Your resource for news, research, opinion and comment in the world of Criminology and Criminal Justice, brought to you by the Criminology Library, Centre for Criminology & Sociolegal Studies, University of Toronto
Showing posts with label Liberalism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Liberalism. Show all posts
Liberalism’s unfinished agenda
In his column, Michael Lind writes that “Obama can't rest on his laurels. He still needs to fix our broken criminal justice and child care systems.”
Lind writes that there “should be an end to the permanent forfeiture of voting rights.
“People who have served out their punishment should be allowed to return to society as fully functioning citizens, not permanently relegated to a legal and political underclass. And tyrannical majorities should not be allowed to disenfranchise specific populations indirectly, as white majorities have sometimes sought to do, by connecting the forfeiture of voting rights to minor offenses like drug possession committed disproportionately by minorities and the poor.”
He cites a report from The Sentencing Project that notes that one in 13 African-Americans is disenfranchised as a result of a prior conviction; the numbers are even higher in Virginia (20 percent), Kentucky (22 percent) and Florida (23 percent).
Read on....
Bench Press: Are Obama’s judges really liberals?
by Jeffrey Toobin
The Obama Administration wanted to send a message with the President’s first nomination to a federal court. “There was a real conscious decision to use that first appointment to say, ‘This is a new way of doing things. This is a post-partisan choice,’ ” one White House official involved in the process told me. “Our strategy was to show that our judges could get Republican support.” So on March 17th President Obama nominated David Hamilton, the chief federal district-court judge in Indianapolis, to the Seventh Circuit court of appeals. Hamilton had been vetted with care. After fifteen years of service on the trial bench, he had won the highest rating from the American Bar Association; Richard Lugar, the senior senator from Indiana and a leading Republican, was supportive; and Hamilton’s status as a nephew of Lee Hamilton, a well-respected former local congressman, gave him deep connections. The hope was that Hamilton’s appointment would begin a profound and rapid change in the confirmation process and in the federal judiciary itself.
Read on...
The Obama Administration wanted to send a message with the President’s first nomination to a federal court. “There was a real conscious decision to use that first appointment to say, ‘This is a new way of doing things. This is a post-partisan choice,’ ” one White House official involved in the process told me. “Our strategy was to show that our judges could get Republican support.” So on March 17th President Obama nominated David Hamilton, the chief federal district-court judge in Indianapolis, to the Seventh Circuit court of appeals. Hamilton had been vetted with care. After fifteen years of service on the trial bench, he had won the highest rating from the American Bar Association; Richard Lugar, the senior senator from Indiana and a leading Republican, was supportive; and Hamilton’s status as a nephew of Lee Hamilton, a well-respected former local congressman, gave him deep connections. The hope was that Hamilton’s appointment would begin a profound and rapid change in the confirmation process and in the federal judiciary itself.
Read on...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)