“The Supreme Court of the United States and the court system generally are not involved in overseeing this new surveillance, not so much because of a power grab by the executive branch, but because the courts themselves have taken the judiciary out of the game,” said UF Levin College of Law professor Christopher Slobogin, author of “Privacy at Risk: The New Government Surveillance and the Fourth Amendment” (University of Chicago Press).

In his book, Slobogin writes, “The assault comes from government monitoring of our communications, actions and transactions. The failure results from the inability or unwillingness of courts and legislatures to recognize how pervasive and routine this government surveillance has become.”

To ensure that the government’s use of these powerful tools is not abused, Slobogin argues, something equally powerful — the Constitution, and in particular the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution — must stand guard. Slobogin’s book focuses on new developments in the government’s use of technology designed to observe our daily activities through physical surveillance and to peruse records of those activities.

While some of these technologically enhanced investigative techniques have been around for years, most are recent in origin, and their use by law enforcement officials has increased dramatically since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Since Sept. 11, the Bush Administration has pushed aggressively in two areas — camera surveillance and data mining. The government has provided millions of dollars to cities and municipalities for the purpose of setting up sophisticated camera systems, which allow the police to zoom in on street activity at night as well as during the day. Significant resources have also been poured into establishing data mining programs, where dozens of government agencies use the power of the computer and the ability to access records through the Internet and through commercial data brokers to obtain personal information about U.S. citizens as well as foreigners.

“The Supreme Court has held that, in essence, we don’t have privacy in public, so the cameras that watch what we do in the streets aren’t governed by the Constitution,” Slobogin said. “It has also held that any information that we give to third parties such as banks or schools or businesses or even doctors is no longer protected by the Fourth Amendment or the courts; the court says that we’ve essentially waived our Fourth Amendment protection when we decided to give information to a third party. So in both of those areas the Constitution is pretty much a dead letter.”

More than 120 government data mining programs gather personal information that can be connected to a particular individual, Slobogin says. These programs troll through financial, travel, and medical records, all with the goal of identifying patterns of behavior that might reveal terroristic or criminal activity.

“Privacy concerns seem to be very secondary to the government when it’s engaging in these kinds of surveillance programs,” Slobogin said. “While Congress or the executive branch has ended some efforts, there always seem to be new programs that crop up to take the place of the previous program. So until the government runs out of money, I think we’re going to continue to see these data mining endeavors, even though they tend to be very ineffective, and even though they can potentially gather huge amounts of personal information about people.”

Harvard Law School professor Carol Steiker said Slobogin’s book could not be more timely. “In the years since 9/11, the growing power and incentive of the government to collect information about its citizens have posed new and increasingly difficult questions. Scholars and students of these questions, as well as legislators and law enforcement officials, will find this book both a wide-ranging analysis of the implications of technological developments for the scope of personal privacy and enormously helpful conceptual framework for regulating the government’s surveillance power under the Constitution.”

As a result of his work in the area, Slobogin has consulted with the Department of Homeland Security about camera surveillance and was asked to serve on an American Bar Association Task Force established to devise rules governing transaction surveillance.

Christina Locke, who is in a combined program pursuing a master’s of mass communication and a law degree, wrote her master’s thesis on her research of the so-called “Son of Sam” laws in each state that has one.

These laws most often apply when a convicted criminal writes a book or collaborates on a movie project, Locke said. They are designed to seize the criminal’s profits and give the money to the victims or the victims’ families.

According to her thesis, 28 states have laws on the books modeled after the original 1977 New York law created to prevent the serial killer known as the Son of Sam from receiving any profits from the book “Confessions of Son of Sam.”

The problem, Locke said, is that the original New York statute was unanimously ruled a violation of the First Amendment by the U.S. Supreme Court and struck down in 1991. Since then, most of the derivative laws in other states have not been revised at all, leaving them critically vulnerable to constitutional challenges.

Because these laws restrict speech specifically based on its content, they are subject to the strictest judicial scrutiny. The Supreme Court said the New York law was dangerously overbroad and that if such restrictions had been in place in the past, they would have prevented the publication of important works such as Malcolm X’s autobiography and Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience.”

Since 1991, California, Nevada and Rhode Island have had their Son of Sam laws overturned by courts on First Amendment grounds.

The solution is to use general forfeiture laws to claim assets and profits that would normally go to convicted criminals, Locke said.

General asset forfeiture laws allow the state to seize assets that are the proceeds or instruments of crime. These laws are frequently used in drug trafficking cases and are not specifically geared toward preventing criminals from any kind of speech. Consequently, they are not subject to the same strict constitutional scrutiny as Son of Sam laws, but their effect can be the same as long as the seized funds are used to compensate victims, Locke said.

“Politically, maybe general forfeiture laws aren’t as effective,” Locke said, “but they work, which I think is more important.”

Florida used general forfeiture statutes in 1994 to seize proceeds from Gainesville serial killer Danny Rolling’s macabre artwork and a book co-written with his then-girlfriend Sondra London, “The Making of a Serial Killer.” The state split the $16,000 it took among the five families of the killer’s victims, Locke said.

The decision to simply use the general forfeiture statute in Rolling’s case, the exact situation for which Son of Sam laws were created, probably indicates that prosecutors did not have faith in the constitutional viability of Florida’s “Son of Sam” law, Locke said.

The most important conclusion reached by her research, Locke said, is that state legislatures must not wait until a court overturns their “Son of Sam” laws to recognize the need to make revisions or change their policies.

“These laws are so rarely used, but when they are, they are really important,” Locke said. “Why wait until a high-stakes case comes along and it’s too late?”

A pilot program in Florida believed to be the first in the nation for juvenile offenders has successfully avoided the separation of church and state controversies that have plagued some adult programs around the country and even shut down a prison fellowship in Iowa, said Jodi Lane, a UF criminologist who led the research.

