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.)

Continue reading →

Schadenfreude is ugly and petty, and delicious. But in the case of Harvey Weinstein, it appears to have taken everyone’s eyes off the prize.

There is a storybook villain, Mr. Weinstein, whose repulsive face turns out to be the spitting image of his putrescent soul. There are victims, so many of them, typically up-and-comers in an industry where he had the power to make or wreck their careers, or bully or buy their silence, or, if some allegations are to be believed, rape them.

But mostly there are enablers, both those who facilitated his predations and those who found it expedient to look the other way.

Bret Stephens goes on to name some corporate types, A-Listers, “and then there was the rest of Hollywood.” Continue reading →

There was a time when the internet offered a breathtaking opportunity to watch, listen and learn from lectures on a broad array of academic subjects with just a click. But then, the internet doesn’t work the same for everyone, as some people have abilities that others don’t, which means some have disabilities. That’s an unfortunate reality of humanity, and one which we, as humane and caring individuals, should do as much as reasonably possible to ameliorate.

Instead, the government passed a law, and now, those videos are gone.

This has spawned two distinct cottage industries, one to create accommodations for people with disabilities and one to seek out and sue public accommodations that fall short.

The lawsuits came one after the other, against Fordham University, Manhattan College, Long Island University and other area colleges and universities. Continue reading →

Our mean-ass host, in a recent tweet, wrote: “John Thompson will suck your trust from the system but give it back in humanity. He was the real deal.”

Pictured below is that man. He recently died of a heart attack after serving 14 years on death row but, happily, Thompson was a free man when he passed.

Thompson’s demise prompts me to write this post regarding the obligation of prosecutors to turn over to the defense exculpatory information. His death also serves to remind judges like me that we need to avoid serving as potted plants. Continue reading →

It was nice to be invited by Jonathan Haidt’s Heterodox Academy and FIRE to join the audience to hear four academics talk about diverse viewpoints on campus. The panel consisted of April Kelly-Woessner, a political-science professor at Elizabethtown College, Samuel Abrams, a political-science professor at Sarah Lawrence College, Mark Lilla, a political-science professor at Columbia and Nadine Strossen, former president of the ACLU who now teaches at New York Law School.

It was all very . . . nice. If you knew nothing about what is happening on campus with students, faculty and administration silencing speech that fails to comport with progressive orthodoxy, you would leave far better informed than you came. It was . . . nice. As in, if we wish really hard for rainbows and unicorns to make things better, it could happen. Nice. Even the College Fix’s write-up of the presentation is nice.

“One person’s hate speech is somebody else’s cherished speech,” and what one person finds hurtful may galvanize another to engage with more speech, said Strossen, who testified at a July congressional hearing on campus free speech.

She told an audience member that a good way to get people to support free speech is to present them with an example of their own opinions getting censored.

Continue reading →

Everything that touches Kareem Bellamy’s world seems to turn ugly. His trial was ugly. The 14 years he spent in prison for murder was, naturally, horribly ugly. The vacating of his conviction and release, ugly, ugly, ugly. Four months after Judge Joel Blumenfeld vacated Bellamy’s murder conviction based on a taped confession by another guy to the murder, it turned out the tape was a phony. Ugly.

And now on appeal before the Second Circuit, challenging the dismissal on summary judgment of his suit for damages for a cool prosecution trick performed by the Queens County District Attorneys office of maintaining a Chinese wall between the handling of snitches and the prosecutors trying cases, it’s ugly yet again.

Prosecutors have absolute immunity from liability for their actions in their prosecutorial function, because the Supreme Court fears the floodgate will open and they will flee the courtroom, and the DA’s office, in tears if they were ever held accountable, even for the most intentional and egregious wrongdoing. If that were to happen, they might be hesitant in their zeal to shoot fish in barrels and society would devolve to anarchy. So prosecutors must be protected at all costs.

But there remained one tiny crack where prosecutors could be liable, based on their actions in an investigative capacity rather than the performance of their prosecutorial function.* Bellamy argued, inter alia, that the concealment of Brady material, of benefits conferred on witnesses against him at trial, was an administrative policy rather than a prosecutorial policy. EDNY Judge Ann Donnelly said “nope, ain’t happening.” Continue reading →

Despite my having little good to say about the Marshall Project, a point raised by criminal defense lawyer, activist and producer, David Menschel, evoked a response by lawprof Carissa Hessick that piqued my interest.

Both have a point. While the Pulitzer hook isn’t at all what one might suspect, it coming by dint of a MP writer riding the coattails of ProPublica, and the vast majority of the content at the Marshall Project being of the tear-jerker, legally vapid, sort that’s become so popular with the homebound and terminally unemployed, during the hours General Hospital isn’t on the air, are they an organ of the #Resistance, are they legitimate journalism or are they . . . something else? Continue reading →

She may not be Roxane Gay, but the newest New York Times Columnist, Michelle Goldberg, is on a roll.

Credit Senator Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee, for momentarily snapping us out of it. On Sunday evening, after a Twitter feud with Trump, Corker gave an interview to The New York Times in which he said publicly what Republican officeholders usually say only privately. Trump, Corker told the reporters Jonathan Martin and Mark Landler, is treating the presidency like “a reality show” and could be setting the nation “on the path to World War III.”

Corker has come out publicly and said what most sentient people already knew. But by raising the “path to World War III,” he raised the specter of Donald Trump with his finger on the nukes. Much as I hesitate to use the word that’s been reduced to a level of triteness challenged only by “rape,” this is horrifying. But then, Trump is the president. We elected an incompetent, irrational, probably mentally-unstable narcissist president, and the nuclear code comes with the job.

This is, of course, a problem of monumental proportions. And as with all such problems, there is a solution that is simple, clear and totally wrong. Goldberg cries that Corker’s admissions aren’t good enough, and that he and the Republicans in Congress must now act upon his statements by neutering Trump. Continue reading →

It would seem unremarkable that a state legislator would be asked to give a presentation at a law school. But for Texas Representative Briscoe Cain, his invitation by the Federalist Society to speak at Texas Southern was quite remarkable.

“Today I attended an event scheduled by the TSU chapter of the Federalist Society a few months ago. I was greeted by campus officials, given a guest parking voucher, and brought into a room in which the administration had specifically requested the talk occur. Then Black Lives Matter came in and bullied the administration into ending the event. It’s a sad day for universities across Texas whenever speech and a variety of views are prevented from being presented due to bullies.”

But it gets worse.

Rep. Cain was invited to the Thurgood Marshall School of Law by the Federalist Society to talk to the students about the recent legislative special session. Instead, the event was shut down before it even started. Continue reading →