I am going to be up in Branford on the weekend before New Year's. Anyone up for going out as a group to dinner on the 29th (that Saturday)?
Some interesting law news.
I hate mandatory minimum sentencing. Nah, but Congress does a terrible job of determining how long people should stay in jail for crimes - when they get involved with determining sentencing guidelines, they have a tendency to grandstand, opting to put excessive penalties on the books in order to seem like they're tough on crime. The Supreme Court made a couple of judgments recently that should weaken the control of mandatory minimum-type laws to dictate the lengths of sentences judges give to criminals, which is a good thing.
Also - for a long time, crack cocaine related crimes have been punished much, much more harshly than powdered cocaine crimes (a gram of crack = 20 grams of coke). Not surprisingly, the effect of that disparity was additional years in jail for blacks, since blacks are much more likely to be involved in crack cocaine crimes than whites. In the last week, Congress lowered the penalties for crack so that they were in line with powdered cocaine. That should cut a few years off the sentences of thousands of people in jail right now, and it'll make our legal system slightly more fair. Good stuff.
Stone