Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
On the news tonight, and now via CNN, I learned that thirteen parents and college staff who participated in the college-admissions scam, falsifying college applications to improve kids’ chances, have pleaded guilty. These include the best-known participant, actor Felicity Huffman. I suspect that others like Lori Laughlin will follow shortly with similar pleas, for there’s a penalty cost for fighting charges that were so well substantiated with evidence.
When this all broke, I thought that some jail time, though not much, would be an effective deterrent to others who might cheat in this way, and would also show that rich white people are not above justice. But now I’m beginning to wonder if the cheaters will get anything more than a slap on the wrist. As CNN writes:
Thirteen wealthy parents, including actress Felicity Huffman, and one coach will plead guilty to using bribery and other forms of fraud as part of the college admissions scandal, federal prosecutors in Boston said on Monday.
Huffman, the “Desperate Housewives” star, pleaded guilty to paying $15,000 to a fake charity associated with Rick Singer to facilitate cheating for her daughter on the SATs, the complaint says.
She faces up to 20 years in prison. In exchange for Huffman’s plea, federal prosecutors will recommend incarceration at the “low end” of the sentencing range, a $20,000 fine and 12 months of supervised release. They will not bring further charges. [JAC: her lawyers have asked for NO jail time.]
A federal judge will have the final say on the outcome for Huffman and the other defendants.
I’m usually not this vindictive, but it seems to me that without jail time, a $20K fine (easily affordable by these rich parents) and a year of “supervised release” is an undeservedly light punishment. Give parents like Huffman 4-6 months in jail! That, I think, will be a strong deterrent. Of course other participants may have committed more serious crimes, but here I’m talking just about those rich parents who paid money to produce college applications full of lies.
Perhaps I’m being too vindictive here, but there’s no deterrent like incarceration, however light, for thenceforth you’ll always be a person who “went to jail”.
What do you think? Vote below, but leave comments with your take.
This is what we’re in for the foreseeable future: a Supreme Court whose conservative majority, while concerned with preserving the life of every fetus, sends criminals to their deaths with impunity, even when those deaths are horribly painful. As the article below in The Atlantic relates (click on the screenshot), Justice Neil Gorsuch, who heretofore had kept his opinions on capital punishment private, joined the 5-4 Supreme Court majority (5-4 is temporary; it will be 6-3 before too long unless we elect a Democratic President in 2020) in the case of Bucklew v. Precythe, a ruling you can see here. The opinion was in fact written by Gorsuch, with the other four conservative justices (including Kavanaugh) concurring. The dissenters were, of course, Ginsburg, Kagan, Sotomayor, and Breyer.
Russell Bucklew, facing execution in Missouri for murder, rape, assault, escape, and other crimes, appealed because he has a disease called cavernous hemangioma, which in his case produces fragile blood-filled tumors in his head and mouth. He can’t sleep lying down lest he choke on his own blood, and it’s possible, even likely, that a lethal injection, the standard procedure in Missouri, would cause insupportable pain by rupturing his blood vessels.
Courts have ruled that if an inmate challenges the lethal-injection procedure, it’s up to him to suggest an alternative procedure that would be less painful. Bucklew’s lawyers argued that stipulating such alternatives in his particular case would be unconstitutional, as it’s unknown whether any alternative procedure would be less painful than lethal injection. (Bucklew had in fact suggested that death by nitrogen gas inhalation might be less painful than lethal injection, and nitrogen inhalation is indeed authorized as an alternative method of execution in Missouri, though it’s never been used in the U.S.)
But Gorsuch et al. didn’t buy it. In an astounding ruling, they demanded that Bucklew not just specify the use of nitrogen (remember, it’s already approved by the state as an alternative method of execution), but do a lot more. From the ruling:
First, an inmate must show that his proposed alternative method is not just theoretically “‘feasible’” but also “‘readily implemented.’” Glossip, 576 U. S., at ___–___ (slip op., at 12–13). This means the inmate’s proposal must be sufficiently detailed to permit a finding that the State could carry it out “relatively easily and reasonably quickly.” McGehee v. Hutchinson, 854 F. 3d 488, 493 (CA8 2017); Arthur v. Commissioner, Ala. Dept. of Corrections, 840 F. 3d 1268, 1300 (CA11 2016). Mr. Bucklew’s barebones proposal falls well short of that standard. He has presented no evidence on essential questions like how nitrogen gas should be administered (using a gas chamber, a tent, a hood, a mask, or some other delivery device); in what concentration (pure nitrogen or some mixture of gases); how quickly and for how long it should be introduced; or how the State might ensure the safety of the execution team, including protecting them against the risk of gas leaks.
