The new Jim Crow: the `drug war''s impact on the black community

from the Guardian
by Michelle Alexander
The New Jim Crow
....A new racial undercaste has been created in an astonishingly short period of time – a new Jim Crow system. Millions of people of colour are now saddled with criminal records and legally denied the very rights that their parents and grandparents fought for and, in some cases, died for.

Affirmative action, though, has put a happy face on this racial reality. Seeing black people graduate from Harvard and Yale and become CEOs or corporate lawyers – not to mention president of the United States – causes us all to marvel at what a long way we've come.

Recent data shows, though, that much of black progress is a myth. In many respects, African Americans are doing no better than they were when Martin Luther King was assassinated and uprisings swept inner cities across America. Nearly a quarter of African Americans live below the poverty line today, approximately the same percentage as in 1968. The black child poverty rate is actually higher now than it was then. Unemployment rates in black communities rival those in developing countries. And that's with affirmative action.

When we pull back the curtain and take a look at what our "colourblind" society creates without affirmative action, we see a familiar social, political, and economic structure – the structure of racial caste. The entrance into this new caste system can be found at the prison gate.

Philippine government warns citizens after China executes two men, one woman for drug transportation

Despite appeals for mercy by the Philippine government at the highest levels to Chinese authorities in Fujian three Filipinos convicted of heroin transport in excess of 30 grams -Ramon Credo, Elizabeth Batain and Sally Villanueva- were all executed by lethal injection on March 30. Capital punishment is not used in the Philippines.

PIA daily news in English, Tagalog, Cebuano, Hiligaynon, Ilocano, Waray, Pangalatok from around the Philippines

AALS criticizes ABA proposed law school accreditation standards

The AALS - the Association of American Law Schools - is the trade organization of America's accredited law schools.  It is dominated, of course, by the tenured faculty who have a vote in the law school governance scheme prescribed by the American Bar Association's Section on Legal Education.  Graduation from an ABA accredted law school is a prerequisite to admission to the bar in most states.  The ABA's Standards Review Committee has proposed changes that allow greater discretion to law schools in faculty governance schemes, and include a more elastic definition of what it means to be a full-time faculty member.

The AALS, in a strongly worded 10 page letter to the ABA, has criticized the  proposed revisions in the ABA committee reports on outcome measures, security of position, and transparency.  The law school leaders fear a de-emphasis on LSAT scores, a weakening of the power and security of tenured faculty, and a departure from the teach and research orientation of full-time faculty.  The ABA proposal, in the AALS view, leaves a lot of room for full-time faculty to be teachers but not scholars.


I don't have an informed position on all of this, but I have, of course, an orientation.  It is this:  LSAT score as a shortcut predictor of academic success is a strong measure; as a measure of success and skill as a lawyer it is a far weaker predictor.  Faculty tenure is important.  It protects freedom of inquiry.  And seniority generally serves skill; but the present upstairs-downstairs system devalues practical skills because clinical faculty generally work on five year contracts, unlike the tenure during good behaviour security of the "academic" full-time faculty - who generally have had only a glancing brush with the practice of law.  


Full-time work as a teacher is important.  I adhere to the 1 - 8 hours per week norm for non-law school work.  Much of that is public service as a member of the NJ Law Journal Editorial Board and the NJ Supreme Court's Advisory Committee on Professional Ethics.  The balance - consulting as an expert witness, occasional ghost-writing of briefs in my specialty, etc. is valuable as a link to the world of practice in which I was immersed for 30 years.  But more than that would impede substantially the job of staying tolerably current in the wide array of subjects I teach (though all are quite closely related - torts, products liability, remedies, professional responsibility).


As one who had to "make payroll" for 30 years I am sympathetic to management prerogatives, but recognize that employment security is key to career satisfaction, intellectual autonomy, and devotion to the central task of law school: teaching students to be good lawyers.

