Category: Notorious Cases

Jussie Smollett, Lying to the Very End

by · Mar 10, 2022 5:58 pm

CNN has this story about today’s sentencing of actor Jussie Smollett.  He was given 30 months of felony probation, ordered to pay restitution of more than $120,000 and a $25,000 fine and spend 150 days in jail for making false reports to police that he was the victim of a hate crime in January 2019.  In fact, Smollett himself hired two men he knew to stage the “attack” so that he could go on the now routine diatribe about how Amerika is a racist and homophobic cesspool.  One might think he was trying out for a spot in the administration of an Ivy League college.

Mr. Smollett’s performance today did not disappoint.

Continue reading . . .

Leading Progressive Prosecutor Federally Indicted for Lying and Cheating

by · Jan 13, 2022 6:38 pm

Baltimore is a disaster area for its grotesque number of murders.  Almost all the victims are black.  The police force, at one time at least marginally effective, has been cowed ever since the Freddie Gray indictments.  In that case from 2015, the State’s Attorney charged six police officers with a variety of offenses stemming from the death, in police custody, of Mr. Gray, a small-time (though repeat) drug dealer.  The state obtained exactly zero convictions on any of the counts against any of the officers, but the damage to desperately needed robust policing was done.

The State’s Attorney responsible for that debacle of a prosecution and the consequent cratering of police morale is Marilyn Mosby.  I blogged about Mosby’s startling incompetence and leftist political grandstanding many times (too many to go back and retrieve right now).

Today Ms. Mosby was indicted by the Biden Justice Department for lying and cheating in order to get her hands on moola sufficient to finance  —  ready now?  —  a fancy rental property in Florida.

For those of you still wondering about the true mindset of “prosecutors” who favor the interests of hoodlums over those of ordinary citizens, welcome to the window into the deeper-than-you-thought embrace of criminality that this case gives us.  It shouldn’t come as a surprise. Continue reading . . .

The Demand for Racism Exceeds the Supply

by · Dec 9, 2021 4:33 pm

Black actor Jusse Smollett was found guilty today by a Chicago jury of lying to police when he reported being the victim of a hate crime in the early morning hours of a frigid night near his apartment almost three years ago.  As the WSJ reports, “Mr. Smollett was the star of the hit show ‘Empire’ when he told police that two men had used racist, antigay language and a pro-Trump slogan before hitting and kicking him and placing a noose around his neck around 2 a.m. on Jan. 29, 2019.”

According to the jury, the whole thing was made up, as (necessarily) was Smollett’s trial testimony, plus numerous of his public statements reiterating his “victimhood.”

Continue reading . . .

Breaking News: The Media is Pushing Racism

by · Dec 1, 2021 3:20 pm

As if we already did not know this, but sometimes the national media exposes itself so blatantly it defies logic.  Jason Riley has this piece in the Wall Street Journal discussing the amazing double standard in the way the national media covered the death of George Floyd, the Rittenhouse case and the Waukesha massacre.  “The protests that followed Floyd’s death rested on two assumptions. The first is that Floyd, a career criminal and drug addict, was somehow representative of black America, which is not only false but deeply insulting. The second is that police acted out of racial animus, which has never been proven. This is what happens when racial identity becomes the centerpiece of politics and public life in a multiracial society.”  But that was the prevailing narrative and the riots and murders swept the country in response to Floyd’s death were generally reported as justified.  “The Biden administration has picked up where the Obama administration left off.”  Although the criminals killed by Rittenhouse were white, he was immediately characterized as a racist white supremacist in “a clumsy attempt by President Biden and his allies to further a narrative about bias in the criminal justice system.”

Continue reading . . .

The Ahmaud Arbery Verdicts and the Felony-Murder Rule

by · Nov 24, 2021 2:11 pm

The felony-murder rule, in effect in some form in most states, is the controversial rule that if a person is killed during the commission of certain felonies, all parties to the felony are guilty of murder of that person. The rule can be harsh in some applications, and I agree that some judicious pruning is in order in many jurisdictions, but many critics want to get rid of it altogether.

