“After President Joe Biden nominated Ketanji Brown Jackson for the Supreme Court, Reason’s Damon Root noted that she “has shown admirable judgment in criminal justice cases.” One especially telling example is Jackson’s handling of people charged with possessing or sharing child pornography, who face absurdly long sentences under federal law even when they have never committed any offenses involving contact with a victim.
Questioning those sentences is politically perilous, since people tend to erroneously assume that anyone who looks at such pictures is a current or future child molester. Yet as a judge on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, Jackson frequently imposed sentences below the range recommended by federal guidelines. Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.), a former Missouri attorney general, thinks those decisions reveal an “alarming pattern” of “sentencing leniency for sex criminals,” whom he equates with “child predators.”
Hawley has no idea what he is talking about. His mindlessly punitive attitude elides crucial distinctions and ignores the fact that many federal judges agree with Jackson that the recommended sentences for possessing child pornography are frequently excessive.
Jackson, who is currently a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, was a member of the U.S. Sentencing Commission (USSC) from 2009 to 2014. During that time, Jackson recognized that people caught with child pornography do not necessarily pose a threat to public safety. Hawley cites a hearing at which Jackson said she had mistakenly “assumed that child pornography offenders are pedophiles” and was “trying to understand this category of nonpedophiles who obtain child pornography.”
While Hawley implies that Jackson’s interest in this subject is clearly crazy, it is consistent with research that underlines the importance of a distinction that Hawley ignores in his haste to score cheap political points. As Karl Hanson, a senior research scientist at Public Safety Canada and a leading expert on sex offenders, told me more than a decade ago, “there does exist a distinct group of offenders who are Internet-only and do not present a significant risk for hands-on sex offending.”
Recidivism research supports that observation. A 2021 USSC study, for example, tracked 1,093 nonproduction child pornography offenders who were released from prison in 2005. Three years later, it found, 3.3 percent had been arrested for a “non-contact sex offense” (which would include possession of child pornography). Just 1.3 percent had been arrested for a “contact sex offense.” Even allowing for crimes that were not reported, these finding suggests this category of sex offenders is far less dangerous than people commonly imagine.
Hawley is completely uninterested in such findings. He even faults Jackson for referring to “less-serious child pornography offender[s],” a complaint that bizarrely implies there are no differences among such defendants that might be relevant to the punishment they receive. As far as lawmakers like Hawley are concerned, there is no such thing as an excessively severe sentence for possessing child pornography.”
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“In fiscal year 2019, the USSC found, 59 percent of nonproduction offenders received sentences below the guideline range, compared to less than 16 percent in FY 2005. “There had been a steady increase in the percentage of sentences imposed below the applicable guideline range in non-production child pornography cases,” the USSC notes, “which indicate[s] that courts increasingly believed the sentencing scheme for such offenders was overly severe.”
In other words, the downward departures that Hawley presents as aberrant, marking Jackson as especially soft on “sex criminals,” are actually typical.”
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“Hawley’s case against Jackson is based entirely on the unquestioned assumption that the current sentencing scheme is just and that any downward deviations from it must be inappropriately lenient. He cites one defendant, for example, who “had more than 600 images and videos and posted many on a public blog.” The guidelines recommended a sentence of 151 to 188 months, but “Judge Jackson settled on 60 months, the lowest possible sentence allowed by law.”
While a sentence of 12 to 15 years might be appropriate (or even too lenient) for someone who sexually abuses a child, Hawley thinks it’s obviously just for a defendant whose crimes consisted of nothing more than collecting and sharing images of such abuse. He likewise thinks it’s obvious that a five-year sentence for such conduct is akin to a slap on the wrist. Many people, including many federal judges, disagree.
Hawley’s sense of justice does not even comport with the views of average citizens who serve on federal juries. In a 2014 case involving a defendant who was caught with 1,500 child porn images on his computer, for example, James Gwin, a federal judge in Cleveland, asked the jurors what they thought an appropriate sentence would be. On average, they recommended a prison term of 14 months—far shorter than the mandatory minimum (five years), the sentence recommended by prosecutors (20 years), and the term indicated by federal sentencing guidelines (27 years).
Taking a cue from the jury, Gwin sentenced the defendant to five years, the minimum required by statute, which was one-quarter the term that prosecutors wanted but still four times longer than the jurors deemed fair. No doubt Hawley would consider five years insufficient in that case as well. But he does not bother to defend that position, except by lazily and ignorantly classifying all such defendants as “sex criminals” who are “preying on children.”
