WASHINGTON, DC — There were audible gasps in the Supreme Court’s lawyers’ lounge, where audio of the oral argument is pumped in for members of the Supreme Court bar, when Justice Antonin Scalia offered his assessment of a key provision of the Voting Rights Act. He called it a “perpetuation of racial entitlement.”

The comment came as part of a larger riff on a comment Scalia made the last time the landmark voting law was before the justices. Noting the fact that the Voting Rights Act reauthorization passed 98-0 when it was before the Senate in 2006, Scalia claimed four years ago that this unopposed vote actually undermines the law: “The Israeli supreme court, the Sanhedrin, used to have a rule that if the death penalty was pronounced unanimously, it was invalid, because there must be something wrong there.”

That was an unusual comment when it was made, but Scalia’s expansion on it today raises concerns that his suspicion of the Act is rooted much more in racial resentment than in a general distrust of unanimous votes. Scalia noted when the Voting Rights Act was first enacted in 1965, it passed over 19 dissenters. In subsequent reauthorizations, the number of dissenters diminished, until it passed the Senate without dissent seven years ago. Scalia’s comments suggested that this occurred, not because of a growing national consensus that racial disenfranchisement is unacceptable, but because lawmakers are too afraid to be tarred as racists. His inflammatory claim that the Voting Rights Act is a “perpetuation of racial entitlement” came close to the end of a long statement on why he found a landmark law preventing race discrimination in voting to be suspicious.

It should be noted that even one of Scalia’s fellow justices felt the need to call out his remark. Justice Sotomayor asked the attorney challenging the Voting Right Act whether he thought voting rights are a racial entitlement as soon as he took the podium for rebuttal.

A transcript of the oral argument will be available soon, and we will post Scalia’s quote in its full context. We will also post audio of Scalia’s words when they become available.

Read more

Forty years after the wrongful convictions of the “Wilmington 10,” North Carolina outgoing Gov. Bev Perdue (D) pardoned the ten individuals falsely found guilty of having firebombed a grocery store in a racially charged case riddled with evidence of perjury by crucial witnesses, overt racism in jury selection, and withholding of exonerating information. The sentence of a total of 282 years in prison for the ten individuals, nine of whom were African American and most of whom were activists in their teens at the time, prompted international outcry. The activist who received the harshest sentence, Benjamin Chavis, later became the executive director of the NAACP. Although an appeals court overturned the convictions in 1980, civil rights groups and others have been vocal in calls for official state recognition of error in the case a recent New York Times editorial called “one of the more shameful episodes on North Carolina history.”  Reuters explains:

“These convictions were tainted by naked racism and represent an ugly stain on North Carolina’s criminal justice system that cannot be allowed to stand any longer,” Perdue said. “Justice demands that this stain finally be removed.”

Wilmington, an historic port city on North Carolina’s coast, was gripped by racial tension in the years after Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1968 assassination and the desegregation of schools.

Violence erupted on February 6, 1971, when demonstrators set off firebombs in the city’s downtown. Firefighters who responded to the blaze set at a grocery store were met with sniper fire.

Authorities blamed the Wilmington 10 for the grocery fire and for conspiring to attack the emergency workers. They were tried and convicted the following year. [...]

Last month, Perdue received the handwritten notes of the prosecutor who picked the group’s jury, and the records showed racism had played a dominant role in the process, she said on Monday.

“The notes reveal that certain white jurors believed to be Ku Klux Klan members were described by the prosecutor as ‘good’ and that at least one African-American juror was noted to be an ‘Uncle Tom type,’” Perdue said. “This conduct is disgraceful.”

Perdue issued the pardons Monday as she exits a term in office marked by dogged battles with the state’s conservative legislature on attempts to roll back environmental protection, workers’ rights, and reproductive rights. Even after the court reversal, some opponents reportedly lobbied against the issuance of pardons, arguing for a standard of justice by which defendants are guilty until proven innocent:

[A] group calling itself Citizens for Justice took out a quarter-page ad in the Wilmington Star News, asking Purdue not to grant pardons to the Wilmington Ten, essentially because, they say, it has never been proven that the nine black males and one white female civil rights activists didn’t conspire to firebomb a white-owned grocery store in February 1971, and fire weapons on responding fire and police personnel from a church steeple.

Retired white Wilmington police officers, and even former prosecutor Jay Stroud, have told Wilmington media that the Ten are guilty …

Both state governors and the president possess the power to mitigate harsh or unjust punishments by shortening sentences through a commutation, or invalidating convictions entirely through a pardon. Perdue’s pardons of the already-released individuals was a symbolic rejection of the state’s racially charged prosecution. But most pardons and commutations are sought in cases in which inmates continue to serve their time. In spite of evidence of individuals serving life sentences for their nominal and nonviolent role in drug deals, and the continued U.S. practice of mass incarceration, President Obama did not issue a single pardon or commutation in 2012.

In Meridian, Miss., it is school officials – not police – who determine who should be arrested. Schools seeking to discipline students call the police, and police policy is to arrest all children referred to the agency, according to a Department of Justice lawsuit. The result is a perverse system that funnels children as young as ten who merely misbehave in class into juvenile detention centers without basic constitutional procedures. The lawsuit, which follows unsuccessful attempts to negotiate with the county, challenges the constitutionality of punishing children “so arbitrarily and severely as to shock the conscience” and alleging that the city’s police department acts as a de facto “taxi service” in shuttling students from school to juvenile detention centers. Colorlines explains:

Once those children are in the juvenile justice system, they are denied basic constitutional rights. They are handcuffed and incarcerated for days without any hearing and subsequently warehoused without understanding their alleged probation violations.

