In Part 1, I addressed intra-district sentencing disparity in the District of Nebraska.  I presented eight tables containing judge-specific sentencing statistics for fiscal years 2015-2016[1] and I asked for insights from readers of Simple Justice. As promised, I now set out some of my thoughts and respond to several of the interesting, and often funny, comments.

I start with two assumptions. The great bulk of the readers of SJ loathe the Sentencing Guidelines. Also, I assume that many of you don’t like Attorney General Sessions, and are particularly worried about his May 10, 2017 memo that, among other important aspects, requires federal prosecutors to charge “the most serious, readily provable offense.”

I don’t want to argue about the Sentencing Guidelines writ large, whether Sessions is a dolt or whether you prefer Attorney General Holders’ previous (and dainty) way of doing business. Indeed, if you are now a CDL in the federal trenches, you have no choice but to “Cowboy up” and deal with the legal realism of the moment. Continue reading →

The bluegrass state has a blue job problem. People just don’t want to be Kentucky State Troopers.

They’ve got some strict rules in Kentucky. There was that 60 college credit thing. And then, there’s the summer tat problem, which totally sucks after the permanent remembrance of that drunken night with the white sheep. What to do? Continue reading →

The cop’s best gal, Heather McDonald, has tried to single-handedly undo one of the few reforms to policing that nearly everyone, cops excepted, else has agreed goes beyond the pale: racial profiling.* Her weapon of choice? Redefinition.

The anti-“racial profiling” juggernaut must be stopped, before it obliterates the crime-fighting gains of the last decade, especially in inner cities. The anti-profiling crusade thrives on an ignorance of policing and a willful blindness to the demographics of crime. Yet politicians are swarming on board. In February, President George W. Bush joined the rush, declaring portentously: “Racial profiling is wrong, and we will end it in America.”

Too bad no one asked President Bush: “What exactly do you mean by ‘racial profiling,’ and what evidence do you have that it exists?” For the anti-profiling crusaders have created a headlong movement without defining their central term and without providing a shred of credible evidence that “racial profiling” is a widespread police practice.

This would be terrible if true. The good news is that its not true. The generous view is that nobody told McDonald, so she’s left to her own devices. Continue reading →

Hard as it may be to imagine an elitist country club in Jersey, Princeton existed. But it’s trying desperately to shed its old legacy Ivy image to appear more like the second-tier Ivies where the poor and downtrodden had a chance of admission.

Eisgruber and his colleagues have made real and rapid progress. Princeton was until recently among the country’s least economically diverse colleges, overlooking hundreds of qualified low-income high-school students each year.

No more. Only 6.5 percent of the class of 2007 received Pell grants, which typically go to students in the bottom half of income distribution. The share among the class of 2017, which graduates next week, is 14.9 percent. The share in both this year’s and next year’s freshman class is 21 percent.

The changes aren’t just about one statistic, either. Princeton is also enrolling more middle-class students and low-income foreigners, who are ineligible for Pell grants.

The mothers at Rosemary Hall are aghast, now that there is no longer a guarantee that one’s roomie will be suitable for a dinner invitation. But it’s not just that they don’t know which fork to use. Continue reading →

Most of us believe ourselves to be normal, by which I mean that we believe our sensibilities to be reasonable and those that differ to be unreasonable, if not totally wrong. And most of us believe that the majority of people agree with us, because we’re, well, normal. For those who believe themselves to be exceptional, this isn’t about you.

Much has been said about cultural appropriation of late, here and elsewhere, largely because of its absurdity and untenability, and this has created a dilemma for those who passionately believe that it exists and is wrong, since they’re constrained to rationalize why they believe something so logically flawed while being smack in the middle of that reasonable majority.

This conflict of feelings and reason took hold at the Guardian, where the problem confronting novelists became a platform for the battle to be fought.

Clearly, if writers were barred from creating characters with attributes that we do not “own” (gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and so on), fiction would be impossible. Stories would be peopled by clones of the author. Since trespassing into otherness is a foundation of the novelist’s work, should we restrict ourselves in some way, so as to avoid doing violence to those who identify with our characters? The injunction to refrain from “cultural appropriation” sounds like a call for censorship, or at best a warning to self-censor, an infringement of the creative liberty to which so many surprising people profess themselves attached.