“If other states can learn from Florida by anticipating the legal issues and addressing them before they start, they’re going to be in much better shape,” Lane said. “I would expect Florida to be a model for other states that want to set up their own juvenile faith-based programs.”

Unlike many other programs in the country that are exclusively Christian, Florida’s participants can select from other religions, Lane said. If a youth is Islamic, for example, the people running the program will find a volunteer from that faith to serve as a mentor, she said.

The other big constitutional issue — religious coercion — was not a concern here because the program was completely voluntary; interested juveniles and their parents signed a consent form agreeing to participate, she said.

As part of the Bush presidency’s focus on faith-based initiatives, Florida’s Department of Juvenile Justice received $3.5 million in 2003 to create a pilot faith- and community-based initiative within juvenile correctional facilities. At the state’s request, Lane and UF criminology professor Lonn Lanza-Kaduce evaluated the program two years later in five residential facilities for incarcerated youth, three for boys and two for girls.

Their initial results were published in the April edition of the journal Evaluation Review titled “Before You Open the Doors: Ten Lessons from Florida’s Faith and Community-Based Delinquency Treatment Initiative.” Findings on whether the treatment helped prevent offenders from committing new crimes are expected this fall after the youths will have returned to the community for at least six months, Lane said.

But so far, anecdotal evidence shows the program to be a positive experience, Lane said. Participants say their morale has improved, and staff report inmates are better behaved, she said.

“We know these kids are getting a lot of attention, which is helping them,” she said. “When you talk with them, they definitely let you know they feel people care about them.”

Lane said she believes the passion the staff have for helping youth, which is driven by their faith, gives them the determination to make sure the participants have whatever they need, even if it means going out and shopping for it themselves. Many left lucrative jobs for a position with no benefits because they believed so strongly in what they were doing, she said.

“They gave up their personal lives to make sure things ran smoothly,” she said. “It was not your typical institutional setting where people tend to work their shift and go home. I think there is something about the faith-based community that gives them energy to work with kids, and kids need people with energy rather than those who go to work every day for a paycheck.”

Recruiting enough mentors for the youths was one struggle the staff faced, she said.

Florida’s program departed from those in many other states in that it sought mentors from a variety of religions, Lane said. Other programs in the country tended to be Christian, whereas participants in Florida were allowed to select from any religion or choose a secular mentor from a community organization if they preferred that to a faith-based mentor, she said.

“There were Jewish kids, who were given a Jewish mentor, Muslim kids, who were matched up with a Muslim mentor, and others who were more nontraditional,” she said.

The biggest concern was whether the youths would feel pressured to participate in the program and Florida’s program was designed to prevent this from happening, Lane said.

The youths are allowed not only the choice of whether to participate, but they also were given the alternative of having something else to do, she said.

“If there is a Bible study, the kid not only gets to choose whether or not to go, but is also given another equally enticing opportunity instead of just sitting in a cell and being penalized for not taking part in the religious activity,” she said.

Also to Florida’s advantage is that its constitution allows only community donations to be used to buy religious items, such as Bibles or the Quran, she said.

The Extension Service is now working closely with the Conservation Clinic, housed in the law college’s Center for Governmental Responsibility, to promote smart growth and sustainability solutions throughout the state.

“With Florida’s population expected to double in 50 years, growth management will continue be one of the most urgent, difficult and potentially contentious issues facing the state,” said Larry Arrington, dean for extension.

“The statewide Extension Service, which is part of UF’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, has faced increased pressure to play a greater role in Florida environmental and land use issues, and our new partnership with the Levin College of Law allows us to better respond to these needs,” Arrington said. “Agricultural producers in the state have emphasized the need for science-based solutions to issues surrounding growth, and county government officials are also requesting more support on growth issues.”

The Conservation Clinic provides environmental and land use law services to Florida communities and non-government organizations and university programs such as the Extension Service and Florida Sea Grant College Program, said Tom Ankersen, director of the clinic. Among other projects, the clinic has consulted with local government on ordinances and comprehensive plan policies, state statutes and conservation easements.

“Demand for clinic legal services has been growing, and much of this has come through requests generated by our expanding relationship with UF’s Extension Service, which has offices in every county,” Ankersen said. “The Conservation Clinic already has an ongoing relationship with the Florida Sea Grant program to support its coastal and marine education programs.”

In the next 50 years, more than 11 million new homes – along with millions of square feet of commercial space and thousands of miles of new roadways – will be needed to accommodate the influx of residents, according to Pierce Jones, director of the Extension Service’s Program for Resource Efficient Communities.

“In order to achieve the kind of resource-efficient growth we need, our community planning efforts require cross disciplinary collaboration with building professionals, local governments, water management districts and other agencies,” Jones said. The Program for Resource Efficient Communities works with these and other collaborators to promote the adoption of best design, construction and management practices in new residential community developments that measurably reduce energy and water consumption and environmental degradation, he said.

The Conservation Clinic recently helped draft the language for Gainesville’s Green Building Program, which is being used as a model by Sarasota and other Florida communities. The incentive-based program incorporates a variety of energy efficient construction and landscape criteria that builders must follow to build homes that are certified by the Florida Green Building Coalition.

Another Extension educational effort benefiting from the clinic’s legal services is the Florida Yards and Neighborhoods program, which encourages builders and developers to protect natural resources by incorporating environmentally friendly landscaping into their new construction.

Jones said the Conservation Clinic provided model language for various covenants, conditions and restrictions to help homeowner’s associations do their part to protect and conserve Florida’s water resources using science based information generated by UF.

Jim Cato, senior associate dean and director of UF’s School of Natural Resources and Environment and director of the Florida Sea Grant College Program, said the Conservation Clinic is a critical partner in both programs. “The clinic has been working with Sea Grant’s boating and waterways management program for a number of years, and recently began assisting the Program for Resource Efficient Communities, which is also affiliated with the UF school,” he said.

