• March 4: Newark Star-Ledger's Paul Mulshine asks, regarding 'Wiseguy' ticket scalpers facing up to 20 years in prison, "what law did they break?"
A CAPTCHA program requires you to decipher some squiggly lettering before you can buy tickets. The Wiseguys hired a programmer who conquered CAPTCHA. They bought a lot of tickets, all at the price Ticketmaster was asking.
So where’s the crime? That’s a mystery to Harvey Silverglate. Silverglate is a lawyer and legal scholar who is the author of a new book "Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent." From the title you no doubt deduce that Silverglate is a critic of the way the feds keep thinking up ways of turning perfectly legal activities into crimes that carry sentences of 20 years or so.
"This sounds like another made-up federal crime," said Silverglate. The Wiseguys didn’t embark on an unlawful scheme, he said, "They just took a lawful scheme and made it more efficient."
One of the charges against the Wiseguys was wire fraud, an offense so open-ended that Tiger Woods could face federal time for every phone call he made to his missus from some cutie’s crib. The guys were also charged under an anticomputer virus statute that bans damaging a computer system. But they didn’t damage CAPTCHA; they outwitted it..
►Read on at nj.com: "'Wiseguy' indictment is just the ticket for LiveNation."
• February 23: At Minding the Campus, Harvey traces the link between his co-authored book, The Shadow University, and Three Felonies a Day.
► "How Corrupted Language Moved from Campus to the Real World"
Evidence of Misconduct
• February 17-19: WBUR's three-part series, by reporter David Boeri, shines light on the Boston U.S. attorney's office allegedly withholding key evidence in a murder trial--evidence that could have spared a defendant more than a decade in prison.
Harvey is interviewed in parts two and three.
⇒Part I: A Prosecutor, Mobster, A Witness Who Lied
Read | Listen (WBUR audio player opens in a new window)
⇒Part II: ‘The Smokingest Gun’
Read | Listen
⇒Part III: The Judges’ Rebellion
Read | Listen
• The current Cato Policy Report features an excerpt from Harvey's Book Forum with Timothy Lynch, Director of Cato's Project on Criminal Justice
► View in browser
► Download full issue (PDF)
• Harvey on the conviction and disbarment of former Massachusetts House Speaker Tom Finneran, featured in Three Felonies (pp. 31-44):
► January 16: Boston Globe op-ed
► June 24, 2005: "Finneran's Wake," Harvey in the Boston Phoenix