The New York Post laments the actions of the new Queens District Attorney, Melinda Katz.

Incoming Queens DA Melinda Katz is vowing to clean house when she takes office in January, dismissing holdovers from Richard Brown’s near-30-year tenure. Take it as an ominous sign.

The “elections have consequences” slogan cuts both ways, and for Katz, who barely edged out queer Latina public defender Tiffany Cabán because her extremely progressive credentials didn’t have the identity brand behind it, there were doubts that she would be as good as progressives wanted or as bad as conservatives expected. Continue reading →

Pamela Coloff did the heavy lifting in a New York Times Magazine story. Now Jesse Wegman reminds us of it, as James Dailey’s stay of execution is about to run out, and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has tired of hearing about it, so scheduling Dailey’s execution seems inevitable.

What Florida officials have so far refused to acknowledge . . . is that Mr. Dailey, 73, is almost certainly innocent.

Jesse gives two reasons for this conclusion. The first is that Dailey’s housemate, Jack Pearcy, was both convicted of the brutal 1985 murder of a teenager named Shelly Boggio, and asserted, twice, under oath, that he, and he alone, committed the murder. The second is that the only evidence against Dailey was the word of Paul Skalnik. Skalnik was the jailhouse snitch. Continue reading →

On “Abolish Today,” police.

We don’t consider the abolition of police a viable position to take because we believe they’re the only thing standing between upstanding citizens and the violence of the deranged. We’re afraid of being attacked on the street, of having our homes shot at, and being left without access to equally violent retribution. But does this mean we want police, or safety and security? Safety and security are ideas, ones that may never be fully achieved, and the police are an institution that have proved themselves capable of only providing the illusion of safety and security to a select few.

Mychal Denzel Smith argues in The Nation that the primary function of cops is to kill black men and protect the monied interest of white people. Indeed, after there was a shooting in his building, he tells of the police keeping a car outside. The “presence of the police scares me more than the kids selling drugs or the gunshots ever did.” If he was shot, he might feel differently, but he wasn’t. Continue reading →

The names should sound familiar. Catharine MacKinnon is a law prof at University of Michigan, and she was, in a very real sense, the godmother of the current Title IX sex policing on campus, deliberate in its construction to sacrifice male students to secure the feelings of female students at any cost.

The co-author is Kimberlé Crenshaw, who coined the term “intersectionality,” constructing the victim hierarchy based on identity. Gay trumps straight. Gay black trumps gay. Gay black unidexter trumps . . . well, you get it.

[I]ntersectionality functions as kind of caste system, in which people are judged according to how much their particular caste has suffered throughout history. Victimhood, in the intersectional way of seeing the world, is akin to sainthood; power and privilege are profane.

Continue reading →

I like to watch car shows on Velocity channel. Dr. SJ, not so much. It’s okay with me. It’s okay with her. To each his own, and if she (I confirmed her pronouns in advance of writing this post) isn’t interested in chasing classic cars, who am I to make her watch?

So why must guys want to watch a chick flick?

While the box office numbers following its release on Wednesday suggest the movie has found a decent audience — it placed third, behind the new “Star Wars” and the latest “Jumanji,” on opening day — that unconscious bias has seemed to trickle down to the casual male viewer as well, if Twitter is any indication. The New York Times critic Janet Maslin recently tweeted her surprise at the “active hostility about ‘Little Women’ from men I know, love and respect.” Continue reading →

Sentence inflation is the sort of thing one notices. When I started defending people accused of crimes, a first-time gun possession would get probation. As fear rose during the crack epidemic, the sentence required a mandatory minimum of a year. Under New York law, it now has a mandatory minimum of 3½ years. So no time to serious time all in my lifetime.

The theory was based on a belief that made complete sense to the public, and was easily played by lawmakers who capitalized on public fears: the longer the sentence, the less likely someone would commit the crime. The problem with the theory was twofold: first, people don’t really consider sentence when deciding to commit crimes. They don’t know what the sentences are, even though people believe that people inclined to commit crimes are somehow knowledgeable about such things. They’re not. In fact, they’re often not the brightest folks around. Continue reading →

Not everyone turns to Die Hard as their favorite Christmas movie. Some enjoy the offerings from Hallmark, soothing, comforting and fascist propaganda, according to Amanda Marcotte at Salon.

None of this should be a surprise, because Hallmark movies, as cloying and saccharine as they are, constitute the platonic ideal of fascist propaganda.

They are certainly cloying. Definitely saccharine. But fascist propaganda, putting aside the question of whether Plato had an ideal about the issue? Continue reading →

There’s something sentimental about it which stirs even the hardest heart this time of year. It wasn’t a gift former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper would give, but the new governor, Jared Polis, was in more of a giving move.

Gov. Jared Polis on Monday announced he has pardoned undocumented immigrant Ingrid Encalada Latorre, a Peruvian woman who had fought deportation and has spent the last two years in sanctuary, from felony charges related to a stolen Social Security number that she had purchased to work in the country. Losing those charges was a prerequisite for her to re-open her immigration case and ask an immigration judge to de-prioritize her deportation order.

That Latorre was targeted for deportation is unsurprising. She was undocumented and pleaded guilty to a felony. It wasn’t a terrible crime by any means, but it wasn’t a victimless crime either. Continue reading →

He’s making a list. He’s checking it twice. He’s gonna find out who’s naughty or nice. These words have very different meaning these days, none of them good. Some years, I write my usual thoughtful and inspiring note on Christmas. Other years, there is little to add. And, of course, some years, I’m reduced to writing gibberish.

Do this long enough and you feel a visceral sense of going nowhere fast. As I’m wont to do, I check the New York Times in the morning, and I did so this morning to see what they had to contribute to the Christmas spirit, to peace on earth and goodwill toward man. What I found was an op-ed by the editorial director of The Times’s Reader Center, Hanna Ingber, about Christmas trees. Well, not really about trees, but her feelings because no one writes about things anymore. Just their feelings about things.

In an interesting, if not entirely serious, proposal by Cato’s Clark Neily, there ought to be a Constitutional Small Claims Court. Sure, there are big cases with devastating damages and injuries that warrant a federal suit under §1983, but as a series of twits got Clark’s juices boiling, there are a million, a billion, trivial constitutional violations that happen and disappear for lack of anything to do about it.

First, this kind of thing happens all the time. Just noodle around on YouTube a bit and you’ll be struck by the utter banality of it all: The casual disrespect, intimidation, deceit, manipulativeness—it’s shocking how so many officers misbehave so flagrantly, even when they know they’re being recorded.

Second, as discussed below, there are rarely any consequences for officers who engage in the sort of low-level harassment described by Zeko and depicted in the links above.

Continue reading →