Category: Politics

Justice, Politics

From Adultery to Polygamy: The Dangers of Morality Legislation

The Washington Post
September 5, 2004 Sunday

HEADLINE: Of Lust and the Law

BYLINE: Jonathan Turley

BODY:

Last month, John R. Bushey Jr. was finally brought to justice in a small courthouse in Luray, Va. Bushey, the former town attorney, stood before the court as an accused criminal with reporters from all over the state in attendance. The charge was adultery. Like 23 other states, Virginia still might prosecute if a husband or wife has consensual sex outside the marriage. Ten states, including Virginia, have anti-fornication statutes as well, prohibiting sex before marriage. Like many fundamentalist Islamic states, the United States uses criminal penalties to police the morality of its citizens.

These morality laws go back to the church-based “bawdy courts” of 13th-century England. Yet, the Bushey case illustrates that there are prosecutors today who remain eager to perform this quasi-ecclesiastical role — to publicly defend the institution of the monogamous marriage, and the unwed, from the ravages of lust and desire. Because these are often unrecorded misdemeanor cases, the specific number of prosecutions is impossible to determine. However, the Bushey case is far from unique. Since 1980, adultery cases have been recorded from Alabama to Massachusetts to Pennsylvania. And in 2003, Georgia prosecuted an anti-fornication case.

This latest adultery prosecution, in a county circuit court in Virginia, should motivate us to finally ban our American version of bawdy courts and force ambitious prosecutors to focus on our courtrooms rather than our bedrooms.

For 32 years, John Bushey, 66, served as the attorney for Luray — a small Shenandoah Valley town of 4,500 people. He had been married for about 18 years to Cindy Bushey, the town’s clerk. John Bushey, however, had an affair with Nellie Mae Hensley, 53, and after the affair ended, Hensley seemed to prove the adage “scratch a lover, find a foe.” Instead of going to the betrayed spouse or to her minister, she went to the police. While Hensley was divorced, Bushey was married and therefore subject to a criminal adultery charge, a misdemeanor.

The Bushey case seemed like the perfect vehicle to get the U.S. Supreme Court to finish work that it began in the 2003 case of Lawrence v. Texas, when the Court struck down anti-sodomy statutes. At one point, Bushey agreed to pursue such a course, and the American Civil Liberties Union took up his case. He kept changing his mind, however, first pleading guilty, then withdrawing the plea and pledging to fight as a matter of principle. Finally, in August, he surprised many observers by accepting 20 hours of community service as punishment for his offense. (His former lover publicly expressed outrage that Bushey would not receive a criminal record for his adulterous affair with her.)

Unfortunately, with his last-minute acceptance of punishment, Bushey implicitly accepted that the state of Virginia has a right to punish him for his moral failings. The far more important question is not Bushey’s faithfulness to principle (or to marriage), but the continuation of this archaic criminal provision, which also exists in Maryland and the U.S. military. (Such a law was recently repealed in the District.) The prosecutor in Bushey’s case, Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney Glenn Williamson, staunchly defends the state’s interest in prosecuting adulterers. When a former lover comes to the police, he insists, the state must prosecute. His rationalization is baffling since, according to studies, he could throw a stick on any corner and probably hit a couple of adulterers.

A famous 1953 study by Alfred Kinsey found that 50 percent of married men and 26 percent of married women had engaged in adultery by age 40. A recent study by Ball State University reported that women under 40 have caught up to men in adulterous affairs. Other studies have shown that between 5 to 15 percent of married couples have “open marriages.” If Virginia were going to prosecute evenly, untold married couples in the state could be subject to prosecution when a former lover opted for the satisfaction of a public charge to heal private injury.

Imagine the work for the courts if prosecutors vigorously enforced the laws against fornication, which is generally defined as premarital sex — a crime that a 1988 study found was practiced by more than 75 percent of women and more than 80 percent of men by the age of 19.

Williamson stressed that he had prosecuted other adulterers and was grateful that “as far as general deterrence, it should now be widely known that adultery is a crime in Virginia.” It is certainly widely known after Williamson has hoisted some wretch for all unfaithful spouses to contemplate. But is it right?

With the medieval bawdy courts, the Anglican Church tried the unfaithful and imposed criminal punishments for “whoredom.” At least six adulterers were executed in England. Since women were viewed as the property of their husbands, these cases were often tried as matters of theft or trespass to chattel. Bawdy courts were embraced by such organizations as the Society for the Reformation of Manners, which supplied the dirt on the unfaithful during the 17th and 18th centuries. These cases were called “criminal conversation” and were uniformly brought by cuckolded husbands. Notably, criminal conversation laws were repealed around the time that women were given the ability to bring such lawsuits in England in the 18th century.

When the Puritans landed in the New World, they wanted their own bawdy trials. There were no church courts, but most states eventually passed laws criminalizing an assortment of private consensual conduct ranging from sodomy to fornication to adultery.

In the Colonies, adultery was once a capital crime and there are at least three recorded cases of people who were executed for adultery, and others were branded with an “A” on their foreheads. (At least one other adulterer, Thomas Newton, escaped in Connecticut shortly before his hanging). Women were routinely stripped to the waist and publicly whipped. In many cases, the convicted were given heavy fines and shaming punishments. A common shaming punishment (taken from England) was recorded in a 1640s Virginia case: the unfaithful were ordered “to stand in the middle of the . . . church upon a stool in a white sheet, and a white wand in their hands, all the time of divine service and shall say after the ministers such words as he shall deliver unto them before the congregation there present and also pay the charges of the court.”

While bawdy courts once mandated harsh punishments for adultery, today’s laws generally have lesser sentences of up to a year in jail and small fines.

It should be obvious that such laws governing private, consensual acts are no longer valid after the Supreme Court decision in Lawrence, but the Court did not actually set these laws aside when it ruled anti-sodomy statutes unconstitutional, even though it stressed that anti-sodomy laws further “no legitimate state interest which can justify its intrusion into the personal and private life of the individual.” While the Court did not address anti-fornication or adultery statutes, the dissenting justices specifically noted that the decision placed such laws in jeopardy. Self-described “morality advocates,” however, have resisted. Thus, Virginia cannot criminalize the act of sodomy between consenting adults but can often prosecute the same adults for having sex in any form under the adultery law.

