US SSN = Canadian SIN
From Michael Erard’s “The Strange Tale of Charlie Smoke” (Legal Affairs: November/December 2002):
… Social Insurance Number – the Canadian equivalent of a Social Security Number …
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May 2006
iSee: online map of CCTVs in Manhattan
From Patrick Keefe’s “Camera Shy” (Legal Affairs: July/August 2003):
One extralegal solution is a project called iSee. Launched several years ago, iSee is an online interactive map of the locations of surveillance cameras in Manhattan. To use iSee, you simply open the map of Manhattan and double-click on your point of departure and your destination. After a few moments of computation, iSee generates the “path of least surveillance.”
iSee can be accessed through the website of the organization which created it, the so-called Institute of Applied Autonomy. IAA is a collective of artists, engineers, and scientists who design technologies for the “burgeoning market” of “cultural insurrection.” The organization presents itself as a tech-savvy civil libertarian answer to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a shadowy R&D wing of the Pentagon. DARPA has recently been in the news for developing the Terrorist Information Awareness project, headed by John Poindexter, which would monitor the everyday transactions of American citizens. Whereas DARPA uses what IAA calls “tools of repression” to take your autonomy away, IAA answers with another set of tools that are intended to give you your autonomy back. …
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In Britain, you can see footage of you captured by CCTV
From Patrick Keefe’s “Camera Shy” (Legal Affairs: July/August 2003):
In London, a city even more intensively scrutinized by closed-circuit television cameras than New York, citizens can at least retrieve copies of footage taken of them through a provision in Britain’s Data Protection Act. Americans have no such legal recourse. …
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Your job? Waiting in line for others.
From Brian Montopoli’s “The Queue Crew: Waiting in line for a living” (Legal Affairs: January/February 2004):
ON CAPITOL HILL, a placeholder is someone paid by the hour to wait in line. When legislative committees hold hearings, they reserve seats for Congressional staffers, for the press, and for the general public. The general-public seats are the only ones available to the so-called influence peddlers, the Washington lawyers and lobbyists whose livelihood depends on their ability to influence legislation. These seats are first come, first served, which is where the placeholders (also called “stand-ins” or “linestanders”) come in. Since most lobbyists and lawyers seeking to rub shoulders with lawmakers don’t have time to wait in line themselves, they pay others to do it for them.
Rather than use an independent contractor, most influence peddlers secure placeholders through one of the two companies that control about 80 percent of the market: Congressional Services Company and the CVK Group, both of which have rosters of on-call placeholders at the ready. Most of the time, placeholders are asked to wait for just a few hours, often arriving around 5 a.m. to wait for hearings scheduled for 10 a.m. If seats are in great demand, however, placeholders can be asked to get in line several days in advance. Congressional Services charges its clients $32 to $40 per hour for each placeholder, and the placeholders themselves make $10 to $15 an hour. …
For the sake of logistics and appearances, the lines usually form outdoors and stay there until a few hours before a hearing. …
Today, however, most placeholders are not nimble students out to earn a little spending money but older men and women trying to make ends meet. Jim Keegan is one of the “Van Gogh veterans,” a group of placeholders discovered by Congressional Services in 1998 when they were standing in line to get coveted free tickets to the Van Gogh exhibit at the National Gallery of Art. …
Now he said he has time to pursue his interests and get paid. “I’ll probably make $2,000 to $3,000 in a good month,” he said. “That’s more than I made at my old job.”
There is a collegial atmosphere among the placeholders – if you leave to go get something to eat, you aren’t going to lose your spot – but simple tasks like going to the bathroom present challenges. During the day, placeholders can go into the Rayburn Building, but after hours they have to make their way over to the public bathrooms at Union Station. Getting sleep is also a problem. Since the lines form on public sidewalks, placeholders are technically not allowed to sit down, and though the Capitol Hill police often ignore them, there are evenings when an overzealous officer will repeatedly wake them up and tell them to stand. …
Once, a group upset over banking regulations brought busloads of protesters to a hearing, only to discover that they wouldn’t be able to get in, thanks to the placeholders. A scuffle ensued, but the placeholders held their ground.
In general, however, most staffers and politicians don’t even notice the placeholders they pass on their way to work. …
Since hearings can be rescheduled or closed to the public at the last minute, the placeholding services insist on getting paid regardless of whether their clients succeed in getting in. Keegan and Herzog’s long wait, for example, ended before they could pass along their spots to their clients: The housing hearing was cancelled because of partisan infighting, and after two days and 20 hours of waiting, the placeholders were sent home on Tuesday at 6:30 p.m.
The next morning, however, after showers and a change of clothes, many of them were back, this time to wait for a healthcare hearing before the Commerce Committee. When I arrived at the Rayburn Building at 9 a.m., over 70 people were waiting to get into the hearing, and by 10, when it was scheduled to start, there were more than 200. The line began around the corner from the hearing room and snaked past elevator banks and Congressional offices. At the front were mostly placeholders, among them a bored-looking young man with red sneakers and a hat worn sideways and a woman in her late 30s wearing a frayed sweatshirt that read “OJ SIMPSON: JUICE ON THE LOOSE.” …
Thirty minutes before the hearing began, the clients started showing up. The placeholders were identified by placards or by assistant managers who worked the line. A bald white man in his 40s with a yellow tie and an expensive suit took his spot and thanked his placeholder. (Congressional rules prohibit tipping.)
