Jeff Sessions issued a memo to the United States Attorneys directing them to charge the highest provable offense possible. What this means is that the charging decision dictates the outcome under the regime of mandatory minimums. If this seems like deja vu all over again, that’s because it is. This was the protocol under Attorney General John Ashcroft.

In the interim, Attorney General Eric Holder issued a memo providing for greater exercise of prosecutorial discretion. As should be obvious, the problem with addressing the outcomes of “prison nation” and the draconian “War on Drugs” by memo is that the next guy gets to write a memo of his own.

In this case, Sessions, contrary to some suggestions, hasn’t quite done something new and horrible, but returned to the old and horrible days of Ashcroft.

“We are returning to the enforcement of the laws as passed by Congress, plain and simple,” Sessions said. “If you are a drug trafficker, we will not look the other way, we will not be willfully blind to your misconduct.”

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At Reason, Elizabeth Nolan Brown describes the execution of the “Human Trafficking” warrant:

“Everybody’s like, ‘Don’t move, don’t move or we’ll shoot you,'” Noel Navarete told local 4 News. His brother Isaias, 18, said he was in the bathroom when police kicked down the door.

According to family matriarch Maria Navarete, police told her to “shut up, you have no rights” when she asked what was happening. She claims police never showed her or anyone in the household a warrant.

Nothing surprising there, as being polite and gracious in the exercise of brute force isn’t part of the deal. And when the crime underlying the warrant is “human trafficking,” one of those phrases that catches in a person’s throat because it sounds so horrifying, who can blame the cops for not being genteel in their actions. Even if the people who are on the business end of their force are the children they’re there to save.

One of the teens was the family’s 13-year-old daughter, who lived there. She wound up face-down and handcuffed on the floor, along with the rest of her family, after cops cut through a locked gate outside the southwest Detroit home and entered with their guns drawn.

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Some cops will hate this. They will rail about how this teaches young people to think cops aren’t there to protect them, to serve them. They’ll mumble about the War on Cops and how young people should respect them because, well, people should just respect cops because reasons. Such fragile teacups, guns and shields notwithstanding.

The Talk. Black parents have been giving it to their black children for ages because they love their kids and want to keep them alive. Is it a shame they need to do this? Of course, but the shame isn’t that they give The Talk, but that they need to give The Talk. But they do.

[Virginia Assembly Delegate Jeion] Ward crafted a bill requiring driver’s education classes to teach students how to handle themselves during a traffic stop.

On Monday, Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D) signed Ward’s bill into law, making Virginia one of only a handful of states grappling with an issue made urgent by the high-profile wave of police-related shootings of African Americans in the past few years. Continue reading →

Hal Niedzviecki called bullshit on cultural appropriation. It didn’t go well for him.

Hal Niedzviecki, editor of Write — a publication for the union’s members — published an opinion piece in the spring 2017 issue titled “Writer’s Prompt.” In the article, in an issue dedicated to indigenous writing, Niedzviecki wrote: “In my opinion, anyone, anywhere, should be encouraged to imagine other peoples, other cultures, other identities.

“I’d go so far as to say there should even be an award for doing so — the Appropriation Prize for best book by an author who writes about people who aren’t even remotely like her or him.”

He didn’t wear a sombrero while writing it, or get soused on margaritas. He just challenged cultural appropriation. After all, if you seize someone else’s culture, then there won’t be enough for them. Continue reading →

Jamie Koehler offers, without commentary, a bit of trial transcript.

PROSECUTOR ON RE-DIRECT

Q: Okay. Ms. Smith, you do have a Yahoo e-mail account, right?

DEFENSE COUNSEL: Objection. Leading.

The prosecutor, of course, can’t lead his own witness. Not on direct. Not on re-direct, where a prosecutor will try to rehabilitate his witness after a withering cross. But in this case, the cross didn’t turn out to be particularly withering. Continue reading →

A few years ago, “good faith” was declared dead. Obama was still president and the Department of Justice was run by the people lionized today for their not being sycophants of the Trump administration. To some howls of disapproval, I disputed the contention as unworkable, the end of the American experiment. A nation cannot function without the presumption of regularity.

The beauty of such presumptions is that they are rebuttable.  The law may presume a public official to act in good faith, but that merely informs the parties of who has the burden to dispute the presumption and the burden of proof.

Yet, the Comey termination letter tests the presumption beyond the breaking point. As Julian Sanchez writes, the claim that he fired Comey for mishandling the Clinton email investigation is too ludicrous to be taken seriously. It’s as if Trump wasn’t even trying to come up with a credible story. It’s insulting. Lawprof Dawn Johnsen, at the WeHateTrump blog, argues that he’s not entitled to the deference otherwise shown presidents: Continue reading →

234,341. What kind of number is that?

