James M. Redwine

News Media

Presumed Mentally Ill

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Luigi Mangione is presumed by the Manhattan New York District Attorney Alvin Bragg to have murdered United Healthcare Chief Executive Officer Brian Thompson and has had him indicted by a Grand Jury for First Degree Murder. If the state does not presume Mangione guilty, it should not have charged him. Of course, the generic legal system is supposed to presume Mangione innocent, good luck with that, but it’s a good theory.

As for me, I know only what CNN, MSNBC and FOX News tell me about the case of December 04, 2024. Therefore, based on my experience with cable news, I conclude I should not presume anything except that Mr. Thompson was shot in the back by a masked person; after all, I have seen that in countless showings on television with my own eyes. And even Mr. Thompson’s identification, medical condition and employment are only known to me via hearsay. Now with AI, even my eyes cannot be afforded unquestioned reliability. The general public has no legal obligation to presume anything unless they happen to be selected to serve on a jury that may eventually try Mangione.

As for Mr. Mangione’s new attorney in his New York case, she has been described by the media as “high powered” and high profile. Attorney Karen Friedman Agnifilo is either Clarence Darrow or Shakespeare’s Shylock if one pays heed to the national media. Regardless, before she agreed to represent Mangione she had publicly opined on mental illness as a defense Mangione might advance. Now, should she decide to appear in Court for Mangione, she might advance in the case the theory that Mangione suffered from mental illness at the time of the shooting; i.e., that the evidence proves it is more likely than not at the time of the shooting Mangione suffered from a mental illness and the shooting was done as a result of that mental illness.

I, nor you either Gentle Reader, is in a position to assign legal liability to Mangione. Under our system of justice as governed by the law of New York state, a judge or jury may end up deciding whether Mr. Mangione is legally responsible for Mr. Thompson’s death. Each of our fifty states has its own statutory scheme to address criminal liability for those who claim their otherwise criminal actions should be processed as a case of diminished responsibility. Each state’s system is both factually and medically sensitive and requires that one charged with a crime first raise the defense of diminished capacity via a pleading filed before the Court and then carry the burden of proving that defense by a preponderance of the evidence.

The presumption in criminal cases is that one charged with a crime did not act as a result of diminished responsibility and that the defendant did understand what they were doing and had the mental ability to conform their actions to the law. The burden of proof on the issue of diminished responsibility, by a preponderance of the evidence, is upon the defendant. The law’s requirement that a possibly mentally ill person must prove his or her mental illness, is the only way our law has so far found to process the mental illness defense. I confess I do not see how society could carry such a burden and still process the countless cases such a defense might engender. Therefore, the burden to prove mental illness at the time of the crime must rest on the defendant.

If Mangione should be found by a Judge or Jury to have committed the shooting and that he was of legally diminished capability when he did so, the State of New York will have the burden of incarcerating him in a medical facility until he is “cured” or until he passes away. Regardless, the legal system will be obligated to process the case pursuant to legal and medical statutory requirements. Also, no matter how the case is finally resolved, I predict about as many people will be aggrieved as will be happy.

The Crusade Charade

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The Crusades were the outgrowth of many factors but they are generally categorized as a series of wars between European Christians and Middle Eastern Muslims occurring from 1096 to 1291 AD involving competing claims over the Holy Land, especially Jerusalem. The catalyst for the first Crusade was a call to Christians made by Pope Urban II at the Council of Clermont in France in November 1095. Urban declared that God had willed Christians to oust Muslims from the sacred sites. Urban promised remission of sins for any Christian who died in this vital service of Christ. Thousands of English, French, German, Italian, Spanish and others “took up the cross.”

Later in the New World, priests, clerics and politicians and plain Americans have spent from the 15th century to 2024 spreading the gospel at home and continuing to attempt to control the beliefs and behaviors of Middle Easterners. Manifest Destiny was based on the premise that the god of Christians had ordained that America must eliminate paganism and not commit the sin of omitting to develop the land. Such “crusades” as the Trail of Tears were the outgrowth of European immigrants and their descendants’ beliefs that their god had ordained that America was the Promised Land for Caucasian Christians and that Native Americans had to be evicted, killed or converted to Christianity. This ingrained racial memory from 1492 until today may influence the justification for our invasions into the Muslim Middle East. Just as Native Americans had to be destroyed to save them, Muslims are still the enemies of Christ who must be saved from their misguided faith.

