That bastion of deep thought and tabloid integrity, the New York Post, asks the question:

Just how many New Yorkers must die before Mayor de Blasio lets cops bring back stop-and-frisk?

Stacey Calhoun has a right to know. His nephew Jahhad Marshall — a 23-year-old aspiring chef — was caught in the crossfire and shot to death in Queens early Saturday, one of four horrific murders this weekend.

“We need stop-and-frisk,” a teary-eyed Calhoun told The Post. “Somebody has to put their foot down.”

There was a crime, a tragedy, and an uncle whose loss demands the evisceration of constitutional rights?  It’s not that Stacey Calhoun should be blamed for the desire to prevent the needless taking of his nephew’s life. Families grasp at anything they can when tragedy strikes. Continue reading →

Remember that “vertical” that caused some consternation?  Well, it’s alive! Meet Fault Lines, the new criminal law and justice section at Mimesis Law.  If you like what you read here (or hate it, we’re not picky about who reads), take a quick trip to Fault Lines, where you will get more pie than ever before.

The good news is that there will be posts from me, as well as Cristian Farias and Tamara Tabo, our inaugural team of writers.  Expect more writers as well, the primary criteria being that they be knowledgeable and honest.  We hope to have people writing from varying perspectives, challenging bias and each other. We look forward to making this as real as it gets when it comes to criminal justice issues.

The better news is that there will be no moderation of comments, except for spam. So if your comments failed to meet the threshold for thoughtfulness here, there is a soapbox for you at Fault Lines.

Now, please show Fault Lines a little love by checking it out. maybe leaving a comment, and adding it to your daily reads.  And no, you didn’t win the contest, but you’re all winners in my book. *hugs*

Public sector unionism was always conceptually flawed.  On the one hand, why should people who work for government be denied the same opportunity to collectively bargain as private sector employees? On the other, the incentives that justified private sector unions didn’t apply to the public sector, making the system untenable. Whoda thought? Me, actually.

But then, my doubts as to the viability of public sector unionism barely scratched the surface of the problem when it came to police unions.  There was another, entirely separate, dynamic at play, and we’re paying for it now.

In a New York Times op-ed, Jonathan Smith,  an associate dean of the law school at the University of the District of Columbia, and formerly a senior litigator in the civil rights division of the Department of Justice, explains what followed the 1960s Kerner Commission report on why minorities were rioting in the inner cities. Continue reading →

Police reports made the killing of Jermaine McBean on Dixie Highway in Oakland Park, Florida, clean as a whistle.  Carrying a rifle as he walked down the street, a call to 911 brought police to the scene. Broward County Deputy Peter Peraza arrived and says he told McBean to drop the gun.  Peraza says McBean turned and pointed the rifle at him, so he killed him. A righteous shoot.

Except for the damn photograph.

After Florida police shot Jermaine McBean to death as he walked home with an unloaded air rifle, they said there was no reason to believe he did not hear their orders to drop the weapon and that he pointed it at them.

But a newly emerged photo that shows headphones in McBean’s ears immediately after the 2013 shooting raises questions about the police version of events, including why the white earbuds were later found stuffed in the dead computer expert’s pocket.

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In 2010, New York’s Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman formed a commission. You remember, right? No? Well, of course not, because nobody gives a flying fuck about another commission, on which blue ribbon types serve and, years later, come up with ideas that no one cares about. Officialdom loves commissions. Nobody else cares.

But this commission was ahead of the curve.  Its mandate was to simplify and make more transparent the New York criminal law sentencing scheme, which has gone through knee-jerk twists and turns since George Pataki decided that he needed to be tough on crime to get re-elected.

New York’s body of sentencing laws is a patchwork, with the history of the state’s changing politics woven into it and over it.  As a result, the new report says, sentencing is “confusing and misleading” for prisoners and victims alike.

Historically, New York State’s sentences were all indeterminate: a judge could hand down a range of years that a prisoner might serve (such as 1-to-3 or 5-to-15).  When during that window the person would actually go home was unpredictable: it was up to a parole board.

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Remember that mother who came into your office to explain to you that her son was denied due process.  She was, if nothing else, impassioned, explaining all the reasons why her son should walk.  It was deeply moving. And legally worthless.  Had you brought the mother’s argument before the judge, whether in toto or selectively, you stood a good chance of a tongue-lashing for wasting the court’s time or being laughed out of the room.

