Jumping To Conclusionstag:www.oobleck.com,2007:/tollbooth//12007-11-27T22:50:37ZThoughts, comments, musings on life, politics, current events and the media.Movable Type 3.33Hard drive crashes sucktag:www.oobleck.com,2007:/tollbooth//1.15392007-11-27T22:49:53Z2007-11-27T22:50:37ZThe title pretty much says it all....David Nieporenthttp://www.oobleck.com/tollbooth/
The title pretty much says it all.
Status updatetag:www.oobleck.com,2007:/tollbooth//1.15372007-03-06T01:28:48Z2007-03-06T01:29:00ZI will be continuing to guest-blog over at Overlawyered.com. In addition, I am starting up a new blog with my friend and former colleague Ron Coleman, who formerly blogged at Dean's World. We will be blogging at Likelihood of Success.com....David Nieporenthttp://www.oobleck.com/tollbooth/
Overlawyered.com.
In addition, I am starting up a new blog with my friend and former colleague Ron Coleman, who formerly blogged at Dean's World. We will be blogging at Likelihood of Success.com. (Yes, it's a law pun. We lawyers are funny that way.) So go check us out.]]>
Not dead yet...tag:www.oobleck.com,2007:/tollbooth//1.15362007-02-26T11:54:54Z2007-02-26T11:55:08ZI know I've been gone for a very long time, but I wanted to announce that I'll be guest blogging over at Overlawyered this week....David Nieporenthttp://www.oobleck.com/tollbooth/
Overlawyered this week.
]]>
Not Fairtag:www.oobleck.com,2006:/tollbooth2//1.13142006-05-12T22:53:44Z2006-07-16T02:41:16ZYeah, it's been a while. Ran out of things to say. And lazy. Maybe I'll start back into this slowly.. So according to the Wall Street Journal: Of 1,003 U.S. adults surveyed in a telephone poll, 29% think Mr. Bush...Peter Duttonhttp://peter.dutton.net/
Wall Street Journal:
Of 1,003 U.S. adults surveyed in a telephone poll, 29% think Mr. Bush is doing an "excellent or pretty good" job as president, down from 35% in April and significantly lower than 43% in January. It compares with 71% of Americans who said Mr. Bush is doing an "only fair or poor" job, up from 63% in April.
The article then goes on to characterize "excellent or pretty good" as "positive", and "fair or poor" as "negative". Well, I'll grant them "poor", but since when is "fair" a negative assessment? If I say I think the President is doing a "fair" job (which I do), I don't mean that negatively. I mean that in a neutral-to-positive "not bad, but could be better" way.
So why not just break down the results as "excellent", "pretty good", "fair", and "poor"? Wouldn't that be fairer reporting?]]>
Dog bites mantag:www.oobleck.com,2005:/tollbooth2//1.13122005-11-07T03:49:10Z2006-07-16T02:41:16ZHeadline of an Editorial in the New York Times: The Time Is Wrong for Tax Cuts...David Nieporenthttp://www.oobleck.com/tollbooth/
The Time Is Wrong for Tax Cuts]]>
How to demonize a judge in twelve stepstag:www.oobleck.com,2005:/tollbooth2//1.13112005-11-02T00:13:20Z2006-07-16T02:41:16ZWith the nomination of Judge Sam Alito to the Supreme Court, I thought it might be a good idea to dust off this list, to help out some of the groups opposing his nomination. Rules for demonizing a judicial nomineeSelect...David Nieporenthttp://www.oobleck.com/tollbooth/
some of the groupsopposinghis nomination.
Rules for demonizing a judicial nominee
Select cases where the judge ruled against a sympathetic party in favor of an unsympathetic one. (e.g. employee vs. employer, injured party vs. negligent rich party, mistreated defendant vs. mean ol' police, anybody vs. insurance company, drug company, big tobacco, etc.). If possible, ensure that the sympathetic party is (a) poor; (b) minority; (c) female; (d) handicapped; (e) an immigrant; (f) a child; and (g) abused.
If the judge was in the majority, describe the resulting harm suffered by the losing party. Never mention that other judges sided with his opinion as evidence of his reasonableness; on the other hand, if you can find an already-demonized judge who sided with him, flag that as proof of his extremism.
