Welcome to my archives. This is a long list of most of the commentaries and longer articles I have written since 1989; the hundreds of articles I wrote for the New York Times from 1980-1988 can be found via the SELECTED MEDIA OUTLETS box. They are sorted by date, with the most recent posts first. If you want to find something specific, I would encourage you to use the search feature in the sidebar. It is powered by Google. It is fast and accurate.
Opening Argument – Polarization Hurts Security — and Liberty
by Stuart Taylor, Jr.
Did you know that the Bush administration is pushing Congress to approve a long-term regime of governmental eavesdropping without judicial warrants on the overseas phone calls and e-mails of countless Americans?
And that the administration still insists on using interrogation techniques so coercive that human-rights groups call them torture?
And that it claims the power to hold dark-skinned foreigners in Guantanamo Bay prisons without meaningful judicial review?
All true. And all horrifying to the American Civil Liberties Union, international human-rights groups, and self-righteous Europeans.
It’s also true, however, that most congressional Democrats support warrantless eavesdsropping on the overseas communications of countless Americans. (See my colleague Shane Harris’s "A Court at the Crossroads," p. 62.)
It’s further true that, although both have waffled lately, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and former President Clinton have supported forms of coercive interrogation that horrify human-rights groups. So will the next president, no matter who wins.
Finally, the Clinton administration itself claimed the power to hold dark-skinned foreigners in Guantanamo Bay prisons without meaningful judicial review. Those were refugees fleeing Haiti, not suspected terrorists. And although most Democrats now support searching judicial review of the current Guantanamo detentions, as I do, there is broad bipartisan support for holding those found to be enemy combatants even if they have committed no crimes or cannot feasibly be prosecuted.
Opening Argument – Affirming Justice Thomas
by Stuart Taylor, Jr.
For all the new attention focused on the tired old arguments about whether Clarence Thomas did or did not talk dirty to Anita Hill almost 25 years ago, his recently published memoir raises far more consequential issues. At the top of the list is Justice Thomas’s impassioned account in My Grandfather’s Son and recent media interviews of his conviction that racial affirmative-action preferences do African-Americans more harm than good.
The Thomas memoir brings this complaint to the fore at a time when a little-noticed battle is raging over an impressive and growing body of social-science research that offers some empirical support for Thomas’s view. This research suggests that preferences set many black students up for failure, as well as stigmatize the accomplishments of those who succeed and divert attention from the real causes of racial inequality.
So unsettling is this research — led by Richard Sander, a UCLA law professor and statistician — that affirmative-action champions are desperately seeking to deny Sander and other scholars access to the empirical databases that could provide even more graphic evidence of the costs of using heavy-handed preferences to engineer diversity.
Sander’s sophisticated statistical analyses suggest that racial preferences place so many black students into highly competitive law schools for which they are underqualified — and thus likely to fail — that there are actually fewer black lawyers than there would be if admissions were color-blind. Other scholars of diverse ideological views have joined Sander in seeking to shed more light on the validity (or invalidity) of his findings.
Opening Argument – Criminal Injustice and Race
by Stuart Taylor, Jr.
It is regrettable that the legend of the "Jena Six" has for many become the leading symbol of the grave injustices to African-Americans that pervade our nation’s penal system. The legend is partly false. And the notion that racism is the main reason for the injustices to hundreds of thousands of black defendants around the nation is entirely false.
To be sure, there is still too much racism among prosecutors, judges, and jurors. But this is far less widespread and virulent, even in Jena, La., than Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson — the media-anointed (albeit, repeatedly discredited) African-American "leaders" — like to pretend. There are still too many unwarranted prosecutions of innocent minority (and other) defendants, as detailed in my August 4 column, "Innocents in Prison." But the vast majority of those prosecuted are guilty, as may prove to be the case with some or all of the Jena Six.
Rather, the heart of the racial injustice in our penal system is the grossly excessive punishment of hundreds of thousands of nonviolent, disproportionately black offenders whose long prison terms ruin countless lives and turn many who could have become productive citizens into career criminals.
The Supreme Court heard two cases on October 2 that focus on a relatively small piece of this problem: how much discretion federal district judges have to depart from federal sentencing guidelines that provide savagely severe prison terms for small-time drug offenders, among others. The most savage penalties of all are for people — overwhelmingly, black people — caught with fairly small amounts of crack cocaine.
Opening Argument – Free Speech and Double Standards
by Stuart Taylor, Jr.
In the matter of the Holocaust-denying, terrorism-sponsoring, nuke-seeking, wipe-Israel-off-the-map-threatening, we-got-no-gays-in-Iran-spouting Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his September 24 showcase speech at Columbia University: It would be easier to stomach the free-speech grandstanding of Lee Bollinger, Columbia’s president and Ahmadinejad’s histrionically hostile host, and others of Bollinger’s ilk if they were a bit less selective in their devotion to the First Amendment. When a student group recently canceled an event featuring an anti-illegal-immigration speaker for fear of a hecklers’ veto by leftist students, for example, Bollinger had nothing to say.
