It’s really no surprise that the same federal judge who dropped charges against a 9/11-connected terrorist and vacated the 25-year-old murder and robbery convictions of a Weather Underground terrorist, ruled last week that the effectiveness of the NYPD’s highly successful stop-and-frisk program, geared toward preventing violent crime, doesn’t matter.
“U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin called it ‘indirect racial profiling’ because it targeted racially defined groups, resulting in the disproportionate and discriminatory stopping of tens of thousands of blacks and Hispanics while the city’s highest officials ‘turned a blind eye,’ she said” of her decision in the case of Floyd v. City of New York.
The 66-year-old judge “apparently believes that population ratios are the proper benchmark for measuring the legality of stop activity… though whites and Asians commit less than 1 percent of violent crime in the 88th Precinct and less than 6% of all crime, they should make up 40 percent of all stops – to match their representation in the local population,” Heather MacDonald points out in City Journal, going through an account of the racial descriptions of suspects vs. the races of those stopped by police in Fort Green, Brooklyn (a high-crime neighborhood) over a three-month period in 2009.
Are we really supposed to take Judge Scheindlin (appointed to the federal bench in 1994 by then-President Clinton… which explains a lot) seriously when she rules that stops should be based strictly on the racial breakdown of a local population, as opposed to specific descriptions of suspects given by victims and eyewitnesses? Are the police supposed to arrest criminals or run a feel-good diversity program?
Well, considering Scheindlin’s history on the bench, her blatant disregard for public safety shouldn’t surprise us. She first pinged my radar in 2002. That’s when she dismissed a perjury charge against Osama Awadallah, claiming it was a “perjury trap” for the Jordanian student who testified before a grand jury about having met with two of the 9/11 hijackers but didn’t remember their names; he later recanted his testimony. She also ruled that his detention was unlawful. Fortunately, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit reversed her decision and reinstated the indictment in November 2003.
In 2006, Judge Scheindlin got the bright idea to vacate the 75-year sentence handed down to convicted murderer and robber Judith Clark. She – Clark, not Scheindlin – was a member of the infamous Weather Underground and a participant in the 1981 Brinks robbery that cost the lives of two Nyack (N.Y.) police officers and a Brinks security guard.
According to Clark’s website, she chose to represent herself at her trial and “refused to participate in the proceedings, absenting myself from the courtroom for virtually the entire trial.” So, tiring of life in prison after two decades of no longer being a media darling, the aged terrorist decided to file for a new trial, claiming that the judge in her case somehow violated her constitutional rights by allowing her to represent herself – despite her having turned down all legal assistance and boycotted much of the trial, due to her insistence that she didn’t recognize the legal authority of the U.S. government. And in Judge Scheindlin, the convicted terrorist found an ally eager to free her.
Fortunately, in 2008, the Second Circuit once again injected common sense and reversed the Scheindlin ruling, noting that Clark complained about the trial judge violating her Sixth Amendment rights, despite her insistence on turning down all legal aid and refusing to take part in her own trial.
Whether the Second Circuit can pull off a hat trick again is up in the air. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has filed an appeal to this aggressively stupid ruling, but he leaves office at the end of this year. While all three Republican contenders for his job have vowed to support the appeal, all six Democrats vying for their party’s nomination promise to drop the appeal and return the city to the 1980s and early 90s. If anyone wants to know what a second Dinkins term would look like, just elect a Democrat to City Hall. Judge Scheindlin has already paved the way for lawlessness.
The Village Republican is a writer in Greenwich Village.