Law, Crime, and Law Enforcement: Year In Review 1999












Court Decisions

In the United States during 1999, several noteworthy court decisions were handed down concerning, at least indirectly, the rights of consumers. In one case, an antitrust case brought by the U.S. Department of Justice, District Court Judge Thomas P. Jackson released a 207-page findings of fact in which he determined that Microsoft Corp. was a monopoly. (See Computers and Information Systems.) The importance of the case could be recognized by the fact that only two other antitrust cases in the 20th century, those concerning the Standard Oil Co. and AT&T, involved the monetary impact of the Microsoft decision. It is not illegal, in and of itself, to be a monopoly, but it becomes illegal if that status is used to stifle competition and thereby seriously injure consumers by depriving them of innovations that otherwise might have been developed by competitors.

In an unusual move the court did not rule on the legal aspects of the case but left the case open to settlement. At the end of the year, in a startling development, it decided that the Justice Department and Microsoft should come to some mutual agreement and appointed Richard Posner, a federal appellate judge, to mediate the dispute. In his earlier writings as a law professor and subsequently his decisions as a judge, Posner had been somewhat skeptical of traditional antitrust remedies. In a lead editorial The Wall Street Journal opined that by these developments the trial judge had extended “a golden invitation” to Microsoft to settle. The newspaper had been critical of Microsoft’s defense, which it regarded as relying too heavily on “semantic diffusion.” In its editorial it stated that Judge Posner would be serving “in a purely private capacity. But it might not be too much to see him as a de facto court-appointed attorney for Microsoft, one whom Judge Jackson hopes will do a better job for the company than the company’s own lawyers have done.”

In another important case, the U.S. Supreme Court sharply limited a corporation’s power to settle massive class-action lawsuits. The case involved a $1.5 billion settlement for asbestos health-related damage claims asserted by 186,000 different people. A Texas court had approved the settlement, as did a federal appellate court, binding all the plaintiffs. The Supreme Court overturned these decisions, stating it might not result in fair compensation to all the victims. It stated that a settlement of massive claims on a mandatory basis can be confirmed only if strict standards are applied.

For perhaps the first time, a federal judge interpreted the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. It held that the amendment gives individuals and not just militia the right to bear arms. The Second Amendment provides that: “A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” The decision set off a furious debate, mainly among law professors, as to the meaning of the amendment. Fifty-two of them filed a brief supporting gun control, which they felt was at stake in the case. Others supported the decision. The case was viewed by many commentators as having substantial political significance for the 2000 presidential election.

Another case of important political significance for the next election of members of the U.S. House of Representatives concerned the way the year 2000 decennial census was to be conducted. Under the Constitution, the House of Representatives is apportioned among the states according to the “actual enumeration of the population” that is to be made every 10 years. Democrats, by and large, have construed this language to authorize “statistical sampling” in calculating the “real” population, because in their view “actual enumeration,” advocated by most Republicans, results in the undercounting of minorities. The Supreme Court’s decision prohibited the use of statistical sampling in calculating population for purposes of congressional apportionment and stated that an actual head count is required.

In other cases in the U.S., Linda Tripp was tried on felony counts that she had illegally taped several conversations with Monica Lewinsky in late 1997 that later figured in the impeachment trial of U.S. Pres. Bill Clinton, even after an attorney allegedly had told her it was illegal to do so; the New Jersey Supreme Court unanimously issued a ruling that Boy Scouts cannot exclude, and therefore discriminate against, homosexuals; and the U.S. Supreme Court held that the doctrine of sovereign immunity shields the states from private lawsuits seeking to enforce federal laws regulating the workplace.

Two cases decided by the Supreme Court of Israel attracted attention in the United States and other parts of the world. In the first case an American Jew, after allegedly having committed a murder in the U.S., fled to Israel and claimed citizenship there. The court held that he was an Israeli citizen and thus was immune from extradition to the U.S. Instead, he was tried in Israel, found guilty, and sentenced to 24 years in prison, with eligibility for parole after 14 years served. The leniency of this sentence, relative to what he would have received if found guilty of murder in the U.S., was widely criticized there.

The result of the other case was better received by the American public. In it the Supreme Court of Israel banned the use of torture in the interrogation of prisoners. The court found it necessary to balance basic human rights, on the one hand, against the protection of citizens against terrorism, on the other.