Del. David B. Albo (R-Fairfax), who is in charge of streamlining Virginia’s criminal code, doesn’t approve of outsiders tampering with morality laws. The Lawrence decision, he complained, is “a perfect example of how the Supreme Court is inserting its own views into Virginia law.” Of course, Albo appears to have less of a problem when inserting his own moral views into the bedrooms of Virginia adults. Virginia, which is seeking to repeal its anti-fornication and anti-sodomy statutes, decided to keep adultery a crime.

Del. Brian J. Moran (D-Alexandria) insists that adultery must remain a crime because “adultery is wrong, and we were not going to eliminate a criminal action even though it has been infrequently prosecuted.” While many would agree adultery is wrong, there are plenty of things that are “wrong” but not crimes, such as betraying boyfriends or girlfriends in unmarried but monogamous relationships. Finally, the law is currently applied in a ridiculous fashion with only Bushey and a few others pulled out for prosecution from a virtual sea of adultery.

The real reason these laws go unchallenged appears to be self-serving politics. Joseph F. Murphy Jr., chief judge of the Maryland Court of Special Appeals and chairman of a committee to overhaul the Maryland code, put it bluntly. “You can imagine what would happen if you tried to take adultery off the books at this point. You would have a large group of people who would complain bitterly about it as another example of that state losing its moral compass.”

It takes courage to take such an action — something apparently in short supply in Virginia, Maryland and some other states.

Citizens should be able to police their marriages without the help of the Commonwealth of Virginia or the other 23 states. These laws have not deterred many adulterous spouses. They invite arbitrary prosecutions in courtrooms replete — it is statistically certain — with adulterous prosecutors, cops, jurors, clerks or judges.

And, these same courts are inundated with divorce cases of proven and admitted adultery by individuals who are never prosecuted — making such prosecutions as random as a societal drive-by shooting.

Since the days of the bawdy courts, women are no longer deemed chattel and towns no longer maintain a “whore’s chair” for public humiliation of adulterers and fornicators.

Bawdy courts have no place in a nation that cherishes individual choice and privacy. Let’s put an end to them — and leave morality prosecutions as a matter of historical interest for 13th-century scholars.

Constitutional Law, Justice, Politics

Right Goal, Wrong Means: A Vote for the District of Columbia

The Washington Post
December 5, 2004 Sunday

HEADLINE: Right Goal, Wrong Means

BODY:

Many D.C. citizens have been elated to hear about a plan to make the city into a congressional district — without the need for a constitutional amendment. That’s understandable. Residents of the District are in the unenviable position of paying taxes and yet having no true voting representative in Congress. However, the plan, known as the District of Columbia Fairness in Representation Act, would achieve a noble goal by ignoble means.

The bill, the brainchild of Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.), chairman of the Government Reform Committee, would expand the number of House members from 435 to 437 to allow for a congressional district in Washington. To satisfy Republicans, Davis’s bill also would give Utah an additional district.

Utah, which fell just a handful of citizens short of another congressional seat in the last census, is expected to get an additional district as a result of the 2010 census. Under Davis’s plan, it wouldn’t have to wait.

Davis appears to genuinely favor a voting member for the District, and he saw an opportunity for a trade. “I don’t feel it’s a sign of weakness in our system to have to consider politics as part of the process,” he said. “Political considerations are neither good nor bad, they simply are.”

However, in matter of constitutional interpretation, politics is a poor substitute for principle. One of the greatest burdens of being a nation committed to the rule of law is that how we do something is as important as what we do. The Davis proposal would subvert the intentions of the Founders by ignoring textual references to “states” in the Constitution as the sole voting members of the houses of Congress. It also would create a city of half-formed citizens who could vote in the House but not in the Senate.

The controversy began almost 222 years ago with a riot. On Jan. 1, 1783, a large group of Revolutionary War veterans marched on Philadelphia, demanding their long-overdue back pay. Congress demanded that Pennsylvania turn out the militia to quell the rioters, but it refused. Congress then fled, first to Princeton, N.J., then to Annapolis and ultimately to New York City.

By the time congressional leaders gathered again in Philadelphia in 1787 to draft a new Constitution, one issue was prominent on many legislators’ minds: the creation of a federal district for the seat of government that would not be a part of any state. The members of Congress wanted to avoid, in the words of James Madison, the unwarranted “imputation of awe or influence” afforded to the host state of a permanent capitol.

The result was Article I, Section 8, of the Constitution, which created a federal enclave exclusively under the authority of the federal government. Virginia and Maryland agreed to pony up land for the enclave, which was gratefully accepted by Congress in 1790. Later, Congress gave some of Virginia’s land back. (The caged stones marking the original parameters of the federal district still can be seen in Northern Virginia.)

Not only does the Constitution not give the federal district a voting member in either house, it created the District precisely to be a non-state under the authority of the states represented in Congress. Article I, Section 2, specifies that members of the House are to be chosen “by the People of the several states.” Likewise, Article I, Section 3, refers to a Senate composed of two senators “from each state.” The makeup of these houses was a delicate balance, and it was a primary focus of the Constitutional Convention.

While the courts have recognized that Congress could give the District many of the same institutions and procedural rights as states, they have never suggested or ruled that Congress can create a new, fully voting member of Congress without a constitutional amendment. Indeed, when Congress wanted to give D.C. residents a voice in the election of the president, it passed the 23rd Amendment, ratified in 1961. That change notably gave the District electoral votes to which it “would be entitled if it were a State.”

Now, after failing in 1978 to ratify a similar amendment on voting rights for the District in both houses, voting-rights advocates want to avoid the constitutional process through a simple vote in Congress. Thus the Davis proposal becomes a celebration of contemporary politics over constitutional principle.

