"In the 1980s and 1990s, the politics of crime turned distinctly punitive and remained racially coded."

"Hillary Clinton’s reference to 'superpredators' when talking about crime (which has come up repeatedly in the current campaign) was made in 1996. On the campaign trail and in office, Bill Clinton worked to shore up his 'tough on crime' credentials. As the legal historian Ian Haney Lopez writes, 'Clinton flew back to Arkansas to oversee the execution of a mentally impaired black individual, Ricky Ray Rector,' and he advocated for a number of federal measures, including [the] federal 'three strikes' law."

From "From Wallace To Trump, The Evolution of 'Law And Order,'" by Marquette polisci prof Julia Azari at FiveThirtyEight.

That reminds me: At Sunday's Democratic candidates town hall, Hillary Clinton got a question from a black man named Ricky Jackson, who'd spent 39 years in prison, some of it on death row (and won freedom through the work of the Ohio Innocence Project at the University of Cincinnati).

Ricky Jackson did not bring up the horrible Ricky Ray Rector case and the racial politics of 1996. I don't know who screened or wrote his question for him, but it was a tame invitation to justify the death penalty in light of the cases of innocence we've seen. The only racial element to Jackson's question was the visual, Jackson himself. And Hillary had a nice opportunity to express empathy for him and balance that with a demand for excellent judicial process and some targeted outrage over real crime (without using the word "superpredators").

What she did was take a hard shot at state courts: "[T'he states have proven themselves incapable of carrying out fair trials that give any defendant all of the rights a defendant should have, all of the support that the defendant's lawyer should have."

State courts are incapable of giving any defendant a fair trial? Not only are all state court trials unfair, it's impossible for state courts to give a fair trial! That's a ridiculous statement. Presumably, she'll walk it back if confronted, but clearly, she had no compunction about stirring up anxiety that the courts that hear the vast majority of criminal trials are hopelessly unfair. That doesn't relate only to the death penalty, but to everyone who's convicted, now and in the future, in state courts.

But federal courts — federal courts are different. She doesn't discourse on the reason. (I'm familiar with it. It's a topic I teach. But it doesn't go so far as to portray the state courts as always and forever unfair.) She supports the death penalty — though she's still "struggling" with it — for "terrorist activities" — but maybe that's a "distinction that is hard to support." Note the weak hedging, even after the intemperate trashing of state courts.

Here's a Salon article from last July, "Bill Clinton’s gutsy apologies: Now he owes one to Ricky Ray Rector," quoting Margaret Kimberley at The Black Commentator:

[R]icky Ray Rector became world famous upon his execution in 1992. Then Governor Bill Clinton left the campaign trail in January of that year to sign the warrant for Rector’s execution. Rector’s mental capacity was such that when taken from his cell as a “dead man walking” he told a guard to save his pie. He thought he would return to finish his dessert.

I try to remember this story when I am told that all Black people love Bill Clinton or that he should be considered the first Black president. Clinton wasn’t Black when Rector needed him. He was just another politician who didn’t want to be labeled soft on crime.

AND: By the way, what's the historical origin — in American politics — of the stock argument that a candidate is "soft on crime"? Was it George Wallace in 1968?

About those 5 teenage boys who confronted a father and daughter at gunpoint in a Brooklyn playground, and ordered the man to go so they could rape the 18-year-old woman...

Remember we talked about it here on January 11th? Two of them were turned in by their own mothers. The police were criticized for not acting sooner.

Now, the charges are all being dropped, WaPo reports:

The woman and her father had provided inconsistent and unreliable stories, said Brooklyn District Attorney Ken Thompson. Snippets of cellphone videos suggested the sex was consensual, prosecutors said. Worst of all, the father himself had been “engaging in sexual conduct” with his own daughter when the incident began, Thompson said....

To some critics, the bizarre, lurid case and rush to judgment recalled in some respects another controversial New York City rape case. In 1989, a woman was brutally raped while jogging through Central Park.... The five teens were convicted of a slew of charges [and later] exonerated....

In the comments to the January 11th blog post, MisterBuddwing had said:

I wouldn't be the least surprised if things happened exactly the way the police said they did. In which case, let the perps rot. But perhaps we should remember the case of the Central Park jogger. Five youths - four black, one Hispanic - were arrested in that rape-assault, and leading the charge, screaming for their blood, was a real estate mogul named Donald Trump. Years later, their convictions were vacated...

Oh! Donald Trump! Fancy meeting him here. The Washington Post drags him into this too:

Donald Trump took out a full-page ad in four New York newspapers with the title: “BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY. BRING BACK OUR POLICE!”