In other noteworthy cases, a French judge ruled that speed, alcohol, and drugs were the primary agents that resulted in the death of Diana, princess of Wales (along with her companion, Dodi al-Fayed, and their car’s driver), dismissing all charges against others implicated in the 1997 accident, including nine photographers, another car, and members of the press. The Supreme Court of Belgium sentenced Willy Claes, a prominent socialist and former secretary-general of NATO, to three years’ imprisonment and banned him from holding office for five years, for corruption involved in taking a bribe. The Russian Constitutional Court ruled that there was no uncertainty as to the meaning of relevant provisions of the constitution and therefore declined to decide whether a person who held the post of president could be a candidate for that position in the next presidential election. The International Court of Justice ruled that it had no jurisdiction to entertain an action brought by the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia challenging the legality of the use of force against it by the United Kingdom in the Kosovo armed engagement; in a related case the court extended the time limit for Yugoslavia to file a rejoinder to an action brought against it largely by members of the NATO forces concerning the crime of genocide.

The Italian Court of Cassation, in a highly controversial case that gained great notoriety in Italy, held that a woman wearing tight jeans could not be raped, since her cooperation would be necessary for the jeans to be pulled off; the court dismissed the contention that such cooperation could have been the result of fear. Canada, on the other hand, seemingly reached a contrary result, deciding that the doctrine of “implied consent,” while found to be important in other aspects of the law, had no place where rape or sexual assault was involved.









Drug Trafficking

The United Nations’ Vienna-based International Narcotics Control Board reported that during 1998 the rising purity levels of heroin available in North America had led to an increase in heroin smoking, especially among young people. In a report released in February 1999, the UN drug-control agency said that heroin originating in Latin America was continuing to displace heroin from Southeast Asia in the illicit marketplace. Efforts made by government and international groups in Latin America had resulted in a decrease in the areas under coca bush cultivation and the production of coca leaf, the main illicit crop in the region. New cultivation sites, however, rapidly compensated for these reductions. In Europe there were indications that the clandestine manufacture of synthetic drugs, such as “ecstasy,” was increasing and that the products were trafficked worldwide. The UN report also expressed concern over the proliferation of do-it-yourself guides on the Internet that enabled users to prepare and abuse controlled substances.

In October the director of the U.S. White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, Gen. Barry McCaffrey, warned the European Union (EU) not to be complacent about the spread of the use of cocaine. He noted that while the U.S. had a serious drug problem that was getting better, the Europeans had a similar problem that was getting worse, partly because of increased tolerance in EU countries for drugs like cocaine and ecstasy. Data released by McCaffrey indicated that more cocaine was being seized by European police forces than had been confiscated along the entire southwestern border of the U.S. In Europe 57% of cocaine shipments from Latin America reportedly entered through Spain or Portugal, whereas heroin came almost entirely from Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Despite McCaffrey’s optimism about the situation in the U.S., critics of the nation’s so-called war on drugs claimed that the initiative had been a costly failure. Surveys showed that the use of crack cocaine had not changed in 10 years, nor had the general level of illegal drug use.

Murder and Other Violence

In 1998, for the seventh consecutive year, the overall rate of serious crime in the U.S. fell. Crime rates reportedly declined 6%, and property crime rates also fell 6% from 1997 to 1998. The rates were the lowest recorded since 1973.

These encouraging figures were marred by a series of bloody massacres during the year in such unlikely and supposedly safe locations as schools, offices, a summer camp, and a church. On April 20 in Littleton, Colo., two students cloaked in black trench coats and armed with guns and bombs opened fire at Columbine High School, killing 13 people and wounding more than 30 before taking their own lives. The killers in this, the worst school shooting in U.S. history, were identified as Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. Both were said to have been members of an outcast group of about a dozen high-school students known as the Trench Coat Mafia, the members of which often wore trench coats and had German slogans and swastikas emblazoned on their clothes. The Columbine tragedy, which followed closely a number of similar deadly incidents of school violence, prompted renewed debate in the U.S. about gun control and the need to make schools weapon-free zones.

In October Luis Alfredo Garavito, who had been in police custody since April, confessed to having raped, tortured, and then beheaded 140 children during a five-year killing spree in Colombia. Authorities had launched a nationwide manhunt in 1997 following the discovery of 36 decomposing corpses of children found in shallow graves near the city of Pereira. An equally horrific case came to an end on December 30 when Javed Iqbal, a well-to-do and methodical man, turned himself in to a newspaper office in Lahore, Pak., after suffocating 100 boys over a six-month period and disposing of their bodies in a vat of acid. The mad spree was apparently an act of retribution for a slight Iqbal had suffered months before at the hands of the police.

In what was widely considered to have been the most important criminal verdict in modern Mexican history, Raúl Salinas de Gortari, the brother of former president Carlos Salinas de Gortari, was convicted in Mexico City in January of having ordered the assassination of a prominent politician in 1994; he was sentenced to 50 years in prison. It was the first time in Mexico that a close relative of a powerful figure had faced punishment for a serious crime. The verdict was appealed but gave a much-needed boost to the credibility of the Mexican justice system.

