The Next Governor of Tennessee

Should be Hamilton County (Chattanooga), Tenn. General Sessions Court Judge Robert Moon.

Chattanooga Times Free Press :

Children Roaming Emma Wheeler Homes: Judge Says Law On Parents Should Be Enforced

Youngsters 7- and 8-years-old have been hanging out at Emma Wheeler Homes as late as 4 a.m. in the morning, Chattanooga Housing Authority members were told Tuesday.

Felix Vess, CHA’s chief of police, said East Lake Courts and other housing complexes are also having problems with youths running the streets in the middle of the night.

Having children out roaming at night is simply not safe, he said.

(snip)

General Sessions Court Judge Bob Moon said, “One of the last drive-by shootings that I had in court involved a 12-year-old boy who witnessed a murder. The child was playing basketball in the street at two o’clock in the morning on a school night. There is no amount of tax money, no summit, nor any innovative programs that are going to change that parental irresponsibility. Parents now have two weeks to get command of their children and prepare them for school attendance.”

Judge Moon was in the news last month for another reason.  He advised a woman that was a beating victim to get a CCW permit, because Chattanooga “has become so rampant that it is no longer possible for the police department to protect our citizens.”

Take it from a “Non-Minority”

That’s how the Missouri Supreme Court now defines your blogmeister.  Or, more accurately, people like your blogmeister that want to be on the Missouri Supreme Court, to fill Limbaugh’s empty chair.  (Note: As much as it would delight some of you, and horrify others, I am not an applicant.)

They might actually go through the detail to describe him as 31.3 years old.

The Burke Court

Heading to Rome to be the Vatican equivalent of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

Has the St. Stan issue had its day at Apostolic Signatura yet?  If it hasn’t, wouldn’t it be ironic if it got there and they saw RB as Chief Justice, so to speak?

Heller Postmorterm

On the St. Louis CofCC Blog.

New York, Chicago, D.C? Antonin Scalia Just Threw Down

On the St. Louis CofCC Blog.

Needs an Amendment

Article 4, Section 2 of the Maryland Constitution:

The Judges of all of the said Courts shall be citizens of the State of Maryland, and qualified voters under this Constitution, and shall have resided therein not less than five years, and not less than six months next preceding their election, or appointment, as the case may be, in the city, county, district, judicial circuit, intermediate appellate judicial circuit or appellate judicial circuit for which they may be, respectively, elected, or appointed. They shall be not less than thirty years of age at the time of their election or appointment, and shall be selected from those who have been admitted to practice law in this State, and who are most distinguished for integrity, wisdom and sound legal knowledge.

I can think of another kind of “knowledge” that Maryland’s judges should have. After reading this, then you’ll agree with me that another requirement is that they should have already consummated at least one relationship with one living, conscious, non-insane, non-retarded adult human being other than themselves. Homosexual, one-night stands, three way, doesn’t matter. Because it doesn’t sound like any of them ever have.

USA Today:

Md. court expands definition of rape; woman can revoke consent mid-act

The definition of rape just expanded in Maryland, where the highest state court ruled yesterday that a man could be charged with raping a woman who withdrew consent after they started having sex, according to The Sun.

Maouloud Baby was convicted of first-degree rape in December 2004 after jurors heard testimony that the 16-year-old continued having sex with an 18-year-old woman for “about five or so seconds” after she told him to stop.

The conviction had been overturned by lower-level appellate courts, but the Court of Appeals concluded that no means no, regardless of timing.

“We conclude that post-penetration withdrawal of consent negates initial consent for the purposes of sexual offense crimes and, when coupled with the other elements, may constitute the crime of rape,” Judge Lynne Battaglia wrote in the majority opinion, according to the newspaper. (The facts of this case are pretty complicated, especially for a blog posting, so we encourage you to read the court’s opinion.)

And there you’ll find out that the facts of the case — the victim never consented to sex, and in fact rejected it when it was implicitly proposed, but Mr. Baby and his cohort forced themselves onto her anyway. That violates the letter and the spirit of the law of every civilized unit of government on Earth, and you don’t need contorted interpretations to make it a crime.  The only thing the victim consented to was sitting in the back seat of a car, between Mr. Baby and his cohort, for the expressed purpose of verbal conversation — but that’s hardly consenting to sex.  It seems as if the lower levels of Maryland’s judiciary that handled this case took the liberty and assumed that her decision to move to the back seat was consenting to sex.  It also seems like the Maryland Court of Appeals (i.e. their supreme court) not only took that same liberty, but took another one to make public policy based on radical gender ideology.  This wound up far more complicated than it should have been.