Why is that stuff Bucklew’s responsibility? It’s the State of Missouri’s responsibility, since it approved nitrogen as an approved method of execution! Author Epps also singles out two other barbaric aspects of the majority ruling:
Gorsuch’s opinion has two even more important malignant flaws. For at least 60 years, the Supreme Court has consistently held that the ban on “cruel and unusual punishments” is not limited to the ideas prevalent in the 18th century (when crimes were sometimes punished by hanging, whipping, branding, and even mutilation). Instead, in a 1958 case called Trop v. Dulles, the Court said that “the words of the Amendment are not precise, and … their scope is not static”; instead, it “must draw its meaning from the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.” This is a hugely important precedent, invoked dozens of times since then. It has led to such decisions as forbidding execution for rape (employed in the South into the 1960s) and execution of those who commit crimes as children or who become mentally ill while waiting to die. It is nothing less than vital to protecting American society from the growing clamor for barbaric treatment of the powerless.
But the majority opinion pretended that Trop did not exist, instead turning to a repellent discussion of how much it hurt to be hanged in the 18th century (rather a lot, apparently) and whether drowning in your own blood is really all that much worse.
In the next section of the opinion, Gorsuch suggested that the real problem with death-penalty jurisprudence is those pesky people who just won’t get aboard the gurney. The Court’s inconvenient involvement in death cases, he wrote, could be reduced if the federal courts begin “invoking their equitable power to dismiss or curtail suits that are pursued in a ‘dilatory’ fashion or based on ‘speculative’ theories.”
And indeed, you can sense the petulance of these death-mongers in the Court’s opinion, which suggests that it’s indeed time for Bucklew to mount the gurney, even if it results in cruel and unusual punishment:You know my view on capital punishment: I oppose it because it offers no alternative over life in prison, with or without parole: it’s neither a deterrent nor does it allow for rehabilitation or keeping criminals sequestered (compared to jailing them). It’s retributive punishment. And if a convicted person is later found to be innocent, having killed them can’t right the wrong. In this case the execution is doubly wrong, for it’s likely to be cruel and unusual punishment, and yet the Court refuses to even consider means of execution that are less painful. The majority is without empathy. At long last, gentlemen, have you no decency?
I just learned this from CNN (click on screenshot):
As you probably know, Smollett was charged with 16 felony counts for faking a racist and homophobic attack on himself, and according to the Chicago Police, they had him dead to rights, including the cooperation of the fake “attackers” and a copy of the check Smollett paid them to stage the attack.
So why this sudden reversal of fortune? The only thing reported is this:
The Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office didn’t immediately explain why the felony disorderly charges were dropped, except to say it came after reviewing the case’s facts, and in view of his agreement to forfeit his $10,000 bond.
“After reviewing all of the facts and circumstances of the case, including Mr. Smollett’s volunteer service in the community and agreement to forfeit his bond to the City of Chicago, we believe this outcome is a just disposition and appropriate resolution to this case,” the state’s attorney’s office said in a statement.
If Smollett was innocent, why did he forfeit his bond? And if they intended to go easy on him, the prosecution could have recommended a light plea deal or a light sentence. I’m truly mystified. Wiping out a potential criminal record, which is what happens when charges are dropped, doesn’t seem to me like a “just disposition and inappropriate resolution to this case.” At the very least, he should have been tried and, if convincted, a sentence imposed as a deterrent. Getting criminal record may have been enough, ensuring that Smollett would suffer some consequences for what he did. Now, by all rights, he can go back to work without disapprobation.
If you’re a lawyer or a savant, explain this to me.
UPDATE: Go here to see a post from later on this day, detailing Adam Rutherford’s objection to this paper, which he calls a “joke” because of the possibility of contamination, the lack of provenance of the shawl, the sloppy calculations, and the weak genetic evidence.
_____________
The paper below is getting a lot of publicity, and its conclusion, that Jack the Ripper—the long unidentified British serial killer—was really a 23-year-old Polish barber named Aaron Kosminski, is being trumpeted in all the media. After all, the Ripper, who killed five women in 1888 in a particularly gory manner, has long fascinated the public as an unknown figure of evil. Hundreds of books and papers have been written speculating about his identity, but nothing conclusive has resulted.
Now, a paper in the Journal of Forensic Sciences (probably free with the legal app Unpaywall; click on link below, or get pdf here) purports to identify the killer using DNA evidence on a shawl linked to the crime. But I’m not really impressed with the paper, as the authors don’t present the results in full, and a piece in Science about the paper identifies further problems.
Here’s the link; if it doesn’t work, I’ll be glad to send you the pdf:
The identification is based on DNA extracted from a silk shawl found at the murder scene of Catherine Eddowes, a shawl recovered by a police officer and passed down to his relatives. (Science, however, says that the shawl was bought in 2007 by a writer, Russell Edwards, and given to Louhelainen. It also notes that “Other critics of the Kosminsky theory have pointed out that there’s no evidence the shawl was ever at the crime scene.”—neither of these facts is mentioned in the paper).
