The needless imposition of low-level bail keeps poor defendants in jail pending the disposition of their case, which almost invariably means they will cop a plea to get out. Progressive Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance announced that his office will no longer seek needless bail for “most misdemeanors,” and no doubt that will start happening any day now. Any day now.

And New York Governor Andy Cuomo saw that it played well, and seized his opportunity.

The fundamental tenet of criminal law in the United States is that all those accused of a crime in this country are presumed innocent unless proved guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. That fundamental principle is not limited to American law; it was also part of Roman law, Islamic law and English common law. This bedrock safeguard has been ratified on more than one occasion by the Supreme Court and is codified in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Well, if the United Nations says so, it must be true. Continue reading →

According to Anna North, “A woman’s account of her date with the actor reveals our broken attitudes toward sex.” According to Caitlin Flanagan, “her story . . . was 3,000 words of revenge porn.” And according to poor Bari Weiss, trying desperately to thread the needle and not outrage her readership, “Aziz Ansari Is Guilty. Of Not Being a Mind Reader.”

But the most revealing commentary, albeit not in the way she intended, is provided through the back door. First, the writer of the original Babe post, Katie Way, viciously attacks Ashleigh Banfield for her age, her lipstick color and her hair. And then Lindy West explains how years and years of effort by the lunatic fringe went into this moment of affirmative nonsense.

The notion of affirmative consent did not fall from space in October 2017 to confound well-meaning but bumbling men; it was built, loudly and painstakingly and in public, at great personal cost to its proponents, over decades. If you’re fretting about the perceived overreach of #MeToo, maybe start by examining the ways you’ve upheld the stigmatization of feminism. Nuanced conversations about consent and gendered socialization have been happening every single day that Aziz Ansari has spent as a living, sentient human on this earth. The reason they feel foreign to so many men is that so many men never felt like they needed to listen. Rape is a women’s issue, right? Men don’t major in women’s studies.

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The use of guilty pleas as a coercive means of getting an innocent, or not quite as guilty as charged, defendant to compromise is nothing new. Prosecutors believe a defendant is guilty, and defendants profess their innocence. Stop the presses.

After Fred Steese spent two decades in a Nevada prison for murder, evidence indicating that he was innocent was found buried in the prosecution’s files. It was proof that Mr. Steese, as he’d always claimed, had been hundreds of miles away on the likely day of the murder and couldn’t have been the killer.

Concealing Brady material, which oddly goes unmentioned, is also nothing new. Most of the time, the undisclosed information doesn’t so much prove anything as provide fodder for trial that might have changed the calculus of taking a plea, or enabled a decent lawyer to raise a sufficient doubt for acquittal. Rarely, as in almost never, does it prove innocence.  Continue reading →

It must be a good question to ask of nominees for the federal bench, since Hawaiian* Senator Mazie Hirono is a lawyer, and she should know how to ask a simple question. If there was any doubt, it received the official seal of approval of Dahlia Lithwick, graduate of Stanford Law School, and sycophant of Judge Alex Kozinski until she revealed that she was a victim of stare rape.

Sen. Hirono actually came up with two questions, taking upon herself the weight of female angst and fear, tears and pain.

Since you became a legal adult, have you ever made unwanted requests for sexual favors or committed any verbal or physical harassment or assault of a sexual nature?

Have you ever faced discipline or entered into a settlement related to this kind of conduct?

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I’m going out of town for a few days with Dr. SJ and the kids, and have no plans to post anything* until I get back. So consider this an open thread. Knock yourselves out and please try not to make anyone stupider.

I’ve left David the keys to the joint, so he’s in charge, to do to SJ what he pleases until my return. I only ask two things: First, please clean up the place before I return, and put the glass beer and booze bottles in the recycle bin. Second, stay away from the Healey. It’s not a Ferrari, Ferris, but it’s what I got. Continue reading →

In some circles, the First Amendment’s right to free speech is viewed as a bug rather than a feature, and defenders of free speech have not been welcome on campus. But as Matthew A. Sears, associate professor of classics and ancient history at the University of New Brunswick, argues, proponents of viewpoint diversity like Jonathan Haidt aren’t the real defenders of thought.

