Source

Reminder that 53% of Alabama’s prison population is black people who are incarcerated at 3x the rate as white people (source).

"The New York City Council voted to ban most uses of solitary confinement in city jails Wednesday [December 20, 2023], passing the measure with enough votes to override a veto from Mayor Eric Adams.

The measure would ban the use of solitary confinement beyond four hours and during certain emergencies. That four hour period would be for "de-escalation" in situations where a detainee has caused someone else physical harm or risks doing so. The resolution would also require the city's jails to allow every person detained to spend at least 14 hours outside of their cells each day.

The bill, which had 38 co-sponsors, was passed 39 to 7. It will now go to the mayor, who can sign the bill or veto it within 30 days. If Mayor Adams vetoes the bill, it will get sent back to the council, which can override the veto with a vote from two-thirds of the members. The 39 votes for the bill today make up 76% of the 51-member council. At a press conference ahead of the vote today [December 20, 2023], Council speaker Adrienne Adams indicated the council would seek [a veto] override if necessary.

For his part, Mayor Adams has signaled he is indeed considering vetoing the bill...

The United Nations has said solitary confinement can amount to torture, and multiple studies suggest its use can have serious consequences on a person's physical and mental health, including an increased risk of PTSD, dying by suicide, and having high blood pressure.

One 2019 study found people who had spent time in solitary confinement in prison were more likely to die in the first year after their release than people who had not spent time in solitary confinement. They were especially likely to die from suicide, homicide and opioid overdose.

Black and Hispanic men have been found to be overrepresented among those placed in solitary confinement – as have gay, lesbian and bisexual people.

The resolution in New York comes amid scrutiny over deaths in the jail complex on Rikers Island. Last month, the federal government joined efforts to wrest control of the facility from the mayor, and give it to an outside authority.

In August 2021, 25-year-old Brandon Rodriguez died while in solitary confinement at Rikers. He had been in pre-trial detention at the jail for less than a week. His mother, Tamara Carter, says his death was ruled a suicide and that he was in a mental health crisis at the time of his confinement.

"I know for Brandon, he should have been put in the infirmary. He should have been seeing a psychiatrist. He should have been being watched," she said.

She says the passage of the bill feels like a form of justice for her.

"Brandon wasn't nothing. He was my son. He was an uncle. A brother. A grandson. And he's very, very missed," she told NPR. "I couldn't save my son. But if I joined this fight, maybe I could save somebody else's son." ...

New York City is not the first U.S. city to limit the use of solitary confinement in its jails, though it is the largest. In 2021, voters in Pennsylvania's Allegheny County, which includes Pittsburgh, passed a measure to restrict solitary confinement except in cases of lockdowns and emergencies. The sheriff in Illinois' Cook County, which includes Chicago, has said the Cook County jail – one of the country's largest – has also stopped using solitary confinement...

Naila Awan, the interim co-director of policy at the New York Civil Liberties Union, says that New York making this change could have larger influence across the country.

"As folks look at what New York has done, other larger jails that are not quite the size of Rikers will be able to say, 'If New York City is able to do this, then we too can implement similar programs here, that it's within our capacity and capabilities," Awan says. "And to the extent that we are able to get this implemented and folks see the success, I think we could see a real shift in the way that individuals are treated behind bars.""

-via NPR, December 20, 2023

Spanking is to parenting what prisons are to criminal justice. Allow me to elaborate:

What does spanking do? “It teaches kids to behave!” Actually, no. It teaches kids to fear their caregiver(s). But say we go with that line. How does spanking teach kids to behave? “It shows them the consequences of bad actions!” Actually, no. It shows kids that when the caregiver is displeased, the kid gets hurt. In the mind of the child, the sequence of events is not [misbehave:consequence]. It is [caregiver unhappy:pain]. And maybe you’ll say “But my kid stopped mouthing off after I started spanking them for it”. Okay, sure. Maybe they stopped responding when you argue, but only because the learned to fear what their response would bring. They’re not holding their tongue because they realized it’s disrespectful or rude or whatever else you believe it is. They’re holding their tongue because they know it won’t do any good and will only make the situation worse for them. I can guarantee they are still thinking all those rebellious naughty talk-backy thoughts. They just aren’t saying them out loud. Spanking did not teach your child to behave, it taught them to walk on eggshells.

