From the Saturday Evening Post: The Civil Rights Act vs. States’ Rights

A look at the tension between the two.

- Click here for the article.

Goldwater recognized that the Civil Rights Act would split the liberal and conservative wings of the Democratic Party. For years, the Democrats had been able to hold these two warring factions together, but as the liberal wing began supporting the growing civil rights movement, many white, conservative Democrats began withdrawing their support of the party their families had supported for generations.

The day would come, Goldwater predicted in a 1963 Post article, “The G.O.P. Invades the South,” when the region would vote solidly Republican. He noted that Republican candidates were already winning elections in Florida, North Carolina, and Georgia. The South would shift its party allegiance, he said, because of “a profound evolution of political thinking and acting.”

It had nothing to do, he asserted, with white voters being angry with liberal Democrats’ support of integration. Southerners were leaving the party, he said, because they believed in “state’s rights,” and limiting the role of the federal government. They viewed the Civil Rights Act as an intrusion that, Goldwater argued, would eventually lead to “the creation of a police state.”

Civil rights were important, Goldwater believed, but they were “resolved more safely and soundly on the state or local level.”

But the local level, as Anthony Lewis wrote, was precisely where the problem lay. (“Goldwater Is Wrong On Civil Right” September 26, 1964) The law in southern states and towns was vigorously enforcing racist policies, using intimidation and violence to deprive African Americans of their rights.

The U.S. Government had tried Goldwater’s approach for nearly a century, Lewis argued. When states were left on their own to handle race relations, “the result was massive inequality, injustice, and cruelty that shocked the conscience of this nation…The law has been cynically manipulated to maintain white supremacy, in defiance of the most elementary rights of a citizen.”

Federal intervention was necessary, he said, to prevent state officials from enforcing racist politics

From the Gallup Vault: 60 Years Ago, the End of "Separate but Equal"

For our look at polling, public opinion and civil rights.

- Click here for the article.

On Nov. 13, 1956, two years after the Supreme Court deemed racially separate schools unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court struck down an Alabama law requiring segregated seating on city buses, trains and public waiting rooms. Several months later, Gallup found 60% of Americans supporting that ruling -- including 27% support in Southern states and 70% support outside the South.

The case, known as Browder v. Gayle, grew out of a yearlong boycott of the Montgomery city bus system by local blacks, in which the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was a key player. That boycott followed the Dec. 1, 1955, arrest of Rosa Parks, a black woman, for refusing to give up her seat on a city bus to a white man.

Beyond the regional disagreement, approval of the court's decision in Browder was fairly broad across major U.S. subgroups, but there were gaps: 63% of Republicans nationwide agreed with it vs. 53% of Democrats. This partisan difference most likely reflects the concentration of Democrats in the South at that time. Further gaps in approval include 67% of those aged 21-29 vs. 56% of those 50 and older; 78% of those with at least some college education vs. 51% of those who never advanced beyond middle school; and 77% of blacks vs. 58% of whites.

Four years later, when Gallup asked the question again, 66% of Americans approved of the decision and 28% disapproved. While perhaps not as celebrated as Brown v. Board of Education, Browder v. Gayle was the last major blow to the "separate but equal" policies that prevailed in the South after the Civil War.

Fair Housing Act

The previous post referred to it.

Here's background.

- Wikipedia: Fair Housing Act.

The Fair Housing Act is a federal act in the United States intended to protect the buyer or renter of a dwelling from seller or landlord discrimination. Its primary prohibition makes it unlawful to refuse to sell, rent to, or negotiate with any person because of that person's inclusion in a protected class. The goal is a unitary housing market in which a person's background (as opposed to financial resources) does not arbitrarily restrict access. Calls for open housing were issued early in the twentieth century, but it was not until after World War II that concerted efforts to achieve it were undertaken.

The legislation was the culmination of a civil rights campaign against housing discrimination in the United States and was approved, at the urging of President Lyndon B. Johnson, only one week after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.