If the judge was in the minority, point out how out-of-the mainstream he was because people disagreed with him. (This one also works if the judge's opinion was reversed on appeal.) Always characterize his opinion as a "lone dissent" -- as if there were another type for a circuit court judge -- to make him sound even more isolated.
In any non-unanimous case, cite the opinion of a fellow judge who disagreed with your judge as if that opinion were established fact. If this opinion predicts bad outcomes that might result from this opinion, treat these outcomes as if they have already been realized.
Never mention that the job of a judge is to apply the law, rather than to make policy. Treat his opinions as if they represented his policy preferences rather than the legislature's.
Never ever ever ever ever mention that the job of a lower judge is to apply the decisions of higher courts. Treat his opinions as if they represented his personal views of what the law should be. (Remember, if he disagreed with the Supreme Court, he'd have just ignored the Court. The fact that he went along with it shows he agrees.)
Never mention the procedural posture of the case, or standards of review. Words like "de novo" or "abuse of discretion" are just confusing, anyway. Act as if an appellate judge was making factual findings, rather than reviewing the findings of a lower court or an administrative agency. Treat failure to reverse those findings as agreement with them.
Always assume "constitutional" or "legal" means the same thing as "a good idea." If a judge rules that one party is permitted to do X under the constitution or law, report it as "Judge so-and-so approves of X."
Remember that a judge is never deciding a particular case; he is always announcing a general policy. If he rules that this specific plaintiff didn't have enough evidence, he is really saying that the sort of behavior allegedly engaged in by defendant is always justified.
Remember that a judge is never applying a general policy; he is always deciding a particular case. If he rules that the law doesn't recognize that legal theory, he is really saying that he approves of what this specific party did.
All allegations of plaintiff are factual when judge rules for defendants. And vice versa.
This is most important: NEVER ADDRESS THE ISSUE OF WHETHER THE OPINION WAS RIGHT. Remember, if you don't bring it up, the media won't, either.
There's some obvious generic advice: use terms like "ultra-right wing," "ultra-conservative," "reasonable" (to describe a law struck down by the judge) and "fundamental" (to describe a right infringed as a result of the judge's ruling). Just follow those twelve easy steps, and soon you could be a member of People for the American Way.]]>
Alito: The pendulum swings back?tag:www.oobleck.com,2005:/tollbooth2//1.13102005-10-31T14:34:04Z2006-07-16T02:41:16ZSo, it's official: the new nominee is Third Circuit Judge Sam Alito. Shorter version of President Bush's introduction of Alito this morning: "Hey, everyone: he's not Harriet Miers! This one's qualified!" Speaking of the Miers-Alito contrast, does this mean that...David Nieporenthttp://www.oobleck.com/tollbooth/
real battle begins.)]]>
A word for everythingtag:www.oobleck.com,2005:/tollbooth2//1.13092005-10-31T04:58:39Z2006-07-16T02:41:15ZI am a long-time subscriber to the fabulous "Word A Day" email newsletter from Wordsmith.org. Last Friday's AWAD finally revealed a word to describe my approach to life, my new favorite word:velleity (vuh-LEE-i-tee) noun Volition at its faintest. [From Latin...David Nieporenthttp://www.oobleck.com/tollbooth/
email newsletter from Wordsmith.org.
Last Friday's AWAD finally revealed a word to describe my approach to life, my new favorite word:
velleity (vuh-LEE-i-tee) noun
Volition at its faintest.
[From Latin velle (to wish), ultimately from Indo-European root wel- (to wish, will) which is also the ancestor of well, will, wealth, wallop, gallop, voluptuous, and voluntary.]
Today's word in Visual Thesaurus.
Finally, a word to describe a few of those things we can't wait to do: filling out tax forms, for example.
Velleity is volition at its weakest. It's a mere wish or inclination, without any accompanying effort. But who could tell just by looking at the word?
So next time you're late in filing your tax return and the tax department sends a reminder, just send them a polite letter vouching for your velleity. The taxman will think the check (or cheque, as our Canadian grammar guru Carolanne Reynolds would write) is coming soon and you've been completely forthright.