Eddowes, one of the five victims, and one of two killed on September 30, had several wounds, and her left kidney and her uterus were cut out and removed (there is plenty of gory detail, and a photo of the autopsied victim at the Wikipedia page). A card purporting to be from the Ripper, and referring to the “double event”, is known as the “Saucy Jacky postcard”, and was received at police headquarters on October 1, but its authenticity is uncertain. This is a facsimile of the front (the card has disappeared), and the message is below:
Text on the obverse:
I was not codding dear old Boss when I gave you the tip, you’ll hear about Saucy Jacky’s work tomorrow double event this time number one squealed a bit couldn’t finish straight off. Had not time to get ears off for police thanks for keeping last letter back till I got to work again.
Jack the Ripper
There’s also a “letter from hell” that accompanied a kidney that was sent to a London vigilance committee, but the handwriting on that letter differs from that on the Saucy Jacky postcard.
Aaron Kosminski was a suspect in the murder, apparently because he “hated women and had strong homicidal tendencies”, but even here there is ambiguity, as Wikipedia reports that his name might have been confused with that of a Jewish bootmaker, Nathan Kaminsky (aka “David Cohen”), and even “Aaron” as a first name was recovered from records of Londoners long after the murders were committed. Both men died in insane asylums.
Back to the paper. The shawl, as I said, was made of silk, and had dyes that ran in the rain. The authors suggest that a fancy garment like this probably belonged to the Ripper, not to Eddowes, as Eddowes was a poor woman who worked as a casual prostitute.
The authors located stains on the shawn by visual inspection of the shawl and UV and infrared photography. Bloodstains were distinguishable from semen stains (presumably the killer masturbated on the shawl). Here’s the shawl:
(From Figure 2 of paper): Images of the shawl parts. Upper left: largest piece of the shawl with the blue and brown sections. Lower left: the floral detail on the shawl. Right: smaller piece of the shawl from the blue side.
The stained areas—both putative bloodstains and sperm stains—were washed and DNA from the extracts sequenced; in most cases they isolated single cells from the material and extracted and amplified both mitochondrial and nuclear DNA from those cells, also doing profiles of others who could have contaminated the shawl in the interim. Not much DNA could be obtained, but enough for the authors’ analysis, which shows how refined the technique has become. Single cells can help incriminate you!
They then compared the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) from the putative blood and semen samples to DNA from relatives of Eddowes and the suspect Aaron Kosminski. Although mtDNA is passed on only through females, it is present in the midpiece of sperm, and is destroyed after fertilization. mtDNA is useful for this analysis because it can be passed on intact (save for rare mutations) in the female relatives of the victim and perp; all one has to do is find females in female lines of descent from Eddowes’s and Kosminski’s mothers, and compare their DNA with that on the shawl. Who they sampled and their relationship to victim and suspect are not reported in the paper for legal reasons, though I think they could have given at least those nameless individuals in a line of descent.
The way the data are reported is weird: they appear as simply blocks colored in, denoting a match in the mitocondrial DNA regions, and the matching sequences are not given. Here’s how the matches are shown:
(From paper’s Figure 7): Sequencing results of mtDNA presented as graphical blocks when deviations from the Human revised Cambridge reference sequence (rCRS) have been recorded. Color coding is used to highlight the results (victim = blue, suspect = red, owner = green, and laboratory operator = gray).
As you see 6 regions of mtDNA on the shawl that were variable (apparently single nucleotides, though they’re not clear on this nor give the sequences) matched Eddowes’s sequence, and seven regions of the shawl that were variable matched mtDNA from relatives of Kosminski (there was a non-match for two nucleotides).
The frequency of a match for Kosminski (using the present-day European population) is .019, or 1.9%, while the frequency of the type for Eddowes is 0.0013, or 0.13%. These are interesting, but also mean that thousands of people in London today could be a match for either sample. The results, then, are intriguing but not dispositive. And they have no database for London, neither now nor of course from 1888, so these figures are at best ballpark estimates. Neither the shaw’s “owner” (not specified) nor the lab boss (or technician) matched the stains.
The 11 nuclear DNA sites were used only to determine what the killer’s hair and eye color were, as these sites are like those used in 23&Me to tell you what you probably look like. They show that the killer had brown hair and brown eyes, which match one eyewitness report (not given in the paper) of what the Ripper looked like. As the authors note:
One of the strengths of this paper is the demonstration of the use of aged single cells as a source of genomic DNA. This was taken further by using in‐house assays for amelogenin sex determination and phenotypic SNP markers. The results were in full accordance with one of the very few witness statements considered reliable: a male with brown eyes and brown hair. Although these characteristics are surely not unique, they fully support our hypothesis. We have no reliable information on how common these phenotypic features were with males in London in 1888, but at the moment, blue eyes are more common than brown in England.