As a federal judge in Iowa, Mark W. Bennett likewise found that jurors did not agree with the sentences that Hawley believes are self-evidently appropriate. “Every time I ever went back in the jury room and asked the jurors to write down what they thought would be an appropriate sentence,” Bennett told The Marshall Project’s Eli Hager in 2015, “every time—even here, in one of the most conservative parts of Iowa, where we haven’t had a ‘not guilty’ verdict in seven or eight years—they would recommend a sentence way below the guidelines sentence. That goes to show that the notion that the sentencing guidelines are in line with societal mores about what constitutes reasonable punishment—that’s baloney.””
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“”Protecting the most vulnerable shouldn’t be up for debate,” Hawley says. “Sending child predators to jail shouldn’t be controversial.” But the issue is not whether “child predators” should go to jail. It is whether defendants who are not “child predators” should be imprisoned for, say, 14 months (as the jurors in the Ohio case recommended), five years (the mandatory minimum in that case), or, as Hawley presumably would prefer, the 27 years recommended by federal sentencing guidelines.”
“while the hard-won union votes might be the most cinematic part, it’s not the end of the story. The lengthy and difficult process of negotiating a contract that benefits workers has only just begun — and its conclusion is far from certain.
To move forward, the union must write a contract with the company, the union and the company must agree on it, and then union members vote on whether they also agree. The process can take anywhere from six months to a few years — and some don’t end with a contract at all. Some 30 percent of unions don’t establish a contract within three years.
The unions representing Starbucks and Amazon workers are off to a good start because, for the most part, their goals are clear. The Amazon Labor Union (ALU) has said its main objectives are to raise wages to $30 an hour, give workers longer breaks, and mostly eliminate mandatory overtime. The first Starbucks Workers United union, at the Elmwood Avenue store in Buffalo, New York, has been in contract negotiations since January 31; it has so far proposed “just cause” firing, better health and safety protocols, and giving customers the option to tip on credit cards. Future proposals include better wages and benefits.
The harder part, experts say, will be getting Amazon and Starbucks to agree on contracts. That’s not for lack of trying on the unions’ part. Rather, unions often face uphill battles with uncooperative companies and toothless labor laws.”
“Florida’s education law is couched in the language of parental rights and uses vague language to implicitly threaten LGBTQ teachers and allies with lawsuits. Though supporters had said the law bans inappropriate conversations about sexual activity with young students, the text never explicitly references discussions of sex — only explicitly forbidding conversations about “sexual orientation or gender identity.” The ban applies from kindergarten through third grade but leaves an opening for “age-appropriate” restrictions beyond those grades, while also not defining what “age-appropriate” means.
The legislation never uses the words “gay” or “trans,” but advocates argue that queer and trans Americans would be the primary targets of lawsuits by parents and officials behind the restrictions. Echoing the model of Texas’s abortion ban, Florida’s law deputizes parents as watchdogs, providing a path through the courts to punish schools and staff that violate the statute.
Legislatures in Alabama, Ohio, and Louisiana have since advanced similar proposals; Texas’s lieutenant governor is looking at introducing a bill when its next legislative session starts, and lawmakers in six other states, mostly in the South, have supported iterations of restrictions on LGBTQ identity in schools.
Some of these proposals are more explicit than Florida’s — Tennessee’s proposal seeks to ban books or material that support or promote LGBTQ “issues or lifestyle” altogether — but all offer a window into how social conservatives see opportunities to roll back protections for queer and trans people: score victories in the courts and make the cultural fight more extreme.”
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“Radical right-wing activists and commentators in recent weeks have been making literal accusations of pedophilia (in a callback to a trope from the 1970s and earlier) and grooming (which in its true sense means to “gain access to a potential victim, coerce them to agree to the abuse, and reduce the risk of being caught,” according to the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network). But they’ve also been increasingly using “grooming” as a casual insult to try to create a vague link between all LGBTQ people and cases of child abuse.
What started on the fringes, with conservative activists riding the coattails of last year’s anti-critical race theory moral panic, crossed over into mainstream media during the Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson last month. Sens. Josh Hawley (R-MO), Ted Cruz (R-TX), and Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) questioned the future justice’s thinking on gender, child abuse, and race. As Georgetown professor Don Moynihan wrote about Hawley’s line of attack, the point was “to create an association between Jackson and this broader trope” of child predators running rampant in public institutions. That spawned a universe of outrage in conservative media, further buoying the legislative action underway in Republican states.”
