Has there ever been a Treasury Secretary who has been an easier target than Timothy Geithner?
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Despite America’s dubious legacy of exercising state power to oppress minorities, that legacy really was not the most important dynamic in play in regard to the improper arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates.
Rather, the real issue here is the increasing arrogance of America’s governmental officials to condone arrest of citizens as punishment for non-criminal behavior that police or prosecutors simply don’t like.
Interestingly, as Alice Ristroph explains, the judicial acquiescence to this increasing problem has Texas roots.
Gail Atwater was an Austin-area soccer mom who got into it with police officer and was arrested for a seatbelt violation, a “crime” that calls for no jail time. Atwater fought the charges, but the U.S. Supreme Court held in a 5-4 decision (what were Justices Souter, Kennedy, Scalia, Thomas and Rehnquist thinking?) that police officers may arrest citizens even for perceived offenses that call for no jail time.
In short, the Court concluded that the “gratuitous humiliations” that the police officer imposed on Atwater were within the scope of the officer’s discretion. Thus, Sergeant Crowley’s exercise of power to put Professor Gates through the same humiliations over a bullshit disorderly conduct charge is protected by the Supreme Court.
Couple the foregoing with America’s penchant for increasing criminalization of virtually everything and you have a very troubling trend.
As Glenn Loury notes in this NY Times op-ed, “anyone who looks closely into the issue of crime and punishment in America cannot fail to notice that the institutions of domestic security — policing, surveillance, prisons, anti-drug policy, post-release parole supervision — have grown hugely over the past two generations.”
Similarly, given the expansion of the federal criminal code over the past generation, Radley Balko notes that “you’re probably a federal criminal, too.” Indeed, the Cato Institute for years has been criticizing what it calls the “overcriminalization of conduct and the overfederalization of criminal law.” We already know all about that here in Houston, now don’t we?
As I first noted in 2004 in regard to Martha Stewart’s conviction on bogus criminal charges, and as I’ve noted many times over the years in regard to other examples of overreaching prosecutions, Sir Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons alerts us on why we should all be concerned with such increasing judicial deference to the overwhelming prosecutorial power of the state. The context is the scene in which Sir Thomas explains to his wife, his daughter and her fiance why he won’t misuse his power as Chancellor of England to arrest his student Richard Rich, despite the fact that Rich is preparing to betray Sir Thomas to Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII:
Lady Alice (Sir Thomas’ Wife): “Arrest him!”
Sir Thomas: “For what?”
Lady Alice: “He’s dangerous!”
Roper: “For all we know he’s a spy!”
Daughter Margaret: “Father, that man is bad!”
Sir Thomas: “There’s no law against that!”
Roper: “But there is, God’s law!”
Sir Thomas: “Then let God arrest him!”
Lady Alice: “While you talk he’s gone!”
Sir Thomas: “And go he should, if he were the Devil himself, until he broke the law!”
Roper: “So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!”
Sir Thomas: “Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
“Roper: “Why, yes! I’d cut down every law in England to do that!”
Sir Thomas: “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down–and you’re just the man to do it, Roper–do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?”
“Yes, I’d give the Devil the benefit of the law. For my own safety’s sake.”
This earlier post noted the troubling indications that R. Allen Stanford and that the federal judiciary to date is doing precious little to check the prosecutorial power of the executive branch as it applies to Stanford. This is not the first time that the prosecutorial power has run amok in a Stanford case.
Now, the motion below reveals that the Department of Justice has placed Stanford under jail conditions that are roughly comparable to those that prisoners endure in third world prisons.
Meanwhile, Stanford essentially has no ability to assist his counsel in the defense of a complicated white collar criminal case.
Increasingly, the U.S. criminal justice system is resembling this one. Yet, after the judiciary and the local media allowed the Enron Task Force to get away with various outrages against Jeff Skilling and various other former Enron executives, it’s as if even the most overreaching actions of the executive branch are now considered acceptable. Or at least not worth the effort of an objection. Or serious media scrutiny.
We live in scary times.
Stanford Mtn Re Jail Conditions
This past Sunday’s edition of the Chronicle marked the beginning of what is arguably the most mind-numbing portion of the sporting year — the five-week period of media coverage of football practice prior to the start of the National Football League season in the second week of September.
Putting aside for a moment his delusions that the Stros actually have a legitimate chance of making the National League playoffs this season when 3/5th’s of their starting rotation are well-below NL-average pitchers, the Chron’s Richard Justice dusts off his Texans’ cheerleading garb and lays this piece of fluff on us:
At least we’ve gotten beyond the basic issues that smothered the Texans for so long. There should be few questions about the coach or general manager. Gary Kubiak and Rick Smith have done their jobs well.
