Brighton Police Covered For Wife Beating Fireman

Randy Cleveland, is a "Brighton[, Colorado] firefighter faces more than a dozen charges, including sexual assault, domestic violence and child abuse, after allegations of years of attacks on his wife."

Cleveland is an abusive husband straight from central casting. He physically and emotionally harms his wife, he sweet talks police officers into doing nothing out of respect for his position as a firefighter, he stalks his wife in a motel where she had fled from him, he threatens to kill puppies.

Police took no action in response to at least three 911 incidents when they responded to the house.

[The wife] called Brighton police last Oct. 15. That day, she alleged, arriving officers "high-fived" Cleveland, and after she told the officers that the abuse that day was verbal, not physical, they decided to have her stay in a hotel for a couple of nights. No charges were filed.

The first contact that was made with the Adams County DA's office also trivialized the allegations. Eventually, an uninvolved prosecutor in the DA's office learned of the case from the wife at church, intervened, and managed to get the case turned over to Boulder's District Attorney acting as a special prosecutor, who is prosecuting the case vigorously.

Brighton police initially took the case to the Adams County district attorney's office, but no charges were filed then either. According to District Attorney Don Quick, the investigating Brighton officer portrayed the allegations as a situation of "he said, she said."

"At the time, there were not injuries apparent or made note of by the officers," Quick said.

Later, however, the woman told another of his prosecutors about the abuse during a conversation at church, and Quick asked Garnett's office to investigate.

A Boulder investigator took over the case May 11, and eight days later a magistrate judge signed an arrest warrant for Cleveland.

It is a little hard to tell if the Brighton police are solely at fault in this scenario, or if at least some deputy DA in the Adam's County DA are also at fault from the facts reported so far.

It bears all the marks of a police cover up, which John Bradley, the spokeman of the Brighton Police denies emphatically with about as much credibility as Gaddaffi's absurd broadcasts from Tripoli claiming that everything is peaceful and happy, and that he is in control.

Adams County has previous brought us instances of gross corruption in road contracts managed by the county commissioners, improperly adjustments of property assessments for contributors to the county assessor, and improper diversion of funds by the treasurer of the county's Democratic party organization. Adams County is a blue colar, Democratic leaning Northern suburb of Denver and Brighton is the fast grown Levittown style suburb that is the county seat.

Still, Adams County is hardly exceptional. Corruption is bipartisan in Colorado. Republicans in Jefferson County (a middle class suburb west of Denver) have been a hotbed of questionable conduct and resulted in the prosecution of its treasurer for kickbacks (IIRC he was acquitted after a mistrial the first time around), Republicans in Araphahoe County brought us neopotistic, sex crazed Tracy Baker as Clerk and Recorder, and a DA who has been sanctioned by unethical conduct while in office by the state supreme court and made other negative headlines for questionable conduct like conviction incentives for prosecutors. The former Larimer County Republican Party chair was just arrested on a felony county related to management of their monies. The DA in Montrose County faces charges related to improper conduct towards his ex-girlfield that are being handled by a special prosecutor from the Attorney General's office, and their unqualified coroner set off political sparks by declaring a routine organ donation by a local hospital to be murder based on inaccurate information on the Internet. Castle Rock's police ignored urgent pleas from a women with a restraining order that produced a pile of dead bodies and a Supreme Court case establishing that police have no affirmative duty to try to protect anyone, even if state restraining order laws say so. This list is hardly exhaustive.

Keeping local government officials out of trouble is a never ending full time job.

The good news is that a judge, who owes nothing to local government because he is not an elected official and not appointed by local officials, eventually issued a restraining order in the case, and a special prosecutor (who may end up charging the bad cops as well as the abusive husband) was appointed based on a strong norm in Colorado for doing so in cases where there is a potential for local law enforcement officials to be at fault; the case involving the DA for Montrose similarly had a smooth hand off. Notably, in both cases, the investigation was handed off to a special prosecutor of the same political party as the DA taken off the case.

Since law enforcement is handled locally and the judiciary is part of state government, there are clearer heads at the state level to keep local corrupt officials in line.

The bad news is that the Brighton Chief of Police, like almost all law enforcement management types, has denied that his men did anything wrong, even when the evidence that they did is very convincing. He should have thrown the bad officers under the bus, immediately suspending them while an investigation was pending, and didn't. The city council and mayor and if there is one, a city manager, could step in and intervene, but so far, they haven't done so. Denver is still struggling to reach acceptable ways of handling cases of police misconduct and finally starting to make process after a decade or so of trying. Brighton apparently isn't there yet.

READ MORE - Brighton Police Covered For Wife Beating Fireman

Denver's Municipal Election Round Two

Ballots must be received in Denver's runoff election on Tuesday. Today is that last day the a mailed in ballot has a reasonable chance of arriving; delivering a ballot to a designed drop off (the instructions in your ballot have locations and hours of operation) is a better bet after today.

The Mayoral Race

The marquee race for mayor is between Chris Romer and Michael Hancock. I made a choice and voted, but honestly, I am as ambivalent as I've ever been in an election. I'm not alone in this; Vincent Carroll at the Denver Post wrote a column saying the same thing.

Polling shows Hancock with the lead, although not an insurmountable one, despite the fact that Romer had the most votes at the end of the first round.  Voting in the Mayor's race once again closely followed ethnic lines in the first round, with predominantly Hispanic neighborhoods favoring Meija, predominantly black neighborhoods voting for Hancock, and white neighborhoods voting for Romer.  Most of the leaders in the Hispanic community have backed Romer in the runoff following the lead of Meija, but many of the runner up white candidates in the Mayoral race have backed Hancock.

Both are Democrats. Neither was my first choice. Both have political experience. Romer has a background as na investment banker who specialized in municipal bonds and focused a fair amount on out of the box solutions to the state's problems, particularly transportation, while in office in the Colorado General Assembly representing parts of the city including Congress Park. Hancock is our outgoing city council President with strong ties to the community. Neither have experience of CEO of an organization in any way resembling the City and County of Denver in either size or character. Romer has stronger ties to big business and has been the preferred candidate of big Denver names in the Republican party, and his father was a decidedly moderate Democrat while he served as Governor of Colorado. Hancock's natural instincts are to consider the impact of policy on the little guy, but he lacks the connection's to the city, state and national power elites that can help make things happen that Romer has at his disposal.

