Month: September 2022

It’s difficult to watch The Woman King and not conclude it’s a masterfully made movie. It has soaring action scenes—the sort that will make you squirm and scream—unconventionally led by a cast of female Amazonian warriors. It has Viola Davis, whose reputation as one of the most formidable actresses alive needs little explanation. And it has a riveting, relevant plot, centered around a kingdom in West Africa that begrudgingly participates in the 19th-century slave trade while it makes moves behind the scenes to hamstring it.

That it’s based on an unbelievable true story should only add to the film’s appeal. Instead, it destroys it.

That’s because the unbelievable true story is truly unbelievable, in that it’s false. The film is indeed based on history. But it’s a revisionist one and not one that can be hand waved away.

The movie takes place in the area that is now southern Benin, known as the Kingdom of Dahomey, which existed from the beginning of the 17th century to the beginning of the 20th. Davis plays Nanisca, the leader of an army called the Agojie composed entirely of women. We see them train and fight and capture people from nearby villages. Their prisoners are then sold to the Oyo Empire, which brokers deals with European slave traders.

But behind the facade we see in battle, Nanisca—loosely based on a real person—is wrought with guilt over enslaving her fellow man and woman. She pleads with King Ghezo, who ruled Dahomey from 1818 to 1859, to withdraw from the trade, suggesting he instead assert economic dominance in the region by relying on the kingdom’s share of palm oil. Epic battles between the Agojie and the Oyo fighters ensue, and (spoiler alert) the (surviving) European slavers are sent packing.

It’s a tale that makes for a compelling, mostly sympathetic watch. But it requires you go into the theater blind, as I did. And it requires that you stay that way—and stay away from Google—after you leave, which I did not.

Absent from the film is that the Kingdom of Dahomey’s success did not hinge on the abolition of slavery. Its demise did, which came about when Great Britain crippled the trade. After Ghezo rebuffed their insistence that he stop buying and selling human beings, the British instituted a naval blockade in the early 1850s, forcing his hand. It was then that he transitioned to heavy reliance on palm oil—not because he wanted to leave the slave trade but in spite of his desire to continue it.

As the movie progresses, viewers watch as the Portuguese—who arrived in Africa to purchase slaves—are vanquished by Davis and company. It’s hard not to cheer when a group of African men, recently freed from bondage, take the European leader Santo Ferreira (played by Hero Fiennes Tiffin) and drown him in shallow water. Missing from the conversation is that Ferreira appears to be based on Francisco Félix de Sousa, who, in reality, helped King Ghezo execute a coup d’etat so the two men could together reinvigorate the slave trade.

Hollywood has often taken liberties in telling historical dramas; this isn’t new. But there’s an important distinction to be made between poetic license and historical revisionism. To portray Dahomey as a kingdom of freedom fighters would be akin to producing a movie about the Confederacy as an anti-slavery republic, starring Robert E. Lee as the primary abolitionist. Society would rightfully reject such a film, at least in today’s day and age.

But The Woman King has received a warm critical reception in reviews from the country’s largest media outlets that fail to reckon with or even mention the historical conflict when evaluating its merits. “Viola Davis reigns supreme,” writes The Washington Post, whose critic adds that whether or not the slave-driven moral quandary “is literally true to life is beside the point.” OK. “She slays,” says The New York Times. The movie is not only “truly inspiring,” says a review on ABC News, but “no white saviors need apply.” The slave trade, but make it feminist.

Such evaluations don’t necessarily land as a surprise. The movie has several elements to please the crowd: fierce female warriors, intersectionality, and racial justice chief among them. “The women are their own greatest weapons, and among everything else it addresses,” the Times writes, “‘The Woman King’ is about strong, dynamic Black women, their souls, minds and bodies.” We are supposed to forget that this kingdom we are glorifying did so via the subjugation and suffering of other black people, which, apart from slavery, included killing thousands upon thousands of their prisoners in human sacrifice rituals each year.

This is the central problem here: The Woman King all but encapsulates the values that take precedence in popular culture. But the producers had to rewrite the history books to get there, because telling a more respectfully-accurate story would’ve required them to buck how we are supposed to talk about such things. Everything must be black and white; there can be no gray. (It is rumored that the actress Lupita Nyong’o, who was originally cast in the film, dropped out over reservations about the historical presentation.)

