March 10, 2012 at 12:55 P.M. Several of my copy cards at the NYPL were disabled yesterday because of "Error E-8 and E-9." Regrettably, I had spent money on those cards. Luckily, I try to have several extra cards in case of such vandalism. I am sure that this was only a coincidence. ("Censorship and Cruelty in New Jersey" and "More Censorship and Cybercrime" then "How censorship works in America" then "The Invicta Watch Company" and "The Invicta Watch Company Caper.")
March 7, 2012 at 12:35 P.M. I was unable to sign-in at computer number #7 at NYPL (Inwood) for about fifteen minutes due to vandalism of this computer. Finally, I was able to overcome the problem. I continue to receive threats that I will not be able to sign-in, again, at these blogs. If I cannot return to write at these blogs, I will try to create new locations from which to write on-line. I regret that this vandalism damages not only me, but also many members of the N.Y. public using these computers, also those seeking to read my writings. An attempt to print this essay was obstructed by hackers yesterday. I can not say what other damage has been done to my writings overnight. I simply can not know whether I will be able to write at these blogs from one day to the next. An essay examining Virginia Long's departure from the judiciary could not be posted today due to these tactics. ("Torture" and "How censorship works in America" then "More in Sadness Than in Anger.")
March 6, 2012 at 1:00 P.M. The resignation in disgrace of Virginia Long from the New Jersey Supreme Court seems to confirm that both Stuart Rabner and Jaynee LaVecchia may be next to "step down" from the bench. No one leaves such a position voluntarily. Many justices have received extensions of the mandatory retirement rule at age 70, including Ms. Poritz and Mr. Wilentz. I have reason to believe that Ms. Long may have visited my sites, including "The Philosophy Cafe," at MSN.
What did Ms. Long know about my matters -- or the cybercrime to which I have been subjected -- and when did she know it?
Leaving the bench will not make the issues go away. Efforts to prevent me from writing on-line continue to go unpunished. ("Law and Ethics in the Soprano State" and "Trenton's Nasty Lesbian Love-Fest!")
African-Americans are discriminated against at every level in the system: In terms of the uses of "negative discretion" to arrest, prosecute, and seek or impose harsher sentences when defendants are African-Americans, for example, especially when victims are white.
Greater leniency and "positive discretion" are available to white defendants, especially if they are well educated or members of ethnic and/or religious groups that are disproportionately represented in the legal profession and judiciary.
Most African-Americans are convicted before they get to the courthouse.
This growing international disapproval of the U.S. legal system is especially directed against New Jersey's appallingly corrupt legal fiasco. ("American Doctors and Torture" and "America's Torture Lawyers" then "Is America's Legal Ethics a Lie?" then "Legal Ethics Today" and "New Jersey is the Home of the Living Dead.")
William J. Stunz, The Collapse of American Criminal Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012).
Richard A. Posner, "Incarceration Blues," in The New Republic, November 17, 2011, at p. 36.
John Paul Stevens, "Our Brown System of Criminal Justice," in The New York Review of Books, November 10, 2011, at p. 56.
Robert Kagan, "Not Fade Away: Against the Myth of American Decline," in The New Republic, February 2, 2012, at p. 19.
James Barron, "Deadline Past, Portugal Says It Won't Send Killer to U.S.," in The New York Times, March 2, 2012, at p. A19.
Phil Angelides, "Will Wall Street Ever Face Justice?," in The New York Times, March 2, 2012, at p. A25.
Raymond Bonner, "When Innocence Isn't Enough," (Op-Ed) in The New York Times, Sunday, March 4, 2012, at p. 8 (Week in Review).
Tamar Lewin, "Black Students Punished More, Data Suggests," in The New York Times, March 6, 2012, at p. A11.
John Marzulli, "'I Carry Scars of Torture': Victim Rails at Monster in Court," in The Daily News, March 6, 2012, at p. 6.
Richard A. Posner, a Circuit Court judge from Chicago and the leading representative of "Law and Economics" in American jurisprudence, reviews Professor William J. Stunz's controversial book, The Collapse of American Criminal Justice. ("Richard A. Posner on Voluntary Actions and Criminal Responsibility.")
Judge Posner believes that the American criminal justice system is not in a state of collapse because "the system is costly in human terms but not in budgetary terms." (Posner, p. 36.)
Curiously, however, Judge Posner does not provide the crucial financial figures which must be at his finger tips: Americans will spend about $70 BILLION on federal and state prisons; several billion more dollars may be added to these costs when all local jail expenses are combined with national prison costs.
At the moment, the U.S. faces a $3-to-$4 TRILLION deficit in the federal budget alone, much of that debt is being held by China and Japan. There is a national security issue for you, a debt that we owe to the Bush/Cheney administration.
To spend $70 to $100 BILLION on making about 2 million people economically unproductive, while destroying the lives of another 2 million or so who are subjected to some form of monitoring, or other legal stigmatizing of some kind, is indeed a budgetary crisis. It is also a crisis of legitimacy for the system because racism, obviously, defines the court system at every stage in the process of criminal prosecution and incarceration. ("Foucault, Rose, Davis, and the Meanings of Prison.")
In the words of Justice John Paul Stevens: "racism" is a "systemic" problem in the American courts because " ... blacks are nine times more likely than whites to serve prison sentences [for the indentical] drug crimes. And the same system that discriminates against black drug defendants also discriminates against black victims of criminal violence." (Stevens, p. 56.)