There's an image of the ad, but it's not enlargeable, so I can't read past the quoted headline. Here's an image big enough to read the text. Let's be clear: Somebody attacked the Central Park jogger. People were terrorized by violence in the city back then and could not walk in Central Park after dark. Women in particular were limited in our movement through the city. Trump wrote: "How can our great society tolerate the continued brutalization of its citizens by crazed misfits? Criminals must be told that their CIVIL LIBERTIES END WHEN AN ATTACK ON OUR SAFETY BEGINS... Let our politicians give back our police department's power to keep us safe. Unshackle them from the constant chant of 'police brutality'.... We must cease our continuous pandering to the criminal population of this city."

There's a lot of resonance with themes in the current election, but there's no focus on the problem of catching the wrong people. There definitely was and is violence from which we expect our leaders to protect us. That involves finding the real perpetrators of genuine acts of violence.

In this new case, it's not a question of finding the right people but of ascertaining whether the actions in question are really a crime. Much of our focus lately — with Season 1 of "Serial" and "The Making a Murderer" and much of The Innocence Project — has been on absolutely real and serious crimes and the problem of pinning those crimes on the wrong man. It's quite another matter when you have the person you know did something, but the question is whether it's a crime, as in this Brooklyn playground rape/nonrape (and also the new season of "Serial," looking into the case of Bowe Bergdahl).

By the way, if the Brooklyn playground sex was consensual and the woman was 18 and one of the boys was 14, hasn't the woman committed second degree rape under New York criminal law? Back to the WaPo article:

[T]he teens told police they had encountered the father and daughter having sex in the park that night. The teenagers then joined in the act. “She said yeah,” a man’s voice can be heard saying on the video, according to the Times. “If you said yeah, it’s lit, like, you know what I mean,” a man then says on the video. “I could tell you a freak.” Confronted by police, the father and daughter reversed course, admitting that there was no gun. The woman admitted that she had consented to the group sex. The father and daughter also both eventually admitted to drinking alcohol and having sex with one another, according to the Times....

“I think [there] is a way, from a policy and social standpoint, to say, ‘Young men should exercise a little bit better judgment in dealing with certain things,’ but what they did didn’t rise to criminality,” attorney Ken Montgomery told the Times. “I would agree, in a sense, that we live in a country and a world where we have a lot of unhealthy ideas of what appropriate sexual relationships are.”

Incredibly sad and debased. I don't know where I would start dealing with a situation that has reached such a low place. It's easy to say the government should back off and do nothing. Maybe Trump has some ideas.

With the focus off the five boys, it shifted to the father and his daughter, who prosecutors have stressed is still a victim, even if she consented to the sex.

Why, exactly, does she get to be the victim?

How she came to have sex with her own father, unleashing a torrid and tragic series of events, is, in part, a story of the failings of the American foster-care system.....

The Guilt Project.

From "Feminist Resolutions for 2016" by Ann Friedman in New York Magazine:

Start the Guilt Project. Thanks to your holiday binge-watch of Making a Murderer, you’ve heard of the Innocence Project, which opens decades-old cases to overturn wrongful convictions. After 2015’s Bill Cosby revelations, it’s clear that we could use a Guilt Project — a squad of lawyers and investigators to follow up on long-ignored claims that a certain man is a serial rapist. Because you know Cosby isn’t the only one.

As if innocence and guilt were the opposite of opposite.

The Innocence Project assists those who it has strong reason to believe are wrongly imprisoned. The Guilt Project would hound free citizens it believes ought to be imprisoned. Quite different ideas of what we'd like "a squad of lawyers" doing.

"A wrongfully convicted man filed a $40 million lawsuit on Tuesday against Northwestern University, a former journalism professor, a private investigator and an attorney..."

"... accusing them of framing him for a double murder to get another man released."

Alstory Simon... was imprisoned in 1999 after confessing to the 1982 murder of two people in a park, and spent more than 15 years behind bars before he was exonerated on Oct. 30, when prosecutors decided his confession was coerced....

Another man, Anthony Porter, was originally convicted of the murders, and sentenced to death but was released after Simon's confession.... Porter's release was an early victory for Innocence Project programs....

Innocence Project founders not happy with the way the Supreme Court cited their book in the DNA case.

Adam Liptak explains.

... Justice Kennedy’s brief quotation from “Actual Innocence” [was not] especially punctilious. Here is how the justice rendered it, including his brackets and ellipses: “[P]rompt [DNA] testing ... would speed up apprehension of criminals before they commit additional crimes, and prevent the grotesque detention of ... innocent people.”

Those first three dots covered a lot of ground. They took the place of more than six sentences and suggested a different point than the one the authors were making. The original passage concerned evidence collected at crime scenes, not from people who might be connected to it....

The omission of two words with the second set of dots is easier to understand. The authors had written that testing could prevent “the grotesque detention of thousands of innocent people.” Justice Kennedy apparently did not want to endorse the possibility that the criminal justice system had such widespread shortcomings....

