We have a president who’s 73 years old. The leading challengers are 78, 76 and 70 years of age. I’m no spring chicken, but damn, these people are old. Is that a bad thing?

Older people today hold disproportionate power because they have the numbers and the means to do so. People 65 and older, for example, are more than three times as likely to make political donations as those under 30. As a result, their voices, amplified by money, carry farther politically than those of the young and impecunious.

There are, of course, obvious reasons for this, though they’re not the sort of reasons that would interest Astra Taylor, for whom age seems to be a stand-alone hurdle to fixing our democracy. Continue reading →

The Supreme Court will consider whether to grant certiorari to Bobby Bostic. It’s a case that cries out for appeal as a flagrantly excessive punishment in desperate need of fixing. But that’s not what the Supreme Court does, despite the fact that it could and should face a bad legal outcome and correct it.

It’s a pompous Court, a Court that announces big issues of legal doctrine. It’s not a janitor court that cleans up the mess the system left behind. It’s too important to deal with the mere details of lives wrongly ruined. Correcting error is too trivial for the Supremes, rock stars of the legal world whose time and attention are far too valuable to be squandered on simple error. Even retired Missouri circuit court judge Evelyn Baker’s admission isn’t likely to help.

“You will die in the Department of Corrections.” Those are the words I spoke as a trial judge in 1997 when I sentenced Bobby Bostic to a total of 241 years in prison for his role in two armed robberies he committed when he was just 16 years old.

Continue reading →

Two things happened that day. Antonio Williams was shot to death by New York City police officers. New York City Police Officer Brian Mulkeen was shot to death by New York City police officers. Whether the death of Williams was avoidable is one question. Mulkeen, who was initially thought to have been shot by Williams who, according to the story, went for Mulkeen’s gun, was killed by friendly fire, his own fellow cops.

Williams’ death was one thing. Mulkeen’s death was another. It’s understandable that the unduly passionate might lack the intellectual capacity to distinguish between the two, their world being wrapped up in childish good and evil narratives. It’s also wrong and dangerously simplistic. Even worse, it reflects an inability to grasp cognitive dissonance, that their respect for the value of life is a pretense that only applies to those they favor. Continue reading →

To no one’s surprise, the New York City Council voted to shutter the jail on Rikers Island and spend $8 billion on four new jails, one in each borough except Staten Island because a jail on a garbage landfill seemed redundant. The only surprise was that the original $11 billion was reduced to a mere $8, showing the Council’s thriftiness when the new jails theoretically open in 2026.

In New York time, that means the jails won’t be ready until sometime after President Chelsea Clinton’s administration at an adjusted cost of $92 billion, but I digress because I lack the sound focus of New York Times editorial board member Mara Gay.

On Thursday, the City Council voted to build four jails across the city, a critical step toward making the closing of Rikers a reality. The plan it approved will further shrink the capacity of the city’s jails from about 22,000 to around 3,800.

Continue reading →

While the ACLU has largely chosen to forsake its interest in constitutional rights that don’t align with the social justice feelings of its staff, and its donors, it hasn’t entirely lost interest in defending speech, as reflected by the Maine chapter’s support of a high school sophomore at Cape Elizabeth High School.

Aela Mansmann, a 15-year-old sophomore at Cape Elizabeth High School outside Portland, has been at odds with Cape Elizabeth Schools for a month after posting a note in a bathroom that said: “There’s a rapist in our school and you know who it is.” She and two other students who left similar notes were ordered suspended.

As it turns out, there may not be a rapist in her school, and she doesn’t know who it is, but that’s not what her sticky notes were about. Continue reading →

In a USA Today op-ed, former Republican turned confused former Republican, Tom Nichols, asks a snarky, yet very real question of the Democrats: Are you trying to lose?

When we watched CNN’s LGBTQ town hall for the Democratic candidates Thursday, we had very different reactions. This is the event, you remember, where former Rep. Beto O’Rourke of Texas said he’d punish religious institutions for refusing gay marriage, and where Sen. Kamala Harris of California started by informing us of her pronouns, and then host Chris Cuomo, after a mild and dopey joke, had to go on Twitter the next day and apologize for making light of it. This is where Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts fielded a question about traditional marriage with a sneering, smug insinuation that the only people who would ask her about that are men who can’t find a woman.

