Modern-day jurors have a tendency to discuss trials and deliberations publicly, and a number of Clancy case jurors have come out with a lot to say, post-trial. Their decision came down, as I figured it would, to the idea of reasonable doubt, held by eleven jurors who would have put Clancy in a mental hospital for an undetermined amount of time rather than in prison for life.

I’ve written before about the fact that Massachusetts law supports that verdict (whether you think it’s a good law or not, and personally I do not) and how unusual that law is. Here’s a post I wrote on the subject.

I will add that in law school I studied the law of criminal responsibility as it relates to mental illness, and I also have my training as a family therapist, and I have long thought there is no good solution to the problem of psychosis and crime. There is a wide variety of legal approaches – very wide, actually – all with pros and cons, and all unsatisfactory.

The approach I prefer is to sentence the person, and if there is diminished responsibility because of a psychosis, the person starts serving the sentence in a mental hospital and finishes out the term in prison when the hospital deems the person recovered from the psychosis, with the total in both institutions being the time served. It’s not a great solution at all, but I think it is probably better than the others.

But it’s very far from the law prevailing in Massachusetts, the law under which Clancy was tried and which operates in this case.

Those who believe Clancy should have been found guilty seem to perceive a sex divide in the jurors’ opinions because the lone holdout was a male – as well as a race divide because he was also black. But there were two other males on the jury, and they sided with the nine women on the panel. The jurors are being portrayed by many on the right more or less this way (the following excerpt is by John Hinderaker):

You know the holdout juror in the Lindsay Clancy case? The one who thought strangling her three children was a crime worth punishing? The one the liberal white women jurors denounced as dumb? Unable to understand the jury instructions and comprehend the subtle concept of reasonable doubt? Turns out he was the only juror “of color.” The holdout juror was a black guy …

But that’s a false dichotomy. Based on Massachusetts law, I might even have reluctantly sided with those “liberal white women jurors” in their verdict (not necessarily in their descriptions of the lone holdout, which by the way don’t seem to have actually included the word or even the concept “dumb”). Was the holdout the only person on the jury who thought strangling three children was a horrific crime “worth punishing”? But the jurors were not being asked if it was a serious crime worth punishing. They were being asked whether Clancy’s moral sense and criminal responsibility were compromised by her serious mental problems:

“We weren’t trying to figure out if she murdered the children. She did. And she’s admitting that. We’re trying to figure out did she know right from wrong at that time,” foreperson Roni Carlson said.

Legally in Massachusetts, if the prosecution failed to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Lindsay Clancy knew right from wrong and also could have restrained herself from those criminal acts, then the verdict of the eleven would be quite appropriate. That seems to me to be the case, whether I like that verdict or not. But instead, the lone holdout is being considered by the right as a hero and as the only virtuous person on the jury, and the eleven others (nine women and two men) are considered to be excusing the murder of children rather than trying to follow the law while realizing full well how horrific these crimes were.

But the most important reason the holdout should come in for criticism is this (at least, according to the other jurors who gave interviews): he had agreed with them that there was reasonable doubt that Clancy should be held fully responsible and yet he was determined to find her guilty anyway. That’s a form of jury nullification, basically, because it’s not the way the law in Massachusetts works. In Massachusetts, if reasonable doubt on the score exists, you must find the defendant not guilty:

“He admitted he had reasonable doubt and I started filling out the forms, I was so excited,” the foreperson said.

“There were three forms I had to fill out and I started filling them out, I wrote my signature on each one but then he said, ‘But I’m still not going to say she’s not guilty by reason of insanity.’”

Nor did the interviewed jurors blame Clancy’s husband Patrick instead, which was one of the conspiracy theories popular with some especially extreme online Lindsay-defenders. Here’s what two of the jurors said about Clancy’s husband:

Juror No. 5 said she “will never be the same” after hearing Patrick’s 911 call, which was not publicly broadcast.

The “horrifying” [911 call made by Patrick] dispelled any online conspiracy theories that the husband was somehow involved, according to the anonymous panelist.

“All I could think was that if these people could have heard that visceral, blood-curdling scream, I don’t think I could name a single actor or actress that could have performed that the way he did, and not that he performed it, but I will never be the same after that,” she said.

“Just to imagine living through that and being the person to find your children in that scenario, it shakes you.”

I think it’s very interesting that a great many people on the right who think Clancy absolutely should have been found guilty are playing the race card about the lone holdout juror. They are asserting that the eleven (who were white) who voted to commit Clancy are racists putting down a heroic black man.

Now it turns out that the holdout juror had a history of domestic violence allegations. The Hinderaker article says this:

It is a rule of modern life that anyone who dissents from leftist dogma must be destroyed.

However, there was a reason to reveal the information that’s not about “destroying” this man. That reason was this [my emphasis]:

The holdout juror who caused Lindsay Clancy’s mistrial has a history of alleged domestic violence such as grabbing his wife by the throat and punching his nephew, according to a report.

The still-unnamed juror, only described as a black man in his 30s, faced a criminal charge in September 2021 for allegedly assaulting his wife, NBC10 Boston reported. …

A juror questionnaire in Massachusetts asks whether someone has been arrested, charged with a crime, or been served with a court order — all boxes that the holdout juror should have checked.

If he’d answered honestly, he almost certainly would not have been serving on the jury. I think this matters and that it’s not merely some idle and vicious doxxing, as Matt Walsh writes:

They’re flat-out doxxing an anonymous juror because he didn’t acquit a triple murderer. These people are evil beasts. Demons from hell.