Applied literally, this decision potentially means that all sex is rape, which matches the opinions of sundry extremist feminists in academia and elsewhere.

His Name Is Earl

World Net Daily:

Students have their say about California homeschooling

Thousands of students from across the nation have weighed into the arguments over the recent court ruling in California that announced there was no legal provision to allowing homeschooling in the state.

“The court cannot ‘make’ something illegal – that’s the legislature’s job. Sheesh!” wrote Jon Chi Lou, of Heritage Christian High School. And Hye-Sung F. Gehring added, “This is ridiculous. California is retarded. Always has been.”

They shouldn’t, but they can.  Haven’t they heard of the Warren Court?  Sheesh!

Beyond that, these two students are demonstrating the effectiveness of homeschooling.  Out of the box, so to speak, they intimately know the difference between legislative and judicial power.  Too bad Earl Warren didn’t.

Where’s Waldo?

New York Daily News:

A razor-wielding drug thug grabbed U.S. prosecutor [*****] in a headlock yesterday and slammed her to the floor at his sentencing in Brooklyn federal court.

Victor Wright had [*****] by the hair and seemed ready to wield the makeshift weapon when his lawyer and a court reporter leapt in to save her.

“I think he was going to slash her throat,” defense lawyer [*****], 72, told the Daily News. “He fully intended to maim her.”

“His face was full of rage,” agreed [*****], the 60-year-old court reporter.

Wright, 37, was a key lieutenant of drug kingpin Kenneth (Supreme) McGriff who founded the Supreme Team in the 1980s, a drug gang that wreaked havoc in southeast Queens.

McGriff is serving a life sentence for murder at Florence ADX Penitentiary in Colorado, the nation’s most secure federal prison. Wright’s sentencing was adjourned after the shocking courtroom attack.

It didn’t appear that escape was the intention of the powerfully built inmate - just revenge.

“He thinks she framed him,” said Batchelder.

The havoc in Judge [*****] courtroom started as Wright was led in through a side door shortly after 3 p.m.

He made a beeline straight for [*****], chief of the narcotics section for the Brooklyn U.S. attorney’s office, and took her down.

“He had her by the hair, she was screaming,” said courtroom clerk [*****]. “She was at the bottom of a pile.”

Wright dropped the makeshift weapon on the carpet during the struggle with Batchelder and Tolkin.

Eugene Corcoran, chief U.S. Marshal for the Eastern District of New York, said an internal investigation is underway to determine how the weapon was smuggled into the courthouse.

Yes, Mr. Corcoran.  While you’re at it, you can also investigate why your Marshals didn’t tackle Mr. Wright, leaving the job to his own defense lawyer and a court reporter.  Either someone at the jail and/or someone in the Marshal’s service didn’t do their jobs.  And knowing how affirmative action-crazy the city and state of New York are, not to mention the Federal government, my bet is some black authority figure(s), such as jail guards, jail administrators, Marshals, etc., let him smuggle the weapon out of the jail and into the courthouse, because they agreed with what Mr. Wright wanted to do.

RICO vs Red Light Cameras

Now, this is interesting. Chet Pleban is using RICO’s civil arm to nix red light cameras in Arnold, and presumably elsewhere.

I think the argument is going to be that since Arnold can’t prove that the car’s registrant(s) is the person driving the car when the cameras spot it running a red light, that Arnold’s attempt to collect fines from the registrant constitutes a “bad act.” And since there have been at least three of these “bad acts” within a ten-year period, then this shows that Arnold is a corrupt organization.

Clinton to SCOTUS?

Some are whispering it, but I’m not buying it.

First off, Bill Clinton is raking in many honoraria on the speaking circuit.  He would have no time for that as a member of SCOTUS, and it pays a lot less — I don’t think he could afford the pay cut.

Second, High Court justices tend to live reserved and anonymous lives, and are not ostentatiously political in terms of electoral matters.  In other words, they are the arch-typical opposite of Clinton.