Most recently the United States has continued the tradition of the Crusades by invading Iraq twice and belligerently engaging Iran and such groups as ISIS, Hamas, Taliban, Hezbollah, Al Qaeda and others. America designates these groups as terrorists but they claim to be part of a resistance movement. These organizations are generally Islamic in their religion as were the native Arabs and Persians during the original Crusades. There were Jewish populations in the Holy Land during the time Christian Europeans were seeking to take over the Middle East, but they were a small minority and could not mount an effective resistance to the Crusades.

Today, due to the world’s post-holocaust revulsion of the Nazi atrocities and the beliefs of many American fundamentalist Christians, such as dreamers in the Rapture, the United States is defending Israel’s aggression and is allied with the Zionists against Muslims, especially Iranians. Many of our politicians and much of the national media are on a crusade to support the hegemony of Israel under the guise of its self-defense. Israel has nuclear weapons it developed by spying on the United States and has an extremely modern and powerful military. It has nothing to fear from the rag-tag Muslim militias even if they are backed by countries such as Iran, China and Russia. Israel does not need our military support. And its current aggression in Lebanon, Iran, Syria, Gaza and elsewhere, to say nothing, as most media does, about Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians, clearly proves Israel does not deserve our support.

Israel is conducting its own crusade against Muslim countries in the Holy Land. If the United States cannot find the moral courage to confront this decades long injustice, we should, at least, not supply it with weapons and diplomatic immunity. It is long past the time America atoned for its own sins against our native population and that we not repeat those sins in the Middle East. To do so, all we need is to be guided by those principles of our Constitution and the philosophy of that Christian faith many Americans profess. Perhaps, if we make a good faith effort to act in the Middle East as the country we claim to be, we will not be misled by the Zionists among the Israelis into the same type of disaster those holier than thou European Crusaders had to endure a thousand years ago.

 

It Is Time

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Sunday, June 18, 2023 Fareed Zakaria on his CNN show, The Global Public Square, introduced a segment about the United States Supreme Court by stating, “The Supreme Court is supposed to be the ultimate, safeguard of our democracy, but has the Supreme Court itself become a danger to our democracy? Is the Court today acting as a defender of democracy or a threat to it?”

Fareed’s guest was Michael Waldman of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. Waldman’s book, How the Supreme Court Divided Our Country, sets forth a central thesis: nine unelected, life-tenured people on the Supreme Court hold too much power for too long and they have become “very, very activist and extreme in their rulings”. Waldman’s position, and mine, is that the U.S. Constitution was designed to adapt to changes in our society and it is critical that the Supreme Court change also.

Zakaria and Waldman advance the idea that the justices’ terms should be limited, Waldman suggested a one-term term of eighteen years. I have long called for term limits for all federal judges plus revamping their selection process to popular elections, not appointments that involve only the president and the senate. I think eighteen years is too long. I suggest if our elected president can only serve eight years that a ten- or twelve-year term for judges is reasonable.

In order to encourage people to run for federal judgeships it seems to me it is in the country’s best interests that once a judge has served her or his term the retired judge continue to receive all pay and benefits during their lifetime as long as they do not seek another judicial position.

Judicial offices could appear on the normal ballot as a non-partisan position as needed. There should be minimum qualifications required, such as graduation from an accredited law school, passage of a national Bar Examination, an age of at least 35, the same as the president, and a clear record as to ethical matters. As in all contested elections the relative merits of the judicial candidates could be brought out by the candidates themselves, their supporters, their opponents and the media.

Surely when our Supreme Court is being accused of “holding too much power for too long” and of being “a threat to our democracy”, it is essential we make some fundamental, Constitutional adjustments. America may not yet be on the brink of disintegrating into legal and political chaos, but when that possibility is bantered about blithely on Sunday news programs, it is time to act.

Lip Service

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Marjorie Taylor Greene from Georgia and some other members of Congress took a fifteen-minute recess from regular duties to raise money for the National Republican Committee. One hundred thousand dollars was raised in a quarter of an hour when Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy pulled out his tube of used cherry flavored Chapstick and auctioned it off. McCarthy is from California so such economic disequilibrium is not surprising to Americans who follow reports of calls for five million dollar per person reparations in San Francisco and especially when Georgia’s Greene was the winning bidder.

