How A City Commits Suicide
The Wall Street Journal today has an article about how Minneapolis is remembering George Floyd. Buried ten paragraphs down is the real story about what’s happening in that city.
Author: Bill Otis
A Surprise Backer for the New Independent Counsel
It’s not news by now that AG Barr has appointed US Attorney John Durham as an Independent Counsel to continue to pursue the investigation of the Russia probe that fueled the failed impeachment effort against President Trump. Although some of Barr’s opponents have criticized the appointment as a political stunt, one prominent lawyer wrote this in defense of precisely this sort of appointment:
“The need for a special counsel who is to some extent independent of the Attorney General and free of the conflicts of interest that exist when an Administration investigates alleged wrongdoing of its own officials has unfortunately been demonstrated several times in [the last] century.”
Who is the mystery author?
Will Biden Throw in with Defense Bar Extremists or with America?
There is understandably a good deal of speculation about whether Joe Biden intends to govern from the center-left or the far left. Biden won the nomination largely as a centrist-sounding counterpoint to the left wing in his Party, represented by Sen. Elizabeth Warren and particularly by Sen. Bernie Sanders. But his platform on criminal justice is anything but centrist, calling, for example, for elimination of the death penalty (a punishment a clear majority of Americans support) and an end to — rather than merely a reduction in — mandatory minimum sentences, freeing judges to impose little to no punishment regardless of the savagery of the crime.
Which way will Mr. Biden go?
Gallup: Majority Support for the Death Penalty Steady at 55%
Gallup does a yearly poll on support for the death penalty. This year’s edition finds that support at 55%, essentially unchanged from the level going back three years to 2017. So this would seem not to be much news. But if you look a little more closely, there is some news in the poll — news not favorable to abolitionist forces.
Acquitted Conduct Diatribe Flops Again
For years, the defense bar and legal academia have been pounding their chests about how grossly unconstitutional it is for a defendant to be sentenced in part based on conduct for which he was acquitted. And as is often the mantra with these people, they are always on the cusp of victory (see, e.g., the constant chipper refrain that “the death penalty is dying” notwithstanding that the country has pretty steadily had an execution every 16 days for the last five years).
Today, the Supreme Court (without a single dissent so far as I can tell) rejected the latest effort to get it to ban district courts from basing sentencing on acquitted conduct, LUDWIKOWSKI V. UNITED STATES, No. 19-1293.
Supreme Court Summarily Vacates Pro-Murderer Judge; Killer Executed
Mike wrote earlier today about the last minute stay of execution entered by Tanya Chutkan, a turbo-charged public defender made a federal district judge by Pres. Barack Obama. The stay was for the benefit of Orlando Hall, who, along with his associates, kidnapped, beat, raped, tortured and then buried alive a 16 year-old girl.
The stay survived for a few hours before being summarily overturned by a 6-3 vote of the Supreme Court. Justices Breyer, Sotomayor and Kagan dissented without opinion. Hall received his long overdue justice shortly thereafter.
Judges like Chutkan are a disgrace to the bench. They are not there to do justice or follow the law. They are there to impose their personal opinions on us lesser creatures. They should find, or be shown, another line of work.
DC Circuit Rejects Inmates’ Lethal Injection Claim
In a somewhat convoluted but important ruling, a liberal-dominated panel of the DC Circuit today affirmed a lower court’s rejection of several death row inmates’ request for an injunction against the Bureau of Prisons’ use of unprescribed drugs to use in lethal injections. Ed Whelan has a quick analysis. Continue reading . . .
Does the Public Want Criminal Justice to Become More Lenient?
In a word, no. This is the unambiguous finding of a new Gallup poll featured on Sentencing Law and Policy. But of course the spin is very different.
Defunding the Police, Minneapolis Edition
While, as Mike notes, other cities are making ready to defund their police, Minneapolis has a head start. Here are the results, as reported by none other than the Washington Post. Its headline is, “Minneapolis violence surges as police officers leave department in droves.” The story underneath the headline doesn’t get any better; instead, it gets considerably worse. Continue reading . . .
The End for Court Packing and Defunding the Police
In the wake of last week’s election, Republicans currently have 50 Senate seats and Democrats have 48. Depending on the results of two special elections to be held in Georgia on January 5, Democrats could conceivably get to a 50-50 tie, with VP-elect Harris holding the tie-breaking vote. That could mean the passage of radical measures such as defunding the police or packing the federal courts, in particular the Supreme Court. But we now know that, regardless of the outcome of the special elections, those things will not be happening in the upcoming Congress.
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