The Fair Housing Act was enacted as Title VIII of the Civil Rights Act of 1968, and codified at 42 U.S.C. 3601-3619, with penalties for violation at 42 U.S.C. 3631. It is enforced by the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Since it was part of the Civil Rights Act of 1968, here's a link to background on it:

The Civil Rights Act of 1968, (Pub.L. 90–284, 82 Stat. 73, enacted April 11, 1968) is a landmark part of legislation in the United States that provided for equal housing opportunities regardless of race, creed, or national origin and made it a federal crime to “by force or by threat of force, injure, intimidate, or interfere with anyone … by reason of their race, color, religion, or national origin.”[1] The Act was signed into lawduring the King assassination riots by President Lyndon B. Johnson, who had previously signed the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act into law.

Title VIII of the Civil Rights Act of 1968 is commonly known as the Fair Housing Act and was meant as a follow‑up to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. While the Civil Rights Act of 1866 prohibited discrimination in housing, there were no federal enforcement provisions.[2] The 1968 act expanded on previous acts and prohibited discrimination concerning the sale, rental, and financing of housing based on race, religion, national origin, and since 1974, gender; since 1988, the act protects people with disabilities and families with children.

Victims of discrimination may use both the 1968 act and the 1866 act via section 1983[3] to seek redress. The 1968 act provides for federal solutions while the 1866 act provides for private solutions (i.e., civil suits).

Titles II through VII comprised the Indian Civil Rights Act of 1968, which applies to the Native Americantribes of the United States and makes many, but not all, of the guarantees of the Bill of Rights applicable within the tribes[4] (that Act appears today in Title 25, sections 1301 to 1303 of the United States Code).

A rider attached to the bill makes it a felony to "travel in interstate commerce...with the intent to incite, promote, encourage, participate in and carry on a riot". This provision has been criticized for "equating organized political protest with organized violence".[

Argued today in the Supreme Court: Buck v Davis

We discussed this briefly in 2305 today. Its - another - due process / death penalty / racial discrimination / ineffective counsel case from Houston.

- Click here for info about the case from ScotusBlog.

The defense attorney admitted evidence from a psychologists that sent his client to death row. The psychologist argued that the defendant was likely to be dangerous in the future because he was African-American. That raises its own set of issues, but the case seems to primarily be about effective counsel, and whether

Here's the narrow issue presented to the court:

Whether the Fifth Circuit imposed an improper and unduly burdensome Certificate of Appealability (COA) standard that contravenes this Court's precedent and deepens two circuit splits when it denied petitioner a COA on his motion to reopen the judgment and obtain merits review of his claim that his trial counsel was constitutionally ineffective for knowingly presenting an “expert” who testified that petitioner was more likely to be dangerous in the future because he is Black, where future dangerousness was both a prerequisite for a death sentence and the central issue at sentencing.

For more: Justices to consider role of racial bias in death penalty case.

A Texas trial court appointed two lawyers to represent Buck at his trial. One of those lawyers, Jerry Guerinot, has been described as the worst capital defense lawyer in the country: Twenty of his clients have been sentenced to death. When the Supreme Court hears oral arguments in Buck’s case next week, the decision by those attorneys to present racially inflammatory testimony by a defense expert will be at the heart of the debate.

A key issue at Buck’s trial was whether he would be dangerous in the future: Unless the jury unanimously concluded that he would be, it could not sentence him to death under Texas law. One of Buck’s former girlfriends, Vivian Jackson, testified that he had repeatedly abused her, but that fear had kept her from going to the police. However, Buck did not have any convictions for violent crimes, and a psychologist testified that he was unlikely to be dangerous in the future.

Buck’s lawyers also retained another psychologist, Dr. Walter Quijano. Quijano provided the defense team with a report in which he indicated that, as a statistical matter, Buck was more likely to commit violent crimes in the future because he is black. That report was admitted into evidence, at the request of Buck’s lawyers. After two days of deliberations, the jury concluded that Buck was indeed likely to be dangerous in the future and sentenced him to death.