Robert Jerry, dean of the Levin College of Law, said smart growth and sustainability are key issues in Florida, and have long been a focus of the college’s environmental and land use law program as well as a number of units in UF’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences.

“An interdisciplinary approach is vital to successfully managing these areas, and this partnership with the Extension Service will greatly amplify available intellectual and physical resources,” Jerry said. “Conservation Clinic projects also leverage taxpayer dollars by utilizing the time and talents of law students under faculty guidance. The students benefit, too, by gaining hands-on, real world experience.”

“Determining a specific dollar value for quality of life is a challenging undertaking,” said project co-director Timothy McLendon, staff attorney at the Center for Governmental Responsibility at UF’s Levin College of Law, which conducted the study along with UF’s Department of Urban and Regional Planning. “Therefore, we offered local decision makers a number of options for protecting historically valuable assets that contribute to the community.”

Florida residents also recognize the importance of historic preservation, according to a survey commissioned as part of the overall study. Based on surveys of more than 1,500 Floridians during November and December 2005, and January 2006, the most threatened historic resources in Florida include historic and scenic landscapes; old homes and neighborhoods; and old downtowns. Respondents, likewise, saw a need to preserve Florida’s historic resources for future generations, scenic reasons and education. The survey was conducted by UF’s Bureau of Economic & Business Research as part of its monthly statewide consumer confidence survey.

The report includes models and tools available to further historic preservation in Florida and to measure the impact of historical structures, events and related activities on the enhancement of the quality of life in Florida.

Specifically, the use of community indicators is described as a tool for decision-makers to measure their success in improving the quality of life in their communities. Community indicators are bits of information that are combined to provide a picture of what is happening in a community. For historic preservation purposes, these may include items like the number or type of local ordinances; the number of projects qualifying for historic tax credits or exemptions; changes in property values; numbers of historic districts; and visitors to and support for local historic museums. Other tools included in the report are preservation laws and policies, tourist-related tax revenues, and creative solutions to conflicts of gentrification, sustainability and rehabilitation.

“We’re excited to have this wonderful study to confirm that along with the economic impacts that result from historic preservation, the quality of life is indeed improved as well,” said Caroline Tharpe Weiss, executive director of the Florida Trust for Historic Preservation, which provided key support for the study.

Sprinkled throughout the report are examples of model communities and projects that have succeeded in using the tools to enhance quality of life. DeFuniak Springs and Fernandina Beach are described as communities whose historic roots lure tourists and improve the economies of their regions. The St. Augustine Lighthouse and Museum; the Fort Christmas Historical Park in Central Florida; and the Riley House museum near Tallahassee are provided as case studies of how history museums can be important community resources.

Also described in the report are conservation districts in Tampa, Sarasota and Zephyrhills that offer ways for local governments to balance historic preservation through protection, rehabilitation and revitalization, all contributing to a neighborhood’s culture. Other incentive programs, including tax credits and exemptions and grants have been key to preserving and improving Florida communities.

The 18-month study was funded with historic preservation grant assistance provided by the Bureau of Historic Preservation, Division of Historical Resources, Florida Department of State, assisted by the Florida Historical Commission. The study was a collaborative effort involving multiple UF partners: the Center for Governmental Responsibility; the Department of Urban and Regional Planning; the Center for Building Better Communities; the Graduate Program in Museum Studies; and the Center for Tourism Research and Development.

The Quality of Life study complements an earlier study on the Economic Impacts of Historic Preservation in Florida released in 2002. The full Quality of Life report is available at: www.law.ufl.edu/cgr, or copies may be obtained from the Division of Historical Resources, Florida Department of State 850-245-6333.

“We’re seeing women in relationships acting differently nowadays than we have in the past,” said Angela Gover, a UF criminologist who led the research. “The nature of criminality has been changing for females, and this change is reflected in intimate relationships as well.”

In a survey of 2,500 students at UF and the University of South Carolina between August and December 2005, more than a quarter (29 percent) reported physically assaulting their dates and 22 percent reported being the victims of attacks during the past year. Thirty-two percent of women reported being the perpetrators of this violence, compared with 24 percent of men. The students took selected liberal arts and sciences courses. Forty percent were men and 60 percent were women, reflecting the gender composition of these classes.

In a separate survey of 1,490 UF students, one quarter (25 percent) said they had been stalked during the past year and 7 percent reported engaging in stalking, of whom a majority (58 percent) were female.

Although women were the predominant abusers, they still made up the largest number of victims in both surveys, accounting for 70 percent of those being stalked, for example.

The reason more college men weren’t victims may be that women in the study did not exclusively date them, preferring men who had already graduated, not yet enrolled in college or chose not to attend college at all, Gover said. “It shows that students who are perpetrating these attacks aren’t just targeting other students on campus,” she said.

It also is possible that some of the physical attacks women claim they are responsible for are actually acts of self-defense, Gover added. “Maybe some of these women have been abused by their partner for some time and they’re finally fighting back,” she said.

Recent studies on domestic violence suggest that whereas in the past victims might have felt trapped in violent situations, today’s women are more likely to understand they have options instead of putting up with mistreatment, she said.

“I think we may also be seeing sort of a new dynamic in dating relationships in terms of women feeling more empowered,” she said. “They recognize they don’t have to be in a dating relationship forever. They can get out of it.”

Child abuse was the single biggest determining factor for men and women becoming perpetrators or victims of either dating violence or stalking, Gover said. Even if one never personally experienced abuse, witnessing violence between one’s parents as a child increased the likelihood of stalking or being stalked as a young adult and it made girls more susceptible to becoming victims of dating violence when they grew up, she said.