It also describes my approach to blogging, unfortunately.]]>
More quick thoughts about the courttag:www.oobleck.com,2005:/tollbooth2//1.13082005-10-27T15:04:30Z2006-07-16T02:41:15ZAs I mentioned, the terms of Sandra Day O'Connor's conditional resignation have her remaining on the court until her replacement is confirmed. Since (a) social conservatives don't really want her on the court, (b) she doesn't want to be on...David Nieporenthttp://www.oobleck.com/tollbooth/
those confirmation hearings -- but (a) I'm not sure she's socially conservative enough for social conservatives (in other words, we don't know her views on abortion), and (b) she's the candidate probably most at risk of being Borked by the left. Someone who thinks the New Deal was a socialist mistake may be my hero, but her views will be derisively caricatured by Democrats. It would definitely distract from any Fitzpatrick indictments, but I'm not sure Bush wants to fight a war on three or four fronts at once.
Other than that, there's Garza, Clement, Jones, Owen... I guess we'll have to wait and see. I just hope we wind up with someone whose conservative judicial intellectual credentials are well-established. This is Bush's last best chance for a judicial legacy. (Yes, Stevens could still retire, but that fight would be very tough, and there's no guarantee Republicans would still control Congress when it happened.)]]>
The buck stops here.tag:www.oobleck.com,2005:/tollbooth2//1.13072005-10-27T15:03:27Z2006-07-16T02:41:15ZSo, it's official: Harriet Miers has withdrawn her nomination to the Supreme Court. I take full responsibility for this event, or at least the timing thereof. Last night, I prepared, in a hoped-for return from my blogging hiatus, a long...David Nieporenthttp://www.oobleck.com/tollbooth/
Harriet Miers has withdrawn her nomination to the Supreme Court. I take full responsibility for this event, or at least the timing thereof. Last night, I prepared, in a hoped-for return from my blogging hiatus, a long post on the Miers nomination. I was going to clean it up and post it this morning. In order to ensure that said post would be pointless, Miers withdrew.
A few quick observations:
Charles Krauthammer called it: the face-saving gesture was executive privilege. Although I question how much face it could possibly save, at this point.
Although I am happy that Miers has withdrawn, I do feel sorry for her, to an extent. She's hardly an innocent bystander in this, to be sure -- but it's got to be difficult to say no when your close friend, the president, approaches you with such an offer. In two years, I doubt anyone outside law/news junkies will remember her, but this has to damage her career. She went from being a politically connected, successful, accomplished corporate litigator, to an unqualified hack who can't write, in the span of a month.
If she were already a federal judge, she could return to that position, secure in life tenure. If she were an academic, she could turn back to academia. If she had been forced to withdraw by a nanny problem, she could have returned to her career and laughed it off. If she had been Borked, she could turn to the conservative book/lecture circuit for support. But what does someone in her position do now?
I wonder how much of a role, if any, blogs played in all this. I also wonder if there was any one factor, such as yesterday's revelation of Miers speech suggesting she may not want to ban abortion at all, or if it was just the constant drumbeat of opposition which Bush and his minions couldn't quell.
I feel sorry for Sandra Day O'Connor, whose conditional resignation is now likely to drag on for more months (thanks to Chief Justice Rehnquist's inconsiderate timing of his death).
I see that Democrats and the activist left are using this as a rhetorical weapon against the conservative movement. I doubt that will have any traction, but they couldn't resist. This is, of course, merely setting themselves up to oppose Miers' replacement. They've got the script all worked out: "Bush nominated a moderate to replace O'Connor, but those ultra-right wing ideologues couldn't tolerate that, so we know that this new nominee fill-in-the-blank must be so radical, so we oppose him. Or her. Whoever."
In any case, I have reluctantly agreed to throw my hat back into the ring. If President Bush calls, I will do my duty, despite my annoyance at being snubbed last time around. And unlike Miers, I have a paper trail. Or at least a virtual one.]]>
Didn't do the reading assignment?tag:www.oobleck.com,2005:/tollbooth2//1.13052005-09-26T05:08:37Z2006-07-16T02:41:15ZI usually assume that the New York Times' bizarre theories of constitutional interpretation come from the fact that they just don't care what the constitution says; they think their own personal ideology is more important. But perhaps there's another, simpler...David Nieporenthttp://www.oobleck.com/tollbooth/
never read the constitution at all:
In Iraq, the elimination of expectations is on display in the disastrous political process. Among other things, the constitution drafted under American supervision does not provide for the rights of women and minorities and enshrines one religion as the fundamental source of law. Administration officials excuse this poor excuse for a constitution by saying it also refers to democratic values. But it makes them secondary to Islamic law and never actually defines them. Our founding fathers had higher expectations: they made the split of church and state fundamental, and spelled out what they meant by democracy and the rule of law.