Similarly, prisons do absolutely nothing to enforce laws. Prisons do nothing to fix the real crimes that do get committed. A shooter or rapist or embezzler being incarcerated does not bring their victim back to life, un-traumatize them, or make reparations for any damages. Additionally, it makes life a living hell for the innocent people who end up in jail (OF WHICH THERE ARE A HELL OF A LOT). And maybe you might say that the point of prison is to encourage good behavior, because no one wants to go to jail. I would ask, then, why there are so many prisons, of which so many are full or overcrowded. Clearly, the threat of incarceration is not keeping people out of jail. Additionally, much like a child who was spanked being afraid to do normal things in their own home for fear of displeasing their caregiver, regular non-criminal people are afraid of prison, even though they have done nothing wrong. They know they could be incarcerated because of falsified evidence, biased testimonies, unfair trial, or simply bigotry. Especially people of color. Even though they haven’t done anything wrong, they are scared of what could happen to them if the person in power (police) was unhappy with them.

Negative consequences unrelated to the actual incident do not discourage “bad behavior”. Just like a child who is spanked will simply learn to be sneakier, a thief who goes to jail will simply cover their tracks better next time.

Stop spanking your kids, and abolish prisons. Have a nice day.

Saw a post about the sex offender list that kept repeating, "police love to get minorities for X crime" and I realized, both people who supposedly oppose the system and the system itself very intentionally frame police and police discretion as a more powerful and unilateral part of the system that it actually is, while ignoring or obscuring the rest of the system.

The DA's office decides what cases to drop and what to move forward with, and what punishments to request. The judges decide to throw out cases or let them continue, and then use judicial discretion in handing down sentences. And so on, I am not a legal expert yet, but there's a whole chain of people more powerful than some beat cop who chose to pursue or drop cases.

This all seems very convenient for the DA, as nobody is rioting to abolish or defund their office.

In most communities in America, Black people and people of color are significantly underrepresented in the jury pools from which jurors are selected. The law requires that the proportion of Black people in a jury pool must match Black representation in the overall population, but courts routinely fail to enforce these requirements. Legal standards created by the courts make it difficult to prove discrimination and have led to a failure to address racially discriminatory practices.

When Black people and people of color do get called for jury service, they are still removed unfairly. There is widespread racial bias in the selection of key leadership roles such as the grand jury foreperson—who has significant power to shape the conduct and outcome of legal proceedings, at least in some jurisdictions.5 In criminal trials, prosecutors and judges often remove Black people after unfairly claiming they are unfit to serve on juries.

Even if people of color successfully navigate all of these barriers to jury service, they can be excluded by lawyers who have the right to use “peremptory strikes” to remove otherwise qualified jurors for virtually any reason—or no reason at all.

Courts allowed prosecutors to use peremptory strikes to prevent Black people from serving on juries throughout most of the 20th century. In a landmark case in 1986, the Supreme Court finally changed the legal requirements for proving a peremptory strike is racially biased.6 But the Court’s decision in Batson v. Kentucky did not eliminate racial discrimination.

Representative juries selected without racial bias or discrimination are essential in our democracy. They are especially important because Black people are underrepresented in prosecutors’ offices and in the judiciary. More than 40% of Americans are people of color, but 95% of elected prosecutors are white. Similar disparities exist within the judiciary.

(continue reading)

Gov. Jeff Landry signed into law Tuesday a bill allowing executions by nitrogen gas and electrocution, opening the door for Louisiana to revive capital punishment 14 years after it last used its death chamber.

Landry signed the legislation, House Bill 6, and 10 other bills into law while surrounded by crime victims' loved ones and law enforcement officials in a ceremony at the State Capitol. HB 6 also shrouds records of the state's procurement of lethal injection drugs in secrecy, a step supporters say will make it easier to obtain those drugs.