And Hinderaker wrote:

This was an effort by a “reporter” named Sue O’Connell and a Boston television station, NBC10, to doxx the holdout juror and ruin his life. Why? So that in the future, no one will dare to oppose the agenda of the far left while serving on a jury. Every juror must toe the line, or else.

Left out is the fact that the juror apparently lied in order to get on the jury. And so perhaps he did have an agenda after all. There’s a reason they ask that question of jurors. Do we not care about that sort of thing anymore? I submit that we should care and that we certainly would care if this juror had come to a conclusion with which we disagreed.

It’s fully possible to give a reasoned argument about why a guilty verdict would have been the correct one. But do it without playing the race card – something about which the right always mocks the left. And do it without pretending that this guy didn’t violate the jury selection rules, at least if these allegations about him are true.

The post The Lindsay Clancy eleven and the sole holdout appeared first on The New Neo.

In a scathing editorial on the Jason Arday tragedy, @Nature credulously parrots claims he made about himself without any acknowledgment on Nature’s part of credible evidence that he was a serial fabulist and that we cannot take his claims, including that he was autistic, at face… pic.twitter.com/4woPSfDWuK

— Benjamin Ryan (@benryanwriter) September 2, 2026

For those without access to X:

In a scathing editorial on the Jason Arday tragedy, @Nature credulously parrots claims he made about himself without any acknowledgment on Nature’s part of credible evidence that he was a serial fabulist and that we cannot take his claims, including that he was autistic, at face value.

Nature makes no mention of credible evidence that he committed academic fraud and that he lied about a lengthy catalogue of elements of his life in an effort to burnish the mythology he had built around himself and that came crashing down in July and early August.

Instead, this editorial effectively removes all blame from Arday for the choices he made and the consequences those ultimately yielded. The editorial minimizes the plagiarism accusations and places blame on journalists for investigating his many false claims and on Cambridge for ultimately placing him under investigation—questioning whether the university followed proper protocol.

It is amazing that a news outlet ostensibly devoted to science would blame those who told the truth or sought to determine the truth about someone who demonstrably lied over and over and who was apparently culpable for committing egregious academic misconduct, including stealing another academic’s data.

Yes, some of the coverage has racist undertones at least. But it is illiberal to argue that the media should not have done their job to thoroughly investigate a public figure at one of the world’s leading academic institutions who had evidently conned his way to the pinnacle of academic success.

But Nature is no longer “devoted to science.” I don’t know when that began, but it was certainly the case by the time this letter was written about a year ago. Excerpt:

Unfortunately, the Nature group has abandoned its mission in favor of advancing a social justice agenda. The group has institutionalized censorship, implemented policies that have sacrificed merit in favor of identity-based criteria, and injected social engineering into its author guidelines and publishing process. The result is that papers published in Nature journals can no longer be regarded as rigorous science.

The author is a chemist, and she cites explicit woke policies of Nature going back at least to 2019.

I first heard of Nature when I was in law school. One of my roommates, who was getting her PhD in a scientific field, was being published in the journal at a very young age. I remember how excited she was and what an amazing achievement it was considered to be. So I long held the publication in very high esteem; it was considered the pinnacle. I haven’t held that opinion in quite some time, and of course it’s not alone in its decline.

The post <i>Nature</i> was once a premier scientific journal … appeared first on The New Neo.

Opinion: it absolutely should succeed.

Here’s its legal basis:

In the petition, Joseph argued that Gov. Tim Walz broke the law in reassigning authority of the case to Attorney General Keith Ellison’s office, making Ellison’s involvement illegitimate. The petition also claimed “there was no medical evidence to support the bogus theory of ‘asphyxia’ advanced by the state,” and that the Hennepin County District Court should have convened a grand jury before charging Chauvin. …

Chauvin first filed a petition to overturn his conviction in 2023, stating that he would not have pled guilty if his attorney told him that a pathologist offered to testify that Chauvin didn’t cause Floyd’s death. The courts denied his petition. Chauvin and Joseph returned in 2025 requesting another review of his case, arguing his rights were violated by faulty testimony and jury instructions. The courts dismissed that petition, as well.

There also have been several appeals; none have been granted. The bases for the appeals rested mainly on the following:

… that Chauvin wasn’t given a fair trial due to intensive pretrial media coverage over riots and civil unrest around the globe that followed Floyd’s killing; that the jury should have been sequestered during the trial; and that the trial should have been held outside of Hennepin County due to bias in the jury pool.

Once a person is sentenced, the bar is set very high for revisiting the issues and granting such requests. I believe that in the Chauvin case the requirements have been met, but it doesn’t surprise me that Chauvin has had no success in these efforts. I’ve written an enormous number of posts on George Floyd’s death and the Chauvin trial, so I won’t recap the details except to say that I’m with Elon Musk here:

“The facts show that [Chauvin] was not the cause of death, nor did he at any time intend for a death to occur,” Musk’s social media post read. “Whatever else he may be, he is not a murderer. That is the truth.”

The post There’s a bid to vacate Chauvin’s state conviction appeared first on The New Neo.

Radicalism runs in the family.

Professor Eman Abdelhadi teaches at the University of Chicago.

On the morning of the October 7 attacks, she celebrated online by tweeting, “Good morning, freedom.”

After the massacres, she called for violent student uprisings on the streets of America.

“Let Palestine break this country wide open. Long live the student intifada.”

In October of 2025, she attended a protest at the Broadview ICE Detention Center outside of Chicago.

She was arrested for violence and spit on a police officer.