Romer has waffled on his stand on medical marijuana. Hancock has attacked Romer for taking big donations from strip clubs, equivocated on teaching evolution and is lukewarm about the right to choose. It is hard to tell how this will play out as the City develops policies for dealing with legal and illegal vices. Neither man seems to have an unwavering commitment to the sensible cost conscious, treatment oriented criminal justice and corrections administration reforms that Doug Linkhart has quietly but relentless secured in his tenure on the City Council.

Romer has promised to cut down on land use and licensing red tape, a legitimate issue that Hickenlooper also put on his agenda but never managed to pull off. Hancock seems inclined to refocus city attention on neighborhood level projects rather than big ticket centralized projects that most of his predecessors have focused upon.  But Hancock has less of a business orientation, for example, fumbling his handling of a situation involving the regulation of the city's taxi market in a way that seemed to help keep a new competitor out of the market for no legitimate reason. Hancock had personal involvement in developing the city's new zoning code (which is substantively probably worse than the hodgepodge that came before it despite being statutorily much more clean) and may feel a stronger stake in defending it whether or not it makes sense in a particular case out of respect for the process that created it, than Romer who has far less participation in that process.

Hancock's political style is more consultative, and community involvement is a natural instinct for him, but perhaps as a result, has few signature innovations as feathers in his cap despite the power he held in city council and he offered no substantive reforms other than greater community contract when asked by Colorado Public Radio how the city would look different after a year in his administration. Romer is better at avoiding falling into group think with independent ideas, but while this may show leadership, it also isn't unusual for his proposals to face opposition because he hasn't won sufficient support behind the scenes with all of the players involved before announcing them. He poses a greater risk of embarking on big new ideas that fall entirely flat. Neither man has the game changing capacity to walking into a room and suddenly secure seemingly impossible compromises that our state's most effective politicians, like John Hickenlooper and Andrew Romanoff, share (most recently seen in Hickenlooper's successful legislative battle to secure passage of the bill approving the state's regulations, despite a squabble over pay day lending regulation that he got state house Republicans to give up upon).

Both men acknowledge that need to continue and improve upon the efforts of Mayor Hickenlooper and acting mayor Bill Vidal to be more effective in disciplining bad cops and both have promised to remove a key figure in that process who has been roundly criticized - although under Vidal's administration public discipline has been stepped up; but it is hard to tell who would be more effective at securing that result. The fact that Romer was endorsed by the Fraternal Order of Police and that Hancock has closer political ties to communities that have been on the receiving end of police misconduct tend to tip the balance towards Hancock in my mind on this very important issue.

Romer's personal life has been unnotable. Hancock's personal life has been messier, for example, he didn't publicly acknowledge an out of wedlock child born two years before he married his current wife who is the mother of his two younger children until around the time he started contemplating his current run for office (thereby heading of the potential scandal of a child appearing out of the woodwork), but not in any way that obviously impairs his ability to serve the city as Mayor.

I could have probably dug deeper and found out more about the candidates before I voted and relied to some extent on a variety of endorsement cues and gut feelings rather than taking the time to really gather all the information I needed to make an optimal decision in what is a close call when lots and lots of information is available. But, I didn't have the time and both men are competent enough that I have considerable hope for Denver's future no matter who gets elected.

Also, notably, while some people have grumbled about negative campaigning in the Mayoral race, I'm not one of them. Honestly, I wish there had been more of it. A flawed Mayor can do a great deal of damage, while the difference between what a pretty good Mayor and a blandly competent one can do for the city is pretty marginal. (Neither runoff candidate is out of the park excellent this time around.) If a candidate has a serious flaw, or even does something that might provide a hint that there is a real probability that the candidate has a serious flaw even if it doesn't squarely prove that, I really, really want to know that as a voter. Civility has its place in politics, and untruthful negative advertisements do detract from the process, but truthful negative advertisements are vital to helping voters make good decisions.

The Race To Be Clerk and Recorder

I also looked into the runoff Clerk and Recorder's race again before voting in that race between McCarthy, my neighborhood whom I should have known better when I first posted about the race who had a much better campaign than I had given her credit for having, and Debra Johnson, Aurora's city clerk. The really good news is that two other candidates for the office, whom I sounded criticized in a blog post prior to the first round were defeated (in one case by a margin smaller than the number of people who had read that blog post).

Again, I didn't have as much time to scour the scarce information about that race as I would have liked, and despite having personally spoken at some length with McCarthy and heard interviews with Johnson on the radio, I ultimately drew a blank on the issues that mattered most to me: "what agenda does each woman have to make changes in the office on day one?", and "who is more likely to make the right decisions on close election administration decisions?" Neither woman articulated much of an agenda or really answered the question of what problems they would solve when in office. Both seemed to manage to avoid giving answers on election administration questions in the statements I heard from them and the materials I reviewed that shed much light on how they would handle those issues differently from their competitor.

I ultimately voted for McCarthy, because she seems to have more political sense and more of a sense that she is entitled to use the authority of the office to the fullest, despite the fact that Johnson's experience is more directly relevant and that Johnson seems to have some sensible detail oriented ideas for improving the apolitical aspects of the office's operations. But, as in the Mayor's race, I didn't have a strong preference for either candidate and was voting as much as anything on gut feeling at a time when I felt that I didn't have the time or energy to get enough information to be comfortable that I'd chosen the person most likely to have the right instincts in close cases and to be the most effective manager of the office administratively (for managerial competence can frequently be as important as policy preferences and attitudes in this kind of post).  This was a very close decision.

The Big Picture

There are a few second round city council district races as well, but I have completely ignored them for the selfish reason that those are choices that I am not required to make myself.  The key point is that the first round of the race eliminated essentially all of the bad possiblities and have given voters time to take a closer look with more information available at the two candidates that remain in each of those races.

Four days from now, electoral municipal politics in Denver will be over for another four years and we will have a new team of leaders who have the ability to fix our city's problems and to help up realize its possibilities if they rise to that challenge, no matter who wins. Denver has been blessed by more than two decades of really outstanding mayors and strong municipal leadership on city council and in its other elected offices, that has allowed it to weather the financial crisis better than many peer cities, and to have a lot of neighborhoods that are vibrant and growing after starting from a pretty miserable place in the early 1980s, despite the fact that it is effectively landlocked. I sincerely hope that our next crew of municipal leaders, who have very big shoes to fill, will manage to continue this proud tradition.

READ MORE - Denver's Municipal Election Round Two

Women Still Get Victimized In Colorado

The victim in a Washington state sex assault that is now linked to a 32-year-old Lakewood man was charged with false reporting and paid a $500 fine in 2008 because police didn't believe her story.

