When a tragic suicide, as if there’s any other kind, makes the rounds on social media, there’s an outpouring of sympathy, “thoughts and prayers” and a push to try to do something to help. Someone did just that for 17-year-old John Albers in Overland Park, Kansas.

When 17-year-old John Albers threatened suicide on FaceTime, his friends called police.

Albers, a junior varsity soccer player and wrestler, was home alone on Jan. 20, 2018, in Overland Park, a suburb of Kansas City, when police were called to the two-story house to check on him.

Was he a young man in distress? Maybe, though it’s a hard call to decide whether to act upon one’s concern, one’s fear. After all, what if, this time, he did it and you did nothing to stop it? Didn’t that make you complicit?  Continue reading →

A racist thing happened at Starbucks, but since nobody wants to say it aloud, I will. It wasn’t implicit bias, the benign sounding word that makes you feel as if you may have been racist, but didn’t mean it. As fashionable as the phrase may be, I don’t buy it. There is no such thing as implicit bias. There’s bias.

On May 29, Starbucks will close 8,000 locations to administer racial bias training for 175,000 of its employees. The move is a response to national outrage over the arrests of two black patrons while they were simply waiting for a meeting to begin at a Philadelphia coffee shop.

But racial bias training for employees is not enough to address the epidemic of discrimination by American companies.

This isn’t an epidemic of discrimination by American companies, but people being people, and they prejudge black guys as being a problem, just as cops prejudge them as being a threat. There’s nothing implicit about it. It’s as explicit as any other bias. Continue reading →

What does actress Jenna Fischer from The Office have to do with racism? The initial responce would likely be, “nothing, as far as I’m aware,” but that’s likely because you’re not sufficiently woke to connect the invisible dots. Fischer, herself, may have nothing whatsoever to do with racism, but she draws people’s attention because of her celebrity. And that’s close enough.

Several dozen students interrupted an event featuring actress Jenna Fischer at DePauw University Tuesday to protests recent racial incidents on and near campus.

Many of them held signs with things claiming they are “afraid for their lives” after recent events.

If you think cops these days are too afraid, it’s nothing compared with students, who function under the belief that a word will break their bones. Continue reading →

A free speech event was held at Harvard the other day. It was given the title “Dissent From Minorities Within Minorities,” which provides about as much clarity of purpose as the title of an SJ post. It was about free speech, but the phrase was nowhere to be found in the title.

Because we were warned not to have the phrase “free speech” in naming our event, lest the student union disapprove it.

The rationale? “Free speech” is now a dog whistle to the far-right.

— Melissa Chen (@MsMelChen) April 19, 2018

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Louisiana is notable for its gumbo, tossing bead necklaces at women with exposed breasts and outrageous failure to adequately fund its defense of the indigent accused. The gumbo is delicious. Its compliance with Gideon is awful, demanding an extreme response. Orleans Public Defender Derwyn Bunton was compelled to refuse to take on more cases.

There is nothing worse than the “nuclear option,” and Derwyn only dropped the bomb when he believed he had no other choice. So it worked?

The bill, which is currently awaiting debate in the Louisiana House, would increase the amount of money allocated to the state’s public defender offices by the Louisiana Public Defender Board, their umbrella organization. The board would be required to set aside 70 percent of its budget for local offices, up from 65 percent. The change would mean a $1.7 million increase in funding for public defenders.

Don’t unfurl the “mission accomplished” banner just yet. Continue reading →

“If only he did as the cops commanded” is a ready retort to the guy shot to death when he inadvertantly flinched, or completely ignored, police orders. Sometimes there is a good reason for it, conflicting commands, multiple cops screaming simultaneously, so that it’s impossible to know what to do, how to stay alive.

But the underlying premise is that if only they followed orders, they wouldn’t be dead. The critical piece of this scenario is that their death at the hands of cops is their own fault. They should have complied. They should have listened. They’re dead because they didn’t.

Elijah James Smith complied. He was ordered to raise his hands. He raised his hands. He was shot to death for it. Continue reading →

I’m friends with Frank Bynum, who’s the Democratic candidate for Harris County Criminal Court 8 judge. I contributed to his campaign because I think he’ll make a great judge. He knows the law and he has a deep concern for the rights of the accused. What more could you want from a judge?

HOUSTON — There was no question on primary night in Texas last month that Franklin Bynum would win the Democratic nomination to become a criminal court judge in Houston. The 34-year-old defense attorney had no challengers.

Frank will be on the ballot as a Democrat, but his affiliation is the Democratic Socialists of America. Continue reading →

Out of the blue, Trump pardoned Scooter Libby, which could only be explained as his way to send a message to his cohorts that they should keep their mouths shut and they too will be the beneficiaries of his largesse. Whether Libby deserved a pardon is irrelevant. It was clearly a message.

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has a plan to thwart any Trump effort to use the pardon power to keep his minions silent.

Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman of New York is moving to change New York state law so that he and other local prosecutors would have the power to bring criminal charges against aides to President Trump who have been pardoned, according to a letter Mr. Schneiderman sent to the governor and state lawmakers on Wednesday.

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Mark Bennett, the Texas Tornado, took another law down for violating the First Amendment. This time, it was Texas Penal Code 21.16(b), the so-called “revenge porn” law. In Ex parte Jones, the 12th District Court of Appeals reversed the court below and held that the statute was facially unconstitutional.

As has been argued from the day Mary Anne Franks began her efforts to create a criminal revenge porn statute, it clearly implicated the First Amendment’s prohibition against laws infringing on free expression, to which she merely screamed her denials and did her best to deflect by creating a fantasy interpretation of the First Amendment. The court made swift work of it.

In the instant case, Section 21.16(b) proscribes the disclosure of certain visual material, including any film, photograph, or videotape in various formats. Because the photographs and visual recordings are inherently expressive and the First Amendment applies to the distribution of such expressive media in the same way it applies to their creation, we conclude that the right to freedom of speech is implicated in this case.

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The notion of mandatory reporters seemed to make an enormous amount of sense at the fringes. After all, if a teacher saw her elementary school student with cigarette burns, how could she not report the child for protection? A child abused needed protection, obviously.

But then came the other end of the spectrum, where it was hardly clear that the child was being abused and yet the law required a mandatory report. And a child would be taken from her parents, put into foster care, a home, while an investigation was conducted. If it turned out that the broken arm just happened, because kids fall and get hurt because they’re kids, the solution proved far more harmful than the putative disease. But hey, it made an enormous amount of sense at the fringes.

When it was a matter of objective physical harm to a defenseless child, it was one thing. In the hands of SJWs, however, it goes off the rails.  Continue reading →