To illustrate how this system works, Colorlines provides the example of Cedrico Green. When he was in eighth grade, he was put on probation for getting in a fight. After that one incident, every subsequent offense was deemed a probation violation — from wearing the wrong color socks, to talking back to a teacher – and the consequence was a return to juvenile detention. He couldn’t even remember how many times he had been back in detention, but guessed 30 times – time when he wasn’t in school, fell behind in his schoolwork and subsequently failed several classes, even though he said he liked school.

The phenomenon of disciplining kids through the criminal justice system is known as the “school-to-prison pipeline” – a  process that paves the way for some kids accused of minor disciplinary violations to spend less time in school, and more time getting exposure to the criminal justice system. Colorlines explains:

A 2010 study by Russell Skiba, a professor of education policy at Indiana University, looked at four decades of data from 9,000 of the nation’s 16,000 middle schools. It found that black boys were three times as likely to be suspended as white boys and that black girls were four times as likely to be suspended as white girls. It is a serious, endemic issue. […]

Research shows that if the intent behind zero-tolerance policies is to discourage misbehavior and foster good learning environments, they don’t do the job. A sweeping 2006 study (PDF) conducted by the American Psychological Association found that zero-tolerance policies don’t actually make schools safer, and in fact can work to push students away from school. If, however, the intent is to push students of color out of school, away from their educational futures and into the criminal justice system, there is also a body of evidence that suggests that zero-tolerance policies are rather effective instruments.

Advocates in Detroit are calling for the director of the local Immigration and Customs Enforcement office to resign after immigration officers stopped two undocumented immigrants on Tuesday while they dropped their children off at school. The agents had followed both men, who had children in their cars, from their homes to the children’s schools.

Jorge Hernandez, one of the men, said ICE officials pulled him over in unmarked cars across the street from his 4-year-old daughter’s school, and his son and wife were in the car when he was stopped. “I was very scared,” said Jorge through an interpreter. “My children were saying, ‘Don’t take my dad away.’” Agents released Hernandez after he was questioned. The second man, Hector Orozco Villa, was detained near the elementary school that his two children attend and is still in custody.

The Alliance for Immigrant Rights and Reform said this incident follows an agreement last year from ICE that officials would be more sensitive when enforcing immigration policies. In 2011, half a dozen ICE agents surrounded another school in the same community, trapping immigrant parents inside.

Now, parents in the area are worried again:

The presence of the agents spread alarm among arriving parents and children in the Latino neighborhood, school officials said. More than 100 people rallied on Wednesday to protest, according to a report in The Detroit News, saying the immigration agency had broken an earlier promise to avoid arrests near schools and other community gathering points.

“It is very alarming to me to have this happen during the rush hour of people taking their children to school,” said Rashida Tlaib, a Democratic state representative who attended the rally. “We are really worried about the impact on these United States citizen children.” Several of Mr. Hernandez’s and Mr. Orozco’s children were born in the United States.

The incident revealed the raw sensitivities in some immigrant communities as federal agents carry out the increasingly complex deportation policy of the Obama administration. Agents have been instructed to focus on capturing illegal immigrants who are convicted criminals or repeat immigration violators, and to avoid detaining those who have committed no serious crimes and have strong family ties to the United States.

Immigration officials said the officers’ actions followed agency policies. “After a thorough review of facts, the arrest of a priority target today in the Detroit metro area adhered to, and was in full compliance of, the stated policies and procedures of the agency,” said ICE Spokesman Ross Feinstein, according to the New York Times. Officials said Orozco was arrested because of a 2008 criminal conviction and had returned to the U.S. after being deported — a felony. While ICE reports Hernandez was not a primary target, he had two convictions for driving with an expired license.

There have been a record number of deportations under President Obama, including tens of thousands of parents whose children are U.S. citizens. Last year, the Obama administration announced a case-by-case review of deportations to ensure that lower-priority deportation cases “are being set aside so we can focus more on our more serious cases of convicted criminals and other high priority categories.”

A Los Angeles proposal to provide photo identification to undocumented immigrants and other marginalized populations cleared a city council committee unanimously on Tuesday.

The measure proposed by Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa would make cards available to any city resident for a small fee. They would include identifying information, allow access to city services such as libraries, and could be used as prepaid debit cards. During the hearing on the measure Tuesday, not a single person spoke in opposition to the measure, and those imploring its passage included not just immigrant advocates, but bankers and business owners, who would benefit from the business of the city’s estimated 4.3 million immigrants.

The proposal aims to reduce crime and increase access for the city’s immigrants, as well as seniors, the homeless and other individuals who have no identification. Those who cannot open a bank account must carry around significant amounts of cash, and day laborers are particular targets for theft. The city also plans to make the cards gender-neutral for transgender individuals. Other cities, including New Haven, San Francisco, Oakland and Richmond, California have passed similar measures, but Los Angeles would be the largest jurisdiction to do so.

Unlike the harsh measures in Arizona and other states that seek to criminalize immigrants and racially profile, ID proposals seek to reduce crime and increase revenue by bringing the immigrant population “out of the shadows.” Importantly, these laws are also less susceptible to legal challenges that charge local interference with federal immigration policy because they do not even consider immigration status, and the card is made available to any city resident who can verify his or her identify. Initial legal challenges to the measures in New Haven and San Francisco were rejected. Of course, because the federal government has the ultimate purview over immigration policy, laws like this can do nothing to change the legal status of immigrants, who remain in legal limbo until the federal government does more to exercise that power.