Authorities in Lynnwood, Wash., reopened their case and reimbursed the woman after Colorado detectives found pictures of the victim on a camera belonging to Marc O'Leary, an Army veteran charged in two similar cases in Golden and Westminster, Lynnwood police Cmdr. Steve Rider said.

From here.

Women are still raped in public view in places like Denver International Airport.

Drunk young women still disappear into the night after clubbing in LoDo, and go missing for weeks without explanation.

Coaches, and pastors still abuse positions of trust.

Little girls are still shot dead.

And, that is just in Colorado so far this month.

READ MORE - Women Still Get Victimized In Colorado

Denver Fires Bad Cops

The City of Denver has taken the encouraging move of firing two more bad cops who lied to investigators about using excessive force, despite videotape to the contrary.

Manager of Safety Charles Garcia has terminated two officers, Kevin Devine and Ricky Nixon, for lying about details in an excessive force case.

The two were accused of excessive force during an incident caught on camera outside the Denver Diner in 2009. The videotape shows an officer with a club pushing several women to the ground. A second officer is seen spraying mace into the face of a woman who is kneeling after being brought to the pavement by the first cop.

The two officers are the third and fourth terminated by Garcia, who took office last month. He fired Officers Devin Sparks and Randy Murr for "deceptive acts" in the case of Michael DeHerrera, who Sparks threw to the ground as he talked on a cell phone in LoDo.

The long overdue trend in still very welcome.

Interim Mayor Bill Vidal has also recommended the removal of a step in the process of disciplining police officers that has become redundant, delays the process and has favored unreasonably mild discipline for bad cops. Most Mayoral candidates in the current Denver Mayor's race favor the change.

READ MORE - Denver Fires Bad Cops

Elements Of Ideal World

Charles Stross has bemoaned at his excellent blog the shortage of writers of utopian, as opposed to dytopian science fiction. There aren't enough people envisioning a positive visions of a good society of the future. I'll take a stab at some pieces of what that should look like today.

Health Care

* Health care billing is invisible to the patient who presents an insurance card, pays a co-pay that is easily determined and known in advance, and never hears about the financial part of the transaction again. The behind the scenes billing process would be highly automated, provide appropriate incentives to health care providers, resistant to fraud and inexpensive.

* A larger share of health care services would be provided by reasonably autonomous health care professionals less expensive and less comprehensively trained, but still carefully technically trained, on a par in expertise and compensation with nurse practioners, physician's assistants, EMTs, and midwives.

* The health care system, somehow or other, would provide universal coverage regardless of ability to pay, and everyone who worked a full working life would be in a pension system that would assure them a tolerable standard of living that was not deeply less generous than the one they enjoyed while they were working.

* A comprehensive, evidence based set of lifestyle recommendations for a healthy life would be easy to understand, easy to access, annotated with the genuine impacts of not following them and their evidentiary basis, and widely followed.

* A comprehensive, easy to access, evidence based authoritative catalog of ineffective treatment for medical conditions would be available as a persausive tool, and false marketing of ineffective treatments with medical claims would be regulated.

* A standard part of the labor and delivery package for every child will be a full genome and biomarker analysis that would become a part of that child's medical file for life and would be available on a privacy protected basis for medical researchers, and would be digested automatically for parents in a way that flagged issues and traits relevant to the child's future mental and physical health care, and educational and parenting needs.

* Cavities would be dramatically reduced by a "vaccine" administered to children around the same time as other childhood vaccines.

* Effective vaccines would be available and widely administered for all significantly harmful viral illnesses.

* Effective treatments to end the causes of injuries and diseases like Type II diabetes, cancer, chronic fatigue syndrome, spinal injuries, and autoimmune disorders (like M.S. and Lupus) would exist and provide relatively inexpensive mostly outpatient treatment.

* Birth control would be near universal for those not ideologically opposed to it from puberty onward, in place until an affirmative decision to have a child was made, capable of being ended without negative long term effects, and not disruptive of normal hormonal balances.

* Effective permanent correction of nearsightedness would be widely available and have an extremely low failure rate.

Mental Health

* Mental health care would be easy to access even by impaired people, would be provided on a categorical basis without regular eligibility evaluation to people diagnosed with conditions that are generally life long (while also having the capacity to address acute and temporary issues), would employ mostly professionals with less comprehensive education and compensation than M.D. trained psychiatrists but the authority to prescribe mental health meds and specialized technical training in mental health care. This would be handled on a more wholistic model than the transactional disease model common today - most mental health patients would see a treating professional at least once or twice a year their home and at least once or twice a year within some context of their daily life outside their home and outside the professional's office.

* Substance abuse would be treatable highly effectively with drugs. Improved, cheap diagnostic "labs on a chip" would facilite more accurate diagnosis of mental health conditions and would reduce the amount of trial and error involved in developing optimal treatment plans.

* An effective permanent "cure" for PTSD would be developed.

* There would be significant "nudges" to influence people needing it to obtain mental health care without going all the way to a court order to compel it involuntariliy in the vast majority of case.

* Evidence based, reliable risk assessment tools and early warning systems would identify people who should not possess firearms due to their current mental health and be implemented in a way that provides genuine and effective barriers to access to firearms for those individuals during those periods.

* The stigma of needing mental health care would be reduced. Indeed, mental health care might be integrated into a larger comprehensive system that reviewed the overall well being of each individual on a regular basis in a wide variety of respects.

* Minimally restrictive residential options for significantly impaired individuals with mental health issues would be about as common as and about as decent as assisted living facilities for the elderly are today.

* There would be adequate psychiatric hospital resources for the most severely impaired individuals with mental health issues, sometime accute and sometimes long term, which would be comparable in quality of life to the nicer private rehab centers today.

Transportation

* Medium and large sized cities would have transit systems that would make up a large share of intracity passenger and parcel traffic, and all places would have transit systems sufficient to meet the needs of those who can't drive.

* Intracity transportation, including cargo delivery, would be almost entirely with electrically powered vehicles in urban areas, and these vehicles would have enhanced safety systems to intervene in cases of operator error or incapacity. Intercity freight bound for urban areas even as small as very small cities and towns would move predominantly by rail rather than trucks.

* High speed rail would have a large share of of inter-city passenger and parcel traffic for distances of under three hundred miles between major urban centers and high volume destinations.