And it's easy to understand the pique of the Innocence Project folks who apparently do not like seeing their names connected to an opinion they loathe, but did Kennedy do anything wrong here?

"Punctilious" — to quote the (unlinkable) OED — means "Strictly observant of or insistent on fine points of procedure, etiquette, or conduct; extremely or excessively particular or correct. Also: characterized by such scrupulous attention to detail or formality." I'll bet Liptak thought a lot about that word. Note how he toned it down with "not especially." So Kennedy was strictly correct, but not all that strictly correct.

"If you're guilty of a crime, you get more support from the state when you're released than if you're innocent."

"They have no authority over people whose conviction is overturned... There is nothing crafted to deal with this kind of situation."

Says Keith Findley, commenting on the case of a man who was freed 2 years ago (with help from the Wisconsin Innocence Project, which Findley direct), and who is now back in jail.

"It was always kind of fuzzy whether he was engaged in journalism or a kind of guerrilla social justice law operation where the ends justified the means..."

"David [Protess] was not totally irresponsible. He was zealot in pursuit of a cause, a cause you could not question.”

State legislator who thinks there are "too many attorneys" convinces state assembly to cut all funding to my law school!

Here's the news from Madison:

"We don't need more ambulance chasers. We don't need frivolous lawsuits. And we don't need attorneys making people's lives miserable when they go to family court for divorces," said Rep. Frank Lasee, R-Green Bay. "And I think that having too many attorneys leads to all those bad results."

Oh, yeah... people have legal problems because of the lawyers. All those divorced people? Divorce lawyers are to blame. What utter lameness! What an embarrassment to the state!

I agree that there shouldn't be frivolous lawsuits, but how do you get a court to dismiss a frivolous lawsuit? You need a lawyer. And how do you get lawyers not to file frivolous lawsuits? You train them well so they know what is frivolous and what isn't and so they have the professional ethics not to use the legal system to harass people.

Good lord, it's one thing for one legislator to think so poorly, but quite another to convince the assembly to vote along with him.
But it's not that bad:

The plan appears to have little chance at surviving negotiations between the Assembly and Democratic-controlled Senate and being included in the Legislature's final budget.

Even if it did, Gov. Jim Doyle would likely veto it. Doyle, whose late mother was a beloved administrator at the law school, said Thursday that the plan was "a really bizarre thing that came out of nowhere."

What weird emotionalism in government! The governor's dead mother will help to get to the right result? She has no more place in the story than Lasee's fervid thoughts about too many lawyers.

Analyze it rationally, and you'll see that if the funding is cut the law school won't shut down. It will only raise tuition:

[Law School Dean Ken] Davis said ... [t]he school receives only $2.5 million per year in state funding, or 10 percent of its $20 million budget. Still, it would have to increase its $12,600 annual tuition, which is the lowest in the Big 10 Conference and enables many low-income students to attend.

"That would be a very bitter pill to swallow for us," Davis said. "We have a national reputation for access to legal education."

There's an easy emotional argument within reach here: Republicans only care about the rich.

Lasee said he would welcome a significant tuition increase for prospective lawyers or a cut in the school's 810-student enrollment.

"When we have an overabundance of attorneys already, there's no point in subsidizing the education of more attorneys," Lasee said.

Yes, the profession will be improved once you've limited access to the people who have the most money to spend on education. Brilliant.

The proposal, made public the day before the vote, prompted wide speculation. Was a lawmaker angry the school rejected him? Were the cuts retaliation against professors who called a sex offender tracking law unconstitutional? Were they punishing the Innocence Project for freeing a man who later killed a 25-year-old woman?

Yes, legislators, why do you hate us? Well, everyone instinctively hates lawyers and lawsuits, and this is essentially a healthy gut reaction. But you need to think a little harder and see why we need a legal system, why we should deeply value the rule of law and the role lawyers play in preserving it, and why legal education is part of that.

Sigh.

ADDED: A post with amusing comments over at Above the Law.

MORE: My colleague Marc Galanter provides some information relevant to the question whether there are too many lawyers in Wisconsin:

Wisconsin, with about 2.% of the U.S. population, has about 1.2% of the country's lawyers.

The ratio of population to lawyers in the U.S. in 2000 was 264/1. In Wisconsin it was 401/1.

Among the 51 jurisdictions (50 states and D.C.), the Wisconsin's population to lawyer ratio was 38th in 2000.

Wisconsin's lawyer population is slightly older (median 50 vs. 47) and significantly less female (22% vs. 27%) than the nation as a whole. This suggests that it has not been growing at as high a rate as the nation as a whole.

In short, Wisconsin seems to have about one third fewer lawyers per capita than the rest of the country and it's not catching up.

Is this a lawyer deficit? Research has shown a correlation between economic growth and lawyer population. Causality may run in either or both directions. But it is clear that lawyer population does not have an inhibiting effect on economic growth.