Third, I don’t think Clinton would want to be anything other than Chief Justice, and John Roberts looks pretty healthy to me.  I don’t think that slot is opening up for a few decades.

Fourth, Clinton appointed two of the Justices (Breyer and Ginsburg) on the bench right now.  Would those two be truly of independent mind if the man who gave them their jobs is suddenly a colleague?

Deja Le Meme Judge Shows

Judy Chooses Quality Over Equality

“We’re not doing any more black shows,” “I don’t want to hear black people arguing,” “book white, upscale, pretty people,” “send black litigants” to other judge shows — a former Judge Judy producer alleges that these things were said and ordered by the supervising producer of the Judge Judy show.

I think JJ and her show’s producers are totally justified and right in doing so.  A black caller to WGNU once said that (pph) “black women are good at suing each other” — and a cursory examination of the non-Judy judge shows that litter daytime weekday TV demonstrates that.  And it does not make for good TV — the objects of the civil lawsuits are trivial and boring (even more so than usual), the dialogue between the litigants is juvenile, and that usually yields to arguing, yelling and screaming.

I’m not a big fan of judge shows period — even JJ gets boring after a week.  But her preferred defendant some flunky attitude punk white teenager to whom she can spout her textbook moralistic preaching, and everything else about the kinds of litigants her show’s producers seem to favor (at least according to this lawsuit) lend themselves to some quality legal and other dialogue, relatively complicated legal disputes, and relatively civil deportment.  That has always been the difference between JJ and most of the other judge shows, which is why I think her show’s “blackout” policy has been going on for a long time.

SCOTUS Takes a Crack at Crack (and E)

AP:

WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court on Monday said judges may impose shorter prison terms for crack cocaine crimes, enhancing judicial discretion to reduce the disparity between sentences for crack and cocaine powder.

By a 7-2 vote, the court said that a 15-year sentence given to Derrick Kimbrough, a black veteran of the 1991 war with Iraq, was acceptable, even though federal sentencing guidelines called for Kimbrough to receive 19 to 22 years.

“In making that determination, the judge may consider the disparity between the guidelines’ treatment of crack and powder cocaine offenses,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said in her majority opinion.

Ginsburg’s logic means that a liberal Federal judge presiding over a drug case can now hand out lenient sentences to black crack cocaine defendants, based on the political permission she has now granted to them to make subjective political assessments on the sentencing guidelines and their disparate impact on non-whites.

Justice Samuel Alito, who dissented with Justice Clarence Thomas in both cases, said that after Tuesday’s decisions, “Sentencing disparities will gradually increase.”

Alito and Thomas are right. Disparity will only increase, because of the wildly varying political opinions of judges on the Federal bench. The Federal sentencing guidelines were meant to factor out the opinion differences between liberal and conservative judges.

Thankfully, though, there was some racial fairness in SCOTUS’s decisions today:

In the other case, the court, also by a 7-2 vote, upheld a sentence of probation for Brian Gall for his role in a conspiracy to sell 10,000 pills of ecstasy. U.S. District Judge Robert Pratt of Des Moines, Iowa, determined that Gall had voluntarily quit selling drugs several years before he was implicated, stopped drinking, graduated from college and built a successful business. The guidelines said Gall should have been sent to prison for 30 to 37 months.

“The sentence imposed by the experienced district judge in this case was reasonable,” Justice John Paul Stevens said in his majority opinion.

Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Stephen Breyer, Anthony Kennedy, Antonin Scalia, David Souter, Ginsburg and Stevens formed the majority in both cases.

I think they are goofy decisions, but at least all nine Justices voted the same way in both cases, and the cases involved a black man dealing a stereotypically “black” drug, and a white man dealing a stereotypically “white” drug. In other words, there was no effective racial favoritism from SCOTUS today.

UPDATE 12/12:  A regular reader e-mails me and raises a pertinent point:  If courts say that sentences for given crimes could be reduced (retroactively when it comes to Federal crack offenders, as it turns out), based on the fact that the given sentence “unfairly” affects racial minorities, then it’s not a stretch to think that the same will be applied to other crimes, like murder — we could see a situation in the near future where non-death sentences for convicted murderers could be reduced because of the disproportionate ratio of black men in prison for murder.