Looking to the other coast, it would be easier to admire the indignation of certain academics and journalists at the temporarily shabby treatment of crusading liberal constitutional scholar Erwin Chemerinsky by the University of California (Irvine) if those same people had also spoken out against the far more widespread campus censorship of less liberal figures.
Those most recently censored include former Clinton Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, a mainstream Democrat whose invitation to speak to the University of California Board of Regents was derailed by the same sort of politically correct faculty mob that drove him from Harvard University’s presidency in February 2006.
As to Bollinger, let’s assume for the sake of argument that it was wise to provide Ahmadinejad with one of the very few forums in which he could score propaganda points around the world by winning televised applause from an American audience while being hectored by an American big shot.
Opening Argument – Reagan Was Right
by Stuart Taylor, Jr.
Are we safer than we were six years ago? Emphatically not. The risk that we will see American cities go up in smoke has steadily increased since 9/11. The main reason is not the Iraq war or Al Qaeda’s revival. It’s not the surging numbers of America-haters and would-be terrorists, or the most publicized failings of the Bush administration, or the supposed weakness of the Democrats.
Rather, the central threat is the spread of nuclear weapons and bomb-building programs to more countries. The new nuclear threats already include the unstable Pakistani regime, the evil North Korean regime, and (before long, perhaps) the lunatic Iranian regime. More than anything else, such nuclear proliferation increases the risk that terrorists will get and use nukes.
At least as terrifying is the risk that a false alarm will spur someone to launch a multiple-missile attack — perhaps Pakistan against nuclear-armed India or vice versa, perhaps Russia (by mistake) against America — with catastrophic effects on all involved and, ultimately, on the entire human race.
We must work harder to keep nukes out of the hands of terrorists, especially through underfunded efforts such as the Nunn-Lugar program to secure and dismantle nuclear weapons and materials in the former Soviet Union. We must also better secure our borders to keep terrorists from smuggling in nuclear bombs. But such measures are, at best, fingers in the dike.
If a nuclear bomb went off in an American city today, our leaders would probably not know who did it. But at least the list of suspected sources of supply — North Korea, rogue Pakistani generals, loose nukes in Russia, or terrorists who acquire them — would be short. This would increase the chance of identifying and obliterating the supply source. And that is a pretty good deterrent against any rogue state that might want to attack us through terrorist proxies.
Guilty in the Duke Case
by Stuart Taylor, Jr and KC Johnson
One night in jail: So concludes the Duke lacrosse rape case — rape fraud, as it turned out. The legacy of this incident should include hard thinking about the deep pathologies underlying the media sensationalism and the perversion of academic ideals that this fraud inspired.
The 24-hour sentence was imposed on Mike Nifong, the disbarred former district attorney of Durham, after a contempt-of-court trial last week for repeatedly lying to hide DNA evidence of innocence. His prosecution of three demonstrably innocent defendants, based on an emotionally disturbed stripper’s ever-changing account, may be the worst prosecutorial misconduct ever exposed while it was happening. Durham police officers and other officials aided Nifong, and the city and county face the threat of a massive lawsuit by the falsely accused former students seeking criminal justice reforms and compensation.
All this shows how the criminal justice process can oppress the innocent — usually poor people lacking the resources to fight back — and illustrates the need for reforms to restrain rogue prosecutors. But the case was also a major cultural event exposing habits of mind among academics and journalists that contradict what should be their lodestar: the pursuit of truth.
Nifong’s lies, his inflaming of racial hatred (to win the black vote in his election campaign) and his targeting of innocent people were hardly representative of criminal prosecutors. But the smearing of the lacrosse players as racist, sexist, thuggish louts by many was all too representative.
The Duke Lacrosse Team Rape Case
by Stuart Taylor, Jr and KC Johnson
Accused
At about 9 p.m. on March 16, 2006, Dave Evans was napping in his room at his rental house on 610 North Buchanan in Durham, North Carolina, when “I woke up to thundering knocks on my door like it was going to be broken down.” The Duke University senior, one of four co-captains of the school’s highly ranked lacrosse team, had just finished a grueling practice. Dave and co-captain Matt Zash, who also lived in the house, yelled to each other about who would get the door. Suddenly Dave heard, “Police! Freeze! Don’t move! Put your hands up!”