We cannot afford the world's most expensive and massive penal system. If we could afford it, the issue of injustice would still arise since the system is designed, in the words of Roberto Unger, to "confine violent members of the underclass" who happen to be minority males, especially African-Americans and Latinos. Also, persons who "appear" violent may be sent to prison. In other words, dark-skinned persons of all genders. ("Roberto Unger's Revolutionary Legal Theory" and "Justice for Mumia Abu-Jamal" then "Mumia Abu-Jamal and the Unconstitutionality of the Death Penalty" and "Freedom for Mumia Abu-Jamal.")
I suspect that Judge Posner knows this fact, but that he struggles to convince himself otherwise. Mr. Posner is even more aware, I believe, of the validity of the deepest criticisms in this book -- which are not economic at all -- to the effect that our laws and judicial determinations are unjust and a betrayal of America's guarantee of equal protection of the laws and due process for all litigants. ("Give Us Free!" and "Driving While Black [DWB] in New Jersey.")
This book under review by Mr. Posner offers a moral critique of American law, not (primarily) a criticism of economic inefficiency or excessive cost in the judicial system.
African-Americans are discriminated against at every level in the system: In terms of the uses of "negative discretion" to arrest, prosecute, and seek or impose harsher sentences when defendants are African-Americans, for example, especially when victims are white.
Greater leniency and "positive discretion" are available to white defendants, especially if they are well educated or members of ethnic and/or religious groups that are disproportionately represented in the legal profession and judiciary.
Jewish defendants do very well, for instance, in comparison with African-Americans, including Jewish defendants charged with theft offenses, like Bernie Madoff, who are punished (generally) less severely than their dark-skinned fellow Americans. ("Neil M. Cohen, Esq. and Conduct Unbecoming to the Legislature in New Jersey" then "Paul Bergrin, Esq. is an Ethical New Jersey Attorney" and "Herbert Klitzner, Esq.'s Greed and New Jersey's Hypocrisy!" and "Have you no shame, Mr. Rabner?" and "Stuart Rabner's Selective Sense of Justice.")
Wall Street crime has left "24 million people jobless or underemployed." Not one of the Wall Street financiers -- who made billions of dollars "disappear" -- will go to prison nor will Mr. Corzine who "did not know what happened to $1.2 BILLION of [his] clients' money."
Few African-Americans have stolen $1.2 billion. Fewer still have committed the frauds attributed to Wall Street financiers -- usually Republicans, like Judge Posner -- frauds that have caused great suffering to children and old people alike. A tiny number of those financiers are African-Americans, none of whom (to my knowledge) are implicated in criminal investigations. Nevertheless, if anybody from Wall Street goes to prison, I suspect that it will be a low-level African-American functionary trapped in a system of greed. ("New Jersey's Office of Attorney Ethics.")
Perhaps we can persuade Judge Posner that these Wall Street financiers are all African-Americans (or "blacks" as Judge Posner insists), so that prosecution will be deemed appropriate and necessary. ("America's Holocaust.")
Judge Posner wonders about the "abnormal crime rate among blacks, which translates into abnormal percentages of black inmates." (Posner, p. 36.)
I wonder whether the crime rate among "blacks" is what "translates into" the higher number of incarcerated African-Americans or whether racism has a little something to do with the grotesque injustice of race-based imprisonment. Judges and juries seem to have different attitudes to offenses committed by persons of color, for some strange reason, as compared with the crimes of lighter-skinned "others."
Differential treatment may be one consequence of television or cinematic images which depict persons of color, overwhelmingly, as criminals as distinct from other persons likely to live in Posner's neighborhood, for instance, who are (usually) represented as victims.
Most African-Americans are convicted before they get to the courthouse.
There is clearly something that Judge Posner does not see -- or wish to see -- in the reality of American courts and prisons. This blindness may result from looking for causes in statistics that should be interpreted for what they "mean" or the ugly truths that they reveal about us.
What we do not acknowledge is precisely what other nations see all too clearly: We are a racist society. This fact about America is not altered by the election of any single public official. Portugal, for example, does not extradict African-American persons easily to a legal system perceived (correctly) as racist and slanted in favor of the rich. ("New Jersey is the Home of the Living Dead" and "Mafia Influence in New Jersey Courts and Politics.")
Much the same is true in France, not just Cuba. Cuba has -- again, correctly -- granted asylum to Assata Shakur. ("The FBI Wants Assata Shakur.")
This growing international disapproval of the U.S. legal system is especially directed against New Jersey's appallingly corrupt legal fiasco. ("American Doctors and Torture" and "America's Torture Lawyers" then "Is America's Legal Ethics a Lie?" then "Legal Ethics Today" and "New Jersey is the Home of the Living Dead.")
Grim facts lead to an obvious response on the question of America's decline. The issue is not about economic "ups-and-downs"; but rather, whether the nation is estranged from its core values and decadent in an intellectual or aesthetic sense. ("Nihilists in Disneyworld" and "Whatever!")
The moral crisis in our prison-industrial complex and society revealed by Professor Stunz is the authentic decline discussed by scholars. America's enduring Habermasian "crisis of legitimacy" is institutional as well as cultural. This crisis includes universities and the media. It is a crisis aggravated by 9/11 and the so-called "War on Terror." America's real decline -- that is still reversible -- is moral as evidenced by recent writings at these blogs. ("Derek Parfit's Ethics" and "Give Us Free!" then "Whatever!")
Perhaps one symptom of decline may be the continuing popularity or "success" of Richard A. Posner and his bizarre "Law and Economics."