The way to achieve full representation for citizens of the District is to return the city to Maryland and reduce the federal enclave to the core of Capitol Hill and a few of its closest blocks. That is precisely what occurred when the Virginia land taken for the District was “retroceded” to the commonwealth in 1846.

Of course, strong political forces in the District and Maryland would not support retrocession. For one thing, Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. likely would be the last Republican to hold the governorship of that state for some time. Yet before we create hybrid constitutional entities, we should use the most obvious vehicle for giving voting rights to D.C. citizens without a constitutional amendment.

The amendment and retrocession processes are hardly easy, but, to paraphrase Davis, such constitutional considerations “are neither good nor bad, they simply are.”

Academia, Justice, Politics

The Return to Separate But Equal

The Washington Post
February 13, 2005 Sunday

HEADLINE: Good Intentions Aside, Separate Still Isn’t Equal

BYLINE: Jonathan Turley

BODY:

Few legal doctrines are more dangerous or despised than that of separate but equal rights — the philosophy that legitimized racial apartheid in the United States. It took the sacrifices of the civil rights struggle to put an end to both this doctrine and the officially sanctioned segregation that it justified.

Yet only months after the nation celebrated the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education — the landmark Supreme Court decision that struck down the doctrine as unconstitutional — some public and private institutions are again dabbling in separate but equal policies.

Two examples highlight this insidious trend. The first comes in the very area in which the battle for civil rights was waged most fiercely decades ago — the schools. It involves a New York City high school created specifically for gay and lesbian students two years ago.The second concerns the California prison system, whose 25-year policy of strict racial segregation of incoming prisoners has been challenged in a case now pending before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Both plans are being vigorously defended on pragmatic grounds — arguments long used by segregationists. From the court’s first articulation of the doctrine in 1896, separate but equal was always an exercise of pragmatism over principle. Rather than confront racial animus, society chose to yield to it — to achieve the appearance of racial coexistence through racial separation. While there are clearly differences between the old segregationists and the new (particularly in terms of their motives), there remain striking similarities in their methods.

New York’s Harvey Milk High School was created with the best possible intentions. Named for the assassinated San Francisco gay rights leader, it was meant to provide a sanctuary for gay and lesbian students who face tremendous pressures and even violence in many schools.

Gay rights activists have long modeled their work on the civil rights movement. But such civil rights leaders as Martin Luther King Jr. and Thurgood Marshall steadfastly refused to accept segregation in public schools — even though thousands of black students faced violence in desegregated systems. They understood that, to be truly equal, blacks had to be assimilated into every aspect of American life, even if the objective could only be reached after a period of painful confrontation.

Much like the integration of black students into white schools, the rise of a new generation of openly proud gay and lesbian students has led to greater tensions in New York schools. The city’s response was to essentially remove the victims and call it an act of reform. Mayor Michael Bloomberg defended the policy on the grounds that a separate school “lets them get an education without having to worry.” Yet, in classic civil rights terms, it is hard to see how removing gay students is any more a solution to homophobic violence in New York schools than removing James Meredith would have been a solution to racial violence at the University of Mississippi.

Harvey Milk — or Gay High, as it is often called — has become a lesson in the unintended consequences of segregation. Its creation reinforces the stereotype of gay students as fundamentally different and in need of special treatment. Some have suggested that the $3.2 million spent to establish the school could be better used to create a systemwide program of counseling and education for all students on the issues of sexual orientation and discrimination. In a city with roughly 300,000 public high school students, Harvey Milk’s 100-student capacity can handle only a small fraction of the city’s gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender teenagers. The remainder must deal with the stigma of a segregated group and predictable taunts that they should “go to Harvey Milk,” where they belong.

On America’s other coast, California provides a second example of a separate but equal policy. The state prison has sought to control violence and reduce gang activity by temporarily segregating incoming prisoners on the basis of race. Hispanic prisoners from Southern California are separated from those from the north; Japanese and Chinese inmates are kept apart; and smaller groups — Laotians, Vietnamese, Cambodians and Filipinos — are segregated as well.

Other large states such as Illinois and New York face similar gang demographics, but none has adopted this sort of automatic segregation. California’s policy of yielding to racism rather than fighting it began almost three decades ago with small concessions, and escalated into a systemwide policy of apartheid for convicts entering any prison. In 1999, when tensions between northern and southern Hispanics erupted into riots at Pelican Bay State Prison, the standard response of corrections professionals elsewhere would have been to crack down on the inmates with a policy of zero tolerance of violence. Instead, California solved the problem by sending each group to its own prison, where it could reign as the dominant Hispanic gang.

Despite the fact that this racial segregation policy has been in place for 25 years, California prisons continue to convulse with racial violence. In 2002, there were about 7,000 incidents of assault and battery and seven deaths — the vast majority linked to racial gangs.

Officials insist that the violence would be worse without segregation for new prisoners. The federal appellate court in San Francisco agreed last year, rejecting a challenge from Garrison Johnson, a black prisoner who refused to join a gang and felt more threatened in a segregated environment. Using a test heavily weighted in favor of the prison, the court demanded that Johnson prove the impossible — that violence would not occur in cells if the policy were lifted. Officials insist that they are just dealing with the realities of racial gangs and their mutual hostility. One prison official observed that “if we have a Northern Hispanic with a Southern Hispanic, they already have a conflict before they come to prison” and the best thing is to simply give them their own space. It is the very logic that the Supreme Court used when it created the separate but equal doctrine in Plessy v. Ferguson, saying the Constitution did not require “a commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either.” Integration, the court said then, would have to be “the result of natural affinities, a mutual appreciation of each other’s merits and the voluntary consent of individuals.” It seems unlikely that the white skinheads, black Crips, and Hispanic Fresno Bulldogs will achieve “mutual appreciation” any time soon.

