While Harper Lee’s “To Kill A Mockingbird” may have been the foremost inspiration for lawyers to defend the accused, it’s not a book without issues. It’s fair for people to take issue with its themes, language and, well, message. No one should be forced to read it if they don’t want to.

But is it fair for Aaron Sorkin to take Lee’s book and turn it into a woke vision of what Harper Lee would have written if she was Sorkin? Her estate says no.

One of the year’s most anticipated Broadway plays — the screenwriter Aaron Sorkin’s adaptation of Harper Lee’s novel “To Kill a Mockingbird” — faces a legal challenge from Ms. Lee’s estate, which is suing over Mr. Sorkin’s version of the story.

In a complaint filed Tuesday in federal court in Alabama, the estate argued that Mr. Sorkin’s adaptation deviates too much from the novel, and violates a contract, between Ms. Lee and the producers, which stipulates that the characters and plot must remain faithful to the spirit of the book.

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If some woman, call her Rosemarie Aquilina, wants to rent a church or auditorium and spend her day sitting on a high-backed chair listening to women tell their stories of harm, some serious and some petty, some real and some imagined, then she should. But there is a fair chance that few would show up to bear witness to this woman.

Unless, of course, this wasn’t merely a random woman, but a judge. And not merely some unknown state judge, but the judge who became overnight-famous during the sentencing of Larry Nassar. How famous? Natalie Portman on Saturday Night Live famous.

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The list of accusations by Eboni Sanders against Thomas Mowbray, and later Patrese Thompson, because she “put herself into the situation when she began seeing Mowbray,” is long and prolix. And if that was as much as you knew about the situation, this poor woman who was subject to threats, harassment and domestic violence, you wouldn’t feel all that bad about the time Mowbray and Thompson spent in cells after their being arrested by Pittsburgh cops.

Except none of it was true. Sanders fabricated all of it, from calling in threats to herself to creating a phony Facebook account to solicit a contract killer to do her in. And almost every aspect of the accusations against Mowbray and Thompson was subject to collateral evidence, videos, fingerprints, telephone records, that would have proven as conclusively as possible that Sanders was fabricating it all.

But the cops didn’t bother to investigate her claims. Instead, they believed the victim. Continue reading →

The trend to reimagine a drug overdose into a murder has been going on for a while. Hysteria takes hold, the word “epidemic” grabs us by our throats and we begin to accept the premise that “something must be done.” But turning the corner from a useful, rational approach to solving a problem to the knee-jerk resort to harsh, unhelpful and carceral responses is just a breathlessly outraged scream away.

When a bullet-riddled body turns up in a gutter, there’s no question that a police investigation will follow. When a person dies of a drug overdose, however, police often dismiss it as a case of self-harm and close the file. That’s a mindset that should change so that victims’ families get justice and so murderers — make no mistake, dealers in fatal overdoses are murderers — get taken off the streets.

“Make no mistake” isn’t an argument. It’s playing your emotions by circumventing reason because someone ends up dead. Any needless dead person is a tragedy, even if it’s death by overdose at the drug user’s own hand. But it’s not even remotely similar to the bullet-riddled body, where someone deliberately cause the death of another person.  Continue reading →

Hard as it is to hold a cop accountable for his violation of constitutional rights, given Qualified Immunity, liability does occasionally accrue. Yet, the prosecutor holding his hand walks away unscathed because his immunity isn’t qualified, but absolute.* Senior United States District Judge Frederic Block of the Eastern District of New York says it’s time to end this travesty.

According to Taylor v. Kavanagh, based upon Supreme Court law, “The falsification of evidence and the coercion of witnesses…have been held to be prosecutorial activities for which absolute immunity applies. Similarly, because a prosecutor is acting as an advocate in a judicial proceeding, the solicitation and subornation of perjured testimony, the withholding of evidence, or the introduction of illegally-seized evidence at trial does not create liability in damages.”

Subornation of perjury? Concealment of evidence? Introduction of illegally-seized evidence? Not the sort of stuff that brings the majesty of the law to mind, that gives you faith in a system that puts people in cages. So when these acts, some of which are crimes, happen, what possible reason could there be to give the wrongdoers, the criminals, a free pass? Continue reading →

It was announced by twit: The Denver Post would be cutting 30 people from its newsroom, a third of its staff. That’s 30 more people, as it’s the third round of cutting in the past two years.

The Denver Post recently cut 10 positions in 2017, according to the Denver Business Journal. More than 20 staffers also took buyouts or were laid off in 2016, according to Westword.

It was a good newspaper, the major paper of Denver, which is a real city and should have a real paper. Now it will be a shell. The paper is owned by a hedge fund, Digital First Media, which is being blamed for putting profit above people, savings above mission. But then, newspapers are cutting, closing all over. And not just old dead tree papers, but digital media as well. And the ones that remain are too often staffed by children, who work cheap and know nothing, with maybe a star journalists here or there to maintain the facade of credibility. Continue reading →

Just maybe, the problem isn’t men and the New York Times isn’t the right place to go to fix what ails you?

Dear Sugars,

How do I deal with my anger toward men? I go to therapy, I’m on anti-depressants and I’m trying to practice self-care. But I’m still angry. I don’t think it’s unwarranted. I’ve been sexually assaulted at least twice. We live in a time where women have more rights than ever, but our president is an alleged sexual predator. Men are socialized to be condescending toward women, and even the few who check themselves often fail. Continue reading →

Wesley Lowery asks a question that has been at the forefront of my concerns about reform for years.

Police are still killing black people. Why isn’t it news anymore?

His subtitle provides a hint as to the answer.

The activism never stopped. But the attention to it vanished.

He assumes, wrongly, that the “activism” was the reason people cared, people paid attention. For a brief, shining moment, following a list of names of unarmed/innocent black people being killed by police for no cognizable reason, people gave a damn. Not just activists, but people. White people. black people, green people. People.  Continue reading →

When Sex Offender Registries were all the rage, despite their fundamentally false premise that people needed to know where sex offenders lived to protect the children from this uncontrollable animals, they were an easy sell to an angry public. But after they were created, after the rules were formed, the shame was established, where else would they go?

In Kansas, drugs seemed like a good idea.

[U]nder Kansas law, having a drug conviction means that her photograph and other identifying details are displayed in the same public registry that includes more than 10,000 convicted sex offenders. Many registrants also appear on third-party websites like “Offender Radar” and “Sex Offender Spy,” and it’s easy for a visitor to miss the single word—“drug”—that differentiates Byers’s crime from those the public judges much more harshly. “People who don’t know me are going to look at me like I’m a horrible person for being on that list,” she said.

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The unholy relationship between media and police is nothing new. The former relies on the latter feeding it stories, press releases, details of crimes and emergencies, and when the cops don’t feed them the story, they have no story to tell. The upshot is that newspapers can’t afford to piss off the cops or they could end up with empty pages.

An email from Shane Jacobs of the Kentucky State Police made this abundantly clear.

Good afternoon, I would like to start out by saying that I feel I have a great working relationship with the media in our area. I work many hours and sometimes on my days off to relay information to the media outlets.  I want you guys to know I do have a personal life and sometimes I can’t respond to your emails as quick as you would like. I am out of town at times spending it with my family. I have trainings, State Fair, Trooper Island, and other events I have to attend, which  causes me to be out of town also.

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