The US loves putting people in jail and in prisons, doing so for all manner of offenses that are non-violent and quite minor, such as inability to post bail or pay fines. This explains why the number of people incarcerated is far greater than in any other country. What is worse is that it also jails minors and ProPublica describes a particularly egregious case.
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The associate of serial sex abuser Jeffrey Epstein appeared in a New York City court today and pleaded not guilty to the charges brought against her. The judge denied her request for bail after prosecutors disputed her defense team’s claim that she was not a flight risk. Prosecutors said that her French citizenship (a country that does not extradite its citizens) and her extensive financial resources would make it highly likely that she would flee. The mystery is why she had not already done so before her arrest because she must have known she was under investigation, especially since Epstein’s death elevated her to the main living perpetrator of the abuse.
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The US has an inordinately long time interval between the presidential election, held the day after the first Monday in November of quadrennial years, and January 20 of the following year when the new president is sworn in. This is a ridiculously long transition time, allowing for all manner of shenanigans by the outgoing president. In most parliamentary democracies, like the UK for example, the transition is made the very next day and seems to go pretty smoothly. James Robenalt argues that if Trump loses in November, he should resign immediately and have Joe Biden become president.
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The US Supreme Court on Thursday issued its last opinions for the term and much attention has focused on the two 7-2 opinions concerning Trump’s tax returns. In one case in which Congress sought Trump’s tax returns, the court returned the case to the lower court saying that the judge should consider the separation of powers question. In the other case, the court said that documents pertaining to Trump’s financial records that were being held by his banks and accountants were not immune from grand jury investigations.
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The history of the US is that of its government making promises to Native Americans and then breaking them whenever they felt like it, usually because they wanted to grab land and resources. Given this long history of betrayals, yesterday’s US Supreme Court 5-4 decision that the US government had to honor its treaty commitments to Native Americans came as a big surprise. In this case, the court ruled that as far as federal criminal law is concerned, about half of the state of Oklahoma had to be considered as part of the Creek Nation reservation. (You can read the opinion here.)
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The one-time lover, confidante, business associate, and alleged procurer of teenage girls for abuse by Jeffrey Epstein and his friends has been transferred from the New Hampshire jail where she was over the weekend to the Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) in New York City. She is expected to appear in court on Friday at which the issue of bail will be discussed. Prosecutors will warn that she is a flight risk because of her money and her UK and French citizenship and connections, and thus should be denied bail, while her lawyers will likely argue that the fact that she had not already left the country (something that has puzzled me) means that she does not want to flee and so could be let out on bail
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Yesterday, the US Supreme Court issued a unanimous ruling of some significance. To understand why, you need to look at the truly weird system that the US uses to elect its presidents. So buckle up for a trip through that maze.
The first thing to appreciate is that the president is not elected by the majority (or plurality) vote of all the people in the country. While voters in an election do cast their votes for a specific presidential candidate, what they are really doing is electing members to an abstract entity called the electoral college and it is these electoral college members who vote for the president sometime after the presidential election is held, in a process that no one pays any attention to because it is assumed that they will vote according to the results of the presidential election so there should be no surprise.
Each state is entitled to a certain number of electoral college votes based on the following formula: one vote for each member of the House of Representatives from that state (which is roughly proportional to the number of voters in that state, with a minimum of one) plus two votes (for the two senators that each state gets). Since there are a total of 435 members of the House of Representatives and 100 senators, that adds up to 535 in total. Washington DC is not a state and thus has no congressional members but for the purposes of presidential elections it is treated as one and is allocated three electoral college votes. Thus there are 538 votes in all and to become president, you need 270 of those.
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There is one thing that puzzles me over the arrest of Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein’s one-time lover and later friend, business associate, and allegedly the chief procurer and groomer of underage girls to have sex with Epstein and his friends, and that why she stayed in the US at all. She was arrested in a secluded mansion that she owns in New Hampshire and is being held without bond in that town pending her transfer to New York City where the charges were brought against her.
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Maxwell was Jeffrey Epstein’s close associate and sometime lover and was accused by his victims as being the person most involved in procuring and grooming young girls to be abused by him. Geoffrey Berman was the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York who arrested Jeffrey Epstein and he had said that Epstein’s death in jail while awaiting trial did not mean the end to the investigation. But when US attorney general Bill Barr fired Berman last month for reasons that are still murky, it was not clear what would happen to those investigations. Now Berman’s replacement Audrey Strauss has ordered the arrest of Maxwell and charged her with conspiracy to entice minors to engage in illegal sex acts and also with perjury. Berman had refused to resign as demanded by Barr until he agreed to appoint Strauss, Berman’s deputy and a respected career prosecutor, as his replacement. (You can read the 17-page indictment here.)
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On the surface, the ruling by the US Supreme Court in the case of JUNE MEDICAL SERVICES L. L. C. ET AL. v. RUSSO to strike down Louisiana’s law that made access to abortion very difficult was a big win for abortion rights. But a closer examination reveals that it may have just set up the next legal challenge.
To understand the ruling, we must note that the Louisiana law under scrutiny was just the latest in a long line of so-called ‘trap’ (targeted regulation of abortion providers) that anti-abortion legislators pass that try to circumvent the right to abortion not by banning them but by imposing regulations on providers that are highly burdensome and unnecessary under the guise of protecting the health of the women seeking abortions. The aim of these laws is to shut down as many abortion clinics as they can because they cannot meet the requirements. This would primarily affect poor people since rich people will be able travel long distances or out of state or even out of the country to get abortions.
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