The Supreme Court decided today that judges do not even have to determine if a child "incorrigible" before imposing a life without parole sentence on that child.

Before looking at what is wrong with that opinion, it may help to see what other countries allow this.

None.
The core problem with the opinion is that the question it's asking should not even be asked.

The question: do judges need to make a formal finding of "incorrigibility" before sentencing a child to die in prison.

But that question... defies asking.
The Court ITSELF admits we can't really answer it. That we simply lack the ability to predict whether a child is beyond hope at the time of sentencing that child.

The solution, then, is... to make it EASIER for judges to do... what we know... they can't do well?

Mind-boggling.
Now, the reality of things.

While some ppl are more prone to violence than others, violence is phase: we age into and age out of it.

It's true all over the world. These graphs are from Boston, Chicago, Canada, and Holland. Can you tell the difference? (Nope.)
Are there some kids who will be more violent over their lives than others, even as they follow that bell-shaped curve? Of course.

Are some going to be seriously violent? Probably.

But few. And we are bad at predicting them. So how many lives do we destroy to "be safe"?
The Court's take is beyond Alice in Wonderland logic.

Because we are terrible at predicting whose lives to completely throw away, in part because so few kids exhibit persistent violence, the Constitution requires FEW safeguards, and we can just let judges do what they want.
I mean, none of this is surprising, given the fearmongering start to this opinion.

TWO INSTANCES PER DAY!

That means... 0.0003% of Americans were murdered by kids under the age of 18, and that stat includes all types of murder and manslaughter.
And, of course, that Kavanaugh didn't just agree to this opinion but had the GALL TO WRITE IT is... amazing. Stunning.

I can't help but think this is a giant middle finger to his detractors.

Will his defenders criticize this, for the same reasons they defended him??
The long-run impact of this case may be slight: states are changing on their own, and DAs are increasingly refusing to charge.

But this is still a deep injustice, and deserves all our condemnation.

I don’t have a SoundCloud, but I was able to describe in more depth in @PostEverything the moral and scientific bankruptcy not just of the majority in Jones, but the very debate in it:

washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/0…

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More from @JohnFPfaff

23 Apr
On Thursday, all nine Justices tinkered with the machinery of locking children up forever.

To even entertain the debate is to get the issue wrong. Morally and policy-wise, locking children in prison forever is horrific.

My latest in @PostEverything:

washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/0…
It’s hard to overstate how regressive we are in how we treat children.

The only reason we aren’t the ONLY country willing to arrest children of any age, or the last one to abolish executing children is bc of places like Cuba, Iran, and Saudi Arabia.

Those are our peers here.
That SCOTUS, in its earlier Miller op, upheld the possibility of life without parole for children found to be “irredeemable” is... TERRIBLE... on the facts and morally.

That SCOTUS decided judges can throw away a kid’s life without even finding “irredeemability” is... vomitous.
Read 4 tweets
22 Apr
Shackling women during labor is illegal. It's been illegal since 2009. Yet it keeps happening over and over and over again.

To be clear: it's illegal in NY, and about 20-some other states too. Still completely legal in a lot of states.
Shackling a woman giving birth: if you can't see what this says about the system from this, I... I don't know what to say. It's such an unambiguous act.

It demonstrates, SO clearly that everyone MUST be able to see it, how we view the people in the system as less than human.
What does it mean to shackle a woman by her hand and foot while she's giving birth?

It means you view her as an animal. You see her as someone who doesn't feel pain, who has inhuman strength, whose drive to escape is so feral she'd jeopardize her own newborn to achieve it.
Read 5 tweets
20 Apr
In case anyone wondered what Chauvin judge was talking about at the end when he talked about "Blakely":

The statutory max for 2nd degree murder in MN is 40 yrs, but MN has fairly strict sentencing guidelines, which set the default at 12.5 yrs.

Takes some work to something more.
It used to be judges operating under guidelines like MN's could do some post-trial fact-finding. If they found aggravating facts, they could impose above-the-default sentences. If they didn't find them, they couldn't.

In Blakely v Washington, SCOTUS threw a wrench into this.
The details of case itself, and the somewhat chaotic and at times infuriating cases that got to it, aren't so important (tho I wrote my dissertation on it, so... if you want them...).

What matters is that it declared judicial fact-finding like MN's unconstitutional.
Read 8 tweets
20 Apr
Our data here is, unsurprisingly, weak, but when I looked at the numbers a while back, weed was abt 1% of prison pops. Bet it’s less now.

That’s 10,000-15,000. Not millions.

And bet it gets even trickier when we dig into the full story.
We shouldn’t arrest ppl for weed. We should legalize and regulate it. We should expunge all past weed records.

But weed isn’t directly driving prison pops. And bet it’s indirect effects are weaker than most think too.
“How many ppl in prison not for weed had weed as a prior? How many weed arrests destabilized a life and thus led to later, more serious crime?”

TOTALLY fair questions.

But, overall, bet less than we might think. Imagine a world without weed arrests....
Read 6 tweets
20 Apr
I've been thinking about this graph a lot lately, and I think it misstates the nature of policing in the US.

The issue isn't the SCALE of policing in the US, but its NATURE.

In terms of police PER CAPITA, the US appears to be... BELOW average, even compared to most of Europe.
Comparing spending is tough, bc so much police spending is wages:spending reflects things like union power, purchasing power parity, etc., etc., etc.

Per capita policing seem like a more apples-to-apples comparison.

Our staffing is middling. Which means the issue is APPROACH.
There are, of course, some major gaps in the UN ODC data (available here: dataunodc.un.org/data/crime/Pol…). Most obv are the missing big countries: China (1), India (2), Indonesia (4), Pakistan (5), Brazil (6), Nigeria (7), and Bangladesh (8).

But the US/Euro comp is informative.
Read 6 tweets
19 Apr
So: the FL protest bill DeSantis just signed is, I think, the first (of many pending) to target defunding.

If a city cuts police funding, DA or other officials can appeal to the gov, who will refer the budget to an Admin Commission, which can restore funding without appeal.
By my count, there are at least ten other states with these bills working their way thru the lege, most in states w GOP trifectas.

Some threaten funding cuts, TX demands cities keep up w inflation, AZ allows sheriffs to take over.

Preemption is coming for reforms.
Some states are expanding supersession laws, which allow the state AG to take cases away from local DAs.

Others are altering local sovereign immunity standards, I think to make it easier to sue cities that don’t crack down hard enough on protests.
Read 5 tweets

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