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The history of solitary confinement
From Daniel Brook’s “A History of Hard Time” (Legal Affairs: January/February 2003):
Dickens wasn’t the first European intellectual who had crossed the Atlantic to visit Eastern State Penitentiary. A decade earlier, Alexis de Tocqueville had been sent by the French government to study the Philadelphia prison. …
What drew the attention of Americans and Europeans was an innovative method of punishment being pioneered at the prison called solitary confinement. While the practice had roots in medieval monasteries, where it was used to punish disobedient monks, solitary confinement came to prominence as a form of criminal punishment in the United States soon after the Revolution. …
In colonial America, capital punishment had been common, and not just for murder – burglary and sodomy could earn an offender the death penalty as well. For less serious offenses, criminals were generally subjected to physical punishments meted out on the public square. In a frontier nation of small towns, public embarrassment was seen as the key to deterring crime. Physical punishment, whether in the form of the stockade or the whipping post, was combined with the psychological punishment of being shamed in front of the community. Jails existed, but they were used mainly to hold criminals before trial and punishment. There were no cells and few rules: Men and women were housed together, and alcohol was often available. …
In 1787, at a soiree held in Benjamin Franklin’s living room, [Dr. Benjamin Rush of Philadelphia, a signatory of the Declaration of Independence & widely regarded as America’s foremost physician] presented an essay titled, “An Enquiry Into the Effects of Public Punishments Upon Criminals, and Upon Society.” Rush declared that “crimes should be punished in private, or not punished at all.” He claimed that public punishment failed to rehabilitate the criminal and risked letting the convict become an object of community sympathy. In lieu of public, physical punishments, Rush endorsed the creation of a “house of repentance.” Grounded in the Quaker principle that each individual is blessed with “Inner Light,” Rush envisioned a place of anonymity, solitude, and silence, where prisoners could dwell on their crimes, repent, and return rehabilitated into society. …
In 1821, the reformers finally convinced the Pennsylvania legislature to approve funding for Eastern State Penitentiary, which would be the largest public building in the country; with a price tag of nearly $800,000, it was likely the most costly one as well. No expense was spared: To prevent disease, each cell in the new prison was equipped with a toilet, a rare luxury at the time. When the penitentiary opened in 1829, President Andrew Jackson was still using an outhouse on the White House lawn.
The principles of the penitentiary system – silence, solitude, surveillance, and anonymity – were incorporated into the architectural plan. Eastern State was designed by John Haviland, a young architect, who proposed a hub-and-spokes model that allowed for constant surveillance. Inmates were housed in 8-by-12-foot cells arranged along a series of cellblocks radiating out from a central observation tower.
Each prisoner remained in his cell at all times, save for a brief daily exercise period held in an individual pen adjoining each cell. Prisoners ate their meals in their cells and did small-scale prison labor there like shoemaking. On the rare occasions when prisoners were allowed to leave their cells, they were prevented from interacting with other prisoners by hoods they were forced to wear to protect their anonymity. They were also forced to use numbers instead of names for the same reason. Silence was maintained at all times in the prison, and reading the Bible was the only activity other than labor that was permitted. Reformers believed that cutting inmates off from the world would foster meditation that would lead to rehabilitation, so visits from family or friends were prohibited. On average, inmates spent two to four years alone in their cells, underneath a single round skylight, known in the prison as the “eye of God.”
The expense of the building limited its influence in the United States, but Eastern State was widely copied in Europe and even in Latin America and Japan, where economic conditions made the model more attractive. Over 300 prisons were built on Eastern States’ hub-and-spokes model, in cities as diverse as London, Paris, Milan, St. Petersburg, and Beijing. Architectural historians consider the hub-and-spokes penitentiary to be the only American building type to have had global influence until the first skyscrapers began to rise in Chicago and New York in the 1880s. …
Dickens, who also interviewed prisoners at Eastern State, was far more skeptical. In his travelogue, American Notes, he described Philadelphia’s system of “rigid, strict, and hopeless solitary confinement” as “cruel and wrong.” …
Dickens didn’t accept that the penitentiary represented human progress over the days of floggings on the public square, or as his prose suggested, even the medieval torture chamber. “I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body.” …
In New York, at the Auburn prison near Syracuse and later at Sing Sing in Westchester County, a modified system of solitary confinement was being put into practice. While inmates spent their nights in solitary cells, they worked together silently in a common area during the day. This allowed wardens to set up profitable prison industries that could offset the costs of prison construction. …
Despite this vehement defense of the solitary system, in the period after the Civil War, the regimen at Eastern State was slowly abandoned. … Without enough funding to keep the system running, inmates were frequently doubled up in cells. In 1913, the solitary system was officially abandoned. Solitary confinement became a short-term punishment for misbehaving prisoners rather than the prison’s standard operating procedure. …
More than half of all U.S. prisons in use today were built in the past 25 years, to house a prison population that has risen almost 500 percent over roughly the same period. The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world. In raw numbers, it has more prisoners than China, a country with over four times as many people. …
Supermax prisons – high-tech, maximum-security facilities – were the answer politicians and corrections departments were looking for to solve the problem of increasing violence in prisons. Following Marion’s lead, corrections departments around the country began building supermax prisons, or adding supermax wings to their existing prisons to handle the growing number of violent prisoners who could not be controlled in the traditional prison system. Today there are 20,000 supermax inmates in the United States, roughly 2 percent of the total prison population, though in some states the proportion is much higher: In Mississippi, 12 percent of prisoners live in supermax units.
The system of punishment in supermax units resembles nothing so much as the system of punishment pioneered at Eastern State. The Pelican Bay Security Housing Unit, which cost California taxpayers a quarter of a billion dollars, is perhaps the most notorious supermax. From the air it looks like a high-tech version of the Philadelphia prison: Its hub-and-spokes design is clearly descended from John Haviland’s 19th-century architectural plan. Inmates in the SHU (known as “the shoe”) are kept in their cells close to 24 hours a day. As at Eastern State, inmates eat in their cells and exercise in isolated attached yards. …
Dr. Stuart Grassian, a Harvard Medical School psychiatrist who was given access to SHU inmates to prepare for providing expert testimony in lawsuits against the California Department of Corrections, has concluded that the regimen in security housing units drives prisoners insane, and he estimates that one-third of all SHU inmates are psychotic. He writes of what he calls “the SHU syndrome,” the symptoms of which include self-mutilation and throwing excrement.
