"Briefly Noted," The New Yorker, March 15, 2021. - "This haunting history of capital punishment in the United States focuses on Texas, which accounts for a third of our fifteen hundred people executed since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976. Probing American history for the origin of our criminal-justice stain, [Maurice] Chamonah, [author of 'Let the Lord Sort Them Out' (Crown)] finds a frontier culture that saw extrajudicial killings as 'expressions of the will of the community,' and ultimately formalized such retribution in law in ways that reinforced racial and class inequities."
#Jarrell Ross, "In the Chauvin case, a nightmare replayed," TIME, March 29/April 5, 2021. - "In a typical year, about 1,000 people are shot to death by police in the U.S. From January 2005 to March 11, 2021, just 138 law-enforcement officers had been charged with murder or manslaughter, for on-duty shootings, according to an analysis prepared for TIME by Philip Stinson, a professor of criminal justice at Bowling Green State University. Of the 138 officers, 44 have been convicted."
"Patrick Bayer, an economist at Duke University, who studies racial inequality and segregation, and his co-authors, examined data from 2,400 felony trials conducted from 2005 to 2012 in Harris County, Texas, which includes Houston. They found that people from predominantly white and affluent suburban neighborhoods were over-represented in jury pools, resulting in juries that looked little like the people living in and around the nation's fourth largest city."
In Hennepin County, which includes Minneapolis, white Americans made up 80% of the jury pool in fiscal 2020, according to the most recent Census data. Black residents were 13.8% of the population but 8.2% of the jury pool.
#Lissandra Villa, "Trump's South Texas gains vex Democrats," TIME, March 29/April 5, 2021. - "Zapata County, a patchwork of cattle ranches covered in prickly pear cactus that is nearly 95% Latino or Hispanic, went for Clinton by a 35-point margin in 2016. In November, [2020] Trump won by 5 points, the first time since 1920, according to data by the Texas State Library and Archives Commission, that this county of 14,000 voted Republican in a presidential race."
#Nicholas Lemann, "Bigger and Better," The New Yorker, March 15, 2021. - "This is the most economically liberal piece of legislation in decades." Lemann is referring to the American Rescue Plan. "It feels as if a century's effort to reorient the political economy away from the state and toward the market may finally have run the course." "Now, because the pain is so widespread, the new law has a very large and racially diverse group of beneficiaries, which ought to make it less vulnerable to the familiar attacks on social programs."
"The new bill's fate will depend on Americans embracing the idea that the reason the misery of the pandemic may finally be abating is that government can solve problems. Republicans accustomed to caricaturing Democratic programs as elitist schemes created by a party that doesn't care about ordinary people, will have to feel too intimidated by their constituents' appreciation for the American Rescue Plan to stage an all-out assault on the new bill."
#Karl Vick, "A vanishing border," TIME, March 29/April 5, 2021. - "Yet 5.5 million people have poured out of Venezuela since 2015, almost as many as the 6.6 million people who have fled Syria over the course of a decade." "The country [Venezuela] has both the world's largest oil reserves and a third of its population facing hunger. Small wonder that as many as one-fifth of Venezuelans have sought help elsewhere. The largest share, estimated at 1.8 million, are in Colombia, which shares with Venezuela a 1,400-mile border, a similar culture and history of hospitality."
"Lockdown hits migrants hard; many would no longer afford the $5 daily rent for shelter in cities like Bogota." "The international community has committed over $20 billion to support Syrian refugees, compared with $1.4 billion for almost as many Venezuelans."
ADDENDUMS:
*Michael Schulman, "Years Lost," The New Yorker, March 8, 2021. - "There are some three million L.G.B.T.Q. seniors in the United States;" "Their numbers are diminished by AIDS, and thirty-four per cent of them fear having to go back into the closet when seeking senior housing."
*Letter writer Erika Arthur, The New Yorker, March 8, 2021. - "The answer involves the Doctrine of Discovery, a collection of edicts issued by the Church throughout the past thousand years on land that was unoccupied by Christians." "Ever since, the logic of terra millius, or 'nobody's land,' has been used to justify the seizure of land and water and the accompanying attacks on indigenous sovereignty."
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