Settling Scores and Legislating Badly

To this day, despite my aging memory, I can still vividly recall my law school Income Tax class–and not just because it was taught by the legendary Larry Jegen. The class was my first introduction to the phenomenon of laws like the one Jegen called “the crazy cousin rule.” This otherwise inexplicable provision, written in the appropriately impenetrable language of the tax code, allowed a tax deduction for any support rendered to certain relatives in mental institutions. Presumably, the author of the measure had such a relative, and he was using his elective position to write tax laws that would benefit him personally, by allowing him to recoup some of the costs involved. Public policy had nothing to do with it.

Which brings me to Mike Delph and his attempt to abolish the use of Grand Juries in Indiana.

As faithful readers of this blog (there are some, right?) will recall, I blogged about this odd proposal a while back, expressing my puzzlement. A more savvy observer of the political scene posted a comment, suggesting a motive for this seemingly bizarre effort: Delph, he said, was a friend of Charlie White, the Indiana Secretary of State who had been indicted by a grand jury on charges of theft and vote fraud.

That seemed petty and irrational even for Mike Delph, but an article about Charlie White’s upcoming trial in this morning’s Indianapolis Star has leant support to that explanation. In the lengthy background piece, Delph is quoted at several points about his friendship with White, and his conviction (no pun intended) that the charges were politically motivated. According to Delph, he and Charlie often pray together in Charlie’s office.

Now it all makes sense. A grand jury indicted his friend. Abolish grand juries.

It needn’t stop there. If your friend is mistakenly arrested by the police, abolish the police; if a doctor’s treatment harms your friend, abolish the practice of medicine….

I don’t know the content of those devotions in Charlie’s office, but may I suggest adding a prayer for less grandiosity and more common sense?

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Excuse Me??

A lobbyist friend sent me a new legislative proposal by Mike Delph to abolish Grand Juries in Indiana.

My considered response was: huh??

In prior sessions, with his not-too-coherent animus against immigrants, Delph established himself as not the sharpest knife in the drawer–proposing measures that (as he should have learned in law school) would not have passed constitutional muster. Despite insisting that he was acting on principle, he came off looking both mean-spirited and uninformed.

But this one is a puzzler.

Grand Juries are constitutionally required in federal courts, but because that requirement has never been “incorporated”–that is, never held to apply to the states–they are entirely optional in Indiana.Unless the law changed while I wasn’t looking–certainly a possibility–Indiana prosecutors initiate charges through the filing of something called an “information,” and only employ Grand Juries in more complicated cases, generally those involving white collar crimes or criminal financial schemes. In any event, last time I looked, the use of a Grand Jury was entirely within a prosecutor’s discretion. So why “abolish” a tool that prosecutors can use or ignore as they see fit?

There is probably a story that explains this bizarre bill, but none of the Statehouse folks I asked had any idea what it might be.

To paraphrase the voice-over that concluded each episode of  “The Naked City,” an old TV crime series: There are eight million stories in our weird Indiana legislature. This has been one of them.

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Facts, Law and Mike Delph

A friend who uses Twitter sent me a series of Tweets from Mike Delph today. Most railed against “activist” judges (beginning with Chief Justice Marshall’s decision in Marbury v. Madison) and the “elites that control them.” Others were–frankly–incomprehensible, not to mention ungrammatical. The one sentiment that came through loud and clear is that Delph is highly pissed off that the courts would dare strike down provisions of his pet legislation. (Putting this as politely as possible, if he has even a rudimentary grasp of the constitutional architecture, that grasp was not on display in these tweets.)

I thought about Delph’s war on immigrants when I read a recent article from the Atlantic.

The article was titled “Safety in Diversity: Why Crime is Down in America’s Cities.” A couple of relevant paragraphs will give its basic thrust, but the entire article is worth reading.

In the popular imagination, crime is frequently associated with big, densely populated cities. Here again, we can separate fact from myth.  Primary cities and older high-density suburbs exhibited the largest decreases in crime between 1990 and 2008, according to the Brookings study. And the gap between city and suburban violent crime narrowed in two-thirds of the nation’s 100 largest metro areas. Our own analysis turns up no association whatsoever between metro size or metro density and the overall level of crime, though we do find a modest correlation (.25) between density and violent crime.

……

It might be hard to wrap your mind around this–especially with all the demagoguery about immigration. But the numbers tell a different story than our alarmist pundits and politicians do. “Since 1990, all types of communities within the country’s largest metro areas have become more diverse,” Elizabeth Kneebone, one of the authors of the Brookings report, wrote in The New Republic. “Crime fell fastest in big cities and high-density suburbs that were poorer, more minority, and had higher crime rates to begin with. At the same time, all kinds of suburbs saw their share of poor, minority, and foreign-born residents increase. As suburbia diversified, crime rates fell.” Along with their entrepreneurial energy and their zeal to succeed, immigrants are good neighbors–cultural and economic factors that militate against criminal behavior, and not just in their own enclaves but in surrounding communities as well.

Don’t you just hate it when the facts smack you down?