Indeed, many now insist that healthy skepticism and free inquiry, the supposed heart of the Socratic method and what Haidt labels the “disinterested pursuit of truth,” are in dire need of a revival in the academy.

I’m not so sure.

In fact, in important ways the social justice approach — which emphasizes the dynamics of power and oppression — that many fear has taken over the humanities and social sciences at its best is actually an improvement over the “disinterested pursuit of truth” and more in line with the Socratic method. In fact, rather than constituting an attack on knowledge, the social justice lens reflects new ideas generated by academic disciplines and experts within them, and generally encourages expanding our knowledge and opening up subjects to new perspectives, much like Socrates advocated.

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The New York Appellate Division, Third Department, majority was not going to delve into the explicit, lurid details of the sexual encounter between the accuser, whom they called the “reporting individual” rather than the accuser or victim, and Matthew Jacobson.

Both were students at SUNY Plattsburgh. Both were drinking. Both had sex. Three times that night. What more do you need to know?

A close reading of the statements reveals that there was no material factual conflict between the relatively consistent accounts given by the participants. To illustrate, neither participant was able to recall which one initiated the sexual activity and certainly both conceded that they had been drinking. Given this consistency, there is no need to further detail the conduct at issue.

Who can blame the judges for finding further discussion of the nitty-gritty of young sex distasteful, so they just glossed over the whole thing. Continue reading →

Don’t the homeless deserve to be treated with  dignity? From this is born regulations to assure that safety net, because the homeless* are still human beings even if they smell bad and you really would prefer they stay out of sight or pee in their own homes (the ones they don’t have). How else can we assure that they be treated in the manner to which they’re entitled, according to people who have no faith in others, who see others as intrinsically malevolent and thus untrustworthy, if rules aren’t imposed.

And no one loves them some rules more than the well-intentioned. Rules assure that their dictates are carried out, their wishes are enforced by the means of benevolent force. And that force came down on Greg Schiller in Elgin, Illinois.

A man’s home may be his castle, but even castles are governed these days by zoning codes and other local ordinances. An Illinois man named Greg Schiller had that lesson reinforced after he opened his basement to homeless people, letting them sleep there overnight during the recent deep freeze that enveloped much of the country. No way, said city officials in Elgin, the Chicago suburb where he lives. They shut down Mr. Schiller’s “slumber parties,” as he has called them, on grounds that they violated a fistful of municipal regulations, among them ventilation and fire-safety requirements.

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It could have been a list of commie sympathizers, a list of Muslims suspected of terrorism, a list of White Supremacists. But it wasn’t. Moira Donegan’s list was of “shitty media men,” and within hours, it went out of control.

None of this was what I thought was going to happen. In the beginning, I only wanted to create a place for women to share their stories of harassment and assault without being needlessly discredited or judged. The hope was to create an alternate avenue to report this kind of behavior and warn others without fear of retaliation.

Donegan, a 2013 college graduate, doesn’t explain her impetus for starting the list. There’s no story of a rape or assault. Rather, she explains it as an alternative to the female whisper network (which can be “elitist or insular”) of guys to watch out for because “police are notoriously inept at handling sexual-assault cases” and HR departments are there to protect the company, not women. Her spreadsheet put it all in one place, judgment free. Continue reading →

Fresh off his campaign contribution scandal, New York County District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. had an epiphany.

The Manhattan district attorney’s office will no longer seek bail for most misdemeanor and violation cases, DA Cy Vance Jr. said Tuesday.

“O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!” Whether this means what it seems to mean has yet to be seen, but assuming good faith on Cy’s part, and wiggle words like “most” misdemeanors, this is certainly a wonderful, if not miraculous, policy shift. But why? Continue reading →