Crime, Punishment, and Stupidity in New Jersey

"Jailing Leona Beldini wasn't easy, judge's scolding was minimal," Jersey Journal (June 17, 2010):

"As you from crimes would pardon'd be, Let your indulgence set me free."
Shakespeare, The Tempest
Brian Neary, the Hoboken criminal defense lawyer known for courtroom antics and merciless cross-examinations, tried a different approach the other day to keep his convicted client out of jail. He quoted Shakespeare.
It didn't work.
Former Jersey City deputy mayor Leona Beldini got three years.
Of course, the sentence could have been worse, so maybe his recital did move federal Judge Jose Linares.
Linares, clearly uncomfortable about jailing a 75-year-old with a heart condition, imposed a sentence below federal guidelines that called for 41 months and also spared her the usual harsh criticisms some judges heap on convicted clients.
The worst he said was "any reasonable person" should have seen Solomon Dwek, the corrupt government witness who brought her down, "was a crook." He was right.
If stupidity were a capital crime, the politicians nailed by Dwek would all have been hanged by now.
But Neary does us a favor by citing these lines from Shakespeare because their meaning - from a soliloquy by Prospero, a wronged but forgiving man - has been debated for centuries as among the Bard's most ambiguous.
As ambiguous, really, as this corruption sting that brought Beldini to prison gates for the crime of playing a role - an ambiguous one - in obtaining $20,000 in contributions to the campaign of a mayor, Jerramiah Healy, who was already awash in $3 million in campaign funds and didn't need it. A mayor who was never charged.
[snip, snip]
After he ordered Beldini jailed, Linares, who has said he hates sentencings, walked through a crowd in the lobby on his way to lunch. Someone called out, "How are you feeling, judge?"
"Not good," said Linares. Ambiguously.

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The dynamic evidence page
It's here: the law of evidence on Spindle Law. See also this post and this post.

Stanley Bond: Potent Evidence of the Value of One Type of Criminal Punishment

When I was a law student -- I was a law student or the equivalent (e.g., "visiting scholar") for many years -- I questioned many things (although I was and remain politically inactive). I even questioned the value of criminal punishment.

In 1971-1972 I was studying at Harvard Law School for my LL.M. degree. Sometime in the fall of 1971 I ran into Kent Nelson. I had known him at Yale College. When I saw him in 1971, he was running an educational program for prisoners at the Massachusetts penitentiary at Walpole. I agreed to give a talk there -- on Christmas Eve. I gave the talk there to a small group of prisoners. I felt very sorry for the people there; although a few of them gave me a hard time, they seemed to be ordinary human beings and I didn't understand why they should be in prison.

One of the people there who gave me a "hard time" was Stanley Bond. Stanley Bond was a very bright fellow. He was also one of a group of people -- a group that included Susan Saxe, Katherine Ann Power, and William Gilday -- who planned a bank robbery that ended in the death of Walter A. Schroeder, a guard at the bank. (The shooter, William Gilday, was one of the inmates I spoke to and with on December 24, 1971. Power and Saxe were political radicals who were apprehended only years later.)

I left the penitentiary at Walpole that Christmas Eve feeling awfully sorry for the inmates there and being fairly convinced that the society that kept them there was a cruel one. However, six months later -- in June 1972 -- Bond killed himself when the bomb he was building prematurely exploded. This incident made me reconsider my doubts that criminal punishment does any good.

In the fall of 1972 I took my first tenure-track teaching job. I taught criminal law.

The good citizens of Walpole later persuaded the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to remove "Walpole" from the title of the penitentiary. The place is now called "MCI-Cedar Junction."

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The dynamic evidence page

It's here: the law of evidence on Spindle Law. See also this post and this post.