Like Walter Olson, I had been highly critical of the “new” ACLU which had forsaken the defense of civil liberties for the appeal to social justice. So when Wally posted that the ACLU had filed an amicus brief in support of the NRA after being targeted for destruction by Governor Andrew Cuomo, I was shocked.

After the Nazis and the KKK, the National Rifle Association is perhaps the group most hated by the ACLU’s fan base. And having reaped monumental financial rewards from tapping into the emotions of the newly woke, the ACLU was not only fabulously wealthy but empowered to limit its largesse to only those issues and parties that were worthy of its patron’s tears.

Yet, there it was, the ACLU coming out in support of its mortal enemy because Cuomo was using his regulatory apparatus to silence an organization because he hated its message. This was so . . . principled. Following Wally, I was inclined to applaud the ACLU and, maybe, concede that it wasn’t dead yet. David Cole, the ACLU’s legal director, remembered why it was there and would not compromise civil rights for the whims of donors. Continue reading →

An admission: I’ve never thought well of Rudy Giuliani. Not when he was United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York. Not when he pretended to be a drug buyer. Not when he was Mayor. Not when he was anything. So understand that I will gleefully seize upon any opportunity to ridicule Rudy.

Rudy Giuliani and Sen. Alfonse D’Amato cosplaying drug buyers

But the paper of record asks whether Rudy, now pretending to be Darth Vader to Darth Cheeto, is winning his trial in the court of public opinion. Continue reading →

Not that I’ve ever been a big fan of the Marshall Project, but that was before they started publishing fiction. But even fiction has its limits, grounded perhaps in something remotely connected to reality so that the parts that try to evoke emotions don’t invoke cringes and laughs instead. They blew it this time.

Three Strikes Didn’t Work. It’s Time to Pay Reparations

Heck of a clickbait title, but the subtitle will really grab you.

Black and brown men paid the price for supplying what the recreational drug market demanded: cocaine and weed.

I know these “good Samaritans” well. I defended quite a few of these great humanitarians, maybe even some the writer remembers from her days in the South Bronx. They were fun days, filled with tiny vials of crack and kids killing for the turf of a decent street corner spot or banging some old lady over the head for their fix.

I WAS RAISED IN THE SOUTH BRONX in the late 1980s and ’90s. I came of age and into my consciousness while a generation of men of color were herded into the criminal justice system under the rigid, unyielding habitual offender laws — three-strikes laws — for nonviolent drug-related offenses.

Except New York never had a “three-strikes” law. That’s the sort of detail that you would think someone at the Marshall Project would realize, since the writer was obviously clueless. Or maybe she wasn’t, and is trying to pull one over on you on the way to her rom-com ending.

There are sound, strong even, rational arguments that the sentences imposed on crack dealers in New York, both state and federal courts, were grossly excessive. When ten years didn’t stem the problem, it was upped. Then raised again. Rinse and repeat. And it never worked, not because the sentences weren’t absurdly long enough, but because there were few options and way, way too much money to be made selling crack.

If you were a young guy in the South Bronx with limited education, your job prospects were, ahem, poor. But there were these guys driving fancy cars, wearing shiny Rolexes, with gold chains that could weigh down a horse. They drank Cristal at night at clubs where women fell on them. It was a life many young men yearned for, and so they took that path. They knew very well what they were getting into, but the good life was worth it. Or at least that’s what they believed.

And whenever there is big money and good times at stake, people will fight for their piece of it. And they did. Some when they were forced to. Some because they wanted to be Tony Montana, enjoying the power of violence a little too much.

But what they were not was great humanitarians, helping out their brother man by supplying a desired pastime. Don’t pay for your crack and see how sweetly they tried to persuade you to honor your responsibilities. And if the only way to get the loot to cover your debt meant some random person got beaten or robbed, well, that was had to be done because you needed that next fix.

That’s not the story Juleyka Lantigua Williams tells, however, as it would never lead to the tear-jerking ending.

In my Bronx neighborhood, after fathers went upstate, mothers often had to work two jobs to keep families afloat, even in rent-controlled apartments. Or they had to do the unthinkable and apply for Section 8 and welfare to help care for an infant. Grandmas would arrive from the Caribbean to become the stay-at-home parent, do the cooking and cleaning, and keep their daughters from succumbing to their virtual widowhood.

