“Can’t we all just get along?” Where have we heard that before?
Category Archives: Law/Justice
Two police officers shot amid Louisville protests over Breonna Taylor ruling Reply
Would it be accurate to say that a low-intensity civil war is no underway?
Reuters
LOUISVILLE, Kentucky, Sept 23 (Reuters) – Two police officers were shot and wounded late on Wednesday in Louisville, Kentucky, during protests ignited by a grand jury decision that civil rights activists decried as a miscarriage of justice in the fatal police shooting of Breonna Taylor.
The grand jury ruled that two white policemen will not be prosecuted in connection with the death of Taylor, a Black medical worker shot in her own apartment, because their use of force during an ill-fated raid on her home was justified, but a third officer was charged with endangering her neighbors.
Ex-Louisville police Officer Brett Hankison charged with wanton endangerment in Breonna Taylor case Reply
If this Brett Hankison dude was a civilian, I’m pretty sure he would have had more serious charges brought against him. One set of laws for the king’s knights, another set of laws for everyone else.
By Minyvonne Burke and Tim Stelloh
NBC News
One of the police officers involved in the shooting death of Breonna Taylor in her home in Louisville, Kentucky, in March was charged Wednesday with first-degree wanton endangerment, but the officer whose shot killed Taylor was not indicted.
Judge Annie O’Connell announced the charges against the former Louisville detective, Brett Hankison, who was fired in June, during a grand jury proceeding. A warrant will be issued for his arrest, O’Connell said.
The charges accuse Hankison of firing blindly into several apartments and recklessly endangering Taylor’s neighbors, but do not charge him with firing at or killing Taylor. Two other officers involved in the March 13 incident, Detective Myles Cosgrove and Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly, were not charged.
Officer shot, protests escalate after Breonna Taylor probe yields no direct charges for police Reply
And another round begins…
Richmond.Com
Louisville police say an officer has been shot amid protests over a lack of direct criminal charges for officers in Breonna Taylor’s shooting death.
The statement did not elaborate on the condition of the officer or the circumstances of the shooting.
That development came amid a fast-changing scene in Louisville, where police had earlier fired flash bang devices to clear demonstrators from a downtown square Wednesday evening. The protesters had gathered there to protest a grand jury’s decision to not indict police officers on criminal charges directly related to Taylor’s death.
Taylor, a Black woman, was fatally shot during a police raid gone bad earlier this year.
SCOTUS Hysteria Is A Mass DELUSION Created By Elites Reply
This commentary is pretty good.
Should Trump Appoint A SCOTUS Nominee In An Election Year? 1
GOP Will Play Dems For Suckers On SCOTUS Forever Reply
The ongoing leftward shift of US culture combined with an increasingly solid Republican control of the courts should make for an interesting political future.
How The Elites RIGGED Supreme Court Politics To Cover Their Corporate Scam Reply
Saager nails it in this. Fortunately, I am neither a “cultural conservative” nor a “cultural progressive” so I don’t need to care about all this Supreme Court stuff.
Crisis Triggered By RBG Death Reveals DEEP POLITICAL ROT At Heart Of US System 1
The system keeps falling apart.
What Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Death Means for America 1
The tribal civil war is about to intensify. Btw, if anyone thinks Old Hag Ruthie was a friend of freedom, liberty, rights, etc, then check out the Bennis v. Michigan case.
By Russell Berman
The Atlantic
A furious battle over a Supreme Court vacancy is arguably the last thing the United States needs right now.
The death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg today represents a devastating loss for feminists who held up the 87-year-old as an icon of women’s rights, and as a bulwark protecting abortion rights and a wide range of other progressive ideals on a conservative Supreme Court. The Brooklyn-born jurist became one of the nation’s foremost advocates against gender discrimination as a lawyer for the ACLU, decades before President Bill Clinton appointed her to be the second woman to sit on the high court.
But her passing less than two months before the presidential election also tosses one more lit match into the tinderbox of national politics in 2020: It will surely inflame a deeply polarized country already riven by a deadly pandemic, a steep economic downturn, and civil unrest in its major cities.
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg dead at 87 Reply
Another battle royale is coming.
