118. Correlations

New Mexico's Court of Appeals rarely allows oral argument, at least in criminal cases.  I've always assumed that's because inviting prosecutors into the courtroom results in such expensive cleaning bills - it's hard to get that brimstone smell out of your robes.  And then there's the nasty hoof-shaped burn marks the AAGs leave in the carpet, if you give them too much time at the podium. 

From comments to this blog and elsewhere in the blogosphere, I gather this isn't a universal attitude among state court judges.  There are, if my readers are to be believed, jurisdictions in which judges see their role as fulfilling the will of the people who elect the legislators who enact laws against criminal behavior.  It's a difficult concept for those of us who practice criminal law in New Mexico to get our minds around.

As it happens, New Mexico is one of the most violent states in the Union.  This table shows that the violent crime rate in New Mexico rose from 143 incidents per 100,000 inhabitants in 1960 to 757.9 in 2000, vaulting us into fourth place in the state rankings.  The murder rate was exactly the same at the beginning and end of the period - but during the same 40 years, the national lethality rate decreased by two-thirds.  (See post 34.) 

For an example of the sort of non-pharmaceutical advances that contributed to lowering the lethality rate, consider that New Mexico's only  Level 1 trauma center first began its helicopter service in 1983.  In 1960, fully 34% of New Mexico's population was rural.  Those folks, and those living in towns of 2,500 to 25,000, had to depend on driving across a very large state to a hospital in one of the very few urban centers to get expert treatment for their knife and bullet wounds.   So for the state's homicide rate to be the same in 2000 as in 1960, we had to manage at least a three-fold increase in potentially-lethal violence.  But, by golly, we were up to the task!

Here's a different table that puts NM # 5 in the violent crime rate among the states in 2004, but # 1 among non-Southern states (with non-state D.C. leading the pack).

Does the judiciary have any impact on the violent crime rate?  Or, to put it another way, is a locality's violent crime rate a reflection on the judiciary?

The Observer, the Sunday edition of Britain's Guardian, gave us some statistics last Sunday:

An investigation shows that conviction rates for many of the most violent crimes have been in freefall since Labour came to power in 1997 and are now well below 10 per cent. The chronically low figures for convictions come at the same time as reports that violent crime is increasing.

An analysis of Home Office figures reveals that only 9.7 per cent of all 'serious woundings', including stabbings, that are reported to the police result in a conviction. For robberies the figure falls to 8.9 per cent and for rape, it is 5.5 per cent.

Since 1980, the paper reported, serious woundings have more than quadrupled, and recorded rapes have increased nearly elevenfold.  Could an 11-fold increase in rapes have anything to do with the 5.5% conviction rate for reported rapes?  Is there a rapist in the world so lacking in malign ego-grandiosity that he would consider himself at risk from a 5.5% chance of punishment?

But, judges told the reporter, the problem lay not with them but with the prosecutors and police.  In 1980, apparently, British prosecutors and police suddenly became incompetent, while the judges kept on doing what they have always been doing.

Well, it's possible, I suppose.  Perhaps some hideous fungus infested barristers' wigs and worked its way into the crown prosecutors' brains.  Only by maintaining a strict professional quarantine from the real world could the U.K.'s judges avoid a similar infestation in their own, even more ludicrous wigs.  (Here's some dress-for-success tips for you legal-fashion mavens.)

But, back in the U.S., the sole justification given by the federal Supreme Court for permitting accused criminals to bring tort counterclaims against the government - that is, motions to suppress evidence - is that preventing laws against criminal violence from being enforced will deter police wrongdoing.  Now, if the dismissal of a prosecution will affect the behavior of a person who isn't even a party to it, doesn't it stand to reason it might also affect the behavior of a person who is?

To answer my own rhetorical questions, if the performance of the criminal courts has no effect on the violent crime rate, there's no reason to have criminal courts.  For judges to deny their direct influence on the numbers of dead and bereaved would be to deny the social value of their profession.