Crime
Last week, Guy Rivera and Lindly Jones were planning to rob a T-Mobile store on Mott Avenue in Queens, New York. The two were in a car with Jones driving and Rivera in the passenger seat. Jones pulled the car up near the store, illegally blocking a bus stop. NYPD Officer Jonathan Diller noticed this and approached the car. Diller asked Rivera to roll the window down. He wouldn’t. Rivera then pulled a handgun and shot Officer Diller, killing him. Officer Diller’s partner returned fire, striking Rivera in the back. Rivera remains hospitalized and, along with Jones, has been charged with murder.
Rivera and Jones are lifelong, violent criminals. Rivera, at only thirty-four years old, has twenty-one prior arrests, nine of which are felonies. When he was booked into jail for killing Diller, corrections officers found a shiv hidden in Rivera’s rectum. Apparently, he is so used to going to jail that he keeps a shiv up his butt just in case. Jones is bad news as well. He has fourteen prior arrests, including for attempted murder and robbery. At the time of the shooting, Jones was out on bond from an April 17, 2023 arrest for second-degree criminal possession of a firearm.
Officer Diller’s death has intensified calls for reversing New York’s 2019 bail reform laws. Those laws say that a judge cannot consider dangerousness when determining whether a defendant should be released on bail. So, when faced with guys like Rivera and Jones, who are clearly a danger to the community, a judge must ignore the obvious. New York bail laws also insist on cashless bail in most circumstances, further hampering a judge’s ability to detain dangerous people. A recent study found that 66% of New York defendants released under the new bail rules re-offend. Congressman Andrew Garbarino, speaking after Officer Diller’s wake, said “The Governor should be focusing on fixing the issue of cashless bail in Albany.” This was after Governor Hochul attempted to attend Officer Diller’s wake. The Governor was turned away by family members who reportedly told her that if she wants to help, then she should fix the bail laws. Let’s hope she listens and that this tragic event leads to much needed change in New York and across the country.
More crime
The Massachusetts General Brigham hospital system announced recently that it will no longer report to child services instances where babies are born addicted to drugs. They claim that doing so disproportionately impacts minorities. They mean that the percentage of non-white drug addicted babies is higher than the percentage of non-whites in the general community. But the test does not discriminate. Either the newborn tests positive for drugs or it doesn’t. And shouldn’t the safety of children take precedent? These hospital administrators are literally sacrificing babies to the god of equity.
Still more crime
This past Saturday, just thirty minutes before Saturday night became Easter morning, a gunfight broke out among a large group of young people gathered at the Circle Center Mall in downtown Indianapolis. Seven juveniles, ranging from age 12 to age 17 were shot. Thankfully, all survived. Indianapolis Mayor Joe Hogsett issued a statement saying that the parents bear responsibility for allowing their children to be out so late. True. The mayor also said that “there is no reason why a young person at any age should be in possession of a gun.” I have to disagree here. Certainly, juveniles possessing guns in this situation is unacceptable. However, there are plenty of young people who own and responsibly use firearms for hunting and sport. Mayor Hogsett’s statement is overbroad. Also, in assessing responsibility, the mayor leaves out a crucial component. Over the last several years, the trend has been to remove accountability almost entirely from the juvenile justice system. These Indianapolis juveniles behave this way, in part, because there are no serious legal consequences.
Originalism
I have written previously about the liberal biases written into recent Artificial Intelligence programs, and the threat to free speech that poses. You can read that here. Sixth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals Judge, John Bush, recently made a conservative case for AI when he spoke to the University of Chicago’s Federalist Society. Bush noted that conservative judges favor originalism, which relies on the historical meaning and context of words used in statutes and the Constitution. Bush said that AI programs using corpus linguistics, a process which involves searching and analyzing vast databases of text, will make it easier for judges to determine the original meaning of words. Instead of manually sifting through search term hits, judges may be able to rely on AI analysis. This assumes, of course, that the bias problem is resolved.
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