Peter McWilliams Quotes
Laws against consensual activities are too randomly enforced to be either a deterrent or fair …. Problems sometimes associated with consensual activities cannot be solved while they’re crimes.
Peter McWilliams Writer and Photographer, Ain’t Nobody’s Business If You Do, 1996
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Doty acquitted Chief Oshkosh who had murdered another Indian in retaliation of the murder of one of his tribe. Under the Indian customs of the time, revenge killings were normal and expected. The white citizens were outraged and voted Wisconsin’s first judge out of office. He later became Governor of the territory and when Wisconsin became a state, Doty became its Congressman.
The Canadian Courts did not agree with him on these points. The Indians had to register their guns also. See {588005}.
Attila the Hun
There were a number of anarchist organizations across the country and in New York that advocated anarchism. As Moss testified, one of the reasons that the anarchists found sympathizers and followers was the incompetence, corruption, and injustice of the courts. After the Page Commission report New York Courts began a reform and triggered similar court reform efforts throughout the country. Even today we have problems with overzealous or corrupt police or prosecutors who falsify or hide evidence, but the frequency is very small compared with what it was in the early 1900s.
Althought most of Seale’s “solutions” were counterproductive and/or ineffectual, and the Black Panthers were regarded as public enemies, Seale was right about some of his complaints including this one. In most of the South the changes forced by the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts where just beginning to have significant effect. So there were proportionately very few Blacks on Southern Juries. Even in the North, Blacks did not register to vote in proportion to their numbers so since jury pools were then usually drawn from voter registration lists, Blacks were statistically underrepresented. When a few Blacks were put on a jury panel, the prosecutor had the right of preemptory challenge as did the defense. But there were enough challenges so that the prosecutor could disqualify all the African Americans on the Jury. Even today, this is legal in many jurisdictions and although better than in 1970, then a Black defendant would rarely have African Americans on the jury of “his peers.”
She was referring to laws that supported slavery.
There is a significant argument as to whether of not race should be used to try and predict the variables that will likely produce crimes. Some social scientists argue that virtually everything correlates with race {633357} and therefore the predictions are meaningless. Here, Kurtz argues that if you do not use race, since it does correlate with so much, then you might as well not try and determine the predictive factors of crime. Reality lies in the center, use race as one of the statistical variables but do not use it for profiling potential criminals and potential suspects unless there is observable and not deduced or inferred evidence of race in the crime.
Peter Alexander McWilliams was an American self-help author who advocated for the legalization of marijuana.
