The Push to End Qualified Immunity Gets a Cold Shoulder

by · Oct 18, 2021 7:57 am

There has been a loud campaign for years now, led by a number of libertarians and some liberals, to end qualified immunity for the police.  The gist of their argument is that police who behave properly don’t need it, and the others shouldn’t have it.  Their legal hook is that QI is a “judge-created doctrine” with no anchor in the text of the Constitution (that the Left gets that one out without choking has to be a source of no little wonderment).

Kent has briefly and persuasively dispatched this argument before, and the Supreme Court was having none of it today, reversing two lower court cases that had refused to grant QI to police.  When, as in these cases, the anti-police side can’t even get Justice Sotomayor, you know it’s time for them to move on (which they’re not about to anyway).

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Soros-Funded DAs Presiding Over a Bloodbath

by · Oct 14, 2021 3:09 pm

In 2003, progressive hedge fund billionaire George Soros emerged as a major player in national politics when he gave $23 million in a failed attempt to defeat George W. Bush.  In the years that followed he continued to pour millions into liberal causes and national campaigns and in 2020 was the largest single contributor to liberal candidates and causes in the entire country, giving a reported $50 million to PACs funding campaigns ranging from Joe Biden for President to progressive candidates for local district attorney races.  Since 2015, Soros’ New York based Open Society Foundations (there are three) have funneled millions through a network of non-profit “527″ groups spread across the country, to encourage the adoption of laws reducing sentences for habitual criminals and to elect district attorneys who refuse to seek the death penalty for murderers, refuse to prosecute drug dealers, thieves and wife beaters, and seek the shortest sentences possible for violent offenders.

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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.

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Newsom Signs Bills Reducing Sentences

by · Oct 12, 2021 2:26 pm

Doubling down on his commitment to empty out California’s prisons, Governor Gavin Newsom signed several bills last Friday to block sentence increases for habitual felons and drug dealers.  Patrick McGreevy of the Los Angeles Times reports that Newsom signed SB 81, introduced by Alameda County Democrat Nancy Skinner, to require that judges dismiss sentence increases (called enhancements) for using a gun in a crime or due to prior convictions.   According to Skinner eliminating these enhancements would reduce the “discriminatory racial impact” on minority criminals.  The fact that blacks commit 7 times as many felonies as whites and 93% of their victims are other blacks is not of importance.

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Time’s Up in Times Square

by · Oct 12, 2021 1:49 pm

One of the great accomplishments of New York’s former law-and-order Mayors Giuliani and Bloomberg was to rescue Times Square from the disgrace it had become and make it once again a vibrant place that people wanted to visit.

To the surprise of no one with sense, in two terms of crime-and-disorder Mayor Bill de Blasio, Times Square has descended back into the sewer. Nicole Gelinas has this article in the City Journal with the above title. Continue reading . . .

CA Law Banning Private Prisons Overturned

by · Oct 11, 2021 2:28 pm

In a 2-1 decision last week a panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a California law phasing out private detention facilities.  Josh Gerstein of Politico reports that the divided panel held that AB 32, signed into law by Gavin Newsom in 2019, unconstitutionally interferes with the federal government’s exclusive authority to enforce immigration law.  California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who authored AB 32 while serving in the state Assembly, vowed to continue the fight to uphold the law, presumably with an appeal of the panel’s decision to the full Ninth Circuit.

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Study: Cops are Abandoning Big City Police Departments

by · Oct 8, 2021 1:41 pm

A study by the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund (LELDF) reports that police officers in ten large urban police departments are retiring or resigning at unprecedented levels.   A story by Fox News reporter Peter Aitken quotes LELDF President Jason Johnson, “In the wake of the anti-police movement and Floyd protests, cops —unwanted and unappreciated by their political leaders —are running for the exits. Resignations and retirements at the largest police agencies in the United States are skyrocketing while recruitment is tanking.”  The study compiled data from police agencies in Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Austin, Las Vegas, Chicago, San Jose, Los Angeles County, Washington DC, San Francisco, and Miami-Dade from June 1, 2020 to April 30, 2021.

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Missouri Executes Triple Murderer

by · Oct 6, 2021 2:22 pm

Despite appeals from the Pope and racial activists including Congressman Cori Bush,  triple murderer Earnest Johnson was executed by lethal injection Tuesday evening.   Jim Salter of the Associated Press reports that Johnson  was sentenced to death for the February 1994 murders of three at Casey’s General Store in Columbia.  Johnson, who intended to rob the store for money to buy drugs, waited until closing time before pulling a gun on the manager, 46-year-old Mary Bratcher, and demanding that she open the safe.  After Bratcher tried to flush the safe key down a toilet, Johnson shot her and employees Mable Scruggs, 57 and Fred Jones, 58.  When all three survived the gunshots, Johnson attacked them with a claw hammer and a screwdriver.  A mountain of evidence left the jury with no question regarding Johnson’s guilt.

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The Riddles of Harmless Error and Habeas Corpus – Part II

by · Oct 5, 2021 7:22 pm

Today the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral argument in Brown v. Davenport, No. 20-826 (transcript here; audio here).

The issue in this case involves the standard of review federal habeas courts must apply when reviewing a state court’s determination of harmless error. Davenport was partially shackled during his trial for first-degree murder. On direct appeal, the state appellate courts found that his partial shackling was unconstitutional, but was harmless beyond a reasonable doubt under the standard announced in Chapman v. California (1968). Continue reading . . .

Liberals Lie While People Die

by · Oct 5, 2021 4:02 pm

In recent years the gap between fact and fiction in American journalism has become so wide that articles citing completely false “facts” are routinely featured in once-respected news sources.  One recent example is a September 29 article in the San Francisco Examiner by Opinion Editor Gil Duran.  The piece focuses on the tragic September 4 sexual assault and murder of 61-year-old Molly Tibbitts in Sacramento.   Habitual felon Troy Davis was arrested for these crimes along with killing the victim’s dogs and setting fire to her home.   Davis had been arrested for stealing a car last June and was released without bail.   As one might expect, the Tibbitts family, her friends and neighbors and law enforcement leaders wanted to know why a repeat felon on parole got released on zero bail after stealing a car three months before the murder.  Duran contends that the Sacramento County’s “pro-Trump” Sheriff “may deserve some of the blame.”  He also suggests that if this crime had occurred in his former home of San Francisco, or in Los Angeles, Republicans would have blamed the progressive Chesa Boudin and George Gascon, both of whom support zero bail.

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