The rape and murder happened in 1983. At the time, people thought we were a fairly advanced society. Horses had long since given way to cars. We had science. The law had gone through the Warren Court and come out better on the other side, protecting the rights of defendants in what today might be considered some social justice fashion. So a conviction for a rape and murder in 1985 had to be pretty reliable, because we were a caring, smart, advanced nation trying to do the right thing.

Yet, the conviction of then-18, now-55, year-old Robert DuBoise, by a unanimous jury beyond a reasonable doubt, got everything wrong. Every single thing wrong. Continue reading →

Ed. Note: Greg Prickett is a former police officer and supervisor who went to law school, hung out a shingle, and now practices criminal defense and family law in Fort Worth, Texas. While he was a police officer, he was a police firearms instructor, and routinely taught armed tactics to other officers.

In 1862, in Minnesota on the Lower Sioux Indian Reservation, the Santee Dakota Indians were starving to death. They had agreed to cede land to the United States and move onto the reservation, and the government agreed to provide for their needs, including food.[1]

In 2020, blacks had suffered for years with young blacks being killed by police officers, culminating in the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, without officers being held accountable for misconduct.[2] In both cases, the affected population did what people do when they have taken all that they can take and have no other readily available options—they reacted with violence.[3] Continue reading →

It was bound to happen, and it happened. What exactly happened is unclear, although one side claims some men with guns were defending a gas station while the other side claims they were just random vigilantes looking for a fight. Either way, it happened.

Three people were shot early Wednesday, two fatally, law enforcement officials said, during a chaotic night of demonstrations over the shooting of Jacob Blake, a Black resident whose children were nearby as their father was shot this week by a white police officer.

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They come fresh-faced from elite law schools, leather briefcases unscuffed and starched white shirts, ready to “do justice” by putting the bad guys where they belong. Some leave after their commitment. Some remain for the duration of their career. They’re prosecutors and they believe that what they do is both right and necessary.

But the closest they ever get to the life of a defendant is a social distance away in a courtroom. For years, I’ve urged that every new prosecutor spend a week in prison, eat Nutraloaf and stare at walls when they aren’t dodging an angry guy with a tattoo across his forehead that says “kill.” Continue reading →

As of July 29, 2020, police have shot to death 111 black people and 215 white people. Each death has its own story, some of which are about police abuse. Jacob Blake didn’t die, and so he isn’t one of these numbers, and his shooting isn’t a simple case of a cop execution.

Police were called because of a “domestic dispute,” which turned out to be a “verbal altercation” between two women. Blake apparently tried to break it up. Police arrived and details are sparse after that. It would seem that Blake was the good guy here, but whether the cops knew that, or even knew who Blake was, is unclear. It’s like they did what they normally do, tried to put the situation on hold until they could figure it out. Continue reading →

Protests present particular problems to police. They see masses of people, not individuals, for the most part, and when they do a round up, it’s not for individualized conduct but for being part of the crowd. It might be a mob. It might be a protest. Maybe the person arrested “deserves” it, whatever that means, or the person arrested might just be a warm body within arm’s reach of a cop.

Portland’s new progressive prosecutor, Mike Schmidt, has chosen to deal with arrests “categorically.”

Ten days after taking office, Mr. Schmidt effectively dismissed charges against more than half of about 600 people arrested since the protests began at the end of May.

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There’s a lot of conflicting information about the impact of marijuana, and it’s not accidental. It’s the result of the federal prohibition on the study of the demon weed. Whether it belongs on Schedule I is a huge issue, but the fact that we’re bereft of sound, scientific scholarship is a problem that smacked states legalizing weed in the face. How much better off would we have been had pot been studied? But alas, it couldn’t be and it wasn’t.

So let’s do it again, but this time with people.

In the wake of the protests over the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, some faculty published an open letter of demands to overcome “anti-Blackness racism” at Princeton. Like many such letters, it included good and bad proposals. Most distinctive and disturbing, however, was the demand for the creation of a faculty committee empowered to “oversee the investigation and discipline of racist behaviors, incidents, research, and publication on the part of the faculty.”

