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December 2007 - Posts
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The SEC allows the sale of securities to individuals who do not need the protection of registration because they can fend for themselves when investing. It now plans to create a category of accredited investors consisting of those with as little as $750,000 of investment owned funds.
There must be a large number of retired folks with such assets. Yet they can hardly be deemed, by that fact alone, to be sophisticated enough to protect their financial interests. SEC registration should thus remain the norm.
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Developing countries are increasingly considering innovative advances in biotechnology. Yet cutting-edge biotechnologies, largely owned by companies in industrialized nations, bring intellectual property constraints that complicate access. These challenges present a unique opportunity to promote the rule of law. But successfully working to that end means taking a more refined and subtle diplomatic approach - not a battering ram through the front door.
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Although bullet lead analysis, now discontinued as scientifically invalid, was a fairly rare technique, its story reveals important lessons about forensic science. Forensic scientists and reformers alike have spent more time thinking about whether "the science" is valid than about whether the testimony is valid. But, as the bullet lead saga demonstrates, even valid science is useless if it can't produce valid testimony. It's time to start thinking more about what forensic experts actually say to jurors.
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At the behest of the Bush administration, Congress hastily passed the "Protect America Act," which significantly expanded the president's powers to spy on Americans. It did this by removing from the definition of "electronic surveillance" wiretapping of any person "reasonably believed to be outside the United States." When the Senate takes up this legislation again, we need to correct this and other mistakes. Why is this so vital? Because of what this administration does when it thinks no one is looking.
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Nearly every criminal justice agency has attempted projects that have fizzled or failed to meet expectations. If we want to encourage testing new ideas, we need to create a climate in which failure is openly discussed. Recently, the Center for Court Innovation and DOJ's Bureau of Justice Assistance set out to jump-start this kind of conversation, bringing together judges, probation officials, prosecutors, police chiefs and defense attorneys to discuss lessons they have learned from projects that failed.
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The past year has seen an epidemic of reports of prosecutorial misconduct. We've seen judges harshly denouncing over-zealous prosecutors in the KPMG case, the Tollman cases, the case against Representative Jefferson and the Duke lacrosse case. These cases, while wildly different, had one common theme: The defendants had the financial wherewithal to defend themselves. DOJ officials need to be much more aggressive, and refer cases to the Office of Professional Responsibility at the first hint of misconduct.
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There's a difference between rogue government operations and widespread misbehavior. Rogues may not be born every minute, but they abound in virtually every issue. Another aspect of that shocked behavior was shown in a recent case where government agents, up to the highest levels of the FBI, suborned perjury and framed four innocent men and conspired to keep them in jail for three decades. The breadth and depth of the conspiracy may inform the current debate about widespread misconduct in Iraq.
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The Terrorist Screening Center oversees the nation's consolidated terrorist watch list, a tool to identify known or suspected terrorists. The center obtains data from a variety of sources and then makes the data available to agencies charged with terrorist screening. Recent laws and regulations require screening for employees who work at some critical infrastructure sites, such as ports and chemical facilities. Unfortunately, the government has yet to finalize guidelines to manage this enormous task.
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The Terrorism Risk Insurance Act of 2002 provided free federal insurance coverage to insurance companies in the event of an extreme loss. The once-extended program is set to expire on Dec. 31. The corporate lobby has argued that terrorism risk is unpredictable and potentially extreme, thus infeasible without federal support. This argument is not credible. Most acts of terrorism will not result in extreme loss. Moreover, the insurance industry is supposed to take risk for profit rather than riskless profit.
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