Category: Academia

Bogus “Study” on Bias in Jury Selection

by · Jun 26, 2020 2:03 pm

A recent study from The Death Penalty Clinic (read Anti-Death Penalty Clinic) at Berkeley Law, headed by long-time defense attorney Elisabeth Semel, has found that “California prosecutors routinely strike Black and Latino people from juries,” according to the Los Angeles Times. A piece by Michele Hanisee, of the Association of Los Angeles Deputy District Attorneys,  raises serious questions about the accuracy of the study and the bias of its author. Ms. Semel’s study, entitled “Whitewashing the Jury Box,”  examined 683 appellate rulings between 2006-2018 in non-death penalty cases where defense attorneys objected to a prosecutor’s  peremptory challenge of a juror.

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Welcome Back, McCarthyism

by · 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.

The Facts Matter

by · Jun 10, 2020 1:42 pm

For decades, the public has been admonished a dozen times a day by the media, liberal politicians and our betters in academia that government policy decisions they prefer are based upon evidence and data.  But what evidence and data are they talking about? Real science carefully reviews all the data.  Junk science supports a narrative.  Americans of all colors have been intentionally misinformed with regard to race relations, particularly when it comes to the police.  The the clarion call of liberal/progressives, race hustlers like Al Sharpton and a complicit major media is that racial bias was baked into the U.S. Constitution by the founding fathers and that 244 years later, every American institution remains systemically infused with bigotry.  In order to sustain this narrative, its adherents simply ignore the data.  In her remarks before the House Judiciary Committee today, Manhattan Institute scholar Heather MacDonald addressed that claim, highlighted by the tragic death of George Floyd, that systemic racism infects the police departments across America.

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