Well, this isn’t very strong evidence, and to be sure the authors don’t make a strong claim that they’ve identified the killer. However, they fail to present all the data they have so that other scientists can judge how strong their conclusion really is. And they seem to omit critical data, like Science‘s claim that there’s not strong evidence that the shawl was in fact found at the murder scene. (There is a chain-of-custody letter.)
So, has Jack the Ripper’s identify finally been revealed? The answer is “probably not,” but the data, at least in the weak form presented here, increase the likelihood that Aaron Kosminski, who was a suspect in the murders, was the killer. But we’re a long way from knowing who butchered those five women. Caveat lector.
Bedridden as I am, and unable to brain, all I can do is pass the news onto you (see CNN here and here and the New York Times for the details). But I do know the two most well known people among those just charged and arrested, since I used to watch television in the days when they were famous.
These are the two actors Felicity Huffman, who was in “Desperate Housewives” and Lori Lauglin, from “Full House”. They joined 31 other rich folk, including executives and magnates of all stripes in faking SAT scores and athletic records of student applicants for positions in prestigious colleges. Others charged were school administrators and coaches who were bribed to create the faked records. The cheating parents, whose kids were unaware of the scheme, paid about $400,000 to $600,000 in fees and bribes, but one hapless parent paid $6 million! Both Huffman and Loughlin were charged with felony conspiracy to commit mail fraud and “honest services mail fraud”, both felonies.
The pdf of the indictment is here, and given the breadth of the case, the Justice Department itself has released a chart with the names and crimes of those charged. I don’t recognize any of the other names, but the ringleaders face other and more serious charges, including obstruction of justice, racketeering, and conspiracy to commit money laundering.
As the New York Times reports:
The case unveiled Tuesday was stunning in its breadth and audacity. It was the Justice Department’s largest ever education prosecution, a sprawling investigation that involved 200 agents nationwide and resulted in the arrests of 50 people in six states.
The charges also underscored how important college has become as a primary determinate of prosperity and success in America, at the same time that admissions have become more competitive and cutthroat. The authorities say the parents of some of the nation’s wealthiest and most privileged students bribed and cheated to secure spots for their children at top universities, not only cheating the system, but potentially cheating other hard-working students out of a chance at a college education.
“The parents are the prime movers of this fraud,” Andrew E. Lelling, the United States attorney for the District of Massachusetts, said Tuesday during a news conference. Mr. Lelling said that those parents used their wealth to create a separate and unfair admissions process for their children.
But, Mr. Lelling said, “there will not be a separate criminal justice system” for them.
The other details are available at the site, and it looks grim given that there are incriminating phone recordings, including from both actors.
A few years ago I would not have thought this possible. After all, it’s Harvard (for which I retain some vestigial affection), and the protestors, who are demanding the scalp of a black law professor who is defending Harvey Weinstein, are so terribly ignorant of the basis of criminal defense that they seem almost stupid. But they’re not stupid: their rationality has been overwhelmed by their wokeness. This is a very sad tale, and what’s worse is that Harvard administrators are complicit in demonizing the law professor.
The professor is Ronald S. Sullivan, Jr., a Clinical Professor of Law at Harvard’s Law School and director of Harvard’s Criminal Justice Institute. He’s also a “faculty dean” at Winthrop House, one of the twelve residential houses/dormitories where Harvard students live for their first three years at the University. As dean there, Sullivan’s job is to oversee student life, making sure that everybody is as comfortable as possible, feels supported, and has the resources they need. It’s a big job, and so far Sullivan has done well, receiving great reviews.
That is, until it was revealed that he was part of Harvey Weinstein’s defense team.
As with many University law professors, Sullivan does private law practice in addition to his academic duties. And his clients have ranged over a whole spectrum, including the family of Michael Brown, the black teenager killed by police in Ferguson, Missouri, and whose death helped ignite the Black Lives Matter movement. That should give Sullivan some bonus points to the students. Sullivan has defended other people whom the Left should approve of as well. In his eloquent and admirable defense of Sullivan in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Harvard Law professor Randall Kennedy (another African-American), says this:
[Sullivan] helped win an acquittal in the double-murder prosecution of the professional football player Aaron Hernandez (a convicted murderer in a different case, who eventually committed suicide). He represented the family of Michael Brown, whose death at the hands of a police officer in Ferguson, Mo., fueled the Black Lives Matter movement. At the invitation of the Brooklyn district attorney, he designed and adopted a conviction-review program that freed scores of improperly imprisoned people. Sullivan is, in short, an imposing, deeply respected figure in the legal community.