The survey found that men and women who were abused as children were 43 percent more likely than their peers who were not mistreated to perpetrate physical violence and 51 percent more likely to be victims of physical violence in a dating relationship. Violent acts included kicking or slapping, pushing or shoving, punching or hitting with a hand or object, slamming someone against a wall and using force to make a partner have sex, she said.

Sexual risk-taking – the age when survey respondents first had sex and the number of sexual partners in their lifetime – was another important risk factor, but surprisingly, attitudes toward women made no difference, said Gover, who did her research with Catherine Kaukinen, a University of South Carolina criminology professor, and Kathleen Fox, a UF graduate student in criminology. Some of the findings were presented at the American Society of Criminology annual meeting in November in Toronto.

The study also was among the first to look at psychological abuse. Examples included preventing partners from seeing family or friends, shouting at them and using threats to have sex. Fifty-four percent of respondents reported being psychologically abusive, and 52 percent said they were victims of this type of behavior. Women were more likely to be psychologically abusive, with 57 percent saying they were perpetrators versus 50 percent of males.

Shelley Serdahely, executive director of Men Stopping Violence, in Decatur, Ga., questions the validity of studies showing women are more violent. “Women might be more likely to get frustrated because men are not taught how to be active listeners and women feel like they are not being heard,” she said. “Often women are more emotional because the relationship matters a lot to them, and while that may come out in a push or a shove or a grab, all of which are considered dating violence, it doesn’t have the effect of intimidating the man.”

In her new book, “Protecting Our Own: Race, Crime, and African Americans,” University of Florida law professor Katheryn Russell-Brown takes an unflinching look at how race, crime, fame and gender affect public attitudes toward people involved in public scandals. The book includes a foreword by New York University law professor Derrick Bell, a founding figure in the field of Critical Race Theory.

“This book was inspired by the O.J. Simpson case,” said Russell-Brown, director of the Center for the Study of Race and Race Relations at UF’s Levin College of Law. “I was intrigued by the black community’s support for O.J., when he had in many ways separated himself from the community.”

Opinions about the Simpson verdict remain seriously divided along racial lines, with a majority of blacks believing he was set up and a majority of whites convinced he got away with murder. In that and other racially charged criminal cases, each side is mystified by the other side’s decision-making process.

Russell-Brown examined 30 cases involving what she labels “black protectionism.” She also held focus groups with blacks and finds there is a simple explanation for the black-white divide in these cases.

“When white people hear that a black celebrity is accused of a crime, they ask one question: Did he do it?” Russell-Brown said. “For African-Americans, there’s a longer list of questions. Did he do it? If he did, was he set up? Is he the only person who has committed this offense? And is he being treated the same as whites who have done the same thing?”

Those questions are rooted in American history, which is rife with examples of entrapment and false prosecution of blacks, Russell-Brown said.

She notes specific historical examples of black celebrities who faced criminal charges that, even if true, seem in retrospect to be the result of selective prosecution. For example, after boxing great Jack Johnson defeated a white man to win the heavyweight title in 1910, he was convicted of transporting a woman across state lines for immoral purposes. Similarly, U.S. Rep. Adam Clayton Powell, who represented Harlem in Congress, spent months defending himself against a $3,000 tax evasion lawsuit.

Whether or not those people were guilty, Russell-Brown said, it is clear today that they were charged because they were outspoken, powerful and black. It’s a lesson black people remember when they hear that a rich or famous black man is charged with a crime, she said.

“Russell-Brown’s book takes a fresh perspective on the concept of linked fate, the idea that African-Americans are alternately embarrassed, protective about, or inspired by the acts of famous or infamous members of their race, by using focus groups and critical race theory to analyze this confounding phenomenon,” said Randolph Stone, a clinical professor of law at the University of Chicago.

Blacks aren’t the only people who engage in protectionism, Russell-Brown notes. White people extend a similar protectionism to police officers facing charges of brutality. She cites the example of the beating of Rodney King, which was caught on video tape, and the killing of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed man who was shot by New York police who had falsely concluded he was a serial rapist.

“In these cases, white people noted that the police have a tough job, that they have to make split-second decisions, or, in the King case, that we really don’t know what happened before the tape was turned on,” Russell-Brown said.

Russell-Brown said she is concerned about the black community’s failure to extend protection to black defendants of average means, who deserve the presumption of innocence.

“The larger community gains when every member is valued and afforded the same protections, regardless of their fame or fortune,” Russell-Brown said.

Study results, released by the Marion Brechner Citizen Access Project at UF’s College of Journalism and Communications, show that constitutions in these five states have the best overall protections for citizens’ access to government records.

These states are in the minority, though. The findings showed that 75 percent of states scored below 2.5 for openness on the project’s seven-point scale, called the Sunshine Index. States in the 2 range received a mostly closed, or “nearly dark” rating. A 7 stands for complete sunshine, or complete citizen access to records. Florida rated a 6, for mostly open and mostly in the sunshine. California and Louisiana rated a 5 for most of their categories, as in somewhat open. Montana and Rhode Island received a 4 in most categories.

Florida’s constitutional language grants every person “the right to inspect or copy any public record made or received in connection with the official business of any public body, officer, or employee of the state.”

That kind of protection is vital to openness, said Bill F. Chamberlin, director of the project and Joseph L. Brechner Eminent Scholar of Mass Communications in UF’s College of Journalism and Communications.

“Without protection to access government records in the constitution, the public is dependent on the legislature to provide access to government documents,” Chamberlin said. “Constitutional authority is the ultimate legal hammer. It is a hammer that few officials can ignore, and statutory requirements are not always taken as seriously as they should be.”

The study is released during the Second Annual National Sunshine Week, March 12-18, in which news media across the nation highlight the importance of freedom of information through stories and editorials.

