In January of 2014, New York City’s newly elected Mayor Bill de Blasio announced the city would drop its appeal of a ruling by a U.S. district court that found the controversial policy of stop-and-frisk unconstitutional, and he would settle an ongoing lawsuit. This was a huge decision. I mean, the number of young black and brown, usually men, we were talking about—what?—700,000 or more a year, a kind of initiation, as they became 10, 11, 12, 13 years old.
Judge Shira Scheindlin talking:
First of all, it was the most important decision I wrote in all those years. It was a very, very major case, because it affected the lives of so many hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers. And I put many years into that case and studied the problem deeply. And what was very satisfying about that case is that I found the stop-and-frisk effort, as practiced, was unconstitutional. In other words, you can make stops and frisks, but only if you do it in accordance with the Constitution. A lot of people misunderstood the ruling. I didn’t say you can’t do it, but you have to do it constitutionally.
And it was not being done constitutionally, in my view. It was done with racial profiling. So, hundreds of thousands of young black men, as you said, were stopped. And it’s a big thing to be stopped and frisked. We don’t realize it because we’re not likely—I’m not likely, and probably neither of you are likely, to be stopped or frisked. But it’s a real intrusion, and it often—it often goes bad. When you think of the young black men who have been shot, it’s because a stop went bad. So, it’s a dangerous thing to be stopped, and you can often end up with an arrest.
Anyway, the good news was the stops dropped by 97 percent as a result of my ruling—so it went down from 700,000 to less than 50,000—with no rise in crime. And that was satisfying, because had crime gone shooting up, as the then-mayor and then-police commissioner predicted, people would have said, “It’s your fault. This city has burnt up, and it’s your fault.” But it didn’t happen that way. Crime is not up.
When the plaintiffs’ lawyer said, “We no longer want to have a jury. We want to have a nonjury trial, so we’re dropping our claims for damages,” I said, “Oh, no, they’re going to attack the judge, whatever the judge rules. You’re better off with a jury, because that’s the voice of the people.” They said, “No, we’ve made a decision. We don’t want damages. We just want what’s called equitable relief. We want you to try the case.” So I knew that I was going to be in the crosshairs of the mayor and the police commissioner.
And I was. There were stories that were planted that were basically untrue, in the sense that they were so slanted, so unrealistic. You can jigger any statistics. And they did. And so they went after me before the decision and during the trial and after the decision. And it was not a pleasant experience.
– Trump talks about is a federal stop-and-frisk program.
There’s no such thing. It really showed, sorry to say, his ignorance. He raised this also in the presidential debate, the first debate. He, again, attacked me personally. He said, “Oh, that judge, she was a terrible judge. She ended this wonderful policy.” So he did that in—nationally, in a presidential debate. But he showed his ignorance, because he has no control over local police policies. Federal law or federal authorities don’t control local police. So he can’t institute—excuse me—a national stop-and-frisk policy. And he didn’t know that.
I thought, in that first debate, he was, frankly, being coached by Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor. He was repeating lines that Giuliani had fed him. Mayor—former Mayor Giuliani came into that appeal along with former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, and it was the power of Giuliani and Mukasey that really caused the stay to be granted and all all that followed that.
But the bottom line is—the bottom line is that it was a bad policy. It was not effective law enforcement, as we now know, because with a drop of 97 percent and no rise in crime and the lowest murder rate, it obviously wasn’t deterring crime. All it was doing was alienating the community from the police. And that’s the last thing you want. The community said at that time, “I wouldn’t talk to the police if I saw a crime in progress. I wouldn’t help them. I wouldn’t talk to them.” Now we’re trying to work together, the police and the community. And that’s effective law enforcement. So it was ineffective. He’s just wrong.
– left the bench, at a relatively early age for a judge.
I left because I had done it for a long time, and I felt I had made an impact in many areas of the law, and it was time to have a different life. One thing I wanted was to be able to speak out. I wanted to write and to speak. And this is the kind of opportunity that I now have. As you pointed out a couple of the op-eds, I think I’ve had six op-eds in the first 18 months. I’ve also had the pleasure of speaking on programs like this, which is important, because you reach hundreds of thousands of viewers. And I want them to hear what I have to say. I want them to understand the federal courts. I want them to understand the effect of this president’s appointment. Now, if the majority changes in the Senate, we may not see rote confirmations in the second two years of the first term.
– Damien Schiff, the lawyer for the libertarian Pacific Legal Foundation, nominated to the Court of Federal Claims which primarily hears suits seeking damages from the government. He has called, you write, the Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy a “judicial prostitute.”
And this is not the kind of person that one would want to give life tenure to on a federal bench. He also said that the court’s ruling on affirmative action, which only permitted race to be a consideration in college admissions, just one consideration, was as bad as the decision in Dred Scott, which upheld fugitive slave laws, or Plessy v. Ferguson, which upheld state’s rights to require racially segregated public accommodations, or Korematsu v. United States, which approved the interment of Japanese Americans. He equated Grutter v. Bollinger, which merely said a college can consider race, with these terrible decisions. So this man doesn’t sound to me to be someone who is qualified to or has the right temperament to be on the federal bench.
– Mark Norris, suggesting that being Muslim is synonymous with being a terrorist.
I can only turn back to you and say, “Can you imagine, to take a whole group of people, a nationality, and accuse all of them, in one sentence, of being terrorists?” That’s what he’s saying, that if you’re Muslim, which is a religion, which affects millions, maybe billions, of people around the world—they can’t all be terrorists. They’re good and decent people. But he equates them. Again, is that the kind of person we want to make the fine distinctions and decisions that a judge has to make? Doesn’t sound that way to me.
– John Bush. “he compared the Dred Scott decision to Roe v. Wade, saying that both ‘relied on similar reasoning and activist justices’ and that ‘slavery and abortion’ are the ‘two greatest tragedies in our country.’”
I first point out his confirmation was 51 to 47. You’ve seen that split before. You saw it a week ago on the tax bill. So what we’re seeing there is straight party-line voting. Again, a person who would equate abortion and slavery is simply mixed up and not qualified. I don’t know how else to phrase it. I find it personally offensive that someone of that view would sit on a United States court of appeals, probably for the next 20 or 30 years.
– “so-called judges,” President Trump.
I’ve never been speechless, and it almost leaves me speechless to think that a president of the United States would treat a coordinate branch of government in that way and call federal judges, who work so hard and are, by and large, so decent and so committed to their work, “so-called,” when obviously these are fine people who take their job seriously. And I think the vast majority really want to do justice—and do, in a very fair and equal manner. So, that was—it was an outrageous comment.
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Shira Scheindlin
former United States district judge for the Southern District of New York. She is a member of the executive committee of the board of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.
— source democracynow.org