It was hard on the family left behind, especially when “their men,” the spouses and fathers, spent every dime they ever made on the accouterments demanded of a big man on the street. There was no money left to feed their children, or for lawyers, when it was pissed away on trinkets. But the passive voice, “after fathers went upstate,” conceals why fathers went upstate. Even if they were sentenced to reasonable sentences, they would still go upstate. Because they were drug dealers.

And after drying your tears over the horrors perpetrated on drug dealers drinking champagne, we come to the fantasy payoff.

Today, the men who were taken from neighborhoods like mine are in their forties and fifties, having spent most of their lives in prison. Their families torn asunder, their children and siblings derailed, and their future — should they eventually be released — a total blank. The only way for states and the federal government to atone and begin to undo the damage is to commute their sentences, reverse their convictions, and pay these men reparations.

Does this romantic kiss at the end of this sad story not break your heart? Had the payoff been reducing sentences of life plus cancer to, say ten years, which would have been more than sufficient to serve the legitimate purpose of a sentence of incarceration, this might be a story with a nexus to reality. But that wouldn’t have made you cry, would it?

Commute their sentences. Reverse their convictions, and the coup de grâce, reparations. Reparations? It’s almost poetic, in a completely batshit crazy sort of way. If that doesn’t make you cry, nothing will.

I’ve spent a good deal of time of late trying to explain to young activists why they’re not helping to achieve viable reform by indulging in their psychotic delusions of denial, their fantasy versions of reality, their weeping over systemic horrors that aren’t quite systemic and weren’t entirely unjustified.

This post was a prime example of pushing a lie so ridiculous, so unfathomably laughable, as to render its writer, and its publisher, a joke. Serious people have fought to get New York to enact an expungement statute to no avail. So instead, proffer a story so absurdly false, plus call for commutation, reversal of convictions and, ta da, reparations?

This didn’t appear at the Marshall Project by accident, but because the young and unduly passionate believe this insane nonsense, spout lies they want to believe and demand solutions that are so outrageous as to be off-the-charts offensive.

And someone like me, a criminal defense lawyer who is supposed to be on their team, refusing to indulge in their delusions and instead fighting for rational solutions based on reality, is the worst of the bad guys. After all, no one is worse than a traitor to the cause, even when the cause is a rom com fantasy.

I was informed yesterday by a woke young lawyer that maybe the problem is that I, “a middle aged white guy,” might not be “the best person to judge the validity of complaints about things like microagressions [sic]” when they’ve stymied effort to prevent cops from needlessly killing black guys in the streets.

Maybe he’s right, that the future of reform will rely on fantastical lies by narcissistic children. So why not reparations? Makes total sense as long as you believe in fantasies. And if you are down with delusions, at least you can take comfort in knowing that the Marshall Project suffers from delusions as well. After all, it’s our messiah, or so it says.

What would Jesus say? Maybe Harvard Constitutional Law prof Laurence Tribe will tell us some day, but for the moment, he’s channeling his inner Hamilton which, miraculously, leads him to the place he so desperately wants to be. Yes, the same Larry Tribe who disclosed client confidences and then lied to cover it up. Not that the rumors of his pending liaison with Louise Mensch have produced physical evidence of any love child. Yet.

This time, Tribe has managed to get an op-ed in the Washington Post, a perk of being a Harvard lawprof, informing the groundlings that the Founding Fathers wouldn’t want Kavanaugh’s nomination to go forward. I didn’t even realize they knew who Brett Kavanaugh was, but then, I don’t teach con law at Harvard either.

The framers built the Constitution on the premise that men aren’t angels, and they did not trust a president’s nominees to the Supreme Court to be impartial in determining whether he should stay in office. At the Constitutional Convention, Virginia’s George Mason thought judges “surely” ought not preside over the impeachment trials of presidents to whom they owed their jobs; Connecticut’s Roger Sherman agreed. So the framers came up with a solution: They assigned the impeachment power to the House and the power to try impeachments to the Senate.

Continue reading →

Derek Daly uttered a racist slur in the 1980s.

In a story published Wednesday night, WISH-TV said Daly, a freelance racing analyst, had confirmed he was the source of the slur in an anecdote Lamey shared from 33 years ago, leading the station to dissolve its 17-year relationship with Daly.