. . . When a disoriented undergraduate running down the street naked was arrested by the police in April 2018, Sullivan was among the first to leap to the student’s aid, providing him with assistance that led to a favorable outcome. That student might well have been marked by a criminal record or suffered jail time but for Sullivan’s intervention. That instance was by no means idiosyncratic. Sullivan is characteristically drawn to defending the vulnerable. A piece in The Boston Globe notes an undergraduate who described how Sullivan supported her efforts to hold to account a sexual abuser. Sullivan’s record of vigilant attentiveness to the interests of students at Harvard should, at the very least, have earned him the benefit of the doubt. Instead he is the target of impudent disdain.
Why? Because he’s on Harvey Weinstein’s defense team and is reported to on the defense team of another Harvard professor, Roland Fryer, who has been accused of sexual harassment. That was enough for the students, as well as some Harvard deans, who can’t abide the idea of a defense attorney defending someone accused of sexual misconduct—even though he’s defended other people who don’t seem so reprehensible and is engaged in constructive judicial work for the poor and marginalized.
More than 50 students called for College administrators to remove Winthrop Faculty Dean Ronald S. Sullivan, Jr., from his post at a rally in front of Massachusetts Hall Monday afternoon.
Toting signs that read “Do Your Job” and “Remove Sullivan,” attendees laid out a set of demands for Harvard administrators. They called for Sullivan’s removal, a public apology, and a formal inquiry into faculty deans’ responsibilities to students.
. . . At Monday’s rally, students stood in front of Massachusetts Hall with tape over their mouths.
After several minutes of silence, a series of students spoke. Hilda M. Jordan ’19 said Sullivan’s comments on Weinstein and Fryer conflict with his role as a faculty dean. In particular, she pointed to Sullivan’s allegations that witnesses in Harvard’s investigations into Fryer were coached.
“Your role is not just in filing paperwork or smiling in our faces. Your role is to deal with the culture that you establish as a Faculty Dean. So Dean Sullivan, please reconcile how you can care about sexual assault and at the same time, have claims against a Harvard affiliate being nothing more than coaching?” she said. “You are a faculty dean, not just an attorney.”
Winthrop resident Madeleine D. Woods ’19 also called for Sullivan to step down from his post and for administrators to reshape the faculty dean position.
“Even if he puts out an apology, the fact that he didn’t even think of the impact this would have is probably the most damning element of this,” Woods said. “The only move forward is not only to remove Dean Sullivan, but then to have a structural reconsideration of what it means to be a faculty dean so we don’t have an issue like this again.”
Here’s a Crimson photo of the protesting students:
Photo: Shera S. Avi-Yonah
And another Crimson photo of how somebody defaced the door of Winthrop House:
Photo: Shera S. Avi-Yonah, The Harvard Crimson
It’s not just the students who are calling for Sullivan’s removal. As Kennedy notes:
“We condemn Sullivan’s decision to represent Weinstein,” The Crimson editorial board declares, highlighting what it views as “the incongruity” of “defending Weinstein in his role as defense attorney, while simultaneously working to promote a safe and comfortable environment for victims of sexual misconduct and assault in his capacity of faculty dean.”
. . . The editorial board writes that “when a mentor and authority figure makes a decision to defend an individual facing allegations of sexual misconduct, he has in effect closed his doors to any student who might look to him for support or solace regarding these issues.”
The Association of Black Harvard Women maintains that Sullivan’s involvement in the Harvey Weinstein case “will only work to embolden rape culture on this campus.”
It’s very odd that these accusations ignore Sullivan’s long-standing commitment to defending the poor and marginalized.
The Crimson suggests that the Harvard administration is taking the side of the students as well, which I find both disturbing and unconscionable:
Several College administrators attended the event. Dean of Students Katherine G. O’Dair and Harvard College Title IX coordinator Emily J. Miller watched the protest and spoke with students afterward. The Office for Sexual Assault Prevention and Response also set up a table with hot chocolate and handouts for attendees.
Lowell Faculty Dean Diana L. Eck, who attended the rally, said she agreed with students’ calls for the College to reevaluate the faculty dean position.
“We talk a lot about what the role of a resident dean is, what the roles of our tutors are, but the faculty dean role is really important. It’s not nominal. It means a certain amount of hard decision-making on the part of those of us who assume that role,” Eck said.
. . . Dean of the College Rakesh Khurana wrote in an email Monday that support for students in residential spaces is “among the highest of the College’s priorities.”
“I take seriously the concerns that have been raised from members of the College community regarding the impact of Professor Sullivan’s choice to serve as counsel for Harvey Weinstein on the House community that he is responsible for leading as a faculty dean,” Khurana wrote. “I have also met with Professor Sullivan to discuss his responsibilities to the House and have communicated that the College believes that more work must be done to uphold our commitment to the well-being of our students.”
