Harris said a Biden administration would get rid of private prisons, cash bail, and decriminalized marijuana, in addition to banning chokeholds. Let's UNPACK 🙂🙃. Private companies only hold 8 percent of people incarcerated in the U.S., but have 15 percent of federal prisoners and more than 70 percent of immigration detainees.

Kamala Harris mentioned that a Harris/Biden administration would ban chokeholds and that would have saved George Floyd's life. There are two restraint techniques that are commonly referred to as “chokeholds” & both involve applying pressure to a person’s neck to gain compliance. The carotid control technique is when officers apply pressure to the side of the neck to cut off the blood supply to the brain—sometimes informally called a “sleeper” hold. This technique is allowed by many police departments under specific conditions.

Detective Brett Hankison charged with three counts of wanton endangerment in the first degree by a grand jury in the shooting death of Breonna Taylor. Judge Annie O'Connell issues a 15K bond and an arrest warrant. That is all of the charges that will be announced today.

A lot is going to be made of Kamala Harris' record as a prosecutor in the coming days and weeks, and it's likely you'll be hearing a lot of two—almost diametrically opposed— versions of her record from commentators on here. Basically these two: I'm not going to weigh in on that except to say that, as you read these takes, recognize that it's very easy to present a very good or very bad narrative for ANY prosecutor, given the nature of the work, using cherry-picked data and anecdotes.

Thread: Think back to the earliest days of life under Coronavirus. One of the images that’s likely to jump to mind is some version of this graph showing why the nation needed to work so urgently to “flatten the curve”. The image charts out two realities: one with a sharp increase in cases that overwhelms the healthcare system, and then flames out just as fast, as everyone becomes infected and the virus runs out of hosts.

I've been re-reading @radleybalko's Rise of the Warrior Cop this last week, and can't help but be struck by how often Joe Biden's name comes up as the architect or the primary spokesperson of some draconian piece of federal justice policy. There's so much more than the '94 crime bill, for which he's been routinely called-out for through this cycle. For example, In 1982 Biden (and Hubert Humphrey) tried to beat Reagan to a bill that would dramatically expand the reach of power of civil asset forfeiture...

I understand the basic contemporary logic around of why national deficit/debt doesn't matter, but has anyone done a good, accessible look at where the constraints of that principle are? It would seem like that logic couldn't carry on to infinity...

nymag.com/intelligencer/… I was recently in a debate with someone on the debt/deficit issue who was making the classic austerity argument, comparing it to household finances. I responded with the arguments you find in pieces like this. They answered back essentially- "fine if none of it matters then...

Prosecutorial rhetoric 101 is to invoke the the clear divide btw "legal" and "illegal". It's plain. simple. sacrosanct even.

When they behave fraudulently, however?

"It doesn't matter if the particular action was lawful or unlawful, proper or improper.” nola.com/news/courts/ar… TV crime dramas don't get *a lot* right, but one thing they do is those courtroom scenes where the prosecutor makes a long list of concessions— "you may like the defendant, you may even think he had his reasons... but the law is the law..."— keep this in mind when you see those.

Remember in 2016, how there as all this discourse #onhere about how marginalized people don't enjoy the privilege of sitting out elections or maintaining ideological purity, because elections (specifically that of Trump) present an existential threat? It feels like that narrative has flipped in 2020, with the popular argument now that marginalized people are thrown into peril when the tent is expanded to welcome the insufficiently woke. Marginalized people now don't have the privilege of safely making such bedfellows.

Doctor: "Would you prefer capsules or tablets?"

Me, apathetic: "uhhhh.... tablets?"

Pharmacy: "That'll be $125"

Me: Storms out to do research.

@UHC: Same drug, dose, qty: tablets: $125, capsules $3.93.

If I had a sick kid or NEEDED it right away, I probably woulda paid. @UHC This is HARDLY the craziest case of messed up medical billing you'll find, but-- that's a 3,000% increase I ALMOST PAID because when I insisted that was wrong, the pharmacist told me, convincingly that "it's the beginning of the year so you probably have to hit your deductible."

