Category: reason

Facts Still Matter, But They Don’t Change Many Voters’ Minds

Good news: Facts still matter. Or at least they do in political science experiments.

In the experiments, participants looked at various claims floating around the political world, including the assertions that solar power employs more people than does the oil industry (asserted by Hillary Clinton), that immigrants commit crimes disproportionately to native-borns (declared by Donald Trump), and that more violence is being committed against the police (alleged by Ted Cruz). As it happens, all of those claims are false, and the experiments showed that people’s views tend to become more accurate after reading information correcting the politicians’ specious claims. Hooray, right?

Not so fast. Yet more research finds that facts don’t seem to matter much when it comes to people’s attitudes about the politicians they favor, at least in the context of a hotly contested presidential campaign.

In a forthcoming paper, University of Michigan political scientist Brendan Nyhan and his colleagues sought to answer a key question: When presented with a realistic fact-check of a false statement made by a candidate, will people not only revise their factual beliefs but also alter their attitudes toward the candidate?

The researchers looked at the effects of journalistic fact-checks of two claims made by Donald Trump, one during his convention speech and the other during the first general election debate. The surveys they drew on were conducted during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. This means that neither the researchers collecting the data nor the survey participants knew at the time who the winner of the 2016 campaign would be.

In his convention speech, Trump claimed America was under assault from a dangerous and rising tide of violent crime. As evidence, an annotated speech released by the campaign cites (among other things) a January 2016 Washington Post story that reported a 17 percent increase in homicides in the country’s 50 largest cities. Yet when Trump gave his speech, the most recent FBI data (from 2014) said the national murder rate was at a record low of 4.5 per 100,000 people. It subsequently ticked up in 2016 to what it was in 2008 (5.4 per 100,000), then dropped back in 2018 to where it was in 2009 (5.0 per 100,000).

The fact-check used in the study states, “According to FBI’s Bureau of Justice Statistics, the violent crime rate has fallen dramatically and consistently over time. According to their estimates, the homicide rate in the U.S. in 2015 was half that recorded in 1991.”

The second Trump claim involved job losses in Michigan and Ohio during the first presidential debate. The candidate said: “Thousands of jobs [are] leaving Michigan, leaving Ohio. They’re all leaving.” That turns out to have been old news. In 2016, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that in the past year Ohio had gained 78,300 jobs and Michigan had gained 75,800; their respective unemployment rates stood at 4.7 and 4.9 percent. (The national unemployment rate in August 2016 was 4.9 percent.)

The fact-check for this claims states: “In fact, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, unemployment has fallen in both Michigan and Ohio. Both states each saw 70,000 new jobs over the last year.”

In the first survey, more than 4,000 participants read a story citing Trump’s claim about a rising crime wave. Some read an uncorrected story, another group read a story with the correction included, and another group read the correction along with a disparagement of the accuracy of FBI statistics from Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, who claimed the FBI statistics are suspect because the agency had failed to charge Clinton over the private email server scandal.

“Though Trump’s supporters were more likely than Clinton’s to believe that crime had increased or not declined significantly over the previous ten years, corrective information reduced misperceptions among supporters of both candidates,” report the researchers. By how much? After reading the story with the correction, the perceived level of crime dropped on a five-point scale from an average of 4.17 to 3.31 for Trump voters and from an average of 3.3 to 2.7 for Clinton voters. The views of both Trump and Clinton voters about crime rates became more accurate when presented with factual information.

Among people who read the story that included Manafort’s comments, the perceived level of crime dropped from 4.17 to only 3.62 among Trump supporters, from 3.3 to 2.9 for Clinton voters. This suggests that whataboutism can work.

But none of this changed how people viewed the candidate. The participants were asked to rate him on a five-point favorability/unfavorability scale before and after reading the fact-check. The researchers found “no significant effects of the fact-check on favorability toward Trump regardless of respondents’ candidate preference.” They conclude: “Fact-checks can still spur people to hold more factually accurate beliefs. However, these changes in belief accuracy do not seem to lead to corresponding changes in attitudes toward the candidate being fact-checked.”

And the second claim? Around 1,500 participants sorted into Trump and Clinton supporters were asked in advance to watch the first presidential debate and to respond to a survey that closed at noon the day after. The participants were also surveyed five days later. The researchers again found that “fact-checking reduced misperceptions but had no discernible effects on participants’ candidate preferences, including supporters of the candidate who had been fact-checked.”

The authors acknowledge some limitations on their research:

First, we did not test a fact-check of a Clinton misstatement and cannot evaluate how her supporters would have reacted. Second, Trump was infamous for extreme exaggerations and misstatements, which may have made some respondents receptive to fact-checking but also prepared his supporters to rationalize their continued support for him.

In 2016, journalist Salena Zito famously summed up reactions to Trump’s constant stream of hyperbole and lies: “The press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.” These studies seemy to bolster that idea. As the researchers write, “Trump supporters took fact-checks literally, but not seriously enough to affect how they felt toward their preferred candidate.”

This is disturbing. If politicians suffer essentially no diminution of support from being wrong and/or lying, they’ll have no reason to hew to the truth. And the proliferation of lies debases public discourse and inflames partisan passions.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2R4GXoN
via IFTTT

Atlanta Disbands Its Narcotics Unit To Focus on Violent Crimes Instead

In what we can only hope is a shift away from overly oppressive policing against low-level drug use and sales, the Atlanta Police Department is disbanding its special Narcotics Unit and shifting cops elsewhere to focus on fighting violent crime. Atlanta has seen a drop in its overall crime rate over the past two years, but homicides and aggravated assaults have both increased.

When reporter Mark Winne of WSB-TV 2 asked for confirmation, the department sent him a prepared statement confirming the news:

We know that the illegal narcotics trade is often at the center of criminal activity fueled by guns and gangs. The Department is de-centralizing its Narcotics Unit in recognition that the violence that surrounds this trade should be the focus of the entire Department, not just one team. We have had tremendous success at targeting the sale of illegal narcotics by tracking violent criminals and getting illegally-possessed guns off the streets.

Violent crime and gang activity must be the Department’s primary focus and where we will have a greater impact on the crimes affecting those most often victimized in our communities.

WSB-TV’s coverage has a slight air of disappointment, as if the station is unhappy that it won’t be able to put those photogenic bust-down-the-door raids on the evening news anymore. Winne makes a vaguely negative reference to the idea of making this change in the midst of the opioid overdose crisis.