The procedural history of Buck’s case is, to put it mildly, complicated. After his conviction and death sentence were affirmed on appeal, Buck (now represented by a new lawyer) filed a motion for post-conviction relief in the Texas courts. However, the motion did not challenge the decision by Buck’s trial counsel to introduce Quijano’s opinion that, because of his race, Buck was more likely to be dangerous in the future.

A year after the post-conviction motion was filed, Texas filed a brief in the U.S. Supreme Court in which it conceded that similar statements by Quijano in another capital case violated the defendant’s “constitutional right to be sentenced without regard to the color of his skin,” and that the references to race in the defendant’s sentencing “seriously undermined the fairness, integrity, or public reputation of the judicial process.” In a press release in June 2000, the Texas attorney general announced that his office had identified six other cases – including Buck’s – in which Quijano had testified about future dangerousness based on race. The attorney general also indicated that the state would not object if the inmates in those cases “seek to overturn the death sentences based on” Quijano’s testimony.

For even more:

- Texas lawyer who never won a capital murder case calls it quits defending 'the very worst' clients.
- Texas Ends Deal With Psychologist Over Race Testimony.

And what is a Certificate of Appealability anyway?

From OffCite: Hazardous: The Redlining of Houston Neighborhoods

For our look at civil rights - and equal protection - in 2305, as well as municipal governments in 2306.

- Redlining "is the practice of denying services, either directly or through selectively raising prices, to residents of certain areas based on the racial or ethnic makeups of those areas."

The process has been argued to be the central reason racially segregated housing patterns persist in the United States - which also maintains de facto racial segregation in public schools despite Brown v Board.

- Click here for the article.

Why are we so compelled to define neighborhoods as “good” or “bad”? Is there one definition of a “good” neighborhood — is it universal? Can a low-income neighborhood be a “good” neighborhood? I often wonder, and frequently challenge, whether these labels accurately depict a place and its people or whether they are self-fulfilling prophecy that makes it easy to invest or divest. The question comes more clearly into focus by understanding the history of neighborhood classification, of “good” and “bad” labels, and why they are too often directly associated with income and ethnicity.

A great deal has been written about “redlining,” which was the practice of denying loans to certain areas of cities based, in part, on race. Not surprisingly, areas that were redlined declined, property values slumped, and for many, the only option was to move. The practice of redlining was institutionalized with the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) Residential Security Maps, though many scholars argue that the maps simply reflected the predominant lending practices of the time — and projected them into the future. Regardless, it is very clear that the maps tell us one part of the story of what went wrong, and how.

From the Houston Chronicle: Feds file discrimination suit against owners of Midtown bar Gaslamp

For out look at civil rights.

- Click here for the article.

A Midtown bar that was accused of charging cover charges only to non-white patrons and turning other minorities away under the guise of "dress code violations" is now the subject of a federal discrimination lawsuit.

The Justice Department filed a lawsuit on Wednesday against the owners and operators of 360 Midtown, which was formerly Gaslamp, at the corner of Brazos and Hadley streets.

Scandal embroiled the bar last year when three black men made the racism allegations last year.

Brandon Ball, Dan Scarbrough and Ken Piggee — all attorneys — said that when they approached the doors of Gaslamp, the doormen immediately told them that to enter, they had to pay $20.

Deciding against it, the trio went to a nearby bar and later walked by Gaslamp.

"We're looking, and there are white people going in and getting their hands stamped," Ball told the Chronicle in September 2015. "They were going in and not paying anything."

The three sat and watched the door for some time, they said last year, watching white customers enter free of charge and minorities get turned away. They said they spoke with the others as they were turned away.

The lawsuit was filed Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas.

It alleges that Ayman Jarrah and his company, Land Guardian Inc., discriminated against African-American, Hispanic and Asian-American patrons "by charging such persons a cover charge to enter the establishment, while not imposing such a charge on similarly situated white persons, and denying such persons the right to enter the establishment while admitting similarly situated white patrons."

The 1866 Texas Black Codes

For our look at civil rights.

- Click here for them.

For more: TSHA - Black Codes

From the New York Times: 50 Years of Electoral College Maps: How the U.S. Turned Red and Blue

Another look at a story we cover in both 2305 and 2306 about how the major parties realigned after the election of 1964 - including Texas.

