Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner has been everything he said he would be when he ran for office, and he’s taken some heat along with the kudos. But a collateral consequence is unfolding as his Conviction Integrity Unit is doing its job. Judges find it hard to adjust to a prosecutor who concedes that there are innocent people in prison.

As much as his office has demonstrated its willingness to go back, review old convictions, determine whether they were obtained through some impropriety or whether a defendant might have been innocent, it wasn’t entirely his call.

It will be a decade in April since a federal judge, after hearing evidence in the case of Terrance Lewis, ruled that he appeared to be innocent of the 1996 murder of Hulon Howard in West Philadelphia — but that for procedural reasons, his conviction and life sentence could not be overturned.

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The proposed Title IX campus sex policing rules (which, I note, are not changes since the prior “rules” were “guidance” rather than regulations, having never gone through the Notice and Comment required by the Administrative Procedures Act, and were merely instituted by bureaucratic fiat during the Obama administration), are coming to the end of their comment period. So how’s that working out?

“F— you Betsy,” reads one comment.

“DeVos is a traitor to women everywhere,” another wrote. One chimed in with: “Ms DeVos: for the good of ALL women: PLEASE RESIGN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

Well, not too bad, apparently. There are more substantive comments as well. Continue reading →

In the midst of the 2016 presidential campaign, someone who lived in my house decried the fact that the options offered were, how to say this kindly, unappealing. On the right was the singularly least qualified, and worst, candidate since Andrew Jackson, and probably ever. On the left was a former First Lady who deplored a significant portion of her countrymen and announced she would not be their president.

That the Democrats lost to Trump was the greatest humiliating defeat ever in the history of politics. That they didn’t win 80-20 is shocking, a point they missed as they cast blame around the fringes. So if they couldn’t pull off a win with Clinton, would they learn anything? Not that they didn’t get their message out well enough, but that their message, pushing ever-harder to toward progressive ends, was rejected. Nah.

Enter the possibility of a run by former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz. So, what if he did? Continue reading →

Cato’s Julain Sanchez proffers a curious theory, that the now-adored Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s takedown of cartoon character Roger Stone was less to prosecute Stone than to get his hands on Stone’s apps.

For many, Friday’s arrest of Roger Stone, the veteran political trickster and longtime adviser to Donald Trump, was a sign that the special counsel investigation into Russian electoral interference is entering its final phase. Yet there were also several indications that the probe may not be as near its conclusion as many observers assume — and that the true target of Friday’s F.B.I. actions was not Mr. Stone himself, but his electronic devices.

There are two aspects of this theory that will give rise to resistance. The first is that Stone is the perfect foil for anyone who wants to see Trump crash and burn. Continue reading →

Every once in a while, there’s a story that needs to be read, and is more important than anything I could write here. This is such a story.

On the morning of October 21, 2017, the budding New York choreographer Jinah Parker was sitting in bed, her husband lying alongside, when she opened her email and found a deeply unsettling, one-paragraph message about her debut dance production.

The show was called SHE, a Choreoplay, an off-off-Broadway interpretative dance in which four women vividly monologize rape and abuse.

While it’s unclear to me how one “monologizes” rape and abuse through intepretative dance, that’s the least of the issues. Continue reading →

At the ideologically amorphous Niskanen Center, Columbia University economics Acadia University political science prof Jeffrey A. Sachs announced the good great news.

THE “CAMPUS FREE SPEECH CRISIS” ENDED LAST YEAR

How cool is that? Sure, Josh Blackman was the target of the children at CUNY law school, to prevent him from giving a talk about white supremacy free speech, but that’s CUNY and chances are they just hadn’t heard yet because they’re a little slow on the uptake, if you catch my drift.

Sachs proves his point using statistics, as that makes it empirical and everybody knows empiricism is the best ism. Protests are down. Disinvitations are down. The antifa hasn’t had to beat anyone with a bike lock on campus in a while. So there ya go. Continue reading →

Like most myths, there’s a strong element of truth behind it. Fraternity parties were bacchanalias. The problem is that this was no mystery, and was precisely why people went to them. There would be drinking. There would be dancing. There would be sex, if you were lucky. Debauchery? It could happen.

The difference wasn’t that women were unaware of the fact that they were going into the lion’s den when they decided to try their hand at being Sigma Chi’s sweetheart, but that the sexual revolution was on, and if women wanted to drink, to get drunk, to have sex, so what? The fight wasn’t over sex or no sex, but the chauvinist belief in the virtue of the virgin.

If a woman chose to have sex, that was entirely her business. She was no more a slut than the guy. That, at the time, was the radical shift. Women with adult prerogative. Women with the right to do whatever the hell they wanted to do, even unmarried sex, without fear that she would be tainted in perpetuity as a harlot. It was revolutionary. It was long ago.* Continue reading →

Dead tree newspapers have been dying for years, but then who touches paper anymore? After all, we now have the internet, and all the news that fits to . . . oh wait. There’s infinite space online, so how can we not have an embarassment of riches in journalism?

There’s a curious thing that happens when some kid gets a job writing for a major soapbox. If some 23-year-old who graduated last year with a degree in humanities stopped you on the street and said, “Hey, do you want to spend ten minutes of your life listening to my opinions about issues in the news,” what are the chances you would? And yet, these are the people whose words you read. At Buzzfeed. At Huff Post. On most online media outlets.

Jimmy Olson is no longer the cub reporter, but your thought leader.  Continue reading →

When news broke of Roger Stone’s arrest, the place went nuts. The “place,” of course, was twitter and the teams braced themselves for war. Caught in the middle were criminal defense lawyers, as here was an FBI takedown of a high profile, and outlandish, Trump guy. Oh, Rachel was gonna be lit that night.

But it created a huge conflict between reality and partisanship, between what experienced criminal defense lawyers saw and what partisans wanted to see. It got bad. Quickly. At one point, Ken White twitted the obvious (at least it was obvious to the rational), albeit in somewhat tepid words.

The “stop questioning law enforcement or you’re pro-Trump” is really, really, really not a good look, and illustrates why criminal defense attorneys believe there is no party or “side” that is reliably in favor of defendants’ rights.

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It was 2016 when the 6th Circuit uttered the magic word that was never to be said. Sex offender registration was “punitive.” To be sure, this came as no epiphany to anyone remotely familiar with SORA, whether because they were on it, dealt with it or read anything modestly thoughtful about it. But that a federal circuit court said it? That was huge.

So, is SORA’s actual effect punitive? Many states confronting similar laws have said “yes.” See, e.g., Doe v. State, 111 A.3d 1077, 1100 (N.H. 2015); State v. Letalien, 985 A.2d 4, 26 (Me. 2009); Starkey v. Oklahoma Dep’t of Corr., 305 P.3d 1004 (Okla. 2013); Commonwealth v. Baker, 295 S.W.3d 437 (Ky. 2009); Doe v. State, 189 P.3d 999, 1017 (Alaska 2008). And we agree. (Emphasis added.)

Yet, two years after this decision, holding Michigan’s retroactive inclusion on the registry an unconstitutional ex post facto law, the problem is solved? Not quite. Continue reading →