Fourth Amendment in the Digital Age - April 3, 2015

How Real is a Facebook Threat?

The Supreme Court agreed in June 2014 to hear the case of Elonis v. United States, an important First Amendment challenge that will attempt to clarify after years of ambiguity and split decisions in the lower courts the question of when threats, specifically internet threats, should be taken seriously by the law.  The case will be heard on December 1^st of this year, and will clarify whether threats of violence made on social media sites such as Facebook, should be judged by (1) whether the speaker intended to harm anyone, or (2) whether the recipient was genuinely afraid of being harmed.  Essentially, it is a decision that will decide whether the crime should be judged by the actor’s subjective intent or the target’s subjective belief.

Online death threats are becoming all too common.  Recent examples include an 11-year-old who faced death threats through Facebook over his love of hunting, a mayor whose life was threatened by his paper boy, and hundreds of Harvard students who received emails from a sender who threatened to “shoot all of you” and “kill you individually.”

Recent Issues in Using Midzolam in Executions

In late July, the United States Supreme Court lifted a stay issued by the Ninth Circuit that required the State of Arizona to provide information about its lethal injection drug cocktail to inmate Joseph Rudolph Wood.  Mr. Wood was executed that same day.  His death was characterized by reporters as taking more than two hours and he took more than 600 gasps for air.  Most executions are complete in ten or eleven minutes.  Mr. Wood’s lengthy execution comes on the heels of another lengthy execution where Mr. Dennis McGuire took more than 20 minutes to die in Ohio, and also repeatedly convulsed and fought for breath after being injected.  An inmate in Oklahoma took more than a half an hour to die in his execution.

The Trend to Disregard Immigration Detainers

Immigration detention is a topic of growing concern to Americans because of the current surge in undocumented immigrants coming to and residing in the United States. National news coverage is full of stories about the dilemma of having too many detainees and not enough beds. Undocumented immigrants can be put in detention while they are waiting for their cases to be heard. This is true for people who come to the border and ask for asylum, as well as hardened criminals who are in deportation proceedings because of their criminal convictions. The numbers are increasing, and finding resources to keep up is proving difficult.

Privileges vs. Rights in a Defendant’s Struggle to “Prove” Innocence

Evidentiary privileges purport to safeguard interests and relationships.  They arise from the rules of evidence and can bar certain pieces of evidence from being used in a trial or other judicial proceedings.  The most common and well-known privilege is the attorney-client privilege where an attorney cannot testify to the relationship between him and his client, encouraging an open and honest dialogue with clients and their attorneys.  Another example of these privileges is the marital privilege where, in the interest of keeping the marriage tranquil and conflict-free, a husband cannot testify against his wife and vice versa (although the intricacies of how exactly this works varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction).  In general, these privileges can help defendants exclude evidence arising from relationships where society has deemed communications to be private.  Understandably, these forms of evidence should be excluded at judicial proceedings, but what happens in a jurisdiction where these privileges exclude evidence that could help, or even exculpate, a defendant?  Doesn’t that defendant have the right to a fair trial and due process under the Sixth Amendment? Can privileges created under evidentiary rules really circumvent a defendant’s constitutional rights?