Today is Day Three of Fault Lines, and for the benefit of you slackers who haven’t yet bothered to read — and show me the love, do I ask for too much? — here’s what you missed thus far:

WELCOME TO FAULT LINES: MONITORING AMERICA’S CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM

PLEADING DIRTY: DO PLEA BARGAINS CORRUPT THE SYSTEM?

POLICE BRUTALITY: FROM MICHAEL BROWN TO MICHAEL BRELO

TSA SECURITY THEATER: WHEN THE SHOW BOMBS

“PERFECT STORM” FOR POLICE REFORM: WHY CLEVELAND MIGHT BE DIFFERENT

SORRY, SCOTUS DIDN’T SAY WHAT YOU WANTED IT TO SAY IN ELONIS

Aside from my posts, Fault Lines has posts from Cristian Farias, slumming from his writing at New York Magazine, Tamara Tabo, slumming from her teaching at Thurgood Marshall Law School in Houston and Greg Prickett, a 20-year police vet who practices law in Fort Worth.

Each brings their own perspective and style to Fault Lines. It’s worth your time to take a look, guaranteed or a full refund.

For a brief and shining moment, sanity returned to journalism as Sabrina Rubin Erdely was revealed to have sold a lie about a rape that never happened.  The University of Virginia was not amused. Rolling Stone magazine retracted the story and apologized for sucking.  Erdely was found walking down dark alleyways, bumping into walls, over and over, mumbling “so what, so what?”

It almost seemed as if the media remembered the one word that required a trigger warning more than any other: facts.  Then the moment devolved into another word, excuses, and spittle shot from advocates’ mouth, striking anyone within earshot.

At the New Republic, freelance writer Jessica Luther seeks to rehabilitate advocacy journalism with an argument against facts, against relying on evidence when there are feelings to be told.  She begins by taking issue with Mike Taibbi’s offer of a very cautious approach:

Then Taibbi, without being asked, offered some advice on how to report on sexual assault. “One way around that, you know, would be for people to cover cases that have already been adjudicated… so that the reporters don’t have to go out on a limb to say that this or that happened. They can rely on something that happened, that’s already been proven in court,” he said.

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The United States Supreme Court issues its long-awaited decision in Elonis v. United States. How cool is that?

Via Ken White at Popehat:

So what did the Supreme Court do?

Screw everything up.

Wut

The Supreme Court could have ruled on just Section 875(c) — it could have just said “this statute requires proof of subjective intent.” It could have gone further and ruled on the First Amendment, saying “the First Amendment requires subjective intent to prove a true threat” or that the First Amendment doesn’t require that.

Instead, seven justices ruled that Section 875(c) requires the government to prove something more than what it did, but not exactly what.

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That bastion of deep thought and tabloid integrity, the New York Post, asks the question:

Just how many New Yorkers must die before Mayor de Blasio lets cops bring back stop-and-frisk?

Stacey Calhoun has a right to know. His nephew Jahhad Marshall — a 23-year-old aspiring chef — was caught in the crossfire and shot to death in Queens early Saturday, one of four horrific murders this weekend.

“We need stop-and-frisk,” a teary-eyed Calhoun told The Post. “Somebody has to put their foot down.”

There was a crime, a tragedy, and an uncle whose loss demands the evisceration of constitutional rights?  It’s not that Stacey Calhoun should be blamed for the desire to prevent the needless taking of his nephew’s life. Families grasp at anything they can when tragedy strikes. Continue reading →

Remember that “vertical” that caused some consternation?  Well, it’s alive! Meet Fault Lines, the new criminal law and justice section at Mimesis Law.  If you like what you read here (or hate it, we’re not picky about who reads), take a quick trip to Fault Lines, where you will get more pie than ever before.

The good news is that there will be posts from me, as well as Cristian Farias and Tamara Tabo, our inaugural team of writers.  Expect more writers as well, the primary criteria being that they be knowledgeable and honest.  We hope to have people writing from varying perspectives, challenging bias and each other. We look forward to making this as real as it gets when it comes to criminal justice issues.

The better news is that there will be no moderation of comments, except for spam. So if your comments failed to meet the threshold for thoughtfulness here, there is a soapbox for you at Fault Lines.

Now, please show Fault Lines a little love by checking it out. maybe leaving a comment, and adding it to your daily reads.  And no, you didn’t win the contest, but you’re all winners in my book. *hugs*

Public sector unionism was always conceptually flawed.  On the one hand, why should people who work for government be denied the same opportunity to collectively bargain as private sector employees? On the other, the incentives that justified private sector unions didn’t apply to the public sector, making the system untenable. Whoda thought? Me, actually.

