Freespace

Say what?

In People v. Howard, which was decided today, the California Supreme Court held that the crime of fleeing from a police officer with reckless disregard for the safety of others is not an inherently dangerous felony for purposes of felony murder. Yeah, that’s what they said. Justice Brown in a separate opinion made the somewhat bleedingly obvious point that reckless disregard for the safety of others is the name of this crime, which would seem to suggest that it’s inherently dangerous, but the Court evaded such logic with reckless disregard of common sense.

Here’s the Courts’ rationale: In determining whether a felony is inherently dangerous, courts look at the elements of the felony in the abstract, to see if the crime, by its very nature, cannot be committed without creating a substantial risk that someone will be killed. The fleeing-from-the-cops crime says:

(a) If a person flees or attempts to elude a pursuing peace officer...and the pursued vehicle is driven in a willful or wanton disregard for the safety of persons or property, the person driving the vehicle, upon conviction, shall be punished by imprisonment....

(b)  For purposes of this section, a willful or wanton disregard for the safety of persons or property includes, but is not limited to, driving while fleeing or attempting to elude a pursuing peace officer during which time either three or more violations that are assigned a traffic violation point count under Section 12810 occur, or damage to property occurs.

Well, section (b) defines “willful or wanton disregard for the safety of persons or property,” as including any flight from an officer during which the motorist commits three traffic violations that are assigned a “point count” under section 12810, or which results in “damage to property.” And you can get a “point count” for such non-violent things as driving an unregistered vehicle, driving with a suspended license, driving too slowly, or failing to signal.

Therefore, it’s possible that a person might flee from the cops in an unregistered vehicle at 45 miles per hour, and fail to signal, which under section (b) would satisfy the definition of willful or wanton disregard, and yet would not be likely to cause someone to die. Therefore, the crime is not inherently dangerous for felony-murder purposes.

This sort of logic, as Lincoln said, would turn a horse chestnut into a chestnut horse. Justice Brown writes,

Although it is possible to imagine slow motion pursuits where neither people nor property are harmed, the facts of this case present the more likely scenario:  the defendant greatly exceeded the speed limit, ran stop signs and stoplights, drove the wrong way on a street and entered Downtown Fresno where the pursuing police officer broke off his chase because he determined that it was too dangerous to proceed.  Unfortunately, although the police officer avoided injury by breaking off his pursuit, the defendant still entered an intersection on a red light and collided with another vehicle, killing its driver. 

Say what you will about the fairness of felony murder, but killing someone while fleeing from the cops should be at the top of the list, if there is one, of crimes that make for felony murder.

This sounds promising

A documentary on the right to earn a living in India: “A Pakistani entrepreneur takes one third of the time taken by an Indian to set up a small business. Surely then something is wrong with the livelihood policies of our democratic nation.”

What would Susan B. do?

Sarah Hempel gives The Vagina Monologues a try. “So we have been fighting all these years to be recognized for more than our wombs and some femme writes a play that reduces us back to only one part of our bodies. No thank you.”

Integrity

Excellent. You know, in light of this nonsense about how accepting federal funding makes you a pet whose views need not be seriously considered, I wonder. Are all the leftist organizations that receive federal funding—thinktanks, University professors, not to mention federal government agencies like the EPA—going to be investigated for their integrity as well?

There’s a story that Roger Pilon or some other Cato guy was testifying before Congress, and someone challenged him. “Aren’t your views bought and paid for by the evil greedy corporations that mutilate baby seals for fun and export?”

“Sir,” the scholar replied, “Cato accepts no funding from the federal government. Our views are therefore not biased in favor of increased governmental power.”

Update: Oops, they beat me to it.

Remember Auschwitz

A great LGF post.

Emails from a nut

Hilarious.

Merry well dressed band

Nice article on IJ.

Books

I finally finished Iris Chang’s The Chinese in America, this weekend. A very good book, well written, very compelling. It drags a little bit in the chapters on the late 20th century, and it relies on some very regrettable historical stereotypes—you know, the Fifties were a decade of conformity and frustration and obedient housewives and McCarthyism, and the Eighties were a decade of greed and junk bonds and deficits and blah blah. Even if this stuff is true, it ought to be a little more strongly put than just the same old stereotypes. But as for the actual subject of the book, I thought that was outstanding, and for the most part, very well put.