The lawyer population also seem to be associated with such non-market goods as civil liberties and political democracy.

(Marc's comment is based on research done done by the American Bar Foundation, Frank Cross, and Charles Epp. It dates back to 2000, but Marc says "there is no reason to suspect that any of this has changed more than marginally.")

150 things to love about Madison.

A nice list. Let me highlight a few things:

UW-Madison students. A continuously cycled transfusion of new blood for the city. Plus, move-in day is good entertainment; move-out day means good junk-picking....

Ice skating on Tenney Park lagoon....

Williamson Street. If it's not the hippie enclave it was in the past, it's still a thriving alternative to chains and the mass-produced, while providing goods and services to the near east side. It's also home to the Willy Street Co-op and the... Willy Street Fair and Parade... and its star attraction the Bubble Car. Not to mention the graffiti wall at Mother Fool's coffeehouse....

The Pro Arte Quartet + Mendelssohn. A match made in heaven....

UW Cinematheque. Vintage, experimental and foreign films at this mecca for movie buffs....

Smart Studios. Nirvana's Nevermind was recorded here. What more do you need to know?

The Innocence Project. The Justice system sometimes screws up, putting innocent people in prison, then mightily resists admitting that it made a mistake. Thankfully, this UW Law School team has helped gather the incontrovertible evidence needed to overturn several wrongful convictions....

UW pianist Christopher Taylor interpreting Olivier Messiaen....

Night swimming. Why does it seem like everyone we know has a story about being spotlighted by cops in the middle of the night at B.B. Clarke Beach in various states of undress?

Lots more. Go to the link.

"Obviously, we're not talking about Steven Avery."

The NYT has a long, front-page story about Steven Avery, the man freed by my law school's Innocence Project who is now accused of murder:

For days, however, the case of Steven Avery, who was once this state's living symbol of how a system could unfairly send someone away, has left all who championed his cause facing the uncomfortable consequences of their success. Around the country, lawyers in the informal network of some 30 organizations that have sprung up in the past dozen years to exonerate the falsely convicted said they were closely watching Mr. Avery's case to see what its broader fallout might be.

Two years ago, Mr. Avery emerged from prison after lawyers from one of those organizations, the Wisconsin Innocence Project at the University of Wisconsin Law School, proved that Mr. Avery had spent 18 years in prison for a sexual assault he did not commit.

In Mr. Avery's home county, Manitowoc, where he was convicted in 1985, his release prompted apologies, even from the sexual assault victim, and a welcoming home for Mr. Avery. Elsewhere, the case became Wisconsin's most noted exoneration, leading to an "Avery task force," which drew up a package of law enforcement changes known as the Avery Bill, adopted by state lawmakers just weeks ago.

Mr. Avery, meanwhile, became a spokesman for how a system could harm an innocent man, being asked to appear on panels about wrongful conviction, to testify before the State Legislature and to be toured around the Capitol by at least one lawmaker who described him as a hero.

But last week, back in rural Manitowoc County, back at his family's auto salvage yard, back at the trailer he had moved home to, Mr. Avery, 43, was accused once more. This time, he was charged in the death of Teresa Halbach, a 25-year-old photographer who vanished on Oct. 31 after being assigned to take pictures for Auto Trader magazine at Avery's Auto Salvage....

Lawmakers who had pushed to have the state pay Mr. Avery more than $420,000 for his wrongful arrest have grown quiet. And the bill of changes - to the way the police draw up eyewitness identification procedures, conduct interrogations and hold onto DNA evidence - is no longer called the Avery Bill.

"The legislation is very important and very sound for our justice system as a whole," said Representative Mark Gundrum, a Republican who helped organize what was then called the "Avery task force."

"But this does detract a little bit," Mr. Gundrum said. "Obviously, we're not talking about Steven Avery anymore, not highlighting his conviction."

And plans for a "grand, glorious" signing ceremony for what is now simply called the "criminal justice reforms" package, he said, seem remote.

As I've written here before, Avery was proven innocent of the rape he was sent to prison for and deserved to be released, and the Innocence Project does essential work. But it's a terribly sad thing to see someone who symbolized your idealism revealed as a monster.

"The Avery Bill."

That's the name given a bill, passed by the Wisconsin legislation, designed to guard against the criminal conviction of the innocent:

His name was dropped from the legislation after he was arrested last week and charged Tuesday with killing and mutilating a young woman.

Avery really did not commit the rape for which he spent years in prison before being freed as a result of the legal work performed by the Wisconsin Innocence Project. The goals of the legislation his case inspired are sound.

But maybe it's not such a good idea to name legislation after living human beings. They do not remain in stationary, symbolic form for you.

Actually, this reminds me of Cindy Sheehan, who served as a symbol for the anti-war movement for a while, but who also did and said things that she saw fit to do and say. She helped the movement for a while but then she turned out not to be so useful.