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From BBC:

Protesters had burnt down [the] family home [of the singer, Yahaya Sharif-Aminu,] and gathered outside the headquarters of the Islamic police, known as the Hisbah, demanding action against him.

Critics said the song was blasphemous as it praised an imam from the Tijaniya Muslim brotherhood to the extent it elevated him above the Prophet Muhammad….

The last time a Nigerian Sharia court passed a death sentence was in 2016 when Abdulazeez Inyass, was sentenced to death for blaspheming against Islam during after a secret trial in Kano.

He was alleged to have said that Sheikh Ibrahim Niasse, the Senegalese founder of the Tijaniya sect, which has a large following across West Africa, “was bigger than Prophet Muhammad.” …

It appears unlikely, based on the story, that the death sentence will be carried out, but Sharif-Aminu is in detention and in hiding.

Thanks to Prof. Howard Friedman (Religion Clause) for the pointer.

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California voters will decide this fall whether they’ll embrace a criminal justice reform movement to stop using cash bail to determine whether people who are charged with crimes remain detained in jail.

Complicating the vote is an unusual coalition of opponents: insurers and bail bond companies that would lose their businesses entirely and civil rights and criminal justice groups who fear that the solution may end up being worse than the problem.

Proposition 25 eliminates cash bail in California entirely. Instead, people who have been arrested would be assessed for risk and released under various monitoring conditions. If deemed an unresolvable flight or public safety risk by a judge, they would be detained in jail until at least an arraignment.

The goal is to create an environment where access to money is not what determines whether a person remains in jail (or not) prior to his day in court. The goal itself is laudable—demanding money as a condition of freedom often has the impact of punishing people, particularly poor people, simply for being charged with a crime regardless of guilt or whether they are convicted. Cash bail often requires that these people and their families turn to bail bondsmen to cover the costs, which requires paying a percentage that they’ll never get back. Otherwise, they’re stuck in jail because they cannot afford bail, and studies show that folks in this situation often end up accepting harsher plea deals and receiving longer sentences than those who are able to contest their charges unincarcerated.

California’s legislature actually already passed these very reforms that eliminated cash bail in 2018; S.B. 10 was signed into law by Gov. Jerry Brown in August of that year. But then the bail bond industry bankrolled a successful signature-gathering effort to push the reform to a ballot referendum, halting its implementation until the voters decide whether to accept it.

Organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and other criminal justice reform advocates had originally been heavily involved in the shaping of S.B. 10, but in the middle of the process, the state’s judges got involved and adjusted the bill so that it gives them much more influence over what happens to defendants once cash bail has been removed. Judges will get a lot more say in deciding what sort of mechanisms would be used to determine who will be freed, how many hoops those people will have to jump through to remain free, and, most importantly, who will remain behind bars. These changes prompted the ACLU and other organizations to withdraw their support for S.B. 10 and oppose its passage. (The ACLU of Northern California did not respond to requests for comment by the time of publication.)

Dissatisfied California reformers can look to New Jersey, which has eliminated cash bail, as an example. In that state, judges still decide which people who have been arrested can be released, but the system simulates an adversarial court environment where a prosecutor presents the argument and the defendant is represented by an attorney. The pretrial courts operate on the presumption that the defendant will be released; it’s up to the prosecutor to make the case that a defendant is dangerous or a flight risk.

California’s proposed reforms give judges more leeway in release conditions and pretrial detentions, so many reform advocates believe this will not result in more defendants actually getting released from pretrial detention. Imagine a situation where a judge won’t release you under monitoring conditions, but you cannot put up money as a bond and promise to return to court. The big fear is that California’s bail reforms could actually leave more people behind bars.

Proposition 25 has resulted in an odd split between California’s Democratic political power structure and many of its progressive activists: The California Democratic Party supports its passage, as do many of the state’s top unions and prominent politicians. Meanwhile, the California wing of the NAACP has come out against Prop. 25 and Human Rights Watch recently called for voters to reject the measure.

Alice Huffman, president of California’s NAACP, said in a statement that the courts will “be even more discriminatory against African-Americans, Latinos and other minorities. Computer models may be good for recommending songs and movies, but using these profiling methods to decide who gets released from jail or who gets a loan has been proven to hurt communities of color.”

Her criticism refers to the use of risk assessment tools to help advise the court system on pretrial decisions. In New Jersey, courts use a pretrial assessment tool that scores a defendant’s risk based mostly on their criminal background and history of cooperation with the court—it doesn’t use demographic factors like race, ZIP code, or employment status. With the exception of age (younger defendants are more likely to miss court dates), the assessment is based entirely on a defendant’s past actions.

Opponents of assessment tools broadly fear that biases present in policing will continue to be perpetuated in a system that’s so heavily based on a defendants’ previous arrests. Proponents, meanwhile, note that these tools are supposed to assist the courts, not serve as a replacement for making thoughtful decisions about release.

It’s not yet clear how some of the crime spikes due to this summer’s unrest might influence the campaign. The anti-Prop. 25 campaign is attempting to perpetuate the argument that New York’s recent bail reforms have led to a crime increase there, a claim that is unsupported by the data.

