Notations From the Grid (Criminal Justice Edition): On The State of Justice in America

We are pleased to launch our newest edition of "Notations From the Grid" with this courtesy of the Marshall Project :

Edited by ANDREW COHEN

PICK OF THE NEWS Twisting in the wind. Speculation and rumor about change at the Justice Department dogged Attorney General Jeff Sessions all day Monday. In the morning, President Trump was said to be considering former New York City mayor (and former U.S. Attorney) Rudy Giuliani to replace him. AXIOSBy the time Giuliani said he was not interested in the job and that Sessions made the right call to recuse himself from the Russia probe (CNN) the name of Texas Sen. Ted Cruz was added to the mix of possible Sessions’ successors. THE WASHINGTON POST Meanwhile, in a Tweet early Monday the president called Sessions “beleaguered” and asked why the feds aren’t investigating Hillary Clinton. THE NEW YORK TIMES Just say nyet. Meanwhile, the DOJ nominee to lead the criminal division, Brian Benczkowski, disclosed to Congress ahead of his confirmation hearing Tuesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee that he represented a large Russian bank with close ties to Vladimir Putin. THE NEW YORK TIMES Related analysis: Is there a perjury case against Sessions for his Russia testimony? LAWFARE How Trump could replace Sessions without Senate confirmation (or a pledge to recuse from the Russia probe). JUST SECURITY Why that scenario seems more likely today than yesterday. POLITICO Looking back on the day Sessions recused himself. DAILY BEAST You have the right to remain silent. Your gun doesn’t. Police in New York are embarking on a new program in which they’ll swab for DNA every illegal gun they come across. It’s an ambitious goal-- even the FBI and the ATF don’t test every illegal weapon they seize. It’s expensive, too, and so far the NYPD is the only police force in the country to be pressing so hard to identify those who have possessed the weapons. The goal, say advocates of the program, is to “make it radioactive” for criminals “to even pick up a gun.” THE TRACE Related: Science in the name of justice. WNYC Norwegian would. North Dakota’s prison population has risen sharply over the past five years as tough-on-crime politics have clashed with the state’s fracking boom. State corrections officials have taken this challenge as an opportunity to try a rehabilitative approach learned from Norway: more freedom, civilian clothes, even offsite jobs. A visit to Europe last year prompted an emotional concession from the state’s corrections chief. “It was definitely one of those moments where you’re rethinking everything,” says Leann Bertsch. MOTHER JONES The plan to litigate opioid manufacturers to death. You may remember Michael Moore from his gunslinging days as attorney general of Mississippi when he led that state’s court battles against Big Tobacco. Those battles led to a $246 billion settlement. Now Moore is pushing state attorneys general to use many of the same tactics against Big Pharma, arguing that drug makers helped spark the nation’s opioid epidemic by misrepresenting the benefits and risks of prescription opioid use. THE WALL STREET JOURNAL Meet the mothers being deported by the Trump administration. Federal officials claim they are focusing their roundups of undocumented immigrants on those who have committed crimes or who pose a threat to public safety. In truth, the recent roundups also have taken in “a considerable number of women who have no criminal records and who are either the primary caretakers of young children, or the primary family breadwinners, or both.” Here are the stories of four such women. By Sarah Stillman. THE NEW YORKER Related: A veteran ICE agent, disillusioned with Trump, speaks out against the wave of arrests. THE NEW YORKER N/S/E/W Police in Minneapolis, Minnesota, face new questions about the “fast-track” training given to the officer who shot and killed an unarmed woman earlier this month. MINNEAPOLIS STAR-TRIBUNE The Wyoming state penitentiary is falling apart, after only 16 years, leading to concerns about the safety and security of guards and inmates alike. CASPER STAR-TRIBUNE Police in Chicago, Illinois, identified the epicenter of the city’s ceaseless gun violence and poured resources into easing the problem. What happened? The shootings moved to a new part of the neighborhood. CHICAGO SUN-TIMES Ohio is about to get back in the death penalty business three-and-a-half years after a botched execution there. COLUMBUS DISPATCH A new law in Louisiana seems unlikely to end the contentious court battles, over life sentences for juvenile offenders. BATON ROUGE ADVOCATE COMMENTARY Race, media coverage, and criminal justice. There are real and troubling differences in the way America covers police shootings where victims are white compared with those where victims are black. VOXRelated: The NRA and its race war; host tells viewers white families will be tortured and killed if the Black Lives Matter movement succeeds. RAW STORY The war on drugs also is a war on women, waged by police and prosecutors. Women “have been raped, choked and killed, all in the service of public safety.” THE NEW YORK TIMES The campus battles of Heather Mac Donald. Free speech and campus protest clash over a visit by the pro-police speaker. THE ATLANTIC The public choice theory and criminal justice. People don’t transform themselves into objective, independent, rational thinkers just because they work for the government. By Radley Balko. THE WASHINGTON POST What would Jesus do? An ordained minister tries to get more information about Alabama’s death penalty protocols. It doesn’t go so well. AL.COM ETC. Decision of the Day: In which a state supreme court says local police have no authority to arrest undocumented immigrants under a federal detainer order just because the feds ask them to. SUPREME COURT OF MASSACHUSETTS Legal Fees of the Day: Florida taxpayers will pay $1.1 million in legal fees stemming from the “Docs v. Glocks” case, the challenge to a state law that sought to prohibit doctors from talking to patients about gun ownership. The law promptly was struck down. THE NEW YORK TIMES Audio of the Day: Everything you always wanted to know about goat milk farming in prison (but were afraid to ask). NPR Video of the Day: New Jersey eliminated its cash bail system. Here’s how the reform looks in and out of courtrooms in the Garden State. PBS TMP Context: “I am a bail bondsman tired of being demonized.” THE MARSHALL PROJECT Interview of the Day: Attorney General Jeff Sessions has declared war on the MS-13 gang. An expert says there is a right way and a wrong way to wage that war. WNYC

Notations On Our World (Special Edition): On Today's Vote in the United States Senate

The United States Senate voted on a procedural motion to move forward the Healthcare Legislation proposed by the US Senate Majority Leader.    Senator McCain returned after surgery to cast an affirmative vote to move the process forward.    He has said that he will not vote for the bill as it is currently written--which means that the legislation will fail as the Vice President had to break a 50-50 tie for the Republicans to score a win.

