by Bill Otis · Jul 26, 2020 9:40 pm
The new name is “mostly peaceful.” That’s the phrase the media use to describe the five or ten minutes Antifa and other thug groups take to organize themselves before they begin the evening’s “entertainment” of arson, rock throwing and assault in one major city after the next. But sometimes the, uh, peacefulness “intensifies.”
by Bill Otis · Jul 25, 2020 5:59 pm
The Seattle Chief of Police sent out a letter yesterday to advise business owners and residents of the city’s new plan to “de-militarize” her officers, thus to advance the reigning agenda in City Council. The letter has the advantages of honesty and brevity.
by Bill Otis · Jul 24, 2020 5:10 pm
Here’s the headline from the piece in today’s WSJ by my friend Sean Kennedy, a Visiting Fellow at the Maryland Public Policy Institute: You’re More Likely to Catch Covid at Home Than in Jail. The sub-head is: Early release policies have had no effect on transmission behind bars. But they have contributed to a crime wave. I thought these two paragraphs were particularly revealing:
While hundreds of millions of law-abiding Americans were on lockdown this spring, progressives were demanding that criminals be allowed to go free. So far, almost 100,000 inmates have been released from prisons and jails around the country—with more to come. It can be no coincidence that crime is on the rise in states where these mass releases took place….
Some savvy jailbirds saw a golden opportunity to win their freedom. Inmates at North County Correctional Facility in Castaic, Calif., sought release by deliberately infecting themselves with the coronavirus. At least 21 of 50 prisoners who were caught on video drinking hot water from the same cup eventually tested positive for Covid-19. It isn’t clear whether they got their wish.
by Bill Otis · Jul 23, 2020 5:59 pm
Underincarceration and the drumbeat for “sentencing reform” that lies behind it are the catalysts for tragic and avoidable murder. No humane society should tolerate such a thing, but ours does, routinely, simply to genuflect to demands by criminals and their swooning spokesmen to treat them as if our behavior were the problem, not theirs.
This is false, foolish, immoral, and lethal. Here’s the latest example.
by Bill Otis · Jul 23, 2020 1:27 pm
A well-regarded history professor at Harvard, Jill Lepore, recently wrote this in New York Magazine (emphasis added):
One study suggests that two-thirds of Americans between the ages of fifteen and thirty-four who were treated in emergency rooms suffered from injuries inflicted by police and security guards, about as many people as the number of pedestrians injured by motor vehicles.
Anyone spot something amiss here?
by Bill Otis · Jul 18, 2020 11:16 pm
In my last post, I noted that the woke culture’s drumbeat of hate against the United States was certain to have, and in fact is having, consequences. In part, they are being reflected in the surge of riots, arson and other violent crime that even the Left no longer bothers to deny. But while the denials have withered, in their place have come the dodges and excuses. One of the most popular is that (ever heard this one?) “correlation is not causation.” Hey, look — the story goes — violent crime has always tended to increase in warmer months. It’s not the woke culture’s anthem of fury; it’s just correlation with the weather. So what’s to worry?
What’s to worry is that if we tell people whose stability is none too good to start with that they are justified in their anger and hate, eventually they’ll believe us. And when they believe us, they’re going to act on what we’ve been telling them.
by Bill Otis · Jul 18, 2020 10:24 pm
When the dominant voices in the culture are telling us at 10,000 decibels that our country is a racist cesspool, that it routinely treats a large segment of its population with callousness if not cruelty, that its history is a stain and its promise a fraud, that is going to have consequences. We are starting to see them. One aspect of the display is the widespread, sudden and shocking increase in violence, documented in this post. Another, related aspect is in the attack on the monuments to our history — and not just Confederate monuments, which were a bait-and-switch — but on monuments to Lincoln, Grant, and Fredrick Douglass, among many others.
There was another attack last night. John Hinderaker has the story
by Bill Otis · Jul 16, 2020 10:49 pm
“Sentencing reform” is the intentionally opaque phrase given to abbreviated sentences and early release handed out to felons, often repeat drug pushers. The mantra is that “sentencing reform” restores families and returns renewed and productive men to the community.
That might be right every now and again. Certainly it’s all the reformers are willing to talk about. But a steadfast refusal to look at the costs of early release is as dishonest as it is dangerous. Hence this story from the New York Daily News: “Three men — longtime partners in crime — charged with gunning down dad in front of his young daughter in Bronx drive-by.”
by Bill Otis · Jul 16, 2020 3:43 pm
Relatively unnoticed among her several frenetic attempts to come to the aid of a child killer was Judge Tanya Chutkan’s order (wiped away by the Supreme Court last night) to stay the Purkey execution because the drug to be used had not been approved by the FDA as “safe” and effective, and had not been prescribed by a physician. Kent analysed this attempt here, but there is more that usefully could be said.
by Bill Otis · Jul 16, 2020 12:40 pm
In my view, criminal law properly conceived has nothing to do with race and everything to do with behavior. When I was a federal prosecutor (as an appellate lawyer), I typically did not know and did not care to know the defendant’s or the victim’s race. The only thing that mattered was that they were human beings entitled to fair-minded and sober application of the law.
But then, I’m decidedly un-woke. Trying to write on a criminal law blog without discussing race has become, in the moment, a hopeless enterprise. Thus it’s not because I prefer it, but because it’s been shoved in all our faces, that I feel constrained to point out that the concern (some might say obsession) with race has now officially gone nuts.
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