Yes, I can well imagine what Khurana’s “discussion of Sullivan’s responsibilities” was about.
These administrators should be defending Sullivan like Kennedy did, not implying that they are on the students’ side. I have written to both Eck and Khurana expressing my displeasure with their behavior (see email addresses below).
The students’ attitude is apparently that anybody who criminally defends someone guilty of sexual assault should be demonized and punished, regardless of their record of social-justice defense. Indeed, it almost implies that no lawyer should be defending people as odious as Weinstein. Yes, Weinstein is odious, but everybody deserves a defense. The purpose of a vigorous criminal defense is largely to keep our system of justice strong and intact, ensuring that only the most rigorous evidence and highest standards of guilt (“beyond a reasonable doubt”) be enforced. In other words, a strong defense keeps the prosecution honest, the law strong, and the citizens comfortable with the judicial system. If Weinstein is found not to have committed crimes “beyond reasonable doubt”, then he shouldn’t be convicted as a criminal (though he could be found guilty in civil suits). I personally think Weinstein is guilty as hell, but his case still needs to go through the criminal-justice system before he’s tossed in the slammer.
This resonates with me because I was once in a related situation. For several years I worked as an expert witness for criminal-defense attorneys, contesting the government’s flawed and often duplicitous use of DNA evidence to “match” the DNA profiles of the accused with blood or semen samples. Almost always working for public defenders, and for free, I defended accused murders and rapists. I was even on the defense team of O.J. Simpson, though I didn’t contribute much to the trial. I learned a lot about our criminal justice system from this experience; one lesson was that the prosecution, supposedly committed to ensuring justice, would often twist the evidence because their real goal was conviction.
I did this work not because I wanted to free criminals, but to ensure that both the poor and the rich, the obscure and the famous, got a fair trial—a trial in which the accused could mount a rigorous defense and that the prosecution was kept on the rails and could make its case strongly. In other words, I worked to keep the legal system strong.
This bothered some of the students in my department, but only when I defended two black men accused of aggravated rape. That upset some female graduate students. To deal with that, I gave a talk to the students explaining how the government was misusing DNA evidence, and why I was contesting the prosecution: to ensure scientific truth and as well as a sound legal system. The public defender with whom I worked, a woman, also spoke to the students. In the end, I think they understood, unlike the students at Harvard. (By the way, let me give a shout-out here to these public defenders, who work long hours at low pay, doing the best they can for the poor people whom they represent. They are often overwhelmed with huge case loads, and my work with them opened my eyes to the difference in legal representation that the poor get in America compared to the wealthy.)
But back to Sullivan. Harvard should be defending him and defending his defense of others. But they aren’t. The students haven’t thought much about this, apparently, despite Sullivan’s having written two letters to Winthrop House students explaining his actions. He shouldn’t have had to do that. This is Harvard, for crying out loud! But even Harvard students can let their “wokeness” overwhelm their rationality.
Kennedy ends his defense of Sullivan with a powerful message. I’ve put part of this in bold because I think it explains why many university administrators are defending the woke, even when the woke are wrong or misguided:
These events are emblematic of a crisis besetting all strata of higher education, as activists of various stripes perceive cannily the temptation of administrators to mollify zealots in return for quiet — regardless of the merits of competing arguments or the importance of the values in question.
That “progressive” activists could denounce so bitterly a person who has demonstrated so clearly a commitment to inclusive, humane, liberal values and practices is indicative of a concerted illiberalism that is menacing university life. As this controversy unfolds, one can only hope that Harvard authorities will decline to defer to expressions of noisy discomfort and instead adhere to those intellectual and moral tenets that sometimes must bear the uncomfortable burden of complexity.
Kudos to Sullivan for vigorously defending his colleague.
One last thought: Harvard students are being groomed to be America’s leaders, and many of them will be. Their behavior thus makes me doubly distressed, for, unless they grow up, they’ll import this wokeness into politics, government, and every area of adult life.
These articles were brought to my attention by Greg Mayer, who also went to Harvard and who added his own take in an email to me:
One of the things that bothers me most about these things is the complete lack of respect for the principles of due process, and how that process often leads to the exoneration of the accused. There was a disturbing piece on NPR piece yesterday about 6 people jailed for a rape and murder they didn’t commit—exonerated years later by DNA tests. They were convicted using classic techniques used to develop distorted and false eyewitness testimony. I taught science and pseudoscience for 18 years, and one of the key take-home lessons is that the sincerity of a witness’s testimony is no guarantee of its accuracy. So many injustices have occurred due to simply believing what people say. It boggles the mind to see how quickly society seems to have forgotten that.
