It’s no crime to be poor. Why then are poor people held in jail because of it? Maurice Walker was held for six days because he couldn’t pay the $160 required by a bail schedule for being a pedestrian under the influence of alcohol. The City of Calhoun, Georgia, used a bail schedule imposed by its municipal court which based release on the amount of the fine plus costs. It made inadequate accommodation for whether the person in custody had the wherewithal to pay.*

The use of bail schedules has its putative virtues. It’s clear, easily applied, gets people out of jail quickly and applies equally to everyone. It also has its issues, foremost of which is that it bears no cognizable connection to the individual in jail. Why does he need bail at all? Does he have the ability to pay bail? The offense of arrest may be the same, but the person arrested isn’t. If you can’t pay the bail, you sit for no better reason than you can’t pay the bail.

In the first round of litigation in the district court, an injunction issued creating a three-tier system. An arrestee could be released by paying bail according to a Standing Bail Order, or be brought before a judge within 48 hours, or, if only charged with a local violation, released on unsecured bail. The Eleventh Circuit rejected the scheme as insufficiently specific. Continue reading →

We often use “jaywalking” as part of the joke, an offense so trivial as to serve as the perfect juxtaposition for police excesses. But Hui Jie Jin is alleged to have jaywalked, and Alameda County Sheriff’s Deputy Phillip Corvello didn’t get the joke at all. Turns out he was all intersectional, and wasn’t about to let Jin get away with it.

A deaf 76-year-old woman accused an Alameda County Sheriff’s Office deputy of excessive force during an alleged jaywalking incident last year, claiming the deputy “violently threw” her to the ground and handcuffed her to an ambulance while she was unconscious.

It wasn’t merely her jaywalking that gave rise to Corvello’s outrage. It was her failure to do as he commanded, a cardinal sin. Continue reading →

As night follows day, Trump twitted something moronic at ten minutes after one in the morning:

NO COLLUSION – RIGGED WITCH HUNT!

It was too early in the morning to exert the effort to twit in relatively full sentences and there was little need to do so. The message was as simple as it was stupid, and it either worked for those so mindlessly obsessed with supporting him or not. Trump may not grasp much, but he gets this. Continue reading →

As Bari Weiss learned when she was vilified for being an inadequately woke woman, there’s a freedom that comes along with no longer having to thread the needle of not being an SJW while expressing one’s belief in equality. You no longer have to equivocate, tummy-rub the fringe nutjobs always at the ready to castigate your heresy. Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose. Bari Weiss is free, so she can write intelligently.

Women are hypocrites. Women are opportunists. Women are liars.

They are abusers and bullies and manipulators. They are capable of cruelty, callousness and evil.

Just like men.

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Most of us were taught in public school that the Thirteenth Amendment outlawed slavery, which is mostly true except for one detail.

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

It’s an understandable exclusion, provided it’s tempered with other understandings, such as the fact that the people in prison remain human beings, not chattel. And that seems to be primary reason why there is a national prison strike happening now, from August 21 to September 9 (the anniversary of the Attica Riot), 2018.

Incarcerated people in at least seventeen states are expected to protest from August 21 to September 9 for “humane living conditions, access to rehabilitation, sentencing reform, and the end of modern day slavery.”

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As fall begins and kids start their trek back to school, an issue lingers in the back of everyone’s mind. Is there going to be another school shooting? If so how bad will it be?

The previous nightmarish year of gun violence in schools was horrendous, and the horror of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida is still fresh on many parents’ minds. Some students from that very school used their anguish to lobby for gun reform. Others are just concerned about getting back to class.

During a heated debate over the subject, G.C. Hutson, a mediator colleague of mine, posed a rather interesting theory over the cause of so much gun violence in schools: what if social media was part of the problem? Continue reading →

My (German) dad, who’s a lot smarter than I am, patiently puts up with my claim that not everything in American politics is currently as nightmarish as it seems from the outside. And it’s a fact that a lot of valuable work is done away from the headlines and the outrage.

But if all you had was a media’s-eye view of what’s happening in America, you’d likely have an extremely skewed idea of the state of the nation. From the outside looking in, the obsession of the press with Trumpian scandals and banal palace intrigue is nothing short of ridiculous. And then there’s the constant drumbeat of fear, the mad scramble for something to feel oppressed about, the sense of gloom and impending apocalypse that rules social media. Is it any wonder that if the commentary on America were all you had to go by, as is typically true of us Europeans, you’d conclude that the country was going to hell in a handbasket – as is typically true of us Europeans?

The truth, of course, is that the scandalmongering and outrage so common in the media poorly reflect the reality of life in the States. I speak from experience: Even in DC, if you are working and keep your head down, politics is hardly the dark all-enveloping cloud Twitter users treat it as. For the vast majority of us, following politics is a game, a distraction. Continue reading →

A press release from FACE, Families Advocating for Campus Equality,* put the shocking news on my radar.

The SMART Office is exploring how institutions of higher education share, respond and coordinate information to prevent sexual assault perpetration. This project will collect information about current policies and practices utilized by colleges and universities regarding registered sex offenders who may be students or employees; individuals found responsible and sanctioned for campus sexual misconduct policy violations; and the review of criminal or disciplinary sexual misconduct history of prospective or current students.

The SMART program, DoJ’s Office of Sex Offender Sentencing, Monitoring, Apprehending, Registering and Tracking, one of the many horrific acronyms beloved by government, proposed to expand its sources to include information from colleges and universities about their handling of sexual misconduct on campus, including information about “individuals found responsible and sanctioned for campus sexual misconduct.” Are they talking about adding Title IX violators to the dreaded sex offender registries? Continue reading →

There is a sense of helplessness that victims of crime experience, when someone with overwhelming force does something to them that they can’t stop, they can’t prevent, they can’t fight. We live our lives in the belief that we have control over our physical integrity, and when that’s violated despite our most strenuous desire that it not happen, and there is nothing we can do about it, we realize that our sense of autonomy is a delusion. We are helpless.

We can’t eliminate the existence of bad people. Criminals who beat, rape, murder. All the wonderful expressions of love and joy are crap. They exist. And their existence doesn’t cease because we want to pretend they don’t, or rationalize why they do. When someone hits you over the head from behind with a club, your first thought isn’t their impoverished upbringing.

But when the violent predator isn’t some bad dude on the street, but a person wearing the uniform of your country, when his weapon isn’t blunt force from behind but the authority your government gives him to act upon you, against your will, or suffer the consequences, it’s different. This isn’t the criminal who exists despite your best wishes. This is your government at work. Continue reading →

The New York Times, much to its credit, broke the story of Asia Argento’s payoff of Jimmy Bennett. They name the “victim,” something they don’t do except when they do. They speak of his financial woes, suggesting he was in it more for the money than the mental anguish and suffering of a person sexually abused. Blaming the victim isn’t usually part of the narrative either. But still, they told the story, which meant that an icon of #MeToo was knocked off her pedestal.

The Italian actress and director Asia Argento was among the first women in the movie business to publicly accuse the producer Harvey Weinstein of sexual assault. She became a leading figure in the #MeToo movement. Her boyfriend, the culinary television star Anthony Bourdain, eagerly joined the fight.

But in the months that followed her revelations about Mr. Weinstein last October, Ms. Argento quietly arranged to pay $380,000 to her own accuser: Jimmy Bennett, a young actor and rock musician who said she had sexually assaulted him in a California hotel room years earlier, when he was only two months past his 17th birthday. She was 37. The age of consent in California is 18.

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