But then, my doubts as to the viability of public sector unionism barely scratched the surface of the problem when it came to police unions.  There was another, entirely separate, dynamic at play, and we’re paying for it now.

In a New York Times op-ed, Jonathan Smith,  an associate dean of the law school at the University of the District of Columbia, and formerly a senior litigator in the civil rights division of the Department of Justice, explains what followed the 1960s Kerner Commission report on why minorities were rioting in the inner cities. Continue reading →

Police reports made the killing of Jermaine McBean on Dixie Highway in Oakland Park, Florida, clean as a whistle.  Carrying a rifle as he walked down the street, a call to 911 brought police to the scene. Broward County Deputy Peter Peraza arrived and says he told McBean to drop the gun.  Peraza says McBean turned and pointed the rifle at him, so he killed him. A righteous shoot.

Except for the damn photograph.

After Florida police shot Jermaine McBean to death as he walked home with an unloaded air rifle, they said there was no reason to believe he did not hear their orders to drop the weapon and that he pointed it at them.

But a newly emerged photo that shows headphones in McBean’s ears immediately after the 2013 shooting raises questions about the police version of events, including why the white earbuds were later found stuffed in the dead computer expert’s pocket.

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In 2010, New York’s Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman formed a commission. You remember, right? No? Well, of course not, because nobody gives a flying fuck about another commission, on which blue ribbon types serve and, years later, come up with ideas that no one cares about. Officialdom loves commissions. Nobody else cares.

But this commission was ahead of the curve.  Its mandate was to simplify and make more transparent the New York criminal law sentencing scheme, which has gone through knee-jerk twists and turns since George Pataki decided that he needed to be tough on crime to get re-elected.

New York’s body of sentencing laws is a patchwork, with the history of the state’s changing politics woven into it and over it.  As a result, the new report says, sentencing is “confusing and misleading” for prisoners and victims alike.

Historically, New York State’s sentences were all indeterminate: a judge could hand down a range of years that a prisoner might serve (such as 1-to-3 or 5-to-15).  When during that window the person would actually go home was unpredictable: it was up to a parole board.

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Remember that mother who came into your office to explain to you that her son was denied due process.  She was, if nothing else, impassioned, explaining all the reasons why her son should walk.  It was deeply moving. And legally worthless.  Had you brought the mother’s argument before the judge, whether in toto or selectively, you stood a good chance of a tongue-lashing for wasting the court’s time or being laughed out of the room.

So let’s give that crap a name, wrap it up in social justice rhetoric, and make it into a thing.  That’s what David Bornstein does in the New York Times Opinionator column, where he pushes the new concept of “participatory defense,” with special praise for the Cobarrubias Project.  Never heard of it?

The “what is participatory defense” section of their website begins with an anecdote, already a dead giveaway that it’s conceptually vapid and is grounded in an appeal to emotion:

If tradition holds, Tony’s mom will continue attending the meetings, and assist other families who find themselves in the position she once did. She will share with them what she learned here from others — how to partner with or push the public defender, how to dissect police reports and court transcripts, and how to build a sustained community presence in the courtroom to let judges and prosecutors know the person facing charges is not alone. Continue reading →

Suicide by cop is a thing.  The police have come to recognize it and, in a bizarre twist of logic, felt the freedom of being able to shrug off the pull of the trigger because he wanted to die anyway.  But then, sometimes a guy doesn’t really want to die, doesn’t really mean to kill himself.

Many  people who threaten suicide do so as a cry for help, not to achieve the end result of their own death.  But that’s a nuance, like many others, that can elude a police officer.  So when the trigger gets pulled, it no longer matters whether it was a person bent on committing suicide or just crying for help. He’s dead. Accomplishment unlocked.

Who knows what Justin Way had in mind as he lay in bed with a knife.  He was drunk. He got the crap beaten out of him when he lost his job. He was feeling bad. Real bad.

On May 11, Justin Way was drinking and threatening to hurt himself. 

Way’s live-in girlfriend, Kaitlyn Christine Lyons, said she’d caught Justin drinking a bottle of vodka, which she took away from him to pour out. She said he was drunk, lying in their bed with a large knife, saying he would hurt himself with it. She called a non-emergency number in an attempt to get her boyfriend to a local St. Augustine, Florida, hospital for help—and told them she did not feel threatened.

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