Dr. Terry Kupers, a psychiatrist who has interviewed supermax inmates, writes that a majority of inmates “talk about their inability to concentrate, their heightened anxiety, their intermittent disorientation and confusion, their experience of unreality, and their tendency to strike out at the nearest person when they reach their ‘breaking point.’ ” Even those inmates who don’t become psychotic experience many of these symptoms. Those least likely to become mentally ill in solitary confinement are prisoners who can read, because reading prevents the boredom that can lead to insanity. (The human psyche appears not to have changed since the days of Eastern State, when an inmate told Alexis de Tocqueville that reading the Bible was his “greatest consolation.”) Because roughly 40 percent of U.S. prisoners are functionally illiterate, however, reading can provide solace and sanity to only a fraction of those behind bars.
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Alcatraz: reality & Hollywood
From Dashka Slater’s “Lights, Camera, Lockdown” (Legal Affairs: May/June 2003):
The first two Alcatraz films, Alcatraz Island and The Last Gangster, arrived in theaters in 1937; the most recent, Half Past Dead, came out last November. In the 65 years in between, Alcatraz has been the subject of some two dozen movies and has made guest appearances in many more. There have been prison movies, horror movies, comedies, romances, action films, cartoons, and even porn flicks set on Alcatraz. It’s rare for a Hollywood set to last even a few weeks after a film is complete, but the prison is so popular with filmmakers that a meticulous replica of its cellblock, first created for the Clint Eastwood film Escape From Alcatraz, has resided on a Culver City soundstage for more than 20 years. It has provided penal ambience for hundreds of movies, television shows, commercials, and music videos. …
THE FEDERAL PENITENTIARY AT ALCATRAZ opened on August 22, 1934. It was to be a prison like no other, a high-tech, escape-proof, super-maximum warehouse for the nation’s most incorrigible bad guys. …
The secrecy had been designed to deflate the celebrity reputations of gangsters like Al Capone, who had enjoyed special treatment at other prisons. James A. Johnston, the prison’s first warden, believed that egoism was the chief failing of recidivists. His prescription was total isolation and total anonymity. At Alcatraz, he promised, Capone and his ilk would become “forgotten men.” …
The articles emphasized the prison’s harshness and brutality, chronicling its excruciating rule of silence, which required prisoners to stay mute except during a two-hour recreation period on Sundays, and describing the dank “Spanish dungeons” where prisoners were sent for disobeying rules.
Many of these accounts were embellished, and some of the more lurid tales were pure fabrications. Alcatraz was tough but not barbaric. Inmates were guaranteed the basics of food, shelter, clothing, and medical attention; everything else – work, exercise, visitors – had to be earned. Minor infractions – failing to finish the food on your plate, talking while in the cellhouse, sassing a guard – brought a swift reduction in privileges. More serious violations, like taking a swing at a guard, sent prisoners to the chilly darkness of “the hole.” Particularly obstreperous prisoners were hosed down with cold water from the bay, a practice that earned the warden the nickname “Saltwater” Johnston.
Alcatraz was hardly a country club, but it was still one of the better-run prisons in the United States. Inmates had their own cells, an improvement over bunking with another con. These five-by-nine-foot cells were cramped, but each had its own light and running water, and prisoners could order as many books as they wanted from the prison library. The cellblock was kept at a comfortable 70 degrees and the food was considered some of the best in the prison system. …
Throughout the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s, films like Train to Alcatraz, Prison Train, King of Alcatraz, San Francisco Docks, and The House Across the Bay picked up the mythology of the “Inside Alcatraz” accounts and ran with it, depicting the prison as a place that made even hardened cons quake in their leg irons. …
… fewer than 300 prisoners [were] kept there at any one time …
The island’s reputation was increasingly out of step with the times, and the prison was facing more tangible problems as well. After years of exposure to the salt air, the fortress was literally falling apart, and the cost of repairs was prohibitive. The prison closed in 1963 …
IN 1972, AFTER LANGUISHING IN BUREAUCRATIC LIMBO for nearly a decade, Alcatraz became a national park, a move that allowed Hollywood to begin making movies on the Rock itself. …
The Park Service originally thought interest in the prison would peter out within five years. Instead, the park receives 1.5 million visitors a year, about five times as many as Antietam or Little Big Horn and nearly as many as Mt. Rushmore. …
Hollywood is responsible, in large part, for making the former penitentiary recognizable as a prison rather than just a decaying collection of empty Depression-era buildings. Escape From Alcatraz brought fresh coats of paint to the mess hall and D block, as well as the yellow stripes (which never existed when the prison was open) that now run down the main cellhouse corridor. Murder in the First funded the restoration of a guard tower on the dock, and The Rock paid for the removal of hazardous waste. Leftover Hollywood props – metal detectors, cell cots, benches, even pillows – have stayed on as permanent adornments, giving tourists a sense of what the penitentiary was like when it was operating. Over time it has become difficult to distinguish Hollywood’s Alcatraz from the real one.
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The tyranny of HOAs
From Ross Guberman’s “Home Is Where the Heart Is” (Legal Affairs: November/December 2004):
ABOUT 50 MILLION AMERICANS BELONG TO HOMEOWNER ASSOCIATIONS, also known as HOAs or common-interest developments, which are composed of single-family homes, condominiums, or co-ops. Four out of five new homes, ranging from starter homes to high-rise apartments to gated mansions, are in one of the nation’s 250,000 HOAs. However they look or whomever they cater to, HOAs impose the same obligations: If you want to buy a property in an HOA development, you must join the HOA, allow a board you help elect to manage shared grounds and other public spaces, pay regular dues and any “special assessments” for upkeep or other costs, and obey a host of quality-of-life rules, even if they’re added after you move in.
In return, the HOA keeps the welcome sign painted, the sidewalk cracks filled, and the flower beds fresh. It may also provide streets, parks, playgrounds, security, snow removal, and utilities that were once the province of local government. But the HOA does more than beautify the neighborhood and preserve property values. It is often the sole driving force behind the Halloween parades and holiday parties that are increasingly rare in an age of bowling alone.