She’s currently charged with two counts of aggravated battery, along with two misdemeanor counts of resisting arrest.

Her social media is flooded with antisemitic garbage and anti-American propaganda.

Did the Democrats vet him at all? Or maybe these things are considered plusses nowadays.

Even this?

From 2015 to 2017, the socialist Muslim Senate candidate from Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed, was executive director and health officer of the Detroit Health Department. In that capacity, he was in charge of Detroit’s Animal Control operation at a time when that department was engaged in some highly questionable activities. El-Sayed has boasted about how he “rebuilt the animal control system,” but he actually seems to have left a wide swath of destruction in his wake. And this is not just a story about the ethical treatment of animals.

The Daily Mail reported Thursday that “his record overseeing Detroit’s troubled animal-control system” includes “high rates of animal euthanasia,” particularly involving the killing of dogs. It seems that “nearly 4,680 dogs and cats were euthanized by Detroit Animal Care and Control (DACC) during the period when El-Sayed was in his post at the Detroit Health Department,” and far more dogs than cats were put to death.

And then there’s his vile racism:

Abdul El-Sayed is facing a wave of backlash over a pair of posts taking aim at Second Lady Usha Vance and Trump aide Natalie Harp.

“So do we think JD is taking Usha with him back in time to meet Papaw, or no…” El-Sayed posted after Vice President JD Vance took aim at his past… pic.twitter.com/IXHlt2tcHK

— Fox News (@FoxNews) August 23, 2026

If you can’t access X:

Abdul El-Sayed is facing a wave of backlash over a pair of posts taking aim at Second Lady Usha Vance and Trump aide Natalie Harp.

“So do we think JD is taking Usha with him back in time to meet Papaw, or no…” El-Sayed posted after Vice President JD Vance took aim at his past comments on Sharia law. Critics quickly accused the Michigan Senate candidate of making a racist reference to Usha Vance’s Indian ethnicity.

Then El-Sayed turned his attention to Trump aide Natalie Harp: “Natalie, I think he’s had a little too much iPad for the week. He needs his rest.”

The posts are now fueling accusations of racism and sexism, adding another flashpoint to El-Sayed’s escalating fight with Vance.

And back in April, from El-Sayed:

“What do you think is going through Usha’s head when he talks? She’s like, ‘Damn, I have to sleep with him,’” El-Sayed said on “The Allen Analysis Show” posted on Friday.

I guess she’s pregnant so something is happening,” El-Sayed continued, “Can you imagine, he’s got Brown kids, at some point he’s going to have a really awkward conversation with his kids, like, you made your career hating people who are different.” …

El-Sayed continued, “I love my Brown kids, and I think my Brown kids are just as American as everyone else. JD Vance has Brown kids who he thinks are less American than everyone else.”

El-Sayed also said on the podcast appearance that Vance has the “charisma of a doorknob” and the “aura of a toad” while urging Usha Vance to “get out” of the marriage.

El-Sayed has the charisma of a viper and the aura of a crocodile. He’s a despicable human being.

The post What a piece of work El-Sayed is appeared first on The New Neo.

Even before the Arday incident, Cofnas was a figure of controversy for his writing and research on race and intelligence:

He became an early-career research fellow at the University of Cambridge and research associate at Emmanuel College, Cambridge in 2022. Controversy developed after Cofnas published a 2024 blog post saying that black people are, on average, less intelligent than other groups, and that they “would disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment” under a meritocratic system. He was dismissed from his position at Emmanuel College as a result.

In 2026, Cofnas secured a position at Ghent University. Following student protest and a petition calling for his dismissal, the university defended his appointment, citing academic freedom. Cofnas attracted further attention after publishing a blog post in which he catalogued multiple examples of alleged plagiarism by University of Cambridge sociologist Jason Arday …

In that Wiki article I just quoted, I don’t see it mentioned that Cofnas says he got these facts from Harvard’s own study on the matter. Cofnas discusses it in the interview I posted, and it’s also mentioned here:

[Cofnas] cites Harvard University data which suggest that were the college to use a colourblind system for academic selection, judging applicants by academic qualifications alone, its proportion of black students would fall dramatically, from around 14 per cent to just 0.7 per cent. When it comes to Harvard faculty, Dr Cofnas added that in a meritocracy they ‘would be recruited from the best of the best students’, meaning ‘the number of black professors would approach 0 per cent’. He adds that black people would ‘disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment’ in this society.

Cofnas is labeled a racist, but basing a statement like that on Harvard’s own statistics doesn’t make him one. Whether he is or is not, I don’t know. He definitely is a person unafraid of making waves, which is also evident from the interview in my previous post. Cofnas waded into Arday’s background where others feared to tread. Now, with Arday’s suicide, Cofnas has been suspended from his current post at Ghent University:

Nathan Cofnas, suspended by the rector of Ghent University, Petra De Sutter, in the wake of Jason Arday’s death, notes that De Sutter used ChatGPT for her inaugural address, which included fabricated quotes.

Previous news reports confirm this.https://t.co/xppHNZk3Wo https://t.co/XjaV0P6zZk pic.twitter.com/9gCl3NsjXs

— Benjamin Ryan (@benryanwriter) August 20, 2026

For those lacking access to X:

Nathan Cofnas, suspended by the rector of Ghent University, Petra De Sutter, in the wake of Jason Arday’s death, notes that De Sutter used ChatGPT for her inaugural address, which included fabricated quotes.

To top it all off, Ghent’s rector De Sutter is a gynecologist who was born a man and transitioned around the age of forty, in 2004.