For the record, there is no contextual defense to Daly’s using the “n-word” back then. It was just as unacceptable then as now. Why it took so long for this to happen is another question, but that Derek Daly said it, and should never have said it, is beyond question.

But what of his son, Conor? Continue reading →

Is it sexist to see a common thread among third-wave feminists in that they feel a desire to scold others? Even when they compliment someone, they have to scold. And so Jill Filipovic, who has a permanent seat on the Feminist Rules Committee, can’t quite bring herself to show appreciation toward Stormy Daniels without Gertruding her disapproval.

Let’s take a moment for Stormy Daniels.

How this sentence got past the NY Times editors is beyond me. Take a moment to . . . think about, express appreciation to, condemn, what? Four paragraphs later, Filipovic gets to her moment for Stormy.

Which is why there is so much power in the fact that Ms. Daniels does not believe her job or her involvement with Mr. Trump or the payoff is her shame to carry. She wants him held accountable, and the justice system is actually stepping in. She is refusing to slink away, despite being paid to do exactly that in a pattern we’ve seen too many times from influential men seeking to maintain their dominance and avoid responsibility.

Continue reading →

At Chronicle of Higher Ed, a child-prof explains his purpose.

I love giving A’s to students, maybe even more than they love receiving them. In my religion courses over the years, I’ve acquired a reputation as an “easy” teacher, and I love that, too.

In this age of grade inflation, student entitlements, skyrocketing tuitions, and rampant anti-intellectualism, my wallowing in the pleasures of giving out A’s as if they were $100 bills might seem like ammunition for the enemies of higher education and the professorial life. In the face of that charge, I have only one response: I’m tenured.

Apparently, Emory University gives out tenure like Gary Laderman gives out A’s. It’s not necessarily that he doesn’t know his subject, religion. It’s not that he isn’t a brilliant teacher, for all I know. It’s that he’s decided he doesn’t care for the method of assessing mastery in his courses, so he has chosen not to play the grade game, so A’s all around. Continue reading →

Ken @Popehat White, who is anticipated to have an op-ed in every major newspaper in America by the end of the weekend, writes at WaPo about the president’s condemnation of “flipping” to distinguish the good reasons to hate rats, and the not-so-good reasons.

America’s criminal justice system routinely coerces defendants to cooperate and incentivizes them to lie to please prosecutors. But most victims aren’t presidential confidants accused of bank fraud. The vast majority of people who confront the choice between cooperation and a longer sentence are poor and uneducated. When it comes to jailing our fellow Americans, we have champagne tastes, but when it comes to defending them, a store-brand-soda budget.

The president’s erstwhile personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, flipped on his benefactor. Had Cohen not managed to worm his way into Trump’s sphere, he might have had a brilliant future doing 18b pleas at arraignment and, perhaps, the occasional real estate closing. He wasn’t “poor and  uneducated,” which is something of the nature of the people who end up in the dock, not because the system is inherently unfair to the poor and uneducated, but because those tend to be some of the attributes of people who commit crimes, people who get caught. Continue reading →

The “incident” happened “on or about October 20, 2017.” The victim was friends with the perp and his family for more than 30 years. There is no information as to whether she was particularly callipygian, but at 55 years of age, might not be at her prime. And the perp of this heinous sex attack?

Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, who ran the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for eight years under President Obama, was arrested in Brooklyn on Friday morning and charged with groping a woman in his apartment in October 2017, the police said.

Before the vicious attack occurred, the “survivor” was deeply involved in the #metoo movement as an artist creating #metoo art. But it wasn’t until her life was turned upside down by her victimization that she was able to add “victim” to her resume. Continue reading →

At the end of its post, The College Fix makes a brutal point that compels repeating:

Had Yovino reported the incident to Sacred Heart administrators rather than police, the male students – both punished by the university after they were charged – would have likely been branded as rapists for the rest of their lives.

It was fortuitous that Nikki Yovino chose to falsely accuse two male Sacred Heart students of raping her to police rather than some Title IX admin at Sacred Heart University. Yovino lied, and it was a nasty, ugly lie. Had she lied only to her college, nobody would have cared. Nobody would have ever questioned her claim. But she lied to the police instead, until she finally admitted it was a lie,  Continue reading →