Although structured as nonprofit corporations, HOAs operate as private governments. An HOA can impose fines on those who flout its quality-of-life policies, just as a municipality can penalize those who violate its zoning, antismoking, or noise-control laws. An HOA also levies dues and assessments that are as obligatory as taxes and sometimes less predictable. In exerting these quasi-political powers, HOAs represent one of the most significant privatizations of local government functions in history. …
About half the states allow “non-judicial foreclosures” if owners lapse on their dues. Typically, the HOA’s collection attorney places a lien on the property and announces its new legal status in a local newspaper. The home is then auctioned. Homeowners get none of the due-process protections they could use to ward off other creditorsâ€â€no right to a hearing and no right to confront their HOA board.
Even in states that require court approval for an HOA foreclosure, the HOA nearly always wins. Under current law, any unpaid dues, no matter how small, can be grounds for foreclosure, particularly once the amount of the delinquency is swelled with interest and fines.
… According to a 2001 study of foreclosures in California by Sentinel Fair Housing, a homeowner advocacy group, when HOAs foreclose, the typical homeowner is $2,557 in arrears. When banks or municipal governments foreclose, by contrast, the typical homeowner owes $190,000 in delinquent payments or back taxes.
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Road rash, fender vaults, & root vaults
From Jascha Hoffman’s “Crash Course” (Legal Affairs: July/August 2004):
Typically there are two kinds of injuries [in hit-and-run cases], those from the initial impact, and the ones from hitting and sliding on the asphalt, known as “road rash.” To illustrate the different types of impact a pedestrian can suffer, Rich cued up a series of video clips on his laptop. The first one showed a well-dressed man with a briefcase in each hand caught crossing a busy Manhattan street. Suddenly, a white minivan blindsided him, causing a “fender vault” that tossed the man three feet into the air, still holding one briefcase. A taxi approaching from the opposite direction then launched him into a textbook “roof vault,” sending his remaining briefcase flying and hurling him headfirst onto the pavement. This was not a walk-away accident.
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Poems dug up from the grave
From Wikipedia’s “Dante Gabriel Rossetti“:
[Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s wife Elizabeth Siddal] had taken an overdose of laudanum shortly after giving birth to a dead child. Rossetti became increasingly depressed, and buried the bulk of his unpublished poems in her grave at Highgate Cemetery. … During these years, Rossetti was prevailed upon by friends to exhume his poems from his wife’s grave. This he did, collating and publishing them in 1871.
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The 80/20 rule
From F. John Reh’s “How the 80/20 rule can help you be more effective” (About.com):
In 1906, Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto created a mathematical formula to describe the unequal distribution of wealth in his country, observing that twenty percent of the people owned eighty percent of the wealth. In the late 1940s, Dr. Joseph M. Juran inaccurately attributed the 80/20 Rule to Pareto, calling it Pareto’s Principle. …
Quality Management pioneer, Dr. Joseph Juran, working in the US in the 1930s and 40s recognized a universal principle he called the “vital few and trivial many” and reduced it to writing. …
As a result, Dr. Juran’s observation of the “vital few and trivial many”, the principle that 20 percent of something always are responsible for 80 percent of the results, became known as Pareto’s Principle or the 80/20 Rule. …
The 80/20 Rule means that in anything a few (20 percent) are vital and many(80 percent) are trivial. In Pareto’s case it meant 20 percent of the people owned 80 percent of the wealth. In Juran’s initial work he identified 20 percent of the defects causing 80 percent of the problems. Project Managers know that 20 percent of the work (the first 10 percent and the last 10 percent) consume 80 percent of your time and resources. You can apply the 80/20 Rule to almost anything, from the science of management to the physical world.
You know 20 percent of you stock takes up 80 percent of your warehouse space and that 80 percent of your stock comes from 20 percent of your suppliers. Also 80 percent of your sales will come from 20 percent of your sales staff. 20 percent of your staff will cause 80 percent of your problems, but another 20 percent of your staff will provide 80 percent of your production. It works both ways.
The value of the Pareto Principle for a manager is that it reminds you to focus on the 20 percent that matters. Of the things you do during your day, only 20 percent really matter. Those 20 percent produce 80 percent of your results.
Modern mercenaries
From Rebecca Ulam Weiner’s “Sheep in Wolves’ Clothing” (Legal Affairs: January/February 2006):
YOU WON’T FIND THE WORD “MERCENARY” on the homepage of the International Peace Operations Association, the trade group for the private military industry. While many of the IPOA’s member companies are staffed by elite former soldiers of the United States military who now make a living hiring themselves out, the so-called “M word” isn’t in the IPOA’s corporate vocabulary. Members are known as private military companies (often called PMCs) or military service providers, who specialize in “private peace operations.” …
In recent years, private contractors have increasingly taken on important military functions, operating in some 50 countries and earning an estimated $100 billion in annual revenue. They provide security to civilian aid workers, other contractors, and even military forces. They train local armies for combat, develop future American soldiers (the firm MPRI helps run ROTC), and interrogate prisoners. At times, they’ve engaged in combat. During the invasion and occupation of Iraq, the U.S. has relied heavily on their support – private contractors make up a workforce of about 20,000, double the British troop presence. …
During the Iraq war, contractors have run the computers that control Predator drones, operated guided missile systems on naval ships, and maintained aerial surveillance and communications systems. In the Persian Gulf war of 1991, the ratio of soldiers to contractors was 50 to 1. In the current Iraqi conflict, it is 10 to 1 and falling.
This proliferation has worried many – in the academy, Congress, the media, and, increasingly, the military – because contractors operate outside the military chain of command and most legal jurisdictions. PMCs have no clear place under the framework of the Geneva Conventions – they aren’t noncombatants, because they carry weapons, but they aren’t lawful combatants, because they don’t wear uniforms. Nor do they fit the anachronistic definitions of mercenaries found in international treaties and resolutions, because those definitions generally require engagement in direct combat.
Soldiers are subject to rules of engagement and can be court-martialed for breaking the law. Contractors are governed most directly by the terms of their contracts – their extraterritorial activities and corporate status make them virtually immune from federal law. …
Worse, critics argue, because the military has no direct control over its contractors, it won’t accept responsibility for their actions. And PMCs allow the Pentagon to evade accountability to Congress, because they circumvent caps on the number of troops approved for deployment and their casualties aren’t counted.
