Tag: police abuses
The Professor Who Brought Reform To American Law Enforcement

The Professor Who Brought Reform To American Law Enforcement

Many people, looking back on their lives, wonder if anything they've done made any difference in the lives of their fellow humans. Yale Kamisar only had to turn on any TV police drama to be reminded that millions of people had benefited from his work.

Kamisar, who died at age 92 on January 30, was a law professor who spent most of his career at the University of Michigan. Like most academics, he toiled away without imposing unduly on the attention of the public at large.

But in 1966, the Supreme Court took notice of an article he had written contrasting the protections afforded defendants in court with the conditions suspects endured when being questioned in police stations. The justices cited the essay four times in one of the most important decisions of the past century, Miranda v. Arizona.

That decision, with a majority opinion by Chief Justice Earl Warren, required police to recite a warning to anyone they arrest: "You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you."

The case involved Ernesto Miranda, who signed a confession only after being handcuffed, forced to stand and browbeaten for four hours by police, who ignored his plea for an attorney and, when his lawyer arrived, refused to grant him access to his client. Such abuses were common police practice at the time, but Kamisar helped the court see a way to combat it.

John F. Kennedy once said, "Victory has a hundred fathers, but defeat is an orphan." It was only Kamisar, though, who became known as "the father of Miranda."

The point of the ruling was to give suspects a measure of protection in the coercive environment of a police station. It was controversial not only at the time but for decades afterward. An official in Richard Nixon's Justice Department argued that the Miranda warning would harm public safety by "preventing a defendant from making any statement at all."

But the concept gained broad acceptance, and in 2000, the Supreme Court strongly, and unexpectedly, reaffirmed it. "Miranda has become embedded in routine police practice to the point where the warnings have become part of our national culture," said the court — in an opinion written by that former Justice Department official, Chief Justice William Rehnquist.

The Miranda warning was not enough by itself to prevent police abuses, as Kamisar recognized. He was an early proponent of recording interrogations — an idea that has been adopted by more than half the states. But the warning serves as a regular reminder to police, suspects and the public that even the worst of us have rights that the government must respect.

Kamisar might have kicked back and spent the rest of his life dining out on that achievement. But his prodigious scholarship continued, and it continued to be a formidable influence on other matters, being cited in more than 30 Supreme Court decisions.

Remember that line in the Miranda warning about your right to a lawyer, at public expense if necessary? It stems from the court's 1963 decision that the Constitution requires ensuring that defendants have legal counsel — a decision that also cited Kamisar.

He was vigilant in trying to make sure that constitutional guarantees had real force. Among his most passionate causes was defending the exclusionary rule, which generally bars the use of evidence that police obtain through illegal searches.

When the Supreme Court applied this restriction to states in 1961, critics howled that it would cripple law enforcement and let the guilty go free. Kamisar pointed out that their complaint was really about the constitutional ban on unreasonable searches and seizures.

The court, after all, didn't alter the Fourth Amendment or the obstacles it posed to law enforcement. All it did was provide a penalty and remedy for constitutional violations.

"If the police feared that evidence they were gathering in the customary manner would now be excluded by the courts," Kamisar noted, "the police must have been violating the guarantee against unreasonable search and seizure all along." The exclusionary rule made this fundamental liberty something more than a quaint ideal.

Constitutional rights are mere words on paper until human beings find ways to give them life. Americans have far more protection against police abuses than they once did, and Yale Kamisar is one of the reasons why.

Follow Steve Chapman on Twitter @SteveChapman13 or at https://www.facebook.com/stevechapman13. To find out more about Steve Chapman and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

At Funeral Of White Teen Killed By Cop, Sharpton Signals Yearning For Change

At Funeral Of White Teen Killed By Cop, Sharpton Signals Yearning For Change

There's no doubt that left-wing culture warriors have done great harm to the Democratic cause. Some of it is mere foolishness. I've never forgotten being chided at a college talk several years ago for using the word "murderess" to describe a character in my book Widow's Web who shot her husband in his sleep and later orchestrated a plot to kill her defense lawyer's wife.