But if the Atlanta Police Department is realizing that “zero tolerance” drug enforcement is not the solution to gang violence, that’s good news. There are indeed nasty and violent dealers out there, but decades of the drug war have taught us that a good chunk of the drug trade involves low-level dealing, often by people who are themselves addicted; harsh enforcement of drug laws has led to large numbers of nonviolent drug offenders serving long prison terms. Focusing on actual violence is surely preferable to chasing after the low-hanging fruit of undercover deals, or of raids based on info from sketchy informants with their own agendas.

It’s not clear how extensive this change might be. Atlanta has another special drug unit that participates in the federal Drug Enforcement Administration’s High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas (HIDTA) program, which helps fund multi-agency drug task forces. The statement from the Atlanta Police Department didn’t mention whether it would stay involved with the HIDTA program, and a call from Reason to the department’s public affairs office was not returned.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/36KvUb8
via IFTTT

Facts Still Matter, But They Don’t Change Many Voters’ Minds

Good news: Facts still matter. Or at least they do in political science experiments.

In the experiments, participants looked at various claims floating around the political world, including the assertions that solar power employs more people than does the oil industry (asserted by Hillary Clinton), that immigrants commit crimes disproportionately to native-borns (declared by Donald Trump), and that more violence is being committed against the police (alleged by Ted Cruz). As it happens, all of those claims are false, and the experiments showed that people’s views tend to become more accurate after reading information correcting the politicians’ specious claims. Hooray, right?

Not so fast. Yet more research finds that facts don’t seem to matter much when it comes to people’s attitudes about the politicians they favor, at least in the context of a hotly contested presidential campaign.

In a forthcoming paper, University of Michigan political scientist Brendan Nyhan and his colleagues sought to answer a key question: When presented with a realistic fact-check of a false statement made by a candidate, will people not only revise their factual beliefs but also alter their attitudes toward the candidate?

The researchers looked at the effects of journalistic fact-checks of two claims made by Donald Trump, one during his convention speech and the other during the first general election debate. The surveys they drew on were conducted during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. This means that neither the researchers collecting the data nor the survey participants knew at the time who the winner of the 2016 campaign would be.

In his convention speech, Trump claimed America was under assault from a dangerous and rising tide of violent crime. As evidence, an annotated speech released by the campaign cites (among other things) a January 2016 Washington Post story that reported a 17 percent increase in homicides in the country’s 50 largest cities. Yet when Trump gave his speech, the most recent FBI data (from 2014) said the national murder rate was at a record low of 4.5 per 100,000 people. It subsequently ticked up in 2016 to what it was in 2008 (5.4 per 100,000), then dropped back in 2018 to where it was in 2009 (5.0 per 100,000).

The fact-check used in the study states, “According to FBI’s Bureau of Justice Statistics, the violent crime rate has fallen dramatically and consistently over time. According to their estimates, the homicide rate in the U.S. in 2015 was half that recorded in 1991.”

The second Trump claim involved job losses in Michigan and Ohio during the first presidential debate. The candidate said: “Thousands of jobs [are] leaving Michigan, leaving Ohio. They’re all leaving.” That turns out to have been old news. In 2016, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that in the past year Ohio had gained 78,300 jobs and Michigan had gained 75,800; their respective unemployment rates stood at 4.7 and 4.9 percent. (The national unemployment rate in August 2016 was 4.9 percent.)

The fact-check for this claims states: “In fact, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, unemployment has fallen in both Michigan and Ohio. Both states each saw 70,000 new jobs over the last year.”

In the first survey, more than 4,000 participants read a story citing Trump’s claim about a rising crime wave. Some read an uncorrected story, another group read a story with the correction included, and another group read the correction along with a disparagement of the accuracy of FBI statistics from Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, who claimed the FBI statistics are suspect because the agency had failed to charge Clinton over the private email server scandal.

“Though Trump’s supporters were more likely than Clinton’s to believe that crime had increased or not declined significantly over the previous ten years, corrective information reduced misperceptions among supporters of both candidates,” report the researchers. By how much? After reading the story with the correction, the perceived level of crime dropped on a five-point scale from an average of 4.17 to 3.31 for Trump voters and from an average of 3.3 to 2.7 for Clinton voters. The views of both Trump and Clinton voters about crime rates became more accurate when presented with factual information.

Among people who read the story that included Manafort’s comments, the perceived level of crime dropped from 4.17 to only 3.62 among Trump supporters, from 3.3 to 2.9 for Clinton voters. This suggests that whataboutism can work.

But none of this changed how people viewed the candidate. The participants were asked to rate him on a five-point favorability/unfavorability scale before and after reading the fact-check. The researchers found “no significant effects of the fact-check on favorability toward Trump regardless of respondents’ candidate preference.” They conclude: “Fact-checks can still spur people to hold more factually accurate beliefs. However, these changes in belief accuracy do not seem to lead to corresponding changes in attitudes toward the candidate being fact-checked.”

And the second claim? Around 1,500 participants sorted into Trump and Clinton supporters were asked in advance to watch the first presidential debate and to respond to a survey that closed at noon the day after. The participants were also surveyed five days later. The researchers again found that “fact-checking reduced misperceptions but had no discernible effects on participants’ candidate preferences, including supporters of the candidate who had been fact-checked.”

The authors acknowledge some limitations on their research:

First, we did not test a fact-check of a Clinton misstatement and cannot evaluate how her supporters would have reacted. Second, Trump was infamous for extreme exaggerations and misstatements, which may have made some respondents receptive to fact-checking but also prepared his supporters to rationalize their continued support for him.

In 2016, journalist Salena Zito famously summed up reactions to Trump’s constant stream of hyperbole and lies: “The press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.” These studies seemy to bolster that idea. As the researchers write, “Trump supporters took fact-checks literally, but not seriously enough to affect how they felt toward their preferred candidate.”

This is disturbing. If politicians suffer essentially no diminution of support from being wrong and/or lying, they’ll have no reason to hew to the truth. And the proliferation of lies debases public discourse and inflames partisan passions.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2R4GXoN
via IFTTT

Short Circuit: A Roundup of Recent Federal Court Decisions

Please enjoy the latest edition of Short Circuit, a weekly feature from the Institute for Justice.

State restrictions on selling homemade food items often serve no public health and safety interest and prevent people—disproportionately women from poor and rural areas—from earning an honest living. Read more about North Dakota’s recent crackdown on food freedom in USA Today from IJ staffers Jennifer McDonald and Daryl James.