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James Jesse Strang, Mormon King of Michigan
From Geoffrey Gagnon’s “King James I, of Michigan” (Legal Affairs: September/October 2005):
One letter that isn’t on display is the one that James Jesse Strang said he received from Smith just before the Mormon leader was murdered in June 1844. In the letter, which now resides in a university library, Smith bequeaths the nascent Mormon Church to Strang – a new friend, a Mormon of just five months, and, of all things, a lawyer. “If evil befall me,” Smith wrote to Strang in the letter, “thou shalt lead the flock to pleasant pastures.”
Strang’s rivals, among them Brigham Young, dismissed the missive as a forgery and Strang as an unworthy successor to Smith. Yet a couple of hundred church members – Joseph Smith’s widow, mother, brother, and sisters among them – believed the letter was authentic and that it granted church leadership to Strang. A disgusted Brigham Young took his followers west to Utah and built what is now the fastest growing religion in the United States. Strang took his followers to a remote island in Lake Michigan and declared the place his sovereign kingdom.
Hold up the palm of your right hand and you’re looking at a map of Michigan’s lower peninsula. Thirty miles off the coast of your ring finger sits Beaver Island, a 55-square-mile island on the inland sea of Lake Michigan. Only one building survives from Strang’s sojourn, a museum in which Strang artifacts fill one room. …
An old metal press, long since disappeared, once filled the building’s big front room. Strang used the press to spit out the Northern Islander, the region’s first newspaper, and to print his magnum opus, The Book of the Law of the Lord. The long-winded tome of decrees includes what Strang described as the lost transcription of the meeting between Moses and God on Mount Sinai. …
He settled, for the time being, on being a lawyer. “I should rather be the best hunter in an Indian tribe than a commonplace member of the New York bar,” he wrote. But a decade of legal practice yielded little more than common accomplishments, and little more power than that which was afforded him in his capacity as the postmaster of Chautauqua County. …
Strang met the church’s leader after making the acquaintance of Smith’s brother Aaron, who lived near Strang in Wisconsin. Initially, he wasn’t impressed with Joseph Smith, describing him in his diary as a man of “meager education.” Smith, however, seems to have been smitten with Strang’s intelligence. Within weeks of meeting Strang, Smith baptized him, and just weeks after that, he named him a church elder.
Strang, who as a teen was tossed out of the local Baptist church for questioning its precepts, had called himself the “perfect atheist” before moving West, but once on the frontier he realized he might command from the pulpit the power that had eluded him. Strang didn’t bother to familiarize himself with Mormon doctrine until long after he was a church leader. …
In June of 1844, an anti-Mormon crowd killed Joseph and Hyrum Smith. At the instant Smith met his demise, Strang claimed that he received a visit from an angel who anointed his head with oil and declared him the leader of the Mormons. A few days later, a letter to the same effect, purportedly mailed by Joseph Smith before his death, arrived in Strang’s hand. His years as a postmaster, perhaps, had not been wasted. …
Strang and his followers arrived on Beaver Island in the spring of 1847 and spent three difficult summers recruiting followers before he was convinced he had enough subjects to make a respectable kingdom. In 1850, with 200 followers on hand in an unfinished log tabernacle, Strang enlisted a traveling Shakespearean actor named George Adams to muster all the pomp and circumstance he could. Strang appeared before an audience of several hundred on a moss-stuffed seat, wearing a giant red flannel robe trimmed in white. Adams came before the crowd and placed a makeshift crown on Strang’s head, anointing him King James the First. Taking hold of a two-foot wooden pole, Strang returned the favor and named Adams his prime minister.
IN THE SPRING OF 1851, NOT YET A YEAR after Strang had taken royal possession of Beaver Island, the sound of waves helped cover the midnight approach of a rowboat full of troops and U.S. Marshals. Carrying government-issue revolvers, the men slipped toward the glow of an oil lamp in a square log house. Expecting a fight, they instead found the small village of St. James asleep. Marines lay on the deck of the iron-hulled Michigan, armed and ready to charge the beach. But no shots were fired. Within an hour of coming ashore, the landing party had matter-of-factly taken the king into custody. …
President Millard Fillmore, who had entered office the day after Strang’s coronation, reportedly received news of the frontier king from his brother, Charles Fillmore, who lived in Detroit. He soon began hearing about the king from prominent members of his party as well, who pressured the president to take action. Among them was Abraham Lincoln’s 1858 Senate rival, Stephan Douglas, who was wary of giving the South a secession movement to point to in the North. Fillmore instructed his attorney general and the secretary of the Navy to arrest the king. …
Judge Ross Wilkins told the prosecution that because the king and his followers hadn’t engaged in war against the United States or aided enemies of the nation in doing so, the king couldn’t be convicted of treason. That left the federal government with charges against Strang of trespassing on federal land, counterfeiting coins, and obstructing the mail. …
The next morning they delivered a verdict of not guilty. …
STRANG RETURNED FROM DETROIT AND DECLARED HIS TRIAL VICTORY a mandate for his absolute rule. He modernized the kingdom with roads (the King’s Highway, recently resurfaced, is still traveled), managed a lumber export business and a booming fishing trade, and enacted progressive conservation laws (“Ye shall preserve the trees by the wayside. And if there be none, ye shall plant them”). He even appointed garbagemen to keep the kingdom clean.
A year after his win in court, Strang won election to the Michigan Legislature, representing the island and a huge swath of the northern woods, and he commuted to the mainland to serve a pair of two-year terms. He deigned to recognize Michigan’s government, he said, because he saw that as engaging in international relations with a neighboring country. …
After his court victory, Strang’s absolute power began to corrupt him, if not quite absolutely, then bizarrely. He had a fixation with fashion that led him to decree that, for reasons of health, women should wear only loose fitting, knee-length bloomers as opposed to anything that “pinches or compresses the body or limbs.” The king’s stance, and the resulting uproar, unraveled the kingdom. When a collection of outspoken wives refused to don their new pants, Strang had their husbands flogged with a willow whip for “endeavoring to incite mischief and crime.” He reprimanded his subjects in print as well. “We laugh in bitter scorn at all these threats,” he wrote, using the royal we, in what proved to be one of the final issues of the Northern Islander.