Weinstein might be guilty, but there is absolutely nothing dishonorable in insisting that he receive a fair trial, and nothing dishonorable in being his lawyer. John Adams defended the British soldiers at the Boston Massacre, winning acquittal of 6 of 8, and reduced charges for the other 2. Though a well known member of the Patriot party at the time, defending the British soldiers, he later wrote, was “… one of the most gallant, generous, manly and disinterested Actions of my whole Life, and one of the best Pieces of Service I ever rendered my Country.”
As I said, I’ve written to both Dean Rakesh Khurana and Faculty Dean Diana Eck, copying Harvard President Lawrence Bacow, defending Sullivan’s right to defend Weinstein (or anybody else) without being demonized by students and tut-tutted by the Harvard administration. You can find their email addresses at the links right above if you want to give your opinion, one way or the other.
UPDATE: Here’s my letter, which I’ve put below the fold to save space:
UPDATE: Reuters reports that Smollett staged the attack because he was dissatisfied with his salary on Empire. (It must have been substantial, though!). This motive apparently comes not from Smollett, of course, but probably from the two “assailants” he hired.
And it gets even weirder. Smollett wrote a CHECK to pay off his assailants, or so this NBC reporter says. HOW CAN YOU BE THAT DUMB?
SMOLLETT CASE Per Chicago PD Commission Johnson, -Injuries to Smollett were self-inflicted scratches. -Smollett wrote a $3,500 check to the brothers to stage the attack. -Attack was done to promote his career. -Smollett sent the threat letter. -Smollett "orchestrated this"
I think that almost everyone has heard of what happened with Jussie Smollett, who’s fairly well known for playing a musician in the ongoing Fox drama Empire. As Wikipedia recounts the details, Smollett, who lives in Chicago where the series is filmed, claimed that he was attacked on the night of January 19 by two white men who beat him, put a noose around his neck, and dumped a chemical on him. They also apparently called him a “nigger” and a “faggot” (he’s gay and black), and shouted, “This is MAGA country.” (That, of course, stands for the Trump motto, “Make America Great Again.”)
This seemed fishy from the outset. How could these guys have known who he was unless they were tracking him? The shouted motto and noose seemed stereotypical, a bit over the top. More important, Chicago police couldn’t find any evidence of an attack from video surveillance, and when the cops came several hours later, Smollett was still wearing the noose around his neck. Why didn’t he take it off?
As the police investigation continued, with a dozen officers assigned to the case, Smollett’s story began to unravel. It was found that his assailants were both black; why would they attack another black man and use racist epithets? Moreover, both of the supposed assailants, brothers, had tangential connections to the show Empire, and that was deeply suspicious. They both knew Smollett. Finally, it appeared that both men, who were from Nigeria, told the police that Smollett had hired them to conduct the attack.
Now, as the New York Times reports, Smollett, who turned himself in to police this morning, has been charged with faking an accident report, which is a class 4 felony in Illinois—a crime for which he could face up to three years in prison. There’s also a threatening note that Smollett received, and if he’s complicit in that, as seems likely, he faces federal charges on top of the state charges (he used the U.S. Mail).
The story, as the NYT recounts, was initially taken up widely by the media as an example of not just racism and homophobia, but also bigotry inspired by Donald Trump. There wasn’t much skepticism or withholding of judgment, despite the holes in Smollett’s story.
Why did Smollett, though, who was pretty famous and certainly well off, have to concoct an incident like this? Writing in The Atlantic, John McWhorter, an author and professor of linguistics at Columbia University, and also a black man, has a thoughtful answer. Click on the screenshot below to read it.
Now it’s almost too easy to use this incident—and I’m assuming the police allegations are true—to indict not just the social justice crowd but also the credulous media. After all, it plays into the hands of all of us who hate Trump and his administration, and also to that moiety of the Left that sees racism and homophobia as institutionalized in this country (I see this bigotry as a recurring problem to be solved, but not, in general, as an institutionalized one). But there’s another side of the coin: these incidents of false reporting play into the hands of the Right as well, actually strengthening Trump’s supporters and giving people an excuse to dismiss any claim of violence motivated by bigotry. For these reasons we should maintain skepticism from the outset, trying to be compassionate but also looking hard at the evidence.
Still, the question remains: why did Smollett do this? And that’s the topic of McWhorter’s essay. While noting that racism is still with us, he raises the tropes of “victimhood chic” and “professional martyrs”:
Until this twist [the Chicago police changing the “trajectory of the investigation” after looking at the evidence], smart people were claiming that the attack on Smollett was the story of Donald Trump’s America writ small—that it revealed the terrible plight of minority groups today. But the Smollett story, if the “trajectory” leads to evidence of fakery, would actually reveal something else modern America is about: victimhood chic. Future historians and anthropologists will find this aspect of early-21st-century America peculiar, intriguing, and sad.
