To this end, Republicans seek to discredit
liberalized law enforcement initiatives adopted by a new breed of Democratic prosecutors.
These Democratic district attorneys — in cities,
counties and suburbs from Philadelphia, Orlando, Chicago and St. Louis to
Contra Costa County, Calif., Suffolk County, Mass., and Durham County, N.C. —
are pursuing policies intended to decriminalize vagrancy, and eliminate cash bail, and they are aggressively
pursuing charges in cases of shootings by police officers.
They are playing a key role in a hotly politicized
movement to curb mass incarceration and to roll back what has become known as “the carceral state.”
The decarceration movement is backed by a wide array
of organizations tightly aligned with the progressive wing of the Democratic
Party: the Real
Justice PAC, Black Lives Matter, the Brennan Center for Justice, the ACLU, Justice
Democrats, MoveOn.org and Brand New
Congress.
Michael Waldman, president of the Brennan Center,
and Adureh Onyekwere, a senior research and program associate there, along with
Inimai Chettiar and Priya Raghavan, described the goals of the movement in a
May 2019 essay, “Ending Mass Incarceration: Ideas from Today’s Leaders”:
Mass incarceration is the civil rights crisis of our
time. The racial disparities pervasive in our justice system compound at every
juncture: African Americans are more likely to be stopped by police, arrested,
detained before trial, and given harsher sentences than whites.
How do we achieve change, the authors ask? The
solutions they envisage range broadly
From eliminating prison for lower-level crimes to
incentivizing states to decarcerate, from ending bail to abolishing private
prisons, from reforming housing and employment laws to changing the public
perception of the justice system and cultivating respect for all lives.
At the same time, as this movement has been gaining
momentum, it has provided ammunition for a powerful counterattack from President
Trump, his attorney general, William Barr, and other law-and-order Republicans.
The result is that the 2020 election is expanding
the 50-year-old culture war into new territory as Democrats — often under
pressure from younger voters — seek to extend broader rights to those who have
been previously stigmatized or marginalized, now moving beyond protection for
minorities, women and gays, to provide more freedom to criminal defendants, the
homeless, the mentally ill and unknown numbers of men and women imprisoned
through prosecutorial misconduct, judicial error or other forms of systemic
failure.
Republicans, in turn, are betting that the
Democratic presidential candidates have moved substantially farther to the left
on issues of crime and punishment than the voting public.
Leading Democratic presidential candidates, for
their part, are not shying away from the challenge, endorsing in whole or in
part the decarceration and decriminalization agenda.
Even Joe Biden, one of the more moderate 2020
candidates, argued at the September Democratic presidential debate that “We
should be talking about rehabilitation. Nobody should be in jail for a
nonviolent crime” and that “Nobody should be in jail for a drug problem. We
build more rehabilitation centers, not prisons.”
Once a strong supporter of the death penalty, Biden
now calls
for its elimination, noting on his website:
Over 160 individuals who’ve been sentenced to death
in this country since 1973 have later been exonerated. Because we cannot ensure we get
death penalty cases right every time, Biden will work to pass legislation to
eliminate the death penalty at the federal level.
While many of the Democratic presidential candidates
have effectively joined the decarceration movement, the same unity cannot be
found among House and Senate Democrats. At this level, the movement is one more
source of conflict between the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wing and the many
members of the House and Senate who must fight for re-election in more moderate
districts and states, including those that cast majorities for Trump in 2016.
Laurence Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard,
described the thinking underpinning progressive Democratic policies broadening
the rights of the homeless. In an email, Tribe wrote:
The supposed “rights” of those who are upset or
psychologically threatened by the homeless, the deinstitutionalized, or others
similarly situated are what I would call second-order rights, rights that a
polity cannot fairly treat as having as strong a claim to protection, as trumps
that override utilitarian claims as is true of genuine rights.
Put another way, Tribe continued,
my “right” not to be upset by your appearance or
life choices cannot occupy the same plane as your right to live your life as
you opt to, or are compelled to, live it if we are to have a viable social and
legal system. One needn’t be a libertarian to recognize that there is a
difference in kind between someone’s genuine right to be free of another’s
physical intrusion or displacement and someone’s ersatz right to be free of another’s
merely offending or upsetting behavior or circumstances.
In this view, according to Tribe, “rights of the
first, or primary, sort can be universally recognized; rights of the second
sort must be subordinated if social life is to be tolerable.”
Trump, for his part, clearly rejects Tribe’s
distinction between first versus second order, or genuine versus ersatz,
rights. For Trump, the people who come into contact with the homeless have
first order rights. In a July 1, 2019, interview with Fox’s Tucker Carlson, Trump declared:
You can’t have what’s happening — where police
officers are getting sick just by walking the beat. I mean, they’re getting
actually very sick, where people are getting sick, where the people living
there living in hell, too.
Trump went on:
We cannot ruin our cities. And you have people that
work in those cities. They work in office buildings and to get into the
building, they have to walk through a scene that nobody would have believed
possible three years ago. And this is the liberal establishment. This is what
I’m fighting.
Republicans are responding to the initiatives of
progressive prosecutors with a vengeance.
In a fiery speech on Aug. 12 at the Grand Lodge
Fraternal Order of Police’s conference in New Orleans, Barr warned that
progressive prosecutors in cities across the nation are “demoralizing to law
enforcement and dangerous to public safety.”
This threat, Barr continued, comes from
the emergence in some of our large cities of
District Attorneys that style themselves as ‘social justice’ reformers, who
spend their time undercutting the police, letting criminals off the hook, and
refusing to enforce the law.
These prosecutors, Barr declared,
have been announcing their refusal to enforce broad
swathes of the criminal law. Most disturbing is that some are refusing to
prosecute cases of resisting police. Some are refusing to prosecute various
theft cases or drug cases, even where the suspect is involved in distribution.
And when they do deign to charge a criminal suspect, they are frequently
seeking sentences that are pathetically lenient. So these cities are headed
back to the days of revolving door justice. The results will be predictable.
More crime; more victims.
Three days later, William M. McSwain, the
Trump-appointed United States Attorney for the Eastern District of
Pennsylvania, called a news conference to explicitly attack the Philadelphia
district attorney, Larry Krasner. Krasner was elected in 2017 on a
platform promising to
End mass incarceration; Stop prosecuting
insufficient and insignificant cases; Review past convictions, free the
wrongfully convicted; Stop cash bail imprisonment; Treat addiction as a medical
problem, not a crime.
To read more CLICK HERE
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment