Articles by Brad R Schlesinger

Bal Harbour, Florida is a small village of just 2,574 people, with a police force compromised of 27 officers. Yet, one not so small thing about Bal Harbour is the amount of money the police department seizes through civil asset forfeiture. In fact, the Justice Department is actually investigating this practice by the village’s police. The Miami Herald reported that federal “agents have frozen millions that Bal Harbour helped confiscate under a program that allows police to seize the riches of c...

Credit: bangstyle.com In just over seven weeks, voters will decide the fate of the three 2012 state marijuana initiatives to legalize possession and use of the plant for adults in Colorado, Oregon, and Washington State. As the polling data available for these measures continue to warrant optimism among those in favor of ending marijuana prohibition, it is no surprise that nine former heads of the Drug Enforcement Agency recently wrote a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder encouraging him to ...

Photo: LiveScience.com When the topic of drug policy is debated and discussed, the conversation is typically centered on the criminal justice aspect of drug prohibition-- and for good reason. As a result of drug prohibition there’s been a massive increase in the number of individuals incarcerated and arrested for drug crimes over the past thirty years; civil liberties and the Fourth Amendment are seemingly becoming a relic of the past due to asset forfeiture laws, stop and frisk, and Supreme C...

As a constitutional republic, the US system of government is designed on the principles of federalism. In our federalist system the federal government is one of enumerated powers and those powers not explicitly granted to the federal government are reserved to the states. The framers of the Constitution established this system through the Tenth Amendment, which reads: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the stat...

Wikimedia Commons Dating back about 400 years is the bedrock common law principle of criminal law that a crime essentially consists of two elements -- the guilty act itself (actus reus) and the guilty mind of the individual offender (mens rea). The mens rea requirement is essentially the mental aspect of criminal liability. In order to be guilty of most crimes a defendant must have committed the offense while under a certain mental state, such as when his conscious object or purpose is to cause...

As recently reported, New Jersey’s Governor Chris Christie did what so many politicians are still unwilling to do: He called the War on Drugs a failure. In a speech at the Brookings Institution, Christie claimed that despite the benevolent intentions behind forty plus years of the drug war, the policy is ultimately a disaster: "We're warehousing addicted people every day in state prisons in New Jersey, giving them no treatment," Christie said during his speech. To belabor the point, the governor...

Back in April, The New York Times ran an article purporting what they considered to be a disturbing new trend of increases in the number of police officers being killed. The article points out how 72 police were killed in 2011, representing a 25 percent increase from the year before, and a 75 percent increase from 2008. An accompanying chart shows the number of officer deaths per year going back to 2000, and aside from 2001 (which includes those police officers killed during September 11) and 20...

Last Thursday the Supreme Court handed down its opinion in the crack pipeline case of Dorsey v. United States. The issue presented was whether the Fair Sentencing Act’s (the “FSA”) new, lower mandatory minimums apply to defendants whose crack offenses were committed prior to the passing of the FSA, but sentenced after the law passed. In a victory for criminal justice and sentencing reform, the Court sided 5-4 with the defendants, overturning the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals and holding that ...

Last Thursday the Supreme Court handed down its opinion in the crack pipeline case of Dorsey v. United States. The issue presented was whether the Fair Sentencing Act’s (the “FSA”) new, lower mandatory minimums apply to defendants whose crack offenses were committed prior to the passing of the FSA, but sentenced after the law passed. In a victory for criminal justice and sentencing reform, the Court sided 5-4 with the defendants, overturning the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals and holding that ...