STORY: "Jeff Sessions has done more damage in his first 100 days than his boss," by reporter Hanna Kozlowska, published by Quartz on May 19, 2017. (From Quarz: Hanna Kozlowska is a reporter at Quartz. She previously worked for the New York Times as a digital writer for NYT Opinion, and was a fellow at Foreign Policy magazine. Prior to FP, Hanna was a stringer for the New York Times in Poland. She graduated from Swarthmore College. Her obsessions include politics, Eastern Europe, human rights, and the American criminal justice system.........Quartz is a digitally native news outlet, born in 2012, for business people in the new global economy. We publish bracingly creative and intelligent journalism with a broad worldview, built primarily for the devices closest at hand: tablets and mobile phones. Like Wired in the 1990s and The Economist in the 1840s, Quartz embodies the era in which it is being created. The financial crisis that recently engulfed much of the world wasn’t just a cyclical decline or a correction or even a bubble bursting. It was a breaking point. And its shockwaves exposed a fundamentally changed economic order with new leaders and ways of doing business.)
GIST: 'US attorney general Jeff Sessions may not be part of the biggest investigation in the Department of Justice, but as he reaches 100 days in office, there’s little doubt that he’s had an important impact on the American criminal-justice system—potentially for years to come. Despite the political turmoil of the Trump administration, Sessions has moved to reverse a tide of progressive reform and to fulfill his boss’s law-and-order agenda, a collection of concepts loosely articulated during the 2016 presidential campaign. Sessions’ biggest actions, from undermining federal oversight of police departments to cracking down on undocumented immigrants, have worried a wide array of lawmakers, law-enforcement leaders, advocates and scientists. “Of all the cabinet members, maybe even the president, he has to this point had the most significant impact as to policy changes,” said Jesselyn McCurdy, the deputy director at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Washington Legislative Office told Quartz. Unlike his boss, Sessions is delivering on what he has promised—sometimes on causes he has championed for decades. “There’s been a great bipartisan movement by organizations on the ground and members of Congress to reform the federal criminal-justice system, based on successes that have happened in the states, but the leader of opposition to that reform was Jeff Sessions, as a senator from Alabama,” McCurdy said. “These are all things that [Sessions], as a criminal justice reform opponent, had on his radar already. McCurdy said Sessions was “definitely” living up to the ACLU’s concerns, and in some areas, fulfilling the worst-case scenarios. Here’s a look at what Sessions has managed to do in just a few short months: (This list of criminal justice measures launched by sessions includes: 'Downplayed the importance of science in courtroom.'..."In yet another reversal from the previous administration, the DOJ under Sessions will not go out of its way to advance and promote reliable science in the courtroom, despite pleas from the country’s top criminologists and forensic scientists. Sessions did not renew the term of the National Commission on Forensic Science, a body formed in 2013 to study methods used to gather and assess evidence in US crime labs, some of which had been discredited as scientifically unsound. Instead, forensic science will now fall under the purview of an internal task force—a move experts warned against. The DOJ also suspended a review of testimony by FBI experts, who have been giving misleading accounts about evidence in court for years."
The entire story can be found at:
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at: http://www.thestar.com/topic/c