Here is the WSJ’s report of the today’s verdicts in the Ahmaud Arbery case:

Travis McMichael, 35, chased Mr. Arbery with his father, Gregory McMichael, 65, and William “Roddie” Bryan Jr., 52, in two pickup trucks on Feb. 23, 2020. Travis McMichael shot Mr. Arbery three times with a 12-gauge shotgun, killing him.

Travis McMichael was found guilty on all counts, including one count of malice murder and four counts of felony murder. Gregory McMichael was found guilty of four counts of felony murder and acquitted on a charge of malice murder. Mr. Bryan was convicted on three counts of felony murder and acquitted on malice murder and an additional felony murder charge.

Two of the three would have been acquitted of murder, and convicted only of non-homicide offenses, if Georgia did not have the felony-murder rule. Continue reading . . .

Is the Federal Death Penalty Act’s Evidence Rule Unconstitutional?

by · Oct 25, 2021 10:43 am

Is the Federal Death Penalty Act’s evidence provision unconstitutional? Does the defendant have a constitutional right to introduce evidence of marginal probative value outweighed by other considerations, which the statute says the trial judge may exclude?

These are the surprising implications of the defense argument in the Boston Marathon Bomber case, argued in the U.S. Supreme Court October 13. I suppose if you are defending the indefensible you have to argue something. But it is surprising when a lawyer barely mentions the primary ground of the decision she is asking to have affirmed. Continue reading . . .

SCOTUS Appears Poised to Re-Instate Death Penalty for Boston Marathon Bomber

by · Oct 13, 2021 3:11 pm

The Supreme Court today heard argument in one of the most prominent death penalty cases of the last few decades, that of Dzhokar Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon bomber.  News reports from the Washington Post and CNN  —  neither outlet being friendly to capital punishment  —  suggest that the Court will reverse the First Circuit and re-instate Tsarnaev’s thoroughly earned death sentence.

Continue reading . . .

Kennedy Family Disagreement on Sirhan Parole

by · Aug 31, 2021 3:01 pm

In last week’s post, I noted the press report that two of Sen. Robert Kennedy’s children spoke in favor of the parole of assassin Sirhan Sirhan. Turns out those two were definitely not speaking for the family as a whole. AP reports:

BOSTON — Former congressman Joseph P. Kennedy II, the oldest son of Robert F. Kennedy, denounced the possible parole of the man convicted of killing his father in California in 1968.

“Two commissioners of the 18-member California Parole Board made a grievous error last Friday in recommending the release of the man who murdered my father,” Kennedy wrote in the emailed statement released Sunday. “I understand that there are differing views about ending the sentence of this killer, including within my own family. But emotions and opinions do not change facts or history.” Continue reading . . .

Sirhan Found Fit for Parole

by · Aug 27, 2021 3:40 pm

Sirhan Sirhan was deservedly sentenced to death for the assassination of Robert Kennedy. Regrettably, a double hit of judicial activism struck in 1972, saving him and many others from their deserved punishments. In February of that year, the California Supreme Court declared that capital punishment violated the California Constitution, brushing off the inconvenient truth that the constitutional convention had debated and voted on the precise question and decided it the other way.

A few months later, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that the way nearly all capital punishment statutes at the time gave wide-open discretion to the jury violated the United States Constitution. Only a year earlier, the high court had decided 6-3, in a thorough and scholarly opinion by Justice Harlan: “In light of history, experience, and the present limitations of human knowledge, we find it quite impossible to say that committing to the untrammeled discretion of the jury the power to pronounce life or death in capital cases is offensive to anything in the Constitution.” Had the Constitution been amended in the interim? No.

California had no life-without-parole alternative at the time, so all the death row inmates got life with parole, including Charles Manson and Sirhan Sirhan. But surely no parole board would actually let either of these two out, considering the magnitude of their crimes, right? Continue reading . . .