Category Archives: Viva!

Donald Trump’s reaction to terror? To make America terrified again | Simon Jenkins | Opinion | The Guardian – Instead let’s be strong…

Terrorism is a means to an end: that of coercive publicity. It will happen. It will happen especially where we polarise confrontations of race and religion round the world. It will happen when weak people cannot resort to armies or bombs or drones, to gain leverage in enforcing their ideas of how society should be run. There is no such thing as a terrorist state. There are just people who use terror as a means to an end.The only power that can be deployed against this curse is the power of perspective. It is to treat terror as a criminal means of making a point. This has not changed since Joseph Conrad described the terrorist as “terrible in the simplicity of calling madness and despair to the regeneration of the world … like a pest in the street full of men”. What cannot be prevented is best accommodated. It is the psychological price we pay to live in an open and liberal society.These dangers pale against those our grandparents and their forebears had to manage. We are incomparably safer than humanity has ever been before. A community that can devote so much attention to suppressing contentious gatherings, offensive remarks and “invalidations of my identity” is not a society under existential threat. As for how best to help the traumatised people of New York, the answer is to do the opposite of what Americans did to European cities hit by such killings, which was to boycott them. The answer is to book a New York holiday, now.

Source: Donald Trump’s reaction to terror? To make America terrified again | Simon Jenkins | Opinion | The Guardian

Wednesday Open Thread | Jeff Sessions is so very, very screwed

PalmerReport: On Monday it became clear that the only option left for Jeff Sessions would be to play the obliviousness defense. On Tuesday it became clear that even that defense won’t have any chance of working. Sessions now finds himself in cascading levels of trouble, thanks to the guilty plea and confession of his campaign subordinate George Papadopoulos, and the relationship Sessions had with Papadopoulos.

Papadopoulos claimed in his confession that before he conspired with the Russian government to try to obtain emails stolen from Hillary Clinton, he got the explicit approval of Paul Manafort and Sam Clovis. Papadopoulos also claimed that Jeff Sessions was in the meeting and was fully aware of the discussion. Others were also in the room, so Sessions won’t be able to argue that he wasn’t there. His only defense would be to claim that he wasn’t following the discussion because he didn’t know who Papadopoulos was, or didn’t consider him important enough to be worth listening to. But that just went out the window.

When Jeff Sessions held a dinner for a number of Trump campaign advisers, he had George Papadopoulos sit right next to him, according to a Washington Post report (link). This makes clear that Sessions not only knew Papadopoulos, but considered him to be one of the most important Trump campaign advisers. It means Sessions would have been fully engaged during the meeting where Papadopoulos sought clearance for his Russian conspiracy meeting.

So there’s no question that Jeff Sessions knew full well that his campaign subordinate was seeking approval to conspire with the Russian government to procure stolen emails – and at the least, he tacitly let it happen by not objecting. This makes him guilty of conspiracy to receive stolen property, or some other similar variation of the law. That’s in addition to the perjury he committed by claiming under oath not to be aware of any Trump advisers meeting with Russia. Robert Mueller can – and will – indict Sessions on a smorgasbord of charges unless he flips on Trump first.

“God cannot be God if God is unjust”

Musawah are a collective of Muslim feminists who are reinterpreting Islamic texts to challenge unjust family law in Muslim legal traditions. Upon their eighth anniversary, Musawah Programme Manager Suri Kempe discussed the founding of the organisation with Zainah Anwar, Ziba…

The post “God cannot be God if God is unjust” appeared first on sister-hood magazine. A Fuuse production by Deeyah Khan..

Study Shows “Significant” Racial Disparities in Plea Deals

Not news – been this way forever – but good to see it reported again – justice is biased against POC.

White defendants generally get better plea deals than their black counterparts, and are more likely to avoid incarceration for low-level offenses, according to new research by Carlos Berdejó of Loyola Law School, who analyzed more than 48,000 cases occurring over a period of seven years.

Most research into racial disparities in the criminal justice system has focused on arrests, initial charges, and sentencing, Berdejó points out in his report. These studies often reveal that African Americans are more likely to be searched by police during traffic stops, be arrested, have force used against them, and charged with more serious crimes than white people. Far fewer studies have looked at disparities in the stages between charging a defendant, and a judge’s final sentencing.

