A Dedication
I’m dedicating the 23rd issue of this newsletter to my all-time favorite baseball player, Chicago Cubs Hall of Fame second baseman Ryne Sandberg. The Cubs retired his #23 uniform in 2005, and the team recently announced that he will become the fifth player to be honored with a statue outside Wrigley Field later this year.
He became my favorite player in 1984 when he won the National League Most Valuable Player Award while leading the Cubs to their first postseason appearance since 1945. But what he did against the St. Louis Cardinals on June 23, 1984, cemented my adoration in what has become known as the Sandberg Game.
On the NBC Game of the Week (when that institution mattered), Sandberg hit game-tying home runs in the 9th and 10th innings to help the Cubs come from behind to beat our most bitter rivals. The Cubs’ Marquee Network made an excellent documentary about this game a couple of years ago.
But now, back to this newsletter’s more typical content—even though I am quite sure Ryno would disagree with my perspective on almost everything that follows. It happens.
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Here are some of the topics that have caught my attention as I’ve been browsing the internet:
Don’t Speak to the Police
New York Times columnist Farhad Manjoo explains how Alec Baldwin’s indictment for involuntary manslaughter demonstrates why people—even innocent people—should use their Fifth Amendment rights when interacting with police.
New Mexico prosecutors filed the charges against Baldwin and the film’s armorer for the October 2021 fatal shooting of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins on the set of the film Rust. Baldwin told the police in the aftermath of the shooting that he would do whatever he could to help. Baldwin spoke to the police about the incident after being told they were not charging him.
Manjoo notes that he is more interested in the general idea than in Baldwin’s specific case, explaining why he has become a “zealot” for the right to remain silent: “The Fifth Amendment of the Constitution allows Americans to refuse to answer questions from law enforcement. Yet despite the ritualistic incantation of the Miranda warning on every TV police procedural, silence is a right that people can find hard to accept. If you’re convinced of your innocence, aren’t you obligated to help the police solve the matter under investigation? Refusing to talk to the police seems like something people do only when they’ve got something to hide.
I have only a passing interest in Baldwin’s guilt or innocence. Several years ago, though, I came upon the work of James Duane, a professor at Regent Law School in Virginia who has become a Johnny Appleseed of Fifth Amendment advocacy. A video of a lecture Duane gave a decade ago on the importance of the Fifth Amendment, “Don’t Talk to the Police,” has been viewed millions of times on YouTube, and Duane has since given his talk dozens of times around the country. The title of his book “You Have the Right to Remain Innocent” sums up the case for silence, since the presumption of innocence and the burden prosecutors bear to prove guilt even when the accused remains silent are the bedrock of American criminal law.”
Duane’s 2012 lecture proved vital to me when I faced a situation where I had to decide whether to speak to the police voluntarily. I listened to my attorney after watching this lecture. You can watch Duane’s presentation on YouTube by clicking here.
Manjoo explains that one of the most critical reasons Duane urges people to remain silent is because it is legal for the police to lie when they interrogate you. He writes, “Looking beyond the Baldwin case, Duane argues that a key danger is that in trying to defend yourself to the police, you may unwittingly admit some wrongdoing. Navigating around such dangers is made all the more difficult because courts have given the police wide leeway to lie to people being interrogated.
“They will lie to you about what crime they are actually investigating,” Duane writes in his book, “whether they regard you as a suspect, whether they plan to prosecute you, what evidence they have against you, whether your answers may help you, whether your statements are off the record, and whether the other witnesses have agreed to talk to them — even about what those witnesses have or have not said.”
Last September, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed into law Assembly Member Chris Holden’s AB 2644. The legislation prohibits law enforcement officers “from employing threats, physical harm, deception, or psychologically manipulative interrogation tactics, as specified, during a custodial interrogation of a person 17 years of age or younger.” The California Innocence Coalition supported the bill, and California is the fourth state (after Illinois, Utah, and Oregon) to ban the police from using these tactics with minors.
I would go further. I don’t think the police should be able to lie in interrogations. And as long as they can do that, people should utilize their Fifth Amendment protections to defend themselves.
Also, let’s stop tolerating how police routinely lie to the media. Reporters and editors do not need to be stenographers.
MN Police claimed George Floyd died of a “medical incident” & made 0 mention of kneeling on his neck for 9 min
Memphis Police claimed Tyre Nichols had “trouble breathing” & made 0 mention of beating him for 10 min
Media needs to hold police accountable—not parrot their claims.
