The plea deal outraged many, as is becoming a common theme. They hear the accusations and, because they believe, demand an outcome that may bear no connection with reality. Maybe the accusations aren’t true. Maybe they aren’t provable. Maybe the witness is awful or the gaps in evidence too deep to ignore. Maybe there are other reasons, which a prosecutor and judge must consider even if the unduly passionate do not, that go into the decision to offer the plea.

In the trenches, decisions get made, whether people who have never stepped foot in the well like it or not. And so the deal was cut with Jacob Anderson.

A former fraternity president at Baylor University who was accused of raping a female student in 2016 will avoid jail time and will not have to register as a sex offender, under a plea deal approved on Monday in Waco, Tex.

The agreement, which has roiled Waco and drawn howls of outrage nationally, calls for the accused man, Jacob Anderson, 23, to serve three years of probation, pay a $400 fine and attend counseling; his plea may never show up on his record.

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The question is fair, even if Matty Yglesias at Vox can’t control the impulse to begin his argument with the worst possible reason.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the biggest star in the Democratic Party, and she has been ever since she unseated Rep. Joe Crowley in a surprise primary upset in May. That her win didn’t, in the final analysis, launch a wave of leftist primary victories only goes to show what a phenomenon she personally is.

Not everyone shares her brand of politics, of course, but her constituency has exploded beyond the initial set of ideologues who powered the challenge to Crowley because of her incredible wit, charisma, social media savvy, and basic political smarts.

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Lara Bazelon wrote about a very real, if rarely mentioned, problem with Title IX campus sex tribunals. Black males are disproportionately accused by white females. Letters were sent to the New York Times about Bazelon’s op-ed, and they carefully selected which to publish. One was from Amelia W., last name withheld to protect her privacy.

The letter to the editor begins with a dubious assertion.

The story Ms. Bazelon relates about a rape accusation was never hers to tell. It’s mine.

This sentence reflects problems on a great many levels. Much as students have adopted a belief, utterly without basis but strongly held nonetheless, that they are entitled to be out in public, protesting, speaking, standing up for their cause, but not to be taped, recorded or reported on without their consent, they believe they own something because they choose to believe. Continue reading →

The problem came to light by an effort to help a student, which is generally considered the sort of thing one would want a high school teacher to do. But Peter Vlaming did it wrong.

Witnesses described a “slip-up” when the student was about to run into a wall and Vlaming told others to stop “her.”

The problem is that the school had been informed that the student was no longer a “her.”

Over the summer, the ninth-grade student’s family informed the school system of the student’s gender transition to male.

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There weren’t enough chairs, so Jazmine Headley sat on the floor. Rather than get an apology from the security people at the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program office in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, for treating her and her 1-year-old son so poorly for being poor, Headley was treated to a lesson in compliance when they called in the NYPD to teach her a lesson.

The New York Times takes progressive NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio to task for being too de Blasio. Continue reading →

On Pearl Harbor Day, 2018, Trump signed into law the Amy, Vicky, and Andy Child Pornography Victim Assistance Act of 2018 (AVAA). Not only was there a name change, with the addition of Andy from the originally proposed Amy and Vicky Act, but there was a far more substantive change as well.

[T]he Act requires a court sentencing a defendant convicted of a child pornography crime harming a victim to determine the full amount of that victim’s losses and then to order restitution from a defendant for amount reflecting the defendant’s relative role in the causal process. (Sec. 3(a)(2)(B)). But — and here’s a new innovation — a trial court must impose restitution in the minimum amount of $3,000.

They may call it restitution, but it’s a $3,000 fine that offsets the amount of restitution to be determined. And this is the good news, as the originally proposed amounts were astronomically higher. Continue reading →

It’s neither the start of a joke nor the thing a woke mugger would say. It’s a conflict happening within the walls containing two very different worlds, where woke meets dangerous machinery. For those unfamiliar, makerspaces are a relatively new concept that allow people to have access to a wide variety of equipment and machinery, from laser cutters to 3-D printers, that would otherwise be unaffordable and out of reach.

A makerspace is a collaborative work space inside a school, library or separate public/private facility for making, learning, exploring and sharing that uses high tech to no tech tools.

Much as the verbiage sounds inclusive, these aren’t toys, and people using this machinery don’t get a pass on safety or competence, unless they’re hoping for the new nickname, Lefty. As obvious as this may seem, a problem arises from the nature of “collaborative work spaces,” which tend toward more ethereal concerns such as diversity, inclusivity and, naturally, empathy. Continue reading →

Abby Honold was raped. We know this because her rapist was convicted upon a plea of guilty and sentenced to 74 months, although the mere fact of a conviction happening was far more a testament to Honold’s fortitude than either a system that worked or police who gave a damn.

Guy Hamilton-Smith describes the disconnect that nearly ended any chance Honold’s rapist would be prosecuted, and threatened her with prosecution for pursuing her cause.

Three days later, the Minneapolis Police detective in charge of the investigation told Honold over the phone that he was dumping her case, warning her that if she tried to get it re-opened, she could find herself charged for making false allegations. Drill-Mellum was released, and the charges were dropped.

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Pantone knows color. Pantone’s business is color. So who better to name the color of the year than Pantone? And yet they got it wrong.

Something insidious is going down at the Pantone Color Institute. Each December, the company announces a new Color of the Year—and its 2019 selection, a warm pink tone called Living Coral, feels like a troll directed at a planet rapidly growing inhospitable to the many organisms that call it home.

What? Yes, the “warm pink tone” of Living Coral is . . . horrifying. Continue reading →

When Penn lawprof Amy Wax and San Diego lawprof Larry Alexander wrote about the breakdown of bourgeois culture, they were excoriated for being racist. From the sublime to the ridiculous, it was taken as an homage to a time in America when racism reigned rather than a commentary on the nature of human conduct and relationships that served to sustain us as a society. Hard work? Family? Education? Civic-mindedness? All tools of white supremacy, probably the patriarchy as well.

But what if these horrifying and exhausting characteristics of American society were divorced from other, negative aspects of society?

They could be followed by people of all backgrounds and abilities, especially when backed up by almost universal endorsement.

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