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““It’s very frustrating to see that we are having the same fight over and over again … but I believe that these folks are desperate. They have lost every fight they have picked on LGBT issues. They lost on trying to criminalize sodomy, they lost on marriage equality, they lost on bathroom bills, they lost on wedding services refusal — and we’re at 75 to 80 percent support for nondiscrimination laws,” she said.
Some of the loudest supporters of this effort have admitted this: “The alternative to the culture war is a culture surrender. There is no neutral option,” one reads. “The right needs to go scorched earth with ‘groomer,’” says another. “We are building a new model of conservative activism” with the grooming messaging, argues Christopher Rufo, a leading anti-critical race theory activist.
The rhetoric complements the institutional work that conservative think tanks are doing in pushing these bills. Lawmakers in these states have consulted organizations like the Alliance Defending Freedom, the Heritage Foundation, and American Principles Project in crafting proposals, Vice reported. (The Alliance Defending Freedom confirmed its involvement in a statement to Vox.) The progressive advocates I spoke with told me they see this feedback loop among radical activists, lawmakers, and think tanks as part of a more desperate ploy to use transgender people as a wedge issue to open the door to more mainstream attacks on trans and queer people in public life.”
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“”They pick on trans kids in the first place, because there are lots of well-meaning people who don’t totally understand what it means to be trans.””
“We do not have oligarchs in the U.S. the way countries like Russia do. Our millionaires and billionaires are prevented from pulling political puppet strings both by custom and by campaign finance laws which cap their financial contributions to some degree and require disclosures. Though companies do sometimes successfully lobby for government contracts and subsidies—Musk’s hypocrisy has been widely documented on this front—we don’t have widespread, unchecked corporatism where the government always serves to further companies’ bottom lines, or where companies become exempt from government scrutiny for having curried favor with the right people. And free marketeers tend to believe that the existing patchwork of subsidies and handouts ought to be stopped since they serve as market distortions, artificially propping up companies that wouldn’t succeed or be competitive on their own merits.
If Sanders’ point is not merely that wealthy people exercise undue influence on the political process (as oligarch implies) but rather that wealth accumulation always and everywhere ought to be prevented, as he insinuates when he mentions their superyachts, that’s an even weaker critique. People accumulate extreme wealth in this country most often through inventing a product or founding a company that millions or billions of people end up valuing highly. Consider Jeff Bezos, worth $177 billion, per 2021 numbers; Elon Musk, $151 billion; Bill Gates, $124 billion; Mark Zuckerberg, $97 billion; Warren Buffett, $96 billion; Larry Ellison, $93 billion; Larry Page, $91.5 billion; Sergey Brin, $89 billion. More often than not, that process is iterative, with tons of failures before striking gold. When a company is successful, those who were involved in its founding often scatter, taking their earnings and intellect and founding new companies, starting the whole iterative process over again.”
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“Financial planning firm Ramsey Solutions’ 2021 millionaire study found that 79 percent of the 10,000 U.S. millionaires surveyed did not receive any inheritance from their families. Of those who did receive inheritances, who are in the top 1 percent, Federal Reserve data show those inheritances were to the tune of $719,000 on average. More than half of America’s billion-dollar companies have at least one immigrant founder who came to the U.S. as a kid. Extreme wealth, by and large, isn’t generated by investing inherited money, but by starting companies that bring value to millions of customers.”
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“The ’08 financial crisis almost brought Tesla crashing down, and disastrous Falcon 1 launches around that same time almost left SpaceX in pieces. “That historic fourth flight on September 28, 2008 made the Falcon 1 the first privately built liquid-fueled booster to reach orbit,” writes Pethokoukis. “It saved the company. But would that launch have happened if Musk had left PayPal with $60 million less? Would Tesla have muddled into 2009 and beyond? Kaplan doesn’t think so.”
Nor does Musk, in fact.
Central planners like Biden and Sanders don’t appreciate how fragile many of today’s biggest and boldest companies—SpaceX, Tesla, and Amazon—once were. Serial entrepreneurs, who exit one venture and quickly invest their earnings in another, are oftentimes wealthy enough at exit that they would be hit with wealth taxes if the Biden plan or any of its evil twins become law. But two things must be kept in mind: Their wealth is rarely liquid, and that money often gets quickly invested into other ventures that we would lose out on if it had been taxed away.”