Less than two weeks later, a mob of angered husbands, still smarting from their willow lashings, ambushed the king. Strang was pistol-whipped and then felled by an assassin’s bullet. … When Strang fell, pillaging mainlanders flooded the island to drive the Mormons away. The kingdom was scattered and soon forgotten to all but a handful of us Michiganders.
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Posse Comitatus Act
From Geoffrey Klingsporn’s “The Secret Posse” (Legal Affairs: March/April 2005):
What do these scenarios have in common? Under current military policy, both fall under the heading of “Information Operations,” officially defined as “actions taken to affect adversary information and information systems while defending one’s own information and information systems.” …
The law that, in effect, prevents the Army from acting as a national police force is the Posse Comitatus Act, an 1878 statute that prohibits law enforcement officers from using military personnel as a posse comitatusâ€â€Latin for “power of the county” or, in the vernacular of the Old West, a “posse”â€â€to enforce domestic law, except with the express authorization of the president or Congress. …
“The use of military forces to seize civilians,” wrote the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, “can expose civilian government to the threat of military rule and the suspension of constitutional liberties,” and can chill free speech and other fundamental rights, creating the atmosphere of an enemy occupation. …
Since the 1980s, though, the statute has been weakened by laws that allow the military to help address the problems of drug trafficking, natural disasters, and terrorist attacks. It is now routine for soldiers and sailors to help state and local police with training, equipment, and logistics; to detect and monitor suspected smugglers; and to keep order in disaster areas. … But the courts generally have ruled that it is well within the discretion of the president and Congress to allow the military to help in nonmilitary situations, including cases of terrorism. In 1988, a federal district judge in Washington, D.C., ruled that the Posse Comitatus Act was not violated when the FBI used the Navy to help capture a suspected terrorist in international waters and transport him to the United States.
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Henry Wirz, the Demon of Andersonville
From Carolyn Kleiner’s “The Demon of Andersonville” (Legal Affairs: September/October 2002):
During the last 14 months of the Civil War, nearly 13,000 Union prisoners of war died at the Confederate prison camp in Andersonville, Georgia – more than at Antietam, one of the war’s bloodiest battles, and more than at any of the other hundred or so Civil War prisons. Reports of atrocities at Andersonville and other Southern jails had been widely circulated in the North during the war, along with photos of severely emaciated inmates who to 21st-century eyes bear an unnerving resemblance to prisoners at Nazi concentration camps. Captain Henry Wirz was the commandant of the prison and, by the end of the war, he was one of the most infamous men in America. By a special military commission, he was convicted of conspiracy to intentionally harm Union prisoners and of personally murdering at least ten soldiers. The noose was for him. …
Many captured Union soldiers were kept in and around Richmond, but as the front lines edged south and Dixie jails started to overflow, the Confederate government planned a new facility in the small, out-of-the-way town of Andersonville. The site was chosen for its easy railroad access, an abundance of pine forests, and a clear creek that ran across the property – and because the town’s 20 or so residents didn’t object. The first load of prisoners arrived in February 1864, before construction was complete. From that point on, the trains never stopped.
Built with the official name of Camp Sumter, the Andersonville prison consisted of a sixteen-and-a-half-acre dirt pen (later enlarged to twenty-six and a half acres), surrounded by a stockade made of rough-hewn, 15-foot-tall pine logs placed so close together it was impossible to see outside.
Though conditions were initially a vast improvement over Richmond detention centers, problems grew in proportion to the number of inmates. By late summer 1864, the prison population made Andersonville one of the largest cities in the Confederacy. At its peak in August, the “bullpen,” built to lodge up to 10,000 enlisted men, held 33,000 grimy, gaunt prisoners, each one crammed into a living area the size of a coffin. Their only protections from the sun were “shebangs,” improvised shelters constructed from blankets, rags, and pine boughs, or dug into the hard, red Georgia clay.
As the war dragged on and the Rebel government fell further into disarray, its resources and supplies depleted more each day, Andersonville became increasingly ill-equipped to provide for its wards. Daily prison rations usually consisted of coarse cornmeal with small bits of cob still in it (very rough on Northern stomachs accustomed to wheat bread), around two ounces of beef or pork, often served raw and moldy, and occasionally beans or molasses. (Guards got the same gruel.) Too many inmates meant not enough water to go around, as well as too much human waste, and the once-clear stream that ran through the camp became polluted, covered with a thin layer of green slime. The stench of the place carried as far as the town of Americus, ten miles away. Prisoners suffered from afflictions ranging from diarrhea and dysentery to scurvy and a condition described in death records as “nostalgia,” when men seemed to stop wanting to live.
Between March and June of 1864, the number of casualties per month more than tripled, reaching 2,994 at the end of the summer – or around 100 men a day. …
After arriving in Andersonville, Wirz initiated a record system and reorganized the prisoners into small details of 90 men each. A believer in strict discipline, he preferred forms of punishment like putting a prisoner in stocks or shackling him to a ball and chain. He was concerned about escapes, so he built a “deadline” of posts approximately 15 feet inside the prison walls; if inmates crossed the line, they were to be shot, no questions asked. Hungry dogs were sent after any who managed to break out. …
Andersonville closed for good the day after Lee surrendered at Appomattox on April 9, 1865. Twelve thousand, nine hundred and twelve of the 45,000 men who did time there as inmates remained behind forever, buried shoulder to shoulder in the prison cemetery. …
The Union government had been loath to recognize the Confederacy as a separate nation during the war, but now that it was over the government made an exception, in order to prosecute Captain Wirz squarely. He was charged as a foreign enemy who had violated the international laws of war. The fact that he was born abroad may have made it easier for Americans to swallow the notion of a fellow citizen being tried for criminal behavior in a military commission. The rules of the commission provided more room to maneuver and allowed for a broader range of admissible evidence.