— Qasim Rashid, Esq. (@QasimRashid) 4:52 AM ∙ Jan 28, 2023
Statistician Fights to Exonerate People
Science’s Cathleen O’Grady writes about how the Dutch statistician Richard Gill has become a leading expert on how the improper use of statistics can lead to the convictions of innocent people.
O’Grady writes, “It wasn’t until late 2006, when Gill read two whistleblowers’ account of the trial, that he started to look into the case—and became incandescent. Tunnel vision, bad statistics, and poor human intuitions about coincidence had marred the investigation. When Gill ran the numbers himself, he found the string of deaths on De Berk’s watch might well be entirely due to coincidence. Along with fellow statisticians, whistleblowers, and others, Gill campaigned for a retrial that eventually led to De Berk’s exoneration in 2010. Her case is now considered one of the worst miscarriages of justice in the Netherlands.
It also opened a new chapter in Gill’s professional life: He became a leading expert on the statistics of medical murder cases similar to De Berk’s—and a loud, persistent voice warning of the shoddy statistics that are sometimes central to prosecutors’ arguments. “In a normal murder case, you actually have a body which has clearly been murdered,” he says. When there’s only a suspicious cluster of deaths, investigators may assume a murderer is at work and selectively focus on evidence that supports that assumption. People’s intuition of an “impossible coincidence” joins the dots in the evidence.”
Chris Fabricant, the author of the book Junk Science and the American Criminal Justice System, has been warning people about the work we need to do to protect innocent people from junk science in our courtrooms. Thanks to the C-SPAN archive, you can watch Fabricant talk about his book at the Printers Row Lit Fest.
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Fast Food Worker Wages on the November 2024 Ballot
The California Secretary of State’s office announced that a coalition of fast food businesses and trade groups successfully collected enough signatures to force a voter referendum on a bill signed into law last year to improve the working conditions of fast food workers in the state.
The Los Angeles Times’ Suhauna Hussain writes, “AB 257 sought to create a first-of-its-kind council of workers, corporations, franchisees and government representatives with a mandate to set wages and other workplace standards statewide.
Had the law gone into effect Jan. 1 as planned, the council would have had the authority to raise the minimum hourly wage for fast-food workers as high as $22 this year.
Labor advocates said the legislation could transform collective bargaining, creating a precedent in the U.S. for negotiating workplace standards. The coalition of businesses opposing the law, led by the International Franchise Assn. and the National Restaurant Assn., argued the law would saddle businesses with higher labor costs and increase food prices.
Fast-food corporations and business trade groups including In-N-Out, Chipotle, Chick-Fil-A, McDonald’s, Starbucks and the National Restaurant Assn. donated millions to support the referendum effort, according to the nonpartisan Fair Political Practices Commission.”
The referendum about whether to allow the bill to go into effect will appear on the November 2024 ballot. I suspect it will be an expensive campaign on both sides.
The Power of Biden’s Corporate Competition Executive Order
The American Prospect’s David Dayen argues that we should be taking more notice of an executive order President Joe Biden signed that has significantly impacted our economy.
Dayen writes, “On July 9, 2021, President Joe Biden signed one of the most sweeping changes to domestic policy since FDR. It was not legislation: His signature climate and health law would take another year to gestate. This was a request that the government get into the business of fostering competition in the U.S. economy again.
Flanked by Cabinet officials and agency heads, Biden condemned Robert Bork’s pro-corporate legal revolution in the 1980s, which destroyed antitrust, leading to concentrated markets, raised prices, suppressed wages, stifled innovation, weakened growth, and robbing citizens of the liberty to pursue their talents. Competition policy, Biden said, “is how we ensure that our economy isn’t about people working for capitalism; it’s about capitalism working for people.”
The executive order outlines a whopping 72 different actions, but with a coherent objective. It seeks to revert government’s role back to that of the Progressive and New Deal eras. Breaking up monopolies was a priority then, complemented by numerous other initiatives—smarter military procurement, common-carrier requirements, banking regulations, public options—that centered competition as a counterweight to the industrial leviathan.”
Naturally, some of those initiatives have gone further than others. Still, the executive order, and key appointments made by Biden, have changed the dynamics around antitrust laws and have fostered increased competition in our economy. We need more of it.
Abortion, Every Day
Jessica Valenti at Abortion, Every Day recaps the news from across the country regarding reproductive freedom and sexual and reproductive health care. Today she highlights a new bill seeking to create a federal government website to collect data on pregnant women.
Valenti explains, “Republicans want to create a federal anti-abortion website that not only seeks to deceive women about abortion and direct them to crisis pregnancy centers—but would collect their personal information to give to anti-abortion groups.