The along graphics are worth your time.

- Click here for the article.

It really begins with the election of 1948 when Southern states pulled support from the Democratic Party following Truman's support for civil rights policies.

- Click here for that story.

By 1947, as the Cold War with the Soviet Union intensified and the nation was becoming increasingly anti-Communist and intolerant, Harry Truman astonished everyone by suddenly supporting civil rights. Truman had been outraged at the murder and assaults on dozens of black veterans of World War II. Although he once held strong racial biases -- he had used the word "nigger" freely in his speech -- in 1947 he decided to make civil rights a national issue. He authorized a fifteen-man committee on Civil Rights to recommend new legislation to protect people from discrimination. Speaking from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Truman became the first president of the United States to address the NAACP. He promised African Americans that the federal government would act now to end discrimination, violence, and race prejudice in American life. Shortly afterward, his panel issued its report confirming that segregation, lynching, and discrimination at the polls had to be ended.

In the election year of 1948, Truman continued to push for civil rights, partially because he felt that it was the right thing to do, and partially because he knew that he had to win the black vote in order to be elected. Although most political analysts predicted a Republican landslide, Truman believed that the election would depend on a handful of cities in the North where the balance of power would be held by black votes. Senator Hubert Humphrey, who was deeply committed to civil rights, had successfully maneuvered the Democratic Party to support a strong civil rights plank in its campaign platform -- much stronger than Truman wanted. One of Truman's strongest arguments in favor of civil rights was that American and Russia were now locked in a deadly "Cold War" and the Russians were using America's Jim Crow policies to win support from the rest of the world. Southerners replied that the civil-rights program was supported by Communists.

Strom Thurmond, Governor of South Carolina, and a group of Southern delegates walked out of the Democratic Convention when the civil-rights platform passed. The dissidents formed the States' Rights party, whose members came to known as Dixiecrats.

From the Houston Chronicle: Histories of TSU and UH marked by segregation Begun as racially separate institutions, schools grew to full public universities

A little know piece of regional history, complex history. One that helped set the stage for Brown v Board of Education.

- Click here for the article.

Both schools began in 1927, when the Houston school board agreed to fund the creation of two junior colleges: Houston Junior College and Houston Colored Junior College.

"Things started very quickly," said Mary Manning, an archivist at UH.

By the fall of 1927, 232 students had enrolled in the white school. Seventy-five students enrolled in the black college. Just seven years later, by 1934, the student body had grown to more than 900 at the white college and 700 at the black college. The Houston school board decided to make them full four-year private universities. The Houston Colored Junior College became the Houston College for Negroes. Houston Junior College became the University of Houston.

The universities eventually moved to permanent homes, just blocks from each other. Millionaire oilman Hugh Roy Cullen donated 53 acres to the black university. He gave money to help UH begin building its campus, declaring that the school must always be a college "for working men and women and their sons and daughters." Left unsaid was that those men and women must be white.

By the 1940s, Texas was becoming a major battleground in the fight to end school segregation. The college that would become Texas Southern was at the heart of it.

In the 1940s, the University of Texas at Austin's law school denied admission to Heman Marion Sweatt of Houston because of "the fact that he is a negro." His case, argued by Thurgood Marshall, for whom TSU's law school is named, would eventually go all the way to the Supreme Court. Before it got there, Texas lawmakers got to work trying to build a case to show black students in Texas had equal - but separate - opportunities in the state. They bought the flourishing black college in Houston for $2 million in 1947 and set to work building a school that at least seemed equal to UT.

And thus, Houston's first public university was born - not as an effort to expand educational opportunities, but to keep the state from having to integrate its flagship in Austin. If state leaders could show black students had their own version of the University of Texas, then the courts, state leaders hoped, wouldn't require the white University of Texas to admit black students.

Judicial challenges to Texas' education funding system

Texas has been front and center - not always in a good way - regarding the constitutionality of education policy.

