SPECIAL LET ME OUT OF HERE EDITION

Next week: The Doctrine of Collateral Estoppel

One of the major legislative efforts of the session was the crime bills. Gov. Sean Parnell proposed three bills: one on domestic violence and sexual assault, one on DNA evidence and one on bail. All three passed the House on 40-0 votes Wednesday night. Two go right to the governor; the third still needs to pass muster in the Senate.

Success has many fathers. Failure is an orphan. So lots of people are taking credit for the bills. Maybe that’s appropriate. But the bald facts are these: The bills the governor and the Department of Law introduced were half baked, and written to give more power to prosecutors rather than anything else. They were bills written by lawyers for—and against—lawyers.

So you can imagine how much fun I had in the powerful House Finance Committee with the bills. There is a strong streak of lawyerism in my family: both my brothers are lawyers and so is my daughter. This doesn’t make them bad people, but it does mean I am familiar with the peculiar way lawyers look at the world. In the realm of criminal law, lawyers are all about winning and losing, rarely, if ever, about discovering the truth.

One example will suffice. The DNA bill seems pretty simple. We have technology now that can, in some cases, prove conclusively who done it. Or didn’t. Several popular TV shows are all about that. So you’d think that if somebody wanted to have their DNA tested, everybody would say, Cool. If the test showed that the DNA proved the person who got tested didn’t do it, everything would be fine.

But prosecutors weren’t interested in science. They wanted to win. So they demanded several rules that would prevent people who’d been convicted from having their DNA tested.  One rule that really bugged me said that in the request for a DNA test “the applicant must identify a theory of defense that (a) is not inconsistent with a defense presented at trail …”

What’s up with that? I asked. Who cares what their defense said? If the test shows they did it, they did it. If it shows they didn’t, they didn’t. What’s wrong with that?

The prosecutors answered with mumbo-jumbo. I asked again. I got more lawyerspeak. After three or four of these exchanges, it dawned on me that what the lawyers were giving me were not answers, but argument. The simple answer was they wanted the section that way because it gave them an advantage in the on-going battle between prosecutors and defense lawyers.

I didn’t care about that. I just cared about making sure that innocent people had a way to prove their innocence. So Rep. Les Gara offered an amendment to remove the phrase, I voted for it, and – lo and behold – we won.

Lawyers.

Buddy, can you spare a billion?

The state’s capital budget has gone from big (the governor) to humongous (the Senate) to who knows (the House).  What’s clear is that hardly anybody in this process knows when enough is enough.

There’s a lot of nonsense being talked about this spending spree. They’re calling it a jobs bill. But the Alaska economy is perking right along, and doesn’t really need a $2.7 billion capital budget to bring it out of doldrums it isn’t in. In fact, there’s a real possibility that with a budget that big we’re going to have the opposite problem: When all the unemployed carpenters in the Lower 48 see what we’re doing, there’ll be a rush north of the kind we haven’t seen since they discovered gold in the Klondike.

I’m sure there are many other wonderful reasons given for the spending, but the truth is we have extra money and it is in the nature of politicians to spend. Some of the spending might be a good idea. But I’m doubtful that it all is. And I’m of a mind that we should spend less and save more, because costs continue to go up and oil revenue continues to go down. What’s being spent right now might be the year after next’s school funding.

I’ve got to say that this is not the prevailing opinion in the Capitol. So I think we’re looking at one of the biggest capital budgets in state history. At least until the governor gets out his veto pen.

Odds & Ends

• Sen. Hollis French, Rep. Lindsey Holmes and I are trying again to have our pizza party and political gab fest. If we aren’t trapped in a special session – hey, anything is possible at the moment – we’ll be handing out pizza and politics on April 24 from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. at Romig Middle School. Be there or be square.
   
• I’d send you a long, scholarly treatise on the necessity to detach the state oil and gas taxes from each other RIGHT NOW, but I just don’t care. We’ll probably pass a bill on what’s called decoupling. Just don’t ask me to explain how it works or why it matters. And if we don’t pass it, mach nichts.
   
• If the Lord is on our side, this will be the last regular e-news of the session. If it’s not, it will mean we’ve gone past 90 days, and the sound you’ll hear is me bellowing like a gut-shot rhino. And if we do get out on time, you’ll be hearing me from intermittently. So more political shenanigans or fewer e-news’. Take your pick.

Best wishes,