The reason given for Cofnas’ suspension:

Ghent University said it had suspended Cofnas “as a precautionary measure” pending a preliminary disciplinary investigation, but did not go into further detail on the reasons.

It could not comment any further “to safeguard the confidentiality of the personnel file and the disciplinary proceedings,” it said in an emailed statement.

Pretty closed-mouthed, but my guess is that they are afraid of an uproar from students, faculty, and the public if they keep him. He is identified as the mean racist guy who lynched Arday.

Here’s more on the matter from the University of Ghent:

The suspension comes after Ghent said that following Arday’s death it had “received many enquiries” about Cofnas’s appointment.

“We attach great importance to academic freedom and to open academic debate, even when views are controversial. However, that freedom is not unlimited. It goes hand in hand with responsibility and may be restricted in order to protect the rights of others,” Ghent said in its statement.

“For this reason, the university takes the recent public statements made by a postdoctoral researcher at Ghent University regarding this matter very seriously. Ghent University has decided to take appropriate action within its powers and the applicable framework.”

In March, more than 300 staff and students wrote an open letter to the university, questioning the appointment of Cofnas and accusing Ghent of violating its code of conduct.

Ghent defended itself then. But will it defend free speech now, or succumb? A robust defense of free speech doesn’t really exist in Europe anywhere; at least, I’ve never found one.

Cofnas is an American, however, and the Trump administration is sticking up for him:

U.S. Ambassador to Belgium Bill White gets right to the point in the X post below. He calls out the Ghent University rector for “retaliat[ing] against an American scholar [Cofnas] following his accurate whistleblower reporting on academic fraud.”

He notes that the U.S. often funds research projects with foreign universities and that “dishonest, corrupt institutions that engage in, or reward, scapegoating mob behavior are not desirable partners for us.” Therefore, the U.S. plans to review “any relationships we have with Ghent University.”

It will be very interesting to see what ultimately happens to Cofnas. I hope he has a security detail.

NOTE: In doing research for this post, I came across this tweet on X praising the Trump administration for doing the right thing in this instance. But when I looked at the responses to the tweet, there were many that said that Trump only did this because he’s controlled by the Jews and Israel, and Cofnas is Jewish. It was quite the barrage of Tuckeresque contempt, such as (for example):

The Trump administration defended Nathan Cofnas because he’s jewish, and it would have done so regardless of whether it was the right thing to do or not.

The absolute only reason they are defending Confas is because he is aggressively Jewish, and the singular aim of this administration is to serve the Jews.

[Trump] would never do this for a White person

Ok, but Trumps law: ‘everything he does, he does for *them*’ holds true in this instance. No matter how repellently obnoxious the other side is, it’s hard not to notice the consistent pattern. If Confas wasn’t a Zionist Jew it would be very different.

Oh please, let’s not be oblivious here.

Cofnas is Jewish and this administration is controlled by Jews.

You don’t see this “based” administration going to bat for nationalist figures in Europe.

Cofnas is a jew. There have been plenty of times they could have defended this rhetoric, but they aren’t defending the rhetoric they are defending the tribe.

There are plenty more where those came from, but you get the idea. Are they bots? Paid trolls? Muslims in foreign lands? Or real people from the US and Western Europe who are Tucker fans? Probably some mix of all three, but I don’t know the proportions.

Note that they don’t consider Jews “white.” The left, on the other hand, considers Jews extremely privileged whites. This double-edged sword is a really good example of how Jew-hatred works – the Jews are regarded as allied with whatever the Jew-hating group sees as the enemy.

[ADDENDUM:

Cofnas tells his side of it here. An excerpt:

I have been flooded with death threats, smeared in countless newspaper articles, and accused of targeting Arday because I think that, as one commentator put it, “people like Cofnas simply don’t believe that Black people deserve to be professors at all.” Speaker after speaker at the vigil held for Arday in Trafalgar Square on Monday denounced me by name, including a prominent politician. Many have claimed that I fabricated the evidence against Arday, although this is easily refuted.

On Aug. 18, the U.K.’s National Union of Journalists released a “Statement on the Death of Jason Arday.” After “condemn[ing] attacks against individual journalists,” the statement singles out one person for criticism: me. “That one of the highest profile critics of Arday was Nathan Cofnas, a former Cambridge academic and self-described ‘race realist’, is deeply concerning.” Although no one has found so much as a mistaken comma in the article I wrote about Arday, I’m apparently not entitled to protection against attack for telling the truth.

On Thursday afternoon, I received a message from the rector of Ghent University, Petra De Sutter, notifying me that, in the wake of the backlash from the Arday affair, she was suspending me from my position as a postdoctoral researcher. Her letter made it clear that the school has laid the groundwork to fire me.

I’m an easy scapegoat because I hold views about race that are controversial and easily misunderstood. I argue that differences between ancestral populations aren’t entirely due to environmental forces, and that some group disparities stem from natural differences for which no one is to blame. I made a widely quoted statement: “Under a colorblind system that judged applicants only by academic qualifications, blacks would make up 0.7% of Harvard students.” That sentence has been cited repeatedly as evidence that I’m a racist.

Few people are aware that my statement about Harvard admissions was summarizing a finding by Harvard itself. In the course of the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard lawsuit, Harvard disclosed an internal study conducted in 2013, which found that, if admissions were based only on grades and test scores, the undergraduate population would be 0.7% African-American—a significant reduction from current levels. Racial representation at many American institutions is maintained by Harvard-style affirmative action.