They inherited a 2-14 mess three years ago and rebuilt it breathtakingly fast. To go from 2-14 to 8-8 in two off-seasons is an amazing accomplishment.
Of course, this is the same Richard Justice who was saying the following just last October (2008):
Wouldn’t you love Bob McNair to start holding people accountable? Wouldn’t you love it if he acted like he cares as much as all those people who write the newspaper and phone the talk shows?
Do you think he understands he’s why this football team stinks? In the end, he’s the guy in charge and every stinking loss starts with him. [. . .]
Coaching isn’t just drawing up a running play that works. Coaching is instilling the right mindset in a team.
It’s getting players to understand what’s important. Don’t think for a moment the Texans don’t care. They do.
Rosenfels cares. Chester Pitts and Ephraim Salaam and DeMeco Ryans and Johnson care.
Those mistakes aren’t a statement about how much they care. They’re a reflection that somewhere along the way, this organization has gotten way off track.
If it was one game, or one series of mistakes, that would be one thing. This is year after year of mistakes, of figuring out different ways to write the same ending.
In fact, what Justice is saying about the Texans now is quite similar to what he was saying about the Texans under the Casserly-Capers regime immediately before the disastrous 2-14 season in 2004:
The Texans have made good use of their honeymoon. They’ve drafted wisely and spent shrewdly on free agents. They’ve assembled a front office admired around the NFL. Their players seem to be quality people. [. . .]
The danger for them is that their greatest strength could become their greatest weakness. They’ve done so many things right and have built such a model operation that it’s impossible not to put expectations on a fast track. [. . .]
So far, it’s impossible not to be impressed with what the Texans have done. They are run as efficiently as any sports franchise I’ve ever been around.
Just before the start of training camp, Casserly gathered his employees and thanked them for all their hard work. Then he went down the list of different departments and explained some little thing each had done that made the team – and the organization – better.
That’s the kind of thing the people who run sports franchises almost never do, and it left every person who was mentioned proud to be associated with the Texans.[. . .]
Capers believes it’s vital to emphasize doing things right because "if you ever slip, you can never get it back."
So far, the Texans haven’t slipped in any significant way.
Meanwhile, the blogosphere continues to bail the Chronicle out. Stephanie Stradley, who pens the Texans Chick blog for the Chronicle, has just completed a series of blog posts (the first one is here and the final one with links to the other four posts is here) that provides more astute analysis of good information on the Texans than anything that I’ve ever read by the Chronicle sports staff. Another Chron blogger, Lance Zierlein, also does a better job of analyzing the NFL than any of the Chron sportswriters.
Given Stradley’s competence in regard to professional football, guess what Justice thinks of her?
It’s going to be a long NFL pre-season.
The video below (H/T Professor Bainbridge) of a Milton Friedman lecture on the health care finance system is as timely now as it was in 1978 when he gave it at the Mayo Clinic. I was reminded of the Friedman lecture when a doctor friend of mine passed along the following front-line observations triggered by this article reporting on the recentt death of a young British man who died while waiting on a liver transplant:
Unless we, as a society, decide that we are going to pay for everything for everybody, there will have to be some form of rationing of health care services. And, into the 21st century, we now can do so much (with some having questionable efficacy) that we can no longer afford to do everything for everybody.
We can ration by age — this is what Obama was suggesting when he said that "maybe you’re better off not having the surgery, but taking the painkiller". No more knee or hip replacements if you’re over a certain age. Perhaps the first step toward a "Soylent Green" society?
Or we can ration by disease, which is what happened in the UK to the fellow who died awaiting a liver transplant and here we get into morals and away from science. It’s kind of like the game we played in psychology courses in high school or college — you’re stuck on a desert island with a bunch of folks who represent a cross culture of society, so who do you choose to get on the life raft? Medical care actually was easier when we did not have the technology to do things like liver transplants. Folks such as this guy just died.
Now, as a society, with the finite resources we are willing to spend on health care, we have to decide if we want to spend $250K to give this guy a new liver (which he may or may not trash through further drinking), to which is added the $25K per year for his follow up care and (very expensive) anti-rejection drugs. Or, do we decide that it would be better to treat 1,000 people who have hypertension by giving them cheap generic meds for $250 per year each? Who is more deserving of a "second chance", as the referenced patient’s mother asks — the one or the thousand? There are no right or wrong answers, but remember, it’s now a zero-sum game. When you spend money on one group of patients, there will be less to spend on others.