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Number of 19c American medical schools
From Emily Bazelon’s “Grave Offense” (Legal Affairs: July/August 2002):
In 1810, there were five medical schools in the United States, in 1860 there were 65, and by 1890 that number had doubled.
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A brief history of American bodysnatching
From Emily Bazelon’s “Grave Offense” (Legal Affairs: July/August 2002):
In December 1882, hundreds of black Philadelphians gathered at the city morgue. They feared that family members whom they had recently buried were, as a reporter put it, “amongst the staring corpses” that lay inside. Six bodies that had been taken from their graves at Lebanon Cemetery, the burial ground for Philadelphia’s African-Americans, had been brought to the morgue after being discovered on the back of a wagon bound for Jefferson Medical College. The cemetery’s black superintendent had admitted that for many years he let three grave robbers, his brother and two white men, steal as many corpses as they could sell to the college for dissection in anatomy classes.
At the morgue, a man asked others to bare their heads and swear on the bodies before them that they would kill the grave robbers. Another man found the body of his 29-year-old brother and screamed. A weeping elderly woman identified one of the corpses as her dead husband. According to the Philadelphia Press, which broke the story, to pay for her husband’s burial she had begged $22 at the wharves where he had once worked.
Medical science lay behind the body snatchings at Lebanon Cemetery and similar crimes throughout the Northeast and Midwest during the 19th century. By the 1820s, anatomy instruction had become central to medical education, but laws of the time, if they allowed for dissection, let medical schools use corpses only of condemned murderers. In their scramble to find other cadavers for students, doctors who taught anatomy competed for the booty of grave robbersâ€â€or sent medical students to rob the graves themselves. …
In the early 19th century, doctors were eager to distinguish themselves from midwives and homeopaths, and embraced anatomy as a critical source of their exclusive knowledge. In the words of a speaker at a New York medical society meeting in 1834, a physician who had not dissected a human body was “a disgrace to himself, a pest in society, and would maintain but a level with steam and red pepper quacks.” …
According to Michael Sappol’s recent book, A Traffic of Dead Bodies, Harvard Medical School moved its campus from Cambridge to Boston (where it remains) expecting to get bodies from an almshouse there. …
“Men seem prompted by their very nature to an earnest desire that their deceased friends be decently interred,” explained the grand jury charged with investigating a 1788 dissection-sparked riot in which 5,000 people stormed New York Hospital.
To protect the graves of their loved ones, 19th-century families who could afford it bought sturdy coffins and plots in a churchyard or cemetery guarded by night watchmen. Bodies buried in black cemeteries and paupers’ burial grounds, which often lacked those safeguards, were more vulnerable. In 1827, a black newspaper called Freedom’s Journal instructed readers that they could cheaply guard against body snatching by packing straw into the graves. In 1820s Philadelphia, several medical schools secretly bribed the superintendent of the public graveyard for 12 to 20 cadavers a week during “dissecting season.” He made sure to keep strict watch “to prevent adventurers from robbing himâ€â€not to prevent them from emptying the pits,” Philadelphia doctor John D. Godman wrote in 1829.
When a body snatching was detected, it made for fury and headlines. The 1788 New York riot, in which three people were killed, began when an anatomy instructor shooed some children away from his window with the dismembered arm of a corpse, which (legend has it) belonged to the recently buried mother of one of the boys; her body had been stolen from its coffin. In 1824, the body of a farmer’s daughter was found beneath the floor of the cellar of Yale’s medical school. An assistant suspected of the crime was almost tarred and feathered. In 1852, after a woman’s body was found in a cesspool near Cleveland’s medical school, a mob led by her father set fire to the building, wrecking a laboratory and a museum inside. …
In the morning, news spread that the robbers had been taken into custody. An “immense crowd of people surrounded the magistrate’s office and threatened to kill the resurrectionists,” the Press reported. …
The doctors got what they asked for. A new Pennsylvania law, passed in 1883, required officials at every almshouse, prison, morgue, hospital, and public institution in the state to give medical schools corpses that would otherwise be buried at public expense.
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The difficulties in establishing time of death
From Jessica Sachs’s “Expiration Date” (Legal Affairs: March/April 2004):
More than two centuries of earnest scientific research have tried to forge better clocks based on rigor, algor, and livor mortis – the progressive phenomena of postmortem muscle stiffening, body cooling, and blood pooling. But instead of honing time-of-death estimates, this research has revealed their vagaries. Two bodies that reached death within minutes of each other can, and frequently do, show marked differences in postmortem time markers. Even the method of testing eye potassium levels, which was recently hailed as the new benchmark for pinpointing time of death, has fallen into disrepute, following autopsies that showed occasional differences in levels in the left and right eye of the same cadaver. …
And the longer a body is dead, the harder it is to figure out when its owner died. In their book The Estimation of Time Since Death in the Early Postmortem Period, the world-renowned experts Claus Henssge and Bernard Knight warn pathologists to surrender any pretensions of doing science beyond the first 24 to 48 hours after death.
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Court acceptance of forensic & biometric evidence
From Brendan I. Koerner’s “Under the Microscope” (Legal Affairs: July/August 2002):
The mantra of forensic evidence examination is “ACE-V.” The acronym stands for Analysis, Comparison, Evaluation, and Verification, which forensic scientists compare with the step-by-step method drilled into countless chemistry students. “Instead of hypothesis, data collection, conclusion, we have ACE-V,” says Elaine Pagliaro, an expert at the Connecticut lab who specializes in biochemical analysis. “It’s essentially the same process. It’s just that it grew out of people who didn’t come from a background in the scientific method.” …
Yet for most of the 20th century, courts seldom set limits on what experts could say to juries. The 1923 case Frye v. United States mandated that expert witnesses could discuss any technique that had “gained general acceptance in the particular field in which it belongs.” Courts treated forensic science as if it were as well-founded as biology or physics. …
In 1993, the Supreme Court set a new standard for evidence that took into account the accelerated pace of scientific progress. In a case called Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, the plaintiffs wanted to show the jury some novel epidemiological studies to bolster their claim that Merrell Dow’s anti-nausea drug Bendectin caused birth defects. The trial judge didn’t let them. The plaintiff’s evidence, he reasoned, was simply too futuristic to have gained general acceptance.
