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Law and Disorder is a weekly independent civil liberties radio program airing on more than 150 stations and on Apple podcast. Law and Disorder provides timely legal perspectives on issues concerning civil liberties, privacy, right to dissent and practices of torture exercised by the US government and private corporations.
Law and Disorder April 3, 2023
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You Might Go to Prison, Even Though You’re Innocent
There is a common belief that if you’re arrested, you are probably guilty because “where there’s smoke, there’s fire.” People assume that only the guilty confess to crimes because why would an innocent person confess to a crime they didn’t commit? And when a person pleads guilty or is convicted by a jury, that’s the end of the matter, in the minds of most people.
In fact, many innocent people are arrested, especially people of color, due to racial profiling and other forms of discrimination by law enforcement. Implicit bias often infects the case as it moves through the criminal legal system – from the initial police stop, to interrogation, arrest, charging, trial and sentencing. This is particularly tragic when a person is charged with a capital crime for which the death penalty is imposed and that sentence is carried out.
However, it is estimated that 10,000 to 20,000 people are currently serving time in prison after being convicted of crimes they did not commit, largely due to prosecutorial misconduct and police misconduct. Unfortunately, even when exonerated, the psychological and physical damage done is so extensive that many people are never able to fully recover from the trauma. In addition, when the wrongful conviction is solely the result of prosecutorial misconduct, those convicted have no legal recourse to be compensated for the wrong done to them because of prosecutorial immunity.
Guest – Justin Brooks criminal defense attorney and law professor has spent decades working to free innocent people from prison. The Founding Director of the California Innocence Project, Brooks is the author of the provocative new book, “You Might Go to Prison, Even Though You’re Innocent.” In it, he discusses false identifications, junk science, lying snitches, and incompetent defense lawyers – which too often lead to the imprisonment of innocent people.
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Expert Panel On Grutter v. Bollinger
Last October, Law and Disorder aired a segment exploring the possibility that the Supreme Court might be poised to overrule Grutter v. Bollinger and gut affirmative action. That’s the landmark 2003 case that held that the 14th Amendment allows public universities to consider race as a factor to assemble a diverse student body.
Around the time of our interview, the National Lawyers Guild New York City Chapter and the Society of American Law Teachers, or SALT, held an educational panel exploring the two affirmative action cases that the Supreme Court will decide by June or July. As many await the high court’s decision, we are pleased to present excerpts from this panel.
The speakers are Victor Goode, former Executive Director of the National Conference of Black Lawyers and Professor Emeritus at CUNY School of Law. Corinthia Carter is a board member of the NLG-NYC Chapter Foundation and president of the Legal Services Staff Association of the UAW. Rounding out the panel is law professor Vinay Harpalani from the New Mexico School of Law and a member of SALT’s board of governors. The panel was moderated by Olympia Duhart, co-president of SALT and a law professor at Nova Southeastern University College of Law.\
Hosted by Attorneys Heidi Boghosian, Marjorie Cohn and Julie Hurwitz
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Law and Disorder March 27, 2023
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Economic Update: Banking Collapse Contagion?
On March 10, 2023, the Silicon Valley Bank, the most important bank in Silicon Valley, failed. This bank held the money of some of the wealthiest people in the world, venture capitalists who invested in tech businesses.
The government bailed it out hoping to prevent the crisis from becoming a nationwide contagion like the one in 2008 when even larger banks failed. As a consequence in 2008, 8.7 million people lost their jobs. Unemployment jumped to 10%. There was a 1/3 drop in the value of homes and 10 million people lost their homes. The government did nothing to help them.
After the Silicon Valley Bank crashed the Signature Bank in New York crashed followed by the Republic Bank and then Credit Suisse. We speak with the economics professor Richard Wolff on why the economy was threatened with collapse and what must be done to protect us from the unstable banking system.