They did? I suppose it's arguably true, if you ignore the constitution and look at documents such as the Federalist Papers. Seems strange to complain about omissions in the Iraqi constitution by pointing to documents extraneous to our constitution, though.
But while that's arguable, the next sentence is not:
It's true that the United States Constitution once allowed slavery, denied women the right to vote and granted property rights only to white men.
Quick quiz: can anybody point me to the section of the Constitution that "denied women the right to vote" or "granted property rights only to white men"? The latter claim is particularly odd, because while women generally didn't have the right to vote, free blacks certainly did have the right to property.
So, maybe the reason that the New York Times is regularly so horrified at the thought of the Scalia/Thomas originalism doctrine of jurisprudence is because they simply have no idea what the constitution originally said.
The Times is lying, by the way; the Iraqi constitutiondoes "provide for the rights of women and minorities" and does not make democratic values "secondary to Islamic law." (It's true that the document does not create a wall of separation between church and state, but (a) neither does our constitution, (b) neither does that of almost any other country, and (c) it does protect religious liberty.)]]>
A billion here, a billion there...tag:www.oobleck.com,2005:/tollbooth2//1.13032005-08-29T12:16:14Z2006-07-16T02:41:15ZThe New York Times is upset because the Base Closing Commission isn't -- in the Times' view -- aggressive enough at shutting down bases:Such reprieves hearten the communities involved, and it is easy to sympathize with local fears of base...David Nieporenthttp://www.oobleck.com/tollbooth/
is upset because the Base Closing Commission isn't -- in the Times' view -- aggressive enough at shutting down bases:
Such reprieves hearten the communities involved, and it is easy to sympathize with local fears of base closings. Yet every such reversal diverts funds the Pentagon ought to be spending on real and urgent requirements - including the needs of soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan - to the upkeep of installations the military has already concluded it can do without. The commission's actions eliminate a substantial chunk of the nearly $50 billion the Defense Department estimated it would have saved over 20 years.
Other reporting from the Times gives more specific numbers:
Principi told reporters Friday night that changes in the Pentagon blueprint approved by the commission had cut the estimated savings over 20 years to $37 billion, from $48 billion, though he called the revised number "very preliminary."
So, in other words, the Times is worked up about a difference of $11 billion... over twenty years. That is, about $500 million per year. Since the military budget (not counting the war in Iraq and Afghanistan) is about $400 billion, we're talking about 1/10th of 1 percent of the military budget. Within rounding error of 0. There may be good reasons to support more base closings... but "savings" isn't one of them.
Neither, in my view, is the Times' short-sighted, fighting-the-last-war argument:
Looking over the panel's rationale for most of these changes, we think the Pentagon had it right the first time. In the case of Portsmouth and the Groton base, a majority of the commissioners seemed to be swayed by the claim that China's naval building efforts might one day create new missions for America's current fleet of 54 underused nuclear-powered attack submarines - a costly legacy of the days when America's main enemy was an oceangoing superpower, not cave-dwelling terrorists. The Portsmouth shipyard is good at repairing submarines. The Groton base, located near the Navy's prime submarine building and repair contractor, Electric Boat, has a school for training submarine crews.
China does theoretically have the economic and technological capacity to build a large and threatening submarine fleet. But it has no obvious reason for doing so unless Washington insists on casting it as a substitute cold war enemy. The United States Navy remains the world's most powerful. The Bush administration has been handing far more dangerous leverage to Beijing by failing to narrow America's gaping budget and trade deficits, which have allowed China to buy a huge amount of the national debt.
Yes, that's all true, and the Times is right when it says that in this century we've been fighting "counterinsurgency wars" that are different than "superpower conflicts." But here's the thing: we don't know what we're going to face in ten or twenty or thirty years. To argue that China will never be our military enemy is myopic. And if/when we do need to confront them -- say, over Taiwan -- it will be awfully nice to have a submarine fleet ready... because it will be rather difficult to build one on short notice.
