On Feb. 26, 2020, in a 9-0 decision, the Supreme Court decided Shular v. United States, rejecting the defense argument that Florida’s unique drug laws cannot be used to enhance a federal sentence. At issue was a federal statute known as the Armed Career Criminal Act (“ACCA”). ACCA imposes a mandatory 15-year sentence on defendants convicted of federal firearms-related felonies if they have 3 or more prior convictions for “serious drug offenses” or “violent felonies.” In 2017, local law enforcement officers executed a search warrant at the Florida home of Eddie Shular who was the target of a drug trafficking investigation being conducted by the Drug Enforcement Administration (“DEA”). During the search, the officers seized a firearm from a bedroom closet. Because Shular was a convicted felon, he was charged under federal law with the crime of being a felon in possession of a firearm (18 USC section 922(g)(1)). He pled guilty to that offense and because he had more than three prior convictions for serious drug offenses, he was sentenced to the mandatory minimum of 15 years in prison under the applicable federal statute. He appealed his sentence arguing that because, under Florida law, none of his state convictions would qualify as a “serious drug offense” because the relevant state laws did not require that the government prove that Shular had “knowledge of the illicit nature of the substance,” and the Florida crimes were, therefore, broader than the generic drug offense analogs under federal law. The Eleventh Circuit upheld his conviction and sentence, rejecting the application of the “categorical approach” to defining “serious drug offenses, and holding that the ACCA definition “requires only that the predicate offense involves certain activities related to controlled substances.” The Supreme Court affirmed, holding that “serious drug offense” requires only that the state offense involves the conduct specified in the statute, and does not require that the state offense in question match certain generic drug offenses under federal law. The opinion was written by Justice Ginsburg. Justice Kavanaugh filed a concurring opinion. To discuss the case, we have Gregory A. Brower, Shareholder, Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck.
On the Gist, Tara Reade and Megyn Kelly on Instagram.
In the second half of our interview with Dr. Nina Fefferman from the University of Tennessee, she and Mike discuss the types of analysis used in predictive modeling, why it’s an essential part of the crisis response, and what the future holds as the models continue to change.
In the spiel, Sweden’s loose measures yielded grim results, and that should be a warning.
Government CIOs leading digital initiatives are evaluating how COVID-19 will impact their mission, and are looking to fast-track the procurement of technologies that can be agile, flexible, and remote to respond to the crisis. Mark Amtower, nationally known speaker, author, and radio host joins the show to discuss how organizations in the near term can capitalize on this accelerated digital transformation evolution.
Testing for the coronavirus is still falling short in many places in the U.S. How is your state doing? Track it using a tool from NPR.
A mutated strain of the coronavirus may have helped it spread more widely, according to a new preliminary study that's getting a lot of attention even before it's peer-reviewed.
One of the deadliest outbreaks of the coronavirus has been at the Holyoke Soldiers' Home in Massachusetts. Officials are investigating what happened there.
Plus, experiments are undeway to see if dogs can be trained to sniff out the coronavirus. Meanwhile, U.S. animal shelters have reported having all their dogs fostered during the lock down.
Trump surrenders in the War Against the Invisible Enemy, pivots to a message about rebuilding the economy, and tries to make the race about Joe Biden. Then Jon and Dan break down the latest polls, answer some listener questions, and Dan interviews Democratic election lawyer Marc Elias about his legal battles to protect our right to vote in November.
Research from New York examining the blood of people who have recovered from Covid – 19 shows the majority have produced antibodies against the disease, The researchers hope to soon be able to establish whether this confers long term immunity as with more common viral infections.
And Research in Berlin and London has identified biomarkers, minute signs of the disease which may help clinicians identify who is likely to develop severe symptoms and what kind of treatment they might need.
Mutations have been much in the headlines, these are a natural processes of evolution and not just in viruses, but the term is misunderstood, two studies focusing on different aspects shed some light on what mutation in SARS-CoV-2 really means.
(Image: People wear face masks as they cross a street in Times Square in New York City. Credit: Kena Betancur/AFP via Getty Images)
The bitcoin halving is just a few days away and the growing excitement is palpable. On this episode of The Breakdown, NLW argues that the excitement is also legitimate, and looks at nine reasons why bitcoin has never been stronger going into one of its every-four-year issuance reductions:
Price
Hash rate
Mining competition
Accessibility and Services
Infrastructure
Institutional awareness and participation
Narrative relevance
Perceived and real resilience
Lindy effects
Oh, and let’s not forget. Paul Tudor Jones just disclosed that he is invested in bitcoin and sees it as a hedge against ‘great monetary inflation’
Political violence aside, the 20th century saw great progress. Looking at health progress, as one example, Princeton University economist Anne Case notes it was a century of expanding lifetimes.