The U.S. Justice Department estimates that 19,500 Federal prisoners, virtually all black men, will be set free thanks to this court decision.  And the areas they are released in are areas where crime will go up, sure as God made apples.

What Kind of a Mickey Mouse Jurisdiction Is This?

KSDK-NBC-5:

ROME (AP) — Tweety may get a chance to take the witness stand and sing like a canary.

An Italian court ordered the animated bird, along with Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and his girlfriend Daisy, to testify in a counterfeiting case.

In what lawyers believe was a clerical error worthy of a Looney Tunes cartoon, a court in Naples sent a summons to the characters ordering them to appear Friday in a trial in the southern Italian city, officials said.

The court summons cites Titti, Paperino, Paperina, Topolino — the Italian names for the characters — as damaged parties in the criminal trial of a Chinese man accused of counterfeiting products of Disney and Warner Bros.

Sylvester the Cat also received this summons, and because he was on the plane to Naples with a cartoon canary, mouse and two fowl, Italian authorities arrested him once he got off the plane for witness tampering.

Get the Cotton Out of Your Ears and Listen

AP profiles Pine Lawn and other cities passing anti-sagging ordinances.

From the tone of the article, it still seems that the NAACP/ACLU types are going to use disparate racial impact of the 14th as their weapon to argue their unconstitutionality.  That’s a risky strategy, because there are conservative judges who don’t buy the notion that disparate impact always amounts to illegal discrimination.  An argument that virtually every judge would buy is substantive due process of the 5th.

Also, the PR of arguing that “the laws are picking on blacks” won’t fly, but “it’s arbitrary and impossible to enforce” will.

In addition:

Two years ago, the Virginia Senate defeated a saggy pants ban passed by the House, but not before it became an international embarrassment, said David Hudson Jr., a legal scholar at the Nashville-based First Amendment Center.

He finds it bizarre that cities spend so much time regulating clothing.

“I’m not sure what it really serves,” Hudson said. “They should solve some real problems.”

I equate the “saggy pants” mania to the obsession with “English-only” among anti-immigration activists.  The city of Miami has an English-only ordinance — look how well it worked.  Also, I get the feeling that the politicians who want to pass these anti-sagging ordinances think that the saggers will turn into Ivy League Ph.Ds if they merely pull their pants up.  They’re both distractions from the real issue.

Candidates, Guns and Washington

Though this New York Post article about SCOTUS deciding to hear the D.C. Gun Ban case, and deciding on its constitutionality probably in May or June of next year, a Presidential campaign year no less, does not mention the Presidential campaign in its text, it does have a prominent photo of the anti-gun former mayor of New York City, Rudy Giuliani.

Since this decision is probably coming down next May or June, the two parties’ nominees will have been settled by then. If Giuliani does win the Republican nomination, increased interest in the issue by NRA members and other pro-2nd Amendment activists might mean that enough of them refuse to vote for him (or the Democrat) such that the Democrat slides into the White House by default. But if RG tries to pander, this only opens him up to Democratic accusations of flip-flopping, ruining his reputation among people not so interested in 2nd Amendment issues, which would mean the Democrat wins.

One interesting aspect raised by this article states that whatever the High Court’s decision, it might not impact the 2nd Amendment issue and legality anywhere else. The reason is that the issue is D.C.’s Gun Ban, and the District of Columbia is a creation of the Federal government and the U.S. Constitution itself, and any action of the home rule D.C. city government (including the gun ban) is an ex officio action of the U.S. Congress. New York and Chicago have gun bans, but those are ex officio actions of the states of New York and Illinois, respectively. And when you have state actions (or implied actions), the 10th Amendment comes into play.

We could have a situation where SCOTUS strikes down the D.C. Gun Ban, using the reasoning that the D.C. city government (an ex officio appendage of the U.S. Congress) violated the 2nd Amendment in enacting the legislation. If they do that, then this does not automatically mean that the New York and Chicago bans are unconstitutional, or does it mean that the same SCOTUS would strike them down. However, the “incorporation doctrine” that is an interpreted element of the 14th Amendment would mean that SCOTUS might, and New York and Chicago might repeal their bans to head off a legal fight.

Scratch Omnipotence

WaPo:

Baseball players sometimes cross themselves before getting into the batter’s box. Basketball players might look up for divine support before a free throw. Some soccer players kiss crucifixes around their necks after scoring a goal.