In Pretoria, S.Af., the trial commenced in October of Wouter Basson, a former government chemical-warfare scientist. An army brigadier and heart surgeon, Basson faced 30 murder counts involving more than 200 deaths, including those of Namibian guerrillas captured during South Africa’s apartheid era. Basson allegedly injected the captives with toxins as part of gruesome medical experiments. He was also charged with the theft of more than $13 million of government funds and with the illegal manufacture of drugs.

White-Collar Crime, Corruption, and Fraud

A new Bribe Payers Index (BPI), published by Transparency International, a Berlin-based global anticorruption organization, ranked China, South Korea, Taiwan, and Italy among the 19 leading exporting countries most involved in paying bribes to senior public officials. The BPI ranked Sweden, Australia, Canada, and Austria among the nations least involved in such bribery. The organization’s annual Corruption Perception Index listed Cameroon, Nigeria, Indonesia, and Azerbaijan as the world’s most corrupt countries.

In March all 20 members of the EU’s powerful executive commission resigned in the face of a corruption scandal. Following months of allegations of cronyism and mismanagement, an independent panel issued a damning report that criticized the conduct of the commission as a whole. The report revealed that no commissioner had profited personally, but the implication was that friends and family might have. Also in March, in an unprecedented move, the International Olympic Committee voted in Lausanne, Switz., to expel six of its members for having accepted payments and other inducements from officials involved in the successful bid by Salt Lake City, Utah, to be the host of the 2002 Winter Olympic Games. (See Sports and Games: Sidebar.)

In August U.S. federal law-enforcement officials announced an ongoing investigation into what was believed to be a major money- laundering operation by Russian organized crime through the Bank of New York. Investigators said that as much as $10 billion could have flowed through the bank in the previous year. Indictments against three Russian immigrants and some of the companies involved were handed down in October. Meanwhile, as speculation continued about whether the money could have included millions of dollars in International Monetary Fund loans to Russia being skimmed off by Russian politicians, U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright urged President Yeltsin in September to make fighting corruption a top priority.

In October, after a four-year trial in Palermo, Sicily, Italy’s foremost post-World War II politician, former seven-time prime minister Giulio Andreotti, was acquitted on charges of associating with the Mafia.

Law Enforcement

Claims of mismanagement surrounded a lengthy FBI investigation into highly publicized allegations that a Chinese spy had stolen design secrets about the most advanced U.S. nuclear weapon, the submarine-launched W-88 warhead. The investigation, which began in 1996, had focused only on Wen-ho Lee, a former Los Alamos (N.M.) National Laboratory nuclear scientist. Lee, a naturalized American from Taiwan who had worked for 20 years at the nuclear weapons facility in New Mexico, was dismissed from his post in March but not charged with any crime. In a dramatic shift in the investigation, the FBI announced in September that it proposed to restart the inquiry by examining more than 500 potential suspects at scores of sites across the country. Lee was indicted in December on charges of mishandling classified data. The embarrassing announcement came at a time when the FBI was confronting new allegations that it had attempted to cover up circumstances surrounding the 1993 fatal fire that ended the 51-day siege of the Branch Davidian complex near Waco, Texas.

Forensic scientists in the U.S. announced in March that they were seeking to develop a device that could produce a unique genetic profile quickly from DNA in blood, saliva, or semen at a crime scene. The idea was to provide police on the beat with a handheld reusable “lab” on a microchip that could prepare the sample in two minutes and then submit it via a laptop computer and modem to a central computer for matching. (See Sidebar.)

EU leaders met in October in Tampere, Fin., to discuss how to set up a common judicial area to match the EU’s single market for goods, services, capital, and people. The aim was to establish a common approach to judicial questions ranging from immigration to money laundering. The existing situation included a jumble of different legal systems, and no fewer than 120 separate police forces made it very difficult to tackle problems such as the smuggling of illegal immigrants and trafficking in humans, which was said to net organized gangs more money than that procured from drug dealing.

A scathing report released in February by the British government about London’s Metropolitan Police Force concluded that the force was ridden with “institutional racism.” The impetus for the report was the botched police investigation into the murder of an 18-year-old black student, Stephen Lawrence, who in 1993 was stabbed to death in south London by a group of white youths who directed a racial epithet at him. The investigation of the Lawrence case failed to find sufficient evidence to bring anyone to trial even though numerous informants identified five young white men as the likely murderers. British Home Secretary Jack Straw rejected calls for the resignation of Metropolitan police commissioner Sir Paul Condon but promised sweeping reforms to combat racism.