* A family taking a trip on an airplane for Thanksgiving or Christmas could reasonable expect to arrive at an airport 45 minutes before takeoff and make their flight; business traveler traveling light at non-peak times could reasonable expect to arrive at an airport an airport 30 minutes before takeoff and make their flight. Checking baggage would add only about 10 minutes to a typical traveller's travel time.

* Commercial airports would routinely have good quality transit that is comfortable, accomodate typical amounts of luggage easily, and be faster than travelling by car and parking at the airport, and no more expensive than it is to drive to an airport in a car and park there now.

* Most ocean freighters would use some form of sail to be more fuel efficient.

* Very low population density areas would be connected by airplanes, boats, and airships rather than roads, which would be removed from these areas.

* Hydrocarbon fueled vehicles would be predominantly used in niche applications in rural settings and in ocean fishing and pleasure boats where a dense electrical repowering grid for vehicles taking short intracity trips was not practical.

Energy

* Electric vehicles, wider use of transit and freight rail, and wider use of alternative fuels would dramatically reduce petroleum consumption.

* Wider use of renewable energy sources like improved solar and wind technology, tidal power, heat pumps with underground loops, and micro-hydropower would reduce coal consumption.

* Comprehensive conservation efforts would reduce energy consumption through means like better insulation, less electricity hungry appliances and devices, and more efficient energy storage devices.

* Nuclear fusion power including recycling of spent high level nuclear waste would provide a much larger share of electrical power and would be available in small scale versions that do not pose weapons proliferation risks in many small communities. Reasonably safe nuclear waste diposal facilities would come on line eliminating existing backlogs and meeting future needs.

* A significant share of coal consumption would involve converting coal into synthetic liquid and gas phase hydrocarbon fuels that would reduce the amount of air pollution generated by the coal. Coal burning would be subject to carbon taxes that reflected their environmental impact and as a result would be used only in niche applications where there were not other economically viable alternatives.

Food, Agriculture and Rural Life

* Organic farming would become the predominant type of agricultural production for most kinds of agricultural products. Petrochemical use in agriculture would decline greatly.

* Automation and other technologies would continue to increase productivity of farms per farmer resulting in a greatly decreased population in places with farm economies. Farmers would be more affluent as a result, and would mostly send their children to boarding schools for middle school and high school since population densities would be too low to support decent local day schools close enough to home.

* Most fish would be produced in fish farms. Better management of commercial fishing and water pollution would restore wild fisheries as well.

* Subsidies for rural living designed to assist economically stuggling farmers would be ended, this would also discourage exurban living.

* Rural governments would be consolidated to serve much larger rural populations over much larger areas and improve the professionalism of the services they provide.

* Meat consumption as a share of total food consumption would be reduced somewhat and more diverse kinds of meats would be available at affordable prices.

* Door to door delivery of mail in rural areas where it is not cost effective to do so would be replaced by post office pickup.

Education

* A system of state funded, secular schools would operate like charter schools do today and local elected school boards would cease to exist. Students would be allowed to choose to attend any of these school free of charge, schools would be compensated based on enrollment and enrolled student need, schools that failed to secure enough students choosing to attend or failed to meet minimum standards would fold, and neither the state board of education nor elected local school board would have day to day managerial control over their operations. Instead, there would be basic health and safety standards, minimum business model approvals, some standardization of the admissions and transfer process, and impartial government administered student performance and satisfaction evaluations. The schools would have the same sort of legal status as public colleges and universities as governmental entities subject to constitutional standards applicable to public actors such as due process and the First Amendment.

* A system of higher education funding that would provide financial assistance to students through scholarships with both need and merit components. The system would commit to meeting 100% of financial need through grants for the best students, 100% of financial need through a combination of grants and loans (no more than 50% loans) for students with less academic merit, and on public grant or loan assistance for academic higher education for studnets with only marginal academic merit.

* Quality vocational education programs would be a respectable and reasonably popular choice for students who were not particularly strong academically and completion of these program would provide graduates with a reasonable prospect of a steady employment in an upper working class to middle middle class career.

* High school graduates would leave school with significant practical knowledge of physical health and mental health matters in connection with the health care system, to the extent necessary to care for themselves, family members, and strangers in emergency situations in a way consistent with evidence based best practices in a manner rooted in a genuine layman's level understanding of the physical processes behind what they need to do.

* Students at high risk of failing academically, ending up engaged in criminal activity, lifelong economic failure, and dysfunctional relationships would be accurately identified by an early warning system in place by pre-school that would devote significant resources starting as early as possible to support them in changing their course, and to the extent that high risks are not corrected by adulthood to intervene appropriately to protect them and others in a pro-active way that is only actually punitive to the extent that it authorized by crimes, child abuse and neglect, domestic violence, financial defaults or similar events.

Criminal Justice

* Criminal defendants are entitled to a public defender with a manageable case load who is paid enough to attract competent lawyers without regard to ability to pay. Criminal defendants can opt to use the funds that would have been used for their defense to apply towards the cost of hiring private counsel instead.

* The primary penalty for failing to enter into a plea bargain would be a court cost assessed against defendants found guilty to cover the cost of the public defender, the prosecutor, and the judicial system in the case, rather than large differences in sentencing outcomes.

* Evidence based statistical evaluation instruments would pay a strong part in determing the kind of sentence appropriate for particular crimes, and the evidence would be regularly re-evaluated in a transparent and open process. Only individuals whose release would pose a significant threat to others from serious recidivism incidents would be released.

* The criminal justice system would make wider use of sanctions intermediate between probation and long periods of incarceration in prisons, particularly for non-violent offenses, such as electrically monitored house arrest, large but proportionate fines and restitution awards, and low security community corrections/low security facilities for low risk prisoners.

* The process of integrating incarcerated individuals back into the community would be more structured, more supportive and less punitive, particularly for the first two or three years, in order to reduce recidivism.

* Prostitution and recreational drug use would be regulated from a public health perspective, but not criminalized.

* Incarceration rates would be significantly lower.

* Prisons would be safer for prisoners and guards, and prison gangs would be more effectively disrupted.

* Law enforcement officers who were caught lying or engaging in police brutality would routinely and promptly be fired even in cases where the proof of the misconduct while solid, was not beyond a reasonable doubt, and would be entered into a national registry of bad cops. The past cases of bad cops would then routinely and systematically investigated to determine if anyone else had been a victim of misconduct by the officer, and law enforcement associates of dismissed bad cops would be have their past patterns of conduct investigated. Incentives to engage in police misconduct would be identified and addressed. Law enforcement officers who did not personally engage in misconduct would have strong incentives individually and collectively to report it and cooperate in investigating it. Employers of law enforcement officials would be vicarciously liable for misconduct by their law enforcement employees without regard to fault.