“When Carlos got pinched by the fuzz, he was holding some hot commodities.
Flaming hot, in fact.
No, that’s not slang. The illegal behavior that landed Carlos (not his real name), a ninth-grade student at a high school in the southern suburbs of Chicago, in the deans’ office on a mid-September morning in 2019 was the illicit sale of chips to one of his fellow students. For the crime, he was summarily sentenced to a one-day suspension from school—and his mother was called to pick him up.
As Karlyn Gorski, a doctoral candidate in sociology at the University of Chicago, relates in a paper recently published in the journal Youth & Society, Carlos is just one small part of a robust black market for snack foods that persists at Hamilton High (not the school’s real name) despite the best efforts by school administrators, security guards, and teachers to stamp it out. The punishment handed out to Carlos for his busted chip-deal was actually a light sentence, Gorski explains, with administrators granting leniency on the grounds that Carlos was a freshman and might not yet understand the school’s zero-tolerance policy for unapproved exercises of snack-related capitalism. Repeat offenders, she writes, faced in-school suspensions—the high school equivalent of solitary confinement.
Gorski spent 112 days observing students and adults at Hamilton during the 2019–2020 school year, though her research was cut short by the school’s closure due to the COVID-19 pandemic. While there, she observed a widespread black market for snack sales. The perpetrators were mere children, but they organized “elaborate strategies to hide sales, build networks of sellers, and develop a verbal shorthand around the market.”
By outlawing the sale of snacks, the school ensured that only outlaws would sell snacks.
Enforcement of the snack-selling ban was robust, with security guards even relying on the use of mounted cameras to identify perpetrators so they could be hauled out of class and reprimanded.”
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“Punishing a student for a victimless crime was apparently more important than whatever he might have learned in class that day.”
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“treating innocuous behavior as criminal forces students to behave more like criminals in order to continue engaging in the market. Those patterns are the opposite of what schools should be teaching.”
“the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) announced that it would reinstate its SAT/ACT test requirement for applicants. In a departure from the trends set by other elite universities, MIT rolled back its admissions policy, implemented in the 2020–2021 admissions cycle, which made standardized test scores optional. Administrators cited key issues with “holistic” admissions standards, an increasingly popular method of equitably distributing open spots to students regardless of how well they perform on standardized tests.
In a statement explaining the decision, MIT Dean of Admissions and Student Financial Services Stu Schmill noted that MIT’s “research shows standardized tests help us better assess the academic preparedness of all applicants, and also help us identify socioeconomically disadvantaged students who lack access to advanced coursework or other enrichment opportunities that would otherwise demonstrate their readiness for MIT.”
Without an objective measure like a standardized test, low-income students—who may not have equal access to other pieces of the holistic pie, such as a plethora of Advanced Placement (A.P.) classes or numerous extracurriculars—have a harder time proving that they are academically prepared for an MIT education. A move that was intended to increase diversity and help low-income students, as it turns out, mostly helps low-scoring wealthy students—and makes it harder to identify talented yet underprivileged applicants.
MIT now distinguishes itself from other elite universities, a spate of which have removed their SAT and ACT requirements in recent years, primarily citing COVID-19 and diversity-related justifications for the policy change.
The original logic of such policies is based on the idea that SAT and ACT scores correlate strongly with income, which suggests that students from poorer households are denied admission to competitive schools solely because they can’t afford to ace the SATs.
However, omitting standardized test scores makes all applicants reliant on application materials that correlate even more highly with income, such as admissions essays. A 2021 Stanford study found that essays are actually more strongly correlated with household income than SAT scores. Thus, by omitting one income-correlated metric, one that is even more closely related to income takes prominence.
While wealthy parents can pay for test prep, they can’t take a standardized test for their children (well, almost never). However, with essay coaches and college counselors at their disposal, many wealthy students’ college essays can be manicured to fit exactly what schools are looking for.”
“Under the Public Health Services Act of 1944, codified in Title 42 of the U.S. Code, federal health officials may issue orders intended to curb the cross-border spread of diseases. Rarely invoked before the pandemic, Trump administration officials looked to Title 42 in late March 2020 as a way to stop migrants from crossing U.S. land borders. Would-be migrants could no longer cross into the United States from Canada and Mexico after the CDC’s Title 42 order, ostensibly because they posed contagion risks. The order has been used almost exclusively to expel migrants at the southern border, and CBP officials have carried out 1.7 million expulsions under its authority.