Guest – Richard Wolff is emerita professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts where he taught for for 35 years and a visiting professor at the Graduate Program in International Affairs at the Nee School University, NYC. He is the founder of Democracy at Work and host of their national syndicated show Economic Update. Professor Wolff has authorized numerous books on capitalism and socialism, including most recently “The Sickness is the System: When Capitalism Fails to Save Us From Pandemics or Itself“, “Understanding Socialism“; and “Understanding Marxism”, which can be found at democracyatwork.info.
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Upcoming Supreme Court Cases
The ever more conservative and activist Supreme Court has already heard arguments this term in a number of cases of vital importance. The cases involve the legality of President Biden’s student debt relief plan, the fate of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and other independent agencies, and the liability of social media cites where it is claimed that Google’s algorithms sent people to a hateful site that the plaintiffs in the case claim led to an Islamic State attack that killed their child.
Also of concern is the Supreme Court’s refusal to take an appeal from a lower count opinion upholding the State of Kansas law forbidding the State from doing business with any company that refuses to certify it does not support the boycott, divestment and sanctions, or “BDS” movement against Israel. And there is the Helaman Hansen case that addresses the question of whether the First Amendment permits criminal punishment of speech that merely encourages a noncitizen to remain in the United States, without any requirement of intent to further illegal conduct, and when remaining in the United States unlawfully is itself not a crime.
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Guest – Attorney Stephen Rohde is a noted constitutional scholar and activist. He is the past Chair of the ACLU Foundation of Southern California; the founder and current Chair of Interfaith Communities United for Justice and Peace; the author of American Words of Freedom, and of Freedom of Assembly. Steve Rohde is a regular contributor to TruthDig as well as the Los Angeles Review of Books, and is a leader in the national campaign to free the imprisoned investigative journalist, Julian Assange.
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Law and Disorder March 20, 2023
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My Country Is the World: Staughton Lynd’s Writings, Speeches, and Statements against the Vietnam War
Staughton Lynd was an activist, historian and attorney who became a leading critic of the U.S. war in Vietnam which claimed the lives of more than 3 million Vietnamese people and 58,000 Americans. He argued that the United States was committing war crimes and crimes against humanity and should immediately and fully withdraw from Vietnam.
Lynd traveled to Hanoi with Tom Hayden and Herbert Aptheker at the end of 1965 to the beginning of 1966 to try to open diplomatic channels between the U.S. and the Vietnamese. For that effort, he was denied tenure at Yale University and his passport was revoked. Lynd and his wife Alice worked in the draft resistance movement and advocated civil disobedience including the non-payment of taxes to confront the war machine.
Guest – Luke Stewart is a historian and has collected many of Lynd’s writings and speeches against the Vietnam War and published an important book called “My Country Is the World: Staughton Lynd’s Writings, Speeches, and Statements against the Vietnam War.”
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Detroit Poet Warrior: Dr. Gloria Aneb House
Around Detroit, one woman has touched many lives in many ways: artistically, intellectually and spiritually. A poet-warrior on the front lines of the fight for social justice, Dr. Gloria Aneb House has lived for decades at the intersection of art, education and urgent political movements — from the 1960s free speech movement in Berkeley, and the civil rights struggles organizing sharecroppers in Alabama and her involvement in SNCC, to the movement for justice for Cuba, and the anti-war movement, to the current movement to end racist police brutality. During Detroit’s water shutoffs, and other human rights and anti-war causes, she was in the streets protesting.
Among other accomplishments, she taught and fought discriminatory policies at Wayne State University for 27 years, and then went on to develop and direct the African American Studies major at the University of Michigan-Dearborn for 10 years, until her retirement in 2014. She has also been an instrumental leader in the efforts to win freedom for several political prisoners over the years, including former Black Panther Ahmad Rahman.
Guest – Dr. Gloria Aneb House has published several books of poetry since the 1980s under her chosen African name Aneb Kgositsile. She has also published essays and books since the early 1980s and taught at universities from Michigan to South Africa. Among her many awards, she received the Kresge Eminent Artist Award in 2019.
Hosted by attorneys Heidi Boghosian, Marjorie Cohn and Julie Hurwitz
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