And yet, such revisionism is not confined to one subject or one political faction. That much is clear in ongoing debates around the history of the Confederacy and its relationship to slavery here in the U.S. I’ve written quite frequently about the need to present such history with precision and to not glorify Confederate military leaders with public monuments, which represent perhaps the largest participation trophies in modern history. But to argue it’s kosher to rewrite history for The Woman King simply because others have unfortunately rewritten history on similar topics is to say that historical integrity doesn’t matter at all. Revisionism isn’t just wrong when done by your ideological foes.

After all, history is best when interrogated and questioned—not sanitized or, in this case, redrafted for the sake of convenience. A great movie would have presented that history in full, likely leaving many viewers exiting the theater unsure of how to feel. In The Woman King, you know how to feel, because you’re told how to feel. It’s decidedly less rewarding than the alternative.

The post <em>The Woman King</em> Rewrites History for a Feminist Twist on the Slave Trade appeared first on Reason.com.

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Please enjoy the latest edition of Short Circuit, a weekly feature written by a bunch of people at the Institute for Justice.

New cert petition: Anthony Novak was jailed for four days and prosecuted for making a fake Facebook page satirizing the Parma, Ohio police dept.—an obvious First Amendment violation! And yet the Sixth Circuit granted qualified immunity to the officers involved, so IJ is asking the Supreme Court to step in and settle a deep split among the circuits on what to do when probable cause rests on speech. Or, better yet, the Court could nuke the doctrine of qualified immunity into the sun. Read all about it at Cleveland.com.

