part of the decision was the concurring opinion written by Justice Alito, which ought to comfort property owners having to contend with the EPA, and chastises Congress for the perfectly unclear nature of the Clean Water Act.

Justice Alito writes,

The position taken in this case by the Federal Government--a position that the Court now squarely rejects-- would have put the property rights of ordinary Americans entirely at the mercy of Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) employees.

The reach of the Clean Water Act is notoriously unclear. Any piece of land that is wet at least part of the year is in danger of being classified by EPA employees as wetlands covered by the Act, and according to the Federal Government, if property owners begin to construct a home on a lot that the agency thinks possesses the requisite wetness, the property owners are at the agency's mercy.

The Sackett's get to return to Federal court but there is no guarantee they will prevail. This is far better than giving them or anyone else no recourse whatsoever when the EPA seemingly arbitrarily decides to violate an individual's property rights. Justice Alito,

The Court's decision provides a modest measure of relief. At least, property owners like petitioners will have the right to challenge the EPA's jurisdictional determination under the Administrative Procedure Act. But the combination of the uncertain reach of the Clean Water Act and the draconian penalties imposed for the sort of violations alleged in this case still leaves most property owners with little practical alternative but to dance to the EPA's tune. Real relief requires Congress to do what it should have done in the first place: provide a reasonably clear rule re- garding the reach of the Clean Water Act.

Sadly, Justice Alito's admonishment to Congress will likely go as far as the saying of throwing pearls before swine. Congress ought to pay more thought to what laws it writes. The Due Process Clause of the United States Constitution requires that no one be made to guess, when their life and liberty is at stake, as to the meaning of a criminal statute. Violation of the Clean Water Act carries with it the possibility of criminal prosecution. Laws enforced by the EPA and other departments of the Executive Branch that carry the penalty of a loss of freedom must be absolutely clearly in apprising all of what conduct is prescribed and what is not. All must know what the Government commands or forbids. The Sackett case is an illustration of this but there are only about 300,000 other regulations that may or most likely may not apprise otherwise law-abiding Americans what the Government may or may not punish.@

R Tamara de Silva

Chicago, Illinois
March 21, 2012

R Tamara de Silva is an independent trader and lawyer

Footnotes:
1. http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/11pdf/10-1062.pdf
2. From 2000 through 2007, Congress enacted 452 new criminal offenses. http://www.heritage.org/Research/Factsheets/2011/04/OVERCRIMINALIZATION-An-Explosion-of-Federal-Criminal-Law

