From a Salon excerpt of the new book, The Collapse of American Criminal Justice, by William J. Stuntz: There are three keys to the system’s dysfunction, each of which has deep historical roots but all of which took hold in the last sixty years. First, the rule of law collapsed. To a degree that had not been true in America’s past, official discretion rather than legal doctrine or juries’ judgments came to define criminal justice outcomes. Second, discrimination against both black...

Nicholas Carr is beyond words: With the Fire, as with its its whizzy-gizmo predecessors, the iPad and the Nook Color, we are seeing the e-book begin to assume its true aesthetic, which would seem to be far closer to the aesthetic of the web than to that of the printed page: text embedded in a welter of functions and features, a symphony of intrusive beeps. Even the more restrained Kindle Touch, also introduced [yesterday], comes with a feature called X-Ray that seems designed to ensure that a book’s...

Yet another video, uploaded last night, “shows Bologna getting trigger-happy with the spray, just moments after the first incident, simply in an effort to get some kids to scram.” Watch: A short while ago Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said Internal Affairs will look into the incident. But he seems to be signaling very little credibility to the video evidence: “I don’t know what precipitated that specific incident,” he said, but added that demonstrators as a group were engaged in...

As more videos surface in the NYPD pepper-spray incident, we might expect a heightening of tensions in the war on photography in NYC. Morgan Leigh Manning, ” What war on photographers, you ask? Less than Picture Perfect: The Legal Relationship between Photographers’ Rights and Law Enforcement,” Tennessee Law Review, Vol. 78, p. 105, 2010. Abstract: Threats to national security and public safety, whether real or perceived, result in an atmosphere conducive to the abuse of civil liberties....

The Rickster remembers: There was a time in the history of this country when people were afraid to go out in public. You go back to Boston in the 1770s and people had to disguise themselves… They were afraid that they’d be persecuted for sending the message about unfair taxation. Matthew Yglesias corrects: Contrary to Perry’s assertion, nobody was “afraid to walk around in public” in colonial Boston out of “fear that they’d be persecuted” for objecting to high taxes. What...

Chris Anderson’s take on the cause of email overload: E-mail is easier to create than to respond to. This seems counterintuitive — after all, it’s quicker to read than to write. But reading a message is just the start. It may contain a hard-to-answer question, such as “What are your thoughts on this?” Or a link to a Web page. Or an attachment. And it may be copied to a dozen other people, all of whom will soon chime in with their own comments. Every hour spent writing and sending messages...

The video has been making its way around the internet and social networks. It was mentioned here this morning by Robert Stein. It’s worth watching… James Fallows, usually a calm, cool observer, calls it Pepper-Spray by a Cruel and Cowardly NYC Cop: He walks up; unprovoked he shoots Mace or pepper spray straight into the eyes of women held inside a police enclosure; he turns and walks away quickly (as they scream, wail, and fall to the ground clawing at their eyes) in a way familiar from...

Are we surprised? NPR.org | Time Out Chicago | New York Times | The Atlantic Reviews of Roger Ebert’s memoir, Life Itself, are pouring in — Maureen Dowd’s was just posted — and the critics love it. “The book charms and entertains, but it also teaches,” Spencer Kornhaber writes in the Atlantic. Robert Feder, who worked with Ebert at the Sun-Times for decades, says his ex-colleague wrote a “warm, funny, insightful and thoroughly engaging” book. Ebert...

Me in March 2010: The truth is, when it comes to revenue, Google is a one trick pony. Online advertising is it. (Google captures 70 percent share of search ad revenue and about 30 percent all online advertising.) For all the cool projects coming out of Google Labs, none makes money. Google makes it easy for customers to switch to competitor’s products and, unlike other technology giants in years past, the company has not been accused of anti competitive tactics. I was for antitrust actions before...

President Obama addressed an audience of some 3,000 people earlier this evening at the Congressional Black Caucus awards banquet. Watch at C-SPAN (they’re not enabling embedding). CNN Reports: “I expect all of you to march with me, and press on,” Obama said. “… Stop complaining, stop grumbling, stop crying. We are going to press on. We’ve got work to do.” The unemployment rate among African-Americans is 16.7%, nearly double the national average, while 40%...

After months of drought, it finally rained last night in Middle Georgia. A wild, heavy rain with bouts of loud thunder and lightning that had the dogs running scared. I woke up happy, even mildly euphoric; the rain had arrived, our trees might survive. Soon enough that turned sour. Why? Maybe the dogs? Maybe not. I’m a fairly happy guy. Still, sometimes in the night I have odd terrors. Scared remembrances. In the morning I report that my demons had visited in the night. In the midst of last...

Reuters: “Enough is enough,” state Senator John Whitmire wrote in a letter on Thursday to prison officials, prompting the move. “It is extremely inappropriate to give a person sentenced to death such a privilege. It’s a privilege which the perpetrator did not provide to their victim.” The letter was in apparent response to the dinner requested, but not eaten, by white supremacist Lawrence Brewer before he was put to death on Wednesday night for the 1998 dragging death...