For consideration:

1973 - San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriquez.
1981 - Plyler v. Doe.
1991 - Edgewood v Kirby.
2015 - Morath et al v. Texas Taxpayer and Student Fairness Coalition et al.

From the Texas Tribune: Latino Voters Sue to Bolster Influence on Electing Judges

For our look at civil rights, elections, and the judiciary - among other things.

Should Texas' top courts be elected in single member districts?

- Click here for the article.

The state’s most powerful courts don’t exactly resemble the population outside of their chambers.

Though Latinos make up more than a quarter of the state’s voting-age population, just one — Justice Eva Guzman — sits on the nine-member Texas Supreme Court. The same goes for the nine-member Court of Criminal Appeals, where Judge Elsa Alcalapresides.
Seeking to bolster their chronically sparse representation, seven Latino voters are suing Texas, arguing that its longtime method of electing statewide judges dilutes the voting power of a rapidly growing racial group.

“This is a very important case,” said Jose Garza, an attorney representing the plaintiffs in a lawsuit filed last week in a U.S. district court in Corpus Christi. “Latino voters don’t have a say in who gets elected to the Texas Supreme Court and the Court of Criminal Appeals.”

For more than a century, judges on the state’s high courts run have run in at-large partisan elections, vying for votes across the state. They serve staggered six-year terms. In a bright-red state like Texas, that voting system yields staunchly Republican courts, limiting election drama to primary races.

The plaintiffs — six voters in Nueces County and one in El Paso — argue that the current system prevents Latinos from choosing the candidates they prefer. Latino candidates would more consistently nab places on the courts, they suggest, if Texas carved up the courts geographically, creating single-member districts.

More on the evaluation of open carry policies

This builds off the post from yesterday. Both from the Texas Tribune.

- Six Months In, Few Open Carry Complaints.

So far, officials say, the newly allowed open carry of handguns hasn't spawned any major incidents.

“I don’t know of any instances where there has been violence, arrests, disturbances that have taken place,” said Kevin Lawrence, executive director of the Texas Municipal Police Association. “I think it’s been amazingly quiet up to this point.”

In February 2015, as the Legislature considered making Texas the 45th state to allow the open carry of handguns, 75 percent of surveyed state police chiefs said they opposed the new law.

James McLaughlin, the executive director of Texas Police Chiefs Association, said that at the time his organization’s members worried that open carry might turn carriers into easier targets.

“If the bad guy goes into a place, the first person they’re going to shoot is a uniformed officer,” he said. “The second person they’re going to shoot is the one they see has a gun.”

But McLaughlin, too, said he had heard of no incidents in which the new law played a major factor.

The Dallas shootings, however, rekindled arguments about revisiting the open carry laws, which state Rep. Diego Bernal, D-San Antonio, called "Republicans thumbing their nose at law enforcement."

Rep. Larry Phillips, R-Sherman, who helped push open carry through the Legislature, said he and his colleagues did weigh the opinion of law enforcement. Despite the opposition from chiefs, rank-and-file members Phillips spoke to were generally receptive to the bill, he said.

- Black Gun Owners in Texas Decry Racial Bias.

The tensions surrounding black gun ownership have a long historical record in the United States, according to research from the National African American Gun Association. Dating back to the 17th century, French and British colonies have openly prohibited gun ownership among black people and Native Americans. And during slavery and the post-Civil War period, states in the South imposed strict laws against black gun ownership that lasted through the Civil Rights Movement. When California’s legislature banned open carry in the 1960s, it was in response to the Black Panthers openly carrying guns.

Black gun owners also are frustrated with what they see as indifference from their allies. The National Rifle Association, the nation's most powerful gun rights organization, took two days to comment on Castile's death, only posting a statement on Twitter calling the shooting "troubling" and saying it "must be thoroughly investigated" after a swell of online outcry.

“The NRA is an organization that has a bunch of old white guys, and honestly, I don’t think they have the tools and minorities in the organization to address these types of issues,” said Cargill, who said he's a national member of the association. “They don’t have enough diversity in their staff and leadership. Probably, they were afraid to make the wrong statement.”