When the case got to the Supreme Court, the justices seized the opportunity to revolutionize the judiciary’s role in supervising expert testimony. Writing for a unanimous court, Justice Harry Blackmun instructed judges to “ensure that any and all scientific testimony or evidence admitted is not only relevant, but reliable.” Daubert turned judges into “gatekeepers” responsible for discerning good science from junk before an expert takes the stand. Blackmun suggested that good science must be testable, subject to peer review, and feature a “known or potential rate of error.” …
There are a few exceptions, though. In 1999, Judge Nancy Gertner of the Federal District Court in Massachusetts set limits on the kinds of conclusions a handwriting expert could draw before a jury in United States v. Hines. The expert could point out similarities between the defendant’s handwriting and the writing on a stick-up note, the judge said, but she could not “make any ultimate conclusions on the actual authorship.” The judge questioned “the validity of the field” of handwriting analysis, noting that “one’s handwriting is not at all unique in the sense that it remains the same over time, or unique[ly] separates one individual from another.”
Early this year, Judge Pollak stunned the legal world by similarly reining in fingerprint experts in the murder-for-hire case United States v. Plaza. Pollak was disturbed by a proficiency test finding that 26 percent of the crime labs surveyed in different states did not correctly identify a set of latent prints on the first try. “Even 100 years of ‘adversarial’ testing in court cannot substitute for scientific testing,” he said. He ruled that the experts could show the jury similarities between the defendants’ prints and latent prints found at the crime scenes, but could not say the prints matched. …
… the University of West Virginia recently offered the nation’s first-ever four-year degree in biometrics …
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In Search of Lost Crime
From Caleb Crain’s “In Search Of Lost Crime” (Legal Affairs: July/August 2002):
… the 1860 Brooklyn divorce case of Beardsley v. Beardsley. …
Richard Busteed, the lawyer for Mrs. Beardsley’s aggrieved husband, denounced her in his closing arguments as “the harlot of the nineteenth century,” and his showy performance brought tears to the eyes of many in the courtroom. In a final flourish, Busteed appealed to whatever yearning the jurors might have had for literary immortality:
If the record of this case shall be preserved in some substantial form, men and women of other generations will recur to it when they tire of Dombey and Copperfield, and drop to sleep over Kenilworth and Ivanhoe. In the glow of this extraordinary drama of real life, the highly wrought pictures of the novelist will pale their intellectual fires. Long after the romance of Bardell against Pickwick shall be musty with forgetfulness, the sad truths of Beardsley against Beardsley will rise up as sorrowing witnesses of the frailty of a woman who deliberately sacrificed the holiest relations of life upon the altar of a roving and unhallowed lust. …
… the popular 1846 trial of Albert John Tirrell … Tirrell’s case was a particularly hot item: A young man from a respectable family, he murdered a prostitute in Boston and set her brothel on fire, but his ingenious lawyer convinced the jury that he had been sleepwalking. …
Consider the prolixly titled 1871 pamphlet Life, Trial and Execution of Edward H. Ruloff, The Perpetrator of Eight Murders, Numerous Burglaries and Other Crimes; Who Was Recently Hanged at Binghamton, N.Y. A Man Shrouded in Mystery! A Learned Ruffian! Was He Man or Fiend, published by E.E. Barclay of Philadelphia.
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Gender, murder, & knots
From Caleb Crain’s “In Search Of Lost Crime” (Legal Affairs: July/August 2002):
… the 1833 trial of Rev. Ephraim K. Avery … discovered Sarah Maria Cornell’s body hanging from a stake among his haystacks …
Consider, as a final example of the pleasures to be had in trial pamphlets, the knot in the rope around Sarah Maria Cornell’s neck.
A coroner’s jury inspected Cornell’s body the day after its discovery. “At first I did not observe the cord about her neck, it was so imbedded,” testified Williams Durfee, who served on the jury. “On looking closer, I observed the knot under her right ear. The cord passed twice round the neck. It was what farmers call two half hitches, and sailors, a clove hitch…. To tighten a clove hitch, the ends must be drawn apart horizontally. If the ends be drawn upwards it will not tighten.” If Durfee was correct about the kind of the knot and the way it tightened, Cornell could not have hanged herself unassisted.
The witness Benjamin Manchester also considered this knot to be a damning clue. Cornell had been a weaver. And yet the knot at her neck seemed to be an unusual one-more typical of a sailor, in Manchester’s opinion. According to Durfee’s testimony, a farmer would also have been familiar with the knot. But in both men’s comments, the implication is that a woman would not have known how to tie it.
The implication stood, unchallenged, until the defense called Louisa M. Whitney, its final witness before the rebuttal phase. Like the late Cornell, Whitney worked in a textile factory, and she performed a remarkable demonstration in the courtroom. She showed “the jury a harness knot and how it is made.” As the impressed stenographer noted in brackets, “It proves to be the same as a clove hitch”-the kind of knot around Cornell’s neck. Whitney testified that weavers tied such knots routinely in the course of mending their harnesses: “We call them harness knots. I never heard any other name.”
In other words, factory women knew how to tie the same knots that farmers and sailors did, but because men and women used different terms and did not work together, the men had underestimated the women’s rope-handling knowledge. The prosecution scrambled to find weavers who mended their harnesses with simpler knots and were willing to swear ignorance of clove hitches, but the damage was done. The moment a woman tied a clove hitch before the jury’s eyes, an important part of the case against Avery unraveled.
The clove-hitch testimony hardly proved Avery’s innocence. While it was easy for his lawyers to discredit much of the evidence against him, the note in Cornell’s bandbox and a few letters she received from him cast a long shadow. Not guilty? In the best trial pamphlets, the lapse of a century and a half has done nothing but sharpen the doubts.
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