You thought it was great. You saw a ringing defense of LGBTQ rights and a reaffirmation of what Democrats stand for.

I saw it and thought: Are these people insane? Are they trying to lose the election?

Continue reading →

No one, but no one, with the slightest grip on how criminal law happens doubted for a moment that there would be leakage. Some wouldn’t return to court. Some would commit another crime while a case was pending. And someone would commit a truly heinous crime after being released.

It’s not a fault in the system, but human nature. Despite the rosy characterizations of the poor and downtrodden as being victims of society’s ills, which may well be true, it doesn’t change the fact that people do bad things to other people. And so it comes as no surprise that a bad thing, a truly heinous thing, happened.

The Chinatown vagrant accused of fatally bludgeoning four other homeless men over a week ago was sprung from jail not once but twice by misguided nonprofits pushing bail reform, court documents show.

Continue reading →

There is a strong argument to be made for former Fort Worth police officer Aaron Dean, knowing that he was in a black neighborhood, and assuming that the silhouette he saw through the window inside Atatiana Jefferson’s home would be a black person, was a significant factor in his perception.

Maybe it meant that the life just wasn’t all that valuable to him. Maybe it meant that the person inside, likely being black, was likely more of a threat because too many cops still believe that black people are more likely to be criminals, more likely to be violent or more likely to pose a threat to a cop’s life. Outside of peeking into Dean’s head, there’s no way to know what synapses fired, in what order, due to race. Unfortunately, no post-hoc apologies or explanations will erase the fact that, yet again, a cop killed an indisputably innocent black person for her being in her home.

Don’t mention the gun she had within her home, which she may or may not have had in her hand. It’s completely irrelevant and immaterial, both because it was entirely lawful and proper for her to possess it, and it played no role in Dean’s actions, as he couldn’t have seen it under any circumstances. Continue reading →

At Slate, Cato’s Clark Neily calls for more judges with criminal defense experience, going so far as to call for a moratorium on judicial appointments from the ranks of prosecutors.

Fortunately, the solution is simple: a temporary moratorium on nominating former prosecutors to the bench and a strong preference for lawyers with substantial experience representing individuals against the government in criminal and civil cases. If that proposal seems extreme, consider the image of a federal judiciary in which former public defenders outnumbered prosecutors 4 to 1. Notwithstanding the transformative effect that would have on our deeply dysfunctional criminal justice system, not to mention the Bill of Rights, it’s probably not a good idea. But neither is it wise to continue doing nothing while the imbalance runs the other way.

Given the climate these days, few social justice warriors will disagree, and some might even split their donations between the ACLU and Cato. Not that it will happen, because the idea isn’t simple, but simplistic, and there are a host of reasons why it will not do what simple minds believe it will do. Continue reading →

Jails have a smell, a combination of disinfectant and disgust. The former never really washes away the latter, and the combination of the two odors is repulsive. Rikers Island was a repulsive place, and it bred a culture of cruelty among not only its transient residents, but among the staff overpaid to keep them in line.

Close Rikers became a rallying cry, even though it was nothing more than an island with human warehouses. Corrections officer culture had become toxic, and unionization plus political inertia prevented any serious change, so the simpler sell was that Rikers had evil walls, and ceilings and steel bars. Blame the buildings and it would fix the problem, as if any other jail wouldn’t smell as awful.

There were two actual problems with Rikers, its isolation and its size. Isolation was its virtue when it was built, since nobody wants a jail in their neighborhood, and the folks who reside there weren’t welcome on Sutton Place. Size was a by-product of necessity, when crack, and its daily killings, caused the need for cells to explode. When Rikers Island ran out of room, they put people on a barge brought in to take the overflow. Nobody ever said they would rather be on the barge than Rikers. Jails smell the same, and both had water views. Continue reading →