But perhaps no sport is more associated with prayer than football, as teams from the NFL to high schools often pray before games in the locker room, during games, on the sidelines and after games, huddled with opponents in the middle of the field.

After leading his team in prayers for 23 years, Marcus Borden, a football coach in East Brunswick, N.J., is involved in a legal battle that is pushing the courts to decide the boundaries of acceptable religious activity for coaches and other educators in public schools.

Last week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit heard arguments on whether Borden has the right to bow his head and kneel while his players pray around him. Borden says he is not leading his players in prayer but simply supporting them. School officials say the coach should not participate in the prayers.

I don’t know which deity the Rams are praying to, but omnipotence does not seem to be one of his/her/its virtues. They just might salvage their season if they find out to which God the New England Patriots pray.

You’ve Heard of Hanging Judges? This One’s a Spanking Judge.

Or is that, spare the rod, spoil the inmate?

I usually don’t like to state the names of sitting judges in this medium, but this story is too good to pass up.

WKRG-CBS-5 Mobile:

The Mobile Press-Register is reporting suspended Mobile County Circuit Judge Herman Thomas is being investigated for allegedly paddling inmates. The newspaper is reporting Thomas is accused of periodically removing prisoners from Mobile County Metro Jail and spanking them in a room at the courthouse.

According to the Press-Regiser, once inside the room, the judge would ask the men to drop their pants and prepare to be spanked with what was described as a wooden paddle. Judge Thomas told the Press Register that he did not have any comment on the allegations. Sources also say that between six to 12 men have shared their accounts with investigators.

Thomas is preparing for an October 29th judicial ethics trial in Montgomery that could remove him from the bench permanently. Those ethics charges allege that he helped his cousin, former Mobile County School Board Commissioner David Thomas, Jr. Investigators say Judge Thomas removed David Thomas from the crowded Mobile Metro Jail to the Prichard City Jail when Thomas was ordered to serve a week long sentence for leaving the scene of an accident that injured a little girl.

Now, if he would have only spanked his cousin, and not used his influence to move him to a less crowded hoosegow, nobody would be complaining. Of the jailed men he has spanked with a wooden paddle, I would imagine that nearly all of them deserved it, and if only their parents would have been that adept with a wooden paddle, they might not be in jail today.

That said, I hope that Judge Thomas’s motivations for these spankings were purely punitive, and not gratuitously and sexually sadistic.

We Almost Got a Truthful Explanation

AP:

Courts across the country have been going to extraordinary lengths in recent years to get people to report for jury duty — a cornerstone of democracy and a civic responsibility that many citizens would do almost anything to avoid.

(snip)

An increase in the number of homicides in Boston and the use of special grand juries to investigate violent crimes have eaten into the prospective juror list.

The city also has a large number of immigrants, who are exempt from jury duty, and college students, who move so frequently that their summonses are often sent back as undeliverable.

The problem appears to be worse in urban courts, where the population is more transient and address lists can quickly become outdated. But rural and suburban areas also have problems with reluctant jurors.

They almost hit the nail of the problem right on its head. In big cities, with big populations of blacks and Hispanics, there is so much crime, and therefore many more criminal jury trials than white jurisdictions, that jurors are needed more often. In Missouri, one can’t be summoned for jury duty more often than once every three years, and if you’re 21 or older and not a convicted felon and you live in the city, you can attest to the fact that the city courts push that rule almost right up to the edge. (The obvious requirement that jurors not be convicted felons contributes to a smaller base of potential jurors in big cities.) You know that, once three years have passed since you were last called in, you can count on one hand the weeks that will pass until you get that summons in the mail. I know that it won’t be long after mid-January next that I’ll be called in.

Meanwhile, I bet there are some people who live in St. Charles County who have never been called in for jury duty for a criminal case in state courts at St. Charles.

Beyond all of that, this article is more right than even its author knows. Jurors, at the time they are serving, have an immense level of power — one person can keep a criminal defendant from going to prison. Intelligent juries can be a firewall against capricious prosecution and abuse of power.  And in spite of what judges say, jurors can judge both the facts and the law in making a decision.

Lying in a court is never a good idea, but if I had to make the Hobson’s Choice, I would rather lie to get on a jury than lie to get out of jury duty.