The decisions to embrace separate but equal policies in a high school and a prison system are telling and tragic. Both schools and prisons represent controlled environments that strive in part to shape future conduct through compelled behavior and observation. High schools are the last such environment before most individuals join the larger society — they are the critical forum to teach not just basic curricular skills but basic citizenship skills. Removing gay and lesbian students allows prejudices and intolerance to continue unnoticed and unaddressed, permitting hateful students to become hateful adults.

Prisons are populated by certifiably asocial individuals, who failed to learn basic social principles and values. As a controlled and supervised environment, the prison is supposed to reinforce social rules of conduct through compulsory measures. The segregation policies of the California prisons not only leave racist and violent impulses unaddressed, they actually reinforce those impulses by yielding to them. A segregated prison is fertile ground for gang recruitment.

Equally disturbing is the growing level of “self-segregation” in institutions where there is no claim of racial violence or intolerance. Some colleges and universities now hold official and separate graduation ceremonies for certain minority groups; a growing number have created separate housing aimed specifically at minorities. The University of Pennsylvania houses almost one-quarter of its African American students at the W.E.B. Du Bois College House, and other schools including the University of Michigan and Dartmouth College have similar options. In a rhetorical echo of the Plessy decision, the segregated dormitories at Dartmouth are called “affinity houses.”

While many of these are voluntary choices by the students, such self-segregation still frames the academic experience in at least partially racial terms. This lesson was not lost on one Latino student at Amherst College, who was quoted in a report by the New York Civil Rights Coalition as saying: “Before I came to Amherst, I wasn’t thinking about race or class or gender or sexual orientation, I was just thinking about people wanting to learn.”

The resurrection of separate but equal is not some reflection of its inherent truth or merit. Rather, it is a reflection of a society that has increasingly favored the most expedient over the most ethical means of addressing contemporary problems. The separate but equal doctrine was the very scourge of the civil rights movement, but it continues to have pragmatic appeal — certainly over the more abstract principle of integration. After all, principle is often quite costly while pragmatism offers at least the outward appearance of tranquility at a bargain price. However, as new citizens walk out of places like the New York schools and California prisons, society may rediscover not just the convenience but the costs of separate but equal programs.

Congress, Justice, Politics

Rep. William Jefferson and the Presumption of Innocence

June 7, 2007 Thursday
SECTION: GUEST OBSERVER

LENGTH: 1188 words

HEADLINE: Jefferson Deserves Presumption Of Innocence

BYLINE: Jonathan Turley

BODY:

The 16-count indictment of Rep. William Jefferson (D-La.) this week has produced a spasm of legislative proposals and speeches calling for his expulsion from the House. Frankly, as a longtime critic of Congressional ethics rules, I never thought I would be arguing against an effort to purge or punish an unethical member. However, expelling Jefferson would violate core constitutional principles and likely trigger an intense legal fight. Even Members of Congress deserve a presumption of innocence and their “jury of peers” must remain fellow citizens, not fellow politicians.

Many of us have remarked on the strength of the evidence against Jefferson, including his famous frozen asset problem of the $90,000 found in his freezer. The 95-page indictment details 11 alleged bribery and fraud conspiracies that stretch across Africa.

Yet the merits of the Jefferson indictment are irrelevant to this debate. Expelling a Member before a conviction puts politicians in the role of a jury – meting out punishment in a politically charged environment. With the exception of the carefully structured impeachment proceedings, the framers did not foresee such a role for Members. It would be a dangerous precedent if a majority could declare a colleague presumptively guilty and toss him or her from Congress.

Expulsion before trial also is grossly unfair for a Member who is forced to defend his name in simultaneous proceedings before the courts and Congress. Putting aside the heavy financial burden, Congressional hearings could compromise privileged information or force a Member to waive constitutional rights to make a compelling case against expulsion.

Congress has long recognized those dangers and waited for the judicial system to reach its own conclusions. For that reason, the House waited until 2002 to expel then-Rep. James Traficant (Ohio), who was convicted on corruption charges. The only prior expulsions concerned two Members who were expelled at the beginning of the Civil War in 1861 as traitors.

Ironically, some of the loudest calls are now coming from Republicans who fought efforts of expulsion or punishment in the previous Congress after the indictments of former Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) and former Rep. Bob Ney (R-Ohio). Yet, they are not alone. Many embarrassed Democrats supported stripping Jefferson of his powerful committee positions before his indictment and now support an expedited process that could lead to expulsion.

History has shown that public assumptions of guilt often fall short in an actual court of law. Various Members have been unsuccessfully investigated or even prosecuted. Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-Fla.) was acquitted of charges of corruption as a federal judge. While some denounced that verdict, Hastings has now served in the House for 15 years and is viewed by many as someone who has served with distinction.

The Hastings case is a useful point of comparison. Congress waited to impeach Hastings until after his trial. It did impeach despite his acquittal. However, there is a great difference between removing a judge and removing a Representative. Under Article III, federal judges “hold their Offices during good Behaviour.” While the Hastings impeachment was controversial because of his acquittal, it generally was accepted that Congress could impeach him under this authority.

Conversely, it would have been shocking for Congress to try to bar Hastings from service in the legislative branch based on the same evidence.

To expel a Member is to negate the votes of citizens who have a right to select their own representative, regardless of the views of other politicians. In Jefferson’s case, his constituents returned him to office after the details of the investigation were made public. Despite national calls for his ouster, he won 57 percent of the vote in his re-election in November.

The framers were adamant in restricting the authority of Congress to engage in selective pruning of its ranks. During the Constitutional Convention, the framers made reference to a contemporary controversy over the expulsion of John Wilkes from Parliament. Wilkes had publicly attacked the peace treaty with France and, in doing so, earned the ire of Crown and Parliament. After he was convicted and jailed for sedition, Parliament moved to declare him ineligible for service in the legislature. He served anyway, and eventually Parliament rescinded the legislative effort to disqualify him.

The framers feared that, unless Congress was prevented from manipulating its membership, history would repeat itself. Citing the Wilkes case as “worthy of our attention,” James Madison warned that if Congress could engage in such manipulation it would “subvert the Constitution.”