We join the team at the Bi-Partisan Policy Center in calling for Bi-Partisanship and echo what Senator McCain has noted.  We have noted this oru team just received courtesy of the team at the Bi-Partisan Policy Center feauturing Senator McCain's full Speech: 

BPC Agrees with Senator McCain's Call for Bipartisan Reform Following the Senate's procedural vote on healthcare legislation, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) challenged his colleagues to move towards a bipartisan reform on health care. McCain urged members to trust one another, work together, and return to regular order; allowing committees to hold hearings and craft legislation. The Bipartisan Policy Center believes sound policy is made when both parties put forth their best ideas, debate them openly and honestly, and forge hard-fought compromises. We agree with Senator McCain's approach and applaud his call to action. Watch Senator McCain's speech.

Notations On Our World (Special Monday Edition): On @POTUS; #Russia & Other Brief Thoughts...

   

We have been assessing the Russia investigation and some of the assertions by President Trump in regards to the issue of "Self-Pardon" and some of the discussions by leading Scholars including Professor Turley of George Washington Law School--available by clicking it here. 

The excerpts of a recent Wall Street Journal above underscores some of the challenges President Trump faces as the White House went through a staff shakeup and as the New White House Communications Director continues to insist that the US Intelligence Community was wrong in hits' assessment of the involvement of Russia.   In the meantime, a number of key challenges loom including Venezuela, Iran (as apparently the President has decided on a much more aggressive course based on reporting from Foreign Policy), Israel (with the continued challenges in Jerusalem) and Gaza.    A power-sharing deal that Mohammad Dahlan, the exiled Gaza Security Chief has worked out with Hamas which will result in a lifting of the Egyptian Blockade is quite a development which was reported on Al Jazeera on Sunday. 

We conclude this with this from Israel on the realities on the ground in the aftermath of the current crisis from Israel's Haaretz:

The Chemisphere

Senior columnist Chemi Shalev's rundown of this week's main stories and what's ahead View in browser

Israel is in crisis mode. As if things weren’t bad enough because of the tensions created by the metal detectors at the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, they became infinitely more complicated on Sunday after a foiled attack on a security officer for the Israeli Embassy in the Jordanian capital of Amman, in which two Jordanians were killed.  Netanyahu had hoped to contain Palestinian protests – as well as deadly terrorist attacks – and avert a complete breakdown of Israeli-Palestinian security coordination; instead, the fallout from the Temple Mount clash is spreading to other Muslim capitals and threatening Israel’s strategic ties with so-called moderate Sunni states, including Jordan.  As I wrote in last week’s Chemisphere, tinkering with arrangements on the Temple Mount is akin to “tickling the dragon’s tail.” Well, the dragon is now fully awake, thrashing about, thumping its tail and blowing fire. And the dragon, as Amos Harel notes, isn’t an Arab leader such as King Abdullah, who would like nothing better than for the new crisis to go away, but enraged Muslim public opinion and the religious fanatics who inflame it further.  For many Israelis, there is a distinct sense of deja vu in the confluence of two blasts from the past, harking back to Netanyahu’s first term. In September 1996 he hastily opened the Western Wall Tunnels and did not anticipate the ensuing mayhem, which left 17 Israeli soldiers and over a 100 Palestinians dead. Exactly a year later, a botched Mossad assassination attempt in Amman against Hamas leader Khaled Meshal sparked a bilateral standoff similar to the one Israeli faces now, as I write. It was resolved only when Netanyahu agreed to release Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, who directed and inspired terrorist attacks in which hundreds of Israelis were killed, before Prime Minister Ariel Sharon ordered his assassination in 2004.  Throughout the ensuing years, the conventional wisdom was that Netanyahu had learned from his mistakes. Notwithstanding his combative rhetoric, Netanyahu was said to handle Israel’s security affairs cautiously and judiciously. But the decision to place metal detectors in the entrances to the Temple Mount following the terrorist attack in which two Israeli border policemen were killed, taken without careful consideration of its potential consequences, belies that assumption.  Netanyahu, many Israeli analysts believe, is too concerned about political rivals and too preoccupied with the numerous police investigations in which he is either a suspect or a person of interest.  The same can be said, and is being said, about Donald Trump – along with son in law Jared Kushner – who is besieged and isolated because of the investigation of his alleged ties to Russia. Along with the U.S. media, which is so obsessed with Trump it has forgotten there’s a world out there, Trump has shown scant interest in helping to resolve the Temple Mount crisis.  He certainly hasn’t emulated Bill Clinton, who conducted several rounds of shuttle diplomacy by phone in 1997, or Barack Obama, whose personal intervention in 2011 averted a potentially disastrous takeover of the Israeli Embassy in Cairo by an Egyptian mob. However, things may change now because of the involvement of King Abdullah, who has cultivated Trump assiduously, as well as other Trump allies, including Saudi Arabia.  Belatedly, Trump is sending in his cavalry, such as it is. The Middle East is the one area in which Trump has been credited with at least a semblance of diplomatic success. He certainly doesn’t want to see it consumed in the wildfire that started on the Temple Mount.