I didn’t quote Harvard’s statistic to celebrate it, or because I believe that black people don’t belong at universities. There are many brilliant black scholars. But it’s a difficult fact to face that in a truly colorblind system that didn’t take race into account, there would be a shocking lack of diversity in certain institutions. As I said in the controversial essay that mentions the Harvard statistic, “when it comes to policymaking in a multiracial society, we might need to make sure that everyone feels they have a voice in determining our collective fate.” To this end, I argued for taking measures to ensure meaningful representation of major demographic groups. But we shouldn’t do this under the banner of DEI, which automatically blames differences in outcome on white racism.

The number of people hearing Cofnas’ side of the story is miniscule compared to the number who think he’s a racist who murdered Arday with malice aforethought.]

The post Ghent suspends Cofnas – the Arday fallout appeared first on The New Neo.

Anthony was found guilty. But many people wanted to paint him as just having defended himself. It was always obvious this was not the case.

But now more has come out, and it paints an even worse picture of Anthony. Why is this emerging now? Anthony’s lawyers are seeking a new trial, plus the case is being used politically in the Senate race in Texas. Here’s Jonathan Turley on the matter:

The [original] criminal case was not a difficult one for the prosecution with overwhelming witness and video evidence of the stabbing. Anthony’s motion for a new trial is extremely weak, in my view, because it focuses on his decision not to testify (despite a record showing he made that decision knowingly and freely). At the same time, the case is now becoming a political issue with Democratic senatorial nominee James Talarico declaring that the case “prove[s] this system is not working for black Texans.”

More [my emphasis]:

New messages have surfaced showing that Anthony was threatening his former girlfriend and expressing violent ideations just hours before killing Metcalf.

Text messages allegedly include a picture of the knife he used in Metcalf’s killing. Anthony’s girlfriend, Valeria, went to the school on the morning of April 2, 2025, before he stabbed Metcalf. She reportedly told school officials that Anthony was stalking her after she broke up with him.

The evidence shows Anthony told her, “I’m low key on the verge” and “When I stab somebody I’m gonna lick their blood off the blade,” prosecutors alleged.

It seems that Anthony was planning something of the sort, and reveling in it. Literal bloodthirstiness. It also seem that this would have been admissible in the trial as evidence for mens rea (intent). Why was it left out? It seems this was the reason:

New information also raises questions about the victim, who was accused of spray-painting racist messages and engaging in threatening conduct. The jury never heard this information about both individuals due to a “gentleman’s agreement” between the prosecution and the defense.

Turley doesn’t dwell on that, but I will. It also seems to me that the alleged racist past of Metcalf would not have been admissible because Anthony had no reason to be aware of it and also it did not involve anything that happened between them the day of the killing. None of the many many witnesses have alleged anything of the sort from Metcalf that day, and that’s all that matters. However, the prosecution probably felt (and correctly so) that making sure that evidence about Metcalf never reached the public was important because it could prejudice the jury, and the prosecution was willing to exclude Anthony’s bloodthirstiness in exchange, considering that they had plenty of evidence to convict him without it.

As for Talarico:

In [Talarico’s] appearance on the New York radio show The Breakfast Club, he discussed how he nodded along as a town hall attendee who called Anthony’s conviction a “tragedy.”

He added: “I’m not an expert on this particular case, but I know that there were no black members of the jury, and to me, that’s, that’s the only evidence you need to, to really prove this system is not working for black Texans.” …

The Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution guarantees trial by an impartial jury, not a particular racial makeup. The Equal Protection Clause also protects after discrimination in jury selection.

Under Batson v. Kentucky, the defense can challenge the use of peremptory challenges by the prosecution on the issue of race. However, the issue is not simply the result of the challenges but the motivation behind such challenges.

In the case of James Kirkland Batson … the Supreme Court and held that, while a defendant is not entitled to have jurors who meet certain racial criteria, the state is not permitted to use its peremptory challenges to automatically exclude potential members of the jury because of their race.

In the Anthony case, challenges to black prospective jurors [were] … because they were educators and the crime occurred on school grounds. The ultimate jury was not “all-White” as commonly claimed. It included Asian, Indian, and Hispanic members.

More on Anthony’s state of mind:

In a 75-page filing, prosecutors also note that Karmelo Anthony had earlier been accused of taking his girlfriend’s phone and, in October 2024, drafted a “to-do” list instructing her how to handle quote “weirdos,” which included the line “say sum slick like my bf kill people.”

Text exchanges further reveal that he admitted on at least two occasions to punching girls in the face.

Prosecutors located 2021 messages between Karmelo Anthony and another student discussing robbing someone for $300.

Other texts show Karmelo Anthony recounting a fight and punching someone “so hard he had to stop fighting.”

In 2023, prosecutors say Karmelo Anthony told a friend he planned to vandalize a house in Austin, Texas, writing, “I just feel like it, I gotta grudge.”

In 2021, Karmelo Anthony informed a friend he had been suspended for three days after fighting, adding, “they said next time I do sum I get recommended for expulsion,” court papers show. …

Prosecutors add that Karmelo Anthony repeatedly threatened to murder his girlfriend in texts, including lines such as “how many bullets u want coming out of ur chest” and “I’m going to get you (expletive).”

More at the link.

It seems as though all of this was left out of the trial, due to the agreement. But Anthony’s lawyers want a new trial, and the prosecution seems ready for it. Of course, a great deal depends on the judge and what he or she would allow in. Conveniently, the judge from the old trial has been replaced:

His new attorneys argued Wednesday that a retrial was warranted in part because state District Judge John Roach, who presided over Anthony’s murder trial in June, enforced overly strict courtroom rules and gave an interview after the murder trial ended. …

A new judge will be assigned for Thursday’s hearing on the retrial request.