Likewise, Alexander Hamilton noted that “[t]he qualifications of the persons who may choose or be chosen … are defined and fixed in the Constitution, and are unalterable by the legislature.”

This history has helped courts understand the meaning of the Qualifications Clause of Article I, Section 2, which references state laws as setting qualifications for Members. Despite this language and the authority of Congress to punish its own Members, the Supreme Court has stressed that neither the states nor Congress can manipulate qualifications to exclude politicians. As the court noted in U.S. Term Limits v. Thornton, the framers feared that, if the membership of Congress could be manipulated, Congress could become “a self perpetuating body to the detriment of the new Republic.”

At least Wilkes had the benefit of a trial and had served time for his alleged crime. Expelling a Member before conviction would allow such manipulation by majority vote based on popular sentiment or political convenience – an obvious danger when our Congress is divided so closely between the parties. These dangers are magnified in a Congress that is now claiming the unprecedented right to create new voting Members. The House recently passed legislation that would, for the first time in history, create a new type of voting Member in the House – giving the District of Columbia a voting representative despite the fact that it is not a state. With the expulsion effort, Congress would not only be asserting the right to create new voting Members for federal enclaves but also the right to expel other Members suspected of crimes.

Politics ultimately may trump principle on this question. In a Congress under intense public criticism for its failure to pass meaningful ethics reforms, Jefferson has become a useful object lesson for Members to demonstrate their commitment to good government. Suddenly, the House looks like a Claude Rains convention with 435 Members practicing their “shocked, shocked” sound bites.

Jefferson recently resigned his only remaining committee position on the Small Business panel. He has been marginalized and vilified – for good reason. However, the House would do far greater damage to its institution if it yields to the temptation to pronounce guilt before a colleague has had his day in court.

Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro professor of public interest law at George Washington University.

Congress, Justice, Politics

Rep. William Jefferson and the Presumption of Innocence

June 7, 2007 Thursday
SECTION: GUEST OBSERVER

LENGTH: 1188 words

HEADLINE: Jefferson Deserves Presumption Of Innocence

BYLINE: Jonathan Turley

BODY:

The 16-count indictment of Rep. William Jefferson (D-La.) this week has produced a spasm of legislative proposals and speeches calling for his expulsion from the House. Frankly, as a longtime critic of Congressional ethics rules, I never thought I would be arguing against an effort to purge or punish an unethical member. However, expelling Jefferson would violate core constitutional principles and likely trigger an intense legal fight. Even Members of Congress deserve a presumption of innocence and their “jury of peers” must remain fellow citizens, not fellow politicians.

Many of us have remarked on the strength of the evidence against Jefferson, including his famous frozen asset problem of the $90,000 found in his freezer. The 95-page indictment details 11 alleged bribery and fraud conspiracies that stretch across Africa.

Yet the merits of the Jefferson indictment are irrelevant to this debate. Expelling a Member before a conviction puts politicians in the role of a jury – meting out punishment in a politically charged environment. With the exception of the carefully structured impeachment proceedings, the framers did not foresee such a role for Members. It would be a dangerous precedent if a majority could declare a colleague presumptively guilty and toss him or her from Congress.

Expulsion before trial also is grossly unfair for a Member who is forced to defend his name in simultaneous proceedings before the courts and Congress. Putting aside the heavy financial burden, Congressional hearings could compromise privileged information or force a Member to waive constitutional rights to make a compelling case against expulsion.

Congress has long recognized those dangers and waited for the judicial system to reach its own conclusions. For that reason, the House waited until 2002 to expel then-Rep. James Traficant (Ohio), who was convicted on corruption charges. The only prior expulsions concerned two Members who were expelled at the beginning of the Civil War in 1861 as traitors.

Ironically, some of the loudest calls are now coming from Republicans who fought efforts of expulsion or punishment in the previous Congress after the indictments of former Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) and former Rep. Bob Ney (R-Ohio). Yet, they are not alone. Many embarrassed Democrats supported stripping Jefferson of his powerful committee positions before his indictment and now support an expedited process that could lead to expulsion.

History has shown that public assumptions of guilt often fall short in an actual court of law. Various Members have been unsuccessfully investigated or even prosecuted. Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-Fla.) was acquitted of charges of corruption as a federal judge. While some denounced that verdict, Hastings has now served in the House for 15 years and is viewed by many as someone who has served with distinction.

The Hastings case is a useful point of comparison. Congress waited to impeach Hastings until after his trial. It did impeach despite his acquittal. However, there is a great difference between removing a judge and removing a Representative. Under Article III, federal judges “hold their Offices during good Behaviour.” While the Hastings impeachment was controversial because of his acquittal, it generally was accepted that Congress could impeach him under this authority.

Conversely, it would have been shocking for Congress to try to bar Hastings from service in the legislative branch based on the same evidence.

To expel a Member is to negate the votes of citizens who have a right to select their own representative, regardless of the views of other politicians. In Jefferson’s case, his constituents returned him to office after the details of the investigation were made public. Despite national calls for his ouster, he won 57 percent of the vote in his re-election in November.

The framers were adamant in restricting the authority of Congress to engage in selective pruning of its ranks. During the Constitutional Convention, the framers made reference to a contemporary controversy over the expulsion of John Wilkes from Parliament. Wilkes had publicly attacked the peace treaty with France and, in doing so, earned the ire of Crown and Parliament. After he was convicted and jailed for sedition, Parliament moved to declare him ineligible for service in the legislature. He served anyway, and eventually Parliament rescinded the legislative effort to disqualify him.

The framers feared that, unless Congress was prevented from manipulating its membership, history would repeat itself. Citing the Wilkes case as “worthy of our attention,” James Madison warned that if Congress could engage in such manipulation it would “subvert the Constitution.”

Likewise, Alexander Hamilton noted that “[t]he qualifications of the persons who may choose or be chosen … are defined and fixed in the Constitution, and are unalterable by the legislature.”