  • In 2014, a commercial flight en route to Beijing disappears over the southern Indian Ocean. All 239 passengers and crew, including three Americans, presumed dead. An investigation yields little insight as to the cause. And, says the D.C. Circuit, the district court did not err in holding that claims against Boeing and Malaysia Airlines should be brought in Malaysian courts.
  • In 2002, Congress amended the Animal Welfare Act to make clear that it applied to birds not bred for research, thereby requiring the USDA to promulgate regulations on the humane care and handling of such birds. However, to this day the USDA has issued no regulations. A violation of the Administrative Procedure Act? The case should not have been dismissed, says the D.C. Circuit.
  • After 30 years in prison for burglary and rape, North Carolina man discovers that prosecutors at his 1976 trial withheld (among other evidence) forensic results that did not link him to the crimes and a sample of the rapist’s semen. Fourth Circuit: The state courts reasonably determined that none of the withheld evidence would have had an impact on the man’s trial, so his convictions stand. Dissent: That is emphatically wrong. “[T]here is zero doubt in my mind that the cumulative effect of the suppressed evidence in this case” might well have had an impact on the trial.
  • Fourth Circuit: Virginia environmental officials must reconsider their decision to grant a permit to a pipeline company to build a compressor station (which would burn gas 24/7/365 days a year) in a historic community established by freed slaves after the Civil War. (Per Georgetown’s Civil Rights Clinic, it’s one of the few remaining Freedmen communities in the country.) Officials failed to properly consider how emissions from the station would impact the community.
  • After the University of Texas and San Antonio officials decide to remove Confederate monuments, the Sons of Confederate Veterans sue to keep the monuments in place. The claim? Removing the monuments violates our First Amendment rights because we like what the monuments stand for. Fifth Circuit: No standing. The First Amendment lets you sue to prevent suppression of your own speech, not any speech you happen to agree with.
  • Allegation: El Paso, Tex. woman is arrested on an outstanding warrant less than three days after undergoing leg surgery and while still confined to a wheelchair. Despite her physical therapist’s conclusion that she is not a candidate for crutches, jail officials take her wheelchair, require her to use crutches, and force her to carry her own food while using crutches, leading to a fall that aggravates her injuries and requires another surgery. Fifth Circuit: And that may well violate the Americans with Disabilities Act, though it’s not egregious enough to violate the Eighth Amendment.
  • For unknown reasons, unknown individuals jump out of a car and shoot at a Saginaw, Mich. restaurant. Can city officials shut down the restaurant because it was the target of a crime by unknown third parties? Two-thirds of this Sixth Circuit panel thinks maybe not.
  • Saginaw County, Mich. ordinance forbids all but one ambulance company from operating. “That’s unconstitutional!” says a second company, which starts providing services. Rather than enforce the ordinance, county officials wait six years to file a federal lawsuit asking the courts to declare that the monopoly isn’t unconstitutional after all. Which, says the Sixth Circuit ever so gently, is not a thing the government can do.
  • In a bizarre bid to defeat a client’s child porn prosecution, expert witness creates more child porn. (He manipulates photos of minors to show them having sex.) Sixth Circuit: This plan was malicious as a matter of law. So bankruptcy does not eliminate the minors’ $300k judgment against the expert.
  • Distasteful though it may be, holds the Sixth Circuit, a high school football coach does not violate Title IX by calling a player a “pussy.” (Although, suggests the dissent, he may commit intentional infliction of emotion distress.)
  • Tennessee state representative sexually harasses at least 22 women, is expelled from the legislature. His lifetime health benefits are terminated. Can he sue the officials who decided to terminate his benefits? His suit is not barred by sovereign immunity, says the Sixth Circuit.
  • Man spends three decades in prison for a double murder he did not commit after Peoria, Ill. police (allegedly) fabricated evidence and forced his confession when he was just 14 years old. He’s paroled in 2006, his sentence is commuted in 2011, and he’s pardoned in 2015. He sues the city within two years of the pardon. City: Too late! You should’ve sued once you were paroled. Seventh Circuit (en banc, over a dissent): Heck no. Central to his claims is that his conviction was invalid, so his conviction had to be invalidated before he could sue over them. And that didn’t happen until he was pardoned, so his case is timely.
  • Missouri, like many states, has a “three-tier system” of alcohol regulation that prohibits alcohol producers and distributors from having any financial interest in an alcohol retailer. Missouri officials interpret the law to prohibit alcohol producers and distributors from retail advertising. A First Amendment violation? Officials: No way! The statute doesn’t say anything about speech; it merely bans advertising. Eighth Circuit: … Oh, that’s it? We thought you were gonna keep going. No, that’s definitely unconstitutional.
  • Allegation: After meeting with his lawyer, Florida inmate is escorted back to his cell by a prison guard. The guard orders him to sit. Then stand. Then sit. Then stand. When the inmate asks what’s up, the guard pepper sprays him, slams him on the ground, pulls down his pants, and forces a finger up his anus. District Court: I don’t believe you. Summary judgment for the defendant. Eleventh Circuit: That’s the jury’s call, not yours. Also, we repudiate an earlier decision that suggested that maybe a little bit of sexual assault in prison is okay.
  • Then-U.S. congresswoman raises $800k for her charity, disburses only $1.2k for charitable purposes, spending the vast majority on personal expenses. At trial, the district court dismisses a juror who indicated during deliberations that he’d had a divine revelation that the congresswoman was not guilty on all counts. She’s convicted. Eleventh Circuit (over a dissent): The judge did not err by dismissing the juror. Dissent: The majority misunderstands “the vernacular of a substantial segment of our citizenry,” and its decision will permit eligible jurors who believe God speaks to them to be stricken from jury pools.
  • And in en banc news: Texas high court denies review of rape conviction, 50-year sentence but inexplicably fails to tell petitioner for eight months, causing him to miss deadline to seek review in federal court. He files his habeas petition eight days after learning of the denial. District court: Tough. You should’ve pursued your rights more diligently. Fifth Circuit: No, the court error gave rise to more time to pursue his deadline. And there’ll be no en banc rehearing, despite the protestations of Judge Smith who finds the state’s refusal to seek rehearing “astonishing” and the panel decision full of “obvious flaw[s]” (such as referring to the state as “the government,” a term “uniformly reserved” for the feds).
  • And in task force news: A Third Circuit task force studying the problem of mistaken eyewitnesses and wrongful convictions has issued a report recommending a commendable series of best practices for lineups, interviews, and more. (H/t to the inestimable CA3blog.)