* A systematic process to allow for the early release of individuals who were given excessive sentences that would not longer be imposed under existing law and sentencing standards whose post-incarceration conduct was acceptable, would be established.

Family Law

* Gay marriage would be legal and accepted.

* The welfare state and legal system would be more accomodating of and sensitive to the needs and expectations of people in extended family and communal living arrangement situations.

* An early warning system and societal norms would encourage earlier intervention in potentially coercive or violent relationships by better informing and empowering potential victims.

* The financial consequences of a divorce in terms of property division and maintenance would be highly predictable due to well defined and easy to apply rules that afford at least rough justice, and as a result, would be far less acrimonious.

* Disputes over parenting time, parental decision making, child abuse and neglect and paternity would be segregated into legal system separate from the financial part of a divorce that would apply without regard to marital status. In this system, advocates for each party, who would not necessarily be lawyer, would be available without regard to ability to pay. This system would be set up to reflect the fact that parenting issues are ongoing matters, rather than something to be resolved once and for all.

READ MORE - Elements Of Ideal World

The Showdown In Wisconsin

Republican Governor [of Wisconsin] Scott Walker . . . is pushing a proposal that would eliminate collective bargaining rights for public workers and make them pay half the costs of their pensions and at least 12.6 percent of their health care coverage. The changes amount to about a seven percent salary cut.

From here.

The budget shortfall that is being used to justify the step cuts to state employee pay and denying unions their collective bargaining rights, of course, is a crisis of Governor Walker's own making created by tax cuts that he backed. Unions are willing to discuss compensation custs, but not the loss of their collective bargaining rights.

A core principle of American political conservatives is that unions are bad and should be busted at every available opportunity. As I've noted before at this blog, one of the key points in the Republican playbook at the moment is that public employees, particularly unionized ones, are overpaid relative to private sector workers (despite evidence to the contrary) and that they employees should bear a large share of the public spending cuts that Republicans campaigned on in the 2012 election.

In Wisconsin, where the 2012 election left Republicans in charge of both houses of the state legislature and the Governor's office, they have the votes to put that ideology into action. While private sector union-management relations are governed by the federal government's National Labor Relations Board, states have considerable freedom to adopt laws concerning the rights of their public sector unions.

Since they don't have the votes to win this battle in the legislative process, Wisconsin union members have marched in force (25,000 strong) on the state capital as the legislature considers the bill and state senate Democrats have removed themselves to an undisclosed location to deny Republicans in the state senate the quorum they need to pass the bill, echoing a similar tactic used in Texas redistricting battles within the last few years. Wisconsin also lacks the citizen's initiative process present in states like California and Colorado, that might have given public sector union members in Wisconsin an end run around the normal legislative process. The unions have President Obama's support, but he has little power when it comes to labor relations in state and local government, an area where even the expansive commerce clause power of Congress probably does not extend.

America's private sector union movement in the United States is close to moribund. Maybe this is due to legislative changes, like labor laws that permit the permanent replacement of striking workers and tolerate significant management misconduct in organizing elections. Maybe it is due to the changing character of the economy that has reduced employment in traditionally unionized industries. Maybe labor is a victim of its own success. The causes are a matter of great debate and controversy. The result, however, is not. American private sector unions haven't been so impotent in numbers or as disinclined to cause work stoppages since long before the United States passed its first national labor laws during the Great Depression.

But, public sector unionization has soared and continues to grow in most states. (Colorado is an exception to the trend.) In part, this is because public sector unions, unlike private sector unions, have employees who can't easily be offshored and employers who can't convincing argue that their wages must be kept low in order to prevent them from losing their business to the competition. Civil service protections that public employees hold to protect them from politically motivated corrupt patronage systems have also made it safer to public employees to organize without fear of losing their jobs than comparable private sector employees. Recall that:

In 1950 . . .the unionized workforce of 14.3 million workers . . . made up 31.5% of the total work force.

In 2008 . . . the unionized workforce of 16.1 million workers who made up 12.4% of the total workforce. The public sector which is 36.8% unionized, is as unionized as the private sector was at its peak. The private sector, which is 7.2% unionized, has the lowest level of unionization in the private sector since the 1920s, if not earlier.

This is a huge deal. As I've noted before, policy more often changes through widespread imitation at historic moments than it does through isolated case by case rational analysis. If Wisconsin is successful in breaking its public employees unions and slashing public employee compensation, the trend will almost surely spread to almost every Republican controlled state in the United States. If public unions lose big in Wisconsin it could mean the end of organized labor unions as a potent force in the American economy and political system entirely for much of the United States.

While looming labor-management disputes in the NFL have attracted lots of attention, public sector unions at the state and local government level in places like Wisconsin are the bread and butter of the labor movement in the United States today. This dispute alone involves hundreds of thousands of middle class workers and their families losing three and a half weeks of pay a year.

Public sector unionization is a different animal than private sector unionization. Protection from unfair unemployment termination has generally been a secondary issue for them because they already have civil service protections. Some public sector unions are legally prohibited from going on strike. While private sector unions can organize politically for labor laws and other laws favorable to their members, public sector unions can organize politically to put union friendly politicians in direct control of their employer.

But, the potential for strikes by public employees to rise to the level of general strikes and to bring vital government services to a halt, whether or not it is legal for them to do so, has always loomed in the background, and covert "sick outs" and work to rule slowdowns remind negotiators of that fact. Denver's police (who publicly deny that this was the case) recently carried out just such a slowdown last year over dissatisfaction with the vigor with which the City of Denver had finally decided to apply to cracking down on instances of police misconduct. Wisconsin is experiencing its own sick outs right now.

Assuming that the political process will eventually prevail in Wisconsin and result in public sector union crushing legislation being passed there, the question is how Democrats and labor unions will respond. With the next election almost two years away, working through the normal political process may not seem like a sufficient response to a powerful political player that is facing deep pay cuts for every single one of its members without any opportunity to collectively bargain the matter and is also facing something close to their very extermination as a means by which the economic cause of state workers can be advanced.

If anything can produce a high profile showdown that could shut down the government of the State of Wisconsin entirely through a work stoppage, legal or otherwise, this frontal assault on public employees unions seems to be a good candidate for it. If public employees' unions in Wisconsin lose this fight, they may be gone for good, and may see much of the rest of the public sector labor movement follow them.

