The Boston Globe reports:

WHEN GOVERNOR Deval Patrick introduced his budget proposal for the upcoming fiscal year, tucked amid big-ticket items like education and health care were a few small changes to the Massachusetts criminal justice system. If approved, the budget would create eight new courts: three designed specifically to deal with defendants suffering from mental illness and five for those struggling with drug addiction.

In the scheme of the $36.4 billion budget, these courts represent a modest investment, and would seem like an uncontroversial nod to the idea that certain people benefit from more individualized attention in court. But in legal terms, Governor Patrick’s proposal is tapping into something much bigger. It’s a new idea about criminal justice, rooted as much in sociology and psychology as in law: the notion that certain kinds of offenders are better handled by dealing with the problems underlying their crimes rather than with simple punishment.

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The Associated Press reports:

The independence of New Jersey judges is under attack by Gov. Chris Christie and lawmakers, retired judges and lawyers told a state bar association task force Tuesday.

Speakers said the process of judicial appointments and lifetime tenure should be changed and judges should get regular pay raises and no longer be forced to retire when they turn 70.

“I was so proud to be the chief justice in this court system that was looked at as one of the finest if not the finest in this country,” said Deborah Poritz, who was chief justice of the state Supreme Court from 1996 to 2006. “I had no sense of how easy it could be to lose that, how quickly we could lose that.”

Poritz was one of many speakers who cited “The Federalist Papers,” used to pass the U.S. Constitution, in arguing for an independent judiciary.

New Jersey judges, particularly state Supreme Court justices, have long been criticized by conservatives for a string of landmark rulings dating to the 1970s that forced the state’s municipalities to make zoning laws that made it illegal to keep out poor people, forced state taxpayers to put more money into schools in impoverished cities and allowed civil unions and then marriage for gay couples. Critics say those were decisions that should not be made by a small number of judges.

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The Illinois Supreme Court has affirmed the right of citizens to make audio recordings without first getting permission from all parties.

The court ruled in favor of defendants in two separate cases. In one instance, a man was charged with recording his own court proceedings without the absence of a court reporter. In another, a woman was charged after recording three separate phone conversations with a court employee.

The justices said that the eavesdropping law was meant to criminalize the recording of private conversations, but had been interpreted too widely.

“None of these examples implicate privacy interests, yet the statute makes it a felony to audio record each one,” the court wrote.

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has ruled this that the US Supreme Court’s Miller v. Alabama ruling is to apply retroactively. Here are the basics:

The state’s highest criminal court Wednesday ordered a new sentence for Terrell Maxwell, who is serving life in prison without the possibility of parole for shooting an Austin man in the head during a 2007 robbery. Maxwell was 17 at the time of the shooting, and the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ruled that his automatic sentence of life without parole violated the U.S. Constitution’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment when applied to defendants who were under the age of 18 at the time of the crime.

The 5-4 ruling left intact Maxwell’s conviction for capital murder in the death of Fernando Santander, who was shot while sitting in a van in the parking lot of his apartment complex near Rundberg Lane. Two accomplices testified that Maxwell shot Santander when the 31-year-old, startled to find a gun pointing at his cheek, quickly raised his hands in surrender, court records show.

The Texas court split on whether a 2012 U.S. Supreme Court ruling — Miller v. Alabama, which established that automatic no-parole sentences for juveniles were unconstitutional — applied retroactively to defendants like Maxwell.

Writing for the Texas court’s majority, Judge Cathy Cochran said the Miller ruling required that Maxwell be given the opportunity to argue in court that life without parole was not an appropriate sentence. The Miller ruling did not prevent life without parole for juvenile murderers, Cochran wrote. But before such a sentence can be imposed, jurors must consider “how children are different, and how those differences counsel against irrevocably sentencing them to a lifetime in prison,” she noted.

Two dissents — written by Judges Michael Keasler and Paul Womack, joined by Presiding Judge Sharon Keller and Judge Barbara Hervey [available here and here] — said the Miller ruling should not be applied retroactively.

