Today is my mother’s funeral, and so I’m off to fight the traffic on the Cross Bronx Expressway and the George Washington Bridge on my way to New Jersey. Because it’s really poor form to be late to your own mother’s funeral.
I’m not really in the mood to write anything today, so please go read something worthwhile elsewhere. And thanks to all for your warm wishes. It’s very much appreciated.
Since my last post about cops in Albuquerque, which included an update about the indictment of two cops for the killing of James Boyd, people have been sending me stories about how the cops have targeted District Attorney Kari Brandenburg in retaliation. I’ve resisted discussion of this, both because it’s friggin’ Albuquerque (which isn’t as fascinating as, say, New York) and because Brandenburg is the DA.
What I mean by that is that anyone who wants to be the District Attorney takes on turf fraught with choices, many of which carry some public or private animosity. When Daniel Donovan, the District Attorney of Richmond County (that’s Staten Island to you New Mexicans) sabotaged his grand jury presentment in the Eric Garner killing, I challenged his ethics. Same with St. Louis DA Bob McCulloch in the Michael Brown killing.
The argument in both cases was that the public was calling for blood, and the District Attorneys felt compelled to put on a play, present the case to a grand jury, while believing there should be no indictment. Rather than sabotage the presentment, I argued that their ethical duty was to announce that they would not indict, because they did not believe an indictment was proper, and suffer the consequences.
Most people thought this ridiculous. How could the prosecutors not bend to the will of the public? What choice did they have? Continue reading
In the team sport of politics, few things are more poorly tolerated than a traitor. It’s one thing for, say, George Will to question politically correct speech, but when a former liberal champion like Jonathan Chait does so, all hell breaks loose.
In a long-form article for New York Magazine, Chait took to task the ugliness of the new political incorrectness that had a few minutes in the sun in the late 1980’s, when feminist lawprof Catherine MacKinnon proclaimed herself Speech Queen for a Day.
MacKinnon’s beliefs nestled closely with an academic movement that was then being described, by its advocates as well as its critics, as “political correctness.” Michigan had already responded to the demands of pro-p.c. activists by imposing a campuswide speech code purporting to restrict all manner of discriminatory speech, only for it to be struck down as a First Amendment violation in federal court.
In Ann Arbor, MacKinnon had attracted a loyal following of students, many of whom copied her method of argument. The pro-MacKinnon students, upset over the display of pornographic video clips, descended upon Jacobsen’s exhibit and confiscated a videotape. There were speakers visiting campus for a conference on prostitution, and the video posed “a threat to their safety,” the students insisted.
From what I would assume to be a transcript posted by Jamison Koehler:
HEARING EXAMINER: I will tell you right now, I do not, unless you have an expert here to testify as it relates to the field sobriety tests, unless you can provide that testimony through an expert –
DEFENSE COUNSEL: — I have an expert right here –
HEARING EXAMINER: — I cannot allow that line of questioning.
DEFENSE COUNSEL: Let me try –
HEARING EXAMINER: Because you are trying to get the officer to say that the tests are not peer-reviewed. What does that mean? What does that mean to the officer?
DEFENSE COUNSEL: I don’t care what it means to the officer. What matters is what it means to you.
HEARING EXAMINER: Right. And so the officer says it wasn’t peer-reviewed, how do you refute that if you don’t have an expert?
DEFENSE COUNSEL: I have an expert. Right here. The officer is an expert. He has been certified multiple times in the administration of the test. Otherwise he wouldn’t be qualified to testify. Continue reading
Omar Rendon was a sergeant in the Marines, which is detailed so you realize that he was one of the good guys. You know, the brave heroes everybody talks about, who deserve our thanks. And indeed, they do, and he does. And he is a good guy, which didn’t really help him much.
From the Daily News:
Omar Rendon, 25, a former Marine sergeant, said he was sitting in his Acura sedan in an Ulmer St. parking lot in College Point, Queens while on his lunch break last week, eating a Subway sandwich and watching “Wentworth” on his cell phone, when an unmarked blue van pulled alongside him.
Two men in plainclothes said, “Police! Get out of the car,” and reached in to unlock the door, he said. When Rendon — a handyman at the commercial complex, which features a movie theater and a Toys “R” Us — asked who they were, he said he was violently yanked out of the car. When he asked to see their I.D.s, one cop punched him in the face, he told The News.
Could the Yale police have made a worse choice of students to pull a gun on? Not likely. The student turned out to be the son of New York Times columnist Charles Blow.
Saturday evening, I got a call that no parent wants to get. It was my son calling from college — he’s a third-year student at Yale. He had been accosted by a campus police officer, at gunpoint!
