Crime
April 16, 2019 — Paul Mirengoff
Prosecutors in Montgomery County, Maryland — the bastion of leftism and Trump hatred I call home — have dismissed charges against the woman who assaulted Kellyanne Conway in a restaurant where Conway was celebrating her birthday. The woman, Mary Elizabeth Inabinett, age 63, grabbed Conway from behind and shook her. That’s clearly a misdemeanor assault. So why have charges against the assailant been dropped? Prosecutors say that even if they
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April 11, 2019 — Scott Johnson
Prosecutors in the case of former Minneapolis police officer Mohamed Noor set about methodically introducing the evidence in support of their case yesterday. The best narrative of the events in court is the Chao Xiong/Libor Jany Star Tribune article. See also the Jon Collins/Riham Feshir MPR report. I want briefly to summarize what went down and note the highlight of the testimony and other evidence in summary fashion. I continue
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March 27, 2019 — Scott Johnson
NBC imported the idea for the satirical news show That Was The Week That Was from the BBC in 1964. I can’t find a kinescope of the American version on YouTube, but you can come up with an episode of the British original as well as a 2006 BBC documentary about the BBC show. It’s only Wednesday a.m. and yet we already have a week overfilled with news — this
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March 26, 2019 — Paul Mirengoff
It’s often said that the U.S. has two criminal justice systems, one for the well-to-do and one for ordinary folks. This may be true. It certainly seems to be the case if we’re talking about well-to-do celebrities who are black and gay and hate President Trump — especially if they fall out with the law in Chicago. I’m referring, of course, to Jussie Smollett. Today, we learned that the actor
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March 21, 2019 — Paul Mirengoff
Being a prosecutor has long been a steppingstone for lawyers who aspire to higher office. But this might not be true anymore for Democrats. The problem is that Democrats have become ambivalent about law enforcement, and hostile towards the police. This puts Democratic prosecutors in a bind. They risk the early derailment of their career if they are ambivalent about law enforcement and hostile towards the police. Just ask Baltimore’s
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March 18, 2019 — Paul Mirengoff
The college admission fraud revelations are a scandal of some significance. The fraudulent behavior was reprehensible and fairly widespread. There are lessons to be learned. I agree with Heather Mac Donald that the two main ones are that “an elite college degree has taken on wildly inflated importance in American society, and the sports-industrial complex enjoys wildly inflated power within universities.” However, some of the lessons being extracted from the
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March 18, 2019 — Paul Mirengoff
As a federal prosecutor in South Florida, Alex Acosta, now the Secretary of Labor, gave pedophile Jeffrey Epstein the “deal of a lifetime.” A federal investigation had revealed dozens of underage victims of Epstein. Yet, through a plea agreement with then-U.S. Attorney Acosta, Epstein managed to plead to only two state prostitution charges, and only one involving a minor. Consequently, Epstein served just 13 months in state prison. He was
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March 17, 2019 — John Hinderaker
On December 6, the New York Times headlined: “U.S. Murder Rate for 2018 Is on Track for a Big Drop.” The story was based on homicide statistics from 66 large cities. (The official FBI numbers for 2018 won’t come out until September 2019.) The murder rate in the United States in 2018 is on track for the largest one-year drop in five years. *** Murder rose 23 percent nationally between
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March 16, 2019 — Paul Mirengoff
Today’s Yellow Vest protesting in Paris produced violence on a scale not seen since the early days of the movement. AP reports: French yellow vest protesters set life-threatening fires, smashed up luxury stores in Paris and clashed with police Saturday in the 18th straight weekend of demonstrations against President Emmanuel Macron. Large plumes of smoke rose above the rioting on Paris’ landmark Champs-Elysees avenue, and a mother and her child
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March 16, 2019 — John Hinderaker
We haven’t written anything about the Christchurch, New Zealand, massacre. There probably isn’t much to say. Nevertheless, a few observations. 1) Liberals wasted no time trying to make political hay out of the slaughter. The deplorable Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tied the murders to President Trump. It is noteworthy that liberals attribute almost superhuman powers to Donald Trump, attributing responsibility to him for pretty much anything that goes on in the world.
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February 22, 2019 — Paul Mirengoff
Andy Puzder was President Trump’s first choice to be Secretary of Labor. Puzder, an extraordinarily wealthy man, agreed to take the job because he had a mission: to reverse the left-wing policies and practices of the Obama-Tom Perez DOL. When Puzder’s nomination failed, Trump turned to Alex Acosta. Acosta too had a mission, but a very different one: to position himself for a better job, e.g., as a court of
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February 13, 2019 — John Hinderaker
As regular readers know, I am a fan of law enforcement. I think “systemic racism” is bullshit, and police officers’ conduct is admirable, or at least defensible, in an overwhelming majority of cases. See, for example, this post and this one. I am unequivocally on the side of law enforcement. But a few cops, unfortunately, are rotten. We saw that here in Minnesota with Mohammed Noor, who shot an obviously
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February 12, 2019 — John Hinderaker
I wrote here about a doctor who preyed on Indian boys and young men on reservations for decades before finally being brought to justice. One of my closest childhood friends battled the bureaucracy to blow the whistle on the predator, with the result that he–my friend, not the predator–was effectively forced out of the Indian Health Service. That appalling story was reported by the Wall Street Journal and PBS Frontline.
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February 8, 2019 — Paul Mirengoff
In analyzing the allegation that Virginia’s Lieutenant Governor, Justin Fairfax, committed sexual assault in 2004, I’ve argued that, in the absence of corroborating evidence, Fairfax’s denial should be credited, or at least should keep him in office. If a second credible accuser came forward, I added, the matter would have to be viewed differently. Now, a second accuser has emerged. The Daily Beast reports that Meredith Watson claims she was
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February 5, 2019 — Paul Mirengoff
President Trump and Congress have adopted a novel approach to combating the drug epidemic in America: release large-scale drug dealers from prison. Our friend Sen. Tom Cotton is the leading critic of this counter-intuitive, if not insane, approach. Yesterday, Sen. Cotton spoke to the National Narcotics Officers’ Associations Coalition about the ongoing fight against the deadliest drug war in our nation’s history. Below is a slightly shortened version of his
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January 29, 2019 — Scott Johnson
In December I wrote about my friend Harley Feldman’s advocacy of law enforcement use of familial DNA matching in the Power Line post “Harley Feldman’s mission revisited.” Harley’s daughter Allison Feldman was brutally murdered in 2015. Her murderer was apprehended last year through the use of familial DNA long after the case had gone cold. Harley was interviewed by Julie Rose on the January 22 edition of BYU Radio’s Top
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January 17, 2019 — Paul Mirengoff
Sen. Kamala Harris styles herself a “progressive prosecutor.” But Harris wasn’t nearly progressive enough for Lara Bazelon, a law professor and former director of the Loyola Law School Project for the [allegedly] Innocent in Los Angeles. In a New York Times op-ed, Bazelon rips Harris for her “regressive” conduct and positions during her time as a district attorney in San Francisco and then California’s attorney general, According to Bazelon: Time
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