Category: crime and punishment

Categories
crime and punishment

Justice Delayed in Cambodia

It’s not a satisfying verdict. And no punishment can ever balance the scales for the many lives that the Khmer Rouge destroyed.

This August the two most senior surviving regime leaders, responsible for slaughtering an estimated 1.7 million Cambodians from 1975 to 1979 in the name of restructuring society along collectivist agrarian lines, were sentenced to life imprisonment. They are 88-​year-​old Nuon Chea and 83-​year-​old Khieu Samphan.

The pair are the first Khmer Rouge leaders convicted under proceedings sponsored by the Cambodian government and the United Nations. The only previous verdict was handed down in 2010 against a lower-​rung if still pretty vicious official, Kaing Guek Eav, then 67, sentenced to 19 years. As a prison commandant, he had overseen the torturing and killing of more than 14,000 people.

“I am not satisfied!” said 79-​year-​old Chum Mey back then. He had testified about being tortured by the regime. “We are victims two times, once in the Khmer Rouge time and now once again.” Others expressed similar dismay.

As for the notorious Pol Pot, he had died in 1998 after briefly suffering a house arrest as penalty for just one of his many murders.

One hopes that the proceedings, tainted by politics and other vitiating factors, will be improved even at this late date. But as near-​futile as the trials must seem to many survivors, I have to believe that even partial justice, however meager and belated, is better than no justice.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Accountability crime and punishment government transparency

Candid Cameras for Cops

Should policemen be required to wear cameras?

Some already do. The rationale for the proposal is this: when police wear cameras that — with a few carefully defined exceptions — must be on whenever officers are on the job, they do their jobs better.

With respect to the furor in Ferguson, Missouri, a big question is what exactly happened there the day a cop shot and killed Michael Brown.

Officer Darren Wilson claims self-​defense; he and eyewitnesses disagree about details.

It would have been helpful to have video of what happened. (We do have video of an immediately preceding incident: of Brown, a large man, robbing cigars from a local store and shoving the protesting store owner, a much smaller man.)

Or consider another case I’ve discussed, that of Eric Garner, the New York City cigarette seller killed by an officer’s chokehold despite Garner’s repeated insistence that he couldn’t breathe. That death was recorded on a bystander’s cell phone. What if it hadn’t been? The shock has spurred renewed calls to begin outfitting NYPD with cameras.

But there’s no reason to limit pilot programs to the Big Apple.

Some police work, like meetings with confidential informants, cannot be recorded without making the work impossible. But cops who are on the beat, entering a home, stopping motorists and the like should be recorded while doing these things. With appropriate safeguards against “malfunction,” the cameras could both prevent unnecessary violence and support officers who are in fact justified in using deadly force.

Until the advent of universal peace and harmony, let’s give the cameras a try.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
crime and punishment education and schooling folly

Nothing to Sneeze At

I don’t believe everything I read. If I did, I’d believe seven incompatible things before breakfast, and by lunch I’d suffer a nervous breakdown.

From a cognitive dissonance overload.

There’s a story just out: A Tennessee teen was allegedly suspended from school for saying “Bless you.”

Un-sneezin’-believable.

I don’t want it to be the case that even the people whose policies I generally oppose — in this case, public school administrators (I think the government school system needs to be opened up, competitive) — can be this outlandishly foolish.

The story comes out of CBS Charlotte. One Ms. Kendra Turner, a senior at Dyer County High, says that she offered a “Bless you” after a classmate had sneezed. And then her teacher reprimanded her, saying (in Ms. Turner’s story) “we’re not going to have godly speaking” in the classroom, and the student protested that it was her “constitutional right.”

The disagreement went to an administrator, and the young lady was booted out of school. The school claims the girl was “disruptive,” which hopefully means something other than saying “Bless you.” The girl’s pastor is concerned, and suspects a very touchy, irreligious teacher.

The story seems preposterous. And yet similar stories elsewhere have been confirmed, usually about non-​existent, symbolic guns. The degree of intolerance amongst today’s cultural vanguard (which includes teachers) for unapproved practices astounds.

There’s almost nothing more innocuous than a “Bless you,” or even a “God bless you.” It’s so traditional it’s hardly even religious.

But this story does have a ring of plausibility. Why? Because there is no level of absurdity — no breach of common sense — that a zealot won’t contemplate.

