By Ross Parker ticklethewire.com The Journal of the American Medical Association reported recently about a forty-year study in Australia about the effect on gun-related crime by the 1997 major gun law reform. The study compared the number of mass fatal shooting incidents, rates of fatal shooting incidents, firearm deaths, and firearm-caused suicides for the periods…
By Ross Parker ticklethewire.com Have the frenzied media coverage of incidents involving police shootings of African Americans and the protests of Black Lives Matter activists affected the Supreme Court? The Court has not addressed a case involving race and the criminal justice system in some time, but two such cases are scheduled for oral argument…
By Ross Parker ticklethewire.com The Supreme Court opens the 2016-2017 term on Monday with only 8 Justices because of the death last spring of Justice Scalia. The conventional wisdom is that the Court will do its best to avoid the confusion of 4-4 voting splits by postponing controversial cases another Justice is confirmed. Of course…
By Ross Parker ticklethewire.com Overlooked in the firestorm reaction to DEA’s decisions last week declining to re-schedule marijuana was its decision not to alter the enforcement policy on industrial hemp cultivation and sale. To me this was a lost opportunity to bring some rationality and sense to one small part of the Cannabis quagmire which…
Ross Parker was chief of the criminal division in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Detroit for 8 years and worked as an AUSA for 28 in that office. By Ross Parker ticklethewire.com The Supremes spent a very busy June and completed opinions on six difficult criminal cases, as well as three important civil cases and…
By Ross Parker ticklethewire.com The Supreme Court issued four opinions in criminal cases in May, which leaves nine more cases to be decided in June before the end of the 2015-2016 term. The split in the vote for the cases was 8-0, 7-1, 5-3, and 5-3, with the Court siding with the government argument in…
By Ross Parker ticklethewire.com The Supreme Court will follow the usual pattern of not hearing oral argument in May and June. But that doesn’t mean that the Justices are loafing in their chambers. Far from it. There are per curiam opinions to write, individual opinions to author and certiorari petitions to consider. So far this…
By Ross Parker ticklethewire.com The DEA announced recently a re-examination of the Schedule I classification of marijuana. This most restrictive classification is reserved for substances which have no accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse. Marijuana’s classification in the federal system is anomalous considering that 23 states have legalized it for medical purposes….