Under the borough’s rental inspection ordinance, Pottstown, Penn. officials claim the authority to enter homes to inspect them for housing code violations without individualized probable cause and without consent from tenants or landlords. Which does not sit well with Dottie Rivera, who does not want officials poking through her perfectly well-maintained home, which she rents. So in 2017, Dottie, her husband, and their landlord joined forces with IJ to challenge the ordinance under the state constitution, which provides stronger protections against suspicionless searches and seizures than the U.S. Constitution. And this week, a state appeals court ruled, among other things, that residents need not submit to an inspection before they can challenge the ordinance. Click here to learn more.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/39ZfbCX
via IFTTT

Brazilian Judge Blocks Gay Jesus Movie, Supreme Court Reverses

Reuters (Fabio Texeira) reported:

A Brazilian judge ordered the streaming entertainment service Netflix to stop showing a controversial movie depicting Jesus as a gay man, according to court documents made public on Wednesday.

In the ruling against Netflix, the state court judge said: “The right to freedom of expression … is not absolute.”

The First Temptation of Christ, created by Brazilian YouTube comedy group Porta dos Fundos, portrays Jesus bringing home a presumed boyfriend to meet his family.

The show, which started playing on Netflix last month as a Christmas special, has caused an uproar among Brazil’s conservative Christians.

Agence France-Presse has an update:

The head of the Supreme Federal Court, Judge Antonio Dias Toffoli, sided with the streaming platform’s appeal against a temporary injunction banning the movie….

“One cannot suppose that a humorous satire has the ability to weaken the values of the Christian faith, whose existence is traced back more than two thousand years, and which is the belief of the majority of Brazlian citizens,” the judge said.

Unfortunately,

On Christmas Eve, the production company’s headquarters in Rio de Janeiro were attacked with Molotov cocktails. No one was hurt. Police said several men with their faces covered took part in the assault.

Police have identified a man named Eduardo Fauzi as a suspect after analyzing security camera footage. He fled to Russia.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/37UQ568
via IFTTT

Adaptation of Stephen King’s The Outsider Swings Wildly in Tones

The Outsider. HBO. Sunday, January 12, 9 p.m.

If you have recurring nightmares of a world populated by drooling zombie clones of Stephen King, a word of caution: They may not be dreams at all.  By my admittedly addled count, King published 20 books during the past decade, while a dozen were adapted into movies and nine more into TV shows. And that’s not even counting King comic books, dolls, or the horde of mutant  Children Of The Corn spinoffs. (Still the nation weeps in rage at the false promise of 1992’s Children Of The Corn II: The Final Sacrifice.) And,  oh my God, is there more to come.

To say that Hollywood’s King-mania has been profligate and promiscuous is certainly not to say it’s been all bad.  Hulu’s miniseries adaptation 11.22.63, King’s tale of time travelers on Lee Harvey Oswald’s trail, made up in sheer, story-telling power, whatever it lacked in political acumen. AT&T’s Audience Channel turned King’s Mr. Mercedes trilogy into a riveting, post-modernist take on pulp detective novels. On the other hand, Spike’s remake of The Mist was so lobotomizingly awful that it killed off the entire network.

The Outsider, the latest float in the King parade, lies somewhere in the middle of this spectrum. Based on King’s 2018 novel, it’s a sort of kissing cousin to Mr. Mercedes (even borrowing a crossover character) in its blend of the horror and noir detective motifs. It’s a serious piece of work, with talented writers like Richard Price and Dennis Lehane doing the adaptation. But the result is curiously—and annoyingly—uneven, as if different production crews took over on alternate days undoing one another’s work.

The Outsider is yet another exploration of King’s favorite theme, the murder of children as an expression of the dissolution of the American family—in this case literally. Each killing of a child triggers an explosion of revenge murders and grief-stricken suicides that obliterates an entire family unit. It starts with the savage assault on a little Oklahoma boy, whose sodomized body, covered with human bite marks, is found in the woods. (King’s book was set in Oklahoma, but the show changes the scene to Georgia for the purely artistic reason that Georgia put up taxpayer subsidies for the production. The result is a murder mystery set in the heart of rural Dixie in which not a single character speaks with a Southern accent, typical of the schizoid cracks running through The Outsider.)

An obvious suspect emerges at once: Little League coach Terry Maitland (Jason Bateman, who also worked as a producer and director on the show). Maitland was seen offering the boy a ride, then emerging from the woods covered in blood. Eyewitnesses, security tapes and fingerprints weave a tapestry of evidence against Maitland so tight that local police chief Ralph Anderson (Ben Mendelsohn, Bloodline), now certain that his own baseball-playing son was molested, orders the coach arrested on the field during a championship game, raising local bloodlust to explosive levels.

But as the investigation continues, new witnesses and forensic evidence emerge to prove with equal certainty that Maitland was at a distant teachers’ conference when the murder occurred and couldn’t possibly have committed it. Anderson, baffled at seemingly irrefutable proof that the killer was two places at once, finds himself in an uneasy coalition with Maitland’s defense attorney Howie Gold (Bill Camp, The Night Of)  and wife Glory (Julianne Nicholson, Masters Of Sex) to find a rational explanation for a thoroughly irrational dilemma.

The first two episodes of The Outsider (there are 10 in all) closely follow King’s novel and are a model of what has made King so successful: His ability to keep one foot  grounded in recognizable reality while moving the other into parts unknown: vampires, werewolves, ESP, killer cars, gypsy-cursed pies. Richard Price’s long familiarity with the urban cop genre in works like Clockers and The Wire pays dividends even in a small-town-Georgia setting as the investigation unfolds.

Even so, those episodes are marred by cinephile gimcrackery gone amok. Bateman is quite capable in his acting as a regular guy who finds himself unaccountably accused of monstrous crimes. But as a director, he seems to have taken the concept of noir far too literally. Nearly every conversation seems to take place in a room lit like an unfinished basement, sometimes to the point that you can only guess about what’s happening and to whom.