• In 2019, President Trump publicly denied a woman’s accusation that he raped her in a department store changing room in the 90s. She sues him in his personal capacity for defamation, but the feds intervene, seeking to substitute the federal gov’t as the defendant, which would mean the case is toast (since the feds have sovereign immunity in defamation cases). District court: No dice, feds. Second Circuit (over a dissent): Actually, we’d like to ask the D.C. Court of Appeals whether, under D.C. law, the president’s comments to the press were within the scope of his official duties. (If so, this case is toast.)
• Connecticut police wish to transfer a mentally disturbed inmate to a padded cell. The inmate gets mouthy and learns what happens when you bring words to a baton/K9/taser fight. Second Circuit: Qualified immunity. Dissent (Calabresi, J.): Not only shouldn’t there be qualified immunity in this case, there shouldn’t be qualified immunity in any case.
• New Jersey highway cops find three plastic bags with heart-shaped candies and arrest the motorist—but do not test the candies for two months. Whoops! They are not drugs. And even knowing that, it takes an additional four months to drop the charges. District court: Could be false arrest and malicious prosecution. No qualified immunity. Third Circuit: And the officers can’t appeal that just yet because the motorist subsequently amended his complaint (at the district court’s invitation), and that’s not interlocutorily appealable.
• Fort Worth, Tex. officer shoots allegedly unarmed septuagenarian dead after going to wrong home to investigate burglar alarm. Plaintiffs: And the city is liable because of its policies: pairing rookie cops together on the midnight shift, not training officers that odd-numbered and even-numbered houses are on opposite sides of the street, and more. District court: Those things are all too attenuated from the actual shooting. The city is off the hook, but the excessive force claim against the officer can go to a jury. Fifth Circuit (unpublished): Sounds right to us.
• Last year, Texas officials flagged over 11k registered voters as potential noncitizens. Must the state turn over info identifying these folks in response to a public records request from the ACLU and other groups? District court: Yup, turn over the records. Fifth Circuit: Reversed. The plaintiffs may be entitled to the info, but they haven’t shown how they—as opposed to the public at large—would be injured if it’s withheld. No standing. Judge Ho, concurring: But that should be pretty easy to get around in a subsequent suit and, unlike the rest of the panel, I don’t think it’s gratuitous to say so.
• Allegation: Texas Justice of the Peace—a former Pentecostal preacher—opens court with a prayer delivered by a local faith leader. During the prayer, the judge scans the audience to see who is participating. Half-hearted participants can expect a surly reception when their case comes up for argument. Fifth Circuit: The evidence of bias is too speculative to support an Establishment Clause violation. Dissent: There’s at least enough to go to a jury.
• In which Kim Davis—of Kentucky-clerk-cum-marriage-license-denier fame—loses her second bid for qualified immunity in the Sixth Circuit (unpublished). Back the case goes to the district court for a trial on damages, after which Ms. Davis gets to appeal to the Sixth Circuit for a third time.
• If law enforcement from eight different federal, state, and local agencies ever raid your home (with a warrant), search your place of business (without a warrant), and ignite a flashbang grenade near your sleeping 1-year-old, the Seventh Circuit has some (published and unpublished) advice on how and whether your suit for damages might proceed if, among other odds and ends, the roles and identities of the officers involved is a tad unclear—and irrespective of whether you are now serving a lengthy sentence for drug dealing. (Ethics query: Should the magistrate judge who signed the allegedly defective warrant recuse from these proceedings? Or is it okay because he isn’t making dispositive rulings?)
• In 1989, the director of the Oregon Dept. of Corrections, who’d been brought in to root out corruption, is murdered at work—stabbed through the heart. A parolee confesses to the murder several times on different days, giving details not publicly known and corroborated by physical evidence. Nevertheless, investigators shift their attention to another man who steadfastly maintains his innocence. No physical evidence ties him to the crime, but he’s barred from introducing evidence of the parolee’s admissions and is convicted on the basis of witness testimony. He’s sentenced to life and spends nearly thirty years in prison before the district court grants habeas and orders him released. Ninth Circuit: Nearly all the witnesses have recanted, claiming they lied because of police misconduct, and it was super unconstitutional to exclude the parolee’s confessions. No reasonable juror would’ve voted to convict with the recantations and other confessions. (Yes, there is a podcast and movie about the crime.)
• Grants Pass, Ore. has more homeless residents than shelter beds, forcing some homeless to sleep in public spaces. Easy fix, says the town, we’ll just make that illegal. Ninth Circuit: You can’t ticket the involuntarily homeless just for being homeless. Dissent: Even if that’s right, it has to be assessed person by person, not on a class basis.
• Police seize cash hidden in Las Vegas armed robbery suspect’s attic (in 2014) and then in his mattress (in 2017). But wait! Charges in first matter are thrown out due to prosecutorial misconduct, and he’s never charged with anything to do with the second. (He is, however, convicted of a different armed robbery.) But the gov’t just sits on the cash, a cool $65k, taking none of the steps necessary to civilly, criminally, or administratively forfeit it. Ninth Circuit: Neither the robber nor the gov’t can have it.
• Does federal law preempt California’s attempt to regulate prisons run for the federal gov’t by private contractors? Ninth Circuit (en banc): Have you read McCulloch v. Maryland? This is not too different from that.
• Congress authorizes a California dam in 1954 and seems to say it shouldn’t let water go downstream to help the local steelhead. Two decades later Congress passes the Endangered Species Act, which, once the steelhead is listed as endangered, seems to mean that perhaps the dam should do just that. Ninth Circuit: Some expansive language in the original act means it doesn’t contradict the ESA, so back to the district court to work out maybe releasing some more water. Dissent: That’s not what the language says. But if it does it’s nondelegation doctrine time.
• Without a warrant, Long Lake Twp., Mich. officials repeatedly fly a drone over family’s home, curtilage, and five-acre wooded property, recording in HD. (They discover some old cars that can’t be seen from a public vantage point.) Michigan Court of Appeals: Which is not a problem because the Fourth Amendment only protects against police searches, and this was code enforcement.
• And in cert grant news, the Michigan Supreme Court will consider whether the state’s civil forfeiture statute authorizes the forfeiture of a vehicle based on Detroit police’s allegations that a nursing student transported—not drugs—but a person who bought and immediately consumed a small amount of drugs in her car. (Not for nothing, but the allegations are applesauce. This is an IJ case.)

In the nearly 10 years since Los Angeles entrepreneur Ryan Crownholm started MySitePlan.com, he’s created over 40,000 informal maps, called site plans, to help people with a huge variety of projects—hotels looking to guide guests from the lobby to their rooms, homeowners and contractors showing local building departments where they’ll build a fence or shed, and much more. Basically anytime someone needs a handy map, MySitePlan.com can make one using publicly available information. But California licensing officials are trying to shut Ryan down because they say he is illegally practicing land surveying. Which is madness. Ryan doesn’t claim to be making the authoritative legal surveys necessary for bigger projects, and no one has ever been confused. Taken literally, the state’s position would mean anytime someone hand-draws a map on a napkin, they’d risk criminal liability. So this week IJ and Ryan filed suit in federal court. Click here to learn more.