76 years ago today, 15-year-old Willie Howard plunged to his death in the Suwannee river from behind the business end of a white man's gun. More than a decade before Emmett Till, Willie was lynched for penning a Christmas card to a white girl he worked with at a general store. The girl's father (a former state representative) and two other men bound the teen's hands and feet with rope and marched him to the river, sobbing, as his father James watched. "Willie I cannot do anything for you now," he said, resigned to the omnipresence of racial terror.

This will be a monologue Pete has rehearsed and is excited to deliver... "I care about this because my faith teaches me that salvation has to do with how I make myself useful to those who have been excluded, marginalized, cast aside and oppressed in society."

Part of the reason this story caught my attention is because of the reporting @stephcliff & @nytimes did on wrongful conviction plea deals, and how municipalities are using them to avoid the financial burden of paying post-conviction civil settlements. nytimes.com/2019/09/30/us/…

https://twitter.com/Jamiles/status/1184198680913629184

@stephcliff @nytimes Which, is troubling enough and federal courts are right to examine whether or not it constitutes an unacceptable level of coercion. But here, it's worse, because it's not merely a cold calculation about fiscal risk, but mixes in this bit of ugly reasoning of my hometown DA. (1/2)

Michael Drejka, who shot and killed Markeis McGlockton after a 2018 confrontation in a Florida parking lot, has been convicted of manslaughter in what @AttorneyCrump called a "victory over stand your ground.” As a refresher: McGlockton was shot by 47-year-old Michael Drejka in a Clearwater, Florida convenience store parking lot on 19 July after Drejka confronted McGlockton’s girlfriend, Britany Jacobs, over being parked in a handicapped space without a permit.

I think those of us who write and discuss how racially exclusionary the US ethos and policy has been through history, are better served letting the Ken Cuccinelli's of the world "self-own" with statements like his remark about "Europeans" vs. reflexively shouting it down. US Immigration policy has been, as a matter of history, hideously racialized and racist. Without having done a lot of research about that poem specifically or the decision to engrave it at the statue of liberty- he's probably "right" about who it was meant to refer to at the time

I fully get the appeal – logic even – of conspiracy theories around Jeffrey Epstein’s apparent suicide. One thing that needs to be challenged, though, is that ANYONE could have so much to lose, or be so mentally stable- that they couldn’t or wouldn’t attempt suicide in jail. These arguments were even more common when they accompanied conspiracy theories about Sandra Bland’s death in custody, and I think the fact that Epstein and Bland literally couldn’t have been any more differently situated helps to illustrate how universal the trauma of jail is.

'They've been killing us for too long': Louisiana residents march in coalition against 'death alley' theguardian.com/us-news/2019/m… A judge has warned that the #deathalley protesters could face up to 15 years in prison if they march across the Sunshine Bridge in St James as planned this weekend. wafb.com/2019/05/31/can…

In Reserve, Louisiana, where earlier this month we brought you the first installment of our #cancertown series, a coalition of groups are marching in the shadow of the Denka/Dupont Ponchartrain Works facility- the most cancer-causing air polluter in the US according to the EPA. Marchers' demands include a moratorium on new petrochemical plants in the Louisiana river parishes, which, thanks to cheap land, easy transport and lax regulation, is already home to hundreds of polluting industrial sites.

Anyways as to the actual charges- I'm not saying this isn't irresponsible, it totally is. You can just release you child into the custody of an adult who is unwilling to take them. That's true even if other Lyft drivers have done it, or even if you're making the comparison to...

https://twitter.com/Jamiles/status/1121909423490904065

Unaccompanied minor programs that airlines have. Lyft doesn't have that, as far as I'm aware (and I drive for them). I totally get a driver feeling like that's an unacceptable level of risk to assume. Especially as a contractor who the company has little obligation to defend.