Quartz: Why is it so hard for the US government to prosecute police who kill?

Between 1995 and 2015, according to a report from the the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, nearly all—a whopping 96%—of the civil-rights complaints against law enforcement got turned down by US attorney’s offices around the country. The few cases that resulted in federal convictions in the past included the Los Angeles officers acquitted on state charges in the brutal beating of Rodney King in 1991. Just a day before the Sterling decision, Michael Slager, the South Carolina officer who fatally shot unarmed motorist Walter Scott in the back in 2015, pleaded guilty to civil-rights charges as part of a deal. [...]

The statement shows exactly why it’s so hard to bring charges in a case like this. For one, prosecutors have to prove that the use of force was not “objectively reasonable” in the given circumstances. “The standard is sufficiently vague that it’s very hard to prove, especially beyond reasonable doubt,” said Barry Friedman, law professor and director of New York University’s Policing Project. What is “objectively reasonable,” a standard determined by a 1989 Supreme Court ruling, use of force may be vastly different for different people. [...]

The other component is the officer’s “willfulness,” or intent to violate someone’s constitutional right. “This high legal standard–one of the highest standards of intent imposed by law–requires proof that the officer acted with the specific intent to do something the law forbids. It is not enough to show that the officer made a mistake, acted negligently, acted by accident or mistake, or even exercised bad judgment,” the DOJ says.

As the department itself admits, this is a nearly impossible standard to hold a case to. The NAACP said in a statement that the standard is “deeply flawed” and that it “frustrates the meaning of the federal statute designed to protect against the deprivation of rights by officers of the state.”

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Slate: Don’t Be Fooled by Marine Le Pen’s Gay Pandering—Her Party Is Awful for LGBTQ Equality

Such a public display of queer love was startling in a country that, for all its claim to liberté, has long struggled with LGBTQ rights. The passage of marriage equality in 2013 nearly tore the country apart, and sparked a new conservative movement called La Manif Pour Tous (roughly Protest for All), which has fought to defend “traditional” family values. In October of last year, 24,000 people marched on the streets of Paris to demand the gay marriage law be repealed. Center-right presidential candidate François Fillon, who received 20 percent of the vote in last Sunday’s first round of elections, ran on a platform to repeal gay adoption rights and, according to a prominent gay rights group, has a vision of France that is “clearly hostile to LGBT people.” [...]

Jean-Marie Le Pen was ousted by his own daughter Marine in 2011, who has since tried to soften the party’s image in her bid for the presidency. In an interview with French newspaper Le Parisien, Marine Le Pen distanced herself from her father’s comments, saying "My father was kicked out of the National Front, he does whatever he wants, it doesn’t concern me anymore...I don’t talk to him, and I’m not responsible for him or his inadmissible remarks.” Speaking with French news channel LCI, Le Pen said she had “found the ceremony very dignified" and was “very touched by the speech that was made by his companion.” [...]

But with less than a week before the decisive second round of the election, it is worth remembering that Le Pen is anything but LGBTQ-friendly: Her campaign platform calls for the repeal of gay marriage and would restrict fertility services for gay and lesbian couples wanting to have children. Her niece, Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, who holds one of two parliamentary seats in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur region, has been one of the most vocal supporters of the anti-marriage equality movement. And no matter how much Marine Le Pen tries to pinkwash the party and distance herself from its extremist past, even going so far as to recuse herself from its leadership last week, the stain of her homophobic father remains indelible.

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The New York Review of Books: Iran: The Miracle That Wasn’t

Iran’s presidential election on May 19 will in all likelihood be won by the incumbent, the moderate cleric Hassan Rouhani. In 2015, two years after he came to power, Rouhani pulled the country back from the brink of confrontation with the West when he guided Iran toward the historic nuclear deal with the Obama administration. For Iran, the agreement—which it reached with the United States, the four other permanent members of the UN Security Council, and Germany—was supposed to bring its economy in from the cold after the bellicose and isolationist presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. According to the terms of the deal, many tough international sanctions on Iran were lifted in exchange for Iran’s mothballing of some of its main nuclear facilities; at last, foreign cash was supposed to flow in and the country’s lucrative oil reserves to flow out. So a Rouhani victory this month might seem like fair reward.

