Wednesday, January 13, 2010
Knoxville Horror Update on the George Thomas Trial: Do Blacks Have a Racial Veto Right against Justice?
(My intrepid reader-researcher has written from Tennessee, with the newest on the Knoxville Horror cases.)
Nicholas,
Here (http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2010/jan/12/thomas-calls-his-trial-flawed/) is a story from Tuesday's Knoxville News-Sentinel. Thomas' lawyers are appealing on the basis of not enough blacks on the jury. Also, there will be a hearing regarding the Vanessa Coleman case the last week of this month.
This is standard procedure in this kind of trial. Note that [defense attorney] Scott Green claimed that blacks were being "unfairly excluded" when 7 blacks were on the original panel for the Cobbins trial.
In these trials, the attorneys take the Johnnie Cochran approach. In his book and interviews, Cochran criticized the O.J. Simpson prosecutors for removing black jurors without mentioning that he worked to strip the jury of whites. Cochran said in his book that 9 out of 12 blacks for Simpson made a "diverse" jury.
A former prosecutor wrote me last night on the subject of parole for convicted murderers. He wrote that unless it is a high-profile crime, "My feeling is that most murderers will eventually be paroled." There will always be heavy public pressure against parole for the killers of Channon Christian and Chris Newsom. The Manson gang killers in the Tate-Labianca murders are still in prison after 40 years. Richard Robles, convicted in the 1963 Career Girls murders, has been in New York state prison for 45 years. Robles comes up for parole again this year.
(NS: As homicide detectives often say, there is no such thing as “life without parole,” as opposed to life until parole or pardon.)
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Hi Nicholas, what's really sad is that most, if not ALL, of this sort of thing springs from the SAME pernicious concept of "disparate impact."
"Disparate impact" has been used to slime standardized written exams as "racist" and "discriminatory against blacks," when in FACT, EVERY reputable and reliable standardized exam has had the same 0.8 to 1.1 standard deviation disproportionate impact" between blacks and whites, with blacks performing appx 1 full std deviation worse or less well than whites.
The lie of "disparate impact" theory is that it is NOT at all focused on the myriad "disparate impacts" between every ethnic group, nor does it seek any sort of proportionalism (making sure every profession is populated by the exact proportions of each ethnic group within society).
The SAME "disparate impact" theory used to undermine written standards and merit is also used to undermine the court system...AND it was used to create the mortgage meltdown we saw in 2008.
The Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), pushed by Senators Kennedy (D-MA) and Proxmire (D-WI) mandated banks to "invest" more of their proceeds within the communities in which they operated. That undermined the true purpose of banks as Capitalist enterprises - making the most money they could for their shareholders/owners.
Once that tool was in place, it emboldened "housing activists like Gail Cincotta and Dale Rathke (of ACORN fame) to bludgeon banks with charges of "unfair lending" when they came to be approved for various mergers and acquisitions, etc.
Through the 1990s AG Reno and HUD Secretary Cisneros sued banks who didn't make "enough subprime loans" to "low income Americans." That charge was entirely based on the claim that traditional lending criteria had an adverse or "disparate impact" on "low income" and particularly "minorities."
In that way, the government micromanaged bank policies and ultimately changed the existing (and tried and true) traditional lending criteria.
THAT change in lending criteria and Fannie and Freddie guaranteeing/buying up those subprime loans and repackaging them as AAA-rated "mortgage-backed securities." In 2000, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac owned appx 24% of the U.S. mortgage market (a figure economists across the board saw as too high), by 2008 they owned a whopping 52% of the U.S. mortgage market, virtually all of that increase in the staggering $4 TRILLION in new subprime loans generated between 2000 and 2008!
"Disparate impact" is behind the erosion of standards in this nation, "disparate impact" is behind the erosion of the U.S. justice system and "disparate impact" was behind the mortgage meltdown, the subsequent global credit crisis and our ongoing economic woes.
As an aside, the FDNY's standardized tests have long been under attack and I am glad to be a part of a group Merit Matters that is fighting that battle on that particular front.
If you or anyone else would like to check out our website, it's at; http://meritmattersusa.blogspot.com/
You can reach us, if you want, at meritmatters@gmail.com
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