Justice Archives

I love The Wire as much as the next person, but we’d all be better off if real life didn’t seem to emulate it so damn much: Year in and year out, the New York Police Department proudly broadcasts its statistics for major crimes. And each year for more than a decade, its numbers have showed Read More

[cross-posted from TAPPED] From ColorLines comes this excellent video, and accompanying story, of what it feels like to be stopped and frisked by police in Brownsville, Brooklyn. That neighborhood, along with nearby neighborhoods of Crown Heights and East New York, are some of the “Impact Zones” flooded with police officers to address the sorts of Read More

Before Monday, I can’t say that I knew much – if anything –  about Jeffrey Lord. I was probably better off, considering his online column posted yesterday morning at The American Spectator about Shirley Sherrod was breathtaking in its ignorance and shamelessness. Lord essentially called Sherrod a liar for using the word “lynch” to describe Read More

(x-posted from TAPPED) The New York Times has a great story about police officers using the stop, question, and frisk tactic in Brownsville, Brooklyn — one of the many areas designated an “impact zone” under commissioner Ray Kelly. Those zones are flooded with police officers, often new recruits, who reinforce small quality-of-life crimes like having Read More

ColorLines has been doing a fantastic job covering the trial of Johannes Mehserle, the cop who shot and killed Oscar Grant on a subway platform. Kai Wright flags a comment from the blog on the verdict. As a former defense attorney, I respect the jury system–it’s better than any alternatives. But jury trials can and Read More

(Cross-posted from TAPPED) Along with his fellow Republicans, Jeff Sessions spent much of the first day of Elena Kagan‘s confirmation hearings weirdly taking aim at the storied judicial career ofThurgood Marshall. Why? Because Marshall was an enemy of originalists, and the senators wanted to portray Kagan, who clerked for him, as cut from the same ideological cloth. Later Read More

Earlier this week, the FBI reported that crime was down across the country last year despite the faltering economy and rising unemployment. Over at TAPPED, Adam Serwer has a post that does a good job explaining why the commonly held idea that prolonged downturns lead to spikes in crime is off base: UCLA professor Mark Read More

It seems like the best way to point out the tragic absurdity of capital punishment is simply to look to Texas, which puts to death more people than any other state. A few months ago, the Lone Star State was the focus of national scrutiny after a New Yorker article on the case of Cameron Read More

BitchPhd‘s M_Leblanc, guest-posting at TAPPED, on the deficit of empathy in the legal profession: The hyper-intellectual, logic-focused law school environment denigrates feelings. Even when the issues were deeply personal, we were supposed to regard classroom and extracurricular discourse as purely academic. This mentality goes beyond the confines of the university. I am reminded of the Read More

[via.] This comment leapt out at my while reading the NYT’s scene story on Arizona’s SB 1070, the state’s draconian new immigration law. …Ron White, 52, said he felt a sense of relief that something was finally being done about “the illegals” — whom he blames for ills like congregating on the streets, breaking into Read More

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