Smollett doesn’t need the money he would get from a court settlement, and he isn’t trying to deny someone higher office. So why in the world would he fake something like that attack—if he did indeed fake it? The reason might be that he has come of age in an era when nothing he could have done or said would have made him look more interesting than being attacked on the basis of his color and sexual orientation.
Racial politics today have become a kind of religion in which whites grapple with the original sin of privilege, converts tar questioners of the orthodoxy as “problematic” blasphemers, and everyone looks forward to a judgment day when America “comes to terms” with race. Smollett—if he really did stage the attack—would have been acting out the black-American component in this eschatological configuration, the role of victim as a form of status. We are, within this hierarchy, persecuted prophets, ever attesting to the harm that white racism does to us and pointing to a future context in which our persecutors will be redeemed of the sin of having leveled that harm upon us. We are noble in our suffering.
Indeed, McWhorter argues later on that the fact that being a victim of racist and homophobic bigotry gives you fame and admiration shows that this country has ascended the moral arc for civil right and gay rights, for in the bad old days you would not be a hero if you were a black or gay man who was attacked.
Certainly, the professional martyr is a race-neutral personality type. However, since the civil-rights victories of the 1960s, when whites became open in a new way to understanding black pain, that personality type has been especially useful to black Americans. With positive racial self-image possibly elusive after hundreds of years of naked abuse, the noble-victim position can seem especially, and understandably, comforting. It can also be handy, in a fashion quite unexpected to anyone who was on the front lines of race activism 50 years ago—as a road to stardom.
“Professional martyr” is a useful term for such cases, and there are many incidents in which people have faked attacks like this to either buttress their cause or claim victim status. (I’m not denigrating, of course, those true reports of attacks based on racism and other forms of bigotry.)
As far as what Smollett had to gain, it was this admiration. He already had it, but presumably craved more:
[Rachel] Dolezal, white, spent years with a spray tan, “identifying” as black and even heading a local NAACP branch, and had fabricated episodes of racist discrimination against herself. As Bryan Cranston’s dentist character on Seinfeld adopted Judaism for the jokes, Dolezal, one might say, took on blackness for the victimhood. She felt that her existence was more meaningful while she was “playing” an oppressed black person than living as a white person despite all the attendant privileges. Few news events more perfectly illustrated that in our moment, a claim of victimhood from a black person is a form of power. Only in an America much further past the old days than many like to admit could a white person eagerly seek to be a put-upon black person out of a sense that it looked “cool.” A Dolezal would have been unimaginable until roughly the late 1990s.
One could imagine that Smollett, if he was playacting, had a similar motivation. For Smollett, being a successful actor and singer might not have been quite as exciting as being a poster child for racist abuse in Trump’s America.
Assuming, again, that the reports are accurate, Smollett’s clumsiness would be an especially poignant indication of how deeply this victimhood chic has taken hold—almost as if he thought this was such an easy score that he didn’t even need to think too hard about the logistics.
Now of course McWhorter is psychologizing Smollett here, and we don’t know what was in Smollett’s mind, but, for a rational person, I can’t think of any other motivation. In his last sentence, McWhorter finds a silver lining in this cloud:
. . . Smollett, if the latest reporting is true, was an eager puppy, jumping with joyous inattention into American social politics as he has encountered it coming of age in the 21st century. He would have known that in this moment, very important people would find him more interesting for having been hurt on the basis of his identity than for his fine performance on an interesting hit television show. He would have known this so well that it didn’t even occur to him that his story would have to be more credible than the dopey one he threw together about being jumped in near-Arctic temperatures by the only two white bullies in America with a mysterious fondness for a black soap hip-hopera. (Yet again, I’m assuming the latest reporting is accurate.)
Only in an America in which matters of race are not as utterly irredeemable as we are often told could things get to the point that someone would pretend to be tortured in this way, acting oppression rather than suffering it, seeking to play a prophet out of a sense that playing a singer on television is not as glamorous as getting beaten up by white guys. That anyone could feel this way and act on it in the public sphere is, in a twisted way, a kind of privilege, and a sign that we have come further on race than we are often comfortable admitting.
I don’t feel any Schadenfreude in this incident. Smollett is a figure to be pitied, and, given that his career is ruined, I don’t see why (if he’s found guilty) he needs to spend much time in jail, except perhaps a modicum of incarceration to deter others from the same kind of behavior. No matter how much time he does, he’ll always be known as the bozo who faked his own attack. The lesson, as everybody has already drawn, is to be skeptical of claims like this, and not bruit about the mantra “believe the victim.”
Empathy yes, credulity no. For it is stuff like this that will help Trump in 2020, and contribute to the division of America.