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Feelings are understandably very raw in Portland at the moment. With good reason. For very pragmatic reasons, Portland’s mayor, Ted Wheeler, has called for the suspension of constitutional rights.

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2) I have confirmed that the City of Portland has NOT and will not issue any permits for the alt right events scheduled on June 4th or June 10th. The Federal government controls permitting for Shrunk Plaza, and it is my understanding that they have issued a permit for the event on June 4th.

3) I am calling on the federal government to IMMEDIATELY REVOKE the permit(s) they have issued for the June 4th event and to not issue a permit for June 10th. Our City is in mourning, our community’s anger is real, and the timing and subject of these events can only exacerbate an already difficult situation.

4) I am appealing to the organizers of the alt-right demonstrations to CANCEL the events they have scheduled on June 4th and June 10th. I urge them to ask their supporters to stay away from Portland. There is never a place for bigotry or hatred in our community, and especially not now.

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The other day, a young lawyer twitted at me about my generation “spitting at vets” when they returned home from Vietnam. This came in response to my twit about students walking out of their graduation ceremony to protest the vice president. While it was unduly defensive, the more important problem was that it was factually wrong.

There were many of us who disagreed vehemently with the Vietnam war. There were a few who spit on returning vets, the “baby killers” to the most radical. This was not, however, a stereotype of my generation, but an anomaly*, which is why a baby lawyer today is aware it happened. So smart and so wrong at the same time.

I was far closer to World War II than a Millennial is to Vietnam. Our fathers fought, and some died, fighting literally Hitler. We were weaned on their suffering and sacrifice. Spare me the presentism of Yippies spitting on returning vets. My generation recognized the sacrifices suffered for this nation. This is one of the many reasons we fight for our rights while others believe them no longer applicable today. Continue reading →

There is a nobility in Cervantes’ Don Quixote’s quest to tilt at windmills despite the fact that we know he’s nuts and won’t win. It’s romantic to fight for a lost cause in the name of morality.

For the rest of his life, Unamuno urged his fellow Spaniards to practice quixotism, which meant adopting the moral courage necessary to fight for lost causes without caring what the world thinks. Today, when much of society and politics — both in and outside the United States — looks like a lost cause to a great number of people, we might do well to consider Quixote’s brand of lunacy.

There is an obvious flaw to the exhortation: morality is a highly subjective goal. Both sides of the same fight believe in the morality of their cause, and both may be right. They just don’t agree. That’s why claims of morality may be heartwarming, “without caring what the world thinks,” but unavailing as a metric for policymaking.

Following the outrage at Evergreen State College over whether Professor Bret Weinstein wasn’t social justice-y enough, the kids met with their dean. It produced some heated words that made the confrontation with Weinstein seem remarkably less delusional. Continue reading →

The use of Jeralyn Merritt’s “life plus cancer” as the rhetorical means of making the point that our notion of punishment has run out of room to inflict harm has an analogy in the health care debate. It’s hard to see at first, but reared its ugly head in the final paragraph of Elisabeth Rosenthal’s op-ed:

Today, Mr. Albert, 52, is not happy with the price of his family’s high-deductible Obamacare policy: $2,000 a month. Even so, he said: “The A.C.A. was a lifesaver for us. Everyone in my family has something that could be defined as a pre-existing condition.”

For the lawyers reading this, let me do the math: that’s a deductible under the ACA of $24,000 per year.* It’s unclear where that comes from, or whether that’s all deductible and co-pay is on top of it. There’s no mention of how much Albert pays for his family’s health insurance premiums, But if you add up all the numbers, it’s a lot of money.

“It’s expensive but I don’t have to worry about being excluded from insurance or about bankruptcy anymore.”

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The word “heroes” has become as loaded and meaningless as so many others used to bolster politics. Cops love the word, pinning medals on their chests to prove it, even if the medals prove nothing more than they need trinkets in addition to paychecks to feel worthy.

Three men in Portland, however, did what heroes do. A racist nutjob yelled at a couple of women for not being as white as his delusion demanded, and they stood up to stop him.

Taliesin Namkai-Meche, 23

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