Bill Cosby has been released from prison

The New Neo Posted on by

The ruling freeing Cosby was handed down on Wednesday:

The court said Wednesday that it found an agreement with a previous prosecutor that prevented him from being charged in the case.

The disgraced actor has served more than two years of a three- to 10-year sentence at a state prison near Philadelphia. He had vowed to serve all 10 years rather than acknowledge any remorse over the 2004 encounter with accuser Andrea Constand…

The former “Cosby Show” star was charged in late 2015, when a prosecutor armed with newly unsealed evidence — Cosby’s damaging deposition from her lawsuit — ordered his arrest just days before the 12-year statute of limitations expired.

The trial judge had allowed just one other accuser to testify at Cosby’s first trial, when the jury deadlocked. However, he then allowed five other accusers to testify at the retrial about their experiences with Cosby in the 1980s.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court said that testimony tainted the trial, even though a lower appeals court had found it appropriate to show a signature pattern of drugging and molesting women.

The article is rather vague and sketchy on the legal issues involved. But I have written extensively on the Cosby trial, and I discussed those issues in previous posts. My conclusion at the time was that the trial in which Cosby was convicted was a real miscarriage of justice, whether or not he was guilty.

One of those posts of mine can be found here. It goes into the issues in some detail, so please read it if you’d like to understand why I think Cosby’s trial was unfair and why I support his release.

That post concludes with this paragraph:

Part II is coming soon. It concerns an agreement that may or may not have been made with Cosby in that civil trial, a deal that would have barred his deposition from being used in a criminal trial.

But I never wrote Part II – at least, I can’t locate it right now.

That is one of the main issues on which Cosby’s recent release was based. It’s not a minor thing, either – it’s actually very important. You can read about it at Legal Insurrection. An excerpt:

But Castor’s successors reopened the case and charged Cosby in 2015, just days before the 12-year statute of limitations expired and amid a barrage of new accusations from women across the country.

At the time, Castor objected to the new prosecution, saying he’d struck a deal with Cosby and his lawyers not to prosecute him for Constand’s assault if Cosby agreed to sit for a deposition in a civil case she had filed against him.

Excerpts from that deposition were ultimately used against Cosby at trial.

It all comes down to the 5th Amendment:

“The right against compulsory self-incrimination accompanies a person wherever he goes, no matter the legal proceeding in which he participates, unless and until “the potential exposure to criminal punishment no longer exists.” Taylor, 230 A.3d at 1065. It is indisputable that, in Constand’s civil case, Cosby was entitled to invoke the Fifth Amendment. No court could have forced Cosby to testify in a deposition or at a trial so long as the potential for criminal charges remained. Here, however, when called for deposition, Cosby no longer faced criminal charges. When compelled to testify, Cosby no longer had a right to invoke his right to remain silent.

“These legal commandments compel only one conclusion. Cosby did not invoke the Fifth Amendment before he incriminated himself because he was operating under the reasonable belief that D.A. Castor’s decision not to prosecute him meant that “the potential exposure to criminal punishment no longer exist[ed].” Id. at 1065. Cosby could not invoke that which he no longer possessed, given the Commonwealth’s assurances that he faced no risk of prosecution. Not only did D.A. Castor’s unconditional decision not to prosecute Cosby strip Cosby of a fundamental constitutional right, but, because he was forced to testify, Cosby provided Constand’s civil attorneys with evidence of Cosby’s past use of drugs to facilitate his sexual exploits. Undoubtedly, this information hindered Cosby’s ability to defend against the civil action, and led to a settlement for a significant amount of money. We are left with no doubt that Cosby relied to his detriment upon the district attorney’s decision not to prosecute him.”

Here’s another old post I wrote about the miscarriages of justice in the Cosby trial. Also see this post of mine.

The bottom line is that the release was the right decision, and it shouldn’t have taken this long to come to it. Why did the prosecution get away with their misconduct in the first place? For one thing, the conviction occurred at the height of MeToo. For another, Cosby had enraged the left by saying that black people should take more responsibility for their problems, and so corners were cut in order to convict him.

