For many of us who didn’t wake up to the criminal justice system on November 9, 2016, the elevation of former Southern District of New York United States Attorney Preet Bharara to progressive hero was like a bad joke. Preet? Seriously? As far as the newly-woke progressive left was concerned, his refusal to resign when Trump told him to made him an icon.

Did they have any idea how many kittens he kicked before? Did they even care? There are a lot of those beloved vulnerable and marginalized people of color who will spend the rest of their lives in prison because of Preet. And he’s your progressive hero?

Josie Duffy Rice calls out the “myth of the progressive prosecutor,” starting with Cy Vance.

Mr. Vance is considered one of America’s most progressive prosecutors and has the accolades to prove it. In 2015, he helped create the Institute for Innovation in Prosecution at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Two years earlier, Attorney General Eric Holder gave him an award for having developed a partnership between local youths and law enforcement aimed at reducing violence.

Certainly Eric Holder was a progressive hero, given all he did to eliminate junk science from the courtroom, reduce wrongful convictions and not execute innocent people, with his trusty sidekick, Sally Yates, at his side. Continue reading →

As part of the “Unsafe Spaces” tour being run by Spiked, a panel discussion will be held at New York Law School on November 2d, with former president of the ACLU, Nadine Strossen, as moderator. The title of the panel is provocative: Is the left eating itself?

The panel will consist of Northwestern prof Laura Kipnis, Evergreen College’s Bret Weinstein, Spiked’s Brendan O’Neill and “student social justice activist” academic, Angus Johnson*. Kipnis promoted the panel on the twitters:

Looking forward to comparing notes with @BretWeinstein on whether the left is eating itself. Or not. Nov 2, NYU. https://t.co/JJueyR0iDG

— laura kipnis (@laurakipnis) October 15, 2017

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Just when progressives, in Congress and elsewhere, were absolutely certain that Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III was the embodiment of everything they hated because he was bent on undoing their bureaucratic shift in law, he went and did something that confused them. He…he…well, let Matt Apuzzo explain.

The Justice Department has dispatched an experienced federal hate crimes lawyer to Iowa to help prosecute a man charged with murdering a transgender high school student last year, a highly unusual move that officials said was personally initiated by Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

In taking the step, Mr. Sessions, a staunch conservative, is sending a signal that he has made a priority of fighting violence against transgender people individually, even as he has rolled back legal protections for them collectively.

Up to now, it was more likely assumed that Sessions would be the one inclined to jail transgender people for being transgender, a status that presumably was unacceptable to someone with a name that, if it was a statue, would demand to be torn down. Continue reading →

The New York Times has issued new social media guidelines to its reporters.

To the newsroom:

The New York Times has been a dominant force on social media for years. Our newsroom accounts have tens of millions of followers. Many of our journalists are influential voices on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and other platforms.

Tens of millions is a lot of followers. Whether that number pans out would require someone to do the math, but regardless, anyone who writes for such a big soapbox is likely to be taken seriously, whether they’re a journalist writing about politics or Roxane Gay.

We believe that to remain the world’s best news organization, we have to maintain a vibrant presence on social media.

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They’re not asking. They’re demanding. And before you ask the obvious, “or what?”, their demands are being met, at least to some extent.

Students are protesting for official recognition of their identities, whether racial, ethnic, sexual, religious, first-generation, low-income or immigrant.

The new word for this is “intersectionalism.” A student can be black, female, gay, immigrant, pastafarian and the first in her family to go to college. All the boxes are checked.

Campuses that have prided themselves on increased diversity in admissions are now wrestling with students who want more control over the institutions they attend, including a say in hiring (even of visiting professors), housing (a theme house at the University of California, Santa Cruz, must be painted in Pan-African colors) and curriculum (among nearly 50 demands presented to the University of Chicago: the creation of courses on the Islamic golden age, sequences on Caribbean and Southeast Asian civilizations, and a required diversity/inclusion course).

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Who cares? For all the focus on campaign donations given New York County District Attorney Cyrus Vance, Jr., for his campaign against no one, nobody outside the crim law community knew or cared who would get the job for life. Unlike Brooklyn, or Houston, there was no pressing demand for reform in Manhattan.