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In 1990, New York City had 2,245 murders. People demanded that something be done, and over the ensuing years, the cops tried two things: the strategy called “Broken Windows” and the tactic called “Stop & Frisk.” While the strategy of the Rockefeller Drug laws had been an abysmal failure, ratcheting up sentences under the theory that they would eventually be so harsh that no rational person would risk going near drugs for fear of spending their lives in prison, there really aren’t all that many strategies around to address the phenomenon of crime.

Then something weird happened. Crime just faded. Crime rates dropped precipitously. The murder rate was at a tenth of what it was. The police claimed they were responsible for this miracle, but it was a lie. Broken Windows just ruined a lot of lives for petty quality of life offenses while Stop & Frisk, before it was held unconstitutional, was a spectacular failure both in its abuse of black and Hispanic young men and accomplishing almost nothing in terms of its sole justification, taking guns off the street. Continue reading →

Much like law school, where classes in social justice have displaced such banal subjects as Evidence, med school has also succumbed to the lessons of the passionate. And we thought they were the smart kids because they could do math.

There have been a growing number of calls for doctors to make the fight against racism central to what they do. The American Board of Internal Medicine, for example, recently decried “structural, systemic and cultural racism.” Meanwhile, the American Academy of Pediatrics has implored its members to “dismantle racism at every level” of society.

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What plot twist could make the unseemly events in Portland turn into a moment of sufficient farce that even the New York Times would notice that the protesters in Portland were still there even after the federal agents, who were the real reason for the renewed outrage until they weren’t, were forgotten? All it took was the Proud Boys to show up.

A group of about 200 protesters, including members of the Proud Boys and families supporting the police, gathered along the courthouse sidewalk beginning at 11 a.m. Many of them were holding American flags, while others carried assault rifles and wore tactical military gear.

Almost immediately, a similar number of Black Lives Matter protesters gathered across the street, many dressed in all black and carrying shields or paintball guns.

Apparently, no members of Antifa were involved, or the Times would surely have mentioned it, since they would be journalistically remiss to leave out such a fact, particularly since they found it critical to note that the pro-police team included Proud Boys.

Within an hour, shouting turned to violence.

It’s hard to imagine what an hour’s worth of shouting was like between these groups, although it would appear that the BLM protesters, whose mostly peaceful right to protest has launched a thousand arguments, didn’t seem willing to fight for the right of the Proud Boys to protest, even though they disagreed with their message.

While noting that some of the Proud Boys carried “assault rifles,” whatever that means, “violence” followed.

Paintballs flew between the two sides. Bottles soared back and forth. Shoves became punches. As protesters who were struck with pepper spray moved back, others came forward to take their place.

Both sides throw things at each other pic.twitter.com/KZzgVkJQZ7

— Sergio Olmos (@MrOlmos) August 22, 2020

As for the Portland police, under a progressive Dem mayor and governor, they demurred.

All the while, police officers watched from a distance and chose not to intervene.

The Portland Police Bureau said in a news release that it did not declare a riot because it had limited personnel for the number of protesters and weapons present.

The statement said that weeks of “violent actions directed at the police” were “a major consideration for determining if police resources are necessary to interject between two groups with individuals who appear to be willingly engaging in physical confrontations for short durations.”

The situation was, of course, ironic for police, whose existence is at issue by one side, which simultaneously expects the cops to come to their defense. And they should have, despite the “abolish” demand being a putative core purpose of the group of protesters, dedicated to preventing the other group of protesters from exercising their right to protest.

Then again, there’s a certain symmetry to two groups looking for a confrontation and finding it. On the other hand, the police responsibility to keep the peace isn’t dependent on how much they like the warring tribes or their sense of schadenfreude. Even if they’re just worn out and unwilling to become embroiled in this battle, that’s the nature of their job.

But what brought the conservative team out to protest? Continue reading →