“It’s far better when these rights are provided in the constitution,” said Barbara Peterson, president of the Tallahassee-based First Amendment Foundation, a nonprofit organization that advocates for open government. “A constitutional right has more weight than a statutory right. The legislature in any state can monkey around with the statutes, but only people can change the constitution.”

Chamberlin said Florida and California have the strongest constitutional language, more all-encompassing than the others.

“In addition, Florida, unlike the others, has in the constitution hoops that the Legislature must pass through before it amends the strong open records requirements in the statute now,” he said.

“As with almost any process that requires human interaction, the more closely the directions for that interaction are detailed, then the more readily we can know what to do and how to do it successfully,” said Shannon Martin, associate professor of journalism at the University of Maine and director of the Maine Center for Student Journalism.

Martin also is a member of the Citizen Access Project Advisory Committee that ranked the state constitutions for openness.

The project’s panel of experts, known as the Sunshine Review Board, analyzed state constitutions in eight categories, including legislature, executive branch, government employees, local government, county government, private institutions, public participation in government, courts and procedures.

Each state constitution was also reviewed in eight specific subcategories, including access to financial records, independent entities, security, redistricting, retirement records, elections, privacy protection and judicial conduct complaints.

“States like California and Florida have in recent years created constitutional provisions for access. Those are really instructions for some of the other states that have not done so,” said Charles Davis, associate professor of journalism studies at the University of Missouri School of Journalism and executive director of the National Freedom of Information Coalition.

“Freedom of Information law has historically been a statutory animal,” Davis said. “What’s really encouraging for states that don’t have constitutional provisions is that citizens’ initiatives … were overwhelmingly supported by the public.”

Members of the project’s advisory board who participated in the rating of the constitutional provisions include: Sandy Davidson, associate professor, University of Missouri-Columbia, School of Journalism; Kevin Goldberg, associate, Cohn and Marks LLP; Harry Hammitt, editor/publisher, Access Reports; Frosty Landon, Virginia Coalition for Open Government; Ian Marquand, special projects coordinator, television station KPAX, and Society of Professional Journalists past Freedom of Information Committee chairman; Patrice McDermott, assistant director, Office of Government Relations American Library Association; Eric Turner, director of public education with the Connecticut Freedom of Information Commission; Charles D. Tobin, partner, Holland & Knight LLP, Washington, D.C.; and Shannon Martin, associate professor of journalism at the University of Maine and director of the Maine Center for Student Journalism.

The Citizen Access Project is funded by Orlando broadcast executive Marion Brechner. The project also received funding from the Miami-based Knight Foundation.

For a complete list of state rankings, visit http://www.citizenaccess.org.

Instead, the dip in state crime is more likely attributable to a national decline in crime that began before the law went into effect, said UF criminologist Alex Piquero.

“Those who support the law credit it with a dramatic reduction in crime,” said Piquero, whose research appears in the October issue of Criminology and Public Policy. “But our study shows that crime was already dropping in Florida, as it was in all states, before the law was passed.”

An analysis of Florida’s Index Crime statistics shows there was a greater drop in crime before the law went into effect. Between 1994 and 1998, the years before the 10-20-Life statute was passed, crime fell by 16 percent, compared with a 13 percent decline between 2000 and 2004, immediately after the law went into effect, he said.

Other factors to which researchers attribute the downturn in U.S. crime rates, such as the hiring of more police officers, also might explain Florida’s crime drop, he said.

From highway billboards to a state government Web page, a high-profile campaign praises Florida’s 10-20-Life law, which authorizes mandatory sentences for pulling a gun during a crime, Piquero said.

The 10-20-Life law, which went into effect in July 1999, requires that a felon who used a gun to commit a crime, such as armed robbery, serve at least 10 years in prison. Firing a gun increases the penalty to a 20-year prison term and shooting a person bumps it to 25 years to life. In addition, any felon who even possessed a gun, regardless of whether it was used during a crime, must serve a three-year prison term, he said.

Parallel to those efforts, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, working with local law enforcement agencies and prosecutors, created anti-crime strategies such as Operation T.H.U.G.S. (Taking Hoodlums Using Guns Seriously), which targets felons who have existing violent-crime warrants and a history of violence, Piquero said. In addition, he said, the governor’s office implemented a $2.7 million public service announcement campaign to warn would-be criminals of the law’s severe penalties: “Use a gun and you’re done.”

According to the Florida Department of Corrections Web site, the results under the 10-20-Life law are “impressive” and “punishing criminals who use guns is making our state safer.”

“Tough-on-crime initiatives have successfully reversed the lenient and disastrous criminal-justice policies of the early 1990s in Florida that caused so much suffering,” the Web site states.

“Anytime I see a state claim that its policy is the direct creator of a drop in crime, I’m a little bit hesitant because there are things that occur around the exact same time that could cause the crime drop,” he said.

Between 1996 and 2000, for example, sworn police personnel increased by 6 percent in Florida, which was part of a national trend, increasing by 7 percent for the United States as a whole, he said.

Although no other study has examined Florida’s 10-20-Life law, research on three-strike policies in other states, such as Washington and California, show they have not been very effective, Piquero said.

“And they actually end up being more expensive because you’re putting offenders in incarcerated facilities for very long periods of time, which costs millions of dollars,” he said.

Jeffrey Fagan, a law and public health professor at Columbia University, said Piquero’s research shows the importance of careful and impartial analyses to evaluate bold claims of success in crime control initiatives.

“Crime rises and falls for complex reasons, and this work once again shows that crime control initiatives such as Florida’s three-strikes laws offer simple solutions that are no match for the web of large social and economic forces that drive crime,” he said. “Piquero joins a growing roster of criminologists and public policy analysts who have failed to find meaningful impacts of such laws on crime rates.”

No matter what the court decides, one University of Florida Levin College of Law professor says law schools should keep their doors open to military recruiters – because this may be the quickest way to reform Pentagon policy.