So let’s give that crap a name, wrap it up in social justice rhetoric, and make it into a thing.  That’s what David Bornstein does in the New York Times Opinionator column, where he pushes the new concept of “participatory defense,” with special praise for the Cobarrubias Project.  Never heard of it?

The “what is participatory defense” section of their website begins with an anecdote, already a dead giveaway that it’s conceptually vapid and is grounded in an appeal to emotion:

If tradition holds, Tony’s mom will continue attending the meetings, and assist other families who find themselves in the position she once did. She will share with them what she learned here from others — how to partner with or push the public defender, how to dissect police reports and court transcripts, and how to build a sustained community presence in the courtroom to let judges and prosecutors know the person facing charges is not alone. Continue reading →

Suicide by cop is a thing.  The police have come to recognize it and, in a bizarre twist of logic, felt the freedom of being able to shrug off the pull of the trigger because he wanted to die anyway.  But then, sometimes a guy doesn’t really want to die, doesn’t really mean to kill himself.

Many  people who threaten suicide do so as a cry for help, not to achieve the end result of their own death.  But that’s a nuance, like many others, that can elude a police officer.  So when the trigger gets pulled, it no longer matters whether it was a person bent on committing suicide or just crying for help. He’s dead. Accomplishment unlocked.

Who knows what Justin Way had in mind as he lay in bed with a knife.  He was drunk. He got the crap beaten out of him when he lost his job. He was feeling bad. Real bad.

On May 11, Justin Way was drinking and threatening to hurt himself. 

Way’s live-in girlfriend, Kaitlyn Christine Lyons, said she’d caught Justin drinking a bottle of vodka, which she took away from him to pour out. She said he was drunk, lying in their bed with a large knife, saying he would hurt himself with it. She called a non-emergency number in an attempt to get her boyfriend to a local St. Augustine, Florida, hospital for help—and told them she did not feel threatened.

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Dr. Kipnis wrote once in a “slightly mocking tone” about neo-feminism run amok.  Having long since established her own feminist bona fides, she thought herself above the fray, a voice not so easily disparaged by cries of hater and misogynist.  When Northwestern prof Laura Kipnis wrote again at the Chronicle Review, there was nothing funny about it.

When I first heard that students at my university had staged a protest over an essay I’d written in The Chronicle Review about sexual politics on campus — and that they were carrying mattresses and pillows — I was a bit nonplussed. For one thing, mattresses had become a symbol of student-on-student sexual-assault allegations, and I’d been writing about the new consensual-relations codes governing professor-student dating. Also, I’d been writing as a feminist. And I hadn’t sexually assaulted anyone. The whole thing seemed symbolically incoherent.

Coherence, as Kipnis learned, has nothing to do with it.

Things seemed less amusing when I received an email from my university’s Title IX coordinator informing me that two students had filed Title IX complaints against me on the basis of the essay and “subsequent public statements” (which turned out to be a tweet), and that the university would retain an outside investigator to handle the complaints. Continue reading →

Scott Sanders was just doing his job, as the Santa Ana assistant public defender representing accused mass murderer Scott Dekraai before Judge Thomas Goethals. But what he found not only compelled the judge to throw the entire friggin’ DA’s office off the case, but may have opened up a can of worms no one could have imagined.

Via Dahlia Lithwick at Slate:

After literally years of alleged misconduct involving jailhouses informants, as well as prosecutors’ repeated failures to turn over exculpatory material, Judge Goethals determined in March that the office can simply no longer work on the case of mass murderer Scott Dekraai, who pleaded guilty last year to killing his ex-wife and seven others at a beauty salon in 2011.

This is the sort of epiphany that brings tears of joy to the eyes of conspiracy theorists everywhere, not to mention those who decry the buying and selling of testimony by jailhouse snitches. Continue reading →

Unlike David Post, I’m a real American and couldn’t care less about soccer. Sure, I joined my high school’s inaugural junior varsity soccer team, but quit after a few weeks. Kicking was fun, but who knew there would be all that running? My people have no tradition of running.

But Post’s point on jurisdiction of the FIFA indictment should send shivers up your spine.

As the Times story notes:

United States law gives the Justice Department wide authority to bring cases against foreign nationals living abroad, an authority that prosecutors have used repeatedly in international terrorism cases. Those cases can hinge on the slightest connection to the United States, like the use of an American bank or Internet service provider.

Continue reading →