Category: reason

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PBS NewsHour co-anchors and managing editors Gwen Ifill and Judy Woodruff will moderate the faceoff between the last Dems standing: Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton. You can catch the PBS livestream here.

It looks like when there is not the slightest ability for anyone to doubt both that the police action caused the death and that the victim did nothing that could in the slightest be interpreted as “asking for it,” then police officers can be convicted in America for killing a citizen.

This afternoon, NYPD Officer Peter Liang was found guilty by a jury of manslaughter.

As I summed up the case of the shooting of Akai Gurley in the stairwell of a Brooklyn apartment tower when it happened back in November 2014, “Brooklyn Man Killed By Police Officer, For No Actual Reason at All; An “Accident” Says NYPD.”

As New York’s NBC station sums up today:

Liang was patrolling in the public housing in Brooklyn with his gun drawn when he fired; he said a sound startled him. The bullet ricocheted off a wall and hit the 28-year-old Gurley on a lower floor.

Prosecutors said Liang handled his gun recklessly, must have realized from the noise that someone was nearby and did almost nothing to help Gurley.

“Instead of shining a light, he pointed his gun and shot Akai Gurley,” Brooklyn Assistant District Attorney Joe Alexis said in his closing argument…..

The 28-year-old Liang said he had been holding his weapon safely, with his finger on the side and not the trigger, when the sudden sound jarred him and his body tensed.

“I just turned, and the gun went off,” he testified.

He said he initially looked with his flashlight, saw no one and didn’t immediately report the shot, instead quarreling with his partner about who would call their sergeant. Liang thought he might get fired…

Liang then radioed for an ambulance, but he acknowledged not helping Gurley’s girlfriend try to revive him. Liang explained he thought it was wiser to wait for professional medical aid.

Liang could receive as much as 15 years for the crime.

He and his superiors kept calling what Liang did an “accident.” Here was what I had to say about that back in 2014:

NYPD Commissioner William Bratton described the killing as “accidental” but doesn’t seem to be claiming the gun went off by, say, the officer accidentally dropping it.

The officer, the facts of how guns work suggest, had drawn his gun, had his finger on the trigger, and pulled it, in the direction of things and people he could not see and said nothing to, by available accounts of the killing. This makes “accident” a perhaps infelicitous way to describe what happened, even if Liang did not knowingly and willingly intend to kill Gurley, who had done nothing criminal or threatening prior to the killing.

Reason coverage of the Gurley shooting. Anthony Fisher reported how Liang contacted his union rep before contacting medical help for the man he shot.

Seeking to cure prospective babies of terrible diseases is clearly ethical, right? Sadly, not everyone seems to agree. Old-fashioned doctor-knows-best paternalism has all too often been replaced by bioethicist-knows-best paternalism—or worse yet, by panel-of-bioethicists-knows-best paternalism. Or at least that’s the case with setting some restrictions a promising new set of treatments called mitochondria replacement therapy (MRT). In addition, the folks on Capitol Hill have also forbidden the FDA to spend any funds on evaluating these new treatments. Banning treatments that would give parents the chance to have healthy children is highly somehow considered ethical.

View this article.

Orange County Register columnist Ron Hart was among the travelers on Reason’s recent trip to Cuba. His latest column is based on his experiences in Castro’s open-air prison.

Cuba is a political and economics lesson not taught well enough to our schoolchildren. With the rise in popularity of Bernie Sanders, who is beating Hillary Clinton in the New Hampshire Democratic primary, it’s clear that Americans do not understand the dire lessons of socialism’s poisonous ideology and the devastation it brings to every country that has fallen prey to its hollow temptations. In a Pew Research Center survey, 43 percent of 18-29-year-olds had a positive reaction to the word “socialism.”

U.S. teachers, who generally lean left, romanticize Marxist revolutionaries like Che Guevara and Castro. Kids today wear iconic Che T-shirts, unaware of the 3,000 political murders and economic devastation he caused….

…years of Cuban socialist rule have turned a prosperous country into an impoverished one. Cubans earn $20 a month, but everything is free! It is just that there is none of it. Store shelves are empty; even toilet paper is scarce. All the “evil” businesses were run out of Cuba, and 70 percent of the people work for the government, so there is no one left to tax.

Read the whole piece here.

Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Arizona) was also on the trip. Since first coming to Congress in 2001, Flake has pushed for the travel ban, partly because he thinks it would be instructive for Americans to see how true socialism really plays out. On the trip, he recounted the time that Polish leader Lech Walesa told him that “you have a museum of socialism just off the coast of Florida, yet you don’t let your people visit it.” Flake has also long called for lifting the embargo, arguing that it violates U.S. citizens’ rights to travel and trade freely while serving no clear foreign policy purpose and helping to immiserate the people of Cuba as well. Flake is no friend to the Castro regime and points out regularly that the American embargo allows the Cuban government to falsely blame its terrible economic situation on the United States.