“In general, law schools are right to turn away recruiting efforts from employers who discriminate,” said professor and former Air Force officer Diane Mazur. “But the military isn’t just any employer, it’s an institution of constitutional significance. When we shun the military, we deny ourselves the ability to influence the Pentagon’s policies.”

Mazur discusses the case in a paper soon to be published in the Journal of National Security Law and Policy.

Rumsfeld v. FAIR involves a challenge to the Solomon Amendment, a law that strips federal funding from colleges that do not allow the military to recruit on campus. The measure has created a dilemma for law colleges, because the American Association of Law Schools, the accrediting agency for these schools, has a long-standing policy prohibiting on-campus recruiting by employers who discriminate against gays. Because of the Solomon Amendment, most law schools do currently permit military recruiting on campus.

A group representing approximately 25 law schools and law faculties filed suit challenging the Solomon Amendment on the grounds that it violates law schools’ rights of free expression.

Mazur is a vocal opponent of military policies discriminating against gays. Still, she argues, the battle over on-campus recruiting has led to a “spiral of shunning” that broadens the cultural gap between the legal community and the military.

Since the early 1980s, civilian courts have deferred to the Pentagon on most cases involving the rights of individual soldiers, Mazur notes. The reason: judges see the military as a separate society, run according to imperatives that legal scholars aren’t qualified to understand. If legal scholars had a closer relationship with the military, Mazur says, they would be emboldened to question its policies in greater detail – and the military might be more inclined to listen to their opinions.

“Law schools ought to be the principal players in legal reform of any nature,” she said. “Keeping recruiters at arms’ length may allow us to feel that we’re standing up for our principles, but it’s costing us our ability to take part in that reform.”

Professor Diane Mazur can be reached at (352) 273-0953 or by e-mail at mazur@law.ufl.edu.

Only Washington, Virginia, New Jersey, New Mexico, Maryland and Utah rated as high as a 5 on a 7-point scale for laws that provide noncriminal penalties for public employees who violate aspects of the public records laws, according to new findings compiled by University of Florida researchers.

The Marion Brechner Center Citizen Access Project at UF’s College of Journalism and Communications found that the six states either provided for a fine for every day the state’s records law was violated or provided steeper fines for additional violations. The six were rated highly by a panel of experts for having penalties punishing violations of state records laws, often for officials’ failure to release records as required by law to individuals, the press, or businesses and organizations.

“Most states with civil penalties provide for only a one-time penalty,” said William F. Chamberlin, director of the Citizen Access Project. “Most penalties are fines up to $1,000 or monetary damages to individuals harmed by the failure to release records.”

The project’s advisory board rates states from 1 to 7, depending on whether a state’s law in a particular category is judged to provide for complete access to government records or no access at all. The laws of the most highly rated states in the study of civil penalties were judged to be “somewhat open.” Sixteen states scored a 4, considered to be neither more open nor more closed. Massachusetts and Kentucky scored a 3 for being “somewhat closed” and 26 states and the District of Columbia scored a 1, completely closed.

The project’s Sunshine Review Board decided that states that had no civil penalty provisions should receive the lowest possible score, a rating given laws that block access to government information. Chamberlin appoints experts on public records laws with backgrounds in law, education and government to the 11-member Sunshine Review Board.

“The project can only rate statutes passed by legislatures and eventually the decisions of the courts,” he said. “What we cannot rate is how those laws are enforced in each state. We don’t know which states are better at using the civil penalties and which states do not.”

Washington state, which the review board rated the highest, allows a judge to fine an official up to $100 for each day he or she is wrongfully denied access to public records.

“Although the Washington law assesses a penalty of $5 to $100 per day a record is withheld, it is more common for judges to assess a $5 penalty,” said Michele Earl-Hubbard, president of the Washington Coalition for Open Government, an independent organization that supports access to government information in the state.

Earl-Hubbard said a Washington man fought public records laws for eight years over a multimillion dollar business deal, and the courts begrudgingly awarded $15 per day. The laws in Washington look strict on paper, but she said they are not utilized to their full potential.

“One of the things that really hurts requestors’ ability to get information is a failure to enforce public records laws,” said Rebecca Daugherty, director of the Freedom of Information Service Center, in Arlington, Va. “The penalties provide a vehicle to obtain that enforcement.”

Many legislators are unaware of public records laws, so knowing about the penalties in certain states through the project can be useful to them, said Daugherty, who serves on the Citizen Access Project Committee advisory board.

“We have had some agencies wait for information they should have access to,” she said. “Public officials should not operate under a threat but should give information. People don’t think about penalties being a part of the law.”

Chamberlin said the most important aspect of the Citizen Access Project data is that citizens can easily discover whether officials can be punished for refusing to give out public records, how their state compares to others with regard to these provisions, and what other states are doing about the problem of public records law enforcement.

The goal of the project is to allow citizens and public officials to better understand public access to local government information in all 50 states. Most of the funding for the project came from Orlando-based media executive Marion Brechner, who established an endowment with a $600,000 gift that triggered a matching grant from the state of Florida. A $250,000 startup grant was provided by the Knight Foundation.

The project will examine every individual statutory provision controlling open meetings and open records in the 50 states, Chamberlin said. The project also examined all of the state’s relevant constitutional provisions and will evaluate all state appellate court decisions.

Results from the Citizen Access Project studies can be found at www.citizenaccess.org.

“It’s always been the case that we expect rates of aggression and delinquency to increase for boys, while girls were considered somewhat protected,” said Julia Graber, a UF psychologist who did the research. “In this study, it’s clear that the differences between girls and boys are diminishing.”

Unlike boys, girls in the study reported feeling increasing amounts of anger between sixth and seventh grades, she said. Both groups reported a decline in self-control.