He ran into the living room. “There were all these cops with their flashlights in our eyes,” he recalled. “It was like in a movie or something. The next thing you know, they were patting us down, going through our pockets, yelling, ‘Why didn’t you answer the door?’ I said I was sleeping. They shouted, ‘Who was in the backyard?’ ”
The cops said that they had a search warrant. Sgt. Mark Gottlieb and Officer Benjamin Himan had obtained it after interviewing a 27-year-old black woman named Crystal Mangum earlier in the day. An exotic dancer—a stripper—she claimed she was gang-raped at this house three nights earlier. As the officers read from the warrant, Evans and Zash interjected. These were lies, they said, and asked for a chance to tell what really happened.
Opening Argument – Law Should Trump Loyalty
by Stuart Taylor, Jr.
For all the partisan bitterness in the air and the messes that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has made, it shouldn’t be that hard for President Bush to replace him with someone far, far more effective. Nor should it be hard to get a conservative Republican nominee of quality confirmed without giving away the store to Democrats or weakening the presidency.
In particular, the right nominee could get through the Senate without caving in to the demands of some Democrats that a special prosecutor be appointed to investigate the White House role in the firings of nine U.S. attorneys, or that Bush abandon his claims of executive privilege.
The big question, at this writing, is whether a president who so clearly values lapdog loyalty over competence, integrity, and independence can bring himself to invert those priorities.
If the nominee inspires bipartisan trust, who needs special prosecutors with their built-in bias toward investigative overkill? The amazingly still-unexplained U.S. attorney firings do smell fishy and do need to be investigated energetically. But this ain’t Watergate. The American people get that.
There is, to be sure, something to the complaint by David Rivkin and Lee Casey, in an August 29 Wall Street Journal op-ed, that "the only unifying theme congressional Democrats have exhibited since taking control last January is an unremitting hostility toward President Bush in particular, and executive power in general."
Any nominee will face a tough confirmation hearing.
But even those Senate Democrats most eager to rub Bush’s nose in the dirt understand that if they come off as obstructionist, or beat the tired "special prosecutor" drum too incessantly, the electorate will punish them. And their hostility to executive power is tempered by their confidence that it will belong to them as of January 20, 2009.
Opening Argument – Innocents in Prison
by Stuart Taylor, Jr.
As recently as 20 years ago, it was extraordinarily rare for a convicted prisoner to establish his or her innocence conclusively enough to get public attention. That changed with breakthroughs in DNA science.
The 205th DNA exoneration since 1989 was recorded earlier this month by the Innocence Project, a group of crack defense lawyers who have made such cases their mission. The exonerated prisoners — including 15 who had been sentenced to death — have been found innocent by courts, prosecutors, or governors based on post-conviction DNA testing.
But America has been too slow to appreciate that the DNA exonerations, and other evidence, suggest that many thousands of other wrongly convicted people are rotting in prisons and jails around the country. And our federal, state, and local governments and courts have done far too little to adopt proposed criminal justice reforms that could reduce the number of innocent people convicted while nailing more of the real criminals.
The case of the most recent DNA exonoree, Byron Halsey, was typical: Based on a confession full of obviously false details, extracted by high-pressure interrogation, he spent 19 years in prison in New Jersey for two heinous child murders committed by another man in 1985. Halsey was able to prove his innocence only after a 2002 New Jersey law forced reluctant prosecutors to give his counsel access to DNA evidence. In Halsey’s and some 70 other DNA-exoneration cases, DNA also helped to establish the guilt of the real perpetrators. All or almost all had committed other violent crimes before being caught.
Shortsighted on Judges
by Stuart Taylor, Jr
Imagine that two years hence, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, or Sen. Barack Obama, or former Sen. John Edwards is president. She or he will be trying to fill dozens (eventually) of vacancies on federal Courts of Appeals with liberal-leaning nominees. And perhaps one or two Supreme Court vacancies as well.
If and when those nominees face Republican filibusters or other tactics to deny them floor votes, what standing will the new Democratic president have to protest? How, for example, could Obama show his own nominees to be more deserving of confirmation than former Mississippi Judge Leslie Southwick, who is under attack by Obama and other Senate Democrats simply because liberal interest groups consider him too conservative?
Southwick, who is a professionally well-qualified and personally admirable Bush nominee for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit (covering Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas), is the latest victim of a judicial confirmation process that has steadily become more degraded by partisan warfare in recent decades.
Senate Democrats’ treatment of Southwick will show whether they are so shortsighted as to provide their Republican adversaries with new precedents and excuses for a campaign to obstruct the next Democratic president’s liberal nominees, no matter how well qualified.
If "too conservative" is reason enough for Democratic senators to block a floor vote on Southwick, who is no right-wing culture warrior, then "too liberal" will be reason enough for Senate Republicans to do the same when the shoe is on the other foot.
The long-term cost to the country is that bit by bit, almost imperceptibly, more and more of the people who would make the best judges—liberal and conservative alike—are less and less willing to put themselves through the ever-longer, ever-more-harrowing gantlet that the confirmation process has become.