Colorado Department of Corrections Chief Tom Clements, who was killed in his home March 19

In the week since the tragic killing of Colorado Department of Corrections Chief Tom Clements – one night before Gov. John Hickenlooper (D) signed a comprehensive gun violence prevention package into law – several telling details have emerged about the primary suspect Evan Ebel that will play into investigation of the case. Reports suggest that Ebel, who had served 8 years in prison for armed robberies, was known as a troubled child who sometimes signed his name “Evil Evan.” They suggest that he had another woman buy a gun and illegally transfer it to him, and that stronger laws for universal background checks and straw purchases might have affected his case. But one element of the criminal justice system that stands out particularly in his story has nothing to do with guns. Ebel spent the bulk of his prison time in solitary confinement, an extreme condition that has been found to exacerbate violent tendencies, and that both Clements and Ebel’s parents had spoken out against.

In a meticulous story that tracks the communications between Ebel and former fellow inmate Ryan Pettigrew, the Colorado Independent explains how Ebel’s actions have been linked to the post-solitary confinement trauma he communicated to Pettigrew in the two months between his release from prison and the killing of Clements. Pettigrew, who also spent time in solitary confinement, explained how the long-term isolation in a sometimes window-less cell for years builds up not just psychological trauma, but hate and violent tendencies, of the sort Clements was advocating to prevent. The newspaper explains:

In an exclusive interview last spring, Clements said that, immediately after Hickenlooper recruited him from Missouri to run the Colorado corrections department, he found disturbing “one very alarming statistic” he said kept him up at night — that 47 percent of Colorado prisoners being released from isolation were walking directly out onto the streets without help reintegrating into social environments and interacting with people.

Clements wanted longer transition periods and step-down programs before setting isolated prisoners free. As Pettigrew tells it, Ebel said he had little help making that transition. He said altercations during his brief period in a step-down program landed him back in isolation. […]

“We have to think about how what we do in prisons impacts the community when [prisoners] leave,” Clements continued. “It’s not just about running the prison safely and securely. There’s a lot of research around solitary and isolation in recent years, some tied to POWs and some to corrections. My experience tells me that long periods of isolation can be counter-productive to stable behavior and long-term rehabilitation goals.” [...]

Pettigrew said he thought many corrections officers weren’t receptive to the reforms Clements was making.

“The old school guards in there, they just hated what he has doing and would come down even harder on us. You develop such a hatred not only from being in solitary but from having been pocked with a stick that long.”

Ebel’s parents also observed that Evan’s behavior changed after his time in solitary, and testified during a hearing in favor of a bill that would require inmates to spend time outside of solitary confinement before leaving prison: “What I’ve seen over six years is he has become increasingly … he has a high level of paranoia and [is] extremely anxious. So when he gets out to visit me, and he gets out of his cell to talk to me, I mean he is so agitated that it will take an hour to an hour-and-a-half before we can actually talk.”

Research about solitary confinement not only suggests that it is a cruel and unusual treatment particularly when applied to the mentally ill, but also that, rather than rehabilitate prisoners, it can make a bad situation worse. In a National Geographic documentary on the practice, one prisoner said, “I think 90 percent of the people that are locked up here, if they ran into a staff member on the streets, they’d hurt ‘em. … It’s hate that’s been building up in you.”

Just a few weeks after the Maryland legislature voted to repeal its death penalty, the Delaware Senate narrowly voted for a similar bill 11-10. The bill now goes to the state house, where Democrats enjoy a 26-15 majority. Gov. Jack Markell (D) has not yet said whether he will sign the bill if it reaches his desk.

As Cornell law professor John Blume explains, the rate of death sentences is unusually high in Delaware, and it is most likely to be applied in a particular kind of case — cases with black defendants and white victims:

White Student Union founder Richard Railey

A white student in Texas feels his heritage is not duly appreciated by his classmates, and he’s out to do something about it.

Ben Sherman at Burnt Orange Report has background about the Fort Worth-area student:

A Tarrant County Republican activist has a new idea for a new club at Tarrant County Colleges: a student union to celebrate and promote white interests.

Richard Railey, a 56-year-old seeking an Associate of Applied Science in IT, calls himself “Mstr Rick” and is currently seeking a school charter for the White Student Union of Tarrant County Colleges. On its website, Railey deems the group “a confederacy of like minds united in pursuit of common political, cultural, educational, and social interests relative to our unique White Heritage”. In the past, the Tarrant County GOP has appointed Railey as an election judge and elected him as a precinct chairman.