The death penalty bill headlined a slate of tough-on-crime legislation approved by the Republican-controlled state Legislature last month and championed by Landry, a Republican and former state attorney general who campaigned on a promise to punish criminals and uplift people affected by violent crime. The new laws reverse a path charted by the state's 2017 Justice Reinvestment Initiative by slashing chances for convicted criminals to be released from prison early and lengthening sentences for some crimes.

"This is what I ran on," Landry said Tuesday.

The Governor also signed bills that allow people to carry concealed handguns without permits, eliminate parole for adults who commit crimes after Aug. 1, dramatically cut the availability of good behavior credits in prison and limit how people can request plea deals after their convictions, among others.

Landry is expected to sign additional bills passed in last month's special session in New Orleans on Wednesday, including measures to publish court minutes for youth accused of violent crimes, increase penalties for carjacking and weapons offenses and give Landry more control over the state's public defense system.

Protests against that legislation — particularly the death penalty bill, which opponents caution promotes one method that has hardly been tested and another ruled inhumane by courts in some states — spurred fiery debate but did little to sway lawmakers, most of whom fell in line with Landry's agenda.

A series of criminal justice advocacy groups spoke out against the new laws again on Monday, saying they will do little to curb crime and risk bloating the state's prison population to pre-2017 levels.

The 2017 public safety laws, which drew bipartisan backing and support from law enforcement, released people with convictions for nonviolent crimes and saved the state some $153 million, a recent audit found.

"Blaming the wrong problems doesn’t get the right solutions, and our communities for years have made clear the solutions necessary to address the very real concerns and needs of all Louisianans," said Danny Engelberg, the chief public defender in New Orleans. "These misguided bills will balloon our already bloated legal system, jails and prison system, and further widen the inequities in justice, safety, and community well-being."

The first modern execution by nitrogen gas occurred in Alabama in January. It sparked pushback from anti-death penalty advocates who expressed concern about eyewitness reports that Kenneth Smith, who was put to death for a 1988 murder-for-hire, writhed and struggled for air for some 20 minutes after nitrogen began flowing into his mouth. Alabama officials said the execution was humane and offered to aid other states' efforts to put the method to use.

Difficulty obtaining the cocktail of execution drugs from pharmaceutical firms, along with former Gov. John Bel Edwards' opposition to capital punishment and a series of federal court orders pausing executions in recent years, had kept Louisiana from putting anyone to death since 2010.

It's unclear when state officials might begin taking steps to obtain materials needed to carry out executions or when executions could resume in Louisiana. Also unclear is which of the three execution options the state will use; the new law leaves that choice to the secretary of the state's Department of Public Safety and Corrections.

HB 6's sponsor, Rep. Nicholas Muscarello, R-Hammond, said in an interview last month that Landry has indicated that his preferred execution method is lethal injection.

Last week, a DPSC spokesperson referred questions about the death penalty process to Landry's office, which did not respond to requests for comment. Landry left Tuesday's bill-signing ceremony without taking questions from reporters.

The new law letting people carry concealed handguns without permits, which supporters dub "constitutional carry" because they argue it restores an absolute right to self-armament enshrined in the United States' founding document, drew applause from gun rights activists and condemnation from gun safety groups.

National Rifle Association Interim CEO Andrew Arulanandam in a statement praised the "resolve" of Landry and "pro-self-defense legislators" who voted for the new law. Angelle Bradford, a volunteer for the Louisiana chapter of the pro-gun control group Moms Demand Action, criticized Landry for "cater(ing) to the gun lobby and reinforc(ing) their deadly ‘guns everywhere’ agenda."

While other children were in school, going to art classes, spending time with their families, squabbling with siblings, playing football and video games, enjoying music, making friends, going to movies, discovering their passions, developing crushes, these children were locked up. Instead of the love and affection of their families and communities, these children were “raised” under the punishing watch of corrections officers and prison guards. They were treated only with cruelty, harsh punishments and stigma. They never had a chance. The PAP propaganda machine loves to go on about how they make sure “no child is left behind”. Well, here they are, the left-behind children.