Its implementation has proven to be largely counterproductive and harmful to migrants. Those expelled under Title 42 faced nearly 10,000 incidents of kidnapping, torture, rape, and other violence after being sent to dangerous border towns in Mexico, according to Human Rights First. What’s more, because Title 42 does not penalize repeat crossings, the recidivism rate rose and the total number of CBP apprehensions spiked. This led to inflated reports of chaos and unprecedented migration at the U.S.-Mexico boundary, which only helped fuel the false argument that President Joe Biden is overseeing an open southern border.
Immigration advocates have long criticized the public health order for the barriers it poses to asylum seekers. Under U.S. immigration law, migrants are legally permitted to seek asylum—a process they must begin either on American soil or at a port of entry. An immediate expulsion under Title 42 means that migrants can’t present their cases for asylum, risking a return to the dangerous conditions many of them have fled.
From the very beginning, public health officials have questioned the efficacy of Title 42 in curbing the spread of COVID-19, noting that the virus was already spreading in American communities and that migrants posed a comparatively minor risk. The CDC’s director of Global Migration and Quarantine, Martin Cetron, refused to support the Trump administration’s initial order. Lawyers at the Department of Health and Human Services and CBP pressured the CDC to issue the order, but the agency refused until former Vice President Mike Pence ordered the borders closed. Since that initial scuffle, more than three-quarters of Americans have received at least one COVID-19 vaccine dose, making the health order’s stated justification even more tenuous.”
“”One of the many pernicious things about civil forfeiture nationwide is that the government has the power to seize your cash, and your cars, and your home, but unlike in a criminal case, you don’t have a right to appoint counsel,” says Sam Gedge, an attorney at the Institute for Justice and a lawyer for Abbott. “So if you want to defend your cash, or your car, or your homes in a civil forfeiture action, you typically just have to pay for a lawyer yourself, and that’s not surprisingly economically infeasible for lots of people who are targeted in civil forfeiture actions.”
It is not an exaggeration to say that the state or the federal government can try to take you for nearly all you’re worth in the process. People in Indiana may know that quite well. The state was the setting for one of the most high-profile forfeiture showdowns after Indiana took possession of Tyson Timbs’ new Land Rover in 2013 following his arrest for a drug crime, setting in motion an almost decade-long legal circus between Timbs and the government. State officials were eventually required to return the vehicle in 2020. But prosecutors continued to fight, arguing before the Indiana Supreme Court in 2021 that there should be no proportionality—no limit—on what the government can seize in cases like Timbs’. (The state’s highest court rejected that winning argument last summer.)
Yet civil forfeiture continues apace and is a source of police funding, with local and state departments able to keep the vast majority of the funds they take. Just last year, the Indiana Senate passed a bill to allow cops to seize assets from people suspected of committing “unlawful assembly,” a charge so vague that whether or not someone committed it is somewhat in the eye of the beholder—who, in this case, would be an arresting officer.
Civil forfeiture is also used at the federal level, and it presents many of the same problems. In May 2020, the FBI seized almost $1 million from Carl Nelson after informing him he was under investigation for allegedly committing fraud. Two years later, no criminal charges have been filed, and the government returned some of the cash. Not unlike Abbott, however, the government’s action made it a Herculean task for Nelson to push back, as he had been temporarily bankrupted. “If you can’t afford to defend yourself, let alone feed yourself, it becomes complicated,” Amy Nelson, his wife, told me in February.
As for the Hoosier state? “The ball is very much in the Indiana Legislature’s court,” says Gedge.”
“Genocide is not merely a word for mass killing in general. In international law, per the 1948 Genocide Convention, it refers to any of the following five acts if they are “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Under this definition, not every act of violence against civilians qualifies as an act of genocide — nor does every such act motivated by racial, national, or religious hatred. Instead, it is an act of genocide when it is part of a plan to “destroy” the target group — that is, to annihilate not just individual members but the group as a collective.
In the Russian case, establishing that Russian soldiers intentionally killed Ukrainian civilians is not enough to prove genocide. It wouldn’t even be enough if the soldiers said they did it because they hated Ukrainians. Instead, you would need to show that the killings were part of an intentional effort to wipe out the Ukrainian people.”