“I think it’s alarming that anger is increasing at a time when self-control is decreasing,” said Graber, an expert on puberty. “Instead of this being a time when girls are building skills, they’re feeling less able to control themselves in challenging situations.”

The study of 1,229 students at 22 public and parochial schools in New York City found that the proportion of girls committing five or more aggressive acts in a month, such as “hitting someone” or “pushing or shoving someone on purpose” jumped from 64 percent to 81 percent between sixth and seventh grades. For boys, it rose from 69 percent to 78 percent.

The share of girls committing a delinquent act during the year, such as “taking something from a store when the clerk wasn’t looking” or “throwing objects such as rocks or bottles at cars or people” increased from 66 percent to 78 percent between sixth and seventh grades, compared with a jump from 76 percent to 80 percent for boys, the study found.

“Girls’ entry into adolescence is generally thought of as a vulnerable time for depression, and studies tend to focus on girls’ emotional experiences with sadness and depressed moods,” Graber said. “What’s interesting about this study is that we see an increase in a different negative emotional experience, and that’s anger.”

A source of girls’ hostility may be the stress of dealing with peer pressure, Graber said. The middle school years tend to be extremely clique oriented, and membership in social groups often changes rapidly, with some kids being excluded unexpectedly, she said.

“Girls tend to internalize the stresses of peer relationships more so than their male counterparts, perhaps because of how we socialize women to be more relationship focused and caring about others,” she said.

The results underscore the need for prevention programs that target broader definitions of aggression among females, Graber said. Because social skills appear to be important predictors of delinquency and aggression, programs that emphasize developing these kinds of skills in addition to anger management would be useful, she said.

Intervention efforts may be particularly important as students progress through the first year of middle school, Graber said. Initially, sixth-grade teachers often provide extra support to make the transition from elementary to middle school easier, but as students are expected to become increasingly self-sufficient they may find it difficult to adjust, she said.

“There’s also the sense that once you’re in seventh grade you’re more exposed to older peers, perhaps even interacting with those who may already be engaging in problem behaviors,” she said.

Graber said it is possible the earlier onset of puberty for girls compared with boys might help explain why girls experienced such a large increase in anger between sixth and seventh grades. Further studies are needed to determine whether boys’ anger levels spike as they undergo physical and psychological changes, she said.

“We need to find out what happens that leads to this hostile emotion that kids report as almost an average experience for them,” she said. “Is it that the environment in middle school and the changes in family and peer interaction are just so stressful that kids are angry during more of their day?”

The UF study, which has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, also found that delinquent behavior — though not aggression — rose for students who experienced some type of family disruption upon entering middle school, such as a change in household structure. Generally, delinquency at this age might involve smaller crimes such as vandalism or shoplifting, which usually drop off fairly quickly, she said.

Patrick Tolan, director of the Institute for Juvenile Research and a psychiatry professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said Graber’s research is important in part because it shows that as gender distinctions lessen, gender differences in behavior can change. “We are seeing that delinquency and violence are not just problems of young men anymore,” he said.

Ambiguity, objections and even fear cause families and physicians to ignore the decisions listed in advance directives more often than most people think, violating a patient’s right to refuse treatment, says Moseley, a University of Florida bioethicist. But he and two other researchers have envisioned an idea that could make end-of-life decisions easier to decipher.

Videotaping an advance directive, the researchers explain in an article recently published online in the Archives of Geriatrics and Gerontology, would allow people to express medical decisions to their physicians and families in a way legal documents do not allow – face to face.

“Studies have shown that advance directives, in spite of the idea that we should honor an incapacitated person’s wishes, just simply don’t work very well,” Moseley said. “There’s this growing frustration out there that written advanced directives aren’t working and there don’t seem to be any alternatives. We’re offering an alternative.”

Moseley said the problem isn’t the message of advance directives, which have been used for about 30 years and allow people to plan ahead for their health care should they become seriously ill. Advance planning can keep people from battling about end-of-life decisions in court, like the family of Terri Schiavo, a Florida woman in a persistent vegetative state whose husband and parents fought for years about whether her feeding tube should be removed.

But a written advance directive doesn’t always stop the bickering among families, Moseley said. Seeing a relative explain his or her decision in a video could quell some of the discord, the researchers suggest. A videotape could spur discussions at home about death, too.

“None of us like talking about end-of-life issues,” he said. “We are a death-denying culture. But that’s only one little part of (the problem). The big part of it is the medium.”

A written advance directive often raises more questions for doctors than the document answers. Physicians don’t always know if their patients were coherent when they signed the form or what they meant by certain terms like “terminal.” And many physicians in hospitals are caring for incapacitated patients they’ve never met before, let alone when they were healthier and still coherent. This confusion about a life-or-death issue can force doctors to make conservative treatment choices, ones that may not coincide with what a patient expressed in an advance directive, Moseley said.

“Some of the most difficult situations – difficult for families, patients and physicians – revolve around advance directives,” said Dr. Robert Hatch, a UF associate professor of medical education who contributed to the report along with another researcher from the University of California at Los Angeles.
Hatch said a doctor with a full hospital schedule probably faces an advance directive problem every other month.
Most doctors are uncomfortable relying on a legal document to determine whether a patient lives or dies, said Kenneth Goodman, a University of Miami bioethics professor and the director of the Florida Bioethics Network.

But with technological and medical advances keeping patients alive longer than they did 50 years ago, advance directives are becoming increasingly important, he said.

“Advance directives are a very important way to let your wishes be known,” he said. “(Video) is a very creative way of demonstrating what you want. I think it’s a good idea.”

The researchers don’t think the written form of advance directives should be scrapped though. They see video as a supplement. While many states would accept a video, some states require an advance directive be signed to be legally binding. In Florida, an advance directive does not have to be written but must be witnessed to be legal.

