Surprise withdrawal in Ohio senate race

Republican Josh Mandel announced today that he was dropping out from the US senate race because of his wife’s health issues. Democratic senator Sherrod Brown is trying to retain the seat he has won twice previously. He faced a strong challenge from Mandel, an intensely ambitious young (he is just 40 years of age) Republican who is currently the state treasurer and was the clear front-runner to gain the Republican nomination. In his 2010 campaign for the treasurer’s office, Mandel falsely suggested that his opponent was a Muslim and in general his campaigns have become notorious for their tenuous relationships with the truth.
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How science is helping eliminate false convictions

In my post on the documentary The Thin Blue Line, I mentioned how in so many jurisdictions in the US the police, the prosecutors, and even the medical examiners offices are so determined to pin the crime on someone that they are willing to manufacture evidence or overlook or even actively suppress evidence that suggests that they might have the wrong person. Fortunately, there has been an increase in private individuals and pro bono lawyers who have taken an interest in such cases and there have been some high-profile releases of wrong incarcerated people.
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China uses Trump to plot its own rise

There has been a huge wave of media attention for Michael Wolff’s new book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House about the Trump administration’s first year in office. One can see why by reading a long excerpt here [Update: Another long extract was released today.]. It seems to consist of the kind of insider gossip that people love, with various people dishing dirt on their rivals. But as far as I can tell, it adds nothing new to what we already knew, that Donald Trump is, as Alfie Kohn accurately described him, a narcissistic, boasting, lying, preening, swaggering, thin-skinned, petulant, desperately competitive, vindictive person with the “attention span of a toddler” who is lacking in “shame, humility, empathy, or capacity for reflection and self-scrutiny” and also “lacking not only in knowledge but in curiosity”. What the book does seem to add is that Trump’s mental faculties, such as they are, are deteriorating even from their previously low levels.
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If Ellsberg is a hero, why not Snowden?

There is a new film The Post starring Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep and directed by Stephen Spielberg that resurrects once again the story of Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers and the legal case that was won by the Washington Post and other newspapers that prevented the suppression of them. Nick Gillespie writes that in an interview with the BBC Arabic service’s Sam Asi, Spielberg, Hanks, and to a lesser extent Streep, praise Ellsberg as a hero for his actions but avoiding doing so with Edward Snowden.
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Some Trump inauguration protestors cleared of rioting

The inauguration of Donald Trump saw a massive protest in Washington DC that resulted in over 200 people being arrested. In a chilling attempt at discouraging political protest, the authorities threw the book at them, as Yael Bromberg and Eirik Cheverud write:

On the morning of President Trump’s Inauguration, police trapped and arrested over 230 people. Some were anti-Trump demonstrators; some were not. The next day, federal prosecutors charged them all with “felony rioting,” a nonexistent crime in DC. The prosecution then launched a sweeping investigation into the defendants’ lives, demanding vast amounts of online information through secret warrants.

Prosecutors eventually dropped a few defendants, like journalists and legal observers, but simultaneously increased the charges against everyone else. The most recent indictment collectively charged over 200 people with felony rioting, felony incitement to riot, conspiracy to riot, and five property-damage crimes — all from broken windows. Each defendant is facing over 60 years in prison.
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What really happened in Las Vegas?

It has been awhile since the horrific mass shooting in Las Vegas on October 1 that resulted in 59 deaths and over 500 injured. What is astonishing is that some major questions, such as the motives that Stephen Paddock might have had for his action, still remain obscure. But what is also disturbing is that more questions have opened up, suggesting that the police initially may have put out an incorrect timeline of the events, as Liz Posner writes.
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There is no such thing as a ‘friendly’ conversation with law enforcement

At a recent Science Café of which I am part of the organizing committee, we had two FBI agents to talk about how they track white-collar crime such as those involving Medicare and Medicaid fraud, with physicians inflating the charges for treatment. The two agents were very friendly and pleasant and before and after the session I had an interesting chat with them about their work. But that same friendliness can be a trap if you happen to be in their sights for any investigation.
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Two court challenges in elections

After the November elections, the Virginia House of Delegates is delicately balanced with 50 Republicans and 49 Democrats, a big shift from the 66-34 majority Republicans had before. One last seat is even more delicately balanced because, after a recount, it had 11,608 votes for Democratic candidate Shelley Simonds, 11,607 votes for the Republican David Yancey, and one disputed ballot. After examining the ballot, a three-judge panel ruled that the voter’s intent was for Yancey, thus causing a tie. Here’s the disputed ballot.


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Film review: The Thin Blue Line (1988) and the conviction of innocent people

This highly acclaimed documentary by Errol Morris has been on my to-see list for the longest time but I never got around to it. I watched it last night and it deserves all the accolades it received. It is also a grim reminder of how in America, at least in some jurisdictions, so many innocent people are executed or incarcerated for decades because the police and prosecutors care less about the truth than ‘notching up a win’ and closing a case as quickly as they can.

The case so well illustrates that when police and prosecutors severely distort the judicial process in order to get a conviction, it is not just that an innocent person is deprived of life and liberty, as bad as that is, but that a whole lot of random innocent people suffer because of it. In their zeal to convict an innocent man of murder, the Dallas police and prosecutors let the real killer walk free and subsequently commit a string of violent crimes for a decade that ended with another murder. It was only after he was arrested for that second murder that the crime spree ended. The authorities are thus indirectly responsible for all those crimes.
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Keeping track of the creeps

The flood of rape, sexual abuse, and sexual harassment accusations against prominent people in public life has made it hard for anyone to keep track of who is accused of what and by whom. Via Rusty Blazenhoff I learned about something called The Creep Sheet that has compiled a list of all the accusations, sorted into categories like Entertainment, Politics and Government, Media, and so on.
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