An unfocused, meandering New York Times op-ed that struggles to find a point opens with a bizarre anecdotal paragraph.

On a cold October morning, Colin Canham and his wife, Sara Emerick, were found dead in an apparent murder-suicide. Mr. Canham was found lying near a firearm outside the couple’s home. Ms. Emerick was inside. A detective told me that it seemed that Mr. Canham had committed a crime of passion — a legal term that implies a lack of premeditation, an act supposedly born out of love or devotion.

The link for “legal term” provides a relatively accurate definition of “crime of passion.” Continue reading →

It’s understandable that 19 states want to prevent the Biden administration from ending the Trump-era Title 42 Covid emergency immigration expulsions of people who are certainly eligible to apply for asylum and may very well prevail. And there is a pretty good chance that the Biden administration doesn’t so much want to end Title 42 expulsions, which would relieve the pressure to some extent at the border from cities and states dealing with the massive influx of immigrants in need of food, housing and care.

But it’s politically untenable for Biden not to do so, given his base of support, even if the calls for compassion conflict with the physical realities of far more bodies than beds. So Biden had to end the program in April 2022, even though there is no plan for dealing with the consequences, which fall heaviest on southern border states. Red states. Continue reading →

I asked a neighbor of mine who had a Santos sign on his property what he thought. George Santos was elected my congressman, having beaten the Democratic nominee, Robert Zimmerman, pretty handily, replacing Tommy Suozzi as our representative. Why, I asked. He wasn’t the Democrat, was the answer my neighbor gave me. But did you know anything about Santos, who he was, what he stood for? “Nah. Who cared? He wasn’t the Democrat.”

As it turned out, George Santos wasn’t a lot of things. Continue reading →

With a tip from Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, a cosmologist at the University of New Hampshire who described herself as “Jewish. queer/agender/woman/she” with an overactive twitter account seeking out and attacking people for their failure to live up to her woke demands, an article in Science accused James Webb of being unworthy of having a telescope named after him.

But as the telescope neared completion, criticism flared. In 2015, Matthew Francis, a science journalist, wrote an article for Forbes titled “The Problem With Naming Observatories for Bigots.” He wrote that Mr. Webb led the anti-gay purge at the State Department and that he had testified of his contempt for gay people. He credited Dr. Prescod-Weinstein with tipping him off, and she in turn tweeted his article and attacked Mr. Webb as a “homophobe.”

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What’s Christmas without traditions? Merry Christmas all and thank you for stopping by here.

Esau McCaulley writes of hearing the “Christmas spiritual ‘Sweet Little Jesus Boy‘” when he was a young boy in his grandmother’s kitchen. Great. And it would be totally fine if he just really liked it, or even kinda liked it, or even just remembered it. But that’s not lofty enough to set us up for where he’s taking us.

“Sweet Little Jesus Boy” was, in my childhood imagination, a connection to the faith of my ancestors, a song composed in the hush harbors where enslaved people gathered clandestinely to celebrate the birth of our savior. The song fought for supremacy in Black church Christmas services alongside hymns like “Go Tell It on the Mountain” and “Mary Had a Baby.”

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There is a general assumption that if a venue is open to the public, then you can buy your ticket and enter. The basis of this assumption is that it’s pretty much the way the world has always functioned, not to mention that it would be pretty bonkers otherwise. After all, if you’re in business to sell tickets to your venue, why would you not want people to buy them, watch whatever display you’re putting on and enjoy it, just as you enjoy the sweet, sweet money they’re paying for entry? Continue reading →

When fire broke out in the police evidence warehouse in Red Hook, Brooklyn, my initial reaction was that a lot of defendants were going to walk when the prosecution was unable to introduce evidence at trial. But the Legal Aid Society has raised a very different question about lost evidence.

A week after a three-alarm fire destroyed a Red Hook New York City Police Department warehouse that contained decades’ worth of evidence, the Legal Aid Society said the blaze will have “far-reaching consequences” for ongoing court cases and called for the city to conduct a thorough investigation of what was lost in the fire and contact defendants whose cases have been impacted. Continue reading →

It’s painful to read the hyperbolic rhetoric of Ian Milhiser at Vox, if only because it’s like watching an aneurysm happen in real time, but beneath the hysteria, an actual legitimate point be found on occasion. This was such an occasion, under the obviously persuasive headline, America’s Trumpiest court doesn’t care if your right to a fair trial was violated.

Last Thursday, however, a far-right panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit effectively eliminated state prisoners’ right to seek what is known as a “writ of habeas corpus” when they are imprisoned in violation of the Constitution or federal law, except in cases of “factual innocence.” Continue reading →

Piling onto the California rape conviction of Harvey Weinstein, losing Manhattan DA candidate Tali Farhadian Weinstein and Jane Manning, former prosecutor and Women’s Equal Justice Project argue in the New York Times that propensity evidence should be admissible in court, but only for sex crimes.

Disagreements over how much a jury should know about a defendant aren’t new. The American legal system has long checked prosecutors’ wish to share negative history about the accused. Prosecutors pursue crimes, not people, and we are supposed to hold people accountable for their bad acts, not their bad reputation. Continue reading →