Ten years ago, would anybody have predicted we'd be engaged in a counterinsurgency war in Iraq? No. So why act as if you know what we're likely to face -- particularly when that prediction is based on faith in the goodwill of the government of China -- in the next ten years? (But I am amused at how the Times is preemptively Blaming America First, just in case such a confrontation with China happens.)]]>
And speaking of race, the 1960s are overtag:www.oobleck.com,2005:/tollbooth2//1.13022005-08-29T05:02:46Z2006-07-16T02:41:15ZMark Kleiman is a very smart person, and (for a Democrat) usually quite reasonable. But every so often, he goes off the deep end. Like many Democrats, that seems to happen when the subject of race comes up. I refer...David Nieporenthttp://www.oobleck.com/tollbooth/
overwrought ranting about Georgia's new voter identification law:
Kleiman has apparently become a mind reader; if one wanted to play this sort of childish game, one could say that the "true purpose" of opposition to this law is to allow Democrats to perpetuate massive voting fraud. In support of his ridiculous assertion, Kleiman links to this crazed, rambling column by "voting rights attorney" David Becker in the Miami Herald; its title, "A law reviving Jim Crow?", tells you all you need to know about it.
The occasion for this hysteria? Georgia has passed a voting law forbidding black people from votingrequiring voters of all races to show photo identification when they go to the polls. To any sane person, that sounds perfectly reasonable, and doesn't have a damn thing to do with race. But to a liberal, everything has to do with race. Unfortunately, the arguments against this law (all from the article Kleiman links to) are so flimsy that they don't stand up to even the least bit of scrutiny. Opposition to the law is predicated on the theory that black people can't possibly get driver's licenses. One would think the starting point for proving such a point would be telling us the number of adults of each race without licenses -- but nowhere is that information provided. Instead, we get oblique evidence such as:
Additionally, it is surprisingly difficult to obtain a photo ID in Georgia. Though the state has 159 counties, there are only 56 places in which residents can obtain a driver's license, and not one is within the city limits of Atlanta or within the six counties that have the highest percentage of blacks.
Immediately, my BSmeter goes off. Why are we talking about "counties"? When one wants to go to a Walmart, or a Barnes & Noble, or the mall, does one look for one in one's county of residence -- or just one close to one's home or office? Why not tell us how many people live near a driver's license facility, instead of telling us about "counties"? (Telling us that the state has "159 counties" is supposed to impress us by showing us how many are unserved by the state motor vehicles bureau, but in fact, the more counties there are, the smaller they must be, which means the less significance there is to the claim. In fact, that's the case, as this map illustrates; the average county is just 370 square miles (the median is 344, and the largest is 900), meaning that one rarely has to travel more than 10-15 miles to get to the next county.
(The part about the "city limits of Atlanta" sounds bad -- until you find out that this is just temporary, and that they're re-opening their facility there within three to six months. Meanwhile, they have plans to "begin the Georgia Licensing on Wheels (GLOW) program, a mobile licensing bus that will travel the state of Georgia with the capability to issue up to 200 photo identification cards per day.")
Besides, despite Becker and Kleiman's red herring, the law doesn't say anything about requiring a "driver's license." It merely requires photo ID. These can include (as per the new statute) a license; a passport (there are 214 places in Georgia where one can go to get a passport); a military ID with a photo; a photo ID card issued by any federal or state government agency; an employee ID card with a photo issued by "any branch, department, agency, or entity of the United States government, this state, or any county, municipality, board, authority, or other entity of this state"; or even a student identification card with a photo issued by any public or private postsecondary school in the state of Georgia. So what's the big deal?
Becker goes on:
The law's proponents claim that it will help protect against voter fraud, but there appears to be no evidence to support this claim. Georgians already have to show one of 17 forms of ID to prove that they are who they say they are when they vote.
In fact, of those "17 forms of ID," ten of them did not have a photograph on them. They included such "ID" as a "utility bill" or "bank statement" -- but not even the originals; a "legible copy" would do. That's a "form" of something, but "ID" it ain't, and a photocopy of a utility bill does not "prove that they are who they say they are" by any reasonable standard. (At most, it proves access to an address's mailbox.) All the new law does is say that ID must actually identify a person in order to actually constitute ID.
Georgia's chief elections official, Secretary of State Cathy Cox, has said that not one instance of voter fraud relating to impersonation at the polls has been documented during her tenure.
