It can be hard to get too teary-eyed over the fact that defendants sentenced to probation, or convicts released on parole, end up in prison for failure to abide the terms of release. The simple answer is that if you don’t want to go to, or back to, prison, comply with the terms of your release. How hard is that?

It’s a far bigger question than many realize.

Nationwide, 45 percent of admissions to state prisons are the result of probation or parole violations. Sometimes these violations are serious, but most involve technicalities, such as botched paperwork, curfew violations or missing a drug test, according to a report released Tuesday by the Council of State Governments (CSG) Justice Center.

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Among the worst of progressive inconsistencies in “reform” is the shift away from certain offenses that affect groups they favor, such as marijuana, and toward groups they don’t, such as sex offenses. And a huge reform celebrated in a New York Times editorial masquerading as a news article is the reform of the elements of sexual harassment under New York’s Human Rights Law.

Well, calling it reform may be a bit unfair. What the New York legislature has done is removed the words “severe or pervasive,” (note the disjunctive) which means there is no effective limitation on what constitutes harassment at all.

For decades, sexual harassment was the State Capitol’s worst-kept secret.

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When he first appeared on my radar, I thought he was kinda shallow, maybe even dense. I was wrong. There was method to his madness, his pandering to the crowd with half-truths, missing salient facts, contorted law and misstated theories.

In fairness, I came to appreciate the skills Director of Policy Scott Hechinger from LIsa Schreibersdorf’s Brooklyn Defender Services brought to the cause. He’s now got a blue tick next to his name and, at the moment, more than 55,000 followers. Give him credit. He’s pulled off a coup for the cause, and with it he’s earned the devotion and appreciation of a great many passionate advocates for social justice and criminal law reform.

My perspective over my career and my tenure at SJ has been guided by two basic principles: to be as intellectually honest as I can be, and to not make people stupider. These are not Hechinger’s principles. He will say whatever is necessary to whip up his audience and inflame their outrage if it will serve the cause. So what if it’s only half a story? If it works to serve what he believes to be the greater good, then isn’t a bit of lying worth it? Isn’t the cause greater than the truth? Isn’t the cause the truth anyway, if you’re passionate enough? Continue reading →

When asked about the hearings to be held on H.R. 40 in the House of Representatives, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell offered his facile response, “telling reporters he does not favor reparations ‘for something that happened 150 years ago, for whom none of us currently living are responsible.'”

Reparations. Even President Obama told Ta-Nehisi Coates that he didn’t think reparations would work.

Now, does that mean that all vestiges of past discrimination would be eliminated, that the income gap or the wealth gap or the education gap would be erased in five years or 10 years? Probably not, and so this is obviously a discussion we’ve had before when you talk about something like reparations. Theoretically, you can make, obviously, a powerful argument that centuries of slavery, Jim Crow, discrimination are the primary cause for all those gaps. Continue reading →

Like it or not, the endorsement of the New York Times is a big deal for politics in general, and New York City in particular. And the Times gave its endorsement for District Attorney of Queens County.

The choice is difficult. The field of candidates is big but disappointing. Tiffany Cabán, a 31-year-old public defender, is the best pick.

Ms. Cabán does not have the managerial experience of Melinda Katz, the Queens borough president, or the prosecutorial experience of Greg Lasak, a retired judge and former longtime assistant Queens district attorney. But Ms. Katz has no experience as a prosecutor nor long commitment to criminal justice reform, and despite Mr. Lasak’s tenure, he would not seem to be someone to bring change to an office where he served for years.

What does Cabán bring to the race? Continue reading →

Years of research, on top of anecdotal experience, conclusively proved the unreliability of eyewitness identification. Yet, when it served a political end, someone at the New York Times thought it worthwhile to publish an op-ed that the trauma of being a sexual assault victim made their observations, their memory of victimhood, reliable.

It wasn’t merely outrageously false, but a sellout of fact to the cause. It was a lie, and they knew it and didn’t care. In their fight for “survivors,” it was a lie they needed people to believe, and so they conveniently forgot the exonerated on death row who were the victims of false eyewitness identifications and proclaimed it real, but with a hook. This was about victims of sexual assault and rape, as if the same trauma, the same false identification, the same false memories, weren’t the same worst evidence against every accused. With that hook, they could pretend it applied exclusively to rape, even though memories are memories for any crime. Continue reading →

As a general principle, how can one not support the notion of prosecutors reviewing prior convictions for improprieties? After all, if the conviction was improperly obtained, and particularly if there is a meaningful potential that the defendant was wrongfully convicted (meaning that an innocent person is in prison and a guilty person is free to harm others), it would be irresponsible to do otherwise.

But that’s not the rationale behind the call for New York County District Attorney Cy Vance to review thousands of cases this time.

Manhattan’s D.A. is holding fast against calls to reopen thousands of sex crime cases and fire a veteran prosecutor accused of mishandling the 1989 Central Park Five case.

D.A. Cyrus Vance has shot down a request from Public Advocate Jumaane Williams to reopen thousands of cases prosecuted by his office’s sex crime unit between 1976 and 2002.

He also refused Williams’ request to fire Elizabeth Lederer, a veteran assistant D.A. who worked on the Central Park Five case, who Vance described as “an attorney in good standing in this office.”

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There are many reason for the Supreme Court to adhere to its prior decisions, even when, as in Gamble v. United States, there are many reasons to reject the past and leave it behind. We need stability in the law so we know how to conduct ourselves and our affairs. We need humility in the Court, so that a shift of a justice or two doesn’t reverse the opinions of their predecessors, similarly wise, merely because they disagree. We need to accept the integrity of the Court’s decision-making process, that it doesn’t blow in the wind as popular views ebb and flow.

We need stare decisis.

But then, when a decision is wrong, we need change as well. Continue reading →

Orenthal James Simpson decided to join the world of Twitter and, despite amassing more than 600,000 followers, received pretty much the unsupportive reception one would expect. While some remain his fans, the vast majority of people despise him as the murderer of Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman.

He was, of course, acquitted of the murders. He was found liable in a subsequent civil trial for damages, and was later convicted of robbery in Nevada, for which he was sentenced to 33 years  imprisonment with parole eligibility after nine. He was released in 2017. But it’s not the robbery that inflames people against OJ; it’s the murders. The murders for which he was acquitted.

I could hear the dulcet whisper of my muse, Appellate Squawk, as I read comments about the loathsome and murderous OJ: But he was acquitted. He has never been found guilty of the murder of anyone, and yet here are people, lawyers, criminal defense lawyers, condemning him as a murderer. See the problem? Continue reading →

A curious argument posed in reaction to Oberlin College’s smear of the Gibson family in furtherance of its blind social justice agenda is whether calling someone a “racist” is a matter of opinion or fact. If the former, then it cannot be defamatory. If the latter, then it can.

The hybrid argument is that the generic characterization of “racist” is an opinion, while the characterization of “racist” based upon a discrete factual scenario is not. Here, because the actions of Gibson’s Bakery in calling the police on a black Oberlin student for shoplifting directly led to students, with the facilitation and encouragement of faculty and administration, acting in concert, provided the express basis for the accusation of racism, the judge denied summary judgment and the jury found the “racist” accusation defamatory.

As with many other words, such as “rape,” “racist” has become untethered from its definition. It no longer is understood to be limited to racial animus, but has expanded to include lack of sufficient racial empathy. Even more, racism to a certain cohort can be manifested in failure to make it one’s primary concern, suffering consequences (such as theft) as a sacrifice to the marginalized. Continue reading →