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Editor’s Note: You can read more Lisa Bloom blogs on “In Session”
Lisa Bloom
AC360° Contributor
In Session Anchor
The debate over whether the eight-year-old Arizona boy should be prosecuted as an adult or as a juvenile misses the point entirely: he should not be prosecuted at all.
Most of the civilized world recognizes that children are not criminally responsible for their actions until they reach a level of maturity such that they can clearly distinguish between right and wrong. In the United States, 37 states, including Arizona, have no minimum age at which a child can be prosecuted.
We thus treat our own children more severely than does Pakistan, Myanmar, or Sudan, which fix their age of criminal responsibility at seven. The age of criminal responsibility in France is 13; China, Germany, Italy and Japan, 14; in Scandinavian countries, 15; Brazil, Colombia and Peru, 18. And in most of these countries, young offenders are tried in juvenile courts and provided with social services upon conviction, with incarceration as a last resort.
In the United States, 25,000 young offenders are now serving time for crimes committed as minors but for which they were charged and convicted as adults. These young people are eight times more likely to commit suicide behind bars and five times more likely to become victims of sexual assault than their adult counterparts.
Editor’s Note: You can read more Lisa Bloom blogs on “In Session”
Lisa Bloom
AC360° Contributor
In Session Anchor
Marcello Lucero was walking to a friend’s house last weekend to watch a movie when his life came to a brutal end. The Ecuadorean native was allegedly beaten and stabbed by a group of teenagers who police said wanted “to beat up some Mexicans.”
Lucero’s death Saturday night on Long Island, New York was quickly labeled a hate crime by authorities. Unfortunately, it’s part of an underreported spike of hate crimes against Hispanics in the last few years. According to the FBI, Anti-Hispanic hate crimes have increased 40 percent since 2003.
Hispanic advocates blame a climate of harsh rhetoric surrounding the national immigration debate, and they surely have a point.
The Justice Department says that out of all bias crimes based on ethnicity, 62 percent target Hispanics, 38 percent everyone else. 62 percent! Though Hispanics are only 14 percent of the population. Those are some scary numbers.
Editor’s Note: You can read more Lisa Bloom blogs on “In Session”
Lisa Bloom
AC360° Contributor
In Session Anchor
In a new low point for the American criminal justice system, an 8-year-old boy accused of killing his father and another man living in his home faces two counts of premeditated murder in Arizona. Authorities are seeking to try him as an adult.
Police say the child confessed to shooting the two men with a .22 caliber rifle kept in his home.
The lawyer for the 8-year-old says police questioned the boy without a parent or attorney present and failed to notify the boy of his rights.
As if an eight year old would understand his Miranda rights.
Police are also investigating possible abuse of the boy, which they think may have lead to the shooting.
Hm. You think?
Editor’s Note: You can read more Lisa Bloom blogs on “In Session”
Lisa Bloom
AC360° Contributor
In Session Anchor
In this week of inspiring change, I want to give three cheers for a new California law that’s just been passed on a subject near and dear to my heart.
In what the Humane Society calls the most ambitious ballot measure for animals in this country’s history, California passed Prop 2 with 62 % of the vote. Prop 2 requires factory farmers to give animals a little extra room to stretch their limbs and to move like animals should. It’s cruel to force a hen to be confined with a half-dozen other birds in a tiny cage for her whole life.
It’s cruel to force a sow to live in a crate so small she can’t turn around. It’s cruel to chain a calf tightly inside a pen. Any pet owner knows that animals experience fear and suffering. This measure will provide them with some minimal creature comforts.
I’ve been a vegetarian nearly all my life because I can’t support an industry that causes so much suffering to animals. But you don’t have to be vegetarian to take a stand against cruelty, as millions of California voters demonstrated. Conditions in factory farms have to change, and it’s in our power to make it happen. Cruelty is out; compassion is in. Let’s hope this is a start of a nationwide trend.
Editor’s Note: You can read more Lisa Bloom blogs on “In Session”
Lisa Bloom
AC360° Contributor
In Session Anchor
YES WE DID!, I wrote in giant letters on my Facebook page on election night, tears in my eyes as I watched Barack Obama’s inspiring acceptance speech. Every moment of it was so moving. And when I heard my African-American friends talk about the symbolism of this day, that they can look into their children’s eyes and honestly say that we are all now truly equal – well, as a lifelong civil rights activist, I thought, it has happened. We shall overcome, not someday, but today.
Martin Luther King, Jr. said the night before he was assassinated, “And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people will get to the promised land.” Hallelujah, I thought, we have arrived. Free at last, free at last.
Then I remembered my gay friends, who faced ugly ballot measures in four states. The California Supreme Court just last May issued a landmark ruling that gay people were entitled to equal marriage rights. My mother, Gloria Allred, was one of the lead attorneys in that case. I remembered Del Martin and Phyllis Lyons, together for 55 years, who were the first couple married after that decision, one in a wheelchair, the other walking slowly to the altar. “At our age,” they said, “we don’t have the luxury of time.” I remembered that on the day of that decision, citizens of San Francisco’s Castro District took down their rainbow flags and flew American flags. “For the first time in my life,” they told me, “I feel like a full citizen. I can tell my children that in the eyes of the law I am just as worthy as anyone else.” I remembered riding in Santa Monica’s gay pride parade alongside my mother in June, getting mobbed by thousands of ordinary people who were grateful that she had won for them the extraordinary privilege of simple respect.
Keep reading
Editor’s Note: You can read more Lisa Bloom blogs on “In Session”
Lisa Bloom
AC360° Contributor
In Session Anchor
O.J. Simpson walked out of court a free man after acquittals in his 1995 double murder trial and his 2001 Florida road rage case. Today jury selection begins in his Las Vegas robbery trial, where he faces a maximum of life in prison if convicted. Will he be 3-0?