A former prosecutor remembers sleepless nights: Some might consider that admission a sign of weakness or a lack of resolve, but in retrospect, I see those nights as ones in which I was fully human. The cost of being wrong as a prosecutor is almost unthinkable. This is especially true in a capital case, such as the recent and tumultuous end game in the Troy Davis case in Georgia. Davis’ final appeals to the state of Georgia were denied, despite the fact that seven of the nine witnesses against...

“May God have mercy on your souls. May God bless your souls.” — Troy Davis’ last words to his executioners. “I did not personally kill your son, father, brother. I am innocent.” — Troy Davis to victim’s family just before execution. Devastating. Not unexpected. SCOTUS rejected the stay. The order read simply: DAVIS, ANTHONY TROY V. HUMPHREY, WARDEN The application for stay of execution of sentence of death presented to...

I’ve only just begun what will no doubt be a long exploration of the ideas put forward by anthropologist (and anarchist) David Graeber, author of Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Graeber supposes that our traditional reading of history, that debt followed barter, is backwards. He posits that debt comes first, here in a much discussed interview with naked capitalism: [W]hat anthropologists observe when neighbors do engage in something like exchange with each other, if you want your neighbor’s...

Freakonomics did an hour on prediction. It’s well worth a listen. Some excerpts… Philip Tetlock, a psychology professor at Penn and author of Expert Political Judgment (here’s some info on Tetlock’s latest forecasting project), on just how bad we are at predicting: TETLOCK: That experts thought they knew more than they knew. That there was a systematic gap between subjective probabilities that experts were assigning to possible futures and the objective likelihoods of...

Ouch: Back in 1991, there were zero states in the U.S. that had an obesity level over 15 percent. Today, Colorado is the only state with an obesity rate below 20 percent. Another 12 states have levels over 30 percent. SEE — F for Fat: How Obesity Threatens America’s Future 2011

Justin Elliott in Salon: “I think she’s a lot smarter than most people credit her,” says ["longtime left crusader" Ralph] Nader. “Judging by her comments, she is squarely in the camp of conservative populism, opposed to corporatism and its corporate state.” … “When she was governor of Alaska she really did take on the oil industry, and [she also] approved a statewide referendum that resulted in the first state in the Union to regulate cruise lines and their...

From Ken Burns. Premieres October 2nd, 3rd & 4th, 2011 at 8 PM on PBS: Watch the full episode. See more Ken Burns. PROHIBITION is a three-part, five-and-a-half-hour documentary film series directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick that tells the story of the rise, rule, and fall of the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and the entire era it encompassed. Prohibition was intended to improve, even to ennoble, the lives of all Americans, to protect individuals, families, and society at...

So says Law Enforcement Against Prohibition noting that the new FBI report shows one drug arrest every 19 seconds in U.S.: A group of police and judges who have been campaigning to legalize and regulate drugs pointed to the figures showing more than 1.6 million drug arrests in 2010 as evidence that the “war on drugs” is a failure that can never be won. “Since the declaration of the ‘war on drugs’ 40 years ago we’ve arrested tens of millions of people in an effort...

I’m a big Flipboard fan. Yesterday Robert Scoble posted on his Google+ feed that Google is working on a competitor. “My source says that the versions he’s seen so far are mind-blowing good.” Kara Swisher follows up: Google is indeed working on rolling out the new product, which is currently called Propeller. Sources said Propeller is apparently one of a number of new socially focused announcements Google is prepping, including new apps. But the timing for their launch is unclear. Here’s...

So says Harvey E. Eisenberg, a Maryland Assistant U.S. Attorney, in this moment from Frontline’s new monthly magazine series. Watch: The segment, titled Are We Safer, is reported by the WaPo’s Dana Priest: Priest examines Maryland… Here, Gov. Martin O’Malley tells FRONTLINE how the Department of Homeland Security backed his state’s efforts to track down terrorists, funding the creation of a “fusion center” to bring together data from new high-tech devices...

Remember when… Johnson positioned himself as a moderate, and succeeded in portraying Goldwater as an extremist. Goldwater had a habit of making blunt statements about war, nuclear weapons, and economics that could be turned against him. Most famously, the Johnson campaign broadcast a television commercial on September 7 dubbed the “Daisy Girl” ad, which featured a little girl picking petals from a daisy in a field, counting the petals, which then segues into a launch countdown...

Following up on my earlier post, this afternoon the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles received petitions with over 663,000 names seeking clemency for Troy Anthony Davis: Davis’ supporters, led by Amnesty International and the Georgia chapter of the NAACP, appeared at the board’s offices and handed over 15 boxes filled with petitions, Amnesty Laura Moye said. The board, which will hear Davis’ clemency petition Monday, also was given letters signed by more than 1,500 legal professionals,...

Troy Anthony Davis: Troy Davis is set to be executed by the state of Georgia on September 21st for a crime he may not have committed. The U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear his final appeal earlier this year. But the story remains the same – Troy Davis could very well be innocent. Davis was convicted on the basis of witness testimony – seven of the nine original witnesses have since recanted or changed their testimony. Troy has survived three previous execution dates, because people like you...