Bent, Not Broken

I know this week didn’t feel good.  The intense partisan fight over the Kavanaugh nomination reached a fever pitch this week, as did the trial in Chicago of Jason Van Dyke, the Chicago police officer that shot Laquan McDonald.   Almost as if decreed by Providence before the weekend was out, the outcomes were announced 15 minutes apart, and I am exhausted.   On the surface, the Kavanaugh nomination fight and the Van Dyke trial are completely unrelated dramas.   Yet these two cases represent a stress test of our system—and, in my view, we passed.   The system was stretched, pulled and dented, but in the end, it held together.  

These two cases represent very tough issues that have been highly politicized.  Sexual assault cases are difficult when they are resolved contemporaneously (see, e.g. the case of Patrick Kane, which took months to resolve http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-patrick-kane-rape-case-decision-20151105-story.html).  Cases that are decades old, with no corroborative evidence whatsoever are nearly impossible.  Likewise, the issue of the use of appropriate deadly force by law enforcement is also very difficult.  The presumption of innocence must go to the defendant in criminal sexual assault cases.   In the case of the application of deadly force in the face of a threat most often goes to law enforcement.  Both of these cases challenged presumptions, and because of the particular facts involved, came out in the right place I believe.

As I discussed in my post last week, the Kavanaugh nomination was about much more than Kavanaugh.  I do not know whether or not he is the best choice—I had not read any of his opinions, although his ruling on the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau warmed me to him.  What was at stake here was due process and the presumption of innocence.  Radical feminists had been successful in using Title IX to upend those fundamental cornerstones of our judicial system upended in higher education, and part of their goal was to get them adopted by our society writ large.   And they were willing to utterly destroy the life and work of an otherwise exemplary man to do so, and tear up his family as well.

Nothing quite captured the unhinged rage of the Left quite like professor C. Christine Fair of Georgetown (who sadly, obtained her undergraduate and graduate degrees from my alma mater) who tweeted that GOP Senators deserved “miserable deaths” and hoped that their “corpses would be castrated and fed to swine.”

But despite the abuse of the system by Ms. Ford and her attorney and the Democrats, despite the abuse of free speech by ugly, hate filled people like Ms. Fair, despite the waffling by Jeff Flake and the grandstanding by Kamala Harris and Cory Booker, Kavanaugh got confirmed.

Had Ford come up with a single verifiable corroborative witness, the result would likely have been different.  But she did not and our society withstood this test.  We simply cannot permit a single old, unverifiable claim to disrupt our entire republic.

A mere 15 minutes before Sue Collins announced her decision, the jury in the Van Dyke case read its verdict.  Van Dyke, you will recall, shot the knife wielding and PCP crazed Laquan McDonald 16 times in an incident that made national headlines, cost a police superintendent his job and was a factor in Rahm Emanuel’s decision not to seek re-election.

As with the Kavanaugh case, the Van Dyke case presents very tough issues and has ramifications well beyond this particular case.   In this case, the police officer was being prosecuted for first degree murder after arriving on the scene at which police were already present and pumping 16 shots into McDonald.  Worse, it was all captured on film. 

My own bias generally lies with law enforcement, and believe that the benefit of the doubt should be given to the police officer.   There were some bad facts on the McDonald’s side as well.  He had PCP in his system and was supposed to be on antipsychotic medication.  He was warned to drop the knife.   He had slashed the tires of a squad car.

Yet, my old high school football coach told me often, “Film doesn’t lie.”  And in the Laquon McDonald case, the film was damning.   The film together with the fact that there were already officers on the scene that didn’t shoot were enough to overcome the presumption that Van Dyke had acted appropriately.    Van Dyke’s actions stood in stark contrast to the incident at the University of Chicago last spring in which a rageful University of Chicago student was shot after he attacked a cop with a two by four.   That incident was also caught on cam and the officer repeatedly told the student to stop and then shot him once.   That officer was exonerated.   The jury in the Van Dyke case returned its guilty verdict the very next day (I thought the most likely outcome was a hung jury).

In the end, despite the passions and politics surrounding these two cases, our system held together and we obtained the right outcome.  The jury system works most of the time.  Although it is rare to convict a police officer for a killing in the line of duty, this is a special –and I hope rare—case.  In the case of Kavanaugh, the presumption of innocence prevailed despite all the noise.

In both cases the losing side used the word sham to describe the process.  The police union said this was a sham trial.  Corey Booker claimed the confirmation process was a sham.  Nonsense  In the end, a just result was reached in both cases, and Friday left me a little more hopeful for the future.