Based on what we know now, it’s going to be a close call. The prosecution case is built on the testimony of a colorful band of O.J. cronies, including a stalker, an arsonist, a thief, and an alleged pimp. Notice that I have to say “alleged” only as to the maybe-pimp. The stalker also has a criminal history that includes receiving stolen property, assault and battery, and he’ll be hauled in from prison to testify. And he is one of the two alleged victims.
This caper may be the most-taped alleged crime in history. There are three secret audiotapes of the planning of the caper, a tape of the incident itself (sold immediately to TMZ.com for over $100,000, reportedly), recordings of phone messages after the incident, and a surreptitious audio recording of OJ and one of the co-conspirators at a bar that night. Even the “You Ring We Spring” bail bondsman had the presence of mind to stick a recorder in his pocket and capture O.J.’s words as he transported him. O.J. Simpson should buy stock in Radio Shack.
Editor’s Note: You can read more Lisa Bloom blogs on “In Session”
Lisa Bloom
AC360° Contributor
In Session Anchor
The pundits applaud and cheer for the newly softened Michelle Obama after her speech. Flattened, more like it, by the American political machine’s insistent steamrolling of intelligent, accomplished women into one dimensional wifeys, apparently still the only mold of First Lady palatable to the electorate.
She came to us in last night’s speech, she said, as a daughter, a sister, a wife and a mother: identities in which she exists only in relation to family members, identities which have defined women for centuries. The first two require only birth. The third and fourth define women solely in relation to our husbands and children.
Are these identities important to strong women? Of course, just as they are for men. Our identities as children and siblings and parents and spouses are key parts of who we all are. But can we imagine a successful man introducing himself on a national political stage as a son, a brother, a husband, a father, and devoting his speech exclusively to these roles? Can we imagine him omitting his work entirely?
There was one drumbeat in Michelle’s speech, surely carefully vetted by the campaign strategists: family, family, family. Breaking news: she loves her daughters, she loves her husband, she loves her mother and her deceased father. Family values are important to her. Of course they are.
When she talked about work at all, it was Barack’s, not her own. She waxed eloquent for hundreds of words about her husband’s work on the South Side of Chicago, but not about her own career in the Chicago mayor’s office, or in public interest programs. There was just one brief throwaway line about how she left a big law firm job for community service, and how she loves America because a working class girl like her got into law school (just as girls are accepted in law schools now around the globe).
Editor’s Note: You can read more Lisa Bloom blogs on “In Session”
Lisa Bloom
AC360° Contributor
In Session Anchor
There are always arguments to be made against war crimes tribunals.
Cambodia: too little, too late? The Cambodian people have waited 30 years for the leaders of the Khmer Rouge, which starved and slaughtered nearly two million men, women and children, to be brought to justice. A hybrid international/Cambodian tribunal, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), which I visited last December, is holding five geriatric Khmer Rouge leaders now, awaiting a trial that has been in the works since it was authorized a decade ago. Speak to any Cambodian and you’ll get the same answer: “They killed my parents.” “My sister.” “Right before my eyes.” “This is the tree they swung children against until they were dead.” It is heartbreaking stuff. Let’s move this tribunal along, can’t we?
The ECCC is moving slowly in part because it’s breaking new legal ground by giving a significant role to victims, allowing them to be present as parties to the action, allowing them to ask questions of the perpetrators directly or through attorneys, and to seek compensation. It is also in desperate need of funding. Japan and many European countries have donated millions; the United States, which contributed to the rise of the anti-American Khmer Rouge by its bombing of Cambodia in the early 1970’s, nothing.
Darfur: too much, too soon? Keep reading
It must be excruciating for Silda Spitzer to wake up to today’s news coverage: Photographs and the life story of her husband’s prostitute plastered all over the New York tabloids and cable television.
Having endured the public humiliation of literally standing by her man twice in the last three days as he confessed to betraying her, now she can see the 22-year old face and bikini-clad body of the Ashley Dupre, for whom Eliot Spitzer paid thousands of dollars for sex in the Mayflower Hotel the day before Valentine’s Day.
It’s far more than any of us wanted to know, that our Harvard Law-educated middle-aged governor turned away from his loyal, attractive, Harvard Law-educated middle-aged wife and was willing to risk his career and his family’s dignity for sex with a young woman only a few years older than his teenaged daughters.
It is time to do away with the wronged wife standing mute next to her man, as he publicly humiliates her and confesses to cheating on her.
Let him stand alone and apologize.
She is not a potted plant. She is not an object, an accessory to his political career. She is a flesh and blood human being who was disrespected once during her husband’s cheating, and now is victimized a second time by being made to stand silently by him.
I watched Dana McGreevey speak movingly on Larry King Live last night of why she made that choice. She loved her husband. She was not in on all the closed door meetings leading up to the press conference. She was asked to appear at his side, and she did, because she continued to want the best for him and for the marriage.
I get that, and my heart goes out to Dana McGreevey. As a personal choice, I respect her decision.
But political spouses have a vital public role too, and they know their appearances and choices matter enormously, which is why they carefully choose what causes they’ll support and what they’ll wear to state dinners.
What political wives choose to do about their marriages once their husband is caught in a sex scandal is a private matter.
But appearing right next to their husband days after he’s been caught with his pants down is a public humiliation, unworthy of women in public life in 2008.
I’m sick of watching the Stepford Wife gaze, sick of explaining to my daughter that women deserve better.
A doormat is not a role model.
- Lisa Bloom, “In Session” Anchor/360° Contributor
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