And in the next two episodes, when Price’s writing departs from King’s story and Bateman’s direction departs from the land of the sane, The Outsider goes badly off-track. As if the literal darkness of his photography isn’t confusing enough, Bateman creates a metaphoric gloom by intercutting scenes too quickly and letting their audio bleed into one another, escalating the degree of incomprehensibility from “what the hell?” to “what the fuck?” Even worse, Price needlessly messes with the most interesting character in King’s novel, the Mr. Mercedes crossover Holly Gibney. In the book, Gibney is a kind of accidental detective, a relative of a mass-murder victim whose obsessive-compulsive disorder and mild autism give her unexpected powers of concentration, and whose stuttering diffidence consistently leads her opponents to underestimate her. (She’s played to perfection by Justine Lupe in the AT&T Mr. Mercedes shows.) She operates a one-person office in a small town in Ohio that specializes in tracing credit-card skippers, and she enters The Outsider story only because Anderson needs somebody local to track down a minor loose end in Dayton.

But in The Outsider, Gibney has mutated into a Chicago investigative prodigy whose near-superpowers make her come across as an arrogant bully rather than a broken waif. And there’s simply no plausible explanation why the best detective in Chicago would agree to take on a minor angle of a case from Middle-of-Nowhere, Georgia. Predictably, the change of persona sets off ripples in the plot, which jarringly turns from rural gothic to urban grit in the blink of an eye. Cynthia Erivo, who plays Gibney here, is a talented actress (as she proved in the title role of Harriet Tubman), but her role in The Outsider is badly misconceived.

By the fourth episode (all that I watched), the wild ricocheting styles and showoff directorial stunts have badly distracted from both The Outsider‘s storytelling and its intellectual point, which is that the world’s pedicide folktales, from Hansel and Gretel to Slenderman,  may reflect something deeper and more disturbing about human cultures than we want to contemplate. Whether the show can get back on track in its remaining episodes is a dubious proposition. If not, it certainly will have wasted excellent performances by Mendelsohn, who resonates with guilt and shame over the police chief’s botched investigation, and Nicholson, who glows white-hot with rage over what happened to her husband. And its epitaph is likely to be found in another of King’s works, the collection of novellas Different Seasons. A novelist character in that book mourns a failed short story: “It’s not a very good story—its author was too busy listening to other voices to listen as closely as he should have to the one coming from inside.”

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/37WLvUS
via IFTTT

Short Circuit: A Roundup of Recent Federal Court Decisions

Please enjoy the latest edition of Short Circuit, a weekly feature from the Institute for Justice.

State restrictions on selling homemade food items often serve no public health and safety interest and prevent people—disproportionately women from poor and rural areas—from earning an honest living. Read more about North Dakota’s recent crackdown on food freedom in USA Today from IJ staffers Jennifer McDonald and Daryl James.

  • In 2014, a commercial flight en route to Beijing disappears over the southern Indian Ocean. All 239 passengers and crew, including three Americans, presumed dead. An investigation yields little insight as to the cause. And, says the D.C. Circuit, the district court did not err in holding that claims against Boeing and Malaysia Airlines should be brought in Malaysian courts.
  • In 2002, Congress amended the Animal Welfare Act to make clear that it applied to birds not bred for research, thereby requiring the USDA to promulgate regulations on the humane care and handling of such birds. However, to this day the USDA has issued no regulations. A violation of the Administrative Procedure Act? The case should not have been dismissed, says the D.C. Circuit.
  • After 30 years in prison for burglary and rape, North Carolina man discovers that prosecutors at his 1976 trial withheld (among other evidence) forensic results that did not link him to the crimes and a sample of the rapist’s semen. Fourth Circuit: The state courts reasonably determined that none of the withheld evidence would have had an impact on the man’s trial, so his convictions stand. Dissent: That is emphatically wrong. “[T]here is zero doubt in my mind that the cumulative effect of the suppressed evidence in this case” might well have had an impact on the trial.
  • Fourth Circuit: Virginia environmental officials must reconsider their decision to grant a permit to a pipeline company to build a compressor station (which would burn gas 24/7/365 days a year) in a historic community established by freed slaves after the Civil War. (Per Georgetown’s Civil Rights Clinic, it’s one of the few remaining Freedmen communities in the country.) Officials failed to properly consider how emissions from the station would impact the community.
  • After the University of Texas and San Antonio officials decide to remove Confederate monuments, the Sons of Confederate Veterans sue to keep the monuments in place. The claim? Removing the monuments violates our First Amendment rights because we like what the monuments stand for. Fifth Circuit: No standing. The First Amendment lets you sue to prevent suppression of your own speech, not any speech you happen to agree with.
  • Allegation: El Paso, Tex. woman is arrested on an outstanding warrant less than three days after undergoing leg surgery and while still confined to a wheelchair. Despite her physical therapist’s conclusion that she is not a candidate for crutches, jail officials take her wheelchair, require her to use crutches, and force her to carry her own food while using crutches, leading to a fall that aggravates her injuries and requires another surgery. Fifth Circuit: And that may well violate the Americans with Disabilities Act, though it’s not egregious enough to violate the Eighth Amendment.
  • For unknown reasons, unknown individuals jump out of a car and shoot at a Saginaw, Mich. restaurant. Can city officials shut down the restaurant because it was the target of a crime by unknown third parties? Two-thirds of this Sixth Circuit panel thinks maybe not.
  • Saginaw County, Mich. ordinance forbids all but one ambulance company from operating. “That’s unconstitutional!” says a second company, which starts providing services. Rather than enforce the ordinance, county officials wait six years to file a federal lawsuit asking the courts to declare that the monopoly isn’t unconstitutional after all. Which, says the Sixth Circuit ever so gently, is not a thing the government can do.
  • In a bizarre bid to defeat a client’s child porn prosecution, expert witness creates more child porn. (He manipulates photos of minors to show them having sex.) Sixth Circuit: This plan was malicious as a matter of law. So bankruptcy does not eliminate the minors’ $300k judgment against the expert.
  • Distasteful though it may be, holds the Sixth Circuit, a high school football coach does not violate Title IX by calling a player a “pussy.” (Although, suggests the dissent, he may commit intentional infliction of emotion distress.)
  • Tennessee state representative sexually harasses at least 22 women, is expelled from the legislature. His lifetime health benefits are terminated. Can he sue the officials who decided to terminate his benefits? His suit is not barred by sovereign immunity, says the Sixth Circuit.
  • Man spends three decades in prison for a double murder he did not commit after Peoria, Ill. police (allegedly) fabricated evidence and forced his confession when he was just 14 years old. He’s paroled in 2006, his sentence is commuted in 2011, and he’s pardoned in 2015. He sues the city within two years of the pardon. City: Too late! You should’ve sued once you were paroled. Seventh Circuit (en banc, over a dissent): Heck no. Central to his claims is that his conviction was invalid, so his conviction had to be invalidated before he could sue over them. And that didn’t happen until he was pardoned, so his case is timely.
  • Missouri, like many states, has a “three-tier system” of alcohol regulation that prohibits alcohol producers and distributors from having any financial interest in an alcohol retailer. Missouri officials interpret the law to prohibit alcohol producers and distributors from retail advertising. A First Amendment violation? Officials: No way! The statute doesn’t say anything about speech; it merely bans advertising. Eighth Circuit: … Oh, that’s it? We thought you were gonna keep going. No, that’s definitely unconstitutional.
  • Allegation: After meeting with his lawyer, Florida inmate is escorted back to his cell by a prison guard. The guard orders him to sit. Then stand. Then sit. Then stand. When the inmate asks what’s up, the guard pepper sprays him, slams him on the ground, pulls down his pants, and forces a finger up his anus. District Court: I don’t believe you. Summary judgment for the defendant. Eleventh Circuit: That’s the jury’s call, not yours. Also, we repudiate an earlier decision that suggested that maybe a little bit of sexual assault in prison is okay.
  • Then-U.S. congresswoman raises $800k for her charity, disburses only $1.2k for charitable purposes, spending the vast majority on personal expenses. At trial, the district court dismisses a juror who indicated during deliberations that he’d had a divine revelation that the congresswoman was not guilty on all counts. She’s convicted. Eleventh Circuit (over a dissent): The judge did not err by dismissing the juror. Dissent: The majority misunderstands “the vernacular of a substantial segment of our citizenry,” and its decision will permit eligible jurors who believe God speaks to them to be stricken from jury pools.
  • And in en banc news: Texas high court denies review of rape conviction, 50-year sentence but inexplicably fails to tell petitioner for eight months, causing him to miss deadline to seek review in federal court. He files his habeas petition eight days after learning of the denial. District court: Tough. You should’ve pursued your rights more diligently. Fifth Circuit: No, the court error gave rise to more time to pursue his deadline. And there’ll be no en banc rehearing, despite the protestations of Judge Smith who finds the state’s refusal to seek rehearing “astonishing” and the panel decision full of “obvious flaw[s]” (such as referring to the state as “the government,” a term “uniformly reserved” for the feds).
  • And in task force news: A Third Circuit task force studying the problem of mistaken eyewitnesses and wrongful convictions has issued a report recommending a commendable series of best practices for lineups, interviews, and more. (H/t to the inestimable CA3blog.)

