It starts with an homage to Gertrude, but it’s understandable given that the air has been fouled by a pervasive, presidentially-repeated, fairy tale that plays to the saddest of tears and most fragile of sensibilities. But after that, it kicks butt.

But let’s also be very clear that, especially on American college campuses, there are few crimes where the deck is more stacked against the accused. Good intentions, political capital, and the lure of presumed expertise have combined to create a system that inflates the incident rate, perpetuates misinformation, and ignores due process. In what has been aptly described as an over-correction, higher education has turned the very premise of judicial logic on its head.

Linda LeFauve goes right at it. While there is a question whether there was a need for a correction, such that the current state of affairs is an over-correction, the post at RealClear Politics tries to thread the needle between what we have come to believe versus what’s real. It’s not easy to do.

The post isn’t legally perfect, as there are some omissions, but in the scheme of things, and without an additional thousand words, it’s understandable. Perhaps the only thing that really needed to be included was the untethering of the words “rape” and “sexual assault” from definitions. Continue reading →

It was 1978 when a group of neo-Nazis wanted to march through the Chicago suburb of Skokie, a neighborhood with its share of Holocaust survivors. As bad as that was, they had the right to think stupid and ugly thoughts, and the First Amendment protected their right to express them. The ACLU famously came to their defense, not because there was anything likable about neo-Nazis, but because the vitality of the First Amendment was invariably tested by the nastiest speech.

It was a proud moment for the ACLU. And in 2017, the ACLU still fondly recalls this proud moment, as it hasn’t done much for free speech since.

This once-favored right has fallen into disrepute with the rise of social justice, and the ACLU has taken guidance from the same fortune-cookie philosophies that apologize for authoritarianism. It’s not that they’re against free speech (except when they are), but that sanitizing the world of disagreeable speech is more important.

So when the current flavor of neo-Nazis (did you think they went away while there’s still tin foil to be had?) was put to the test, who was there to call?  Marco. Not because Marco likes Nazis. Not because Marco thinks their conduct swell. But because somebody had to fight for free speech, even for these guys, for the same reason the ACLU did so in 1978. Continue reading →

It’s infuriating that some guy is rich enough to fight Dallas over taking his land. infuriating, she says.

Why can’t he be like most people and just give up his land when and as Dallas commands? Did I mention infuriating?

H/T Keith Kaplan, Landowner

My mother used to tell what she thought was a hysterically funny joke, that when she was a child, she never knew she was poor because nobody told her. She was no Samantha Bee. But her point was that she lived pretty much like her peers in Newark, New Jersey. She didn’t have much, but she didn’t miss what she didn’t know. Sure, rich people lived like rich people, but what did that have to do with her?

But what she could, and did, manage to accomplish was to send her two kids to college to become something. Like most Jewish parents, education was the one gift she had to give her children. It was the one thing the Nazis couldn’t take away. They could take your homes, your possessions, even your life, but they couldn’t take your education. As it turned out, that was enough.

Richard Reeves, a senior fellow at The Brookings Institution, finds this to be unfair.

The big difference is that most of the people on the highest rung in America are in denial about their privilege. The American myth of meritocracy allows them to attribute their position to their brilliance and diligence, rather than to luck or a rigged system.

Continue reading →

Claire Fox isn’t the first person many would go to for their life philosophy. The Brit’s wiki page opens with a very weird description:

Claire Regina Fox (born 5 June 1960 in Barton-upon-Irwell, Greater Manchester) is a British libertarian writer. She is the director and founder of the think tank the Institute of Ideas and a former member of the Revolutionary Communist Party.

For many, the “libertarian” thing would be enough. Add to it the Revolutionary Communist Party and we’re pretty deep into tin-foil hat territory. So take Terry Murray’s review of her book, I find that offensive, with a grain of salt.

Fox recalls how before the corpses of the Charlie Hebdo journalists had even grown cold, many who had initially defended the principle of free expression had U-turned to denouncing as inflammatory and offensive the cartoons that catalysed the incident, implying that the Hebdostaff were themselves to blame for the violence they suffered. So low has the tolerance bar fallen that one no longer has even to be conscious of her own ‘racism’, ‘sexism’, ‘homophobia’, ‘cissexism’ or ‘Islamophobia’ in order to be guilty of these thought crimes. Continue reading →

Much like Bill Lewinski is the guy to call when you’re a killer cop, always ready with an excuse for whatever went wrong, Veronique Valliere is the psych to call when the prosecution needs a witness to explain away the flaws of a rape case.

