Who needs a trial when we have Twitter?
Chelsea Handler has some ideas about criminal justice reform.
In Back to the Future II, we learn that in the far-off year of 2015, criminal trials only take a few minutes because lawyers have been banned.
I wonder if Chelsea Handler, whom I understand to be famous though I’m not sure why, thought it was a documentary or something:
It’s not even the celebrity’s ignorant musings that offend me so much as the hundreds of trained seals in the responses agreeing with her, confident that a world of mob justice will work out just peachy for marginalized people.
Here’s a statement that might offend you: the horrifying video of George Floyd’s death does not, by itself, prove that Chauvin’s actions actually caused that death. It strongly suggests as much - hence Chauvin’s arrest, detention and trial - but it is not absolute proof.
The video does not determine Chauvin’s state of mind, nor whether he intended to kill Floyd. It does not show what happened before the cameras were running, nor what happened after the cameras were turned off. It does not show whether Floyd had any medical conditions, or had consumed anything, that may have hastened his death. It does not show whether Chauvin had any kind of medical condition that may have affected whether he knew what he was doing.
A video can be persuasive - extremely persuasive - evidence. But you still need a medical examiner to determine the cause of death. And witnesses to testify to what happened before, during and after the incident occurred. And, yes, the person on trial must be given the opportunity to tell his side of the story.
I want Chauvin convicted for killing George Floyd. I see no contradiction between acknowledging his right to a fair trial, in which he is legally innocent until proven guilty, and giving my own opinion on the case based on what I’ve seen and read.
But I sure don’t want a world where fair trials are replaced by online hordes. It wasn’t that long ago that Redditors drove an innocent man to suicide because they thought they’d proven he was the Boston Marathon bomber.
And that’s not even getting into the issue of deepfake videos, coming to a social media platform near you. (Note: if a video shows Handler saying something funny or insightful, it’s probably a deepfake.)
In a strange way, I kind of respect Handler for doubling down:
There’s another horrifying video making the rounds this week, showing the botched carjacking that claimed the life of Mohammad Anwar, a Pakistani immigrant working as an Uber Eats driver. Two African-American girls, aged 15 and 13 years, have been charged with his murder.
Is Handler saying they shouldn’t get a trial, either?
In other criminal justice news, it’s always the ones you most expect:
The Department of Justice is investigating whether Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida had a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old girl and paid for her travels with him, The New York Times reported Tuesday.
The government is examining whether Gaetz violated federal sex trafficking laws, according to the newspaper, which cited three people briefed on the probe. The congressman has not been charged.
The Justice Department declined to comment to CNBC on the Times report.
Gaetz, a 38-year-old conservative firebrand and close ally of former President Donald Trump, denied the reported allegations against him. He said that he is being threatened in a $25 million “organized criminal extortion” scheme.
Gaetz went on to say he was cooperating with the FBI and his father “has even been wearing a wire at the FBI’s direction.”
I’ve mocked the QAnon people many times, but maybe I owe them an apology. They say there are sexual predators at the highest levels of power in Washington, and maybe they were right after all.
Of course, these allegations have to be proven in a court of law. (Unless all of this was caught on video, according to Chief Justice Handler.) Investigators have their work cut out for them digging through Gaetz’s past looking for evidence that-
Gustavo Arellano of The Los Angeles Times writes that even one of his childhood heroes, Cesar Chavez, had some blemishes on his legacy:
Let me tell you about an American hero whom the San Francisco Unified School District Board of Education might find, um, troublesome.
He opposed undocumented immigrants to the point of urging his followers to report them to la migra. He accepted an all-expenses-paid trip from a repressive government and gladly received an award from its ruthless dictator despite pleas from activists not to do so.
He paid his staff next to nothing. Undercut his organization with an authoritarian style that pushed away dozens of talented staffers and contrasted sharply with the people-power principles he publicly espoused. And left behind a conflicted legacy nowhere near pure enough for today’s woke warriors.
A long-dead white man? A titan of the business world? Perhaps a local politician?
Try Cesar Chavez. The United Farm Workers founder is the first person I always think about whenever there’s talk about canceling people from the past. He’s on my mind again, and not just because this Wednesday is his birthday, an official California holiday.
[…]
Chavez’s main cause — bringing dignity to farmworkers — remains so radical and righteous that to criticize his personal failures is still largely verboten.
That’s why there was never any call by the San Francisco school board to remove Chavez’s name from an elementary school in the Mission District. Or for the same fate to befall city schools named after Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, even though the former once advised a teenage boy in Ebony magazine that his homosexuality was a “problem,” while the latter called white people “devils” and spoke at a rally along with the head of the American Nazi Party.
History — life — is not an easy-peasy snap-judgment call. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde: Every saint had a past, and every sinner has a future. And Chavez is perhaps as great an example of this in California history. It’s a thought that took me my adult life to realize and appreciate — and accept.
Arellano doesn’t call for cancelling Chavez, nor does he argue that his flaws negated his important work fighting for poor farm labourers. He concludes that “the hero was a man. And that Man, invariably, is no saint.”
That’s a lesson we should all keep in mind when deciding whose statues should be demolished.