The National Law Journal has a commentary that begins:

Ask the average American whether failing to pay a debt can land a person in jail, and the answer will likely be “no.” But that would be wrong. Although the federal government abolished imprisonment for debt in 1833, more than one-third of the states permit incarceration of those in default of their civil obligations. Furthermore, despite the U.S. Supreme Court’s holding in Bearden v. Georgia (1983) that revoking probation for failure to honor a criminal fine or make restitution abridges due process when obligors through no fault of their own are unable to pay, the constitutional mandate is widely in the breach. Affronted by these shameful practices, several organizations have recently called for abolition of debtors’ prison in its modern incarnations. Their appeals must be heeded promptly.

In February, American Civil Liberties Union and the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law wrote to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau regarding the misuse of civil contempt to obtain repayment of private debts.

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Kansas Chief Justice Lawton R. Nuss penned an op-ed in The Hutchinson News last week, criticizing a deal in which legislators will give the courts more money in exchange for “reforms” made to the judicial branch:

Legislative money is being offered to keep all Kansas courts open after July 1—in direct exchange for some important restructuring of the judicial branch. More specifically, the money would be given if the KDJA [Kansas District Judges Association] endorsed the ‘package deal.’

The legislation would give the chief judges in each of Kansas’ 31 judicial districts the power to submit and control their own budgets. The judges in each of these districts would also able to choose their own chief. The Kansas Supreme Court currently has control over both of these actions.

The National Law Journal reports:

Jury misconduct didn’t start with Twitter, but reports of jurors behaving badly via social media are on the rise. In a new study, two Illinois judges urged their colleagues to tackle the social media problem head-on in jury instructions.

U.S. District Judge Amy St. Eve of the Northern District of Illinois and Judge Charles Burns, in the criminal division of the Cook County, Ill., Circuit Court, surveyed hundreds of jurors in their respective courts during the past three years. They asked jurors about their temptation to communicate about a case through social networks while serving.

Most jurors said they didn’t feel tempted, with many citing the presiding judge’s social media-specific instructions. St. Eve and Burns, along with co-author and Jones Day associate Michael Zuckerman, said the survey showed that generalized instructions that didn’t explicitly discuss social media were insufficient.

St. Eve began surveying jurors in 2011. Along with Zuckerman, a former clerk, she published her initial results in 2012, analyzing 140 responses from an informal survey of federal jurors in her court.

St. Eve said in an interview that when the first study came out, other judges told her it was useful to have numbers quantifying the problem and asked how to adjust their jury instructions. “And some who aren’t, let’s say, familiar with the technology or keeping up with it found it helpful,” she added.

In the updated study, published in late February in Duke Law & Technology Review, St. Eve and her co-authors surveyed an additional 443 jurors in federal and state courts in Illinois.

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The Supreme Court on Wednesday unanimously bolstered the federal law that bars those convicted of domestic violence from possessing a firearm.

In United States v. Castleman, the question before the Justices was whether James Castleman’s state conviction for “misdemeanor domestic assault,” arising out of an incident involving the mother of his child, qualifies as a “misdemeanor crime of domestic violence” under federal law, thereby prohibiting him from having a gun.

The court gave a wide interpretation of the law’s requirement of “physical force.”  The federal government said that was important because in some states, misdemeanor domestic-violence laws are not specific about the force required.

In a January ruling, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals held — in light of the Supreme Court’s ruling striking down part of the Defense of Marriage Act last year — that “classifications based on sexual orientation … are subject to heightened scrutiny.”

While most laws that create groups or classifications must merely show there is a rational basis, or a legitimate reason, for the law, laws subjected to heightened scrutiny — under the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (and applied to the federal government through the 5th Amendment) — must show more. Some, like those that classify based on race, must show a compelling state interest for classifying people, while others, like those based on sex, must show an important state interest in doing so.

Since February 2011, the Obama administration has joined with LGBT advocates in arguing that such heightened scrutiny should be placed on laws that classify based on sexual orientation — and, per other documents since then, gender identity.

The Supreme Court has avoided resolving the question, with opinions by Justice Anthony Kennedy over the past 18 years striking down laws that classify based on sexual orientation on the grounds that they don’t even pass that lowest level of “rational basis” review.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper says he will respect the Supreme Court ruling that declared Judge Marc Nadon, his latest appointment to the highest bench, as not legally qualified for the job – the strongest signal to date that Ottawa will not attempt to buck the decision.

“We’re obviously going to respect the decision. We will respect not just the letter of the decision but the spirit of the decision as well,” the Prime Minister told reporters in The Hague, where he had just wrapped up a nuclear security summit.

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