The NRA did not respond to The Texas Tribune’s requests for comment. A spokesman for the Texas State Rifle Association said in a statement that while the group does not speak for the NRA, "every law-abiding citizen, no matter their race, creed, or sexual preference, has a right to protect themselves."

Racial profiling and gun ownership had emerged as hot-button issues during last year's legislative session when state lawmakers were debating the open-carry law that went into effect in Texas this January.

Amid concerns that minority gun owners would be racially profiled by officers, Sen. Don Huffines, R-Dallas, introduced an amendment that would prohibit officers from stopping someone solely because they are visibly carrying a handgun. The measure, which eventually passed, attracted support from Democrats who said it would help prevent racial profiling. Conservatives said it also was necessary to protect the Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable search and seizure of legal gun owners.

From the TexasTribune: Appeals Court Tells Texas Foster Care Reforms Must Continue

Federalism in action: 

- Click here for the article.

Texas must continue drafting court-ordered plans to fix its broken foster care system, according to a new order from the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals.

State officials have repeatedly gone to court seeking to avoid compliance with a ruling last year by U.S. District Judge Janis Jack finding the state’s long-term foster care system in such disrepair that it systemically violated children’s civil rights.

The Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, represented by lawyers from the Texas Attorney General’s office, has argued that Jack lacked standing to order changes to the state’s foster care system. State officials also charged that her ruling ignored years of progress made by the agency.

Despite a series of setbacks in appeals court, Texas officials most recently hoped to derail the plan for reforms that is currently being overseen by outside appointees.

Justices on the bench of the 5th Circuit, considered one of the country’s most conservative appellate courts, found that lawyers for the state “failed to demonstrate that they have a ‘clear and indisputable’ entitlement to relief” from complying with the reform process.

USA Today: Religious liberty vs. civil rights: A balancing act

Rights and liberties conflict. Here's the latest: Recent push backs against the expansion of civil rights - notably to gays and lesbians - have been oriented around religious liberty.

- Click here for the article.

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer may have ended the latest controversy in her state by vetoing a "religious freedom" bill that threatened gay men and lesbians, but the nation's legislatures and courts are just getting started.

While religious liberty remains a "core value" in Arizona, Brewer said Wednesday, "so is non-discrimination." And therein lies the balancing act that's at the root of several other disputes.

Can the Obama administration force for-profit businesses to provide health insurance for their employees that includes forms of contraception the owners equate with abortion? That case comes to the Supreme Court next month.

Can a New Mexico photographer, an Oregon bakery and a Washington state florist refuse to provide services to same-sex weddings? Those questions are pending before courts and could soon go to voters as well.

Can several states from Mississippi in the South to Utah in the West enact laws similar to the one Brewer vetoed in Arizona, setting up potential conflicts between religious liberty and other freedoms?

The answer isn't simple. Congress and the states often carve out exceptions for religious beliefs. The Supreme Court has consistently made room for religious exercise. And unlike race and gender, sexual orientation is not a protected class — yet.

However, for a religious liberty bill such as Arizona's to pass the smell test, it must show a compelling interest on the part of those who want to flex their religious muscles, and it must not impose undue costs or burdens on others. That is where many such efforts collapse.

For more:

- Redefining Religious Liberty: The Covert Campaign Against Civil Rights.
- It’s not as simple as homophobic thugs vs. civil rights in Indiana.
- Religious Freedom vs. Compelling State Interests.

From CityLab: The Death of Jeffrey Pendleton: A homeless man was found dead in a jail cell in Manchester, New Hampshire. What killed him? The criminalization of poverty.

Something to think about as we cover the due process of the law. I posted a similar story below about whether we have de facto debtor's prisons in the United States. Do criminal justice procedures place additional burdens on the poor?

Might low pay be a civil rights issue?

- Click here for the article.

New Hampshire has no state-set minimum wage, so it abides by the federal government’s woefully low $7.25 per hour rate. State legislators killed bills last month that would have established state-issued minimum wages—livable wages. It can’t be ignored that Pendleton would probably still be alive if he made enough money to afford his bail.
 The federal government has recently come to accept that that the criminal justice system’s policies around bail and court fines are exacerbating the nation’s poverty and incarceration crises.