Sgt. Daniel Perry charged with murder for shooting an Austin protestor

The New Neo Posted on by

Here are some of the facts of the case:

Sgt. Daniel Perry, a soldier in the US Army, has been charged with murder after killing a BLM protester last summer. This happened during the months of violence and destruction that occurred last year following George Floyd’s death. Cities across the nation were inundated with demonstrations, many of which devolved into rioting.

But Perry didn’t just suddenly shoot a random protestor. He was being mobbed and potentially attacked:

Perry was making extra money by driving for a ride-sharing service at the time. After dropping off a fare, he turned onto a street that was being blocked by what was ostensibly a protest. When he attempted to make his way through, people surrounded his car, beating on it. That’s when Garrett Foster approached him with an AK-variant rifle, pointed it at him, and demanded the window be rolled down. At that point, Perry feared for his life and discharged his firearm in what he felt was self-defense.

There is video that shows the scene, confirming that the car was, in fact, mobbed.

So it doesn’t seem as though there was any way for Perry to retreat from the threat without mowing down some other protestors with his car. This is from Perry’s attorney:

“Sgt. Perry again simply asks that anybody who might want to engage in a hindsight review of this incident picture themselves trapped in a car as a masked stranger raises an AK-47 in their direction and reflect upon what they might have done,” Perry’s lawyer, Clint Broden, said in a statement provided to the Austin American-Statesman.

This is Texas, too – but it’s Austin, Texas, which is a special case.

Nikole Hannah-Jones: the squeaky wheel gets academic tenure

The New Neo Posted on by

Nikole Hannah-Jones, the disseminator of the wretchedly mendacious and destructive “1619 Project,” is a journalist. Her 1619 Project, which re-cast the history of the US as slavery-focused and slavery-driven from earliest colonial days, was excoriated by historians but lauded by fellow journalists patting her – and themselves – on the back. She received a Pulitzer Prize in 2020 for the Project, as well as this:

New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute named the 1619 Project as one of the 10 greatest works of journalism in the decade from 2010 to 2019.

Previously (2017), she had also received a MacArthur “genius” award.

And if you define journalism as the ability to influence the public with propaganda, I guess she richly deserves all those honors. And isn’t that what journalism is these days?

It’s not surprising that Hannah-Jones was further rewarded for these efforts with an offer to teach at the university level:

When [the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill] first hired Hannah-Jones to join the faculty, she and her supporters were angry that it did not offer her tenure. Some faculty members threatened to leave the school. Last week, Hannah-Jones even refused to start her job if she did not get it.

So, there was a rather brief moment of the university attempting to apply its usual academic standards to at least the tenure portion of the hire, but rules and standards are just for the little people, not for race-baiting “journalist” stars with a string of honors attached to their names. Hannah-Jones and her supporters are well aware of this, as they are also aware that UNC Chapel Hill is unlikely to tell them all to go pound sand and be hired elsewhere if they don’t like it.

So, quite predictably:

Now she has gotten what she wanted. Tom Foreman Jr. writes for the Associated Press:

“Trustees at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill approved tenure Wednesday for Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, capping weeks of tension that began when a board member halted the process over questions about her teaching credentials.

“The board voted 9-4 to accept the tenure application at a special meeting that included a closed-door session that had sparked a protest by supporters of Hannah-Jones. At one point, a student said, she was manhandled by a campus police officer trying to get her out of the ballroom where the meeting was held.

“’Today we took another important step in creating an even better university,’ trustee Gene Davis said after the vote was announced. ‘We welcome Nikole Hannah-Jones back to Chapel Hill.’

“Davis said that in granting tenure to Hannah-Jones the board was reaffirming its commitment to the university’s highest values of ‘academic freedom, open scholarly inquiry, commitment to diversity of all types, including viewpoint diversity, and promotion of constructive disagreement and civil public discourse.’”