CBS News
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has died at the age of 87 from complications from metastatic pancreatic cancer. According to a statement from the court, Ginsburg died surrounded by her family at her home in Washington, D.C. Norah O’Donnell anchors a CBS News Special Report from Washington with CBS News chief legal correspondent Jan Crawford.
Study provides first estimate of total US population with felony convictions Reply
Eight percent of the US population are convicted felons.
Science Daily
New research led by a University of Georgia sociologist on the growth in the scope and scale of felony convictions finds that, as of 2010, 3 percent of the total U.S. population and 15 percent of the African-American male population have served time in prison. People with felony convictions more broadly account for 8 percent of the overall population and 33 percent of the African-American male population.
The study includes the first estimates of the felony conviction population and maps their distribution in the states, documenting the dramatic growth since 1980.
“There’s been a great deal of scholarly and policy attention toward incarceration, and rightfully so, as it has very distinct consequences for people that have that experience, as well as their communities and families,” said Sarah Shannon, assistant professor of sociology in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences and first author on the study.
As Many Americans Have Criminal Records as College Diplomas Reply
There are more Americans who have a criminal record than Americans who have a dog. Awesome.
By
Brennan Center
The number of Americans with a criminal history has risen sharply over the past three decades. Today, nearly one-third of the adult working age population has a criminal record. In fact, so many Americans have a criminal record that counting them all is nearly impossible.
According to a 2012 Department of Justice survey, state criminal history repositories contain more than 100 million records. These are popularly referred to as “rap sheets” or “criminal records” although most people who have them have never been convicted of a serious crime. These repositories chronicle nearly every arrest, regardless of whether or not it leads to an indictment or conviction. And while 100 million records do exist, this figure almost certainly overstates the true number of individuals who have been arrested at any point in their lives, since one person can have an arrest record in multiple states.
Why Are More Americans Than Ever Getting Busted? Reply
The ever-expanding police state.
By J.D. Tuccille
Reason
With the crime rate continuing its decades-long slide, why are arrests way up? The answer matters, because arrest records—and subsequent convictions—tend to cast a shadow, limiting people’s options and reducing their income for the rest of their lives. That is, if they still have lives; interactions with the police can be dangerous and even lethal, which is another reason to worry about the growing frequency with which cops slap on the cuffs.
You and your kids are a lot more likely to get busted than your grandparents ever were.
“Americans are experiencing higher rates of arrests and convictions by age 26 than did members of the generations before them,” according to a recent RAND Corporation research brief that draws from a full study published in Crime & Delinquency. “Americans ages 26–35 were 3.6 times more likely to have been arrested by 26 when compared with those who were age 66 and older.”
As a result, about 6.4 percent of Americans born before 1949 have been arrested, compared to about 23 percent of those born between 1979 and 1988.
That might be acceptable if we were talking about dangerous criminals whose arrests contributed to the decline of the violent crime rate by another 3.3 percent from 2017 to 2018 (and of the property crime rate by even more), according to the latest FBI figures. That welcome decline is in addition to the reduction of violent crime by roughly half since 1993. And some of those sorts of criminals are in the mix.
How Many Americans Have a Police Record? Probably More Than You Think Reply
Criminals are the largest and most oppressed of all minorities. Crime Power Forever!
Jo Craven McGinty
Wall Street Journal
Pop quiz: How many American adults have a criminal history?
a) 5% b) 15% c) 30%
It’s often reported that nearly 1 in 3 American adults, or about 30%, has a police record.
To some, that figure sounds surprisingly high. In fact, it may be low—but there are some caveats.
First, there is no way to pinpoint the exact number because a complete data set of arrests and prosecutions doesn’t exist. And second, the statistic depends on how you define “criminal history.”
“The juvenile who got arrested when he was 15 and now is 32 and applying for a job as truck driver—does he have a criminal history?” asked Robert Brame, a criminologist at the University of South Carolina who has tried to answer the question. “I think reasonable people might disagree about that.”
Researchers who study the issue typically include anyone who has been arrested or taken into custody by police, regardless of whether the charges were ultimately dropped. By that definition, many people who have never been convicted of a crime have a criminal history.