Can they win? There is really no way to know until it happens. The last general strike in the United States outside Puerto Rico was in 1934. But, if public sector unions in Wisconsin manage to inflict decisive political pain on the Republican party in the state, even if they lose on the legislative front for the time being, they may have a real shot at remaining a relevant force in American politics.

READ MORE - The Showdown In Wisconsin

Cell Phone In Prison Concerns Overblown

NPR ran a rather hysterical story on the rising number of contraband cell phones in prisons in California a couple of days ago, that is a follow up to a case where a prison guard was fired after smuggling 150 cell phones into a prison in exchange for $150,000 of bribes. A prison regulation, but not a criminal law, prohibits cell phones in prison and corrections officials and some state legislators want to change that state of affairs.

Some of the points that deserved more scrutiny were these:

Last year, one guard claimed he made $150,000 smuggling phones. He was fired but never charged with anything.

Richard Subia, of California's Department of Corrections, says smuggling cell phones to convicts isn't a crime.

Subia may be right in detail, but he is almost surely wrong in his ultimate conclusion. While it may not be a crime to smuggle cell phones to convicts, it is almost certainly a crime for a prison guard to accept bribes in order to change the way he conducts his official duties in contravention of Department of Corrections rules, and it is likewise a crime to bribe a public official. In Colorado, these are both serious felonies (and there is also a separate minor felony for introducing contraband including cell phones into prisons), and I have a hard time believing that California lacks a bribery law.

Also, in the case, for example, of someone who throws a football full of cell phones into a prison, at the very least, it is almost surely illegal littering (a minor issue, but one that could at least provide a basis for an immediate arrest and booking of a suspect and the imposition of probation conditions prohibiting the conduct), and more importantly, the person who did so would have potential criminal liability as a co-conspirator for any crime committed by someone in the prison with that cell phone.

Corrupt prison guards are a long standing problem, and one that can't be solved once and for all. California has a strategic interest in bringing as much clout as it can to bear on guards who are found to be corrupt in order to discourage other guards from acting the same way. California would be well within it rights, for example, to charge the guard who smuggled cell phones into the prison as a co-conspirator in any attempted witness killing ordered from prison with one of those phones, and once phones are confiscated it would be possible to use cell phone company records to make those kinds of cases.

It may be possible to block unauthorized calls from prisons. But testing of that new technology won't start in California for months.

Cell phone jamming is not some highly experimental new technology, although the experience in New Zealand, where it is being phased in for all prisons is mixed. You can order one and get it delivered in a matter of months. A single device of the type used in the war in Iraq, which is the size of a boom box, could prevent cell phones from working anywhere in a prison complex. Industrial grade versions are available off the shelf. For example, one model designed for use in prisons costs about $8,900. You can order a model that blocks a 40 foot radius for immediate delivery off the shelf for $25 and use it as a stop-gap if a problem is suspected until a more comprehensive solution is devised. At any rate, the main concerns are legal rather than technical.

It's very frustrating to me that we have people who work for our organization that are willing to risk the lives of their fellow employees. It creates another risk for the employees and inmates in our facilities, as well as the public at large.

- Richard Subia, of California's Department of Corrections

The risk from cell phones in prisons is not significantly a risk to the lives of prison guards. This is hyperbole. The main risk is that gang leaders and organized crime figures will use cell phones to run their criminal enterprises from prison, for example, ordering that witnesses be killed, something a high profile case in Denver involves right now even without a cell phone. A secondary risk is that the inability of prison officials to monitor cell phone communications as they can land line communications might make it harder to collect evidence from recordings of those calls that can be used to bring prosecutions of other crimes. There is some dim possibility that a cell phone could be used to coordinate and plan a prison break, but, the sheer difficulty of arranging a prison break from a prison with any significant level of security is immense with or without a cell phone.

Of course, a huge amount of cell phone use by prisoners would be benign - calls to friends, loved ones and legitimate business associates much like calls that anyone else would make. The majority of prison inmates are not violent criminal masterminds with large organizations at their beck and call; they are mostly stupid, ineffectual losers with poor impulse control and substance abuse problems who were acting alone or whose co-conspirators are also in prison themselves.

The truly scary prisoners whom we worry would direct criminal activity from cell phones in their prison cells are pretty much confined to a small number of higher security prison facilities. So, one could get the vast majority of the public safety benefit from cell phone blocking at prisons from devices at a very small number of facilities.

Of course, an even lower technology solution could be devised. State governments could pass a law prohibiting cell phone companies from providing coverage in the tiny handful of cells where they make cell phone use from high or medium security state prisons, and use their power of eminent domain to compensate the cell phone companies and the property owners they have leases with for the economic harm that this does to them. They could probably even impose a users fee on cell phone companies to pay for it.

In short, while the NPR story identified a legitimate matter of public concern about corruption and about cell phone use in California prisons, its uncritical reporting left unchallenged some very questionable statements made by the public officials involved.

READ MORE - Cell Phone In Prison Concerns Overblown

Short Takes

* I went to the Burger King restaurant in Cherry Creek earlier this week to get a cheap breakfast sandwich while I waited for the bank to open. The location was previously famous for being the parking nazi of Cherry Creek North, aggressively booting people in its lot. This time, I had to wait several minutes for anyone who worked there to appear, even after calling out an "anybody home?" Their bathroom is also the skankiest in all of Cherry Creek.

* Radio stations in Denver are in a slump. I have twelve FM and six AM pre-sets on my car radio, which I regularly revise with the best available options on the airwaves. Yet, several times in the last week, the elevator music in retail stores around town has been fresher and more interesting than what I can hear on any of those eighteen stations.

* Science Fair is over for another year. Next up, History Day.

* What is with all of the little banks on and around 1st Avenue in Cherry Creek? There must be twenty of them in the neighborhood, most with just one or two locations. You'd think it was Bern, Switzerland, or Luxembourg, or the Cayman Islands. I almost never see anyone actually doing business there, but presumably they have enough customers to stay afloat. I presume that they are catering mostly to a high end, local market clientele making loans to businesses, real estate developers, wealthy individuals and medium sized businesses, but I'm really not entirely clear what the business model is, although it seems to be a very similar business model for all of the banks that are not retail customer oriented.

* Even though Denver was almost 20% below average in precipitation in 2010, the snow pack in all of the state's major river basins was well above average, and since that is what really matters most for both Front Range water users and for the Colorado tourism industry, it's all good.