But the outcome of this ballot referendum is hardly dependent on whose data is better. Bail reform elsewhere has mostly taken place in environments where crime had been trending downward in a way that was easy to perceive and explain. Now, we’re seeing a spike in some violent crimes in big cities, particularly homicides and gun-related crimes, even as other crimes continue to decline. While it’s not logical to pin that blame on bail reform absent data that links it, that doesn’t mean the reform movement won’t pay the price.

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Commenters have occasionally asked why American law generally recognizes a right of public access to civil court cases between two private parties. Why not treat those cases as just a private matter of purely private concern?

I think Justice Holmes put it well in Cowley v. Pulsifer (Mass. 1884), a case about people’s right to report on civil court cases without fear of libel liability:

The chief advantage to the country which we can discern [from the right to publish information from judicial proceedings] … is the security which publicity gives for the proper administration of justice…. It is desirable that the trial of causes should take place under the public eye, not because the controversies of one citizen with another are of public concern, but because it is of the highest moment that those who administer justice should always act under the sense of public responsibility, and that every citizen should be able to satisfy himself with his own eyes as to the mode in which a public duty is performed.

And courts have since then pointed to this as a justification for the tradition of public access to court proceedings and court documents as well. The administration of justice, even in cases between private citizens, is an important governmental function. It involves the spending of government funds, but, more importantly, the exercise of the government’s coercive power: The outcome of a civil case is often the government limiting a party’s liberty or transferring the party’s property; and the decision may set a precedent that will later affect the liberty and property of others. Courts allow some restriction on access to court records (especially when the restrictions focus on minor details). But there is a strong presumption of such access.

Of course, not all government activity that affects people’s liberty and property is carried on openly. Legislative sessions can go on in secret; not all executive documents are subject to Freedom Of Information Acts; and even the judicial process isn’t entirely open (consider the deliberations of judges on a panel, or juvenile proceedings). But tradition matters in our legal system, and there is a longstanding tradition of open court proceedings and open court files, represented in the common-law right of access.

Courts have also constitutionalized this tradition, by concluding that there is a First Amendment right of access to court proceedings and records—an unusual feature of First Amendment law, which generally doesn’t recognize such a right of access to other government documents and functions. The Supreme Court has so ruled as to criminal cases, but many lower courts have done the same as to civil cases.

One can question whether this constitutionalization was sound (see, e.g., Justice Rehnquist’s dissenting opinion in Richmond Newspapers, Inc. v. Virginia). Perhaps this question should be left entirely to state courts and state legislatures instead. But in any event, the rule is one of broad access, even to ordinary civil litigation.

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Madison Cawthorn is a 25-year-old motivational speaker running for Congress in North Carolina as a Republican. He has a compelling life story—he survived a horrific car crash that left him wheelchair-bound, ending his plans to become a Marine—and a fresh face. If elected, he would be the youngest member of Congress in history.

His campaign rhetoric reflects his youth, as well as the sloganeering and rah-rah patriotism of the #MAGA era. It’s all “I love America too much to let the squad destroy it,” and “A Patriot revolution is on the rise,” and “America needs more Young Patriots in Congress and less Socialists.” (Fewer socialists would be a goal worth supporting, indeed.)

A recent piece by Jezebel‘s Esther Wang attempts to poke holes in Cawthorn’s alleged professional accomplishments and the narrative he tells about himself. Wang asserts that Cawthorn was rejected from the Naval Academy not because of his accident but prior to it, and that despite billing himself as a successful businessman, Cawthorn is not actually a real estate investor at all.

Since these are not particularly exciting revelations, Wang also goes to great lengths to paint Cawthorn as some sort of closeted white supremacist. Indeed, the very second sentence of the piece contains the out-of-absolutely-nowhere claim that his hair is “swept back and gelled a la Richard Spencer.” Cawthorn has hair—you know who else had hair?

Wang then notes several increasingly thin pieces of evidence that Cawthorn might be alt-right adjacent. The most damning of these is that Cawthorn apparently thought it was a good idea to take a picture of himself touring Hitler’s vacation house in 2017, adding this caption for Instagram: “The vacation house of the Führer. Seeing the Eagles Nest has been on my bucket list for a while, it did not disappoint. Strange to hear so many laughs and share a good time with my brother where only 79 years ago a supreme evil shared laughs and good times with his compatriots.” It’s a truly cringeworthy comment, but one that strikes me as a failed attempt at perspective—in the vein of those moving dance-at-Auschwitz videos—rather than an endorsement of Hitler.

The rest of the evidence is even less convincing. Cawthorn has a Betsy Ross flag, and some white nationalists like the Betsy Ross flag. Cawthorn really likes the acronym “SPQR,” which stands for “the Senate and the Roman Republic,” something that white nationalists have recently appropriated. It would surprise me if Cawthorn knew that these have become alt-right symbols, just as it would surprise most people to learn that making the OK gesture will get them branded as white nationalists by hate-group watchers.

Again, if the criticism of Cawthorn is that he’s immature, out of his depth, or exaggerating his accomplishments, these are fine points. But Wang titled her article, “My Dark Journey Into the Soul of a Model Young Republican Candidate.” Reported pieces that aspire to be “dark journeys into the soul” probably should not rest upon somebody’s haircut resembling some other sinister person’s haircut—which is a false smear, in any case.

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