Look for an interview with Flake, conducted while we were in Havana, soon.

In 2009, Reason TV interviewed Gorki Aguila, the lead singer for the Cuban rock bank Porno Para Ricardo (Porn for Richard) about creative and commercial life under the Castro regime. Aguila and his bandmates have been arrested over regularly over the years, most recently just last fall.

• The last of the occupiers of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon surrendered peacefully to authorities this morning.
• The mayor of Cleveland apologized to the family of Tamir Rice, the teen killed by a police officer in a public park, for the $500 bill sent to them for Rice’s “emergency services.” City officials say the claim has been withdrawn.
• The Congressional Black Caucus is endorsing Hillary Clinton for president over Bernie Sanders.
• The Clinton Foundation received a subpoena from investigators with the State Department for documents about projects by the foundation that might have required federal approval while Hillary Clinton was still secretary.
• Congress voted Thursday to permanently bar state and local governments from taxing Internet access. President Barack Obama is expected to sign the bill into law.
• “Whole Foods May Put Tattoo Parlors Inside New Millennial-Focused Stores.” Will the inks be locally sourced?

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“There is a place, I think, for jury nullification.” So said Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor in a talk this week at New York University Law School. As my colleague Jacob Sullum pointed out in response, jury nullification can be a good thing from a libertarian point of view, as it means “that jurors sometimes should consider information that the judge considers irrelevant. In a drug case, that information might include the stiff mandatory minimum awaiting the defendant, the defendant’s medical or religious motivation for violating the law, or the arbitrary disparity in punishment between crack and cocaine powder offenses.”

This is not the first time that Justice Sotomayor’s legal views lined up with those of libertarians. In her November 2015 dissent in Mullenix v. Luna, for example, Sotomayor faulted her colleagues on the Court for “sanctioning a ‘shoot first, think later’ approach to policing [that] renders the protections of the Fourth Amendment hollow.” Earlier that same year, during oral argument in Rodriguez v. United States, Sotomayor lectured a Justice Department lawyer on why “we can’t keep bending the Fourth Amendment to the resources of law enforcement.” It was a moment to warm even the coldest of libertarian hearts.

Yet Sotomayor is not always so constitutionally vigilant. During the same 2015 SCOTUS term, for example, the justices heard the case of Horne v. United States Department of Agriculture. At issue was the USDA’s attempt to force a pair of California raisin farmers named Marvin and Laura Horne to surrender a portion of their raisin crop each year to federal authorities for the purpose of creating an “orderly” domestic raisin market. The central question before the Supreme Court was whether the government’s attempt to confiscate those raisins (or their cash equivalent) counted as a taking under the Fifth Amendment, which requires the payment of just compensation when the government takes private property for a public use.

“Sounds like a taking to me,” observed Justice Stephen Breyer during oral argument. And Breyer was not the only one who thought so. The Court ultimately ruled 8-1 that the government’s attempt to take raisins qualified as an attempt to take raisins. Only Justice Sotomayor agreed with the USDA’s claim that the Fifth Amendment had no bearing on the matter because the case did not involve any sort of taking at all. “The government may condition the ability to offer goods in the market on the giving-up of certain property interests,” she asserted in her dissent. So much for not bending the Bill of Rights in favor of the government.

Justice Sotomayor is often a welcome voice in defense of civil liberties and the Fourth Amendment. Too bad she can’t seem to muster the same respect for the Fifth.

MoveOn, the federal political action committee (PAC) “focused on running powerful progressive advocacy campaigns” wants Democratic Party superdelegates to “follow the will of Democratic voters and caucus-goers” and pledge to back the candidate with “the most votes” at this July’s Democratic National Convention.

The PAC endorsed Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) for president in January and announced its new campaign yesterday via a petition on its website. At the time this post was published, it had received more than 80,000 signatures.

MoveOn also intends to track the commitments of the 712 superdelegates (a group comprised of sitting congresspeople, governors, and other party elites) and that it is “prepared to launch accountability campaigns focused on any superdelegates who argue that insiders rather than voters should choose the nominee.”

MoveOn Politcal Action Executive Director Ilya Sheyman said in a press release, “The party’s base simply will not tolerate any anti-democratic efforts by superdelegates to thwart the will of the people” and that the process which allows a well-placed party official’s preference to count for as many as 10,000 individual votes in determining the nomination is “undemocratic and fundamentally unfair to Democratic primary voters.”