Sherman goes on to note that last year, Railey commented to the Fort Worth Weekly that the mere presence of an Ebony Magazine in a polling place is “EXTREMELY inappropriate and probably a federal election law violation” because it “was an attempt to intimidate, bully, and threaten white voters.”

The group’s flyers say it meets “to combat institutional racism and discrimination on campus” and help with job training “within the white business community”. The group also offers scholarships “EXCLUSIVELY for White Men” through another organization, “The Former Majority Association for Equality.”

“White Student Unions” have gained notoriety recently. A similar group at Towson University grabbed headlines this month when its members defended slavery at a conservative conference and promised to begin nighttime patrols on campus to protect against the “black crime wave”.

During the second week of testimony on New York City’s controversial stop-and-frisk program, an officer admitted to detaining and then mocking a 13-year-old boy when he started crying. Though the boy was innocent, he was still cuffed and brought to the station:

Appearing on the stand Wednesday, police officer Brian Dennis testified that he had taunted a 13-year-old boy after he detained him. Dennis told the handcuffed child, Devin Almonor, to “stop crying like a little girl.”

The teen was reportedly stopped on the street in Harlem when he reached into his pants’ waste-band. The two officers that stopped him claimed to have been searching for a firearm, but Almonor was found to be carrying no weapons. He was nonetheless handcuffed, taunted and taken to the stationhouse.

Dennis conceded that he no longer thought the taunt was appropriate, but another officer, Jonathan Korabel, maintained the stop of the boy was a “lawful frisk.” He claimed the teen was jaywalking and started “yelling and making a scene” when officers tried to frisk him.

Almonor is hardly the NYPD’s youngest target. In December, the police were once again sued for cuffing and arresting a 7-year-old boy for stealing $5 from a classmate. Lawsuits over police misconduct cost the city $22 million in just one year.

The current case, Floyd v. City of New York, has exposed many harrowing new details about stop-and-frisk. Last week, other officers testified that they were pressured to meet quotas of 5 stop and frisks, 20 summons and 1 arrest every month. Another cop recorded his superior instructing him to specifically target “male blacks 14 to 21″ years old.

These instructions have been carried out with gusto; in 2011, the NYPD stopped young black men more times than the total number of young black men in all of New York City. Since Mayor Michael Bloomberg took office in 2002, more than 86 percent of the people stopped by the police were black or Latino. Almost 90 percent of these stops resulted in no ticket or arrest.

Thursday morning, local police released previously embargoed police records about the Newtown, Connecticut shooter, Adam Lanza. The records disclosed that, in five minutes, Lanza was able to fire 155 shots, partly as a consequence of the numerous 30 round high-capacity magazines he was carrying.

Most of the released documents were search warrants for Lanza’s car and home, which he shared with his gun-collecting mother (the weapons used at Newtown were taken from his mother’s stockpile). Put together, the findings in these warrants paint a disturbing picture of the arsenal available to Lanza:

– 1 NRA certificate for Adam Lanza and 1 NRA training book. Police investigators found a National Rifle Association certificate in Adam Lanza’s name, though the nature of the certificate was unspecified. Police also found a book titled “NRA Guide to the Basics of Pistol Shooting,” a book that’s commonly given out as part of NRA pistol training courses. Graduates of these courses are given certificates.

– 3 new guns. In addition the newly-identified shotgun in his parked car outside (it was a Saiga 12), a search of the Lanza home found an Enfield Albian bolt action rifle and a Savage Mark II .22 rifle. The latter contained live ammunition.

– 4 high capacity magazines, 2 of which were brought loaded to the crime scene. There were two high-capacity shotgun shell magazines for his shotgun at the crime scene, containing a combined 70 extra rounds for the fortunately-unused shotgun. Police also found two 20-round magazines at the Lanza residence.

– Over 1700 rounds of ammunition. These covered a variety of different calibers and gun types, and would have stocked 170 standard 10-round magazines or 56 of the 30-round high capacity magazines Lanza used to such deadly effect in the school.

– 13 types of bladed weapons. The Lanzas didn’t just collect guns; they also had a variety of knives, samurai swords, and one “six foot ten inch wood handled two sided pole with a blade on one side and a spear on the other.”

Though public outcry after the Newtown shooting generated more political momentum for effective gun law regulations than any other time in the past decade, the political effort is in danger of stalling out in the Senate.