But the economic miracle that was promised by the Rouhani government hasn’t happened, and the sense of anti-climax is palpable—a disillusionment that has broadened into a general contempt for politics, politicians, and promises that aren’t kept. Whether in Tehran or far-flung areas such as Khuzestan—an oil-rich province in the south that nonetheless suffers from chronic electricity and water outages, and whose inhabitants complain of neglect by the central government—there is widespread skepticism of the state’s determination to improve the lot of the ordinary Iranian. [...]

Few of Iran’s current ills can in fact be traced to the Rouhani administration, which, on the whole, has played a poor hand well. But the government is paying the price for raised expectations of an influx of foreign investment, which—notwithstanding President Donald Trump’s claims that Iran has been making hay since the lifting of sanctions—has signally failed to materialize. Investors fear that the new US administration and the US courts will continue to punish multinationals—including banks and oil companies—that have extensive dealings with Iran.

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Nautilus Magazine: How the Tension Between Mercy and Blame Shaped Our Legal Codes

In a 2008 study, Cushman found part of the reason why: Different factors matter to us when we’re judging, on the one hand, an act as permissible or not and when we’re deciding, on the other hand, what’s a suitable punishment and whether anyone is to blame. Moral judgements, he writes, are “overwhelmingly determined” by our understanding of what someone was thinking, whether their mental state was “culpable”; but our thoughts on punishment and blame have more to do with “causal responsibility,” or how someone’s actions led to some consequence, regardless of what they were thinking. These two distinct processes actually compete to determine our moral judgement, Cushman concludes: “The assignment of causal blame competitively blocks the assignment of mental culpability, while the silencing of the causal assessment allows the mental-state assessment to dominate.”

We also often take people’s actions as a reliable proxy of their mental states. In a 2015 paper, Neil Levy, Deputy Director of the Oxford Centre for Neuroethics, writes, “Because there is a sufficiently high correlation between causing and intending harm in a range of circumstances, we are disposed to take the causation of harm as a sufficient condition for some blame in those circumstances.” The problem here, he explains, is that the proxy may be misleading. Cushman says it resulted in unreasonable legal codes: “Legal codes tend to start focusing just on outcomes. There are instances where our laws reflect that more primitive response.” Hammurabi, the king of the city-state Babylon, for example, put forward lex talionis, an “eye for an eye.” But over time, Cushman says, legal codes “acquire a greater and greater focus on intent.” [...]

In one of their experiments, the researchers provided subjects different information explaining why Robert Alton Harris killed two teenage boys in 1978. One group received a historicist narrative describing a troubled and abused past, while another received fabricated information that Harris was born with a brain defect. (They told another group, the control, only that Harris killed the boys.) The researchers found that subjects who heard a historicist narrative assigned the least amount of blame because the narrative, the researchers argue, reduced subjects’ impression of how much control Harris had over his “self-formation.”

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The Atlantic: Imagining the Presence of Justice

Over the past several decades, America has seen a startling divergence between crime and punishment. While crime rates dropped steadily from the dramatic peaks of the 1990s, the nation’s incarceration rates continued just as steadily to grow. And so, despite containing only 5 percent of the world’s population, the United States came to hold a quarter of the world’s prisoners. 

We’ve covered this divergence extensively in the print and digital pages of The Atlantic, from Ta-Nehisi Coates’s landmark story on the rise of the carceral state and the devastation it wreaked on black families to Inimai Chettiar’s exploration of the many causes of the decline in crime. Among the findings that emerge most clearly from this robust, sad literature is that the factors driving both aspects of the divergence—the fall in crime, the increasing spread of punishment—are highly complex. Despite dawning awareness of the deep social and economic costs of mass incarceration, no one-size-fits-all solution exists to change this picture. Rolling back mass incarceration while protecting public safety will require a legion of efforts in thousands of prosecutors’ offices, police departments, parole boards, and legislative chambers. "What we have is not a system at all,” as Fordham University’s John Pfaff told The Atlantic's Matt Ford, "but a patchwork of competing bureaucracies with different constituencies, different incentives, who oftentimes might have similar political ideologies, but very different goals and very different pressures on them.”[...]

The powers-that-be had sought and won a court injunction to forbid the troublemakers from kneeling and sitting and walking, and yet the troublemakers kneeled and sat and walked. Some of them, including King, got thrown in jail. From his cell, King wrote the famous letter that would cleave the nation’s understanding of “law and order” right in half, arguing that the observance of an unjust law violates the moral order. "An individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law,” he wrote. He castigated "the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order' than to justice; who prefers a negative peace, which is the absence of tension, to a positive peace, which is the presence of justice."

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