Krystal and Saagar DEBATE: Should Violent Protesters Be Charged With Sedition By Bill Barr? Reply
There is a little too much “law talk” in this segment for my tastes. The ideal situation would be for the center-right, center-left, far-right, and far-left to fight, both in the electoral system/political institutions and in the streets, to the point that none of these can achieve anything approaching a monopoly of state power. The enemy is all around. The objective is for them to keep fighting each other to a permanent stalemate.
Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti weigh in on the controversial comments made by Attorney General Bill Barr advocating for criminally charging certain protesters with sedition.
Police or Prosecutor Misconduct Is at Root of Half of Exoneration Cases, Study Finds Reply
By Aimee Ortiz
New York Times
Official misconduct played a role in the criminal convictions of more than half of innocent people who were later exonerated, according to a new report by a registry that tracks wrongful convictions.
According to the report, by the National Registry of Exonerations, official misconduct contributed to false convictions in 54 percent of exonerations, usually with more than one type of misconduct. Overall, men and Black exonerees “were modestly more likely to experience misconduct,” although there were larger differences by race when it came to drug crimes and murder.
The report comes at a time of reckoning for the American criminal justice system as nationwide civil unrest against racism and police brutality continue.
Ain’t Nobody’s Business If You Do: The Absurdity of Consensual Crimes in a Free Society Reply
Peter McWilliams’ classic from the early 90s. McWilliams himself later became a casualty of the state. The primary cause of police misconduct, mass incarceration, and related issues is overcriminalization, not lack of police “training,” lack of social worker cops, private prisons, or even racism in some abstract sense. All of these things are symptoms, not causes. The main weakness of this book is that is focusing mostly on “morals” related laws like drugs and prostitution, and not overcriminalization generally, which extends into a huge range of areas.
A Judge Asked Harvard to Find Out Why So Many Black People Were In Prison. They Could Only Find 1 Answer: Systemic Racism 2
The problem with “systemic racism” analysis of this kind is that, while not factually wrong on its face, no context is provided. The assumption is that the present system would be fine if only it were less racist, which has the effect of obscuring and obfuscating critiques of “systemic capitalism” or “systemic statism.” Actually, the current system would still suck out the ass even if it were 100% non-racist. Economic policies that are intended to create more poor people will inevitably produce more poor black and brown people, who will be more likely to form oppositional cultures and come under attack from the state.
State policies that create more criminal laws will inevitably produce more poor black and brown people who run afoul of the law (and more people of all races, classes, and cultures who are attacked by the state as well). Progressives and liberals cannot have their cake and eat it too. They cannot have less systemic racism involving poor minorities and have gun control, drug prohibition, laws against selling loose cigarettes, gambling and prostitution prohibition, stringent regulations of self-employment activities like hair braiding and nail-polishing, truancy laws, a huge range of traffic offenses, housing policies that create homelessness, etc., etc., etc.
By Michael Harriot
The Root
Edward Snowden Fully Vindicated In Court Ruling Reply
Andrew Cuomo Says 4,000-Person NYPD Social-Distancing Taskforce Needed Before He’ll Allow Indoor Dining in NYC Reply
The therapeutic police state.
By Christian Britschgi, Reason
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) said on a press call today that he would not allow indoor dining to return in New York City unless local politicians devoted significant police resources to enforcing social distancing and other reopening conditions.
Officer charged in fatal shooting of Black man at San Francisco Walmart Reply
By Jordan Freiman
CBS News
A police officer in San Leandro, California, has been charged with voluntary manslaughter in the fatal shooting of a Black man wielding a baseball bat inside a Walmart, Alameda County District Attorney Nancy E. O’Malley announced Wednesday. Officer Jason Fletcher shot and killed 33-year-old Steven Demarco Taylor on April 18.
“A thorough review of the statements of witnesses and involved police officers, physical evidence and the review of multiple videos of the shooting shows that at the time of the shooting it was not reasonable to conclude Mr. Taylor posed an imminent threat of death or great bodily injury to Officer Fletcher or to anyone else in the store,” O’Malley said in a press conference. “I believe Officer Fletcher’s actions, coupled with his failure to attempt other de-escalation options rendered his use of deadly force unreasonable and a violation of Penal Code Section 192(a), Voluntary Manslaughter.”