This impromptu fundraiser took place in the halls of Congress on Tuesday, May 23rd. Such tangential matters as the then impending default on our 31 trillion dollars national debt and the 30 billion dollars worth of military armaments we have given to Ukraine pale in significance to the issue of chapped lips. Perhaps fifteen minutes spent on funding social security or avoiding a nuclear war with Russia could be squeezed into Congress’ agenda. It is certainly impressive how the essential matter of financing political campaigns could be so quickly addressed by our politicians.

Of course, America is not the only country that pays lip service to grave matters while politicians and the news media, including newspaper columnists, concentrate on bruised lips and egos. Meghan Markle sought to bring down the British monarchy before she had even joined it by demanding to use Kate Middleton’s Clarins Natural Lip Protector during a February 28, 2018 meeting of the Royal Foundation Forum. Kate and William were shocked and Meghan and Harry were offended that Kate and William were shocked. A toppling of the throne was averted by Meghan squeezing some balm out of the tube onto her finger instead of applying it directly to her lips.

The backdrop for Meghan’s royal faux pas was the first public event to initiate the Royal Foundation Forum which was established to help fund charitable causes such as mental health needs. Naturally, the failure of British etiquette by the plebeian American received more coverage than the fund raising. Harry even saw fit to highlight it in his family confessional book, Spare.

I suppose it is too much to expect the British public to be less concerned with the battle among the royals over lip gloss than the Battle of Hastings. Nor should we be surprised if our Congress can find time to quickly fund political campaigns but not the national debt. But, Gentle Reader, wouldn’t it be refreshing and bring smiles to our faces if such topics were the fodder of columnists instead of chapped and colored lips?

Undermining the Courts

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At 3:30 am on Thursday, April 20, 2023 I was watching cable news anchor Alex Wagner of MSNBC, who was analyzing the controversy involving two conflicting federal court rulings concerning the abortion drug Mifepristone. Wagner pointed out the federal district judge in Texas had been appointed by President Donald Trump. Ms. Wagner did not refer to the federal district judge in the state of Washington having been appointed by President Barack Obama. Wagner opined that these diametrically opposed court holdings and the U.S. Supreme Court’s attempts to reconcile them, “Could undermine the legitimacy of the courts.”

Naturally, Gentle Reader, your first thought is what was I doing watching television at three thirty in the morning and why would I watch MSNBC at any time? As to why I was awake, hey, I’m frequently responding to urges I never had when life was new. As to why MSNBC, I watch the news with my finger on the remote so I can attempt to outmaneuver the commercials. MSNBC happened to have the court story on instead of some offer of products guaranteed to enhance weight loss and other things, so I listened in.

It was Wagner’s views on the court system, not any exposition of Mifepristone, that piqued my attention. She said on national TV what may be a sub rosa thought with many Americans, “Why should we have confidence in the independence and reliability of our federal judges?” Are federal judges acting as Socrates demanded or are they deciding cases politically? Does a federal judge’s ruling depend more on the facts and the law or the judge’s political views and those of the president who appointed them?

In his trial before the Athenian judges, Socrates admonished his judges, “To do justice, not make a present of it.” In other words, a judge’s duty is not to repay his or her appointing politician, but:

“To hear courteously; to answer wisely; to consider soberly; and to decide impartially.”

Americans have for over 200 years supported the right of judges to be a separate and independent branch of our government. However, in our current national environment, many decisions from, especially the U.S. Supreme court, but more and more frequently also from the lower federal courts due to wide-ranging injunctions from one-person federal district judgeships, are seen by many Americans as political pronouncements.

Virtually every national debate about federal judicial decisions begins with a reference to the politics of who appointed the judge or judges and the history of the judge’s political leanings. It may be difficult to recall, but before our current turbulent social environment seldom was it alleged that, as justices Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor said in dissent to the abortion decision of Dobbs vs. Jackson, “Today the proclivities of individuals (Supreme Court Justices) rule.”

When even one third of the members of the U.S. Supreme Court publicly and in print accuse the other two thirds members of deciding cases for political reasons, it sounds an alarm about an independent judiciary. An independent judiciary is essential to maintaining our democracy. As long ago as 1835 Alexis de Tocqueville noted, “In America, practically every political question eventually becomes a judicial one.” De Tocqueville meant that Americans have confidence in the impartiality of our courts so they take their disputes to courts to be resolved.