During its case in chief, over defense objection, the Government presented expert
testimony from Dr. Veronique N. Valliere, on the areas of victim recantation, delayed
reporting, and victims’ tendency to stay in the relationship. In an Article 39(a), UCMJ,
10 U.S.C. § 839(a), hearing on this issue, the Government proferred that Dr. Valliere
would testify about counterintuitive behaviors by victims of domestic violence. Specific
areas would include delayed or staggered reporting, returning to the offender, recantation,
potential aggressiveness towards an offender, and the concepts of fear and dynamics of
fear in a domestic violence relationship.

It’s expert testimony, as provided by psychologists like Valliere, that distinguishes the obvious, the purported “common sense” grasp of facts, from the narrative the prosecution wants to sell to the jury.

Why would a rape victim not immediately run to police? Why would a rape victim continue to maintain a relationship with her rapist? Why would a rape victim deny it was rape, then later allege the opposite? The key word here is “counterintuitive,” and it’s Valliere’s job to explain away what people would otherwise naturally believe to the ordinary and expected human behavior. Continue reading →

It’s impossible to blame Daniel Szalkiewicz for doing what was in his client’s best interests. And from the description, what happened to his Jane Doe sounds horrible.

A 27-year-old Bronx woman sued the blogging site in Manhattan Supreme Court last week after a tape of her having sex with her boyfriend 10 years ago, when she was just 17, was posted in December and shared 1,200 times.

The post included the woman’s name and a link to her Facebook page.

She only learned that the private X-rated video was on the site when strange men started contacting her through Facebook with obscene messages such as, “Did you like the way his c–k felt? Sure looks like you did.”

Nice, guy. This is why you spend your time on Tumblr, because lines like this don’t endear you to actual living women. But as Julia Marsh at the New York Post explains, she didn’t take it lying down. Continue reading →

To paraphrase contrarian extraordinaire Christopher Hitchens, to describe this latest column from the Chicago Tribune as a piece of crap “would be to run the risk of a discourse that would never again rise above the excremental.” The column starts with a hyper-cynical version of what Alstory Simon went through:

For the last several years, Alstory Simon has had a good run in the media.

His version of an important local story — devious critics of the justice system hoodwinked me into confessing to a double murder I didn’t commit in order to get the real killer off death row and undermine capital punishment — has become the dominant narrative.

A better starting point would’ve been, “For 15 years, 8 months, Alstory Simon had a horrible run in the justice system. During that time, he was locked up 23 hours a day for a crime he did not commit.”

When Simon was finally exonerated, the proprietor of this space wrote about it, about how the deeply passionate Northwestern University’s Medill Innocence Project – led by a journalist — tricked and coerced Simon into confessing to a crime he did not commit in order to save one of their own, whose name is Anthony Porter. Continue reading →

“I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go. He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.”

–President Donald J. Trump to F.B.I. Director James Comey

So that settles that, right? In a pop-up symposium at Politico, fourteen lawyers and academics gave their views, ranging from Larry Tribe’s view that it conclusively proves guilt to Eugene Kontorovich’s view that it conclusively proves innocence.

Nobody suggested that Trump’s words were appropriate, which House Speaker Paul Ryan explains away as just his lack of knowledge of governance and protocol. Hey, the guy doesn’t know anything about how government works, about what a president is allowed to say to an F.B.I. director, so he stupidly crossed some lines. He’s a dope, but not a criminal.

The neo-SJW late of SDNY, Preet Bharara, calls that “silly,” because he wants to be relevant.

Silly. DJT knew protocol well enough to attack, rally after campaign rally, the breach of “protocol” in Clinton’s tarmac meeting with Lynch.

Of course, somebody could have just told that to Trump. For his part, Comey heard the words and felt them to be a “direction.” Continue reading →

Oh, Linda Greenhouse, doing her best to sow the seeds of discontent in the judiciary toward Darth Cheeto on the eve of Comey’s Senate testimony.

Sixty-eight years ago, in Watts v. State of Indiana, the Supreme Court overturned a murder conviction on the ground that the defendant’s confession had been coerced. The case is not much known today because it was overtaken two decades later by Miranda v. Arizona. That landmark decision gave criminal suspects the right to the presence of a lawyer and meant that a six-day interrogation like the one Robert Watts endured on his own would thereafter be considered flatly unconstitutional, without the need for the detailed parsing of the facts that the court undertook.

Does she recite this obscure decision because of her deep concern for the welfare of defendants? Not exactly.

The Watts case nevertheless lives on for a single line in Justice Felix Frankfurter’s opinion for the court. “There comes a point,” Frankfurter wrote, “where this court should not be ignorant as judges of what we know as men.”

Continue reading →