Category: Justice and the Courts

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Piracy on the IPs

Gootchy gootchy goo

December 8th 2011

Let’s say that one day, I’m at a yard sale, and I spot a crate full of 78s. They’re cracked and warped, but there’s about 50 of them in there, missing labels and so on, and because I’m a fan of Swing Era music, I buy the whole lot for 25 cents and take it home, hoping to find a jewel in the rough.

And I find a song, “Boobie Baby” by Gootch McKinnerson. Gootch was an old jazz trumpet player who died in a freak accident in Europe in 1943 when, stoned, he picked up and tried to lick a wolverine. But before that, he cut several records, including “Boobie Baby,” which jazz aficionados all agree is the greatest example of trumpet playing by a man who thought he was playing a tuba in the history of jazz.

It came out in 1937, and made the top 100 for a week. Then it was quickly forgotten, and shortly after Gootch’s death, the record company went bust, and Gootch’s family, who were all also jazz musicians, had forgotten by 1947 that Gooch had ever existed. So “Boobie Baby” has a mythical status among jazz fans. There’s a couple of old jazzmen from New Orleans who could hum a few bars once, but beyond that, nobody knows quite what it sounds like.

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Water Wars

Alabama has a new crop of blind boys

October 8th 2011

 The California economy is still in the crapper, thanks partly to the ongoing world crisis in capitalism and thanks partly to thirty years of Republican insistence that taxpayers not be forced to pay for the items they wanted. As a result, California put a lot of needed growth items on credit in the form of state bonds, and because a lot of them were via the state initiative process – best described as brain surgery with a sledge hammer – it took an already bad economic situation and made it far worse.

Why Jerry Brown would even want to be governor again at a time like this is something of a mystery. As his predecessors discovered, governors don’t have much power to fix things, but they will get blamed for them in any event. Arnie could have been working on “Terminator 10” right now and getting compared to William Shatner. But no, he had to be a governor, and his reputation suffered as a result.

Brown is just as captured in that as Arnie was, but Brown at least brings a measure of idealism and humanity to the job that Arnie could do only sporadically. It was largely due to his pressure that he was able to shepherd California’s version of the “Dream Act” through the State Lege, and sign it today.

As the name suggests, it’s similar to the Dream Act George W. Bush proposed that would allow undocumented aliens residing in the region to be eligible for funding for college. One of the few good things Bush ever proposed, it tacitly recognized that America owed something to the people who come here and do the jobs most Americans won’t do, and that it was flat-out wrong to punish the children of these people by refusing them educational aid.

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The Death Penalty

Killing time

September 25th 2011

 The main problem with the Troy Davis execution wasn’t that the man was almost certainly innocent of the crime he was being killed for; the problem was that no civilized nation should have the death penalty in the first place.

I’m not going to discuss the particulars of the Davis case. If you somehow haven’t heard about it, there’s a million places on the web to find thousands of different opinions, pro and con.

Instead, I’m going to discuss the guilt or innocence of the people who murdered him. That would be you and me, since it was done in our names.

Troy Davis is far from unique. There are 140 men walking free today who had been on death row, found guilty of a capital crime by twelve peers on a jury and sentenced by a judge. Through the work, not of the justice system, but legal volunteers, mostly in the Innocence Project, all 140 men were saved from execution by proof that they did not commit the crime. Witnesses lied. Cops fabricated evidence. In some cases, everyone was simply mistaken. Cops, anxious to close a case that was stirring public passion, arrested someone who might plausibly by the suspect, and witnesses, anxious not to have to spend months on the case, testified with far more certainty than they felt.

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The Anthony Trial

Not guilty? So what?

July 5th 2011

 I’ve been watching the public response to the Casey Anthony trial with a certain amount of befuddlement and apprehension.

Understand, I haven’t followed the trial at all. I was only dimly aware of the proceedings, and that it was one of those annoying background whinges that passes for news on the cable networks. Just the fact that the reptilian Nancy Gracie was front and center on the coverage would be enough to assure that I would have no interest in the proceedings. Except I didn’t even know that until yesterday. I barely knew about the trial, and I didn’t care.

So I have no opinion, informed or otherwise, as to whether the jury reached a just verdict or not. Given that it was a murder trial—one of thousands the US has every year—in a state 3,000 miles away, the trial was of no particular importance to me. Yes, even if she was guilty. Not important.

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Classless Action

Tony and the Gang declare open season on consumers

April 30th 2011

AT&T Mobility vs. Concepcion won’t be as utterly destructive of the American form of government as last year’s horrible Citizens United decision, but it does immense damage to consumers in America, and, like Citizens United, tips the balance of power, already wildly out of whack, to the corporations.

The vote to drastically limit the ability of consumers to file and pursue class-action suits was five to four, and I probably don’t need to tell anyone which five voted in the majority. Tony Scalia wrote the opinion, and said that companies could force buyers to sign arbitration agreements. He didn’t even bother to conceal his intent, adding, “Arbitration is poorly suited to the higher stakes of class litigation.” Which is the whole idea.

Class action suits result when a large number of people have been injured by the actions of a company or other entity. The injury can be relatively minor, as was the case in AT&T Mobility vs. Concepcion, where AT&T was accused of overcharging by $30 for cellphone service. Or it can be life threatening and affect millions. Eventually America will have a Bhopal or a Chernobyl sort of disaster, and class-action would be the only sensible recourse in the wake, when people would be trying to recoup major damages suffered.

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