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With the conviction of elite track coach Trevor Graham, the government scored yet another victory in it' war on elision. Graham joins a legion of high-profile defendants (Scooter Libby, Lil' Kim, Martha Stewart, etc.) who have been prosecuted and convicted not for the conduct at the center of the investigation but for being less than fully ...

The impending sentencing of Wesley Snipes on his misdemeanor tax convictions nicely frames an interesting question about celebrity and sentencing.In celebration of Tax Day, the government filed its sentencing memo today, urging (not surprisingly) that the judge send Snipes to jail for the full three years he's facing. There are plenty of reasons a ...

Michael Brick’s ambitious piece in today’s New York Times about the wide ranging narcotics prosecutions in the housing projects of Brooklyn omitted some important details which suggest that the “historic conspiracy” referred to in the Brooklyn District Attorney’s press releases was not the series of drug transactions being prosecuted under the ...

In the layman's view of the criminal-justice system, defendants go to trial, are convicted or acquitted of certain charges, and if convicted, are sentenced for the offenses. But try to explain the reality of being sentenced for acquitted conduct, and you're likely to be met with stares of astonishment. ''You mean you can go to trial, get ...

In the New York Times this week, Adam Liptak takes a long overdue and somewhat tepid look at the fuzzy math Justice Scalia used in his concurrence in Kansas v. Marsh when he concluded that ''The rate at which innocent people are convicted of felonies is less than three-hundredths of 1 percent - .027 percent, to be exact''.  Scalia sleeps well ...

I hate, once again, to be the guy to bring our blog down from the empyrean of Supreme Court analysis and that whole ''Unitary Executive'' thing, but can we talk -- just for a minute -- about what went down at Newark Airport on Tuesday when a British memoirist was denied entry to the US because, it seems his book described using lots of drugs ...

While I think Orin's right about both the outcome of Heller and the impact of the Obama talk, I am far less sanguine about the chances of a conservative base so contented that they'll stay home in any significant numbers.  There are dozens of easily fabricated social issues with which to generate conservative outrage toward morally or sexually ...

While the last episode of The Wire may not have wrapped up quite as cleanly as some closure-loving commentators would have liked, the final act of the writers-captured not on the little screen but in the pages of Time magazine-was a stunning and brazen act of courage. In the magazine last week, David Simon and his staff take dead aim at this ...