The Rainmaker

My prediction turned out to be right, though just not about the “civil rights” part.

Contact Sport

Federal Appeals Court gives the go-ahead to pat-down searches at the entrances to stadiums hosting NFL football games, rejecting a suit brought by a fan in Tampa, Florida. Meaning that football is a contact sport for both players and spectators.

The Judiciary Isn’t Any Better in Sweden

AP:

STOCKHOLM, Sweden - Convicted sex offenders in Sweden are free to read pornography in their cells following a court ruling that has angered the prison service.

The Supreme Administrative Court in Stockholm last week ruled that the Swedish Prison and Probation Service had no right to deny a rape convict access to his porn magazines.

Prison officials had argued that reading porn would interfere with the man’s rehabilitation program. They also said the magazines posed a security problem for staff and other inmates because they could increase the risk of the man relapsing into criminal behavior.

But the court, whose ruling cannot be appealed, said the prison service failed to prove that the magazines could “jeopardize the security of the institution.”

Even without knowing anything about that infamous Scandinavian liberalism, this edict from a country whose geographical shape looks like a male organ isn’t that surprising.

Letting imprisoned sex offenders look at porn is like letting imprisoned armed robbers read gun magazines. I wonder if the Swedish Supreme Administrative Court would countenance that idea.

Two Stories on Deseg

Hungate kicked off. Now that he’s gone, I can say his name, and say that he was the person I was referring to back in late December that the local media made an object of praise, when he reacted to the death of Gerald Ford. At the time, since he was retired but not disgraced, I did not want to say his name.

The other story is that, in spite of their earlier rhetoric, St. Louis County’s school districts will continue with the deseg program while the St. Louis City Public Schools are under state control, and all but Lindbergh, Ladue and Pattonville will accept St. Louis City refugee students. Jane Cunningham must be smiling today.

Thursday Afternoon Courts vs Friday Night Lights

SCOTUS rejects arguments that Tennessee rules against high school football coaches recruiting middle school football players to attend their school is an abrogation of free speech.

I can think of someone locally who was paying really close attention to this case, and was hoping for a different outcome.

A R**e By Any Other Name

One St. Louis man was convicted of doing it to an 11-year old girl when he was 66 years old, eight years ago, and another St. Louis man had his sentencing for a conviction of the act postponed.

What act was this?

I can’t say anymore. A Nebraska trial-level judge has prohibited the use of the word in his courtroom.

Lincoln (Neb.) Journal-Star:

Tory Bowen says she knows what happened to her on the morning of Oct. 31, 2004.

But she won’t be able tell her story to jurors — at least not in a way that’s truthful to her, she says — because a judge’s order bars witnesses from using words like “rape” and “sexual assault” in the trial of Pamir Safi, who is accused of sexually assaulting Bowen.

“In my mind, what happened to me was rape,” said Bowen, 24. “I want the freedom to be able to point (to Safi) in court and say, ‘That man raped me.’”

Last month, Lancaster County District Judge [*****] denied a motion by prosecutors that would have prohibited Safi’s attorneys from using words like “sex” and “intercourse” when describing the encounter between Safi and Bowen.

So, in other words, the only permissible way to describe the act in his courtroom is that Safi and Bowen had a tender romantic moment that she was unsure about having.

Saw it Coming

The state PDs commission is asking the SCOMO to ratify new rules about overworked PDs. If they are ratified, then the PDs office in given region (there are 36 PD regions in Missouri; St. Louis City and County are in one region together) would be allowed not to assign new cases to its office’s PDs if their region is considered overworked.

If this comes to pass, then in St. Louis City, the wheels of criminal justice may not stop, but they would become so inexplicably slow that it will seem that they have. Police would still be allowed to make arrests (perhaps), but I think one needs a lawyer as early as the bond hearing.

The scenario I see is that SCOMO or SCOTUS will declare that the state’s underfunding of the PD’s offices amounts to an unconstitutional violation of the due process of the law, and of the right of a speedy trial, and under a consent decree, the state will have to spend more money on the PD’s offices.

Get Them Armani Business Suits

McPaper:

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — Handcuffs pin the teenage girl’s wrists together. The cuffs connect to a heavy chain around her waist so she can’t raise her arms. Another chain connects her ankles, shortening her step as she shuffles into the courtroom. When she shifts in her chair, the shackles clink.