The post Short Circuit: A Roundup of Recent Federal Court Decisions appeared first on Reason.com.

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I had missed this story by Evgenia Peretz when it came out in early May in Vanity Fair (“Scene Stealer: The True Lies of Elisabeth Finch,” Part 1 and Part 2), and only saw it because of this MedPage Today (Emily Dwass) piece (“Was I Conned by a ‘Grey’s  Anatomy‘ Writer? — Her alleged duplicity could make things tougher for female patients”). It’s fascinating and chilling, and a reminder of how even people we’re predisposed to trust are sometimes untrustworthy.

One item, by the way, from the MedPage piece:

I get why no one doubted her cancer journey—who would lie about having a deadly disease? According to Peretz, Finch was given time off from work whenever she requested it to take part in treatments and clinical trials at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota.

What I can’t wrap my head around is why Finch’s colleagues apparently didn’t question the escalating and extreme crises that tormented her. Peretz writes about the string of calamities that afflicted Finch, “some of which she chronicled for the world, some of which she talked about in select company.” There was a doomed pregnancy, a failing kidney, a friend murdered in the Tree of Life synagogue mass shooting (Finch claimed to help clean up the body parts), an abusive brother who attempted suicide. Peretz’s article calls into question whether any of these things actually occurred.

How was it possible that no one at “Grey’s Anatomy” saw these catastrophes as red flags that something was off, and that Finch needed some kind of mental health intervention?

It seems to me the answer is clear: It’s naturally always hard to accuse someone of lying, especially about circumstances to which most people are normally inclined to react with sympathy. But when skepticism and failure to #Believe… is often condemned as a moral failing, who wants to “question”?

The post The <i>Grey's Anatomy</i> Writer Hoax appeared first on Reason.com.

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Legislation was introduced this week in Congress that would bring independent oversight to the beleaguered federal prison system.

Sen. Jon Ossoff (D–Ga.), Sen. Mike Braun (R–Ind.), and Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D–Ill.) introduced the Federal Prison Oversight Act on Wednesday. The bill would require the Department of Justice’s Inspector General to conduct detailed inspections of each of the Bureau of Prisons’ 122 facilities and, more significantly, create an independent Justice Department ombudsman to investigate complaints.

The legislation comes on the heels of a bipartisan investigation by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations into widespread corruption and abuse at a federal prison complex in Atlanta. Congressional investigators found that senior leadership at both the complex and the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) had been aware of the problems for years but failed to act.

“My 10-month bipartisan investigation of corruption, abuse, and misconduct in the Federal prison system revealed an urgent need to overhaul federal prison oversight,” Ossoff said in a press release. “I am bringing Democrats and Republicans together to crack down on corruption, strengthen public safety, and protect civil rights.”

The federal prison system has been in a state of turmoil for several years now, racked by chronic staff shortages, embarrassing lapses in safety and security—such as the in-custody deaths of disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein and Boston mobster Whitey Bulger—and a cover-up culture that shields misbehaving officials from consequences and retaliates against whistleblowers.

In February, an investigation by the Associated Press into FCI Dublin, a federal women’s prison in California, found “a permissive and toxic culture at the Bay Area lockup, enabling years of sexual misconduct by predatory employees and cover-ups that have largely kept the abuse out of the public eye.” 

Reason reported in 2020 on allegations of three cases of fatal medical neglect at FCI Aliceville, a federal women’s prison in Alabama. The daughters of one woman who died in Aliceville, Hazel McGary, said they had been calling the prison for months trying to get help for their increasingly sick mother.

“They ain’t do nothing,” Kentiesha Kimble told Reason. “They laughed at her. They said she was faking. They told us she was too young to be having a heart attack.”

The Biden administration recently tapped Colette Peters, the former head of the Oregon prison system, to take over leadership of the BOP from outgoing director Michael Carvajal, who faced bipartisan criticism for his refusal to acknowledge the serious problems within his agency.

