Criminal Law

• Sex Crimes
  A federal judge probed the backgrounds and political biases of dozens of New Yorkers, searching for nine people to serve as jurors for E. Jean Carroll’s rape lawsuit against the former President.
• Misdemeanors
  We went for a weekend to Berlin, where there was an exhibition of the artist Louise Bourgeois’s late fabric works. Beyond the tall open doors of the museum’s entrance, where the attendant sat checking tickets, one of the artist’s giant stuffed forms could be seen hanging in space, suspended from the ceiling—a human form without identity, without face or features. It was genderless, this floating being, returned to a primary innocence that was also tragic, as though in this dream state of suspension we might find ourselves washed clean of the violence of gender, absolved of its misdemeanors and injustices, its diabolical driving of the story of life. It seemed to lie within the power of this artist’s femininity to unsex the human form.
• Embezzlement
  In April, 2022, Olivera Lakić wrote an astonishing report for Libertas based on the Europol intelligence. It detailed how Milos Medenica, the son of Vesna Medenica, one of Montenegro’s most senior judges, appeared to have plotted with a corrupt police officer to import cigarettes and cocaine through Bar’s port. In one text, Milos told the policeman, “Right now I’m working on cigarettes. You know 100% I left for Bar from 11p.m. on Thursday.” Moreover, intercepted messages sent by Milos suggested that his mother was protecting the illegal enterprise. Vesna, he said, had the power to influence judges in criminal cases, and even to initiate multimillion-dollar embezzlement cases against her son’s enemies. “I went to her,” Milos texted one correspondent, according to a later story, in
• Murder
  In 2016, the Dutch National High-Tech Crime Unit targeted Ennetcom, a network used by some nineteen thousand people, most of them based in the Netherlands. After discovering that Ennetcom’s servers were housed in Canada, the crime unit requested that Canadian law enforcement obtain a search warrant to copy the data. The network, owned by a Dutchman named Danny Manupassa, had made a spectacular bungle: it had stored the private keys for the system on the same server as the network’s messages. Analysts in the Netherlands obtained the private keys and then used them to decrypt Ennetcom texts. Manupassa was arrested for “purposefully facilitating crime,” as were many of his customers—including Naoufal (the Belly) Fassih, a notorious Moroccan Dutch hit man and drug trafficker, who was later convicted of attempted murder.
• Money Laundering
  Although many gangsters on encrypted networks were low-level figures, these conversations have helped law-enforcement officials build detailed cases against “high value targets.” Daniel Kinahan is a forty-five-year-old Irishman who leads an organization that, according to the U.S. Treasury, “smuggles deadly narcotics, including cocaine, to Europe, and is a threat to the entire licit economy through its role in international money laundering.” Sports fans may also know Kinahan as the former owner of MTK Global, a boxing management company, and as the man whom Tyson Fury, the World Boxing Council heavyweight champion of the world, publicly thanked for arranging two title bouts against Anthony Joshua. (After Fury’s acknowledgment sparked outrage, he distanced himself from Kinahan.)
• Kidnapping
  Von Ahn’s mother expected him to go to college in the United States, but he was ambivalent about the idea. Then, in 1995, during his senior year of high school, his aunt was kidnapped. Ransom schemes were on the rise in Guatemala, which was nearing the end of a decades-long civil war. Von Ahn’s aunt had once been married to a colonel in the military, and her ex-husband helped connect the family with an anti-kidnapping unit, which advised them on how to proceed. “One of the things they tell you is: ‘They’re gonna ask for an amount. Even if you have it, don’t pay, because what they’re trying to do is measure how much you can pay. If you immediately pay it, they are going to think that they undershot.’ ” A member of the family—a more distant relative, as the unit had instructed—negotiated with the kidnappers, and von Ahn’s aunt, who died a few years ago, was freed. “That was a pretty horrifying experience,” von Ahn told me. He decided that he would go to Duke, to study math.

Property Law

• Eminent Domain
  By 2015, India was planning solar farms that were hundreds of times bigger. The central government formed an alliance with the Karnataka state government to create K.S.P.D.C.L.; the newly minted solar corporation went looking for a site with thousands of sunny acres and found it near the town of Pavagada, where drought had made growing crops difficult. In the light of hundreds of land conflicts that have erupted across India over the years, the government found a way to avoid buying the site or seizing it through eminent domain. In early 2016, K.S.P.D.C.L. approached landowners with an idea that, according to the corporation, had not been tried on a large scale before: it would lease land holdings for a period of twenty-eight years. Locals, of whom thirty per cent are illiterate, would become landlords and the solar company would become their tenant.