Translation: it doesn’t matter if Hannah-Jones’ work is a load of horse pucky; she’s famous, she’s black, she plays the race card, she’s got a bunch of awards, and in particular she has supporters whose pressure we don’t have the guts or even the general inclination to resist. Please, please don’t call us nasty names and we’ll do whatever you say.

Two SCOTUS decisions favoring the right

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) The first:

The Supreme Court just delivered a big win to the Republicans in an Arizona voting rights case.

The 6-3 decision was written by Justice Samuel Alito. Justices John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett joined in the majority with Justices Kagan, Sotomayor, and Breyer in the dissent, which was written by Kagan.

So, the nominally conservative wing of the Court held together on this one.

What it boils down to is the Court upheld the state’s ability to prohibit third-party collection of mail-in ballots, otherwise known as “ballot harvesting” and said that the state can also disallow votes cast in the wrong precinct.

That’s a huge blow against the Democrats because of how they have utilized ballot harvesting. Many believe that they are able to use it, perhaps questionably, to change the nature of elections. Republicans have been fighting against it for some time to make elections more secure.

Democrats had tried to argue that the restrictions disallowing votes in the wrong precinct were somehow racially discriminatory. The court rejected that argument and it’s a good thing. The very argument is itself racist — to suggest that somehow people of color don’t know what precinct to vote in.

Democrats will be mounting similar challenges to all the voting laws passed by states in the wake of the 2020 election, and will be calling them racist. Hopefully, this is a harbinger of how SCOTUS will rule on such matters.

(2) Here’s a second ruling:

In an Opinion issued today, the Supreme Court has stricken a California policy requiring disclosure of large non-profit donor information to state regulators. The case establishes the important principle that if you want to make, ahem, large donations to organizations like the Legal Insurrection Foundation, your identify would not need to be disclosed on a routine basis to state regulators…

This confidentiality of donor information is of great importance to Legal Insurrection Foundation and other right-of-center non-profits given the long and vicious history or supporters of conservative causes (whether non-profits or candidates) being harassed and targeted for cancelation. But some state charity regulators, including California, require that the entire Form 990, including Schedule B, be filed with the state when renewing state charitable registration.

The Court split 6-3 in much the same manner as in the other opinion.

Kamala Harris is getting some bad press from the MSM. Why?

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s been obvious for a long, long time that Kamala Harris leaves something to be desired in the “likeability” department, lacks political skills despite the heights to which she’s risen, and isn’t even especially bright or articulate – unlike her similarly “unlikeable” Democratic female presidential-hopeful predecessor Hillary Clinton, who was intelligent and could express herself fairly well. It’s hard to see what political attributes Harris actually has besides her sex (female) and racial makeup (mixed white, East Indian, and black).

Until now, that’s been enough to get her the vice presidency. She was chosen for those two latter identities by a party that values identity politics above nearly all else.

I noticed Harris’ unlikeability and political flat-footedness long ago (as I described in this recent post). It didn’t take incredible perceptiveness to do so, either; it was obvious. And yet she’s second in line to the presidency of a man of 78 with signs of fragile health, and until quite recently the MSM has lauded her.

So why are we now being treated to articles such as this in The Atlantic and this in Politico? The first one is at least somewhat critical of Kamala, and the second one is quite critical of her staff.

Does the following except from that Atlantic piece contain at least a hint about what one of the reasons might be for the sudden appearance of criticism of Harris in the press? Has she alienated the MSM by the way she treats them?:

The vice president and her team tend to dismiss reporters. Trying to get her to take a few questions after events is treated as an act of impish aggression. And Harris herself tracks political players and reporters whom she thinks don’t fully understand her or appreciate her life experience…[S]she continues to retreat behind talking points and platitudes in public, and declines many interview requests and opportunities to speak for herself (including for this article). At times, she comes off as so uninteresting that television producers have started to wonder whether spending thousands of dollars to send people on trips with her is worthwhile, given how little usable material they get out of it.