Supreme Court blocks 1983 claim despite prosecutorial misconduct

In Brady v. Maryland, the landmark 1963 U.S. Supreme Court case, prosecutors were ordered to turn over to the defense all exculpatory evidence.  It is a now firmly embedded proposition.  In Connick, District Attorney v. Thompson the Supreme Court yesterday ruled that John Thompson, a man convicted of murder  due to prosecutors suppression of exculpatory evidence cannot keep the jury award he won in a civil rights action against a prosecutor's office which blatantly failed to enforce the principles of the Brady case.


The District Court held that, to prove deliberate indifference, Thompson did not need to show a pattern of similar Brady  violations when he could demonstrate that the need for training was obvious.  The jury found the district attorney’s office liable for failure to train its staff and awarded Thompson damages.  The Fifth Circuit affirmed.  The Supreme Court, in a predictable 5-4 lineup, held that a district attorney’s office may not be held liable under 42 USC §1983 for failure to train its prosecutors based on a single Brady violation.  Only if the plaintiff can show a pattern can a state policy be demonstrated.  Isolated misconduct is not actionable.  Such evidence will rarely be available.


So a person aggrieved by a prosecutor's violation of the principle has as comfort only the prospect that the prosecutor will be disciplined for such a breach, an uncertain prospect as Bruce Green has observed.
Adam Liptak's summary in the Times is HERE

Monty Python - The Philosopher's song

h/t John Steele

Leonard Weinglass remembered - Newark and the Chicago 7

Leonard Weinglass and William Kunstler speak to the press during the Chicago 7 trial

In September 1970 I arrived in Newark at Rutgers Law School - to work on the Chicago 7 appeal.  Tom Hayden's lawyer Len Weinglass's office was opposite Ackerson Hall on Bleecker Street.  It was a little brick one-man shop.  But he had founded a law firm with recent grads that would be known as the Newark Law Commune.  A hyper egalitarian movement - the law communes pledged to share and share alike.  Even legal workers were to be paid the same and have a voice.  Egalitarianism required that the law firm's name be in alphabetical order.  At that moment it was Ball, Broege, Elberg, Fogel & Weinglass.   The personnel changed quickly but the core group bought a brick town house around the corner.  Len returned for a few years to the routine practice that had been his before fame overtook him via the Chicago 8, then 7 case.  

The overwhelmed trial judge Julius Hoffman had ordered Black Panther Party leader Bobby Seale bound and gagged in his chair in the courtroom before severing him from the rest of the motley crew of pacifists, anarchists, earnest activists, and militants who called themselves "The Conspiracy".  They had, the U.S. charged in its indictment , crossed state lines to incite a riot at the Democratic Convention in Chicago.  Prof. Arthur Kinoy had recruited a cadre of young activists - of which I was one - to come to Newark to work on the appeals.  Five of the seven had been convicted.  


All seven defendants and two lawyers- Weinglass and William Kunstler - had been  held in contempt of court for their vigorous advocacy. The contempt citations of Len, Bill, and the defendants were overturned - through the work of the brilliant Newark lawyer Morton Stavis, a founder of the Center for Constitutional Rights - which had just moved from Newark to an office above a paint store on 9th Avenue in the 40's .


The criminal convictions too were reversed.  A team of law students had helped Kinoy with the massive brief - two points of which I had drafted in my first semester of law school.  Not much of my attention went to coursework that term.  I was busy with the Chicago cases (my then wife Margo Anderson was paid staff), and preparing for my comprehensives for my masters' degree at BU where I had studied with Howard Zinn.
The Times obit tells the rest of the story HERE
And the Guardian, a few dates later, is HERE

Geraldine Ferraro remembered

Geraldine Ferraro has died.  One of Fordham Law School's most important alums.  I met her when she presided over the fractious meetings of the 1984 Democratic National Platform Committee - of which I was a member.  I saw her a few years ago when she was the auctioneer at Fordham's Student Sponsored Fellowship auction; and for the last time at Union Station on the day Barack Obama was inaugurated.
Video - the Last Word - is HERE
The Times obit is HERE.  The Guardian HERE

Bob Herbert leaving the Times

Voices angry at the growing inequality in our society are few among"serious" people.  Raising taxes on millionaires is off the table.  A society that taxed such income at 90% in the Eisenhower years barely manages 35% today.  We are losing one at the Times:  Bob Herbert is leaving after 18 years as a columnist.  Here is his last column.  And below is a substantial excerpt.