In a watershed ruling in September, the Israeli Supreme Court unexpectedly banned several of the techniques admitted to have been used by security service members to obtain information from suspected terrorists, including violently shaking suspects’ upper torsos, forcing them to crouch like frogs, and shackling them in contorted positions with opaque sacks over their heads.

In South Africa the Truth and Reconciliation Commission refused in January to grant amnesty to a former police officer, Gideon Nieuwoudt, who said he helped four colleagues tackle the anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko and smash his head against a wall while Biko was being held in custody in 1977.

Prisons and Penology

The number of untried and sentenced prisoners continued to rise in many countries in 1999, with the worldwide total exceeding eight million. More than half of these prisoners were in the United States (where the total was approaching two million), China, and Russia. Other countries with high prison population rates included Belarus (505 per 100,000 citizens), Kazakstan (495), Belize (490), and Singapore (465). Among European Union countries Portugal had the highest rate (145), with the United Kingdom second (125).

In attempting to ease prison population pressures, several countries resorted to amnesties and other early-release mechanisms. In Rwanda plans for the release of 10,000 genocide suspects were announced. On the accession of King Muhammad VI in Morocco, almost 8,000 prisoners were released and 38,000 had their sentences commuted, which thereby eased crowding levels. In England and Wales the introduction of an electronic tagging scheme resulted in almost 2,000 offenders’ being placed under home-detention curfews within six months, a total less than half that anticipated by the authorities.

Throughout the world many deaths in prisons resulted from preventable or treatable diseases, with tuberculosis being the most serious health problem in prisons in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Overcrowding was also a serious problem. In the Nizhny Novgorod region of Russia, the Pre-Trial Detention Centre was housing some 5,000 prisoners in a space designed for 1,200. According to Human Rights Watch, human rights abuses were committed daily in Brazil’s penal institutions, and many thousands of people were affected. In South Korea some 70,000 prisoners were crammed into facilities with a capacity of only 56,000, and the Roman Catholic Church’s Human Rights Commission alleged that prisoners suffered poor conditions, inadequate medical care, and systematic beatings. Many of the most severely crowded conditions were to be found in Africa, with, for example, more than 7,000 persons held in facilities designed for 5,500 in Malawi and 146,300 in space designed for 100,000 in South Africa. In Britain an official inspection found the largest young-offender institution, at Feltham, to be “rotten to the core,” with conditions described as unacceptable in a civilized society.

Amnesty International reported a persistent and widespread pattern of human rights violations in the United States, where inmates were “physically and sexually abused by other inmates and by guards in overcrowded and understaffed prisons.” Attention was drawn to the indiscriminate use of restraints (including leg irons, restraint poles, and electroshock equipment), which resulted in unnecessary pain, injury, or even death.

Death Penalty

In 1999, 105 countries had abolished the death penalty, either by law or by practice. During the year Bulgaria, Canada, and Lithuania abolished the death penalty for all crimes; this brought to 67 the number of totally abolitionist countries. Lithuania took a further step toward abolition by overwhelmingly ratifying Protocol No. 6 to the European Convention on Human Rights. Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan instituted moratoriums on executions, and in Nepal the death penalty was formally abolished for all crimes. At the UN Commission on Human Rights in April, a European Union resolution was carried by 27–13 (with 13 abstentions) backing a worldwide ban on executions called on nations that retain capital punishment to establish a moratorium on executions with a view to abolishing the death penalty completely. The United States and China voted against the motion, along with 11 other members of the commission, namely Bangladesh, Botswana, Cuba, India, Japan, Republic of Korea, Morocco, Pakistan, Qatar, Rwanda, and The Sudan.

Ninety countries retained the death penalty in 1999, and 37 of these carried out executions in 1998. In China, with at least 2,000 executions annually, death sentences were often carried out at public rallies. In the Philippines, where the death penalty was reintroduced in 1993, more than 900 people had since been sentenced to death. In Cuba the death penalty was extended to include serious involvement in drug trafficking, corruption of minors, and armed robbery. In the U.S. 98 people were executed in 1999, 30 more than in 1998.

The countries that since 1990 had executed individuals for crimes committed when they were juveniles included Iran, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, the U.S., and Yemen. Since 1997 the four people known to have been executed for crimes committed when they were under 18 were all put to death in the U.S. In July 1999, however, the Florida Supreme Court outlawed the state’s use of the death penalty against 16-year-olds, and Montana abolished the death penalty for those who were under 18 at the time of their crimes.