Tag: news

One
more story about a cop facing charges before 2013 comes to a
close.

From WTAE:

Pennsylvania State Police Trooper Ernest Boatright is
charged with endangering the welfare of children and harassment
after police said he shot pepper spray into the bedroom of his
girlfriend’s 13-year-old son.

According to court papers, Boatright found the teen still in bed
when he was supposed to be in school, so he discharged his pepper
spray in to the bedroom.

The criminal complaint said that the boy immediately
began to cough, sneeze and suffer from runny eyes and nose. Police
said that the boy knew he had been pepper-sprayed because Boatright
had pepper-sprayed him before.

Boatright was suspended, without pay.

More Reason on police abuses here.

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at @reason247.

Every December the Baltimore City
Paper publishes a feature called “People Who Died,” covering
some of the less-well-known-but-still-important figures who passed
away in the past year. This year and last year, unlike
previous years,
the obituarists have limited themselves to deceased people who
lived in the Baltimore area. That means a couple of bona-fide
celebrities, such as Tom Clancy and Richard Ben Kramer, slipped
onto the list this
time, but it also means the more obscure entries will be
really obscure for those of you who don’t live around
here, so it balances out. The 2013 edition’s highlights
include tributes to actor Robert Chew,
best known for playing Proposition Joe on The Wire, and
writer “Blaster”
Al Ackerman, an old-time zinester whose weird and funny tall
tales deserve a much wider audience than they got in his
lifetime.

Picking the year’s worst op-eds wasn’t easy in
2013. There’s the Slate writer who announced you’re “a bad person
if you send your children to private school”; the New York
Times piece arguing that conservative Dallas ”willed the
death” of JFK (by getting a communist to shoot him?); and the
fellow who worried that allowing more high-skilled immigration
would exacerbate “America’s Genius Glut.” If you’ve been losing
sleep over the genius glut in American punditry, writes Gene Healy,
rest easy. That threat’s a long way off.

View this article.

It’s Groundhog Day for Lake Superior State
University. Ignored by all 364 days a year, the college gets
attention for a day as newsrooms find themselves short of actual
things to report in newspapers and broadcasts due to the holidays.
LSSU produces the annual list of “banished words.” It gets
national attention for what is essentially a list created by people
bitching about popular culture.

The list, compiled from nominations sent to LSSU throughout the
year, is released each year on New Year’s Eve. It dates back to
Dec. 31, 1975, when former LSSU Public Relations Director Bill Rabe
and some colleagues cooked up the whimsical idea to banish overused
words and phrases from the language. They issued the first list on
New Year’s Day 1976. Much to the delight of word enthusiasts
everywhere, the list has stayed the course into a fourth
decade.

Through the years, LSSU has received tens of thousands of
nominations for the list, which is closing in on its 1,000th
banishment.

This year’s list is culled from nominations received mostly
through the university’s website. Editors of the list consider pet
peeves from everyday speech, as well as from the news, fields of
education, technology, advertising, politics and more. A committee
makes a final cut in late December.

This year’s
choices range from the obvious (“selfie,” twerking,” “hashtag”)
to the political (“intellectually/morally bankrupt,” “obamacare”)
to weird inclusions that must have been pushed through by a
committee member with a grudge (“T-bone”? What the hell?).

LSSU’s site offers a full archive of each year’s list. It’s an
interesting, but frankly a bit tiresome, look at Americans’
seething resentments toward each other, as expressed through shifts
in colloquial language. I find this year’s list particularly awful
– not the words themselves, but rather that they were chosen.
Previous lists have included words or phrases that are actually
problematic in that they were often used to mislead or obscure or
were used in a contradictory fashion or just tossed around
recklessly, terms like “transparency” (2010),  “maverick”
(2009), “sanitary landfill” (2004), “paradigm” (1994), “mandate”
(1985), and one of my own least favorite words, “dialogue” (1976,
their very first list).

But this year’s list is really just all about griping about kids
shaking their asses and posting pictures of themselves on the
Internet. It’s not so much of a collection of loathsome words so
much as it a collective “Get off our Lawn!” directed at the
dictionary.

The year 2013 marked the 50th anniversary of two landmark
Supreme Court cases in criminal defense law. In Brady v. Maryland,
the Court ruled that prosecutors are required by law to turn
favorable evidence over to defense attorneys. And in Gideon v.
Wainwright, the Court ruled that for felony cases, the government
is obligated to provide indigent defendants with adequate legal
representation.

Earlier this year, I interviewed longtime criminal defense
attorney Sam Dalton for a
long investigative piece on prosecutorial
misconduct. Dalton is something of a legend in Louisiana
courtrooms. He has just entered his seventh decade of practicing
law. In that time, he has defended more than 300 death penalty
cases. Of those, he spared 16 defendants from execution — this in
a state that’s rather fond of executing people. He has also been a
voice for civil rights, he chartered a model public defender
system, and he’s currently leading a charge to impose some
accountability on Louisiana’s more egregiously misbehaving
prosecutors. My favorite thing about him: Outside his office door
there’s a “welcome” mat that reads: Come back with a
warrant.

Read the interview at The Huffington Post.