“These individuals in our care have the right to feel safe when they are incarcerated with us,” Peters told the Associated Press this week. “So we’re going to do everything we can to ensure their safety.”

But civil liberties and prison advocacy groups say an independent ombudsman would add a layer of oversight that has been sorely lacking at the BOP, which has long been a black box of information.

“It’s been said that sunlight is the best disinfectant—and yet our prisons are the darkest places in the nation,” said Families Against Mandatory Minimums President Kevin Ring. “With no meaningful oversight, incarcerated people and correctional officers are not safe, and our elected leaders are not even aware of the problems that need to be fixed. Families with incarcerated loved ones for years have been calling for greater transparency, safety, and accountability from our federal prisons. The bipartisan bill introduced today answers their calls.”

A companion bill to the Federal Prison Oversight Act has been introduced in the House by Reps. Kelly Armstrong (R–N.D.) and Lucy McBath (D–Ga.).

The post Bill Introduced To Bring Independent Oversight to Federal Prison System appeared first on Reason.com.

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In a complicated turn of events, a teenage girl who California law enforcement thought had been kidnapped by her father was killed in a shootout between deputies and her father. Now the state attorney general’s office is investigating what exactly happened.

On Monday, a woman named Tracy Martinez was shot and killed in Fontana, California. The suspect in the shooting was Anthony John Graziano, her husband, who then went on the run. The two of them had a 15-year-old daughter, Savannah. Officials worried that Graziano had kidnapped Savannah and put out an Amber Alert looking for her.

San Bernardino County sheriff’s deputies found Graziano driving in his pickup truck on highways between Los Angeles and Las Vegas in the Mojave Desert on Tuesday. The deputies gave chase. According to police and news reports, deputies pursued Graziano for 70 miles, with Graziano shooting at them at times, reportedly disabling one of the patrol cars.

Deputies finally managed to contain Graziano on an offramp near the town of Hesperia, and a massive gunfight followed (some of which was captured by bystanders on video). At some point, Savannah jumped out of the truck and ran toward deputies. She was shot and killed. (At this point, it’s not clear whether she was shot by deputies or her father.) Graziano was also killed in the shootout.

When the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department first discussed what went down, Sheriff Shannon Dicus said Savannah was wearing body armor and a tactical helmet.  “Evidence suggests that Savannah Graziano was also a participant in shooting at our deputies,” Dicus said. He did not at the time get into detail about what that meant or whether she was armed when deputies shot her. Nevertheless, Dicus’ suggestion was treated as credible.

Then, L.A.’s ABC7 tweeted that she “shot at deputies before she was killed in a highway shootout between her father—a fugitive wanted in the death of the teen’s mother—and law enforcement.” This is not what Dicus said. While Dicus was irresponsible for presenting vague information as “evidence” at a press conference, ABC7 compounded the problem by presenting something under investigation as fact.

The latest reports now show that Savannah was likely unarmed at the time that she was killed. After the state attorney general’s office took over the investigation of the shooting, it found that the only weapon on the crime scene was an AR-15 recovered in the truck, which is where Graziano was killed.

The sheriff’s department is no longer answering questions, directing media to the state attorney general’s office for the investigation, according to the L.A. Times. ABC7’s irresponsible and inaccurate tweet is still up, and now the news that Savannah was likely not armed is being described by them as a “stunning new twist.”

The story is turning out even more complicated. It’s not clear anymore whether Savannah was a kidnapping victim at all. Videos and eyewitness testimony from the scene of the mother’s killing show that Savannah was there in the back seat of the truck when Graziano shot Martinez. This doesn’t necessarily mean she was there voluntarily or was an accomplice (as the sheriff was suggesting). But at the time of the chase, authorities thought Graziano picked up and kidnapped his daughter after shooting Martinez, and that’s apparently not the case. Savannah had been living with her father as the couple went through a divorce.

All we do know is that an unarmed teenage girl was shot and killed as she jumped out of a truck and ran toward deputies. The sheriff then spoke vaguely about what might have happened, suggesting that the girl may have been a threat, and some media outlets treated that presumption as fact. Media outlets really, really need to stop doing that.

The post Teenage Girl Killed in Police Shootout With Her Dad in California Desert appeared first on Reason.com.

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