The military has a problem.

Some troops have drawn equivalencies between the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol and last year’s protests for racial justice during recent stand-downs to address extremism, worrying the military’s top enlisted leader.

In a Thursday briefing with reporters at the Pentagon, Ramón “CZ” Colón-López, the senior enlisted adviser to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that some troops have asked, when the Jan. 6 riot is brought up, “How come you’re not looking at the situation that was going on in Seattle prior to that?”

Continue reading →

Is there more to the Butterfly Theory than meets the eye of the logically challenged and intellectually dishonest? Jessica Valenti argues that the mass murder in Altanta confirms her priors about white men murdering women of color because of religion, as that’s the only tune she’s capable of playing. If neither facts nor logic play any role, and one is never pressed to actually show their work to back up their hysteria, aren’t they allowed “their truth”?

But the sudden concern for animus against Asians, which has yet to reach the inner sanctum of elite colleges refusing to admit curve-busting Asians based on their qualifications rather than let them take seats away from applicants who wouldn’t otherwise make the cut. has not only given rise to a new reason to blame white supremacy, even if most anti-Asian violence is committed by people who aren’t very white at all, but has sanitized criticism of a foreign nation. China, still communist after all these years, as the people of Hong Kong found out, is now off limits. Continue reading →

Ed. Note: Below is part two of the debate, with Miami criminal defense lawyer David Oscar Markus‘ response to Atlanta’s Andrew Fleischman’s post, In the Criminal Justice System, Wealth Is A Huge Advantage.

The criminal justice system crushes people.  Men and women.  Black and white.  Rich and poor.  A federal criminal case impacts your liberty, your family, your finances, your mental health, and every other aspect of your life whether you are rich or poor.  Each broad category of defendants faces their own hurdles in the system.  There is no question that poor defendants face enormous challenges in trying to mount an effective defense again a government with unlimited resources, what Andrew rightly calls “a bit like [fighting] a grizzly bear.”  There’s an unfortunate perception out there, however, that the governmental grizzly bear isn’t as interested in gobbling up the rich.  But that perception is wrong.  This particular bear loves plump and shiny prey.

Let me briefly explain some of the disadvantages that rich, well-known defendants face in the system: Continue reading →

Odd things happen at CUNY law school. There was the protest to silence Josh Blackman because of his presentation on free speech. Now the dean of the law school, Mary Lu Bilek, has been “canceled.” Except this time, she canceled herself.

The dean of the CUNY School of Law has decided to cancel herself — saying she is retiring in atonement for referring to herself as a “slaveholder” during a faculty meeting.

Continue reading →

Credence Clearwater Revival is going to have to change the lyrics to its 1969 song, Fortunate Son. The song was a condemnation of how the connected could avoid the draft, could avoid going to Vietnam, could avoid dying in Southeast Asia for a war they neither understood nor supported. But then, it was just boys who were drafted to fight.

Now, it’s just boys who, upon reaching their 18th year, have to register with Selective Services for the draft. No, we don’t have an active draft, but if needed, the mechanism exists. Male privilege reared its ugly head.

In 1981, in Rostker v. Goldberg, the Supreme Court rejected a sex-discrimination challenge to the registration requirement, reasoning that it was justified because women could not at that time serve in combat. Continue reading →

One of the most profound concepts is that any time you enact a law or regulation that involves a police interaction, it could result in a person’s execution. Is it worthy of execution? Did New York City Mayor Bill deBlasio ask himself that question before coming up with this brilliant idea?

Those who commit hateful but noncriminal conduct should be confronted by the NYPD, @NYCMayor @BilldeBlasio says:

“I assure you, if an NYPD officer calls you or shows up at your door to ask about something you did, that makes people think twice, and we need that.”

— Matthew Chayes (@chayesmatthew) March 18, 2021

Continue reading →

Few people today give much thought to how astoundingly far beyond the contours of American understanding of governmental power the 1964 Civil Rights Act went. Here was a law that told people, businesses, whom they must hire, whom they must serve, how they must disregard their own ideas and feelings in the conduct of their private businesses because the government commanded them to do so.

Of course, there may be no one who would question that the law was salutory, serving a far higher and better purpose than the banal notion that our personal right to conduct business with whomever we choose, hire and fire whomever we choose and serve whomever we choose. What about our personal freedom? Ending discrimination was more important, and so government crossed a line of dictating how individuals and business would conduct themselves, even if government stretched its authority to the breaking point. Continue reading →

Ed. note: Anatole France wrote “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.” But when it comes to federal prosecutions, is wealth always an advantage or can it also be a detriment? 

The following post, by my former Fault Lines colleague, Atlanta’s Andrew Fleischman, is the first in a series of posts debating with Miami’s David Oscar Markus the issue, “Is Rich Law better than Poor Law?”

David Oscar Markus recently wrote an editorial on behalf of his clients, the family of Ghislaine Maxwell, in which he said that “the rich do not enjoy enormous advantages in a federal criminal case.”¹ If anything, they are greatly disadvantaged.” I’d love to live in a world where this was true. But justice ain’t cheap, and the tools a criminal defendant needs to rebut the presumption of guilt our system heaps upon them often require significant investment.

First off, there’s choosing the correct lawyer. Justice Roberts was not exaggerating when he wrote that a defendant’s inability to pay for their counsel of choice “raises substantial concerns about the fairness of the entire proceeding.” Continue reading →

Georgia’s new Trump-elected senator, Rev. Raphael Warnock, gave his first floor speech to the United States Senate, and it was a doozy. Unsurprisingly, he spoke in support of the Senate version of H.R. 1, the House’s attempt to usurp state control over their voter rules in reaction to some state’s efforts to rein in changes that facilitated voting in the last election.

“We are witnessing right now a massive and unabashed assault on voting rights unlike anything we have seen since the Jim Crow era,” Warnock said, pointing to a wave of bills that limit voting in Republican-controlled states like Arizona and his own Georgia. “This is Jim Crow in new clothes.”

He went on: Continue reading →

MARCH 18, 2021
4:45 AM

Deputy Ernesto Miranda and Patrolman Ray Stevens quietly entered the dimly lit bullpen of the Mud Lick Sheriff’s Department. Both men were, to put it charitably, extremely hung over.

It wasn’t as if this was unexpected. The night before, both men attended the Grassy Knoll Pub’s “Irish Day” celebration, where the citizens of Mud Lick, like many Americans, used the holiday to get stinking drunk and pretend to be Irish.

Miranda moved through the office quietly, turning on lights, booting up his desk computer and starting a pot of coffee. Stevens, a new transfer, crashed into a file cabinet. Continue reading →