For folks in Singapore there is an event with the family members and a letter writing campaign. Join if you can.

Warning! Warning! Warning! Warning!

Unpopular opinion time

Yes. Call it an "Opinion." It's a truth and a dire warning but we'll call it an opinion:

The current "Squatters" problem is about to make a very ugly turn.

Imagine you come home from work one day and your key doesn't work. Your locks have been changed and people are your home! They tell you to leave, get off your property.

You persist. After all, it is your home. You've had a long day. All you want to do is get inside your own home, pour yourself a bowl of cereal and plop down in front of the TV. And here these strangers are inside your home, they changed your locks and they're telling you to get off your own property! So you break in. You break into your own home and confront these strangers.

Then they call the police.

On you.

These strangers in your home, call the police on you. They do.

The police show up.

The home invaders show the damage from where you broke in, show the police some rental agreement they made up, one or more receipts for rent they never paid..probably some bills in their name.

The police arrest you. The police arrest YOU for breaking into your home, trying to wrongfully evict these "Renters" you are victimizing.

Again, this is your home. You live there. You got up that morning, left for work, locked the door behind you and when you came home at the end of the day you found these squatters inside your home.

This is going to happen.

It's going to happen a lot.

Why wouldn't it?

When it comes to squatters, there's literally no difference between them being there for a week or them being their for hours. The police don't see a difference. The courts don't. In both cases it comes down to pieces of paper, and these squatters inside your home made sure to print out lots of authentic and properly dated pieces of paper.

Oh, you'll probably get them out. Eventually. Maybe in only six months! In the mean time you can't get inside your home and God knows what kind of damages they're doing...

It's going to happen.

They just have to pick an address, cherry pick the legal jurisdiction to give them the greatest advantages, print everything out & wait for you to leave for work in the morning.

People are going to start coming home and finding strangers inside their homes. Squatters. It will happen, if it's not happening already.

Source

By: Wilfred Reilly

Published: Jan 3, 2024

Researchers just found substantial evidence for something conservative scholars and criminal lawyers have long suspected.

‘Systemic racism,” at least in the criminal-justice system, has been comprehensively measured. This, following my recent review of Cory Clark and Lee Jussim’s excellent analysis of academic censorship, to which I myself contributed the odd word, will be my second “academic findings” article in a row for National Review. Get excited!

This week’s topic is at least as important as last week’s. In a recent quantitative meta-analysis, Stetson University’s Christopher Ferguson and Sven Smith found substantial evidence for something conservative scholars and criminal lawyers have long suspected. Simply put, based on models that adjust for social class as a variable, there appears to exist little or no “systemic” racial bias in the U.S. criminal-justice system.

Overall, the pair’s meta-analytic review of some 51 studies — which, combined, included around 120 distinct effect tables — concluded that “neither class nor race biases for criminal adjudications for either violent or property crimes could be reliably detected.” For drug crimes such as crack sales, some evidence of bias was found, but “effect sizes were very small” — often on the order of a few percentage points — and may be primarily artifacts of the weaknesses of past studies.

Ferguson and Smith note that the “better quality studies” that were included in this complex analysis were “less likely to produce results supportive of [racial] disparities.” Studies with “citation bias” toward one side of the debate about whether racism exists in the modern criminal-justice system — generally, a bias in a liberal direction — were far more likely to find racism than were unbiased fair-test studies, and they “consistently produced higher effect sizes.” Only the innermost hearts of a few academics truly know why that is — although the findings of my last piece might provide a clue. Overall, the Stetson pair concludes: “Narratives of ‘systemic racism’ as relates to the criminal justice system do not appear to be a constructive framework from which to understand this nuanced issue.”

On some level, and this is not to minimize a top piece of work, these findings seem gobsmackingly obvious in 2023. As Ferguson and Smith put it, “the civil rights movement was successful in creating equality before the law.” Since then, they add, “evidence from psychological studies demonstrates major reductions in both explicit and implicit racial prejudice.”

