Actor Emily Mortimer writes about her father, criminal defense attorney John Mortimer:
Murderers were my father’s favorite clients, not just because they were the most obliging and compliant. He also considered murder to be the most human of crimes, the one crime any one of us could commit. We might not rob a bank, we might not sell drugs or fiddle our taxes, but he thought that all of us when pushed could just about find it in ourselves to kill.
Ezra Klein shares this nugget:
There’s a famous 1986 study called “Ambient Temperature and Horn Honking: A Field Study of the Heat/Aggression Relationship.” In it, Douglas Kenrick and Steven MacFarlane simply let a car idle at green lights in Phoenix during the spring and summer, and measured how long it took the driver behind to honk. The hotter the day, the faster the honks came. The most aggressive honkers were the drivers with the windows rolled down, as they were most exposed to the heat. It’s an amusing study, but subsequent research was bloodier: hotter days bring more assaults, gang violence and murders.
Israel vaccinated its friends before its wards.
NYT: Israel Gives Vaccine to Far-Off Allies, as Palestinians Wait
Kentucky public defender Stefanie Mundheck says perpetrators were once victims themselves:
Once, during a heated argument with an ex, I grabbed the nearest thing to me — the TV remote — and threw it at his head. Luckily, I have terrible aim, but I still think about what could have happened if my throw hadn’t missed, or if I had grabbed something heavier, or if I had opted to punch him instead. I almost certainly would have found myself in the back seat of a police car instead of seeking therapy. And when it was my turn to shuffle before the judge, no one would have cared about what had happened to me years ago. They only would have cared about what I was accused of.
Chad Galts writes a remembrance of his one-time boss, Norman Boucher, the longtime editor of the Brown Alumni Magazine:
Norman had a kind of 1960s sensibility that the only really smart or principled people in the world were those who had not yet turned 30.
Galts also articulates:
a feeling that his memory will always evoke in me: a sense of the search, a desire for the great redemptive moment of meaning expressed in perfectly weighted words.
David Anderson writes about handling an excessive caseload as a young public defender in Louisiana:
We only had 90 seconds per case, so this happened rarely and with a frankness that was not seen elsewhere in the criminal process:
“Third offense theft. Looks like a serial shoplifter. Maybe she’ll learn her lesson with five years [in prison].”
“She’s homeless. The shoes were for her kids. They were waiting outside the shoe store barefoot. If you put her in prison, that’s three kids in the foster care system. [Not a good look in an election year.] How about probation?”
“Three years and she pays restitution to the shoe store. Next?”
Nick Kristof on inexpensive rotisserie chicken:
Torture a single chicken in your backyard, and you risk arrest. Abuse tens of millions of them? Why, that’s agribusiness.
As the Supreme Court lifts California’s restrictions on in-person religious services during COVID, Justice Kagan dissents:
All this from unelected actors, “not accountable to the people.” South Bay, 590 U. S. , at _ (ROBERTS,C. J.,con-curring) (slip op., at 2). I fervently hope that the Court’s intervention will not worsen the Nation’s COVID crisis. But if this decision causes suffering, we will not pay. Our marble halls are now closed to the public, and our life tenure forever insulates us from responsibility for our errors. That would seem good reason to avoid disrupting a State’s pandemic response. But the Court forges ahead regardless, insisting that science-based policy yield to judicial edict. I respectfully dissent.
Sara Mayeux, a historian of public defense, writes in the Nation:
The common criticism by defendants that their public “pretender” colluded with the prosecution hints at something more fundamental: a critique of the overbearing presence of the state when processing and punishing them, on the one hand, and the near-total absence of the state when they need help in their everyday lives, on the other. For disadvantaged defendants, justice must exist outside the criminal courts to exist within them. To treat the criminally accused fairly means creating a system that involves not only the right to legal representation but also the right to a job, affordable housing, and health care—in other words, the rights that would allow them to be equal participants in society well before they enter the courthouse.
Law prof Margaret Martin Barry notes:
Maryland has the dubious distinction of leading the country in incarceration of Black people. In 2018, the Justice Policy Institute reported that more than 70% of the state prison population is Black, though only 31% of the state’s population is Black. Looking at long-term incarceration, nearly 80% of those who have served 10 years or more in prison are Black and among the people with the longest prison terms, 82% are Black.
Footsteps 