by Bill Otis · Jun 28, 2020 6:28 pm
What do we need in a President? Maybe someone who thinks for himself, has the courage to stand against the winds of a debased culture, and understands, even if just intuitively, that the United States, though in need of a continuous struggle for improvement, has been a force for good in the world like no country that has existed before.
I don’t know this person’s political party. But I just found my candidate.
by Bill Otis · Jun 28, 2020 2:31 pm
As I noted in an earlier post, no normal person disagrees with the proposition that black lives matter. So the obvious question is: What can we do to preserve and enhance them?
This is not a hard question, because we’ve been preserving and enhancing black lives for an entire generation. We didn’t do it by tearing down statues, defacing monuments, chucking bricks through store windows or setting up lawless “autonomous zones.” Liberals know perfectly well how we did it, but don’t want to admit it because that would confound The Received Woke Wisdom. Jason Riley of the WSJ spills the beans, however.
by Bill Otis · Jun 26, 2020 7:15 am
Since no normal person thinks that black lives do not matter, I thought it would be worthwhile trying to see what else is in the Black Lives Matter program. Fortunately, this got looked into by Paul Mirengoff at PowerLine. Here are some of the goodies:
The retroactive decriminalization, immediate release and record expungement of all drug related offenses and prostitution, and reparations for the devastating impact of the “war on drugs” and criminalization of prostitution, including a reinvestment of the resulting savings and revenue into restorative services….
Reparations for the wealth extracted from our communities through environmental racism, slavery, food apartheid….
A divestment from industrial multinational use of fossil fuels and investment in community- based sustainable energy solutions….
In other words, BLM has ambitions well beyond, and having nothing to do with, police behavior. It has a comprehensive, far Left agenda taking root in a vision of America as a centuries-long racist cesspool.
by Bill Otis · Jun 24, 2020 2:13 pm
Police, who take a relentless battering from Those Who Are High-Minded — especially lawyers (and criminal defense lawyers in particular) — are trusted more than twice as much by the public as their finger-waving critics. But it’s not lawyers’ hubris or hypocrisy that most earns them the the public’s distrust. It’s spectacles like this.
by Bill Otis · Jun 23, 2020 2:53 pm
Tomorrow, one of the line prosecutors in the Roger Stone case will testify before the House Judiciary Committee. A news story relating part of his prepared testimony tells us that the attorney, Aaron Zelinsky, plans to say, among other things:
What I saw was the Department of Justice exerting significant pressure on the line prosecutors in the case to obscure the correct Sentencing Guidelines calculation to which Roger Stone was subject – and to water down and in some cases outright distort the events that transpired in his trial and the criminal conduct that gave rise to his conviction….What I heard – repeatedly – was that Roger Stone was being treated differently from any other defendant because of his relationship to the President. I was told that the Acting U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, Timothy Shea, was receiving heavy pressure from the highest levels of the Department of Justice to cut Stone a break, and that the U.S. Attorney’s sentencing instructions to us were based on political considerations.
Zelinsky’s account seems both odd and oddly incomplete.
by Bill Otis · Jun 21, 2020 6:54 am
Geoffrey Berman was appointed interim US Attorney for the Southern District of New York (Manhattan) by then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions. After his 120-day interim appointment had run its course, he was re-appointed by the US District Court. Over the last couple of days, we have seen quite a drama as Attorney General Barr announced Berman’s “resignation;” Berman said he had never resigned and was staying put until a successor was confirmed; Barr then fired him, saying it was at the direction of the President; and (yesterday) Berman said he was resigning forthwith.
The House Judiciary Committee has scheduled a hearing to look into this. No doubt it will be chock full of politics and accusations that the President and/or Barr were trying to derail potentially damaging investigations in the run-up to the election. In this post, however, I’m going to put the politics to one side and address the quite interesting question whether, under the governing statutes and the Constitution’s separation of powers principle, the President can fire a court-appointed US Attorney. Continue reading . . .
by Bill Otis · Jun 17, 2020 9:58 pm
When I was a federal prosecutor, I often thought that drug dealers would do better if they’d just put their ingenuity into an honest business. I was reminded of that thought again today.
by Bill Otis · Jun 17, 2020 12:03 pm
“Bail reform” has been one of the most prominent of the innovations the Left has been pushing. The theory is that no one should be held in jail simply because he can’t pay cash bail to assure his later court appearance. That would be the “criminalizing of poverty,” to use one of their favorite phrases. Moreover, it would interrupt (and often for practical purposes end) the defendant’s employment, such as that might be. We need to overcome our class-ridden, knee-jerk punitive responses to embrace “real solutions” and compassion.
Heard that before?
OK. Here, in a video that justifiably has gone viral, is what compassion looks like.
by Bill Otis · Jun 16, 2020 6:02 pm
If you’re a normal person leading a normal life, you welcome the police in your community (as Kent has noted) and have a high regard for their integrity. If, however, you’re an academic, particularly at a prestigious place like Yale, Stanford, Harvard or Berkeley, you view police as a racist menace with power that needs to be curtailed if not ended completely. What’s worse, in a way, is that if you have a minority view on campus — if your thinking about police Does Not Conform To The Standard — you are the object of derision or worse. Prof. Jonathan Turley takes note of the sad and ominous state of diversity of thought in academia:
First, it is increasingly rare for any conservative or libertarian to be hired on a faculty, particularly a highly ranking school like Berkeley…In my thirty years of teaching, I have never seen the level of open intolerance for opposing views on faculties as I have seen in the last few years. I have spoken with young law professors across the country who say that they feel that they cannot speak openly to colleagues about such issues because they fear they will be fired or punished by their liberal colleagues. Indeed, many faculty are now quite clear in forcing colleagues either support or stay silent on such issues.
Jonathan’s full piece is here.
by Bill Otis · Jun 16, 2020 11:37 am
We have been repeatedly admonished to distinguish between peaceful protesters, on the one hand, and rioters and arsonists, on the other. For many of those in the Defund movement, my guess is that that’s a fair and needed distinction. But many isn’t everyone. As we now hear from a leading voice on the Left, Nation magazine, violence and looting are not the mere occasional incident, or a few hotheads or opportunists taking advantage. Violence is integral to achieving their aims.
The beans get spilled here: In Defense of Destroying Property
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