The defense argued Roach compromised his impartiality by speaking publicly about the case after the verdict. In one interview, Roach agreed with the assessment that the jury “got it right.”

Anthony’s attorneys also challenged Roach’s decisions to limit cameras and public access during the trial.

It seems they are not alleging actual bias on the part of the original judge, just the appearance of bias. Their only defense, really, is to play the race card. And play it they will.

The post Oh, you mean <i>that</i> Karmelo Anthony appeared first on The New Neo.

From Roger Kimball:

Whatever else can be said about the “Jason Arday Affair,” he was not the victim. Perhaps you can say he was the casualty, first, of his own mendacity and race-fired megalomania and second, of an educational establishment that, marinated in the anti-white, self-flagellating racial animosities of the moment, colluded in the construction of Arday’s fantastical, self-aggrandizing, and ultimately self-destructive fantasies.

And Kurt Schlichter is harsh but correct here:

Of course, the entirely predictable response of the institutional left to [Arday’s] cowardly and apparent self-deletion has been to insist, loudly and with quivering outrage, that his death is our fault. You see, we normal people pointed out that he lied about his background, his achievements, his credentials, and his work. The fact that we did what a functioning institution should’ve done itself outraged his boosters, so these moral illiterates now invert the moral calculus to keep the exposure of academic fraud from happening again. Arday lied pathologically and endlessly, enabled by a ridiculously solicitous academia, then likely killed himself when his lies were exposed. …

But let’s be serious about these condescending leftists. They knew Arday was a phony. They also knew he was useful. His existence supported their narrative, so that irritating objective truth thing could be dispensed with. But he was never their peer; he was their pet.

Yes, they treated him as a pampered and indulged pet, which is both insulting and cruel. In the end, it was very cruel indeed.

But I wonder how much they actually knew, at least at the start when they first hired him. He checked all the DEI boxes and then some, and scholarship isn’t what it used to be (and perhaps never was, in the field of education). I think they wanted so much to believe that they followed a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy and never checked a thing. When the first doubts were raised, they then went into protective mode. At some point they definitely knew the truth, at least most of them did. But denial is a very powerful thing. People can fool themselves, and that makes them even bigger fools.

Here’s a recent tweet from Nathan Cofnas (I featured an interview with him in this post; he’s the professor who said Arday plagiarized his PhD thesis):

There is an anti-Cofnas hate rally in Trafalgar Square with ~15,000 attendees. If I were in London there is a real possibility that I would be murdered.

1000s of academics & journalists knew the truth about Jason Arday for more than a year. Now you know why no one said anything. https://t.co/V8Y0xzrRYG

— Nathan Cofnas (@nathancofnas) August 17, 2026

For those without X, it says:

There is an anti-Cofnas hate rally in Trafalgar Square with ~15,000 attendees. If I were in London there is a real possibility that I would be murdered.

1000s of academics & journalists knew the truth about Jason Arday for more than a year. Now you know why no one said anything.

Cofnas is asserting that tons of people knew for at least a year. That probably is true. I don’t think most of them knew for the first year or two, but that was through willful blindness. I also think Cofnas is correct that many people were afraid to speak up, for fear of getting the sort of vicious reaction he’s getting. Others wouldn’t speak up because they felt it would hurt the DEI cause to which they were wedded. Some didn’t speak up because they felt not only would it be cause for accusations of racism against them, but because they also might lose their positions.

The post Jason Arday, leftist martyr appeared first on The New Neo.

So Cofnas was an imperfect messenger, to say the least. I noticed some discussion of Cofnas in the comments here a few days ago, and I’ve been curious about who Cofnas is and what he’s been saying that’s so controversial. I found this recent interview with him, and this is the most relevant part. You don’t have to go by what other people say that he’s saying. Make your own decisions about his message:

The entire interview can be found here:

And if you want to read more of the details from a source defending free speech, there’s this. An excerpt:

You don’t have to agree with what Cofnas wrote to see that the fact he might be fired for expressing his views violates fundamental principles of academic freedom. If people believe he is wrong, then they are perfectly within their rights to say why and how and to explain the flaws in his arguments. Instead, the principal claim levelled against Cofnas has been that some find his ideas ‘offensive’ and ‘distressing’. That may well be so, but if universities are to successfully fulfil their truth-seeking mission, academics’ right to explore offensive or controversial topics must come before considerations of hurt feelings. This vital principle must always be defended – especially when it comes to hard cases. Nathan Cofnas must be free to speak.

The post Nathan Cofnas and accusations of racism appeared first on The New Neo.

Apparently Arday was a tough grader, too:

A number of Mr Arday’s former students have complained that they received lower grades than expected after “inadequate” supervision by the professor. In one case, a student who asked to change supervisor was accused of being racist.

Separately, Prof Deborah Prentice, the university’s vice-chancellor, is facing demands to refund the tuition fees of students who were taught by Mr Arday after they were “deceived about the nature of their education”.

A mass refund or large-scale retrospective grade changes would be unprecedented in the university’s 800-year history.

I would be nice if they had to give refunds out of their own salaries, but that will never happen. I actually don’t think any refunds will happen, although every student Arday taught should get a pro-rated one. If not, his former students should sue the university for some cause of action involving fraud.