Under the borough’s rental inspection ordinance, Pottstown, Penn. officials claim the authority to enter homes to inspect them for housing code violations without individualized probable cause and without consent from tenants or landlords. Which does not sit well with Dottie Rivera, who does not want officials poking through her perfectly well-maintained home, which she rents. So in 2017, Dottie, her husband, and their landlord joined forces with IJ to challenge the ordinance under the state constitution, which provides stronger protections against suspicionless searches and seizures than the U.S. Constitution. And this week, a state appeals court ruled, among other things, that residents need not submit to an inspection before they can challenge the ordinance. Click here to learn more.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/39ZfbCX
via IFTTT

Brazilian Judge Blocks Gay Jesus Movie, Supreme Court Reverses

Reuters (Fabio Texeira) reported:

A Brazilian judge ordered the streaming entertainment service Netflix to stop showing a controversial movie depicting Jesus as a gay man, according to court documents made public on Wednesday.

In the ruling against Netflix, the state court judge said: “The right to freedom of expression … is not absolute.”

The First Temptation of Christ, created by Brazilian YouTube comedy group Porta dos Fundos, portrays Jesus bringing home a presumed boyfriend to meet his family.

The show, which started playing on Netflix last month as a Christmas special, has caused an uproar among Brazil’s conservative Christians.

Agence France-Presse has an update:

The head of the Supreme Federal Court, Judge Antonio Dias Toffoli, sided with the streaming platform’s appeal against a temporary injunction banning the movie….

“One cannot suppose that a humorous satire has the ability to weaken the values of the Christian faith, whose existence is traced back more than two thousand years, and which is the belief of the majority of Brazlian citizens,” the judge said.

Unfortunately,

On Christmas Eve, the production company’s headquarters in Rio de Janeiro were attacked with Molotov cocktails. No one was hurt. Police said several men with their faces covered took part in the assault.

Police have identified a man named Eduardo Fauzi as a suspect after analyzing security camera footage. He fled to Russia.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/37UQ568
via IFTTT

Adaptation of Stephen King’s The Outsider Swings Wildly in Tones

The Outsider. HBO. Sunday, January 12, 9 p.m.

If you have recurring nightmares of a world populated by drooling zombie clones of Stephen King, a word of caution: They may not be dreams at all.  By my admittedly addled count, King published 20 books during the past decade, while a dozen were adapted into movies and nine more into TV shows. And that’s not even counting King comic books, dolls, or the horde of mutant  Children Of The Corn spinoffs. (Still the nation weeps in rage at the false promise of 1992’s Children Of The Corn II: The Final Sacrifice.) And,  oh my God, is there more to come.

To say that Hollywood’s King-mania has been profligate and promiscuous is certainly not to say it’s been all bad.  Hulu’s miniseries adaptation 11.22.63, King’s tale of time travelers on Lee Harvey Oswald’s trail, made up in sheer, story-telling power, whatever it lacked in political acumen. AT&T’s Audience Channel turned King’s Mr. Mercedes trilogy into a riveting, post-modernist take on pulp detective novels. On the other hand, Spike’s remake of The Mist was so lobotomizingly awful that it killed off the entire network.

The Outsider, the latest float in the King parade, lies somewhere in the middle of this spectrum. Based on King’s 2018 novel, it’s a sort of kissing cousin to Mr. Mercedes (even borrowing a crossover character) in its blend of the horror and noir detective motifs. It’s a serious piece of work, with talented writers like Richard Price and Dennis Lehane doing the adaptation. But the result is curiously—and annoyingly—uneven, as if different production crews took over on alternate days undoing one another’s work.