Of course, since people don't have to show ID, it would be pretty difficult to "document" this fraud, wouldn't it? Clever, ain't it? Make it impossible to prevent fraud, and then say, "Ha! You didn't prove fraud."
But let's assume I'm wrong about everything I said above. Let's assume that it really is typical for people not to have licenses -- although there are far more licenses than voters in Georgia -- or other ID. Let's further assume that some people really do live far from motor vehicle offices, and that they can't get any other acceptable form of ID. Even so, keep in mind that this is a one-time requirement. You don't have to undertake this onerous task every time you have to vote; you can get a license good for ten years, and can renew it by mail. Does it really amount to "disenfranchisement" or "Jim Crow" to spend an afternoon once every ten or twenty years to get a picture ID?
But if that obvious hyperbole weren't silly enough, it gets worse!
Furthermore, while purporting to combat fraud, the Georgia law expressly excludes absentee ballots from the ID requirement. While all the evidence indicates that minorities are far less likely to vote absentee than whites, absentee balloting is the only form of voting in which there is documented fraud in Georgia. The exclusion of absentee ballots from the identification requirement raises serious questions about whether the anti-fraud justification for the law is purely pretextual.
Kleiman and Becker both raise this argument -- though they don't explain how one could require photo identification for absentee voting. But this proves too much. If it's so easy to vote absentee without identification, then why can't all these black people we're worried about do the same?
In sum, this is simply much ado about nothing. This law won't keep a single legitimate voter from voting. At best, the hullaballo represents misplaced liberal paternalism; at worst, it's deliberate race-baiting by a group of people devoid of any other ideas.]]>
All blacks are black, but some blacks are blacker than otherstag:www.oobleck.com,2005:/tollbooth2//1.13012005-08-29T04:03:26Z2006-07-16T02:41:15ZIn 1986, the Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional to exclude people from juries in criminal trials based on race. At the time, Warren Burger warned in dissent:A further painful paradox of the Court's holding is that it is...David Nieporenthttp://www.oobleck.com/tollbooth/
the Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional to exclude people from juries in criminal trials based on race. At the time, Warren Burger warned in dissent:
A further painful paradox of the Court's holding is that it is likely to interject racial matters back into the jury selection process, contrary to the general thrust of a long line of Court decisions and the notion of our country as a "melting pot." In Avery v. Georgia, 345 U.S. 559 (1953), for instance, the Court confronted a situation where the selection of the venire was done through the selection of tickets from a box; the names of whites were printed on tickets of one color and the names of blacks were printed on different color tickets. The Court had no difficulty in striking down such a scheme. Justice Frankfurter observed that
opportunity for working of a discriminatory system exists whenever the mechanism for jury selection has a component part, such as the slips here, that differentiates between white and colored. . . .
Id. at 564 (concurring) (emphasis added).
Today we mark the return of racial differentiation as the Court accepts a positive evil for a perceived one. Prosecutors and defense attorneys alike will build records in support of their claims that peremptory challenges have been exercised in a racially discriminatory fashion by asking jurors to state their racial background and national origin for the record, despite the fact that "such questions may be offensive to some jurors, and thus are not ordinarily asked on voir dire." People v. Motton, 39 Cal.3d 596, 604, 704 P.2d [p130] 176, 180, modified, 40 Cal.3d 4b (1985) (advance sheet). [n10] This process is sure to tax even the most capable counsel and judges, since determining whether a prima facie case has been established will "require a continued monitoring and recording of the ‘group' composition of the panel present and prospective. . . ." People v. Wheeler, 22 Cal.3d 258, 294, 583 P.2d 748, 773 (1978) (Richardson, J., dissenting).
Even after a "record" on this issue has been created, disputes will inevitably arise. In one case, for instance, a conviction was reversed based on the assumption that no blacks were on the jury that convicted a defendant. See People v. Motton, supra. However, after the court's decision was announced, Carolyn Pritchett, who had served on the jury, called the press to state that the court was in error, and that she was black. 71 A.B.A.J. 22 (Nov.1985). The California court nonetheless denied a rehearing petition. [n11]
Burger's worry was prescient, but I'll bet even he never realized how far it would go. Taking the balkanization of American society to its logical extreme, the New York Times reports that Mark Watson, a convicted black rapist in New York, is appealing his conviction, claiming Batson violations. The twist? Watson not face an all-white jury, as Batson did; in fact, there were ten blacks on Watson's jury.