In one of the more punishing blows to the class action mechanism since the 2011 Wal-Mart gender discrimination loss, the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday rejected a class lawsuit alleging that Comcast jacked up prices to Philadelphia-area customers through anticompetitive practices.

The plaintiffs may or may not have been able to prove antitrust violations by the cable company. We may never know, because the five-justice majority led by Antonin Scalia said they cannot be certified as a class, the mechanism that enables plaintiffs to band together with the necessary resources to go up against corporate behemoths. This decision is one of many by the Roberts Court to limit the class mechanism and erode corporate accountability through procedural rulings, but it may be the first in this string in which any justice, let alone two, read their dissent from the bench – an infrequent practice that typically connotes particularly strong disagreement with the majority decision. On this Wednesday morning, Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer had a particularly large and rapt audience for their scathing oral dissent, with court-watchers there to witness landmark arguments on marriage equality. What the audience got is a lesson on how obscure procedural cases with major implications for consumers are susceptible to manipulation.

The Comcast v. Behrend case involved a class of some 2 million plaintiffs in the Philadelphia region who argued that Comcast monopolized the regional market by exchanging territories with competitors — enabling everyone to charge higher prices. Plaintiffs who file class lawsuits must establish that they can prove their injury and damages on a classwide basis, and the majority in this case said they hadn’t met that burden. But here’s where it gets interesting. The majority’s holding does not answer the question the court had said it would answer when it agreed to review the case. It granted the petition on the much narrower question of what standard is required for admitting expert testimony in class cases, and this is what the parties addressed in their written and oral arguments. According to a passionate and fuming dissent from Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan, the plaintiffs were victims of a bait-and-switch that deprived them of even an opportunity to properly brief the issue:

The Court’s newly revised question, focused on predominance, phrased only after briefing was done, left respondents without an unclouded opportunity to air the issue the Court today decides against them. And by resolving a complex and fact-intensive question without the benefit of full briefing, the Court invites the error into which it has fallen. […]

Incautiously entering the fray at this interlocutory stage, the Court sets forth a profoundly mistaken view of antitrust law. And in doing so, it relies on its own version of the facts, a version inconsistent with factual findings made by the District Court and affirmed by the Court of Appeals.

And the dissenters go farther than this. Typically it is left to outside commentators to observe the activism that motivates a particular method of deciding a case. Not here, where the majority’s manipulation of the case was so egregious that the dissenters explicitly call them out on the practice:

Today the Court reaches out to decide a case hardly fit for our consideration. On both procedural and substantive grounds, we dissent. This case comes to the Court infected by our misguided reformulation of the question presented.

Whether this case’s ruling rejecting the plaintiffs’ methodology for determining damages will have impact on future class questions is not clear. According to the dissenters, this case sets no new precedent and should have no application outside of this particular case. According to lawyers who defend these cases, the ruling will make it still easier for companies to beat back class challenges. The primary take-away is that Comcast found an ally in the Roberts Court, whose five conservative justices remain virulently hostile to the class mechanism. At a minimum, the ruling deprived at least 2 million consumers of the opportunity to challenge an alleged Comcast practice that no one consumer could take on alone.

At yesterday’s marriage equality hearing, several of the Court’s conservatives took swipes at President Obama for refusing to defend the unconstitutional Defense of Marriage Act in court. Justice Scalia worried that “we’re living in this new world where the Attorney General can simply decide, yeah, it’s unconstitutional, but it’s not so unconstitutional that I’m not willing to enforce it.” Justice Kennedy compared Obama’s actions to President Bush’s infamous signing statements. Chief Justice Roberts, somewhat bizarrely, accused the President of lacking “the courage of his convictions” by saying DOMA is unconstitutional but continuing to enforce it.

But if Roberts and his fellow conservatives don’t like Obama’s decision, they have only one person to blame for laying the groundwork for it — Chief Justice Roberts.

In 1990, the Justice Department was tasked with defending a law protecting an affirmative action program governing broadcast licensing to minority-owned stations. Despite the fact that none of the traditional reasons why DOJ might refuse to defend a federal law were present in the case, then-acting Solicitor General Roberts refused to defend the law anyway. Instead, Roberts signed a brief arguing that the law was unconstitutional. Ultimately, the law Roberts refused to defend was upheld by the Supreme Court.

So when the Obama Administration refused to defend DOMA, it did nothing more than follow the “Roberts Rule” and travel the path laid by Chief Justice Roberts himself. If Roberts’ fellow conservative have a problem with this Roberts Rule, they should take it up with the Chief.