As the world waits with bated breath for the emergence of the latest—and cutest—member of the British Royal Family, allow us to put forth a gentle reminder: In a just world, this innocent child would be going up for adoption, since its family would have been imprisoned for crimes against humanity.
Tonight a Florida man’s acquittal for hunting and killing a black teenager who was armed with only a bag of candy serves as a Rorschach test for the American public. For conservatives, it’s a triumph of permissive gun laws and a victory over the liberal media, which had been unfairly rooting for the dead kid all along. For liberals, it's a tragic and glaring example of the gaps that plague our criminal justice system. For people of color, it’s a vivid reminder that we must always be deferential to white people, or face the very real chance of getting killed.
Trayvon Martin was murdered. George Zimmerman murdered him. The jury may or may not see it that way; juries get a narrow and complicated view of things, and sometimes they get things wrong. But outside the jury box, there's no excuse.
A reader of mine sent me this photo last night. As the murder trial of George Zimmerman wheezes to its conclusion, the TV networks dutifully pipe in live pool video from the courtroom, as if it is force-fed to them and they have no choice but to excrete it, soft and undigested, into our living rooms, bedrooms, offices. Sometimes, the pool recorder or the networks' producers don't switch to a mundane image of lawyers being lawyerly quite fast enough, and we get to see snippets of the human cruelty, stupidity, and frailty that occasion trials such as this.
For several days now, CNN’s extensive coverage of the George Zimmerman trial has shouldered aside the more important Egypt story on the network’s U.S. channel.
In the aftermath of the revelations about the NSA's secret spying programs, there is plenty of anger to go around. American citizens are pissed that they were spied on. European governments are pissed that they were spied on. Nobody, it seems, is happy with being spied on. So why is spying such an accepted institution?
Cameron D'Ambrosio spent more than 30 days in jail for a Facebook post. On May 1, the high-school senior from Methuen, Massachusetts was playing hooky when he posted rap lyrics that referenced the Boston Marathon bombing and called the White House a "federal house of horror." His school contacted the local cops, who arrested the kid and charged him with "terroristic threats," a felony punishable for up to 20 years in prison.
The criminal justice system in the state of California is operating perfectly, excepting the small matter of the looming and inevitable infectious disease race war.
No matter who you are or where you live, chances are your parents expect you to fix their computer for free.
When retainer attorneys employed by Big Deals send out scary cease and desist letters to nobodies on behalf of their Super Important clients, it's typically a pro forma matter.
In 1997, Duane Buck was convicted of shooting and killing two people, including his former girlfriend, in Houston, Texas. A jury sentenced him to death. Among the factors that influenced their decision: testimony from a psychologist who said that black people like Buck are more violent and dangerous than other people.
The Los Angeles Times reports that Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan, facing trial in the shooting of 45 people at Fort Hood, asked the judge today for a three-month delay so he can prepare a new strategy: The psychiatrist-allegedly-turned-gunman wants to argue, he said, that he was acting in "defense of others."
Today, the ACLU announced that it is filing a federal lawsuit on behalf of prisoners at the East Mississippi Correctional Facility, a private prison in Meridian, Mississippi. The suit alleges that EMCF is "hyper-violent, grotesquely filthy and dangerous." One example of the jail's dangers: this handwritten letter from an inmate describing his own rape.