Moseley notes that video living wills may not solve every problem. He said he thinks the idea needs to be studied further and people need to learn to accept others’ wishes so a patient’s rights are never violated. But for most families and doctors, Moseley said video is one step closer toward a conversation and potentially, one step closer toward acceptance.

“Our goal should be to honor a patient’s wishes as best we can, and a video living will would significantly help,” he said.

To meet the burgeoning demand for courses in the specialty, the University of Florida’s Levin College of Law, one of the nation’s top-ranking schools for tax law, is launching a Master of Laws in International Taxation degree. Though the program was created primarily to serve foreign students, law school administrators believe it will also attract U.S. students.

“Legal expertise in international taxation is greatly valued in a world of multinational corporations, electronic commerce, and international business and investment transactions,” said Associate Dean Michael Friel, head of the law school’s Graduate Tax Program. “U.S. lawyers in cities throughout the country must become more familiar with international tax rules, and foreign lawyers must become more familiar with both U.S. and international tax rules.”

For years, many of America’s brightest young lawyers have been coming to Gainesville to study tax law. UF’s Graduate Tax Program consistently ranks among a handful of top tax law programs in the country.

Since the late 1990s, however, the tax faculty have noticed a new trend: a growing number of applications from international students. Those prospective students came from literally all over the map — from Peru to the People’s Republic of China — but they all shared a desire to study America’s tax system.

“We weren’t marketing this program overseas at all,” said Friel. “The international students just seemed to find us, either on the Web or by word of mouth.”

Oscar Picon Gonzalez was one of those students. Already a practicing tax lawyer in a Peruvian firm, Picon wanted to set up his own international tax practice to meet the demand created by Peru’s recent surge of foreign investment. Picon, a Fulbright scholar, chose to study at the Levin College of Law after researching the nation’s top tax law schools — UF, New York University, Harvard and others — on the Internet.

“I chose UF because it offers one of the top programs in the United States at a very good price,” Picon said.

The tax program’s U.S. students have also shown a growing interest in international tax courses in recent years.

“At some point, we realized that there was more than enough demand for a degree program just for international tax,” Friel said. “We also realized that with our current faculty — including internationally respected people in the field such as (Culverhouse Eminent Scholar) Larry Lokken and (Freeland Eminent Scholar) Paul McDaniel – we had already had the core of a degree program in place.”

Even before the degree program was approved by the Board of Trustees in mid-June, the law school received inquiries from dozens of potential students. Law school administrators say that, in coming years, the degree program will be able to enroll up to 25 students at a time.

Those new arrivals will join current UF law students such as Patrick Schmutz and Virna Vallucci-Schmutz, who traveled from Switzerland to attend UF because of the selection of courses the school offers in U.S. and international tax. The couple say matters of American tax law came up often in their earlier careers – when both worked as lawyers for a Swiss bank.

“We chose UF because of the strength of the faculty, and because the school offers a broader range of courses than many other programs,” Schmutz said. “As an added benefit, we’ve found that one can live more inexpensively in Gainesville than in most university towns, and the people are very friendly.”

Addicts are misusing a clear patch that transfers a controlled dose of fentanyl through the skin into the bloodstream over the course of a few days, UF experts say. The adhesive patch is typically prescribed to treat postoperative pain or chronic pain conditions, but in some cases is being misused, often with deadly consequences.

“Because the patch is a sustained release form of the drug, if one withdraws the 72 hours’ worth of drug and uses it in a form that it wasn’t designed to be used for, then it can rapidly result in death,” said the study’s lead researcher, Bruce Goldberger, director of toxicology and an associate professor in the departments of pathology, immunology and laboratory medicine and psychiatry in UF’s College of Medicine.

Patients who are prescribed the patch must be made aware of the potential dangers of misuse, Goldberger added.

Florida Department of Law Enforcement records cited in the UF study, presented this month in Orlando at the annual meeting of the College on Problems of Drug Dependence, show abuse of the patch resulted in the death of 115 people in Florida last year.

While the number of fatalities linked to the patch is still one-quarter the number associated with other drugs abused, such as methadone or hydrocodone, the number of sudden deaths from overdosing on fentanyl has been on the rise during the past few years — not just in Florida but also nationwide, researchers found.

“We have seen an increased use and abuse of the patch form of fentanyl for the past five years or so,” Goldberger said. “This is a recent finding related to the prescription of fentanyl patches.”

In many cases, people who died from overdosing on the drug were able to easily remove the full dose of fentanyl from the patch and take the entire three-day amount at once, either by injecting, ingesting or smoking it.

In some cases, the deceased sought a state of euphoria by applying multiple patches simultaneously.

It is not always clear from the law enforcement records where people who overdosed obtained the drug, whether from a prescription of their own or from one that had been stolen or otherwise not used according to doctor’s instructions, the group reported.

“Oftentimes we don’t know where the patch comes from. Sometimes it is from someone who had a prescription or it was purchased on the street or acquired from a friend, so it has been diverted to them,” Goldberger said.

Goldberger’s team, which includes Dr. Mark Gold, a distinguished professor with UF’s McKnight Brain Institute and chief of the division of addiction medicine, has been focused on the use and abuse of prescription drugs. In the past few years his team has seen increased abuse of methadone, and now fentanyl.

“Based on our study we’re recommending that physicians better educate their patients on the use of the patch, and, as a result, we might see lower numbers in fentanyl-related deaths in the state of Florida,” Goldberger said.

Dr. Albert Ray, medical director of Pain Medicine Solutions in Miami and a past president of the American Academy of Pain Medicine, said that the UF study brings necessary attention to the importance of physician and patient education regarding addictive disorders.

“There is nothing wrong with the patch, the problem is with addictive disorders,” Ray said. “Any drug has the potential for abuse. This study is useful for raising awareness of the need for educating prescribing physicians on the importance of screening and monitoring their patients for addictive disorders in order to help decrease the abuse of the patch.”