It would be a fitting logical consequence if Cambridge was made to pay, but although that probably will not happen in the monetary sense, I think it’s already happened in terms of the school’s reputation. Also, not only Arday should be losing a job over this. It could start with these two ladies:

Prof Prentice is also facing criticism for failing to grip the crisis engulfing the university, which has damaged its reputation on the international stage. The academics have accused the £507,000-a-year leader of the university of “inaction”, having made no public comments since The Telegraph first reported on the plagiarism row around Mr Arday a fortnight ago. He has now resigned.

It has also emerged that when Cambridge was sent fresh evidence of Mr Arday’s alleged plagiarism last year – having first been alerted to it in 2023 – the “responsible person” allocated to the case was Prof Hilary Cremin, the head of Mr Arday’s faculty who had told him he was “the best in the world” when he was hired.

Were they DEI hires as well? Both are white women; Prentice seems to have a conventional background in social psychology, whereas Cremin seems profoundly granola-esque.

Ann Coulter has pointed out the prevalence of women among Arday’s champions, boosters, and helpers:

All the people promoting Arday seem to be women – agents, editors, co-authors, professors:

Arday’s book editors—Dawn Davis and Kris Doyle

Eve Claxton – co-wrote the book with Arday

Jennifer Gates – Arday’s book agent

Prof. Hilary Cremlin – called Arday’s research, “the best in the world”

So his memoir was “co-written.” Interesting. The book supposedly got an advance of 1.4 million dollars (I wrote “supposedly” because, as far as I can tell, that’s based on Arday’s own report; and we know how reliable that is). Guess what? It’s going to be released anyway; my guess is that it may sell even better because of the notoriety:

Despite allegations against Arday, Simon & Schuster said earlier this week it was planning to go ahead with the publication of his memoir on 11 August in the US and 27 August in the UK. Simon & Schuster US told the Guardian on Thursday night it was “proceeding with the publication of Great and Unfortunate Things by Jason Arday as planned”.

In a previous interview with the Guardian, Arday said Simon & Schuster had offered 1.4m for the book in a “pre-empt”, a type of deal in which a publisher is so keen on a book they put in a high offer to take it off the table before it can go to auction. Arday did not specify whether the 1.4m figure was in pound sterling or US dollars. Simon & Schuster did not respond to a request to comment on the sum. …

One senior publisher said it was an utterly mad number, but that “madness sometimes happens”, so it was conceivable.

It seems that “madness” is happening more and more as time goes on.

The book’s title is Great and Unfortunate Things, which I think is nearly perfect as a description of the entire debacle – not that the book goes into that; I’m going to assume it does not. There’s also this great promotional material:

In comments reported by the Bookseller in April, Kris Doyle, the nonfiction publisher at Simon & Schuster UK, said: “I can promise you’ve never read a story like this – even the viral news headlines don’t do it justice.”

Arday’s lies were entirely egregious, and it doesn’t seem as though the simplest checks were brought to bear. There was totally and complete trust, a willingness to believe that was fervently intense, and a self-congratulatory glow for having done so.

Some of the Cambridge faculty seem to be angry and want an independent investigation:

The signatories want an independent investigation into the circumstances of Arday’s appointment, and any risk assessment made by the university’s management “when crafting a media narrative focusing on his youth, his race, and his transformative potential”.

It also wants details of the university’s handling of allegations of academic misconduct against Arday, including whether the university was involved in efforts to deter journalists from reporting on the allegations.

The university has denied supporting Arday’s efforts to stop publication of critical coverage in the Times Higher magazine last year, or funding his use of lawyers.

The signatories also call for an evaluation of the “enormous damage this episode has done to people of colour within and beyond the Cambridge academic community, and what can be done immediately to reassure them – and the wider public – that anti-racism and academic integrity at Cambridge are both essential and mutually reinforcing.”

It seems to me they want to have their cake and eat it too. Are “anti-racism and academic integrity both essential and mutually reinforcing”? Yes – if and only if the anti-racism is based on equality of opportunity rather than equality of outcome.

Lastly, the more I think about the Arday case – and I’ve though about it a great deal – the more I think he wasn’t a DEI hire because of race alone. That was an element, of course. But I think the even-greater element in his story was his supposed profound autism and recovery to ascend the heights of intellectual thought. The two had a synergistic (shall we say intersectional?) effect, making him the perfect candidate for a university position based on sympathy, virtue-signaling, and wishful thinking.

[ADDENDUM: Some details on the complaints of some of Arday’s students:

Former Cambridge students who contacted The Telegraph complained that Mr Arday gave them minimal supervision, telling some they did not need supervision because they were so outstanding, only for them to get lower grades than predicted.

Interesting.]

The post More Arday fallout: some students want their money back appeared first on The New Neo.

While criticism is an inevitable part of academic life, what I have experienced has gone far beyond scholarly disagreement. The relentless accusations, speculation and public commentary have taken a profound toll on me and on those I love.

I have tried to continue because I believe deeply in the values of higher education, in rigorous scholarship, and in the transformative power of universities. I have tried because of my students, my colleagues and the countless people who have written to tell me that my journey gave them hope.

But there comes a point when the personal cost becomes too great. …

For my own wellbeing, for my family, and for those who have stood by me throughout this difficult period, I have concluded that the only way to bring this chapter to an end is to step away. …

This decision should not be interpreted as a loss of faith in scholarship or in the values that first brought me to Cambridge. Nor should it be mistaken for an acceptance of the narratives that have surrounded me. It is simply the decision of someone who has reached the limits of what any person should reasonably be expected to endure.