Blow’s commentary often addresses the state of race relations in America. I suppose it comes with the territory, though that would be a racist conclusion based on Blow’s skin color. He could just as easily be a fencing writer, though it doesn’t pay as well. In any event, that’s what he does. And he does it well, whether or not you see the world as he does.
According to the column, his son was doing what normal people who have no reason to think any cop would be interested in them do. Continue reading
Bye, Mom.
______________
I hope you will forgive me for not replying to each comment below, but thank you for your kind words and thoughts.
I admit it: I’m a sucker for a well-played French horn. And I’ve been a fan of CBS’ Sunday Morning since Charles Kuralt held the reins. That his fellow Charles, the Osgood one, wears a bow tie is a bit dated, but still, the French horn intro is magnificent. It’s very hard to blow a good French horn. [Ed. Note: As I’ve since been informed, it’s a trumpet, not a French horn, which means I’ve been watching for years for the wrong reason. My bad.]
But a segment yesterday morning was shockingly bad. Not because it took an ideological position with which I disagree, but because it was factually vapid. The website write-up began with the discredited “According to the U.S. Justice Department, one in five college women will experience some kind of sexual assault while in school.” Would it be too much to expect that a news organization like CBS be aware that these numbers, which don’t come from the DoJ, have been so thoroughly and utterly debunked that not even the most radical feminist organization will use them anymore?
Apparently not.
By way of explanation for his view that the prosecutors who appear in federal court in general, and in his courtroom in particular, are pristine and above reproach, Judge Richard Kopf offered his experiences.
* After 28 years as a federal magistrate judge and district judge, I have witnessed countless examples of Nebraska federal prosecutors playing it entirely straight up and doing so when they could have stood silent and no one would have been the wiser.
* While I do not want to slander most Nebraska state prosecutors who are entirely ethical, I have too often seen in habeas cases or heard (in the case of a wiretap) state prosecutors behaving badly.
* To the degree that Judge Kozinski, a judge who I respect greatly, believes there is an “epidemic” of Brady violations in the federal system, that has not been my experience here in fly over country. As a result, I did not want my earlier post to be an implicit endorsement of the judge’s criticism of federal prosecutors for violating Brady.
To this, Judge Kopf reminded of his earlier explanation about why he believed cops most of the time, which was addressed here. Continue reading
“You have to draw the line between your right as a citizen to privacy and a community’s right to live in a crime-free environment.”
“You can’t have them both.”
— Carrie Mills, International Brotherhood of Police Officers
When the flashbang grenade landed in Baby Bou Bou’s playpen, the Georgia SWAT team was ready with its excuses for why they had no choice:
Sheriff Terrell says the suspects are dangerous drug dealers who are known to be armed. Hence, the SWAT team, the no-knock raid and the flash grenade.
The “drug dealers are inherently dangerous and armed” mantra has been spewed for a long time now, reaching the point where it’s judicially taken for granted. Drugs = danger, so therefore any measures that protect police in the heroic performance of their duty are acceptable. No, more than acceptable, necessary. You can’t have police harmed, when all they’re doing is protecting society’s right to a crime-free environment. Continue reading
If there was a list of tough gang-style rapper names to pick from, what would the chances be that the winning name would be “Tiny Doo”? I mean, it just isn’t particularly manly, and worse yet, provides ample opportunity for potty jokes. Yet, that was the name under which Brandon Duncan rapped, and will be the name under which he could serve 25 years for being a gang killer.
Except he never killed anyone, unless you take this song too literally. Via Gawker:
According to the San Diego County District Attorney’s office, Tiny Doo—real name Brandon Duncan—is a documented member of the gang that allegedly perpetrated the attempted murders. No one is alleging that Duncan fired a gun himself, bought the weapons, or was at the scene of the crime—that he had anything to do with the shooting at all, really. Continue reading
The video of oral argument before the 9th Circuit in Baca v. Adams is making the rounds, and it is certainly worth watching for anyone interested in lying prosecutors and what happens to them. Sidney Powell provides the story at the New York Observer.
In this case, the prosecution infected the case with false testimony–including by a prosecutor himself–over benefits given to a “cooperator” or a jailhouse “snitch.”
The entire program of “cooperation” is rife with problems. Prosecutors often put extraordinary pressure on the worst criminals, threatening not only them but their families. After completely terrifying the person who knows he will go to prison no matter what (because he really is guilty), the prosecutor then offers life-saving benefits, often secretly, in exchange for testimony against many less culpable “targets” of the government’s investigation.