* Justice Kagan wrote her first U.S. Supreme Court opinion on the subject of the proper way to calculate the car expense in Chapter 13 plan calculations. The ruling was 8-1 with only Scalia dissenting. I agree that her reading was the better interpretation of the statute (it disallowed the expense when there was no actual loan or lease on a vehicle that had to be paid). The court took the case because there was a circuit split on the issue.

* The Article I immigration court based in Denver has a new judge who is married to one of the ICE prosecutors in the Denver office who presses these cases. The new administrative law judge must "must recuse herself from any case directed by her husband" but I have real doubts about whether that is sufficient to remove the appearance of impropriety in this situation.

In an ordinary court, only part of the docket involves cases brought by the government. But, all of the cases before this administrative law judge will be brought by the office of which her husband is a part. The pervasive association the new immigration judge has with one side of every single case before her creates a clear appearance of impropriety. I can't imagine how I could possibly be impartial in her shoes. Immigration judges have immense discretion. Statistically, the judge a person with a case in immigration court is assigned to is the single most important factor in determining the outcome of the case. Inappropriate use of that discretion by immigration judges, mostly to the detriment of immigrants, has flooded the federal appellate courts in recent years, and has cast grave disrepute on the credibility of the immigration courts as institutions where any meaningful kind of due process exists. This development certainly doesn't help the situation. If the recusal were from all cases with ICE involvement, that would probably resolve the problem, but that isn't a viable option for an immigration court judge.

I feel for the couple, who are no doubt both very smart, competent immigration lawyers, each of whom has a good federal government jobs. Neither has personally done anything wrong. But, maintaining this kind of status quo, even with recusals from cases where the other is personally involved really doesn't cut it. In government contexts the concern is not primarily ex parte communications about particular cases or personal gain (the government lawyers don't win or lose anything as a result of the outcome of particular cases), but about bias towards one side or the other on the part of the office, which is just as strong even without personal involvement in the same cases. We are not such a parochial backwater in Denver that we have no choice but to have a conflicted immigration court system because no one else is up to the job.

* Once again, Denver cops are being sued in a police brutality case and fraudulent police report case arising from a January 2009 traffic stop. Westword has more details.

* Marginal Revolution is a superior blog that I will add to my sidebar in due course.

* The percentage of women in Colorado's General Assembly (41 out of 99) is the highest of any state in the United States. The national average is 23.4%.

* Republicans are constantly accusing liberals of inventing constitutional rights that aren't supported by the language of the constitution. But, these days, the shoe is on the other foot. John Tomasic at the Colorado Independent nails it with this headline:

King to Polis: Healthcare law infringes on right to have babies in garbage cans

He goes on to explain:

Iowa Rep. Steve King today on Capitol Hill at a Rules Committee hearing on the GOP plan to repeal the healthcare reform law. He ended up telling Colorado Rep. Jared Polis that the law is unconstitutional because, for instance, it forces uninsured women who deliver babies in garbage cans to buy health insurance. Polis, aghast, searched for words.

Isn't funny how the rights Republicans want to invent always seem to be ones you have no desire to actually exercise?

READ MORE - Short Takes

Colorado Politics Recap

* Governor-Elect Hickenlooper is now Governor Hickenlooper. He's has the near impossible task of balancing the budget ahead of him, but at least the NY Times is writing nice stories about him and even the Republicans haven't gone into attack mode yet with our new Governor. Now we're in for an exciting four months of the legislative session including highlights like the redistricting of Congressional districts, with a partisan split between the State House and State Senate. The party line, shared with President Obama, is that Hickenlooper wants to create jobs. Despite having fewer tools at his disposal to do so, I have more faith that Hickenlooper will be successful than I do that President Obama will. We also have a new Republican State Treasurer and Secretary of State.

* We also have a new Mayor in Denver, Bill Vidal. Unfortunately, he is the guy is charge of the department that recently failed to adequately discipline two corrupt parking enforcement officers, until there was a public outcry over it. The caretaker administration will end this spring when a sucessor is elected in Denver's municipal elections. I'm starting to get calls from candidates' organizations (not personal ones) seeking my support. The last real race was in 2003, in which I supported Penfield Tate in the first round, and John Hickenlooper in the second. Hickenlooper had no serious competition in 2007. Tate is not running this time around.

* The report of a grand jury investigation into lies under oath and attempts to suborn perjury by Denver Police Officer Paul Baca that did not result in an indictment, despite denunciations of him in open court by a judge and recorded court testimony that strongly suggests he was lying, has been sealed by the Denver judge presiding over the case. The Jefferson County special prosecutor appointed to prosecute the officer has appealed the ruling but isn't allowed to comment on the grand jury report or the contents of the order closing it. It isn't that unusual for a prosecutor to ask that a grand jury report be sealed in order to permit the prosecutor to continue an investigation, perhaps with a future grand jury. But, it is quite unusual for a grand jury to write a report of its own, and even more unusual for such a report to be suppressed over the objection of the prosecutor in the case. Perhaps there are good reasons for doing so, but an appearance of impropriety results any time a high profile corruption prosecution is closed without full disclosure of what happened.

* One of the school board members in Greeley, Brett Reese, who is also a pretty difficult character in his role on the school board, is using his low power radio station to broadcast dubious and outrageous conspiracy theories about Martin Luther King, Jr. without even providing authorship for the sentiment, as we head into the holiday named after the Civil Rights leader. It is his free speech right to do so, but it also shows bad judgment on the part of someone who should be a role model for the students in the district. Respecting other people's right to say stupid things is honorable. Using your own resources to say stupid things just shows that you're stupid. Also, while the school board member's official line is that he is simply allowing people to air concerns about a cult of personality, it sure sounds like crackpot conpsiracy theory racism to me. Oh, and he's also decided that the way to respond to the controvery he has created is to carry a gun. Brett Reese looks a lot more like a nutjob who is an embarassment to the Greeley. Fortunately, as just one member of the Board, he can't do much harm by himself and still belongs in the "mostly harmless" and "do not feed the troll" category.

* What sort of jerk steals somebody's else's dead wife's ashes? As this story comes from Colorado Springs, it is hard to know.

* Daily Kos and Colorado Pols both have compelling documentation today and in the past few days of the pattern of Tea Party's incitement of violence with its campaign rhetoric. I don't have the stomache to post about it at the moment, but it is there is you are so inclined.

