February 2019 Archives

Under the nonprosecution agreement with Mr. Epstein, who had been the target of a Federal Bureau of Investigation probe, federal prosecutors promised not to bring charges against him in Florida if, among other conditions, he pleaded guilty to two state prostitution-related felonies and served a 13-month prison sentence with work-release privileges that let him spend much of his time outside prison.

When the Ninth Circuit issued its opinion in this case, Judge Reinhardt was neither an active judge nor a senior judge. For that reason, by statute he was without power to participate in the en banc court's decision at the time it was rendered.

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That practice effectively allowed a deceased judge to exercise the judicial power of the United States after his death. But federal judges are appointed for life,not for eternity.

With the exception of one recent decision issued by the Ninth Circuit after Judge Reinhardt's death but subsequently withdrawn, see supra, at 1 n., we are aware of no cases in which a court of appeals panel has purported to issue a binding decision that was joined at the time of release by less than a quorum of the judges who were alive at that time.

CHICAGO--Prosecutors on Wednesday charged actor Jussie Smollett with disorderly conduct for filing a false police report when he claimed to have been the victim of a racist and homophobic attack last month.

Mr. Smollett turned himself in to police on Thursday, Chicago police said, according to the Associated Press.

The charge is a class 4 felony, Chicago Police Department spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said. It carries a penalty of 1 to 3 years in jail, and up to a $25,000 fine, according to the state Legislature's website.

Over the last quarter of a century, the United States has seen historic drops in crime--most famously in New York. These gains, once thought impossible, were achieved largely through dramatic innovations in policing, especially the adoption of an approach that stressed order maintenance in communities, data- and intelligence-gathering, and a problem-solving approach to crime and disorder.

In recent years, however, antipolice sentiment has risen in the U.S., sparked in part by a series of tragic, high-profile police-involved killings in major cities but also by the work of critics, mostly on the left but also on the libertarian right, who argue that targeted policing aimed at public disorder is coercive, hostile to community life, and often racist. These critics see such policing as the antithesis to what they call community policing. The arguments that have gained popular currency among police critics have essentially blinded them from seeing that the sort of aggressive policing that they object to can actually be an element of a community-policing model.

The increasingly widespread view that community policing and order-maintenance efforts are at odds represents a fundamental misunderstanding. In reality, the proactive policing that New York first undertook in its subway system under then-transit police chief William J. Bratton in the early 1990s--informed in significant part by Broken Windows theory--was a core element of community policing. Indeed, the very behaviors that residents wanted more heavily policed called for exactly the sort of approach that many modern community-policing advocates now decry.

The women's movement was on display at this week's State of the Union address ....  One would expect that these same Democratic women would be similarly excited that a woman has been nominated for Kavanaugh's now empty seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

But just the opposite was true when the Senate Judiciary Committee met Tuesday to hear from Neomi Rao, the D.C. Circuit nominee. I'd like to say I was surprised but Rao is a conservative and, on the Hill, the #MeToo movement is about partisan politics rather than about women.

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An irony of Democrats' judicial confirmation politics is that their efforts to thwart nominations deliberately and disproportionately impact stellar minority and female nominees. Just ask Miguel Estrada or Janice Rogers Brown.

John Galton and his girlfriend Lily Forester had finally made it. On a March 2017 evening, the young American couple sat on their balcony above Acapulco, Mexico, counting their blessings. They'd recently moved into a big house on a mountainside and were eyeing an ambitious push into the artisanal bong business.

Galton and Forester were anarcho-capitalists who slipped U.S. drug charges worth 25 years in prison, they said in a YouTube video that night. They'd hopped the border and resettled in what Galton called one of the world's "pockets of freedom," a community billed as a libertarian paradise.

Almost two years later, Galton was murdered.

New York governor Andrew Cuomo is urging the exemption of mugshot photos and arrest booking information from public disclosure under New York's freedom of information laws. This is understandable, given the impressive montage that might be made from mugshots of one-time Cuomo aides, advisors, and associates now on their way to prison, but it nevertheless raises serious civil-liberties issues around press freedom and public information--and it seems like yet another gubernatorial pander toward the Democratic Party's crime-coddling Left.

Cuomo isn't the only politician moving in this direction. Virtually the entire Democratic presidential field has embraced it to one degree or another, as has every elected Democrat of note in New York. And Cuomo is typical of the state party's establishment. He long ago embraced sanctuary-statism. He has turned a blind eye to the wholesale theft of mass-transit services--that is, fare evasion--that cost the MTA $215 million last year. He's on board with the refusal of most New York City district attorneys to enforce laws against the public use of illegal drugs, and he strongly backs the legalization of marijuana. He hasn't said a word about the de Blasio administration's effective abandonment of quality-of-life policing in the streets, or about the need for discipline in public schools.

These positions are rooted in the left-wing notion that "social justice" must take precedence over criminal justice when enforcement of certain laws falls disproportionately on favored demographic groups. It's the doctrine of disparate impact, along with its cousin in the public schools, restorative justice--together, the two concepts are turning conventional standards of accountability on their head.