According to Berdejó’s research into the plea bargaining stage of a case, white defendants are 25 percent more likely than black defendants to have their principal charge dropped or reduced to a lesser charge. Because of this, white defendants charged with felonies are less likely than black defendants to actually be convicted of a felony. Whites are 15 percent more likely than their black peers to receive a misdemeanor conviction, instead. Similarly, cases involving white defendants charged with misdemeanors are 75 percent more likely to end in no conviction, or a conviction for a crime that carries no jail time, than a black defendant accused of the same crime. Cases involving serious felonies result in similar outcomes for black and white defendants, but the disparities are more pronounced in misdemeanor and low-level felony cases, according to the study.

“The impact of a misdemeanor conviction on a defendant’s life should not be understated,” Berdejó writes. “Although certainly less serious and severe than felony convictions, misdemeanor convictions can carry major consequences for individuals…not only are black defendants originally charged with misdemeanors more likely to be convicted of a misdemeanor than white defendants, but conditional on a misdemeanor conviction these black

defendants are more likely to be punished by incarceration than white defendants.”

Controlling for other factors, outcomes are particularly affected by defendants’ criminal histories, Berdejó found. White people with no prior criminal history are more likely than black defendants with no criminal history to have their charges reduced, according to the study. The gap disappears for the most part when black and white defendants have prior convictions–both groups get similar treatment from prosecutors.

“These patterns in racial disparities suggest that prosecutors may be using race as a proxy for a defendant’s latent criminality and likelihood to recidivate,” Berdejó writes.

Although the study’s author is based in Los Angeles, at Loyola Law School, he chose to look at data in Wisconsin.

The state has one of the highest incarceration rates for black males, according to Berdejó. Data from 2010 shows that African Americans, who represented 7 percent of the state’s population, made up 43 percent of the prison population. Most of the disparity can be traced back to Milwaukee, where 50 of black males between the ages of 30 and 50 have spent time in state prison.

Berdejó says he chose Wisconsin, specifically, because the state’s courts’ data is “comprehensive,” he wrote. There’s a specific set of information regarding each crime, which allowed Berdejó to follow the trajectory of a case from initial charges to sentencing.

Local district attorneys’ offices make decisions regarding charges and plea bargains, and in Wisconsin and elsewhere, prosecutors have broad discretion in filing charges and in the plea bargaining process. It’s rare for a judge to reject a plea agreement, Berdejó writes.

The study looks at Wisconsin court data involving felonies and misdemeanors committed on or after January 1, 2000, that were adjudicated before December 31, 2006.

Berdejó says he narrowed down the data to look at Dane County, which includes the state capital, Madison, and is the second most populous after Milwaukee. The final dataset contains 48,368 cases from Dane County. Of those, 17,561 included a felony crime as part of the initial charges. The other 30,807 involved misdemeanors and lesser charges.

The Loyola researcher grouped the cases by charge severity, and controlled for certain characteristics of the crimes and defendants, as well as the identity of the prosecutors, quality of the defense attorney, and other factors.

“Efforts to mitigate racial disparities in sentencing and incarceration rates should take into account disparities in the plea-bargaining process and initial charging decisions,” Berdejó writes. “Proposals aimed at restricting prosecutorial discretion by increasing judicial discretion, for example via the elimination statutory minimum sentences, would seem to remedy these disparities.” Berdejó says his research also supports criminal justice experts’ calls for increased scrutiny of the misdemeanor process.

Trolls force shutdown of French anti-harassment hotline

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Phone number launched as tool for women being pestered by over-insistent men closes after intimidation and death threats

Internet trolls carrying out an orchestrated campaign of intimidation and death threats have forced the shutdown of a French telephone hotline aimed at shaming men who refuse to take no for an answer.

The anti-harassment phone number was launched on Friday afternoon as a tool for women being pestered by over-insistent males.

Continue reading…

Bus Driver Says He Honked At Citi Biker Before Fatally Running Him Over

Bus Driver Says He Honked At Citi Biker Before Fatally Running Him Over

Dan Hanegby, the 36-year-old man killed by a commercial bus driver in Chelsea this June, did not swerve into a bus moments before he was fatally struck, prosecutors said Tuesday. Instead, the criminal complaint against bus driver Dave Lewis states that he honked at Hanegby, then struck and killed the cyclist in the process of passing him. [ more › ]