The ‘Standing with Moms Act’ was introduced this week in the House by South Carolina Rep. Nancy Mace, and in the Senate by Florida Sen Marco Rubio. The legislation would set up the website life.gov as a portal for pregnant women that would explain the “risks related to abortion at all stages of fetal development,” and direct users to local crisis pregnancy centers. But here’s where it gets interesting: The way that this government website would let users know about crisis pregnancy centers in their area is by taking women through a series of questions about their location and contact information.”
Can pundits please stop arguing that Mace and Rubio are moderates?
On a related note, The Nation’s Elie Mystal writes about how forced-birth advocates are forum shopping in our judiciary as they seek to ban abortion medication.
Mystal writes, “Unfortunately, we have to treat this incoherent nonsense masquerading as a lawsuit as a serious threat to abortion drugs because of the judge who recently got hold of the case: Matthew Kacsmaryk. Kacsmaryk is a Trump-appointed district court judge in Texas who is basically the bad guy from a Nathaniel Hawthorne novel made flesh. He was an anti-gay crusader for a Christian right law firm before Trump raised him up to be a judge. He claims that homosexuality is a “disorder.” He’s attacked the right to contraception and denounced the “sexual revolution” of the 1960s and ’70s. Senator Chuck Schumer said Kacsmaryk “has demonstrated a hostility to the LGBTQ community bordering on paranoia.”
Since rising to the bench, Kacsmaryk has functioned as a wish-fulfillment machine for the most wackadoodle right-wing causes and legal theories. He once ordered the Biden administration to reinstate Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” immigration policy—and then tried to do it again, even after he was overruled by the Supreme Court.”
Mystal explains that Kacsmaryk getting this case is no accident but rather part of a coordinated strategy that has every chance of working.
Altercation Says Goodbye
One of my favorite columnists, Eric Alterman, is leaving The American Prospect because his columnist position’s grant funding has run out. I’m sure he will pop up somewhere else, but I wanted to share a couple of paragraphs from his last newsletter in which Alterman distills why these times seem so perilous.
“The key question I want to leave people with is this: Given the lack of guardrails, how far are these people willing to go? Trump is as popular as he was before January 6th and has been invited back on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. His only credible alternative for the Republican nomination at this point, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, is in many significant respects even worse than Trump. Kevin McCarthy is elevating lunatic insurrectionists who fear Jewish space lasers and children’s books about loving gay parents to positions with real power and rejecting people merely because they are competent and committed to the Constitution. Tucker Carlson, a paranoid, racist co-conspirator of the morally disgusting Alex Jones, has the highest ratings in cable news. Thanks in part to a great lineup at the New York Jewish Film Festival this month, I’ve just recently seen a whole bunch of films about the fate of fascism in Germany, Austria, France, Ukraine, and Poland—I’m considering Stalinism to be a form of fascism here—and another about Eichmann’s trial and death in Israel, and elsewhere in theaters about town, about fascism in Argentina, in Italy (which I wrote about here), and another one about Austria. They speak to this question, which has long been on my mind: How far are these people willing to go and what is to stop them?
My answer is that I really don’t know. I just know I never imagined, when I began writing about the overall awfulness of the American right and the wimpiness of its left, that my country would ever face a question like this one.”
Baseball Online Art Exhibition
The Society for American Baseball Research’s Lefty O’Doul (San Francisco Bay Chapter) shared that a new online exhibition from Krevsky Fine Art, Art of Baseball: Hot Stove League, launched on January 26 and will run through March 30. You can click here to view the exhibition.
“The Hot Stove League refers to the efforts by sportswriters who wrote about baseball during the dark winter season. Between the end of the World Series and the opening of Spring Training in mid February, in order to maintain interest in the truly folk tradition of America’s Pastime, stories were written about legends of the past and prospects for the future. It is still a flourishing institution in small towns across the country. In anticipation of the next season’s cry of “Play Ball,” pitchers and catchers report to Spring Training February 15th so get ready and enjoy the show.”
Quick Pitches
Netflix dominated the streaming charts in 2022, with 11 of the top 15 most-streamed programs, led by Stranger Things.
The AP Stylebook deleted this tweet after the French Embassy U.S. successfully mocked it.
That said, as long as the AP is reconsidering things, it’s time to adopt the Oxford comma.
Of these, I’m a 6, but only because I don’t see a fountain pen option.
OK, you can only write with ONE type of pen for the rest of your life, which one are you picking? (ignoring the ink color)
— 𝘾𝙝𝙧𝙞𝙨 𝙂𝙧𝙤𝙨𝙨𝙚 (@Chris_Grosse) 11:06 PM ∙ Jan 25, 2023
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