NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly has taken to the media to defend his, and his police department’s, record. Let’s examine his arguments to see if they stand up to even basic scrutiny. I’ll be working off the op-ed that Kelly wrote, and which was published in the Wall Street Journal on July 23, 2013. Continue reading
Crime and Justice
19 posts
Everyone’s talking about the latest issue of Rolling Stone, with the picture of alleged Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev on it. Continue reading
Perhaps it would have been best to take some much needed time to reflect before putting oneself at the center of a media bonanza after one of the largest televised court cases in recent American history. Did Juror B-37 of the George Zimmerman trial seek to process what was happening in the world around her before speaking publicly about the highly charged case — or did she rush to gain her fifteen minutes of fame? Continue reading
When we think of racial profiling and subsequent murders leading from the act, so many of the stories host a common thread, “A suspicious black male…” This is the thread that binds many young, black men across regions, through time, and through shared history. This is something Emmett Till, Oscar Grant, Trayvon Martin and numerous others can count as their experience in life and…in death. Continue reading
There were 77 cases argued before the US Supreme Court in the 2012 October Term. The Court announced the decisions in the last 3 cases on June 26th. Continue reading
For the first time since 2005, more Americans view President George W. Bush positively than negatively. A new Gallup poll released Tuesday found that 49 percent of people view the former president favorably and 46 percent unfavorably.
George W. Bush is taking a shower. Suddenly he pauses in his ablutions; even the water pressure seems to slacken, steam ceases to rise. He gazes downward: His male organ has vanished. It appears to have retracted into his body. Neither mirror-reflection nor desperate loofah-scrubbing reveals the missing unit. It is simply gone. Continue reading
As we all know by now, last week the U.S. Senate, in spectacular, lily-livered fashion, caved to the NRA, voting down even the weakest, most watered down version of a gun control bill. After the massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, which so many people claimed “changed everything”, nothing, in fact, has changed at all. Forget an assault weapons ban, forget bans on high capacity magazines; we can’t even ask gun buyers to submit to a simple background check at a gun show. And, since, according to Mother Jones, “around 40% of all legal gun sales involve private sellers and don’t require background checks” that’s a lot of buyers and a lot of guns. Continue reading
On April 10, 2012, 25 year old Sam Michel was found stabbed to death in his Los Angeles apartment. A year later, his murder remains unsolved and there are no leads. His family has just announced that they have doubled the reward from $50,000 to $100,000 in the hopes of bringing renewed awareness to the case. Continue reading
After spending more than eighteen months of pre-trial confinement in a military prison, most of it under “maximum custody,” alleged WikiLeaks source Bradley Manning has finally begun the judicial process in a military court.
In the second day of his (UCMJ) Article 32 pre-trial hearing, it was revealed that the affidavit that served as the basis for his arrest appears to have been based in large part on unconfirmed or erroneous information.