This history has helped courts understand the meaning of the Qualifications Clause of Article I, Section 2, which references state laws as setting qualifications for Members. Despite this language and the authority of Congress to punish its own Members, the Supreme Court has stressed that neither the states nor Congress can manipulate qualifications to exclude politicians. As the court noted in U.S. Term Limits v. Thornton, the framers feared that, if the membership of Congress could be manipulated, Congress could become “a self perpetuating body to the detriment of the new Republic.”

At least Wilkes had the benefit of a trial and had served time for his alleged crime. Expelling a Member before conviction would allow such manipulation by majority vote based on popular sentiment or political convenience – an obvious danger when our Congress is divided so closely between the parties. These dangers are magnified in a Congress that is now claiming the unprecedented right to create new voting Members. The House recently passed legislation that would, for the first time in history, create a new type of voting Member in the House – giving the District of Columbia a voting representative despite the fact that it is not a state. With the expulsion effort, Congress would not only be asserting the right to create new voting Members for federal enclaves but also the right to expel other Members suspected of crimes.

Politics ultimately may trump principle on this question. In a Congress under intense public criticism for its failure to pass meaningful ethics reforms, Jefferson has become a useful object lesson for Members to demonstrate their commitment to good government. Suddenly, the House looks like a Claude Rains convention with 435 Members practicing their “shocked, shocked” sound bites.

Jefferson recently resigned his only remaining committee position on the Small Business panel. He has been marginalized and vilified – for good reason. However, the House would do far greater damage to its institution if it yields to the temptation to pronounce guilt before a colleague has had his day in court.

Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro professor of public interest law at George Washington University.

Justice, Lawyering, Politics

The Criminalization of America

Published March 2007

Texas Rep. Wayne Smith is tired of hearing about parents missing meetings with their children’s teachers. His proposed solution is simple: Prosecute such parents as criminals. In Louisiana, state Sen. Derrick Shepherd is tired of seeing teenagers wearing popular low-rider pants that show their undergarments — so he would like to criminally charge future teenagers who are caught “riding low.”

Across the USA, legislators are criminalizing everything from spitting on a school bus to speaking on a cellphone while driving. Criminalizing bad behavior has become the rage among politicians, who view such action as a type of legislative exclamation point demonstrating the seriousness of their cause. As a result, new crimes are proliferating at an alarming rate, and we risk becoming a nation of criminals where carelessness or even rudeness is enough to secure a criminal record.

There was a time when having a criminal record meant something. Indeed, it was the social stigma or shame of such charges that deterred many people from “a life of crime.” In both England and the USA, there was once a sharp distinction between criminal and negligent conduct; the difference between the truly wicked and the merely stupid.

Legislators, however, discovered that criminalization was a wonderful way to outdo one’s opponents on popular issues. Thus, when deadbeat dads became an issue, legislators rushed to make missing child payments a crime rather than rely on civil judgments. When cellphone drivers became a public nuisance, a new crime was born. Unnecessary horn honking, speaking loudly on a cellphone and driving without a seat belt are only a few of the new crimes. If you care enough about child support, littering, or abandoned pets, you are expected to care enough to make their abuse a crime.

High crimes

Consider the budding criminal career of Kay Leibrand. The 61-year-old grandmother lived a deceptively quiet life in Palo Alto, Calif., until the prosecutors outed her as a habitual horticultural offender. It appears that she allowed her hedge bushes to grow more than 2 feet high — a crime in the city. Battling cancer, Leibrand had allowed her shrubbery to grow into a criminal enterprise. (After her arraignment and shortly before her jury trial, she was allowed to cut down her bushes and settle the case.)

Of course, it is better to be a criminal horticulturalist than a serial snacker. In 2000, on her way home from her junior high school in Washington, D.C., 12-year-old Ansche Hedgepeth grabbed some french fries and ate them as she went into the train station. In Washington, it is a crime to “consume food or drink” in a Metrorail facility. An undercover officer arrested her, searched her and confiscated her shoelaces.

Running out of adult targets, many state laws pursue the toddler and preteen criminal element. In Texas, children have been charged for chewing gum or, in one case, simply removing the lid from a fire alarm. Dozens of kids have been charged with everything from terrorism to criminal threats for playing with toy guns or drawing violent doodles in school.

In the federal system, Congress has been in a virtual criminalization frenzy. There are more than 4,000 crimes and roughly 10,000 regulations with criminal penalties in the federal system alone. Just last year, Congress made it a crime to sell horse meat for human consumption — a common practice in Europe where it is considered a delicacy. Congress has also criminalized such things as disruptive conduct by animal activists and using the image of Smokey Bear or Woodsy Owl or the 4-H club insignia without authorization.

The ability to deter negligence with criminal charges has always been questioned by academics. Negligent people are, by definition, acting in a thoughtless, unpremeditated, or careless way. Nevertheless, prosecutors will often stretch laws to make a popular point — even when the perpetrators have suffered greatly and shown complete remorse.

In 2002, Kevin Kelly was charged criminally in Manassas, Va., when his daughter, less than 2 years old, was left in the family van and died of hyperthermia. With his wife in Ireland with another daughter, Kelly watched over their 12 other children. He relied on his teenage daughters to help unload the van and did not realize the mistake until it was too late.

The suggestion that people like Kelly need a criminal conviction to think about the safety of their children is absurd. Kelly was widely viewed as a loving father, who was devastated by the loss. The conviction only magnified the tragedy for this family. (Though the prosecutors sought jail time, Kelly was sentenced to seven years probation, with one day in jail a year to think about his daughter’s death.)

The cost to all of us

The criminalization of America might come as a boon for politicians, but it comes at considerable cost for citizens and society. For citizens, a criminal record can affect everything from employment to voting to child custody — not to mention ruinous legal costs.

Yet, it now takes only a fleeting mistake to cross the line into criminal conduct. In Virginia, when a child accused Dawn McCann of swearing at a bus stop, she was charged criminally — as have been other people accused of the crime of public profanity.