Then I read Natan Sharansky’s recent The Case for Democracy. It’s a very good, readable, impassioned argument that foreign policy ought to be tied to a nation’s respect for the individual rights of its people—and that we must abandon this notion of propping up dictators for the purpose of international stability. Sharansky in particular argues that the Palestinian Authority ought to be required to move in a democratic direction before vesting it with any more international prestige than it already (unfortunately) has. Although I strongly agree that we shouldn’t prop up foreign dictators, I fear that in some cases it’s unavoidable. Sharansky doesn’t discuss Pakistan, for instance—a nation which, from the looks of things, would attack us in an instant if given the chance. Still, I like most of what he has to say. Reminded me a lot of Herschensohn.

Then I started Roy Jenkins’ biography of Winston Churchill. Reading it is something like doing the breaststroke through a swimming pool full of peanut butter. It is by far the most British book I’ve ever read—with all the unnecessary verbiage and hyperintellectual showiness that is the worst trait of that people. The unnecessary parentheticals alone are enough to give me a headache. Check it out:

General political issues, however, rarely failed to engage Churchill and during his Board of Trade years he managed to ruffle the feathers of a number of his colleagues and of the King. His dismissive comment on Burns and Runciman has already been cited. He also had acrimonious exchanges of letters on May 1908 with Crewe (who had succeeded Elgin at the Colonial Office) about his (Churchill’s) intervention in a commons colonial debate—which he claimed he had done only at the request of the Prime Minister*; and in December of the same year with Edward Grey over his attempt to use the Paris Embassy to organize a whole series of political conversations with French politicians far beyond Board of Trade responsibilities during a visit he planned for the following month. King Edward became sufficiently upset by speeches which Churchill made at Leicester in September 1909 and at Manchester in March 1910, to cause his private secretary to write letters of remonstrance. And after the first general election of 1910 Margot Asquith (although very doubtfully speaking on behalf of her husband, who had however himself written a letter of rebuke to Churchill after an Edinburgh speech in July 1909—his indiscretions were geographically well spread) contributed a letter at once hysterical, contradictory, and purporting to convey royal views. If only Churchill would ‘thrive on being liked instead of loving abusive notice and rotten notoriety,’ he would vastly improve his position in the eyes of ‘the best elements both in politics & society.’

*—It was a good example of Churchill’s indestructible bounce that less than three weeks after this sharp exchange of letters he was writing to Crewe (presumably in the latter’s capacity as the Secretary of State of his private secretary’s ‘home’ department) more or less demanding that Eddie Marsh be given the upper-middle grade honour of CMG.

It is at moments like this that I want to get on my knees and pray thanks to Saint Mark Twain.

Ah, sweet euphemism

I had to laugh at this comment on Doing Things With Words: “These studies, and similar accounts, show the strength of liberalism. The state makes sure everyone has access to the knowledge and material they need. People then figure out what to do on their own, and things work out for the best.” It reminded me of Aristotle’s comment in the Politics that we hear constantly of schemes to redistribute property, and that “men readily listen to [them], and are easily induced to believe that in some wonderful manner everybody will become everybody’s friend.”

Keep in mind what the euphemistic phrase “state makes sure” really means—and “material” as well. What this really means is, the state takes things away from people who earn them and give them to people who have not earned them. Then the state stands back and lets the beneficiaries of this process “figure out what to do on their own”? Hardly. It then monitors how these beneficiaries use their new-found gains, scrutinizes their lives, and then takes from them what they earn, to give to still more undeserving beneficiaries. A person seeks to start a small business, let us say. The state begins by stealing someone else’s earnings and giving it to this entrepreneur in the form of a grant—just making sure that the entrepreneur has access, you know. Then the entrepreneur faces the bureaucratic gauntlet of applications, permits, approval processes, regulatory barriers that sap his time and energy. All along he is cursed for his profiteering, pollution and greed, and if he manages to make it through and somehow earn something, he’s told he must “give something back to the community,” whereupon the government comes in and plunders him so as to give to another mendicant, to make sure that this new person has the “material [he] need[s]”! Ah, the Circle of Compassion. You gotta love it when “things work out for the best,” eh? Doing things with words, indeed!

As H.L. Mencken said, “Whenever A annoys or injures B on the pretense of improving or saving X, A is a scoundrel.”

(This, of course, has nothing to do with sex-ed, which was the subject of DTWW’s comment, but I still thought it amusingly Clintonian.)

Who am I?

Thanks to Vast Right Wing Conspiracy for pointing me to this...

take the WHAT INTENTIONAL TORT ARE YOU test.
and go to mewing.net. because law school made laura do this.