"Murderess," one professor said, was unacceptably "gendered" language. To quibble about it would have been pointlessly distracting. Even so, I've wondered about it ever since. After all, is "murderer" an honorific? To most people, "murderess" conveys something even more sinister; a meaningful distinction. What's gained by making language less precise?

But it's when cant touches upon real world concerns that the trouble starts. Consider the phrase "Defund the Police." Has there ever been a dumber, more politically maladroit slogan in American political history? Worse even than Hillary Clinton's "basket of deplorables."

Far worse, actually. Clinton's remark merely convinced people that she was a snob. Rhetoric about doing away with cops made voters think that liberal Democrats inhabit a different planet. In an interview with VOX, veteran political operative James Carville put it this way: "Maybe tweeting that we should abolish the police isn't the smartest thing to do because almost [bleeping] no one wants to do that."

Words matter, Carville insists. "You ever get the sense that people in faculty lounges in fancy colleges use a different language than ordinary people? They come up with a word like 'Latinx' that no one else uses. Or they use a phrase like 'communities of color.' I don't know anyone who speaks like that. I don't know anyone who lives in a 'community of color'….This is not how voters talk. And doing it anyway is a signal that you're talking one language and the people you want to vote for you are speaking another language."

In the real world, for example, people wake up to headlines like these, which arrived in my inbox as I composed the preceding paragraph: "UAMS Officer kills gun-wielding man"; "Police ID man fatally shot at apartment complex"; and "15-year-old arrested in killing of Jacksonville man."

One medium-sized Southern city; one ordinary weekday in July.

Abolish the police? In which solar system, pray tell?

So no, what with homicide rates rising sharply nationwide, I was not surprised to see Eric Adams, a Black former NYPD captain who campaigned on making New Yorkers feel safe and restoring confidence in the city's police, winning a Democratic primary that makes him the city's de facto mayor-elect.

"The debate around policing has been reduced to a false choice," Adams declared. "You are either with police, or you are against them. That is simply wrong because we are all for safety. We need the NYPD — we just need them to be better."

Whether or not Adams can deliver, that's exactly how Democrats should be talking. Also, contrary to a lot of loose rhetoric, it's all about the guns. Property crimes—burglary and theft—are actually decreasing in many places. Gun battles between rival gangs and drive-by shootings of innocent bystanders are way up.

Although you've not heard about it in the national news, something else that happened in my backyard has convinced me that ordinary people are hungry for change. In the farming community of Lonoke, Arkansas roughly 35 miles northeast of Little Rock, a sheriff's deputy shot a 17 year-old white kid named Hunter Brittain to death during a 3 AM traffic stop. The boy was unarmed and had no criminal history. He'd been working late to fix his uncle's truck transmission.

Details are scant, because the state police have kept their investigation close, although a special prosecutor has been appointed. Also because the deputy never turned on his body camera, for which he's been fired. Nightly protests began outside the Sheriff's Department, growing steadily more intense. His family likened young Brittain to Minneapolis murder victim George Floyd. Even Little Rock media, however, showed limited interest.

Not until the Rev. Al Sharpton showed up in town to preach at Hunter Brittain's funeral along with Ben Crump, the attorney for George Floyd's family — virtually the only black faces among hundreds of mourners.

Sharpton referenced a can of anti-freeze the victim held as he died. "We've been frozen in our race; we've been frozen in our own class," he said to thunderous applause. "I believe today Hunter is calling to us. It's time for some antifreeze."

I've got my reservations about Sharpton, but the symbolism of his appearing was impossible to ignore: Americans are ready to talk.

Danziger: That Good Ole Law ‘N Order

Danziger: That Good Ole Law ‘N Order

Jeff Danziger’s award-winning drawings are published by more than 600 newspapers and websites. He has been a cartoonist for theRutland Herald, the New York Daily Newsand the Christian Science Monitor; his work has appeared in newspapers from theWall Street Journal to Le Monde and Izvestia. Represented by the Washington Post Writers Group, he is a recipient of the Herblock Prize and the Thomas Nast (Landau) Prize. He served in the US Army as a linguist and intelligence officer in Vietnam, where he was awarded the Bronze Star and the Air Medal. Danziger has published ten books of cartoons and a novel about the Vietnam War. He was born in New York City, and now lives in Manhattan and Vermont. A video of the artist at work can be viewed here.