“When bail is set unreasonably high, people are behind bars only because they are poor,” said U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch at a White House convening last December. “Not because they’re a danger or a flight risk; only because they are poor.”

After dressing down Ferguson, Missouri, for the city’s reliance on fining low-income residents into jail and to death, the U.S. Justice Department realized that Ferguson was no anomaly. Many cities and their court systems have been imposing exorbitant fines and fees on people who’ve been arrested for the pettiest of crimes, like jaywalking. Lynch said at the White House in December that it has become “painfully clear” that “in so many instances, an individual’s access to justice has become predicated on their ability to literally pay for it.”

This point is made more disturbing by the fact that cities are increasingly using criminal justice debt—court fines and fees—to service municipal debt, with low-wage individuals bearing the brunt of these economic burdens. A report from the White House’s “Council of Economic Advisors on Fees, Fines, and Bail” points out the ways this has built up over time:

From ABC News: Paper: Federal Civil Rights Cases Against Officers Are Rare

For our look at due process and civil rights - where 2305 and 2306 overlap. It's tough to prosecute police officers for violating civil so often it doesn't even happen.

- Click here for the article.

The study it refers to can be found here:

- Trib investigation: Cops often let off hook for civil rights complaints.

Federal prosecutors declined to pursue civil rights allegations against law enforcement officers 96 percent of the time since 1995, a newspaper found, with most experts blaming the low prosecution rate on the difficulty of winning such cases.

The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review said the 12,703 potential civil rights violations turned down nationwide out of 13,233 total complaints from 1995-2015 include high-profile incidents in Chicago, New York and Ferguson, Missouri, but also thousands of incidents the public knows little about.

It said the most frequent reasons cited for declining civil rights complaints involving officers were weak or insufficient evidence, high standards of proof established by Supreme Court rulings, and policies set by the Justice Department.

Many legal and civil rights experts told the newspaper ( http://bit.ly/252UQoo ) that convicting a police officer of a civil rights violation is one of the toughest challenges a prosecutor can face. But some criminal justice experts also said the Justice Department needs to put more resources into the cases, and suggested that the typical partnering of police and prosecutors affects decision-making.

"The standard is high and challenging," said Alan Vinegrad, a former federal prosecutor in Brooklyn, New York, who oversaw criminal civil rights cases.

"It's got to be a willful deprivation of rights, meaning the police officer intended and wanted to either kill or injure the person," said Vinegrad, now a partner at the law firm of Covington & Burling LLP in New York. "Not just 'it was reckless or negligent' or anything like that."

The U.S. attorney's office in Pittsburgh will open files for even minor accusations that the FBI investigates against a police officer, said Steve Kaufman, chief of the office's criminal division. But, he said, "it's one of the most difficult cases to gather sufficient evidence to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt at trial."

Is there a right to education in the United States? Part Two

This builds off the post below. Below are a variety of posts related to the - alleged - right to education.

- Why there isn’t a constitutional right to an education.
- The Status of the “Right to Education” in the United States.
- Why Doesn't the Constitution Guarantee the Right to Education?
- U.S. Education Law: Is the Right to Education in the U.S. in compliance with International Human Rights Standards?
- Education and the Constitution.
- The Federal Right to an Adequate Education.

This Day in History: Harding publicly condemns lynching

The year is 1921. The story is from History.com, and it compliments our look at the shift parties took on civil rights issues - as well as the relationship between the national and state governments - over the 20th Century.

- Click here for the story.

On this day in 1921, President Warren G. Harding delivers a speech in Alabama in which he condemns lynchings—illegal hangings committed primarily by white supremacists against African Americans in the Deep South.

Although his administration was much maligned for scandal and corruption, Harding was a progressive Republican politician who advocated full civil rights for African Americans and suffrage for women. He supported the Dyer Anti-lynching Bill in 1920. As a presidential candidate that year, he gained support for his views on women’s suffrage, but faced intense opposition on civil rights for blacks. The 1920s was a period of intense racism in the American South, characterized by frequent lynchings. In fact, the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) reported that, in 1920, lynching claimed, on average, the lives of two African Americans every week.

