Law & Justice

• Part 1: Chris Hedges: The Collapse of the American Judicial System
  • Chris Hedges discusses restoring America’s justice system with legal scholar Edgar Cahn.
• Part 2: Why Technology Will Not Solve Our Criminal Justice Problems
  • In the context of criminal justice, America’s faith in technological interventions is worse than misplaced; it is dangerous.

Compiled by David Culver, Ed., Evergreene Digest

Part 1: Chris Hedges: The Collapse of the American Judicial System

Screenshot by Dandelion Salad via Flickr
RT America <https://www.rt.com/on-air/rt-america-air/>

Aug 5, 2017 | On this week’s episode of On Contact, Chris Hedges discusses restoring America’s justice system with legal scholar Edgar Cahn. Cahn is a law professor, former counsel and speechwriter to Robert F. Kennedy, and co-founder of the Antioch School of Law which placed emphasis on serving the poor and trained prospective lawyers in social activism. RT Correspondent Anya Parampil examines the collapse of our legal system.

RT America broadcasts news reports, features and talk shows with a totally different perspective from the mainstream American television. We delve deep into the most important issues on the US agenda, report the other side of the story, and explore unanswered – and unasked – questions.

Full story … 

Part 2: Why Technology Will Not Solve Our Criminal Justice Problems

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In the context of criminal justice, America’s faith in technological interventions is worse than misplaced; it is dangerous.

Jennifer L. Lieberman, Counterpunch / Rise Up Times

Auguist 2, 2017 | Technological and scientific interventions in criminal justice are not always newsworthy enough to draw our attention away from urgent and sensational issues on Capitol Hill. But when a jail in Tennessee promotes sterilization by offering reduced sentences to men who volunteer to have vasectomies, we have to pay attention. The problem is not that one jail implemented a terrible eugenicist policy; it is that stakeholders in the criminal justice system are consistently looking for scientific and technological solutions to social problems, forgetting that—as fivethirtyeight contributor Laura Hudson writes— “technology is biased too.”
In the context of criminal justice, America’s faith in technological interventions is worse than misplaced; it is dangerous.

Full story … 

• In video of the video of her brutal encounter, Mendez-Medrano gets at the heart of the problem. “Why go after people trying to make a decent living?” she asks. “Why not go after gang-bangers?” The answer is that too much of what we’d call “making a decent living” is what our government calls “crime.”
• Related: Justine Damond’s death at the hands of the Minneapolis police raises so many questions.
• Related: Death by Cop: Black and White Issues

Bonnie Kristian, Rare 

July 19, 2017 | A video surfaced Monday night of a police officer in Perris, California, tackling a 52-year-old woman, grabbing her arms and pulling her hair — all for the “crime” of selling flowers without a permit.

As the local news station KLTA, which covered the video, reports, Juanita Mendez-Medrano was peacefully selling flower bouquets and Hawaiian-style leis to families celebrating at a nearby high school graduation when the cops got involved. She was ticketed along with some other vendors for selling without a city permit, and when she declined to provide her name for the ticket, one officer escalated the situation into a violent arrest.

Bonnie Kristian, Rare Contributor

Full story … 

Related: 

Justine Damond’s death at the hands of the Minneapolis police raises so many questions, Bonnie Kristian, Rare

• Why? It’s beyond ludicrous. She wasn’t a threat. She didn’t do anything wrong or violent. And now she’s dead.
• The Minneapolis PD have a lot to answer for.

July 18, 2017 | More than 660 people have been killed by police officers in the United States this year so far. Number 661 was Justine Ruszczyk Damond, an Australian woman who was fatally shot by a cop in Minneapolis this week.

Unlike many other high-profile police shootings — like the death of Philando Castile, who was also killed by a Twin Cities officer — Damond’s death wasn’t caught on camera. Ironically, that’s part of why this tragedy has made headlines: Minneapolis police wear body cameras, but the officers involved didn’t have their cameras turned on when one of them shot Damond as she went out to meet them, unarmed and in her pajamas, in her own alleyway, after having summoned them by calling 911.

Bonnie Kristian, Rare Contributor

Full story … 

Related: 

Death by Cop: Black and White Issues, Glen Ford, Black Agenda Report / Truthdig 

• U.S. police kill more Black women every year than the total of all civilians killed annually by their counterparts in western Europe’s largest countries. These sisters’ male relatives are slaughtered on an epic scale—with the connivance and consent of most of the Congressional Black Caucus, 80 percent of whose members voted to continue the militarization of local police when the issue came up for a vote on the full House floor in June of 2014.
• Related: After Minneapolis police shooting of Justine Damond, it's time to decide who runs this town.