TWO SUPREME COURT opinions written by Justice Clarence Thomas and issued in the past month, Shinn v. Ramirez and Jones v. Hendricks, look like routine attacks on the Warren Court’s protections for criminal defendants. In fact, they declare a war on innocence. Shinn decided two Arizona capital cases. In one, the victim’s time of death excludes the defendant […]
James Doyle
Posted inOpinion
Looking at 911 mental health calls in a new way
A SPOUSE, A SISTER, or a brother suffers an acute mental health crisis. Family members call 911 as a last resort. A Boston Globe analysis reports that these calls—there are a lot of them—initiate chains of events that can (and, on an average of five times each year in Massachusetts, do) culminate in a fatal police […]
Posted inOpinion
It’s time for major reforms at the US Supreme Court
FOR 146 YEARS, until 1935, the Supreme Court had no building of its own: it met in the Capitol. But architect Cass Gilbert, in consultation with former chief justice Charles Evans Hughes, modeled new quarters for the court on a Roman temple, creating a marble structure suitable for opening the bodies of fowl and examining their […]
Posted inCriminal Justice
We need to learn from criminal justice mistakes
OUR IDEA of safety is person-based. Whenever something goes tragically wrong in criminal justice our reflex is to go “down and in” to find the malfunctioning human whose misconduct defeated our safe system and victimized a helpless citizen. We equate “accountability” with “punishment.” In the context of the police violence that is now a media […]
Posted inCriminal Justice, Opinion
The problem isn’t just a few bad apples
Now we learn that Inspector General Glen Cuhna, who once seemed ready to pin a massive state drug lab scandal on a lone chemist, Annie Dookhan, actually referred four other lab workers for prosecution. Interesting. Still, counting the number of “bad apples” shouldn’t distract us from the reality that the Massachusetts lab scandals were not the work of […]