This inequality, in which an enormous segment of the population struggles while the fortunate few ride the gravy train, is a world-class recipe for social unrest. Downward mobility is an ever-shortening fuse leading to profound consequences.
A stark example of the fundamental unfairness that is now so widespread was in The New York Times on Friday under the headline: “G.E.’s Strategies Let It Avoid Taxes Altogether.” Despite profits of $14.2 billion — $5.1 billion from its operations in the United States — General Electric did not have to pay any U.S. taxes last year.
As The Times’s David Kocieniewski reported, “Its extraordinary success is based on an aggressive strategy that mixes fierce lobbying for tax breaks and innovative accounting that enables it to concentrate its profits offshore.”
G.E. is the nation’s largest corporation. Its chief executive, Jeffrey Immelt, is the leader of President Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. You can understand how ordinary workers might look at this cozy corporate-government arrangement and conclude that it is not fully committed to the best interests of working people.
Overwhelming imbalances in wealth and income inevitably result in enormous imbalances of political power. So the corporations and the very wealthy continue to do well. The employment crisis never gets addressed. The wars never end. And nation-building never gets a foothold here at home

Colleagues, do we need to order 20 million echocardiograms a year?

In Colleagues, do we need to order 20 million echocardiograms a year? Eric Topol, the Cleveland Clinic cardiologist discusses on his Topolog the fact that American Cardiologists order an average of 500 echocardiograms/per year.

Yet there are new "pocket echoes" but they have not been embraced - and they are cheap. Not as complete a picture - but useful for screening as to whether the more expensive test is needed. Given the crisis of health care spending, he asks:

Are cardiologists willing to take the initiative and take steps to limit the "runaway use of echocardiography"

Shouldn't cardiologist be part of the solution?

Professional Responsibility: Supreme Court grants cert in yet another prosecutorial misconduct case

Professional Responsibility: Supreme Court grants cert in yet another prosecutorial misconduct case

ABA backs Right to Counsel for Civil Contempt in Child Support in Supreme Court filing

The American Bar Association has backed the right to counsel for someone facing jail time for contempt in a child support case.
ABA Brief Supports Right to Counsel for Civil Contempt Defendants Facing Possible Jail Time - News - ABA Journal
The case Turner v. Rogers was argued yesterday in the Supreme Court.  Michael Turner was $6,000 in arrears on his $60/week child support obligation when a South Carolina judge sentenced him to 12 months in jail for contempt of court in a civil contempt.  He could purge himself of the contempt by paying the $6,000.  Where he was supposed to get that money I don't know.  He was a drug user who had asked for a second chance.  This was his fourth time in the slammer for failure to pay child support.


Two law professors Benjamin Barton and Darryl Brown in an amicus brief urge reform of pro se representation - saying that extension of Gideon will raw resources from criminal defendants by putting greater burdens on public defenders, etc.


SCOTUS Blog previews the argument HERE.


The transcript of the argument is HERE

Regulating the Ethics of Supreme Court Justices? - Brookings Institution

Regulating the Ethics of Supreme Court Justices? - Brookings Institution

Supreme Court needs an ethics code: John Leubsdorf on Bloomberg

Rutgers Law School: John Leubsdorf was a Reporter for the American Law Institute's Restatement of the Law Governing Lawyers

Obama in El Salvador visits grave of slain Archbishop Romero's El Salvador visit overshadowed by Libya events - latimes.com

From the L.A. Times

Salvadorans rally in honor of Archbiship Romero - slain at the altar

President Barack Obama completed here (after much delay and out of view of the public) what could arguably have been the most dramatic gesture of his swing through Brazil, Chile and El Salvador: The U.S. leader Tuesday evening made a pilgrimage to the crypt of Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero.

Revered in much of the region, the cleric was slain in 1980 by death squads working for the side in El Salvador's civil war that the U.S. government came to support against leftist guerrillas.