More bluntly put, about 40 percent of Americans are now members of minorities, and 90-odd percent of whites do not test as racist when this is measured by any real metric such as opposition to interracial marriage. Hell, roughly 30 percent of cops are black and Hispanic — and so are more than 10 percent of lawyers (before we throw in Asian and Jewish Americans). Setting CRT mumbo jumbo to the side, where it belongs, there seems to be no reason to expect black or Irish-American big-city judges to treat (say) Puerto Rican teen goons differently from Italian or Bosnian ones. And, overall, they do not.

Serious analyses, of the kind that Ferguson and Smith conducted, frequently come to similar conclusions across a variety of sectors. Back in 1990, the economist June O’Neill took a look at the black–white income gap — then about 18 percent annually, and always attributed to racism. She concluded that fairly simple adjustments for variables such as age (the modal age of a black American is 27, versus 58 for a white Yank), region of residence, test scores, and years (rather than quality) of education shrink this gap to roughly 1 percent. Similarly, in policing, Harvard economist Roland Fryer’s multifactorial analysis, which included controls for the behavior of suspects and racial groups’ rate of contact with police, concluded that white suspects are actually 27 percent more likely than black suspects to be shot by cops . . . rebutting the entire Black Lives Matter narrative almost in passing.

This brings us to a key point. Life, much like good analysis, is multivariate. People who differ from one another in terms of a major factor such as race or religion are also very likely — indeed almost certain — to differ as well in terms of other characteristics, like those O’Neill studied. Racism occurs only when individuals are treated differently entirely and solely because of the single factor of their race.

It’s worth spelling this out. An analysis of mortgage-loan rates could be said to have uncovered racism only if large and statistically significant gaps in lending rates to racial groups remained after a statistical adjustment for black/Caucasian/Asian differences in age, region, income, wealth, credit score, and probably default rates. Similarly, any study of arrest rates (or crime rates) by race has failed to demonstrate the existence of bias — and therefore is pretty much useless for our purposes — if it has not made the obvious adjustments for age and social class.

By this standard, a rather amazing amount of past research — journalistic “studies” and some academic work — is pretty much useless. As Ferguson and Smith note, in a surprising number even of the better-known studies in their field of criminal justice, “control variables are comparatively lacking. . . . Many studies that examine race issues don’t control for class” (emphasis mine). “Most” studies control for “age and prior criminal record,” but not all.

Interestingly, very few papers on criminal sentencing control for what may be the most critical variable of all — whether your lawyer was a public defender or private counsel and how good he was. Criminal justice is hardly unique in this regard: Conservative éminence grise Thomas Sowell devoted an entire book to debunking scholars’ and reporters’ cross-disciplinary trend of simply attributing any disparity between groups — black vs. white maternal mortality, for example — to racism. But that particular dragon even the great man could not slay.

Why is the univariate problem that Ferguson and Smith and Sowell describe so well, and which I have been known to gripe about myself, so prevalent? There are many reasons, one suspects. Many writers, especially in the journalistic sector, are almost certainly well intentioned but unskilled with advanced statistical tools such as Stata. Others likely notice real racism in today’s online public squares, jump to the premature conclusion that this kind of tawdry stuff explains serious decisions that adults such as bankers make, and don’t test for much else.

But it is hard not to notice a potential third factor. An entire sector of the economy — within which fall most left-aligned think tanks and lobbying groups and more than a few academic departments (“postcolonial studies,” anyone?) — is dependent on the continued existence of old-school bigotry in the United States. Old warhorses such as Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Push and Al Sharpton’s National Action Network never really went anywhere, and they have been joined at the trough by more than 100 BLM groups led by Patrisse Cullors’s Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation. Even sexual-rights groups now host seven-figure fundraisers centered on professional-looking white papers (I responded to the Human Rights Campaign’s claims of “trans genocide” here). This lucrative grift is quite hard to defend in the near absence of real and serious bias — and it might often be tempting for smart activists or even ideologically inclined academics to go out and create some.