The left isn’t too happy with her, which is probably another clue (if the following is even true):

Now, four months into the administration, many progressives like Jayapal and Barber are surprised at how satisfied they are with Biden’s presidency so far. But some of those same activists and elected officials still find ways to gripe about Harris. Everything she doesn’t do is a strike against her. Everything she does gets attributed to Biden.

And then there’s this:

Harris has been an elected official for 18 years straight, but she has only a few senior aides on staff who have worked for her for more than a few months. Turf battles have been a recurring feature of Harris offices over the years, but her newest circle believes it is finally getting her on track after years of past staffers not serving her well.

Wow, only a few have stuck it out more than a few months. And the Politico, article, which focuses on her staff, adds:

The handling of the border visit was the latest chaotic moment for a staff that’s quickly become mired in them. Harris’ team is experiencing low morale, porous lines of communication and diminished trust among aides and senior officials. Much of the frustration internally is directed at Tina Flournoy, Harris’ chief of staff, a veteran of Democratic politics who began working for her earlier this year.

In interviews, 22 current and former vice presidential aides, administration officials and associates of Harris and Biden described a tense and at times dour office atmosphere. Aides and allies said Flournoy, in an apparent effort to protect Harris, has instead created an insular environment where ideas are ignored or met with harsh dismissals and decisions are dragged out. Often, they said, she refuses to take responsibility for delicate issues and blames staffers for the negative results that ensue.

While much of the ire is aimed at Harris’ chief, two administration officials said the VP herself also bears responsibility for the way her office is run. “It all starts at the top,” said one of the administration officials, who like others requested anonymity to be able to speak candidly about a sensitive matter.

You get the picture.

So the question remains: why is this being reported? And why now? I don’t know the answer (one of Rumsfeld’s “known unknowns“). But I’ll offer a guess: Harris has made some enemy or enemies in the White House. Is it Dr. Jill? And/or, is Biden or the Biden forces concerned that, if Harris keeps getting good press, there will be a growing movement to get rid of Biden for health reasons and replace him with Harris? Weakening her in the eyes of the public could help counter such a scenario.

If you have further ideas about what’s happening and why, go for it in the comments.

The story of California so far

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a summary by Michael Barone. The concluding paragraph:

California’s divergence from the rest of the nation politically, on top of its continued domestic out-migration and, over the last decade, slower than average population growth, make it clear that it no longer is a harbinger of the nation’s future. It has gone off on its own, for better or worse, and most of the nation has charted its own course, a few closely resembling California’s, many quite different. That may seem odd, and perhaps off-putting, for those who grew up in the era when California seemed to be the model toward which the nation was aspiring. But a longer perspective, taking account of California from the time Richard Henry Dana recorded the aboriginal version of smog in the Los Angeles Basin and the American flag was first raised over Monterey and San Francisco Bays, suggests that the natural state of things is for California, off on one coast of America, with its unusual climate and atypical economy, to be distinctive, even idiosyncratic—adding its own savory and sweet flavor to America’s multivarious stew. The influx of Americans in the great domestic migration to California in the quarter century from 1940 to 1965 made California a plausible model for the rest of the United States, but the great immigrant migration in the quarter century from 1982 to 2007 has made it, once again, a commonwealth of its own.

I’d caution Barone not to be too sure of that. If the Biden administration and the left (redundant, I know) is successful in its policy towards illegal immigration, California may once again point the way to America’s future.

RIP Donald Rumsfeld

The New Neo Posted on by

Rumsfeld died on June 29 at the age of 88.

It seems like a long time ago that he was a mover and shaker on the world stage.

A portrait of Rumsfeld by someone who knew him well:

That’s the way he saw the world—he and Joyce blessed by providence and a wonderful country. From his days as a young aviator in the United States Navy, he spent the majority of his adult life serving that country. When Rumsfeld left government in 2006, he took all the weight of the Bush administration’s failure in Iraq onto his shoulders and bore it into exile. Though he offered some defense of his actions, he also protected colleagues by refusing to reveal in his books some of the more damning information he knew that could have justified some of his decisions. He refused many opportunities to make a McNamara-esque apology for Iraq that would make him look good or to fault President Bush or others for the decisions he took part in. Instead he lived his life—writing bestselling memoirs, spending time out West, helping others where he could, trying to make the world a better place without bitterness or rancor.

