#Matthew Clair, "Unequal Before the Law," January 2021. - "As a number of activists have argued, criminal courts more often than not reach verdicts that legitimate police abuse, and they do so while expending the bulk of their resources to control and exploit poor people of color through pretrial incarceration, probation requirements, fines, and fees." Defendants are "pressured to accept guilty pleas or consent to behavioral modification despite maintaining their innocence."
"As recently as the 1950s, public defender offices were rare, and they were viewed by many lawyers and policy-makers as a social reform contrary to American values." "The seeming success of the concept of the public defender remains so that the expansion of rights in one domain cannot rectify social injustice without a corresponding expansion in others. Fixing the failures of our criminal legal system requires more than the provision of effective legal representation to the poor; it requires a redistribution of power and wealth to the marginalized communities and individuals whom criminal law targets for punishment."
" 'The more that indigent defense became associated with a right,' [Sara] Mayeux, author of 'A History of the Public Defender in Twentieth-Century America,' writes: 'the less eager were charitable funders to provide support.' " "In 1963, in 'Gideon v. Wainwright,' the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the right to counsel applied to the states, requiring them in all felony cases. To provide a defense attorney did not imply much in the way of a right to an effective lawyer. They, (public defenders) were seen at best, as chronically underfunded, and therefore unable to provide an adequate counter weight to the power of prosecutors, and, at worse (because they often recommend taking a guilty plea), as government employees, coopted by a criminal justice system that is inherently unfair."
"For disadvantaged defendants, justice must exist outside the criminal courts to exist within them. To treat the criminally accused means creating a system that involves not only the right to a legal representation but also a job, affordable housing, and health care. For example, while one may have a right to legal representation in criminal courts, those without money do not have the same protections in civil courts, where poor people are effectively barred from litigating employment disputes or fighting landlords who threaten to evict them."
[We] "must transform the institutional practices of our courts, and invest government revenues in community well-being, and alternative models of peacemaking and restoration."
#Lawrence Wright, "The Plague Years," The New Yorker, January 4 & 11, 2021. - "In the twenty-first century, infectious diseases seemed like a nuisance, not like a mortal threat. This lack of concern was reflected in the diminished budgets given to institutions that once had led the world in countering disease and keeping Americans heathy." [Nonetheless] "during the twentieth century, the life span of Americans increased thirty years, largely because of advances in public health, especially vaccination."
The arrival of the pandemic severely interrupted life span progress. "Without the test kits, contact tracing was stymied; without contact tracing there was no obstacle in the contagion's path. The country never once had enough reliable tests distributed across the nation, with results available in two days."
Although President Trump claimed that he had stopped air flights from China, "between December and March there were thirty-two hundred direct flights China to the U.S., many of them landing in New York. Moreover, at least fourteen thousand passengers from China were arriving in the U.S. every day."
Among many misleading statements about the coronavirus, President Trump claimed that insurance companies had agreed to waive all payments for coronavirus treatments, although they agreed only to waive test fees. Governors discovered that the Trump administration was sabotaging their efforts to protect their citizens. At a briefing, New York Governor Cuomo fumed: "You have fifty states competing to buy the same item. We all wind up bidding up each other." "Between March 23 and April 6, hydroxychoroquine was mentioned on Fox News nearly three hundred times; also, White House officials, including Peter Navarro, heavily promoted it."
#David J. Worley, a lawyer and the only Democrat on the Georgia state elections board, cites Georgia Code 821-2-604, which makes it a crime to solicit someone else to commit election fraud, and can be punished for up to three years in prison. Justin Sevitt, a law professor at Loyola Marymount University, said that Trump "knowingly and willingly pressured" Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to count nonexistent votes. Trump was not pushing for an "honest tally," when he told Raffensperger to find 11,780 votes. Michael R. Bromwich, a former Justice Department inspector general, said: "His best defense would be to [declare] insanity"
ADDENDUMS:
*Matt Hovlding, "Seeding a revolution." TIME, January 18/January 25, 2021. - "Nearly 97% of all water is salt water. For all our brains and ambition, humans have never figured out much to do with salt water." "According to the U.N.'s Food and Agricultural Organization, humans will need to increase agricultural output by 60% to feed the nearly 10 billion people expected to live on earth by 2050."
*A new CBS-YouGov poll show 55% of Americans favor impeachment, but just 15% of Republicans do.
*Trump's one-paragraph statement after the sacking of the Capitol. "In light of more demonstrations, I urge that there be NO violence, NO lawbreaking and NO vandalism of any kind. That is not what I stand for, and it is not what Americans stand for. I call on ALL Americans to help ease tensions and calm tempers. Thank you."
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