The Outsider is yet another exploration of King’s favorite theme, the murder of children as an expression of the dissolution of the American family—in this case literally. Each killing of a child triggers an explosion of revenge murders and grief-stricken suicides that obliterates an entire family unit. It starts with the savage assault on a little Oklahoma boy, whose sodomized body, covered with human bite marks, is found in the woods. (King’s book was set in Oklahoma, but the show changes the scene to Georgia for the purely artistic reason that Georgia put up taxpayer subsidies for the production. The result is a murder mystery set in the heart of rural Dixie in which not a single character speaks with a Southern accent, typical of the schizoid cracks running through The Outsider.)

An obvious suspect emerges at once: Little League coach Terry Maitland (Jason Bateman, who also worked as a producer and director on the show). Maitland was seen offering the boy a ride, then emerging from the woods covered in blood. Eyewitnesses, security tapes and fingerprints weave a tapestry of evidence against Maitland so tight that local police chief Ralph Anderson (Ben Mendelsohn, Bloodline), now certain that his own baseball-playing son was molested, orders the coach arrested on the field during a championship game, raising local bloodlust to explosive levels.

But as the investigation continues, new witnesses and forensic evidence emerge to prove with equal certainty that Maitland was at a distant teachers’ conference when the murder occurred and couldn’t possibly have committed it. Anderson, baffled at seemingly irrefutable proof that the killer was two places at once, finds himself in an uneasy coalition with Maitland’s defense attorney Howie Gold (Bill Camp, The Night Of)  and wife Glory (Julianne Nicholson, Masters Of Sex) to find a rational explanation for a thoroughly irrational dilemma.

The first two episodes of The Outsider (there are 10 in all) closely follow King’s novel and are a model of what has made King so successful: His ability to keep one foot  grounded in recognizable reality while moving the other into parts unknown: vampires, werewolves, ESP, killer cars, gypsy-cursed pies. Richard Price’s long familiarity with the urban cop genre in works like Clockers and The Wire pays dividends even in a small-town-Georgia setting as the investigation unfolds.

Even so, those episodes are marred by cinephile gimcrackery gone amok. Bateman is quite capable in his acting as a regular guy who finds himself unaccountably accused of monstrous crimes. But as a director, he seems to have taken the concept of noir far too literally. Nearly every conversation seems to take place in a room lit like an unfinished basement, sometimes to the point that you can only guess about what’s happening and to whom.

And in the next two episodes, when Price’s writing departs from King’s story and Bateman’s direction departs from the land of the sane, The Outsider goes badly off-track. As if the literal darkness of his photography isn’t confusing enough, Bateman creates a metaphoric gloom by intercutting scenes too quickly and letting their audio bleed into one another, escalating the degree of incomprehensibility from “what the hell?” to “what the fuck?” Even worse, Price needlessly messes with the most interesting character in King’s novel, the Mr. Mercedes crossover Holly Gibney. In the book, Gibney is a kind of accidental detective, a relative of a mass-murder victim whose obsessive-compulsive disorder and mild autism give her unexpected powers of concentration, and whose stuttering diffidence consistently leads her opponents to underestimate her. (She’s played to perfection by Justine Lupe in the AT&T Mr. Mercedes shows.) She operates a one-person office in a small town in Ohio that specializes in tracing credit-card skippers, and she enters The Outsider story only because Anderson needs somebody local to track down a minor loose end in Dayton.

But in The Outsider, Gibney has mutated into a Chicago investigative prodigy whose near-superpowers make her come across as an arrogant bully rather than a broken waif. And there’s simply no plausible explanation why the best detective in Chicago would agree to take on a minor angle of a case from Middle-of-Nowhere, Georgia. Predictably, the change of persona sets off ripples in the plot, which jarringly turns from rural gothic to urban grit in the blink of an eye. Cynthia Erivo, who plays Gibney here, is a talented actress (as she proved in the title role of Harriet Tubman), but her role in The Outsider is badly misconceived.

By the fourth episode (all that I watched), the wild ricocheting styles and showoff directorial stunts have badly distracted from both The Outsider‘s storytelling and its intellectual point, which is that the world’s pedicide folktales, from Hansel and Gretel to Slenderman,  may reflect something deeper and more disturbing about human cultures than we want to contemplate. Whether the show can get back on track in its remaining episodes is a dubious proposition. If not, it certainly will have wasted excellent performances by Mendelsohn, who resonates with guilt and shame over the police chief’s botched investigation, and Nicholson, who glows white-hot with rage over what happened to her husband. And its epitaph is likely to be found in another of King’s works, the collection of novellas Different Seasons. A novelist character in that book mourns a failed short story: “It’s not a very good story—its author was too busy listening to other voices to listen as closely as he should have to the one coming from inside.”

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/37WLvUS
via IFTTT

Connecticut Racial Ridicule Prosecution: One Student Agrees to Probation, the Other’s Case Is Still Pending

According to the Hartford Courant (David Owens),

One of two UConn students charged with yelling racial slurs [in particular, “nigger” -EV] outside a university apartment complex was granted a special form of probation Tuesday that could result in the charge against him being dismissed.

Jarred Karal, 21, of Plainville, will be on probation for six months and must complete 20 hours of community service and undergo diversity and bias training. Rockville Superior Court Judge James Sicilian approved Karal’s application for accelerated rehabilitation, finding that his offense was not of a serious nature and that it was unlikely Karal would offend again.

As I argued in this New York Daily News article, the statute is unconstitutional, and on its face not even applicable to the speech here; but I can understand why a defendant might prefer to make the case go away quickly rather than fighting. The other student, though, seems not to have made any such deal; I hope to know more soon about whether he’ll be challenging the constitutionality of the prosecution.

Here, in the meantime, is a quick summary of the problems with the statute:

[1.] Connecticut General Statutes § 53-37 (which, oddly enough, is listed in some Connecticut government documents under the “affirmative action” category, as in this Affirmative Action Policy Statement and this Affirmative Action—Laws List) provides:

Any person who, by his advertisement, ridicules or holds up to contempt any person or class of persons, on account of the creed, religion, color, denomination, nationality or race of such person or class of persons, shall be fined not more than fifty dollars or imprisoned not more than thirty days or both.

And, as best we can tell, prosecutors have averaged a bit over one conviction per year under the statute from 2000 to 2016, and in 2017 they had four prosecutions—two that were dropped, and two that were still pending as of the end of 2017. (Because records of prosecutions that don’t lead to convictions are purged fairly promptly, I can’t get information on unsuccessful prosecutions in past years.)

