Author: Bill Otis

The Dishonesty of Biden’s Choice for No. 3 at the Justice Department

by · Mar 12, 2021 12:45 pm

President Biden has nominated Vanita Gupta to be Associate Attorney General, the third highest position in the Justice Department.  Gupta was Assistant AG for Civil Rights under Obama.  As such, she was asked by the Attorney General, then Loretta Lynch, for a recommendation whether DOJ should seek the death penalty against the mass killer of black worshipers, Dylann Roof.  Gupta recommended against it on the preposterous grounds that mitigating factors outweighed aggravating ones.

She was asked about her role in making that recommendation at her Senate confirmation hearing.  Instead of telling the truth, she did a fancy dance designed to mislead the Judiciary Committee.  It was a deception worthy of a pickpocket, not someone who hopes to get a job overseeing the prosecution of criminals.  For her flagrant deceit alone, she should be rejected (indeed, her nomination should be withdrawn).

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The Massive “Murder Tax” on the Poor

by · Mar 9, 2021 7:41 pm

My friend Sean Kennedy, a visiting fellow at the Maryland Public Policy Institute, has the specifics about how America’s unprecedented murder spike in 2020, fueled in part by coerced police pull-backs and partial de-funding, has brought catastrophic economic damage to those least able to withstand it.  As Sean sums it up:

[T]he crime tax costs jobs, reduces property values, deters investment, and undermines trust in public institutions  —  and, destroying opportunity, dashes hope for those who need it most….Crime may not pay but it certainly costs, a lot. Economically struggling Americans need relief, so let’s start by cutting the most regressive tax of all—violence.

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Why Do We Have a “School to Prison Pipeline”?

by · Mar 8, 2021 11:44 am

For the most part, we don’t.  A recent report from the Pew Foundation, linked here at Sentencing Law and Policy, shows that the the number of people housed in prisons and jails in the USA is just over one-half of one percent of the population (that is, 1.8 million out of 330 million).  This sliver of one percent is what the “justice reform” crowd ceaselessly and dishonestly refers to as “mass incarceration.”

But to the extent we do have a “school to prison pipeline” in some jurisdictions, the following article reporting on conditions in Baltimore tells us why:    “City student passes 3 classes in four years, ranks near top half of class with 0.13 GPA”

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Should Prosecutors Take a Pass on Stealing?

by · Mar 8, 2021 10:28 am

For practical purposes, that is the question raised by this piece in the Washington Post authored by three professors at the Georgetown University Law Center’s Criminal Defense & Prisoner Advocacy Clinic.  You will not be surprised to hear that their answer is “yes.”  Specifically, they opine that, “The U.S. attorney’s office should stop criminally prosecuting nonviolent misdemeanors,” which means, in practice, that it should stop prosecuting almost all the massive amount of stealing that gets done in Washington, DC’s stores.

I respectfully dissent.

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Joe Biden and His Critical Race Theory Allies Versus the Reality of Surging Violent Crime

by · Mar 7, 2021 12:47 pm

Commentary Magazine has a long and wonderfully wide-ranging article about two present-day phenomena on a collision course:  The Critical Race Theory alliances that have captured much of President Biden’s attention and seem to be shaping his criminal justice policies; and the massive (indeed, unprecedented) surge in violent crime we have seen unfolding for more than a year  —  a surge most pronounced in the cities friendliest to CRT and “progressive prosecutors,” e.g., Minneapolis and Philadelphia.

The basic question the article presents is whether Biden has forgotten his past support for sober criminal justice policies and the life-saving success he (and Bill Clinton and George W. Bush) had with them, and whether, if so, we are headed back to the bloody failures of the Sixties and Seventies  —  failures that exact a disproportionately high toll on minority communities.

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The Tide Starts to Turn

by · Mar 6, 2021 10:43 am

I’ve taken the title of this post from an entry on Power Line by my friend Steve Hayward.  He in turn is recounting a USAToday/Ipsos survey titled, “Stark divide on race, policing emerges since George Floyd’s death.”  The gist of it is captured in the first sentence:

Americans’ trust in the Black Lives Matter movement has fallen and their faith in local law enforcement has risen since protests demanding social justice swept the nation last year, according to an exclusive USA TODAY/Ipsos Poll.

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Should Felons Decide What Sentences Felons Deserve?

by · Feb 25, 2021 2:06 pm

Sentencing Law and Policy has this thought-provoking post urging President Biden to make filling Sentencing Commission slots a priority, and recommending  —  you’ll never guess  —  “diversity.”  But it’s diversity of a notable kind.  The post’s final paragraph tells the story in only slightly scrubbed language:

In his pioneering 1972 book, Criminal Sentences: Law Without Order, Judge Marvin Frankel first advocated for a “Commission on Sentencing” to include “lawyers, judges, penologists, and criminologists, … sociologists, psychologists, business people, artists, and, lastly for emphasis, former or present prison inmates.”  As Judge Frankel explained, having justice-involved persons on a sentencing commission “merely recognizes what took too long to become obvious—that the recipients of penal ‘treatment’ must have relevant things to say about it.”  Judge Frankel’s insights remain ever so timely a half-century later, and the federal system can now follow a recent sound state example: Brandon Flood was appointed Secretary of the Pennsylvania Board of Pardons in 2019, not despite but largely because of his lived experience as an inmate and his numerous encounters with the criminal justice system.  President Biden’s could and should consider going even further by including multiple persons with diverse, direct experiences with U.S. justice systems in his nominations to the U.S. Sentencing Commission.

What to make of the suggestion that the inmates should decide how long other inmates remain in the asylum?

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Of Nosy Cops and Children Saved

by · Feb 21, 2021 1:54 pm

I saw this story recently in the WSJ and thought it had two lessons worth noting, one about when government agencies should intervene in family matters and one about when standard issue thinking about the obligations of criminal defense lawyers runs into basic decency.

It’s about a little boy who went to a diner with his family.  What happened next is both grotesque and uplifting.

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De-Fund the Police……Oh……..Wait………..

by · Feb 16, 2021 8:48 pm

Minneapolis, the site of George Floyd’s death in the hands of the police in May of last year, initially reacted as you might expect a city with far Left leadership to react  —  namely, to strike out against the police as a product of reflex rather than reflection.  The snarling demand was to de-fund and disband the police department.  In early June, the Minneapolis City Council declared an intent to restructure the department as a “new community-based system of public safety.”

But a funny thing happened on the way to de-funding.  Reality.

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