On the first visit by a U.S. president to Romero's tomb, Obama was accompanied by Salvadoran President Mauricio Funes, elected in 2009 as the candidate representing those guerrillas, now recast as a political party.

Housed in a rather austere lower chamber of the Metropolitan Cathedral, Romero's tomb is a frequent shrine of prayer and supplication for Salvadorans and other faithful from around the world.

Obama appeared solemn and lighted a candle alongside the tomb, as did Funes, who paused and crossed himself.

Obama in Latin America: Obama's El Salvador visit overshadowed by Libya events - latimes.com

ThinkProgress » Judge Rules Chris Christie’s Education Cuts Violated State Constitution

ThinkProgress » Judge Rules Chris Christie’s Education Cuts Violated State Constitution

China Tightens Electronic Censorship - NYTimes.com

Once upon a time it was common prattle to say that the PC was inherently decentralizing and democratizing. Because the system could not control the PERSONAL COMPUTER. Apple devotees were particularly prone to this disorder. Newt Gingrich had the bright idea that cities were obsolete. The suburbs could rule. Every child on welfare would be given a PC he proposed at one point. Never made any sense. Great power was plainly going to rest in the network. Now we have a new wave of silly talk about Facebook and twitter. The Chinese CP is demonstrating how much control the network can have.

China Tightens Electronic Censorship - NYTimes.com

slow learner: law student gives the wrong answers at Bonds jury voir dire

One prospective juror got up Monday and said he would find it difficult to be fair and impartial while rendering a decision about a great athlete like Bonds.
“If you grow up in San Francisco, you’re a Giants fan,” said Scott Ito, a second-year student at the University of San Francisco School of Law. “I think Giants fans just want closure. Right now, I think what baseball and the Giants are doing is trying to turn their back on Barry Bonds a little bit because they don’t want the taint of whatever might happen. But at the end of the day, Barry Bonds was a Giant for a long time — whether he did steroids or not. He’s still going to be a Giant. We just want it to be over.”

The correct answer to "Can you be fair and impartial, accept the law as I give it to you, and decide the case without bias, passion, or prejudice?" is YES.


h/t William Rhoden, NY Times, March 21, 2011

deja vu all over again: war, earthquake, and famine - signs Jesus is coming back

Franklin Graham and Sarah Palin
at Graham's Samaritan's Purse relief op in Haiti

"God is not behind every storm"  Rev. Franklin Graham - son of evangelist Billy Graham says.  "I believe in the devil" who roiled the Sea of Galilee. He also thinks the earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan might mean that Jesus is returning to earth sooner rather than later.

Graham said that Jesus told his followers that increasing war, famine, and earthquakes were one of the signs of the second coming.  "Maybe this is, I don't know. But regardless, all of us need to be prepared to stand before almighty God," Graham said.

As he explained, an increase in natural disasters was just like how "as a woman gives birth to a child, those labor pains as they begin they start intensifying with more frequency."

The relief efforts that Graham' s Samaritan's Purse undertakes are admirable.  But I confess it astonishes me that there are people who actually take this apocalypse now stuff seriously.  - gwc

HERE is the link to the audio on Newsmax. h/t TPM

Just a Bad, Bad Idea | Talking Points Memo

by Josh Marshall

"So let's review: No clear national or even humanitarian interest for military intervention. Intervening well past the point where our intervention can have a decisive effect. And finally, intervening under circumstances in which the reviled autocrat seems to hold the strategic initiative against us. This all strikes me as a very bad footing to go in on."

Just a Bad, Bad Idea | Talking Points Memo


Marshall's view seems right to me.  How does this end?  With Qaddafi as our new Saddam Hussein, our new "why doesn't Obama finish the job?" tag line for Fox News?  Are we really ready for three wars in the Muslim world?

Warren Christopher, 1925-2011 - James Fallows - National - The Atlantic

I was one of those for whom listening to Warren Christopher was like watching paint dry.  The always reliable James Fallows has this remembrance which describes him as a  "a good, modest, wryly humorous, public-spirited and public-minded man, who should be remembered...


Warren Christopher, 1925-2011 - James Fallows - National - The Atlantic