The Politics of Law, A Progressive Critique Edited by David Kairys

This book is a collection of essays or articles. Justin says it was a textbook he used in law school. It is fun to see his handwriting and notes from when he was a younger man. He liked the book so much he used it when he was teaching a class on Civil Rights at the law school. It is pretty dense, but I decided to read the article by David Rudovsky titled “The Criminal Justince System and the Role of the Police.” This was written in 1990, explained the situation clearly and things have turned out much as the author predicted. He talks about the War on Drugs and how the incarceration of Black people grew at such a fast rate. He briefly outlines the Warren court and some of the changes in criminal procedures that were implemented to give some modicum of due process to the accused (like Miranda). But also discusses how the Court failed to required disclosure of of police informants. Then the Burger-Rehnquist court started to erode this precedents in the name of “public safety and law enforcement.”

I noted the disucssion of qualified immunity and a how it was established as the law by the Supreme Court in LA v. Lyons. It was a situation where the detained person was stopped for a motor vehicle violation, did not resist, but the police used a chokehold on him and rendered him unconscious. Luckily he survived, because he had documented at least 15 people who had died at the hands of police who used this stranglehold. The Court showed “little concern for the deadly consequences of this unconstitutional police practice.”

Sound familiar? 30 years later, here we go again.

The article closes with a prescient sentence:

“Ultimately, the costs of the current approach [the conservative crime control model] will not only be increased economic inequality and unchecked violence, but a weakening of the constitutional guarantees of liberty and equality.”

Check, check, check & check.

https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/commentary/defund-police-reform-accountability-social-services-20200615.html