The verdict on all three counts, guilty. Does it say that the jury in one trial found one defendant’s guilt was proven beyond a reasonable doubt, or does it reflect a shift in public perception of cops, of law enforcement, that enough is enough? Both? Something else? Interpreting the meaning of things like guilty verdicts beyond their inherent parameters is a game for fools and knaves, usually found on cable news, but one thing is clear: the jury convicted and it has validated the beliefs of a great many Americans that police are prejudiced, callous and too violent.

Put aside the legalities at issue in the conviction, most of which will ultimately prove insignificant. Don’t read anything more into the verdict than the jury found the facts. Legal issues on appeal aside, defendants are presumed innocent unless and until a jury find the defendant guilty. That has now happened. You accept the wins and losses alike. This is our system and that was the jury’s verdict. Continue reading →

I was asked my best guess as to the verdict in the Derek Chauvin prosecution, and replied “It will either be guilty, not guilty or hung.” If the jury hangs, it will be a mistrial, not a verdict, of course, but the point is no one knows what a jury will do. That’s the point of juries, that we put the decision in the hands of “twelve good men and true,” and then wait.

Some people can’t wait. Maxine Waters, the person some people from California deemed wise enough to send to Congress, called for protesters to “get more confrontational” if Chauvin isn’t convicted. Others smeared the former (which is a nice way of saying some poor random person’s because these are really passionate critical thinkers) house of defense use-of-force witness Barry Bodd with blood and a severed pig’s head. Continue reading →

An interesting study suggests that the Supreme Court is unimpressed with the fortitude, competence and basic reliability of the media, and has been for the past decade.

“A generation ago, the court actively taught the public that the press was a check on government, a trustworthy source of accurate coverage, an entity to be specially protected from regulation and an institution with specific constitutional freedoms,” wrote the study’s authors, RonNell Andersen Jones, a law professor at the University of Utah, and Sonja R. West, a law professor at the University of Georgia. “Today, in contrast, it almost never speaks of the press, press freedom or press functions, and when it does, it is in an overwhelmingly less positive manner.”

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As we watch the video, we know that Karen Garner is 73 years old, maybe 80 lbs. and suffers from dementia. That can, and should, inform what we see. How then is it possible that Loveland, Colorado, police officer Austin Hopp engaged her so forcefully, so needlessly, so wrongly?

The background is laid out in a suit for excessive force. Continue reading →

One of the most curious rhetorical tricks these days is that when the woke refer to violence, it’s limited to acts done to the person, not a thing. Words can be violence. A Molotov cocktail thrown into an empty store is not violence, but property damage. Property can be replaced. Lives cannot. The law values life above property, which is certainly correct, and so there can never be a justification for use of force against the person when the person’s only offense is burning buildings or looting stores, property damage.

Destroying property, which can be replaced, is not violence. To use the same language to describe those two things is not moral.

—Nikole Hannah-Jones

As a laundry list of words have been untethered from any cognizable meaning over the last ten years, from rape to racism, so that they can be accused at random, it’s interesting that this one word, “violence,” has been tightened up in such facile fashion. Then again, there is a somewhat consistent rationale here, as all are defined by outcome rather than conduct. If a “victim” feels that she’s been raped, then it’s rape. If arson destroyed a business that somebody sunk their life into, but no one dies, then it’s just property damage. Continue reading →

No less a deep thinker than New York’s junior senator, Kirsten Gillibrand, told us.

Paid leave is infrastructure.
Child care is infrastructure.
Caregiving is infrastructure.

— Kirsten Gillibrand (@SenGillibrand) April 7, 2021

Is that it? Not necessarily. Continue reading →

Joe Biden’s 36-member commission to reimagine the Supreme Court is designed to do nothing and go nowhere, which makes it perfect for all its member from Yale Law School. Rep. Jerry “Weeble” Nadler, chair of the House Judiciary Committee isn’t going to let it go that easily, perhaps making good on the Democratic senators’ threat to SCOTUS, and so he along with Senator Edward Markey offered a DOA bill to expand the Supreme Court to 13 justices.

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He was a 13-year-old seventh grader at Gary Elementary School. He was also a 13-year-old with a gun being chased by cops down a dark alley late at night. There’s an inexplicable compulsion to turn victims into saints these days. They’re not. They don’t have to be. Even kids who do bad things shouldn’t be needlessly killed. Adam Toledo was doing bad things, even though he was just a 13-year-old seventh grader. That shouldn’t have been the case, but it was. And he still shouldn’t have been shot and killed.

Adam Toledo complied. Continue reading →

John McWhorter calls them the “Elect.” Georgetown Palestinian-American feminist law prof Lama Abu Odeh called them the “Progressoriat.” Lacking both the intellectual bona fides of these academics and the identitarian cred, I’ve come up with no new names and have relied on a variety of terms that are invariably seen as pejorative when they come from an old, unwoke, white male liberal lawyer. But then, does the name really matter when someone goes as far out on a limb as Lama Abu Odeh?

Progressive liberals are blind to the fact that there is a regime take-over apace everywhere in academic institutions. A new ruling elite is taking over academic institutions by using its “minority status” to exercise a “soft” coup and is appealing to the minoritarianism of progressive ideology to legitimize its coup—or, if you like, to “manufacture consent.” I will call the adherents of this ideology the “progressoriat.”

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The killing of Daunte Wright is subsumed by the fact that he was an unarmed young black man who shouldn’t have been shot, shouldn’t have died. There can be no dispute about this. But that doesn’t mean that all other facts and circumstances cease to exist, unless the only thing that matters is that it happened. And to some, that’s certainly the case, Wright’s death coming during the Derek Chauvin trial, following almost immediately upon the stop of Lt. Caron Nazario, both within miles of each other.

Twenty-six year police officer Kimberly Potter has been charged with manslaughter 2 upon her claim that she thought she was firing her Taser when she fired her service weapon and killed Wright. There are arguments that cut both ways as to the veracity of her claim, though there is no reason why she would have wanted to kill him rather than prevent him from fleeing after being stopped for expired tags and having an open warrant in an armed robbery case. The man 2 charge tells us that its premised on the reckless mistake of shooting her gun rather than the Taser. And, indeed, if that’s what happened, it would seem quite likely that she was reckless. Continue reading →