It would be a shame if now de Tocqueville might have to conclude, “In America, practically every federal judicial question becomes a political one.” Perhaps next week, if I am still awake at 3:30 am, we might further address these volatile issues including some suggested remedies.

The Mass Shooting Tocsin

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The definition of a “mass shooting” in the United States is a moving target based on the source of who describes an incident. While there is no neutrality on the issue of guns, the non-profit organization, Gun Violence Archive (GVA), defines a mass shooting as an incident in which four or more people, not including the shooter, are killed from gunshots. Applying these criteria, the GVA has published its figures for the period of January 01, 2023 to April 10, 2023 and compared it to the same time for 2014. In 2014 there were 59 incidents of mass shootings in the U.S. and in 2023 there were 146.

While those who announce the statistics may have motives to mischaracterize the figures, the statistics starkly establish an alarming trend upward. In a country of 330 million people where more people commit suicide with guns than commit mass shootings, and more than 30,000 die in vehicle accidents each year, it may appear that mass shootings in America are not out of control. But the tocsin should sound to alert us to a possible greater danger of a change in our national character.

It is not the inanimate objects of firearms that may be our greater concern but the animus we feel for one another. The most significant issue we should concentrate on is not the number of guns in our country nor who can access them, although these are important. What may be in play is why are we as a people engendering a degree of nihilism in some members of our society that so devalues oneself and others that “death by cop” and the deaths of unknown others is preferable to living.

I own guns, have since I was a boy. We had long guns in the pantry right next to our family’s dining table. There were no locked gun cabinets and no need for one. If I wanted to go hunting, I pulled back the curtain on the pantry, grabbed one of the guns and went hunting. Every boy and man I knew owned or had access to guns. Guns were not a means to achieve attention. We knew approval came from school and work and how we treated others, disapproval too. National attention was not on our radar but if it had been we knew it would need to come from helping others not indiscriminately murdering them. Our family was like most others and if we ever achieved any news media notoriety it was for some small contribution to local culture. It did not compute for most people that fame and infamy were equally desirable as long as they spelled the names right. So, what happened? What went wrong and how can we fix it?

The news media is not to blame for fostering a climate of “If it bleeds, it leads.” As a newspaper columnist for 33 years, I am a member of the media and I deny responsibility for anyone else’s behavior. I have enough to do being responsible for my own. No, the media is simply following the demands and interests of the American public. Movies, songs, video games and television shows that garner ticket sales and awards for ad nauseam renditions of pornography and senseless violence are the harbingers of what news sources people will pay attention to. CNN, MSNBC, Fox News and others are in business. They follow the demographics and those demographics are that what sells is the denigration of our politicians and blood from our citizens. What does not sell is any mention of good character and acts of kindness.

So, what does a disaffected, depressed, detached and marginal person conclude from the media? If one wants to matter, he or she must denigrate others or spill the blood of innocent strangers and themselves. I realize we will not return to the Andy Griffith Show and Walter Cronkite country we transitioned out of when all politics and all news was local. However, we can reevaluate how we report, not comment, on people with whom we disagree or, perhaps, even despise. The facts should be enough. Adjectives as to a politician’s motives should be eschewed. If the object of a news story is wrong, the public can reach that conclusion without some news anchor repeatedly claiming, “That’s a lie!” A lie requires intent and how does the news anchor know one’s intent. It should be sufficient to state the evidence and leave it up to the viewer or reader to decide if it is a lie or a mistake or even a difference of opinion.

A gradual turning away from a culture where, “The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones”, might be a good place to start. Or, if not Shakespeare, how about our mothers’ advice, “If we can’t say something nice about someone, don’t say anything at all?”

I get it that this approach might take years to help assuage our epidemic of gun violence and mass shootings. But I ask you, Gentle Reader, do you think the problem will be solved by continuing to vilify everyone we disagree with? Maybe, at least, respectfully hearing out opposing views before we label someone a crook or a liar might pour oil on troubled waters and help reduce our national tendency to assassinate character. Such an approach of just reporting the news may tend to discourage people teetering on the edge from taking up arms and actually assassinating innocent people.