Our insatiable desire to turn everything into a crime is creating a Gulag America with 714 incarcerated persons per 100,000 — the highest rate in the world. Millions of people are charged each year with new criminal acts that can stretch from first-degree murder to failing to shovel their sidewalks.

We can find better ways to deal with runaway bushes, castaway pets, or even potty-mouth problems. Congress and the states should create independent commissions to review their laws in order to decriminalize negligent conduct, limiting criminal charges to true crimes and true criminals. In the end, a crime means nothing if anyone can be a criminal.

Lawyering, Military, Politics

The Feres Doctrine: What Soldiers Really Need Are Lawyers

The president and Congress have been falling over themselves to pledge better care for our wounded veterans in the wake of the scandal over “squalid” conditions at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center that included mold, rats, cockroaches, rotting walls and callous treatment of patients. The president has empanelled the perfunctory “blue-ribbon commission.” The hospital walls have literally been whitewashed, so politicians can use them again as backdrops for speeches about “nothing being too good” for our troops. Yet no one is talking about the one thing that soldiers and sailors are most desperately lacking: They don’t need another spit and polish; they need lawyers.
For decades, our military members have been barred from suing for medical malpractice and other forms of negligence by the government. Whether it is a military doctor cutting off the wrong leg or a military gasoline station cutting a brake line, military personnel are not allowed to seek legal relief as other citizens can. The result is that they are victims of grotesque forms of negligence that have not been widely seen in the civilian world for more than a hundred years. In the civilian system, the threat of lawsuit serves a critical deterrence of negligence by the government, companies and others. A rational actor will avoid liability costs by taking measures to minimize accidents.

Most Americans do not know that we deny our servicemembers the basic right to sue when they are injured by negligence. They live in a type of tort-free zone where their injuries are subject to relatively minor levels of compensation. With the silent approval of Congress, we have created a system of discount citizens who become easy fodder for incompetent or even criminal actors. Indeed, killing a soldier on an operating table or in a military recreation area is a virtual bargain at a fraction of the cost of a full-value citizen.

The military’s loss of legal protections is the result of a 1950 Supreme Court ruling on a series of cases that became known collectively as the Feres Doctrine. It was named after Army Lt. Rudolph Feres, who died in a fire allegedly caused by an unsafe heating system in his New York barracks. In this and later opinions, the Supreme Court interpreted the Federal Tort Claims Act to effectively bar any tort actions by servicemembers, even though Congress exempted only “combat-related” injuries. The court unilaterally decided that even injuries in peacetime that are far removed from any combat-related function are still “incident to service.” Thus, in one of the Feres cases, a soldier was barred from suing after an Army doctor left a 30-by-18-inch towel inside him marked as property of the “Medical Department U.S. Army.”

Little deterrence

As a result of the Feres Doctrine, there is little deterrence for military negligence beyond self-regulation, bad publicity or a political scandal. Because most accidents are isolated and military personnel tend to stay within the chain of command, these are relatively low risks for military tort-feasors. Moreover, since such accidents are not litigated, there is no reliable system to determine the rate of accidents in the massive military complex. Thus, we cannot reliably compare the accident rates in recreational or medical areas with their counterparts.

The military medical system is a prime example of what happens when patients are stripped of their legal protections. The military has long had many talented and dedicated doctors and nurses. Nevertheless, it also has long been plagued by scandals involving everything from doctors without medical licenses to medical treatment that borders on the medieval. Consider a few examples from the military malpractice-free-zone:

•Lt. Cmdr. Walter Hardin spent 11 months with red lesions from his legs to his torso that a doctor classified as eczema. It was correctly diagnosed as cancer shortly before he died.

•Sailor Dawn Lambert had to have a fallopian tube removed, but military surgeons left five sponges and a plastic marking device in her abdomen. They remained there for months until resulting complications forced a second surgery to remove her other fallopian tube, leaving her infertile. She was given $66 monthly in disability pay.

•Linda Branch lost her husband while he was serving in the Air Force after he was turned away twice by a military hospital that told him his intense stomach pains was nothing more than stomach flu. He died of a bowel obstruction.

•Navy Petty Officer Joe Cragnotti went to a military hospital with pneumonia, which is treatable with antibiotics. The doctor left it untreated, then Cragnotti suffered brain damage.

•Air Force Staff Sgt. Dean Patrick Witt had appendicitis but was repeatedly misdiagnosed and sent home with some antibiotics. When he finally collapsed at home, he was rushed into surgery. He came out brain-dead. It’s alleged that a series of malpractice led to his death, including the use of a pediatric rather than an adult device to open an airway when he had trouble breathing.

When civilian doctors leave a patient paralyzed or crippled for a lifetime of care, the family members often receive millions in compensation. In the military, the families receive a couple thousand dollars a month and, you guessed it, more military medical care. Dorothy Meagher found herself carrying for her son after he went in to have a cyst removed at a Navy hospital. Her family alleged that, due to an overdose of anesthetics and the failure of a Navy doctor to immediately call for assistance, her son was left a quadriplegic.

Unanswered questions

Many families in the military never know that they were the victims of malpractice because, without discovery, there is no routine way of forcing such disclosure. For example, Army Staff Sgt. Michael McClaran had a simple surgery for acid reflux. He said he was not told that the surgeon had severed two critical nerves — the cause of chronic respiratory and digestive problems.

Feres extends beyond medical malpractice. It bars lawsuits in a vast array of activities in such areas as travel, recreation, housing, restaurants, bars and service stations — military enterprises often run in competition with civilian businesses. Thus, when a rented water ski loses its brakes or a soldier is raped at a concert, the military invokes Feres and walks away immune from its own negligence.

Liberals and conservatives on the court — such as Justices John Paul Stevens and Antonin Scalia — have denounced the court’s continued use of this doctrine, as have dozens of lower court judges. This doctrine has done more harm to military personnel and families than any court-made doctrine in the history of this country.