During the 1920 presidential campaign, Harding’s ethnicity became a subject of debate and was used by his opponents to cast him in a negative light. Opponents claimed that one of Harding’s great-great-grandfathers was a native of the West Indies. Harding rebuffed the rumors, saying he was from white “pioneer stock” and persisted in his support of anti-lynching laws. Although the anti-lynching bill made it through the House of Representatives, it died in the Senate. Several other attempts to pass similar laws in the first half of the 20th century failed. In fact, civil rights for blacks were not encoded into law until Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964.

Harding’s public denunciation of lynching would appear insincere if one were to believe allegations that he had actually been inducted into the Ku Klux Klan while in office. In 1987, historian Wyn Wade published The Fiery Cross, in which a former Ku Klux Klan member claimed to have witnessed Harding’s initiation into the Klan on the White House lawn. Scholars have since pored over Harding’s papers, but have found no evidence to support this allegation.

 Wikipedia: Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill.

From the Houston Chronicle: HERO supporters lead opponents in new poll - Ordinance's opponents say issue turns on small number of votes, but those in favor claim growing momentum

For those of you in 2306 who are writing on this issue in the upcoming election. Notice that the key is likely to be turnout. Also note that positions on the issue do not cut across typical ideological lines.

- Click here for the story.

With both campaigns ramping up spending before Election Day, supporters of Houston's contentious equal rights ordinance are leading opponents by 6 percentage points, a new poll shows. 

Overall, 43 percent of respondents to the KHOU/KUHF poll released Sunday supported the ordinance, 37 percent opposed it, and 18 percent were unsure of their stance. The poll offers some empirical heft to the prediction in many political circles that the fate of the ordinance will turn on a relatively small number of votes.

Broken out by race, black residents were the most evenly divided on the issue, with 40 percent in support, 39 percent opposed and another 20 percent undecided. Rice University political scientist Bob Stein, who helped run the poll, said black voters may be the most malleable on the issue leading up to Election Day. 

"The largest proportion of undecided voters are African-American," Stein said.

"Otherwise, generally, we tended to see that people had staked out their positions on this issue and felt very strongly one way or the other."

Proponents of the law heralded the poll as a sign the ordinance is picking up broad support. The campaign Houston Unites reported about $1.3 million in donations during the most recent fundraising period, more than doubling critics' haul. "Yet another poll shows the momentum is on the side of the treating everyone fairly and equally under the law," campaign manager Richard Carlbom said in a written statement.

Opponents, however, viewed the poll as evidence that the race will be close and that there's opportunity to sway the bloc of undecided voters. "We're going to be very aggressive and expose this ordinance for what it really is," said Jared Woodfill, the group's campaign spokesman. "What this race will really prove is who has the better turnout model."

Political scientists have said they expect the embattled law's presence on the ballot to drive up the usually low voter turnout in November, potentially a factor in the open mayor's race.

Catching up on the HERO ordinance

Here are a  few links for 2306 students who are thinking about  writing about the controversy over the "Houston Equal Rights Ordinance" aka HERO. I posted the following in a previous post, but am re-posting for convenience.

- Texas Monthly: Houston’s Equal Rights Ordinance, Explained.
- City of Houston: Equal Rights Ordinance.
- Chron: Texas Supreme Court says city must repeal HERO or put it on ballot.

Here a few more, with emphasis on the emerging campaign for and against it. So far it seems that access to women's bathroom is a dominant theme for opponents of the measure.

- Houston Press: SO, THE ANTI-HERO "BATHROOM BILL" ADS HAVE FINALLY STARTED...
- Campaign for Houston.
- Houston Chronicle: HERO ballot fight presents challenge to GLBT Caucus.
- Houston Chronicle: In first radio ad, HERO opponents press bathroom issue with women voter

I'll add more on a regular basis - and I;ll try to get a timeline together soon so we can see how this issue has morphed recently.