And that’s what most every obituary or essay on Rumsfeld you will read in the wake of his death will get wrong. They’ll tell you the story of the ferocious, take-no-prisoners Washington operator whose headstrong tactics got us into an unwinnable war. The great irony is that in the end, this supposedly ruthless political animal didn’t play the game that many others played against him.

Here’s one of his most memorable sayings:

I was surprised that this statement was widely mocked at the time. My guess is that it was mocked by people who think they know what they don’t know.

Open thread 7/1/21

The New Neo Posted on by

Music videos from the 1980s are often so bizarre that a literal video treatment only makes them slightly funnier:

Here’s the original video. I put it up for the spectacular tenor voice of Russell Hitchcock, which cannot be imitated:

Jim Steinman wrote the song, by the way (see this).

Can trust in our election integrity be undermined any further? New York shows how it’s done.

The New Neo Posted on by

After many months of shrieking that challenges to election integrity by anyone even vaguely on the right are Big Lies by definition, the left has a bit of egg on its face.

In New York’s recent mayoral primary the Democratic Party had some candidates who were more to the left as well as those who were not as far to the left and maybe even a bit on the right. One of the latter, Eric Adams, did quite well in what is a complex ranked-choice system that won’t declare a winner till a few weeks have passed.

Adams is a Democrat (he’s also black), but he’s a relative law-and-order guy, which puts him somewhat on the right. Suddenly, over 100,000 votes came out of nowhere and narrowed his strong lead considerably. That’s when Adams questioned the validity of what had happened, and the left exploded with anger and derision:

“The vote total just released by the Board of Elections is 100,000-plus more than the total announced on election night, raising serious questions,” Adams said in a statement. “We have asked the Board of Elections to explain such a massive increase and other irregularities before we comment on the Ranked Choice Voting projection.”

The BOE eventually responded by admitting they made an oopsie that didn’t get caught until Adams raised the issue.

“The Board of Elections conducts rigorous and mandatory pre-qualification testing for every election. It has been determined that ballot images used for testing were not cleared from the Election Management System (EMS),” they explained, noting that the test results included “approximately 135,000 additional records.”…

And therein lies a big part of the problem. Noting discrepancies and demanding clarifications and corrections if necessary in vote totals – even raising legal challenges if you’re concerned enough – is not a “threat to democracy,” no matter how Democrats and the media try to spin it. Nor is objecting to the certification of election results, which is what Sens. Cruz, Hawley, and numerous other Republican members of Congress did on January 6th, something Democratic members of Congress also did as recently as 2001, 2005, and 2017 – all times when Republicans won their respective presidential elections.

Election integrity can be compromised either intentionally or accidentally. But this example illustrates how easily it can be compromised. This time the problem was obvious enough – and the Adams camp alert enough – that it was caught in time. But there’s no reason to imagine that’s ordinarily the case.

The charges against the Trump organization

The New Neo Posted on by

There’s been a lot of legal news lately, much too much for me to cover it all. But most of it seems to point to the continuing and deepening politicization of our legal system and the use of lawfare by the left against its political opponents.

For example, the story I reported on four days ago – that the charges New York state is preparing against Trump aren’t going to be what the left has long hoped would drive a stake through his heart – appears to be going forward as previously stated:

They investigated the Trump organization for three years and the best they could come up with is unpaid taxes on fringe benefits? This is the kind of thing you normally handle as a civil matter. In fact, as my prior write-up noted, the Times literally could not find a previous example of a prosecutor filing criminal charges in a similar case. That’s how much of a politicized witch-hunt this entire thing is.

These marginal charges come days after it was leaked that Trump himself would not be charged for anything, and you know that wasn’t from lack of trying. Per RedState’s report on that, there isn’t some other shoe waiting to drop either. This is literally all there is.