As I noted last week, Bernie Sanders has a superdelegate problem, with the current tally running 355-14 (with 341 uncommitted) in favor of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (D-NY) over her only rival for the Democratic nomination for president.

Paste‘s Shane Ryan argues that those who have been taking note of this substantial lead in favor of the Democratic Party establishment’s clearly preferred candidate are peddling “bullshit” meant to “discourage, dismay, and dishearten” ecstatic Bernie Sanders supporters in the wake of his landslide victory in the New Hampshire primary. 

Though Ryan offers a thorough explanation of the whole superdelegate phenomenon, the only evidence he offers for his belief that superdelegates couldn’t possibly tip the nomination in favor of Clinton is this:

Superdelegates have never decided a Democratic nomination. It would be insane, even by the corrupt standards of the Democratic National Committee, if a small group of party elites went against the will of the people to choose the presidential nominee.

That line of thinking assumes 2016 will be like 2008, when then-Sen. Barack Obama (D-Il.) won 133 more primary delegates than Clintion, even though Clinton held a substantial (though not nearly as large as this year) lead in pledged superdelegates during most of the campaign. 

But what happens if this year’s “will of the voters” is not as clear as it was in 2008, when a sizable number of pledged or uncomitted superdelegates went with Obama once the delegate math seemed to be indicating his victory? If going strictly by the popular vote, the “will of the voters” of 2008 is even more difficult to pin down, due to a number of complicating factors such as the party’s decision to penalize Michigan and Florida with “half-votes” for holding primaries on earlier dates than they were instructed to.

Come convention time, it’s not inconceivable that Sanders and Clinton could wind up separated by a handful of delegates and just 1% of the popular vote, as was the case in the recent Iowa caucuses. If such a scenario were to occur, would the establishment whose support has been cultivated by the Clintons for decades flip to the socialist senator who is not even an official member of the party?

The question of Sanders’ electability has probably been the most frequently-deployed tactic by Clinton loyalists used against the Vermont outsider. Just today on MSNBC, former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell said, “I think the superdelegates who cast their vote based on electability have serious doubts whether Bernie Sanders could be electable once the GOP starts campaigning against him and putting ads against him.”

For an idea of how an air-tight finish between the two Democratic hopefuls might play out, look back at what Clinton wrote to undeclared superdelegates in May 2008:

Recent polls and election results show a clear trend: I am ahead in states that have been critical to victory in the past two elections. From Ohio, to Pennsylvania, to West Virginia and beyond, the results of recent primaries in battleground states show that I have strong support from the regions and demographics Democrats need to take back the White House…

And nearly all independent analyses show that I am in a stronger position to win the Electoral College, primarily because I lead Senator McCain in Florida and Ohio. 

Swap the words “Senator McCain” and replace then with “Donald Trump” or “Senator Cruz” and you have your late-stage campaign Hillary Clinton selling point: I do well in battleground states and you’d be insane to pledge support for Bernie Sanders.

Has this campus security officer ever heard of the First Amendment? A University of Texas at Austin cop issued a disorderly conduct citation to a preacher because his words were offensive to some students.

“You’re offending students on the campus,” said the officer. “The job here is write you up for disorderly conduct for offending someone.”

The preacher, according to The Daily Caller, had been inveighing against anal sex from his perch just outside the boundaries of UT’s campus. Students who heard him complained to the cops.

When the preacher asked about his freedom of speech rights, the cop responded: “It doesn’t matter, freedom of speech. Someone was offended. That’s against the law.”

The preacher could scarcely believe what he was hearing. “It’s against the law to offend someone?” he asked.

“Yes,” the cop repeated.

The officer, it goes without saying, was wrong. Thankfully, his department eventually corrected him and voided the citation. It also issued an apology to the preacher. Still, it’s troubling that an officer of the law could be so mixed up about it.

It’s also troubling that students thought the best way to deal with an offensive speaker was to sic the cops on him.

The New York Times isn’t just the most presitigious paper on the planet; it’s one of the most bullying, too.

That’s the conclusion I think most of us would draw from a great column written by former Reason Editor Virginia Postrel.

The background: War Is Beautiful is a book by David Shields that argues the Times systematically glamorizes war by the way that it depicts armed conflicts and their aftermath. Shields licensed several dozen images and does close readings of them. But he also included thumbnail versions of the images too.

The Times claims that the tiny reproductions violate its copyrights. But Shields has a good case that they constitute “fair use,” the legal exception that allows creators of new works to use bits of old ones without violating copyrights. 