READ MORE - Colorado Politics Recap

Corrupt Denver Parking Enforcers Fired

Denver's municipal government fired parking enforcement officers Eric Madril and John Culhane on December 9, 2010. They faked a ticket to retaliate against someone who had been reduce to one of them when given a first ticket and were caught in parking court. Denver's Public Works Department initially gave them trivial punishments, but when the news got out via 9News and the Denver Post, Denver's District attorney charged each of them with felonies and we now learn that they were fired a few days after they were charged with the felonies.

The initial decision to go easy on them was a serious lapse of judgment by municipal supervisors in the case, continuing a long history of overly lax treatment of law enforcement officials who engage in misconduct in the City, but public outrage and a nudge from the District Attorneys' office (which doesn't have the same intimate need for cooperation from parking enforcement officers that it does from the police in the city) ultimately caused the city to do the right thing.

READ MORE - Corrupt Denver Parking Enforcers Fired

Ideas Interrupted

Every once and a while, I start to make a blog post, get interrupted, and it ends up with some links and some half finished analysis in my blogs collection of draft posts. The analysis is often unsalvagable, either because it was too fragmented, or because it was topical and now untimely, but the links are often worthwhile references, so I don't delete the draft posts. In an effort to clear my backlog of draft posts, here are some interesting links that I collected and might have blogged about over the last few years, that didn't make it to the front page. Think of it as a director's cut.

* A Gallup Survey looks at who identifies as a Republican and looks at eight year trends as of May 2009. At that low point, the Republican party was older, more conservative and more religious than it had been in the past. The young, liberals, moderates, the less affluent and more secular voters left it in droves.

* The removal of the President of Hondorus in 2009 may have had sound legal justification.

*"The U.S. Court of Appeals on Wednesday released a ruling in favor of a group of zombies who say they were wrongfully arrested while protesting consumerism during the 2006 Aquatennial." From here (ruling here).

* Tampa cops apparently don't like clowns any more than Minneapolis cops like zombies.

* "Leading theories of the Eleventh Amendment start from the premise that its text makes no sense." From here.

If you have been taught that the United States Constitution was a document of near perfection, you haven't studied enough constitutional law. The Eleventh Amendment is a good example of both this truth, and of the limits of a "plain text" understanding of the document.

Leading theories of the Eleventh Amendment start from the premise that its text makes no sense.

From here.

The text of the Eleventh Amendment reads:

The judicial power of the United States shall not be construed to extent to any suit in law or equity commenced or prosecuted against one of the United States by citizens of another state, or by citizens or subjects of any foreign state.

It amends the following language of Article III, Section 2 of the United States Constitution (language naiively modified by the Eleventh Amendment emphasized):

The judicial power shall extend to all cases in law and equity arising under this constitution, the laws of the United States, and treaties made, or which shall be made, under their authority; to all cases affecting ambassadors, other public ministers and counsuls; to all cases of admiralty and maritime jurisdiction; to controversies to which the United States shall be a party; to controversies between two or more states; between a state and citizens of another state; between citizens of different states; between citizens of the same state, claiming lands under grants of different states; and between a state or citizens thereof and foreign states, citizens and subjects.

In all cases affecting ambassadors, other public ministers and consuls, and those in which a state shall be a party, the supreme court shall have original jurisdiction.

The Eleventh Amendment has been read by prevailing constitutional law to include not just the edits to Article III that its plain text encompasses (shown above), but also to establish a substantive doctrine of sovereign immunity for state governments, with selected exceptions, and embellished with permissible strategies to avoid the limitation.

For example, while local government are treated as part of the state government for most purposes, many local governments and independent governmental agencies as distinct from the state government for Eleventh Amendment purposes. Also, the case law permits suits against governmental officials for actions that they have taken in their official capacity, rather than seeing them as benefiting fully from sovereign immunity from suits against states in federal trial courts. State permission is inferred when states are parties to bankruptcy cases (or alternately, state sovereign immunity is abrogated in those cases). In practice, the exceptions swallow the rule, which has been narrowed to prohibiting in practice only suits for money damages against the parts of state governments which are financed with tax money.

More particularly, going beyond the express terms of the Eleventh Amendment, the Eleventh Amendment has been held to prohibit citizens of a state from suing their own state on a federal question theory in federal court, despite the fact that this isn't clearly prohibited by the terms of the U.S. Constitution, if the suit is commenced in the U.S. Supreme Court, and the Eleventh Amendment is routinely applied in this way.

The Eleventh Amendment is, in fact, applied to limit the authority of the federal government to sue states, since allowing citizens of a state, but not non-citizens of a state to sue a state in federal court on a federal question seems absurd, even though this is not expressly banned by the Eleventh Amendment.

The Eleventh Amendment, by its terms, also does not apply to admiralty suits, as opposed to those arising "in law and equity," although the case law does not draw such a clear line, as the U.S. Supreme Court explained in California v. Deep Sea Research, Inc., 118 S.Ct. 1464 (1998).

The article linked explains this situation:

Anti-federalists threatened to undermine this case for the Constitution by arguing that the state-citizen diversity provisions of Article III — authorizing suits "between" states and out-of-state citizens — could be construed to permit suits against states (and thus imply federal power to enforce any resulting judgments against states). Although Federalists denied this construction, the Supreme Court proceeded to read Article III to permit out-of-state citizens to sue states. Federalists and Anti-federalists quickly joined forces to restore their preferred construction of Article III.

In adopting the Eleventh Amendment, they saw no anomaly in prohibiting “any suit” against a state by out-of-state citizens because they did not understand the Constitution to authorize any suits against states by in-state citizens. Federal question jurisdiction did not expressly authorize such suits, and the Founders likely would not have perceived any real need for such jurisdiction given their understanding that the Constitution conferred neither legislative nor coercive power over states. Because the Eleventh Amendment, as written, made sense in light of the nature of the Union, the absurdity doctrine cannot justify departing from the terms of the Amendment.

In other words, this author too finds that the Founders didn't really believe that Article III really meant what it actually says.

Since suits against states in federal courts other than the U.S. Supreme Court are prohibited by the clear language of Article III, it would have been possible, and probably more desirable from the point of view of matching case law to the actual language of the U.S. Connstitution, for the U.S. Supreme Court to simply adopt of refusing to exercise its power to hear suits between private parties and states in non-admiralty cases on forum non conveniens grounds, rather than jurisdictional grounds, rather than creating the expansive concept of state sovereign immunity. But, this isn't how the doctrine has evolved.

READ MORE - Ideas Interrupted