The rest of us, however, shouldn’t go along with the radicals (or Thuh Science™) if their ideas and methods are simply bad and unscientific. To quote Ferguson and Smith one more time, when it comes to understanding at least the major and nuanced issue they study, “narratives of ‘systemic racism’ . . . do not appear to be a constructive framework.”

[ Via: https://archive.today/tUTln ]

--

Highlights

It is commonly believed ethnicity predicts criminal justice outcomes in the US.

For most crimes, evidence for racial disparities is weak.

Very small disparities appear to persist for drug crimes only.

Academia has often worryingly overstated the evidence for racial disparities in the US criminal justice system.

Abstract

It is widely reported that the US criminal justice system is systematically biased in regard to criminal adjudication based on race and class. Specifically, there is concern that Black and Latino defendants as well as poorer defendants receive harsher sentences than Whites or Asians or wealthier defendants. We tested this in a meta-analytic review of 51 studies including 120 effect sizes. Several databases in psychology, criminal justice and medicine were searched for relevant articles. Overall results suggested that neither class nor race biases for criminal adjudications for either violent or property crimes could be reliably detected. For all crimes, effect sizes (in terms of r) for Black vs White comparisons were.054, for Latinos vs Whites, 0.057 and for Asians vs Whites −0.028. There was significant heterogeneity between studies, particularly for Asian vs White comparisons. Effect sizes were smaller than our evidentiary threshold, indicating they are indistinguishable from statistical noise. For drug crimes, evidentiary standards were met, although effect sizes were very small. Better quality studies were less likely to produce results supportive of disparities. Studies with citation bias produced higher effect sizes than did studies without citation bias suggesting that researcher expectancy effects may be driving some outcomes in this field, resulting in an overestimation of true effects. Taken together, these results do not support beliefs that the US criminal justice system is systemically biased at current. Negativity bias and the overinterpretation of statistically significant “noise” from large sample studies appear to have allowed the perception or bias to be maintained among scholars, despite a weak evidentiary base. Suggestions for improvement in this field are offered. Narratives of “systemic racism” as relates to the criminal justice system do not appear to be a constructive framework from which to understand this nuanced issue.

==

So, here's the question: will you accept the evidence and the conclusions drawn from it, or continue to believe based on faith?

So I was having a discussion about abortion rights and mentioned that making them illegal will not stop abortions from happening, and the person I was talking to sort of scoffed and said “Right so why have laws at all? Murder still happens. And I could apply that to your gun control laws too”

I need yall to understand that the point of laws is not and has never been to stop something from happening. The point of laws is to make those actions legally punishable.

Murder isn’t illegal because the law stops murder, murder is illegal so that if you beat someone to death in anger there are consequences.

I don’t want gun control laws because I think they will automatically make all wrongful deaths by firearms end forever. I want gun control laws so that it’s harder to get away with slaughtering people. So that guns are harder to access for those people who would misuse them.

Republicans know this. That’s the entire reason they want abortion to be illegal: so you can go to jail if you get one. Their aim is not and has never been to “protect life”. It has always been to control women and queer people. This isn’t about saving babies, it’s about making the exercising of bodily autonomy punishable by law.