Given that, the disappointment on the left is palpable. Here a few comments from the Journal’s breaking post…”Evading taxes on fringe benefits and perks doesn’t sound like the hammer I was hoping for. Surely there’s more.”

Hope springs eternal.

I conclude that Trump just may be the cleanest real estate developer in the world. But the legal cost of working with and/or for him has been made crystal clear.

All the news that’s depressing enough to print: on disbarments

The New Neo Posted on by

I have to gird my loins (metaphorically speaking) to look at the news these days. It’s hard to know what to say about so much of it, other than that it feels like a looking-glass world in which the Red Queen is in charge and “the best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.”

Some of the depressing news is quiet and probably has no significance for most people. For example, if you were to conduct a poll of the American public and ask them who Kevin Clinesmith is, how many would be able to identify him as the FBI lawyer who falsified an email as part of the Russiagate web spun to snare Trump? I would say that 10% would probably be a high estimate.

So I think that this recent story about Clinesmith’s law license wouldn’t have much meaning to most people:

Former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith and his legal team have agreed to a one-year law license suspension in Washington, D.C., after the official was found guilty in August 2020 of illegally modifying a statement relating to the Russiagate investigation and scandal, according to new bar records.

A District of Columbia Board on Professional Responsibility committee will hear the suspension proposal on July 19 and decide whether to approve or reject Clinesmith’s bar sanction.

If the panel proceeds with the suspension, Clinesmith will be prohibited from practicing law again until August 2021, one year from the date when he reported his guilty plea to the D.C. disciplinary counsel’s office.

Clinesmith pleaded guilty in court to the charge that he had doctored an email that was presented to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) in 2017 concerning whether or not former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page had been a “source” for the CIA. He was then sentenced to 12 months probation and 400 hours of community service in January 2021.

In other words, not even much of a wrist slap – more like a love tap. The message? If you’re on the side of the left, you can get away with things like that with hardly any consequences at all.

Meanwhile, Rudy Giuliani – who was on the other side – has had his law license suspended:

Rudolph W. Giuliani … had his law license suspended after a New York court ruled on Thursday that he made “demonstrably false and misleading statements” while fighting the results of the 2020 election on behalf of Donald J. Trump.

Alan Dershowitz has something to say on the matter:

Rudy Giuliani has been suspended from the practice of law without a hearing, based largely on First Amendment-protected statements he made outside of any court of law. A panel of the Appellate Division of New York suspended the former mayor of New York and former United States Attorney last week without giving him an opportunity to dispute the charges against him at an evidentiary hearing. Moreover, he was suspended largely on the basis of statements he made not in court but on television…

Although Giuliani is now entitled to a post-suspension hearing, it seems clear that the judges already have made up their minds, saying that the result will “likely” be “substantial permanent sanctions” — which means disbarment…

…[T]here are no compelling arguments why anyone — lawyer or non-lawyer — should be denied the full protection of the First Amendment when he or she participates in the marketplace of ideas on television, podcasts or other media, even when representing a client.

Any statements made in such a public context can be rebutted in the marketplace of ideas, and so the public needs no special protection from statements made by lawyers…

The rules under which Giuliani has been suspended are so vague that they cannot possibly satisfy the standards of due process, especially where public speech is concerned and clarity is required before it is suppressed.

The court cited a rule allowing disbarment for conduct, including speech that “adversely reflects on the lawyer’s fitness as a lawyer.” It is difficult to imagine a more subjective standard subject to selective application. The panel also cited a rule that called for disbarment for knowingly making “false statements of fact or law to a third person.”

As usual, Dershowitz is both clear and correct. And then he adds this, which expresses my sentiments exactly:

If these rules were applied across the board fairly, and equitably, thousands of lawyers would be disbarred every year.

If we’re going to apply such a standard – which I think is absurd – then I nominate Ben Crump to be first in the disbarment line. He’s lied over and over and over about nearly every one of race-centered police violence cases in which he’s been involved, and his lies have done remarkable damage.

And no, I won’t sit on a hot stove till Crump’s disbarment occurs.