The idea is simple. If every blogger, book reviewer, scholar, and nonfiction author who quoted a paragraph or two from another work had to fear a copyright suit, the cultural conversation would atrophy. Rather than encouraging the production of new works, copyright protections would deter them. Arguments would go unanswered, works uncritiqued, theories undeveloped. Instead of reporting what people actually said, writers would have to paraphrase—and readers would have to trust them.

When it comes to images, though, there’s a lot less to go on in terms of fair use. Postrel explains:

The newspaper’s suit seems like a loser. In a 2006 case called Bill Graham Archives v. Dorling Kindersley Ltd., the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit, whose precedents would apply to the Times suit, ruled that publishing thumbnail images of Grateful Dead concert posters in a coffee table book on the band constituted fair use. The court deemed the new use “transformatively different” from the original and noted that their small size strengthened that critical element of its analysis, since the publisher “used the minimal image size necessary to accomplish its transformative purpose.”

The Times thumbnails are even tinier — so small that the headlines are barely legible. No wonder Georgetown University law professor Rebecca Tushnet opined that the paper “has, quite unwisely, sued over this textbook (coffee-table book?) fair use.”

Postrel is hopeful that the lawsuit will actually backfire on the Times and end up laying out clearer and broader rules for fair use when it comes to images. Here’s hoping. The lack of clear and loose legal standing makes it harder to have conversations worth having. I’d argue that most laws limiting reproduction of most works (whether words, music, or images) rarely are in the interest of the copyright holder.

In a footnote, she throws in a link to a Pinterest board she compiled while working on her excellent 2013 book, The Power of Glamour: Longing and the Art of Visual Persuasion. It consists of a series of images for which she couldn’t secure the rights (most commonly because the copyright owner either couldn’t or wouldn’t follow through on requests). How whacked is it that she can post the images online but not in a book? Pretty damn whacked, I’d say.

For a discussion of libertarian views on copyright and intellectual property, go here.

Reason TV talked with Postrel about The Power of Glamour when it came out. Check that out below.

Now is John Kasich’s moment. The Ohio governor finished second in the New Hampshire Republican presidential primary, a finish he had banked on getting to propel him into upcoming primaries in South Carolina, Nevada, and beyond.

Kasich, and his opponents, know he’s fairly well poised to pivot to the center in a general election, and have come to calling him an “Obama Republican” because of his support for the Obamacare Medicaid expansion in Ohio and for Common Core’s federal education standards. Kasich insisted he supports local control of schools and that Ronald Reagan supported expanding Medicaid too. He boasts of cutting taxes by billions in Ohio and of balancing more budgets than anyone else.

Several debates ago, Kasich got a question about improving police-community relations, giving him a chance to talk about the kinds of police reforms he’s produced in Ohio, like mandating body cameras and imposing restrictions on use of force policies.

When Kasich tried to tackle the collective bargaining privileges public unions have, he didn’t exempt police unions, unlike Gov. Scott Walker in his efforts in Wisconsin. Kasich ultimately failed, but understanding that all public unions produce rules that protect bad actors, not just the ones you’re politically at odds with. Activists associated with Black Lives Matter included police union contract reforms as one of ten policies to reduce police violence, and launched a website to collect and analyze police union contracts around the country.

Democrats won’t talk about the role of police unions in creating the conditions for police violence, because while police unions may not be active supporters, other public unions are. And they work the same way—teachers unions, for example, create the conditions for substandard learning, and often work actively to prevent reform. Some Democrats talk about the link between education and crime, but not about the public unions’ role in those links. Bernie Sanders claimed police departments as an example of socialist institutions.

Kasich signed sentencing reforms into law in 2011, just months into his first term as governor. “This kind of reform legislation sat idle for 25 years, maybe. Nobody wanted to touch it,” Kasich said. “If you’re going to put your own future ahead of other people’s lives and their ability to reclaim their lives then you’re making a big mistake.” Ted Cruz, a first term senator, supported legislation for sentencing reforms but after gaining momentum in the presidential race, has walked back that support, worrying disingenuously that it would put “dangerous felons” on the street.

Kasich’s support for criminal justice and police reforms haven’t been used to paint him as an “Obama Republican” yet. The National Review‘s David French pointed out that Kasich is a (relative) darling of the left despite being something of a “theocrat” because the governor uses it to support more government, like expanding Medicaid. He once told a state legislator when he gets to heaven what he did to help the poor would be more important than what he did to keep government small. Support for things like criminal justice and police reforms are tantalizingly close to the realization that keeping government small and helping the poor is largely the same thing. And there are other such flashes too.