The system is failing the mentally ill population across the nation. As a mentally ill person, I was incarcerated and abused, neglected, and also excessive force was used against me and I suffer from mental illness.There could come a time in your very own life where you are in crisis and are having episodes trying the best you can to survive with your mental illness out in society, out in public. You may act out and lash out at law-enforcement being that you may be delusional. This occurs all the time in public with law-enforcement. It happens in public. No one understands what a mentally ill person goes through with his life of mental illness. There are occasions and instances where we may become psychotic with episodes because we are unmedicated or other crisis and stresses that causes us not to be not in control of our mental health. The system has failed us because there is nothing in place to be proactive and provide the correct support and response that we need. There is not enough social workers trained professionals in law-enforcement to deal with the crisis that we have now. Incarceration while being mentally ill is very dangerous to the mentally ill person. I know this for a fact. I think once a person has been established as someone who suffers from mental illness in their community. There should be a red flag. Whenever a call comes in that this person is in crisis again. The place where it all goes wrong is communication and keeping record of who is mentally ill in the community. When consecutive calls are made on a mentally ill person it seems like that they have become a nuisance to the public. so the law enforcement becomes your enemy and wants to see you locked up for good because you have committed so many disturbances out in the public. They wanted to give me 2 to 10 years for spitting on the officer which  I would have never done in my right mind. But I went through incarceration and a stressful probation. I had to pay fines and complete community service when I am mentally ill. Plus from the abuse I suffered in the county it caused permanent damage to my spine and I was expected to complete community service. By the grace of God, I made it out without having to be re-incarcerated for revoking my probation. But I made it. There are a lot of things I would like to talk about while being incarcerated. I have ideas in my head to revamp the system the way it is right now. The status quo has to go. abuse, neglect should and remain held accountable to those who provide actually nothing at all to help the mentally ill while incarcerated. They do very little to correct the problem with the person that is on the ground in crisis. Their solution, the system, is to incarcerate and convict. And with that comes abuse suffering and neglect to a degree that blows my mind. I can’t believe that I have to discuss this issue in this day and age but this exist. You may be schizophrenic and new to your diagnosis and there are a lot of things you need to examine that’s going on in the media with mentally ill people stay abreast to everything that’s going on because it could happen to you, because it happened to me,. When all I needed was help. God help this mess.

Continued from 4/17/2023 post

4/10/23. Monday. 8:53pm

Kind of a magical day…a total “the mysteries plan” type day (The Intuit Indians say there are two plans everyday. Your plan and the mystery’s plan). Jury duty morphed into a possible 3 week trial experience on a different case later this week! Although, the chances of me being chosen are less than infintesimal. In Department 6, three jurors told profound criminal justice system failure stories.Two said they could not be fair in a case where police officers testified. The third through her eyes welling with tears, said “police killed my son or brother after a high speed chase in Oakland. The judge asked her if she could be fair in the this trial in light of what happened to her son/brother? The woman, still very emotional, said yes. In saying yes, she screamed out “The system is NOT working!” The three potential jurors collectively pointed to a total systems failure. Shortly thereafter, we were asked to return to the jury assembly room, where we learned that the case settled.

The jury selection in Department 6 became a  trial  of the  criminal justice system. The system was convicted of being broken. Useless. We potential jurors shared an abiding conviction of the truth of the charge (The jury instruction definition of reasonable doubt).

First warm day in an ice age. Really warm. After leaving jury land, I treadmilled at Valley Gym for 36 minutes. It helped me to process the huge  Department 6 experience.  On the way home, at Palendale and Mc Henery, a major intersection, I stopped for the red light. Near my car was a homeless man and his dog,. He was “flying a sign” (a term the homeless use when they create a sign asking for help and stand by the roadway). I gave him $5 and two bottles of sparkling water. And, as I sat there waiting for the light to change, he drank. He drank in the heat. And, as he drank, I was healed. He healed me. It was the perfect gesture “at” …….”.At”  the callus hardness of the court house experience today. The homeless man, a white male maybe 35 years old, was blackened from sleeping outside. It’s been a brutal, cold ,wet, long stretch out there. But, today, it was warm and he and his dog now had water.

End of entry

Notes. 4/13/2023

I was back for the second trial toady as a potential juror. Got seated in the jury box right away. But, the judge said the parties had decided to excuse me in light of the fact that I knew the judge, the DA and one of the defense lawyers in the case.  

