Systemic Racism? Make Them Prove It.

 Systemic Racism? Make Them Prove It.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/09/systemic-racism-criminal-justice-system-make-critics-prove-charge/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Saturday%202020-09-19&utm_term=NRDaily-Smart

Excerpt: I worked in the crminal-justice system for a quarter century. Itis run, day-to-day, by the

crème de la crème of graduates from America’s top law schools. Those institutions wear their progressive bona fides on their sleeves and proclaim it for all the world to hear. In their offhand rhetoric — insouciant, because they know their bien pensant allies in politics and media will never call them on it — legal elites will tell you that the administration of justice in America is systemically racist. But they are the system. The judges, the top prosecutors, the defense bar, the experts who craft the sentencing guidelines and the standards of confinement — overwhelmingly, they are political progressives. That’s fine. I’m a lawyer from New York City. I’ve not only lived in and around this world for decades, I have affection for lots of its denizens. Most of them are proud of being on the left. I don’t agree with them politically, but the routine handling of criminal cases is not political. It is clinical: professionals doing the best they can. And that’s just the point: They do the best they can. That is the antithesis of racism. These professionals strive to do justice for individual defendants. The concrete experience of routine cases in the justice system is fairness to a fault. The enforcement authorities, defense counsel, and the court frequently bend over backwards to plead cases out to softer versions of the criminal conduct’s harsh reality. They do so precisely to rationalize the avoidance or reduction of jail time. They will tell you there is endemic racism in the system. If pressed on the matter, though, they would not be able to describe for you any racist things that they themselves have actually done, nor any racist things done by colleagues. Nor can the earnest lawyers who represent the purported victims of racism point you to stacks on stacks of motions they’ve filed claiming the police arrested their felonious clients because of skin color. The crimes, it turns out, are not only supported by abundant proof; they have victims, who are disproportionately black and Latino. The lawyers are at a loss to point to cases in which they’ve shown that prosecutors charged their clients due to racial animus rather than evidence. They can’t cite cases where clients were sabotaged by the racism of the presiding judge. In a system that was pervasively racist, such cases would abound. Not in this one, though. [One of the things I enjoy about McCarthy is his ability to go directly to the heart of an issue. Here, he not only has great points, he all but issues a challenge to progressives to point out specifics that don’t exist. Well worth reading. I added emphasis. Ron P.].