DANY was the premier local prosecutor’s office in the nation, and when Robert Morgenthau decided it was time for him to pass the torch, he handed it to Cy. Morgy was an old-school patrician prosecutor. Cy was his ordained successor. The job is now Cy’s until he decides it’s time to go.

Cy doesn’t need the money personally. Cy doesn’t need the money to run a campaign against anyone. Not since his initial election has anyone mounted a serious campaign against him. It’s not as if he has to run a campaign ad to get some name recognition. As long he doesn’t do something monumentally stupid that puts his name in front of people such that they start to think, “hey, who is this guy who owns the DA’s office,” he will be there forever.

But that happened, if inadvertently. Two lawyers gave Cy’s campaign significant donations, which nobody would have cared about except that their clients are now hated. I could remind you that correlation does not prove causation, but we both know that nobody cares about logical fallacies. As Nancy Grace loved to say, where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Continue reading →

Caddo Parish, Louisiana. Accomack County, Virginia. Now Biloxi, Mississippi. What do these three places have in common? They’ve banned Harper Lee’s 1960 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, To Kill A Mockingbird, from the public school curriculum.

“To Kill A Mockingbird,” considered one of the best novels of the 20th century, is also one of the most controversial. According to the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, the Harper Lee novel is one of the most challenged and banned classical books. Many of these objections come from parents, school administrators or advocacy groups who contend that its racially and sexually-charged themes are inappropriate for young readers.

On the one hand, it uses words that, while commonplace in music, are deemed unacceptable on paper. On the other hand, it challenges the “believe the victim” narrative, as it reflects an innocent black man convicted upon the lie of a white woman. These may have been important, provocative themes when the book was written, but we were a tougher society then, capable of thinking instead of merely crying whenever an idea challenged our sacred cows.

For criminal defense lawyers, the banning of To Kill A Mockingbird holds a special place in hell. This was the book that pushed many to go to law school, to defend the accused, to want to be like Atticus Finch. This was our book. And they’ve stolen it, twisted it, tainted it. Continue reading →

It should come as no surprise that the compulsion to disrupt a speaker with whom one disagrees isn’t just a progressive problem, but an entitlement for college kids. And so a group favoring Trump proved itself no different than its opposition.

Whittier College…hosted California’s Attorney General, Xavier Becerra, in a question-and-answer session organized by Ian Calderon, the Majority Leader of the California State Assembly.

They tried to, anyway.

The event ended early after pro-Trump hecklers, upset about Becerra’s lawsuit against the Trump administration over DACA, continuously shouted slogans and insults at Becerra and Calderon. A group affiliated with the hecklers later boasted that the speakers were “SHOUTED DOWN BY FED-UP CALIFORNIANS” and that the “meeting became so raucous that it ended about a half hour early.”

On the bright side, no one was physically harmed in the process, but to the extent there was any claim of holding higher moral ground by the support of free speech, the willingness to allow people with whom they disagreed to speak, this exercise of the heckler’s veto sucked the air out of the room. Continue reading →

If you’re Sheriff Steve Prator, your concerns about the release of prisoners differ a bit from other folks.

In the midst of the Louisiana’s incarceration reform, one local sheriff is unhappy that the “good prisoners” who wash officers’ cars will get their freedom early due to a new state law.

“In addition to the bad ones, they are releasing some good ones that we use everyday to wash cars, change the oil in our cars, to cook in the kitchen, to do all that, where we save money,” Sheriff Steve Prator of Caddo Parish said in a press conference this week.

What are they, slaves? Sit down. I have something to tell you and it’s going to make you sad. Continue reading →

Hate the speakers as much as you want, but at least they come to campus to be shouted down, if not physically attacked. Then again, it’s hate speech, so you say, and speech is violence, so you say, and you’re entitled to use violence to stop violence. So you say.

But scholarship?

Third World Quarterly ( TWQ ) is the leading journal of scholarship and policy in the field of international studies. For almost four decades it has set the agenda on development discourses of the global debate.

So it planned to publish Bruce Gilley’s peer-reviewed essay on colonialism. And now it won’t.

Bruce Gilley’s eyebrow-raising essay in favor of colonialismhas been scrubbed from the scholarly record, but not for any of the reasons cited by its critics. (Among them: that it was historically inaccurate, that it ignored the vast literature on colonialism and colonial-era atrocities, that it was rejected by three peer reviewers, and that Gilley himself requested it be pulled.)

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