Returning to the jury assembly room to be sure I was released from jury duty, I ran int the Da from Monday’s trial in Department 6. He said “that was the worst jury selection experience that he had ever had.”  He was referring to what the 3 potential jurors said about not being able to be fair. He is a seasoned trial attorney. He has probably picked countless juries, including the one in my last jury trial. He was the Da in that case. If he was blown away by what happened April 10 in Department 6, then it just underscored the fact that people are seeing the police as being out of control and they have lost faith in the courts to ensure justice.  The Da told me that the reason we were asked to leave the court room was because that, after the 3 jurors spoke,  the defendant told his lawyer that he wanted to represent himself.  The Da said , if I heard him right that the case involved the defendant hitting some cars with his car and then getting involved in a 100 mile an hour chase by the police. The defendant apparently has psychiatric issues. He ended up pleading for 2 years in prison I think the Da said.

But, it’s possible that what the 3 jurors said sparked the defendant to want to represent himself. It may have cause him to lose faith in the system, including his lawyer.

The Da asked me today if any other jurors from department 6 on Monday were in the jury pool today for the second trial. I said yes. I think that he was concerned that what the Department 6 jurors heard on Monday could impact their ability to be fair in the second trial. The 3 department 6 jurors were that powerful because they spoke the truth about the way the world is now.

The Da said he checked out the facts re: the juror who said her son was wrongfully convicted. It was true. Her son was accused of murder in a gang case. The only thing connecting him to the killing was that a green van was involved that he sometimes drove. But, at that time of his trial, the jury could hear evidence to prove that a gang existed. The jury heard a few hours of facts about unrelated gang crimes. The Da said that is why he was convicted. The laws have changed. I believe now, The gang evidence is heard only after a person is concvicted. That is why his conviction was overturned. His mother, one of the Department 6 jurors who spoke, was right in saying she did not now believe in the system.

The poisoned Skittle problem, from the perspective of a non poison Skittle

The metaphor of the bowl of Skittles, some percentage of which are poison, and how many of those Skittles you want to eat, has been used by feminists about men, and republicans about immigrants. I'm increasingly devoid of shits to give about what kind of vile things I'm going to be called, so what the heck, I'll use it too for this.

With class and housing in the US, there is a poisoned Skittle problem; the lower income you go, the higher the percentage of assaults George type people are in the mix. (Please note now that I am Not claiming that the elite are not prone to being assaults Georg, or that there's no assaults Georg in higher income brackets) For added fun, the poorer you are, the more you have to be in physical proximity to others who live in your area, while walking to the store or taking public transportation, increasing your vulnerability to being assaulted, etc. In the suburbs, a lot of the time, the guy who lives three houses down from yours and you have literally never seen each other, so it doesn't matter if he would immediately grab your crotch if he was in crotch-grabbing range, because the two of you have never been that close together. If you live in a more dense environment and travel by foot, your chances of being in crotch-grabbing range are much higher, so a crotch-grabber, etc. in your area is a more concerning problem for you.

Most people very reasonably prefer to live somewhere further away from assaults Georg. The thing is, other people also prefer to live further for assaults Georg, and if you were just living next to assaults Georg, you are a Skittle of indeterminate poison. So when a nice redlined Blue suburb with a great school district is considering if they're going to permit some affordable housing, they are going to look at the income bracket that will be living there and say, "There's too high a percentage of poison Skittles in that income bracket. We don't want to live in a community with assaults Georg, or invite assaults Georg Jr into our nice school, so we don't want affordable housing here."

So now you, as an innocent non poison Skittle are left trying to figure out how you are going to communicate your non poison status so you can get the heck away from the poison Skittles. The current way this information is conveyed is by convincing a higher paid job to hire you, making more money, and buying your way into a better neighborhood. This is a rather lossy way to sort, and shit like constantly disrupted sleep at the weekly hotel from all the shitty people who live there with you doesn't help with better job thing. There's plenty of non poisoned Skittles in that bowl, but how to extract them safely?

The obvious next question is why we as a society don't seem to have any solution to the problem of getting assaulted by assaults Georg other than to individually just try to scramble away from where such folks are statistically and to price the entire category of people who are statistically more likely to be assaults Georg out of certain areas. And now it's a criminal justice system problem and I'll leave that for another day, but overall, the criminal justice system seems a lot more interested in hassling people based on statistical similarities to assaults Georg than doing fuck all about stopping assaults Georg.