[2.] The statute, though, is pretty obviously unconstitutional, because it suppresses speech based on its content (and viewpoint), and because there’s no First Amendment exception for speech that insults based on race or religion. Beauharnais v. Illinois (1952) did uphold a “group libel” statute that banned derogatory statements about racial and religious groups, but that decision is widely and rightly regarded as obsolete, given the last 50 years of First Amendment jurisprudence. The only part of Beauharnais that likely survives is its general conclusion that there is a libel exception to the First Amendment; since then, that exception has been dramatically narrowed. As the Court has repeatedly held, racist and religiously bigoted speech is as constitutionally protected as speech that expresses other ideas.

But it turns out that Connecticut prosecutors aren’t enforcing the law as it is written. I have found no prosecutions for advertisements that ridicule people based on race or religion—not for commercial advertisements (which in any event would be pretty bad for business these days) and not for political advertisements.

Rather, based on the 13 police reports that I’ve read, prosecutors seem to be enforcing the statute to punish people for race- or religion-based “fighting words”: generally speaking, face-to-face personal insults that include racial or religious slurs. (The facts of the cases are a mix: Three involved racial insults of police officers, one case with anti-white insults and another with anti-black insults. The other ten mostly involved insults of black ordinary citizens, though one was of a Hispanic, one of someone perceived to be Muslim, and one of an ambiguously labeled “nigga cracker.” The defendants were mostly whites, but two were likely Hispanic and one was black.)

Now that might be less troubling than trying to punish, say, political advertisements. But is itself unconstitutional, for three related reasons.

[A.] First, such insults may be offensive and empty of serious arguments, but they aren’t advertisements, under any definition of the word “advertisement.” The convicted defendants are not guilty of the crime they were charged with, given the plain text of the statute. And there are no appellate decisions reinterpreting the text of the statute (as there are for some statutes), so the defendants weren’t guilty under either the law as written or the law as authoritatively construed. Indeed, the one nonprecedential decision I could find, National Socialist White People’s Party v. Southern New England Telephone Co. (D. Mass. 1975) (3-judge court), and the one decision cited in that case, State v. Jensen (Conn. Cir. Ct. 1969), read the statute—consistently with its text—as genuinely limited to “advertisements.”

Yet a 2008 report from the Connecticut legislature’s Office of Legislative Research and a 2014 East Haven Police Department manual describe the statute simply as covering “ridicul[ing] any person or class of people on account of creed, religion, color, denomination, nationality, or race,” likewise dropping the “advertisement” requirement. The prosecutors in the cases cited above for which I’ve seen arrest reports (more than half of the list) likewise seem to be ignoring that requirement.

[B.] Even if prosecutors are reading the state as only banning race- or religion-based fighting words—contrary to its text—there’s no reason to think that all the judges are reading it that way, or will read it that way. Some guilty verdicts might thus easily be entered without the judges finding beyond a reasonable doubt that the speech constituted fighting words. Indeed, this very case involves speech that is unlikely to be viewed as “fighting words,” since that narrow First Amendment exception is limited to “personally abusive epithets” that are “directed to the person of the hearer”; these words weren’t directed to any particular person.

[C.] But even if the statute were somehow read as banning race- or religion-based fighting words—contrary to its text—there’s a Supreme Court decision squarely holding such statutes unconstitutional: R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul (1992). R.A.V. struck down a ban on those fighting words that “arouse[] anger, alarm or resentment in others” based on, among other things, race or religion; this statute seems to be read as a ban on those fighting words that “ridicule[] or hold[] up to contempt any person or class of persons” based on, race, religion, or nationality. The words of R.A.V. apply just as well to this statute: Even assuming that “all of the expression reached by the [statute] is proscribable under the ‘fighting words’ doctrine,” the statute “is facially unconstitutional in that it prohibits otherwise permitted speech solely on the basis of the subjects the speech addresses.”

The 1999 “Hate Speech on the Internet” report from the Office of Legislative Research has noted that the statute’s “constitutionality is questionable under the U.S. Supreme Court’s rulings.” But a 2008 report written by the same lawyer doesn’t include that note.

[3.] One might ask: Why hadn’t defense lawyers objected to this earlier, or appealed the cases? (I could find no appellate decisions that mention the statute.)

I suspect some defense lawyers are objecting, and some (perhaps many) prosecutors aren’t bringing charges because they realize the statute is unconstitutional. Other defense lawyers might agree to charges under the statute as part of a plea bargain that they think is better for their clients, if in the absence of these charges the clients might have faced more serious ones (or more serious sentences on other accompanying charges). Still others might not recognize the First Amendment problems. I’ve tried digging a bit, and ran into lawyers’ normal tendency to keep quiet.

[4.] A few historical points. First, the statute was enacted in 1917, and the act that passed it was titled “An Act concerning Discrimination at Places of Public Accommodation.” It really was aimed at “advertisement[s]” for businesses, not at (say) KKK rallies or the like.

Second, the reference to “creed” seems to refer to religion, perhaps to make clear (together with “denomination”) that all religious discrimination was covered (e.g., so people can’t say “I’m not contemptuous of Catholics, but only of people who believe in adherence to the Pope”), or perhaps because of the lawyer’s habit of using multiple synonyms for the same thing (which might itself stem from a desire to avoid any inadvertent gaps in coverage).

Certainly the cases from the early and mid-1900s confirm that, and modern cases also take the same view: “The word ‘creed’ has a definite meaning, as a formal declaration of religious belief.” Hammer v. State (Ind. 1909). “In my opinion the [New York] Legislature in [a law banning housing discrimination] used the words ‘creed’ and ‘religion’ interchangeably. I cannot subscribe to the argument of the petitioners that the word ‘creed’ may refer to any beliefs, be they economic, political or sociological. Viewed in the light of the history of the statute, the evils it intended to cure, and its constitutional forerunner, I hold that ‘creed’ means religious belief.” Cummings v. Weinfeld (N.Y. trial ct. 1941). “The rubric ‘race, color, creed or religion’ … has attained too fixed a meaning to permit political groups to be brought within it.” Beauharnais v. Illinois (1952) (which I think is good evidence of the legal meaning of the term at the time, even though its constitutional analysis is not consistent with more recent precedents).

Continue reading “Connecticut Racial Ridicule Prosecution: One Student Agrees to Probation, the Other’s Case Is Still Pending”