So what's Watson's argument? They weren't the right kind of black.
In an unusual reflection of New York City's growing diversity, lawyers for a West Indian man are arguing that he was denied justice because the Bronx jury that convicted him of rape, sodomy and burglary included only American-born blacks while all five potential jurors who were West Indian were improperly excluded by the prosecution.
[...]
The lawsuit challenges the trial court judge's conclusion that West Indians are simply black people "who happen to be from the West Indies" and his rejection of the defense argument that "the absence of this group excludes a specific point of view that cannot be articulated by other members of the jury."
They go on to argue -- with sociological "evidence" -- that West Indians and American blacks have "separate experiences and values." A careful reader will note that this really has nothing to do with what the trial was supposed to be about -- guilt or innocence -- but that's beside the point, when you're playing the racial game. And as more facts make clear, it won't end with a division between American-born and West Indian blacks:
He also said that judges had not supported the defense claim that West Indians were systematically excluded and that, in fact, two of the jurors were West Indian (although Mr. Taglieri says they were of Puerto Rican descent).
Geographers would point out that Puerto Rico is in the West Indies, but that's also clearly irrelevant. There's no stopping point. If there are blacks on the jury, then they're not West Indian blacks. If they're West Indian blacks, then they're from Puerto Rico rather than Jamaica. If they're from Jamaica, well, they must be from the wrong province of Jamaica. If they're from the right province, they could be from the wrong city. Or from the wrong side of the tracks within that city. Whatever. And let's not forget the predictable claim that Jamaican women and Jamaican men have "separate experiences and values," and that the jury needs to include some of both. (Let's not even get into sexual orientation.)
I'd call it the law of unintended consequences, but that usually applies to unforeseen side effects, and as I noted above, Warren Burger predicted it at the time.
Only two things are certain: an imaginative defense attorney can always come up with a new ethnic category, and we'll never put this particular genie back in the bottle, as Democrats will scream "Racists Turning Back The Clock On Civil Rights!!!!!!" at any judge who tries.]]>
Blogging in the NYTtag:www.oobleck.com,2005:/tollbooth2//1.13002005-08-21T04:45:43Z2006-07-16T02:41:15ZYes, this is yet another post about Paul Krugman -- but I'll leave the details to others. Power Line comments on our favorite New York Times columnist:Krugman's second Ohio nugget relates to Miami County: "Miami County reported that voter turnout...David Nieporenthttp://www.oobleck.com/tollbooth/
Power Line comments on our favorite New York Times columnist:
Krugman's second Ohio nugget relates to Miami County: "Miami County reported that voter turnout was an improbable 98.55 percent of registered voters." Well, that would be quite a turnout, all right--impressive even by the standards of Democratic Philadelphia. I think I know where Krugman got that figure; it is on page 58 of the Conyers report authored, as noted above, by the Democratic staff of the House Judiciary Committee.
Of course, Krugman has never been one to trouble himself by actually doing research. As far as I can tell, he never does any: he simply reads a far-left book or a Democratic National Committee press release, and summarizes it in his column. (And for this the New York Times pays him?) I'm not talking about hard, obscure research here; I'm talking about going to the website of the Ohio Secretary of State's office, where official voter turnout numbers are recorded. Miami County's turnout in 2004? 72.2 %.
How true. I don't know why many people haven't caught onto this already: Paul Krugman is a blogger. The vast majority of his pieces are simply passing along what other people have already written. He does no original research; he never picks up the phone to talk to an actual source. (Most bloggers don't do these things, either -- but they aren't paid by the Paper of Record, either.) What he does is find a news report, or story, that superficially "proves" what he wants to say -- Republicans are evil, of course -- refuses to dig any deeper, and then spends 750 words ranting about it.
In other words, he's a blogger.
Say what you want about Tom Friedman's ridiculous name-dropping and overextended metaphors, or Bob Herbert's tired warmed-over 1960s liberalism, or David Brooks' oversimplified sociological essays, but they all get out of their offices long enough to learn something about the subjects they write about. Krugman can't even be bothered to ask, "Is this really true?" before reprinting Democratic talking points.]]>