*Eugene Robinson, the Washington Post columnist, has commented on how difficult it is to convict a police officer, even in what should be a slam-dunk case of conviction for murder. Police officer Michael Slager shot a fleeing Walter Scott in the back and it was all caught on video. Robinson writes: "Last week, a mistrial was declared when a South Carolina jury of 11 whites and one African-American could not convict police officer Michael Slager of either murder or manslaughter in the shooting death of Walter Scott, an unarmed African-American. In the trial, Slager claimed he feared for his life; apparently, that's all a police officer has to say to get off the hook."
Officer Slager committed another crime, which was not prosecuted. He picked up the trigger assembly of the Taser that he had used on Scott and walked it over to Scott's body, where he dropped it on the ground. Planting evidence is a crime in most, if not, all, legal jurisdictions. Slager brazenly carried out the plant, even though another police officer had already arrived upon the scene.
*Fontana, California police shot and killed a legally blind and mentally ill person named Hall. A total of 12 officers had arrived on the scene but five of them were most closely involved in the fatal shooting. The police claim that Hall was advancing on them with a knife in his hand. The video does not show Hall lunging at any officer, and although one image seems to show Hall with a small object in one hand, other images show him empty-handed.
*In October 2015, a Gallup poll found 61 percent of Americans still supported capital punishment for convicted murderers; however, the Pew Research Center also conducted a poll in the fall of 2016 and found only 49 percent favoring a death sentence for convicted murderers. Sometimes how a poll is worded changes the results. Yet, half of Americans in favor of capital punishment is a high level of support.
This high level of support is very troubling when measured against the finding published in DeathPenaltyInfo.org, showing that over the past four decades there have been at least 156 people exonerated and freed from Death Row. And try as they might, experts have never been able to find evidence that capital punishment deters future murders. A phenomenon that has been noted is that murders spike when highly-publicized executions are carried out.
*Two Los Angeles police officers who shot and killed a 25-year-old African-American named Ezell Ford will not face charges. The decision comes 18 months after a police oversight board had faulted one of the officers, saying his handling of the encounter was so flawed that it led to the fatal shooting.
Records show that the Los Angeles District Attorney has not charged a single officer in an on-duty shooting since 2000.
*When Willie Earle, a 24-year-old African-American was lynched in South Carolina in 1947, 31 white men were charged and all acquitted. The Equal Justice Initiative, which places a memorial at the site of each lynching it finds in the nation, has found 184 lynchings in South Carolina. During the past 40 years, 81 percent of those given the death sentence in South Carolina had been convicted of killing white victims.
In a statewide poll in South Carolina, two-thirds of African-Americans favored sentencing Dylann Roof to life in prison, while 64 percent of whites believed that the death sentence was warranted. "A death sentence for Roof would add a patina of fairness to a practice steeped in the racial disparities of the criminal-justice system. A life sentence, on the other hand, would seem to suggest that, whatever the opaque mathematics of race, a black life is worth less than one-ninth of a white one." (Source: Jelani Cobb, "Prodigy of Hate," The New Yorker, February 6, 2017).
Roof's appointed attorney, David Bruck, wrote a 1983 article in The New Republic, in which he argued that the imposition of capital punishment, a practice that reinforced the value of the lives of white victims over those of black ones, was as troubling as violent crime itself.
*In a letter to the editor, published in the February 6/13, 2017 issue of The Nation, Stephen Rohrde vents his frustration over the Obama administration for failing to prosecute torturers. "No one in the Bush administration, beyond a few soldiers at Abu Ghraib, has even been held accountable for torture and other crimes against humanity --despite mountains of evidence contained in reports from the CIA, the Department of Defense, the Department of Justice, and committees of Congress. It was Obama's sworn duty under the Constitution and the United Nations Convention Against Torture to investigate and, if warranted, prosecute those crimes."
*"Disparate groups triggered a huge movement but the [Vietnam] war was finally ended by Vietnam veterans, the civil-rights leadership, and a congressional bloc that woke up and took action." "Few of the pro-war pundits, elites, and think-tankers have apologized or resigned since Vietnam. Instead, they have risen in the ranks of the national-security establishment while implementing further military follies based on many of the same assumptions that led to the Vietnam collapse."
"The myth persists that freedom can be expanded at home while repression is imposed and massive bombings escalated abroad." "Instead, the antiwar movement has been ignored or scapegoated, while those truly at fault have enjoyed decades of immunity." (Source: Tom Hayden, "The Forgotten Power of the Peace Movement," The Nation, January 30, 2017).
*Treasury Secretary-nominee Steven Mnuchin failed to properly disclose that he was a director of a offshore business in the Cayman Islands that owned more than $100 million in real estate. Senator Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) says that one does not go to offshore entities other than to "avoid, in some form or fashion, the tax laws of the United States."
Mnuchin's OneWest bank has been described as a "foreclosure machine."
*The New York Times has reported that some police departments keep "wish lists" of items they'd like to seize; in one case, officers were advised to focus on TVs, cash, and cars and not to bother with computers.
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