“Just to take one particular group,” she tells interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast, “if you look at people aged 45 to 54 in the U.S., back in 1900 the death rate was 1,500 per 100,000. By the end of the century, it was down below 400 per 100,000.
“The risk of dying just fell dramatically and fairly smoothly. There were a couple of spikes -- one was the 1918 flu epidemic -- and a little plateau in the 1960s when people were dying from having smoked heavily in their 20s and 30s and 40s. But people stopped smoking, there was a medical advance as antihypertensives came on the scene, and progress continued from 1970 through to the end of the century.”
Even stubborn health disparities – such as the life expectancy gaps between say whites and blacks, or between the rich and the poor - narrowed in the century’s second half.
“We thought that sort of progress should continue,” Case says. But as she and fellow Princeton economist Angus Deaton found as they sleuthed through the data, starting in the 1990s progress had reversed for a fairly large demographic in the U.S. population.
“[W]hat Angus and I found was that after literally a century of progress, among whites without a college degree – these would be people without a four-year degree in the U.S. – mortality rates stopped falling and actually started to rise.”
The trend was clear: looking at figures from the 1990s to the most recent data available from 2018, mortality among middle-aged, non-college-educated white Americans rose, stalled, then rose again.
“This was stunning news to us and we thought we must have done something wrong because this never happens, or if it had happened, it would have been reported,” Case admits. But it was news, and Case and Deaton’s findings and analysis – that controllable behaviors like drug addiction, suicide and alcohol addiction were driving the numbers – created a furor. Citing sociologist Emile Durkheim’s argument that suicide is more likely when social integration breaks down, Case explains, “We think of all of these as a form of suicide – not necessarily that a drug addict wants to take him or herself out, but that it leads to that eventually.”
Meanwhile, Case and Deaton’s shorthand expression ‘deaths of despair’ entered the common –not just the academic social science – lexicon. (It helped that they were speaking publicly about this “group that just wasn’t on anyone’s radar” at roughly the same time that a demographic both similar and similarly ‘unknown’ was seen as a surprise well of strength for the political maverick Donald Trump.)
Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism is also the name of the new bestselling book that Case and Deaton, her husband, have written for Princeton University Press. (Deaton, a Nobel laureate in economics, has also appeared on Social Science Bites.) The book looks at the physical and mental causes of these deaths – Case and Deaton count 150,000 of them in 2018 alone – and how aspects of America’s unique medical and pharmaceutical system have resulted in this unique tragedy.
Case explains that these deaths of despair didn’t suddenly arise in the 1990s, but they had been obscured by advances made in treating heart disease (and obesity, despair, drugs, alcohol are all hard on the heart). “As deaths of despair got larger and larger, it would have taken more progress against heart disease for this to continue to fly under the radar. Instead what happened was we stopped making progress against heart disease.”
Also in the 1990s, prescription opioids became widely available in the United States – “a self-inflicted wound,” Case says that made the existing trend “horrifically” worse. “In the U.S. in the mid-1990s Oxycontin was allowed onto the streets. Any doctor with a script could prescribe it. It’s basically heroin in pill form with an FDA label on it, and they sprinkled it like jelly beans. It landed on very fertile soil.”
Between opioids and existing problems with America’s mostly private health care system, deaths from despair keep rising.
What might end this cycle? Something dramatic, Case says. And perhaps something already creating drama …
“We think something is going to have to break, and break badly, in order for us to see reform. Maybe, possibly, COVID-19 is breaking things really badly and this might be a time when enough people in the middle of the distribution start talking about reform, then it might be possible to see change.”
Anne Case is the Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of Economics and Public Affairs, Emeritus at Princeton, where she directs the Research Program in Development Studies. She’s received numerous awards for her work on the nexus between economic health and physical health, including the Kenneth J. Arrow Prize in Health Economics from the International Health Economics Association and the Cozzarelli Prize from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. She is a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a fellow of the Econometric Society, and an affiliate of the Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit at the University of Cape Town. Case is a member of the National Academy of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society.
On April 23, 2020, in a 9-0 decision, the Supreme Court decided Romag Fasteners Inc. v. Fossil Inc., holding that a plaintiff in a trademark infringement suit is not required to show that a defendant willfully infringed the plaintiff’s trademark as a precondition to an award of profits. The decision, which vacated and remanded the opinion below from the Federal Circuit, was written by Justice Gorsuch on April 23, 2020. Justice Alito filed a concurring opinion, in which Justices Breyer and Kagan joined. Justice Sotomayor filed an opinion concurring in the judgment. To discuss the case, we have Adam Mossoff, Professor of Law at Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University. As always, the Federalist Society takes no particular legal or public policy positions. All opinions expressed are those of the speakers.