Category Archives: ethics

Cashless Bail and Flight Risk

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Illinois has passed its cashless bail law, euphemistically styled the SAFE-T Act (Safety, Accountability, Fairness and Equity-Today Act—how cute, how misleading). This is a law that will allow lots of suspects accused of violent crimes to walk without even needing a hearing—an Illinois magistrate can simply release the suspect, functionally, on his own word that he’ll appear in court when called to do so.

Supporters of the law, set to take effect at the beginning of next year, point out it does not prohibit detention and that anyone deemed a flight risk can be detained.

This is as cynical as it is disingenuous.

The degree of flight risk isn’t the only factor that should be used in assessing bail amounts; it isn’t even the most important. What’s central to bail consideration, or should be central, is the nature of the crime alleged and the degree of risk to the people in the local community from having the accused walking free among them.

A man accused of a violent crime needn’t flee in order to commit (further) violent crimes; indeed, most crimes (like politics) are local. And now he has a collection of targets in the local area against whom to commit further violence: witnesses against him, and their families.

Journalists Deceiving

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Project Veritas lost a case brought by Democracy Partnerships in the DC District Court, with the jury awarding $120,000 to the consultancy. The firm had been targeted by PV, and recordings made by an undercover PV operative strongly indicated that DP was engaged in efforts to incite violence at rallies for then-President Donald Trump in the final weeks of the 2016 Presidential campaign.

The DC jury, made up of residents of Washington, DC, decided that

the actions of the former operative…breached a fiduciary duty to the consulting firms and amounted to fraudulent misrepresentation….

Project Veritas has said it will appeal; founder James O’Keefe saying in part

The jury effectively ruled investigative journalists owe a fiduciary duty to the subjects they are investigating and that investigative journalists may not deceive the subjects they are investigating.

I generally agree with what Project Veritas does, discovers, and publicizes.

However.

Not here. No one should be able to deceive anyone; although in most cases, that’s a moral limit, not a legally actionable one.

There’s a fine line here regarding investigative journalism. Going undercover isn’t deception unless the operative openly lies about who he is or what he’s doing. Letting the target draw a wrong conclusion, though, is on the target: do a better job of vetting. The “fiduciary duty” is the target’s as part of its own decision to spend money.

Beyond that, though, deception is what journalists do far too routinely, especially to their readers and viewers. PV needs to do better in its defenses.

But not Protection of the Community

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It appears that Minneapolis’ Progressive-Democrat Mayor Jacob Frey, of Minneapolis’ post-Floyd murder rioting and his own disdain for letting the city’s police department deal with the rioters infamy, is ready to announce a new police chief—nine months after the Floyd era chief retired.

The new chief’s job description includes this Critical Item:

[A] visionary leader, able to communicate the need for and create long-lasting and systemic change within MPD.

Change within the police department, but no change in hizzoner‘s (non)enforcement policy or the department’s capacity for enforcement.

That’s not very reassuring for the damaged, even destroyed, neighborhoods and businesses, which were almost exclusively minority-populated and -owned.

“Pay Their Way Out of Jail”

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Illinois has a law, signed into that status by Progressive-Democrat Governor JB Pritzker, that will allow folks accused of any of a broad array of felonies, including kidnapping, armed robbery, second degree murder, drug induced homicide, aggravated DUI, threatening a public official, and aggravated fleeing and eluding to walk free pending trial under the law’s cashless bail component. This component takes effect next January.

The problem with this cashless bail foolishness of Illinois—with any jurisdiction’s cashless bail policy—is made crystalline by Pritzker’s reaction to one State’s Attorney’s lawsuit against Pritzker and his Attorney General, Kwame Raoul.

Kankakee County State’s Attorney Jim Rowe has filed a lawsuit in his county’s circuit court against the governor and state attorney general, arguing that the SAFE-T law violates the state constitution.
Pritzker’s office criticized the lawsuit, calling it a “weak attempt to protect the status quo that lets murderers and abusers pay their way out of jail.”

Pay their way out of jail. Pritzker wants to let murderers and abusers out of jail for free, instead. (And he completely ignored the premise that his policy violates the State’s constitution. Apparently, Pritzker cares not a fig for his State’s supreme law.)

A Tacit Admission?

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Attorney General Merrick Garland (D) has filed his appeal (to the 11th Circuit) of the Federal district judge’s order blocking the DoJ from using certain documents seized in the DoJ’s Mar-a-Lago raid in its criminal investigation. That order parallels the judge’s appointment of a Special Master to oversee and sort through all of the seized documents. Garland’s appeal reads, in pertinent part,

Although the government believes the district court fundamentally erred in appointing a special master and granting injunctive relief, the government seeks to stay only the portions of the order causing the most serious and immediate harm to the government and the public by (1) restricting the government’s review and use of records bearing classification markings and (2) requiring the government to disclose those records for a special-master review process[.]

[R]estricting the government’s review and use of records bearing classification markings.

Garland no longer is willy-nilly calling the documents classified. Might this be his tacit admission that the documents aren’t actually classified?

Why does Garland not want them “disclosed” to the Special Master? The judge’s order here was for more than mere disclosure, too; she ordered the documents delivered to the Special Master for the explicit purpose of the Master’s assessment of whether they are classified. Why is Garland so terrified of an independent review, instead of his “trust me” position?

A tacit switch: the judge ordered the documents turned over to the Master, but Garland’s appeal refers only to disclosing the docs to the Master. Is Garland planning on continuing to refuse to turn them over if the Circuit court rejects his appeal of disclosure?