Congress must amend the Federal Tort Claims Act to put an end to this disastrous doctrine. We can no longer afford to leave our servicemembers in the hands of politicians who express shock every 10 years as new scandals regularly emerge. Some lawmakers knew of the appalling conditions at Walter Reed but took no legislative action.

The fact is that military hospitals are often treated as little more than a reservoir of human props for political photo ops. The only other part of Reed that members of Congress routinely visit is the VIP floor located on the top floor. Known as the Eisenhower Executive Nursing Suite, it’s where high-ranking politicians, jurists, generals, admirals and diplomats are treated. Of course, the politicians, judges and foreign dignitaries are allowed to sue for any negligence.

Former senator Bob Dole, who co-chairs the new blue-ribbon commission, was treated there and recently noted that he never saw anything to complain about. That is not surprising since, unlike the vermin-infested and mold-covered rooms of wounded soldiers, politicians are given suites that include fine carpets, antique furniture, separate dining rooms and fine china.

If members of Congress truly want the best for our troops, they should start by giving them the same legal protections that the members themselves enjoy. No one is asking for Congress to treat our soldiers as high-value VIPs, but simply full-valued citizens with the same protections as the people they are defending around the world.

Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University and a member of USA TODAY’s board of contributors. He is the author of a three-part study of the military, including its legal and medical systems.

Columns, Politics

Peter Agre and Al Franken and the Minnesota Senate Race

For those who believe that American democracy is at a crisis point, there is no more vivid example than Minnesota, where comedian Al Franken has launched a full-throated effort to unseat Republican Sen. Norm Coleman. It is fast-food politics at its artery-clogging worst: instant gratification and no nutritional value. Yet, Franken has both personal wealth and a host of wealthy donors at his call — pushing out virtually all competitors. While Minnesota has long prided itself on favoring underdogs, the day may have passed when an idea-rich, cash-poor candidate can secure a major office.
Democracy becomes a noble lie when money bars most citizens from elective office. Candidates must now pony up millions to have a chance for statewide office, creating a type of oligarchy where offices are restricted to a small elite. The closing of politics to most citizens has profound implications for the country. There was a time when politics attracted certifiable geniuses such as Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and Daniel Webster.

The threshold barriers to new voices entering our political process were evident during a recent conversation that I had with Nobel Prize winner Peter Agre. A Minnesota native, Agre revealed his interest in running but said he was told by state politicos that, in opposing Franken, he is a day late and a dollar short — well, $9 million to be specific. That was the amount that he would need to be “credible.” Despite a lack of money, Agre still intends to run as either a Democrat or independent.

Money machines

The $9 million could prove a conservative estimate. The average cost of the 10 most expensive Senate campaigns doubled in four years from $17 million in 2002 to almost $35 million in 2006. The 2008 presidential campaigns have already triggered their own records. In the 2000 Senate race in Minnesota, lawyer Mike Ciresi (who is also running in 2008) put up $5 million of his own money in his losing bid.

To win, a candidate needs buzz and bucks, and Franken — who has raised $1.4 million as mere seed money — has an endless supply of both. He thrilled bored voters by calling Coleman “one of the administration’s leading butt boys.”

Conversely, Agre does not have much to put on the table beyond a Nobel Prize for chemistry and global work on behalf of academic freedom. In today’s politics, that gives him about the same odds as Albert Schweitzer running against Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Of course, brilliance is no guarantee that Agre would make a good senator, and he would have to prove that he could appeal to people beyond Minnesota Mensa members. Nonetheless, there is something fundamentally wrong when a man such as Agre is considered political roadkill. Even in a state that once embraced underdog candidates such as professional wrestler Jesse Ventura (who became governor) and college professor Paul Wellstone (the late U.S. senator), money now confines politics to the ranks of rich personalities and robotic functionaries.

Obviously, money has long played a great role in politics. But the exponential rise in campaign costs belies the popular notion that anyone can become president or senator in this country.

Except for his lack of money, Agre would appear the perfect candidate. Besides instantly doubling the IQ of the Senate, Agre would be the first Nobel Prize winner for science to be elected to Congress. While the Senate has been Nobel-free for more than six decades, he would join three prior senators and one vice president (the president of the Senate) who received Nobel Peace Prizes.

Born in Minnesota and a former Eagle Scout to boot, Agre seems to have walked off the set of A Prairie Home Companion: milking cows in the summer and eating lutefisk in the winter — a vile codfish soaked in lye that only a snow-crazed Norwegian can swallow with success. Part of a large farming and working-class family, Agre went to Theodore Roosevelt High School in Minneapolis (with another student named James Janos — later known as Jesse Ventura). His father was the chairman of the chemistry department at St. Olaf College. Growing up, Linus Pauling — two-time Nobel laureate for chemistry and peace — stayed at their home, unaware that the gangly kid running around would inherit his Nobel Prize 49 years later.

Clear contrast

Agre’s announcement would create a wild contrast for Minnesota voters. On one side, there is Franken, whose contributions to humanity include such books as Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right and Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot. On the other side is Agre, who has quietly served medicine and human rights for decades around the world. His published works include scientific breakthroughs credited for having “ushered in a golden age of biochemical, physiological and genetic studies … at the molecular level.”

Agre could present an equally sharp contrast with Coleman on issues such as stem cells. Coleman has often discussed his tragic loss of two children to a rare genetic disorder as shaping his opposition to most stem cell research. Agre’s loss of his 3-month-old daughter, Lydia, to cerebral palsy helped shape his views in favor of such research.

The question is whether Agre will have a chance to make his case. The Man from Mensa could be the ultimate test of whether merit still plays a significant role in U.S. politics or whether money alone dictates our choice of leaders.

Of course, the very notion of a Nobel laureate joining the less-than-cerebral ranks of the U.S. Senate is something too much to hope for. It would be a scene reminiscent of when John F. Kennedy welcomed Nobel Prize winners to the White House in 1962 and observed, “Never has there been so much collective intelligence in this room, since Jefferson dined here alone.”

Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University and a member of USA TODAY’s board of contributors.