Over fifty-seven years ago, the Supreme Court voted unanimously to end segregation in schools in what many consider to be the most important legal case of this century. Brown v. Board of Education and the companion cases that followed, held that "separate was not equal," and state laws that required separation between the races in schools, offended both Equal Protection and Due Process. Brown found that state laws that drew invidious distinctions based upon race, prejudiced black students. After Brown, any state law that provided for separation based upon race became illegal-forever changing the complexion of the nation's schools, workplaces and neighborhoods.
It is inarguable that Brown has achieved an anti-discriminatory purpose and changed the nation-the degree to which it has succeeded merely as a desegregation measure or a political one, is widely debated but to a degree academic. Some of the smallest numerical minorities of non-white Americans, like Indian Americans are the most over-represented in colleges and universities. Yet, it is also true that below the college level, schools are almost as segregated now as they were fifty even years ago, but there are a complex set of causes for this-admittedly among them is some degree of desire to voluntarily segregate in housing locations.
Today race is not the consideration in need of anti-discriminatory policies in institutions of higher learning that it was when Brown was decided. One of the interesting consequences of Brown v. Board is that its scope has expanded to set the stage for new civil rights statutes like the Americans with Disabilities Act ("ADA"), which seek to protect in academia and in the workplace, people with disabilities. The ADA and its companion acts like the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, have to some extent become the next generation of the civil rights statutes. The language of the ADA mimics the language of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. However, it is not clear how well the principles behind anti-discrimination in the context of race apply to the disabled, but particularly unclear when applied to the learning disabled.
Race is a stereotype that leads to a preference that is not per se rational-especially because of its application to all persons belonging to the race. As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said, "deep seated preferences cannot be argued about," and "The mind of a bigot is like the pupil of the eye. The more light you shine on it, the more it will contract."
It is never rational according to the principles behind Brown for an employer or an admissions officer to discriminate on the basis of race. It is only rational to discriminate based upon merit, because when race is factored out, a level playing field exists that allows for a more precise judgment on merit. Employers and admissions officers, who do not take race into consideration, will be better able to judge the strongest and most capable candidates.
However, the anti-discriminatory principles behind Brown, may not translate into rational preferences for an employer or an admissions officer in many instances of making choices between disabled and non-disabled persons. If an employer discriminates solely on race, this is not a rational decision but one made on stereotype-not likely to be reasonable on its own.
Since almost any principle can be carried to its logical end, some illustrations may be helpful. The preferences of an employer or an admission's officer on the other hand towards a non-disabled person are arguably rational against a disabled person. For instance, an employer may not rationally want to hire a blind person to be a sewing machine operator. An admissions officer will rationally want the applicant with the strongest intellect (other factors being equal) and not someone who has enormous difficulty reading or sitting through a lecture.
There is a crucial difference between civil rights statutes and those that prevent discrimination against the disabled. The civil rights statutes prohibit irrational discrimination, that is discrimination based solely on race, gender or national origin. Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, Individuals with Disabilities Education Act ("IDEA"), ADA and related statutes do not differentiate between rational discrimination and irrational discrimination. Nietzsche held great contempt for disabled persons as being dangerous to healthy and strong ones-an irrational opinion. Yet what about a manufacturer, who must take into account costs in hiring, and is faced with a choice between hiring a blind sewing machine operator and an additional employee to work side by side to assist, and one non-disabled person? The ADA prohibits rational, economic decision.
The ADA came into being by defining a disability as an impairment that substantially limits a major life activity-this impairment is measured against everyone else in society without the impairment. Major life activity has been held to include, caring for oneself, walking, seeing, breathing, working and learning. It has evolved to enlarge the definition of disability to include people with learning disabilities ("LD") which measure some cognitive impairment measured against an individual's own best self-what they would be were they not to have the LD.
This article is concerned not with physical disabilities, or mental disabilities such as Downs Syndrome or mental retardation but specifically learning disabilities and the extension of anti-discriminatory principles that came into existence to prevent discrimination based on race to people with LDs. This article does not dispute the existence of LDs like dyslexia and mental retardation including forms of severe autism, which are accepted even outside of the LD industry, by the outside scientific community as real.
The definition of a LD is genuinely inclusive:

"The child does not achieve adequately for the child's age or to meet State-approved grade-level standards in one or more of the following areas, when provided with learning experiences and instruction appropriate for the child's age or State-approved grade-level standards:

• Oral expression.
• Listening comprehension.
• Written expression.
• Basic reading skills.
• Reading fluency skills.
• Reading comprehension.
• Mathematics calculation.
• Mathematics problem solving.
•
The child does not make sufficient progress to meet age or State-approved grade-level standards in one or more of the areas identified in 34 CFR 300.309(a)(1) when using a process based on the child's response to scientific, research-based intervention; or the child exhibits a pattern of strengths and weaknesses in performance, achievement, or both, relative to age, State-approved grade-level standards, or intellectual development, that is determined by the group to be relevant to the identification of a specific learning disability, using appropriate assessments, consistent with 34 CFR 300.304 and 300.305; and the group determines that its findings under 34 CFR 300.309(a)(1) and (2) are not primarily the result of:

• A visual, hearing, or motor disability;
• Mental retardation;
• Emotional disturbance;
• Cultural factors;
• Environmental or economic disadvantage; or
• Limited English proficiency."