It’s really an extraordinary letter, under the circumstances – the circumstances being that Arday was caught in an enormous number of lies, and with having issued other statements about his history that were so suspicious as to probably be lies. And yet he claims both integrity and victimhood, even as he leaves the fray.

The fact that AI tools indicate his resignation letter may have been written or assisted by AI – see this – isn’t of all that much importance to me compared to the rest of his story. Those tolls aren’t always correct, for one thing. If they are correct in this case, it would be one of the least of his deceptions. At any rate, I am assuming the sentiments in the letter are his, no matter how it was written. And as such, it is very typical of the sort of thing we see these days when people are caught in wrongdoing – a doubling-down on their innocence, and a blaming of those who have uncovered what they did.

I say “people” because this phenomenon is hardly limited to one race or another. It seems common everywhere, and it doesn’t matter how much evidence implicates them. With Arday, the evidence finally reached critical mass so that even the leftist Guardian piled on. It has become too embarrassing to continue to defend him.

But, as this article indicates, it is especially embarrassing and actually destructive to the black community in Britain, especially those in academia. The piece is written by one such person, who says:

But the existence of bad-faith agitators can’t excuse us from confronting the rot: the patronising assumption is that standards and truth are optional when evaluating a black professional. This is a slap in the face to the 160 or so black professors in Britain today who earned their chairs through gruelling intellectual labour, original research and the unglamorous grind of academia.

It’s also an insult to the civil-rights titans who forged the path before us. Pioneers like Doreen Lawrence, whose unyielding pursuit of justice transformed British policing; Dr Harold Moody, who founded the League of Coloured Peoples in 1931; Sir Geoff Palmer, Scotland’s first black professor; and visionary educator Dame Jocelyn Barrow. These giants didn’t demand to be recognised based on sentiment. They forced a hostile establishment to respect them because their work was bulletproof.

The ultimate casualty of the Arday scandal isn’t one man’s career, nor the bruised egos of those who rushed to his defence. The tragic reality is that Jason Arday has potentially done far more damage to black Britons than any racist agitator ever could. External critics and bad-faith actors can only ever attack from the outside – their prejudices are expected, discounted and easily identified. But Arday’s unchallenged rise, if the allegations turn out to be true, has handed our harshest detractors the ultimate weapon. It provides a silver bullet to anyone looking to roll back equality legislation or widening-participation schemes, or to question every rightful appointment and call professionals like me ‘diversity hires’. No external opponent could ever inflict as much damage as this “>case potentially has.

But it doesn’t only give “the ultimate weapon” to bigots. It can certainly make even non-bigots doubt the credentials of minorities in academia. This problem was identified quite a while ago in the US by two brilliant black people who had a remarkable lack of advantages in their early lives: Thomas Sowell and Clarence Thomas. Sowell is older, and grew up in a time when there was nothing remotely like DEI to help him along, and his intellectual achievements are so profound that I don’t think they’ve ever been doubted. But black academics today all run the risk of having their accomplishments doubted, because of the Ardays of the world as well as minority professors who seem mediocre rather than duplicitous. And this is true even though there are plenty of non-minority professors who are also mediocre (I’ve had my share).

I went to school a long long time ago, and it was before there was any favor shown to black teachers or professors. Nevertheless, I was taught by a number of black teachers both in high school and college, and it just so happens that they all were highly superior teachers, definitely among the best teachers I ever had. Perhaps that is a reflection of the fact that, back then, the standards for black teachers were higher than for white teachers. That was a discriminatory situation, but it certainly made for some extremely excellent and memorable black teachers (here’s a previous post I wrote about one of them, a junior high school English teacher who was one of my main inspirations for writing).

That state of affairs was discriminatory and wrong. But the supposed corrective – favoring certain minorities – was wrong, too. I submit that there are plenty of very qualified black teachers who would be hired if the standards were merely the same – I knew some of them and know some of them now. Probably, however, some or even many would tend to be – like Sowell and Thomas – more conservative than leftist. And there we have another group which has been discriminated against in the teaching field in recent years: the right.

Arday wasn’t just a DEI hire. He was a DEI hire with a story that was preposterous on its face. And yet the desire to hire him – and broadcast his wonderful story not just of race but of overcoming profound autism – was apparently too great to resist and too good to fact-check. One of his claims is that he didn’t speak until he was eleven or read and write till eighteen, and yet he became a brilliant professor. Just now I did an experiment; I asked Google “is there a documented case of someone autistic who didn’t speak until the age of eleven but later spoke well and fluently?” The answer from Google AI was this:

Yes, Jason Arday, a professor of sociology of education at the University of Cambridge, was diagnosed with autism and global developmental delay as a toddler and did not speak until age eleven. He later acquired fluent speech, learned to read and write at eighteen, and went on to earn a PhD.

But the only authority who has said this about Arday was Arday himself; I have been unable to find a single independent confirmation of it, either from a doctor or a relative of his. There are tons of articles referring to his diagnosis and story of language acquisition, but it appears that the only source is Arday. And although it’s not unusual for children with autism to gain speech much later than average, I can find no other case of a non-verbal autistic child beginning to speak as late as eleven; it tends more often to be some time between four and eight.

To have challenged Arday would not only have raised cries of “racism,” but cries of discrimination against the autistic as well. Some people may have originally kept silent out of fears of accusations of racism being leveled against them, but my guess is that a larger number simply wanted to believe in his fabulous story.

[NOTE: Here’s a summary of some of Arday’s apparent fabrications.]

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