Especially a zealot in America’s intellectually bankrupt public schools.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
crime and punishment insider corruption

Texas-​sized Trouble

Texas Governor and 2012 presidential candidate Rick Perry has never been exactly “my guy.” But now he seems like a kindred spirit, having been indicted on two felony counts of … well … as the indictment states it, “threatening to veto legislation that had been approved and authorized by the Legislature of the State of Texas.”

The indictment is only two pages. Easy to read.

What seems hard to read is why a prosecutor would bring a criminal charge in a case like this.

Last year, Governor Perry publicly and transparently threatened a veto of the $7.5 million in funding for the Public Integrity Unit of the Travis County District Attorney’s office unless Travis County District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg resigned her office.

Why should she resign? Lehmberg was arrested and convicted for driving drunk and still found it necessary to behave badly in the process. Which arguably, per Gov. Perry, clashed with her continuation as head of the Public Integrity shop.

Lehmberg refused to resign and Perry vetoed the $7.5 million.

Now Perry is facing two felony charges from the same prosecutor’s office that has had other high profile cases — most famously the prosecution of Tom DeLay — end in acquittal. If convicted, he could face up to a 99-​year sentence.

Someone more “my guy,” former Texas Congressman Ron Paul, called the indictment “pure politics” and “a joke.”

He didn’t mean it was funny, though. It is a very serious signal of just how out of control our political process has become.

Governors have the constitutional veto power for a reason. Threatening a veto is standard politics. It’s their job.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
crime and punishment U.S. Constitution

The Right to Remain Recording

Every once in a while, a judge makes a judgment so sensible, it’s as if he had this Common  Sense column in mind.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Edmund Brennan has determined that the same right to video-​record police in public also applies within a would-​be videographer’s home.

The case involves a 2011 search of the home of Mary Crago, which was subject to search without warrant under the terms of her probation. Defendant Kenneth Leonard deleted a video recording she made of the search, telling her that recording it was prohibited. In court Leonard has contended that no right to video-​record police officers has been established for persons on probation or in a non-​public setting.

To this, Judge Brennan responds that if a plaintiff has “a clearly established constitutional right to record from a public place where the plaintiff has the lawful right to be, a plaintiff surely has such a right in his or her home.”

Brennan sees no “no principled basis” for the assumption that we have a protected right to record officers performing their duties in public that “does not extend to those performed in a private residence. The public’s interest in ensuring that police officers … do not abuse [their] authority … does not cease once they enter the private residence of a citizen.”

If anything, it is even more urgent to protect a citizen’s right to document proceedings when an officer’s actions are shielded from public view — from other witnesses.

But of course. It’s just Common Sense, isn’t it?

I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
crime and punishment media and media people

Absence of Talk

Yesterday morning, Paul Waldman of the Washington Post wondered why libertarians and limited government conservatives weren’t all over the Ferguson riot suppression, and the police shooting that sparked the whole fracas. He recognized that Reason magazine’s website has covered it, but, he noted, “the politicians and conservative media figures who claim to be the most fervent advocates of individual freedom and to care the most about misuse of government power have been silent.”

One might be tempted to conclude they believe that when somebody’s grandson has to pay taxes on their inheritance, it’s a horrifying injustice that demands redress, but when somebody else’s grandson gets shot walking down the street, that’s just how things go sometimes.

Or maybe one should yield, instead, to the temptation to wait and see what they say when they say it. Rep. Justin Amash tweeted about it later in the day. But Waldman got his licks and innuendo in first.

The whole thing smacks of bad government to me — deadly misgovernment — but I can understand why many folks might want to reserve judgment.

Weighing on the wait-​and-​comment-​later side of this particular debate, it is worth acknowledging that the information so far has been awfully confusing. Especially since the Ferguson government has been cracking down on reporting and video recording, as well as being not very forthcoming about the initial shooting or the autopsy.*

The 24-​hour news cycle is bad enough. The 24-​hour commentary/​reaction cycle is doubly daunting. Forgive me if I don’t have anything profound to say yet. I’m sure, when the facts become clearer, at least I will make my thoughts known.

Isn’t it too early to make comments about comments not made?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* Those are good reasons to be protesting in Ferguson. There are no good reasons for looting Ferguson businesses.