The definition of LD, some would argue, eradicates what was once thought to account for the difficulty of students to learn as well as others-natural intelligence, aptitude or that someone can be better at math than reading or vice versa. Tests like IQ tests are sometimes administered and if a child scores higher in an IQ test and relatively poorer in a math test or reading test-this is considered evidence supporting the diagnosis of LD. LD proponents imply that were it not for the occurrence of LD, children and adults would be as smart as they are supposed to be (their idealized selves) and perhaps smarter than other children and adults without LDs.
Some within the LD industry supported by nothing other than rank speculation, insist that historical figures like Einstein, Charles Darwin, Beethoven, Van Gogh and Churchill had some form of LD. But by the amorphous catch-all definition of LD-who living or dead, would not?
By law, LDs can be diagnosed by a child's parents and one teacher-there is no medical or scientific testing requirement to prove its existence. LDs also encompass ADD and ADHD. Predictably, this has led to skepticism and what critics point out is a specific lack of scientific rigor in this field.
There are other problems with the application of the ADA and related statutes arising from their definition, or lack thereof, of what constitutes a disability. Learning disabilities have exploded in occurrence among school age children. Asian students are least diagnosed with LD. All other ethnic groups appear to be over-represented. The relatively high and recent statistical occurrence of learning disabilities (suggesting an over-diagnosis), the fact that they disproportionately occur in the most affluent economic groups (suggesting a diagnosis of apologetic and hopeful parents) and their lack of scientific proof of its existence (in terms of objective double-blind tests, biological or genetic markers)-has further fueled skepticism. Some skeptics suggest that standardized testing and overly homogenic schooling leads to the diagnosis of LD because it is a fallacy that all people learn or process information the same way.
Another problem with including LD/ADD/ADHD as a disability under the ADA is that this diagnosis is rewarded in academia to the point of encouraging faking it. A person with a LD can take six hours to take the SAT as opposed to three hours. In colleges, an LD student can ask to take multiple choice tests home and ask for much more time to complete everything. This may provide an incentive to claim an LD. Harvard's graduating class in 2011 consisted of 2,058 students that were picked out of a field of well-qualified 22,955 applicants. Having three extra hours to take the SAT could be a competitive advantage.
LD is somewhat akin to the diagnosis of an epidemic in search of a disease. Nothing in this article is meant to cast aspersion on the existence of legitimate learning disabilities like dyslexia, which are real conditions. Unfortunately, the definition and diagnosis of LD is democratic and general enough to include anyone-it is there for the taking. There are a number of medical doctors that dispute the existence of learning disabilities completely, comparing it to a for-profit hoax because of the lack of scientific evidence and what they term is the massive for-profit industry that has mushroomed because of it.
In 2008, President George W. Bush, signed the Americans with Disabilities Act Amendments Act of 2008 ("ADA Amendments Act") which became law in 2009. This act broadened the definition of disability to include "individuals to the maximum extent permitted by the terms of the ADA and generally shall not require extensive analysis." Wearing contact lenses or glasses, however, is not alone to be considered a physical impairment casting one with a disability under the ADA. Also, "reading and bending" were added to the ADA's original definition of "major life activities,"-the list now includes anything that impairs one's ability in, "caring for oneself, performing manual tasks, seeing, hearing, eating, sleeping, walking, standing, lifting, bending, speaking, breathing, learning, reading, concentrating, thinking, communicating, and working"-list is not apparently meant to be limited to these enumerated activities and may include others.
This presents a lessening of the protections afforded under the ADA to people with more legitimate disabilities, who need accommodations entering buildings, parking, require service animals, etc. throughout their entire lives. Using the principles behind Brown and its companion cases that made discrimination based upon race unlawful to extend to discrimination against people with LD/ADD/ADHD is a cheapening of a monumental case. An important principal carried to a seemingly silly conclusion.@
R. Tamara de Silva
Chicago, Illinois