Malyra Perez is 14, and yes, her mother says, she is troublesome. Malyra runs away and goes to school high, her mother tells the judge. She is in court on a charge of grand theft auto.

But she shouldn’t be in shackles, Myra Perez says. “I didn’t like that, not at all. She’s not a criminal.”

Such sentiments are being heard in courts across the nation, where there are increasingly vigorous debates over rules that require metal shackles to be used on youths who appear at juvenile court hearings.

At issue is whether kids as young as 10 need to be shackled for court security, and whether putting chains on young defendants not only makes them look like criminals but also makes them more likely to think of themselves in that way.

(snip)

“You go to a juvenile courtroom and you see a child shackled like a wild animal, and you go over to the adult courtroom and the adult is not shackled,” says Carlos Martinez, assistant chief public defender.

Chaining black or Hispanic juvenile defendants carries racial overtones that make the experience worse for the kids involved, he says. Shackling is “a shameful practice that is rooted in the horrible racist past of this country.”

To correct an implied past mistake in this medium, adult defendants may not be shackled while appearing in front of their jury for the formal trial.

Other than that, it looks like we’re well on our way to having the courts decide that every juvenile defendant appear in front of a judge in an Armani business suit as a civil right. The complaint is that the shackles and jail house jump suit makes the juvenile defendant look like and feel like a criminal. In most cases, they deserve to feel like criminals, because they are criminals.

And what, pray tell, does shackling black and Hispanic defendants have to do with “the horrible racist past of this country?” Perhaps it’s reminiscent of black slavery, even though slavery has been prohibited legally since 1865, so none of these juvenile defendants has ever been anybody’s legal slave. But what does that have to do with Hispanics? They were exceedingly rarely if ever used as slaves in the USA or its territories.

 

Full Takeover Ahead

The Cole County (Mo.) State Judge who heard the arguments by lawyers for the St. Louis City Public Schools that the state takeover should be suspended temporarily, has turned down the plaintiffs’ request this evening.

Therefore, the state takeover happens tomorrow.

One of the plaintiffs’ arguments, which was specifically rejected by the judge, was that the state takeover of the SLPS was arbitrary and capricious, and reflected hasty discrimination. I have said all along that the reason that the state didn’t take over the SLPS long before now is because of race, and racial pandering. So in a sense, the plaintiffs were right, the state has treated the SLPS differently, only in the sense of handling it with kid gloves.

Why People Can’t Stand the Judicial Branch

A three-judge panel of the 8th Circuit of the Federal Appeals Courts in St. Louis ruled today that Missouri’s method of lethal injection of convicted murderers who are sentenced to death is not unconstitutionally cruel and inhumane, reversing a decision by a Federal district court judge in western Missouri.

I cannot join the non-stop chorus of people that always and incessantly bash the judicial branch of government, even though they do plenty of hare-brained things. However, the fact that any judge at any level of the judiciary in the United States of America let this case go onto the docket without summarily dismissing it and laughing it out of court, based on the notion that they’re supposed to be concerned about “cruelty and inhumanity” towards convicted murderers, whose murders were cruel and inhumane, is emblematic of how the word “judiciary” has become a cuss word in the ears of many people. Though Federal civil rights lawsuits may be of the sort that cannot be dismissed summarily.

The Beaux Ideal Defendant

This black convicted murderer might get his verdict overturned and a new trial because two jurors out of the twelve on the jury noticed his race, and juxtaposed that with his “intimidating” look and his estimated mass in a nice round number of pounds.

In the past years, I have heard calls from civil rights groups and ACLU-type groups that criminal defendants who were forced to attend their trials in jail garb and in chains should be re-tried, because the images of men in jail house orange jumpsuits and in metallic leg or arm restraints supposedly biases jurors against the suspect, and slightly weighs Libra’s scales in the guilty arm even before evidence is presented.

Combining these two things, I can predict that at some point in the future, the Federal judiciary will force authorities to buy every criminal defendant an Armani business suit, and paint the non-white ones with white paint.

MO Supremes: Collective Bargaining OK for Public School Teachers, Public Employees

But it does not appear that they permitted strikes.  So don’t celebrate yet, AFSCME.  Bricks won’t stand long without mortar, and likewise, collective bargaining is useless without the privilege to strike.