Here we go again with yet another senseless police murder of a helpless person, Tyre Nichols, who was mercilessly beaten to death at the hands of five rogue police officers of the Memphis, Tennessee Police Department on January 7, 2023.  According to Nichols' mother, Rowyaughn Wells, Tyre was two minutes away from his home when he was pulled over for an alleged traffic violation, which, when it was all said and done, resulted in the five officers inflicting a fatal beating on Tyre.  After the incident, Nichols reportedly "complained of having a shortness of breath" and was transported by ambulance to Memphis' St. Francis Hospital in critical condition.  He died three days later.  One of the attorneys for the family said "He was a human piñata for those police officers." and said that "It was unadulterated, unabashed, nonstop beating of this young boy for 3 minutes."  The family said they saw the police kick, pepper spray and use a stun gun on their son all while Nichols repeatedly asked, “What did I do?” 

There is a very substantial controversy going on in the country regarding the draft opinion that was written by Justice Samuel Alito calling on the Court to overrule Roe v. Wade —the landmark 1973 opinion that legalized abortion nationwide that has been leaked out.  Chief Justice John Roberts has confirmed that the leaked document is “authentic” but in doing damage control he said that it does not represent a decision by the Court of the final position of any member on the issues in the case.”  That is poppycock and Roberts knows it!

We now have another Senate Judiciary Committee hearing going on for the questioning of a U.S. Supreme Court nominee, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, who from most accounts is a very fair minded and even-tempered jurist, and extremely qualified for the position from most accounts.  Generally, when I write about judicial issues I keep political party affiliations out of the equation, but this time around I will have to make a bit of an exception since the Republicans, particularly Josh Hawley, a Republican Senator from Missouri, who is hell bent on attacking Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s record on crime, particularly on the judge’s record of sentencing child porn offenders to which Hawley has stated “a pattern of letting child porn offenders off the hook for their appalling crimes”.  But despite Howley’s rhetoric, a CNN review of the materials in question shows that Jackson has mostly followed the common judicial sentencing practices in these kinds of cases.  https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/18/politics/republican-attacks-scotus-nominee-sentencing-record/index.html.

There is something very fundamentally flawed in the way that federal judges are vetted in the appointment and confirmation process.  Federal district court judges, circuit court of appeals and supreme court judges are political appointments and are nominated by the president and confirmed by the senate.  Because these are basically lifetime appointments, we should be much more inquisitive in the selection process.  Quite frankly, the questions that the senators ask at the senate confirmation hearings of the judicial nominee are getting to be old hat and not helpful to the majority of the population in terms of the limited subject matter of the questions.

For anybody who doubts the existence of corruption in the American justice system, even when it comes to a person’s freedom, I urge you to watch this very telling video of an actual hearing in a criminal court case in Utah where you will see with your own eyes and hear with your own ears the lying and falsification of the proceedings by the court officials. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrsuMLwH09A&t=473s.  The case involves Luis Sanchez, a person claiming his innocence but stabbed in the back by his own lawyers from the Salt Lake Legal Defender Association who were upset that he (Sanchez) resisted their pressure to plead guilty without ever receiving or reviewing video evidence that police had in their possession regarding a traffic stop matter.  The evidence was destroyed but Sanchez’s lawyers failed to bring it to the attention of the court.