I’ll give you a hint: it’s not how many days it feels like Trump’s been in office. Nor is it how many brain cells you lose when you watch an episode of Bill Nye Saves the World. It’s actually how many criminal insult investigations the German police conducted last year.

“Now David,“ I hear you say, quizzically, “I’m an American. Why do I give a fuck, as you appear to do, about what those demiliterate Teutons get up to in the wilderness of Central Europe? Hell, I’m apathetic about things that happen right here in our very own backyard. Why should I waste five minutes of my time reading your drivel?“

Well, consider this. That First Amendment of yours? Just as those who neglect to study history are condemned to repeat it, so too are you at risk of losing your free-speech rights unless you understand what goes on in places that never benefited politically from the Enlightenment. If that sounds a little hyperbolic, you’d do well to remember that the barbarians – who, in classic barbarian fashion, have chosen to invade the warm places first – are already at the gate.

At Berkeley and across the nation, there’s a large and growing group of people whose contempt for America’s liberties is matched only by their ignorance of its heritage. Each day, a new unprincipled, poorly written op-ed pops up in which they call for the U.S. to adopt a European-style censorship scheme, one that would allow them to bar speech they deem hurtful or hateful. Continue reading →

The case of Justin Thompson, who died following his assault by guards at the Washoe County Jail in Reno, is only the latest episode of scandalous brutality coming out of America’s jails/prisons. Thompson, a 35-year-old who suffered from mental illness, tried in vain to draw his last breath after being crushed, beaten, and taunted by guards. The Reno Gazette-Journal reports:

Videos released by the Washoe County Sheriff’s Office show in gut-wrenching detail the final hours of a Reno man with a mental illness who died after struggling against deputies who kept him pinned to the floor — his face covered with a spit hood — for more than 30 minutes.

Justin Thompson, 35, was booked into the Washoe County Jail on Aug. 3 and spent 24 hours pacing an empty holding cell in growing distress, curling in the fetal position while clutching his head, stuffing toilet paper in his ears, drawing on the walls with his own blood and climbing the metal sink to talk into the ceiling vent.

It took more than a day for jail personnel to decide Thompson needed to go to the emergency room. When he returned to the jail, the violent struggle that ultimately killed him occurred. The video shows Thompson wriggling under a crowd of deputies who kicked him, kneeled heavily on his back and applied painful arm-bar holds. Continue reading →

The New York State Senate, remiss in not using street gang hysteria to prove how tough on crime it can be in an age of incredibly low crime, is on the cusp of enacting Article 495 to the Penal Law, a new series of “Criminal Street Gang” crimes. Its opening salvo of definitions is a textbook example of how hard it is to write law.

S 495.05 DEFINITIONS. AS USED IN THIS ARTICLE, THE FOLLOWING TERMS SHALL MEAN AND INCLUDE:

1. “CRIMINAL STREET GANG” MEANS A STREET GANG THAT ENGAGES IN A PATTERN OF CRIMINAL STREET GANG ACTIVITY FOR ITS BENEFIT OR FOR THE BENEFIT OF ONE OR MORE MEMBERS. AS USED IN THIS ARTICLE, THE TERM “STREET GANG” MEANS AND INCLUDES ANY FORMAL OR INFORMAL ASSOCIATION IN FACT OF TWO OR MORE INDIVIDUALS IDENTIFIED BY A COMMON NAME, SIGN, DRESS, SYMBOLS, TATTOOS, OR OTHER MARK OR MARKINGS.

The definition is really two definitions lumped together. The first part defines “criminal street gang” as “a street gang that engages in a pattern of criminal street gang activity.” When a definition uses the word or phrase being defined to define it, it’s utterly worthless. For those who say, well, it says “criminal street gang,” and everybody knows what that means, you’re required to listen to Dylan all day today.  Continue reading →

Let’s get a few things straight off the top. It’s not unconstitutional for the president to fire the Director of the FBI. It’s not at all the same as firing Sally Yates and Preet Bharara. There are parallels to the Saturday Night Massacre, when Nixon caused the firing of Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, but there are significant differences as well.

While Jim Comey allowed, if not caused, himself to be thrust into a politically untenable position, no one who knows him thinks he was anything other than a stand-up guy. While he may have done wrong, it was not with malevolent intent.

But these things provide no cover for Trump’s firing of Jim Comey, a project in the works awaiting the confirmation of deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, to lend a veneer of respectability. The letters sought to rationalize it on two levels, that it was due to his handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation, and that Comey had thrice informed the president that he was not under investigation for any connection to Russia. Continue reading →