Grand Jury Research Articles

Our Accountability to Survivors

Our Accountability to Survivors Brian Clites4 The Pennsylvania grand jury report was published in August 2018.5 Within the following month, ten states launched new investigations into Catholic clergy sexual abuse, and Pope Francis called an emergency summit of leading bishops from across the globe. Although it is too soon to know whether these reactions will culminate in lasting reforms, it is imperative that scholars of Catholicism begin to think more critically about the scandal, including our complacency as a discipline and our accountability as a community. I began researching clergy sexual abuse in 2011. Those first conversations led me to explore the history of survivor-advocacy communities in Chicago, with a focus on their distinctively Catholic visions for political and ecclesiological reforms.6 Since the release of the Pennsylvania grand jury report, many colleagues have reached out to discuss how they might begin incorporating the abuse crisis into their own research. I am grateful for this influx of new methodologies and perspectives. With an eye towards encouraging additional conversations, this essay lays out ten theses on our accountability to survivors. 1. We need to listen to the ways that survivors have interpreted their own abuse. Since the 1980s, many Catholic victims have stepped forward to share their private histories of abuse. Frequently, however, the news media has exploited victims’ intimate suffering while ignoring survivors’ analytical insights. In spite of the betrayal that they experienced as children, most survivors still have a keen intellect. In addition to inspiring award-winning films and documentaries, survivors have also produced their own interpretive literature, including numerous blogs, novels, memoirs, and edited volumes. We need to find ways to uplift and support survivors’ voices—not as data, but as co-producers and close conversation partners in our own [End Page 4] analyses. We should likewise strive to publish in formats that survivors can access and share. 2. We must resist the temptation to identify a silver bullet. The phenomenon of clergy sexual abuse will not be solved solely by recourse to classical theories of patriarchy, celibacy, power, violence, or pedophilia (to name a few of the usual suspects). Identifying a singular culprit might serve our own theological and ideological interests—and in some cases those might even align with victims’ own reform agendas—but these narrow causations do not do justice to the variety and depth of survivors’ experiences. Acknowledging the topic’s complexity does not mean abandoning our scholarly training. On the contrary, it necessitates research that is rigorously grounded in the specificities of historical time and place. 3. Although Catholic sexual abuse has emerged as a crisis in many countries, we must attend to the specific dynamics that formed each survivor and each abuser, including their national, regional, and local cultures. Catholic studies has been defined largely by its capacity to hold the local and the transnational in tension with one another, yet regional influences are frequently jettisoned in studies of clergy abuse, often in favor of condemning a vague, apparently universal “clerical culture.” We should continue to research global patterns of abuse, but we must also study the specificities of each victim’s diocese and region.7 4. One of our main tasks is to work with survivors to define the ways in which Catholic clergy sexual abuse is different from other forms of rape and sexual assault. Many survivors were abused sacramentally, in church spaces, and through the explicit context of Catholic rituals and prayers. At the same time, we should not ignore the Catholicity of less-explicitly sacramental abuses. As Robert Orsi has argued, “There is no one who was not abused in a Catholic way.”8 It is critical to study the specifically Catholic institutional, religious, and theological dimensions of Roman Catholic clergy sexual abuse. 5. Just as no two survivors had exactly the same experience of abuse, no two priests were identical in their moods and motivations. In my conversations with survivors, I have heard stories that left me paralyzed, curled up, crying, and trembling. But I have yet to hear any stories about monsters. In fact, what survivors often emphasize is the humanity of their abuser, including the shared interests, intrapersonal [End Page 5] chemistry...

Introduction

Introduction Matthew J. Cressler1 On August 14, 2018, a Pennsylvania grand jury released a 900-page report that named credible allegations of sexual abuse of minors by over three hundred Catholic clergy across six dioceses in the state. The report is the largest of its kind to date in the United States, both in terms of the number of accused priests and identified victims, and in the excruciating and comprehensive account of violence it presents. This report led to a cascade of responses, beginning with the outrage and disgust of ordinary Catholics and followed by attorneys general in ten states announcing investigations into Catholic clerical sex abuse; religious orders, most notably U.S. Jesuit provinces, making public lists of clergy with credible accusations of sexual abuse of minors; and Pope Francis convening a summit of bishops from around the world. While in one sense the Pennsylvania report offered nothing new—Catholics and the scholars who study them have long known of the breadth of clerical sex abuse in the church and the depth of the institutional coverup of that abuse—the report renewed a sense that sexual abuse must be reckoned with in scholarly conversations about U.S. Catholicism in particular and about U.S. religion, more broadly. The essays collected here emerged out of these sorts of scholarly conversations in the months that followed the release of the report. I recall speaking with Brian Clites, who reflects in this forum on “Our Accountability to Survivors,” about the ways U.S. Catholic studies needs to change. I confessed how, as a scholar of religion and race, I had insisted that we understand race and white supremacy as constitutive of Catholicism in the United States,2 but had failed to conceptualize sex [End Page 1] abuse as something similarly systemic and not anomalous in the past and present live of Catholics. If one set of discussions revolved around how Catholic studies must change to account for clerical abuse, another centered on how studies of sex abuse needed to shift to include indigenous and other non-white populations often erased in these narratives. This is something Kathleen Holscher insists on in her essay “Colonialism and the Crisis Inside the Crisis of Catholic Sex Abuse,”3 an intervention Jack Lee Downey builds on in his contribution to this forum. These exchanges and others like them online led to an “emergency session” on Catholic Sex Abuse and the Study of Religion in 2018 hosted at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion in Denver, Colorado. The session gathered religious studies scholars with different areas of specialization and different methodological approaches who shared a commitment to thinking substantively and critically about the implications sex abuse holds for the study of religion. Each scholar was invited to reflect on how the Catholic clerical sex abuse crisis appears from his or her own particular vantage point, and on how they think the historical and contemporary contours of the crisis should change the ways we research, write, and teach. How should scholars approach the study of Catholic sex abuse, conceptually and methodologically? What impact should the study of Catholic sex abuse have on the study of Catholics and Catholicism more broadly? What, if anything, is distinctively Catholic about Catholic sex abuse? How is Catholic sex abuse related to sex abuse in other settings, religious and otherwise? These were among the many questions raised by the session and, as you will find, not everyone agreed on the answers. These essays collected in this forum represent the revised remarks of the scholars who participated in that AAR emergency session and are, we hope, just a few of the first signs of a shifting field. The first three contributions to this forum insist that we shift the ways scholars study Catholic clerical sex abuse by centering people who have been marginalized and erased from the preeminent narratives. First, Brian Clites calls on scholars to hold themselves accountable to survivors of clerical sex abuse. He offers ten theses that illuminate the implications this accountability has not just for how we understand Catholic sex abuse, but even for how we understand the moral imperatives of scholarship itself. Next, Susan Ridgely...

Colonialism Is Abuse: Reconsidering Triumphalist Narratives in Catholic Studies

Colonialism Is Abuse: Reconsidering Triumphalist Narratives in Catholic Studies Jack Lee Downey31 In recent years, scholars who have written about Catholic child abuse often remark upon the dearth of literature on the subject, as if it were an internal taboo within the discipline of Catholic studies.32 Certainly, that sentiment was part of the genesis of this roundtable, coupled with the feeling that continued silence rendered scholars complicit with covering up this violence against children and their families—against the body of the community that we study. There has been frequent speculation in the months since the Pennsylvania grand jury report that, perhaps this time, there will be real change in the way the church addresses abuse. This has been echoed by earnest penitential sentiments among scholars of U.S. Catholicism to do better, and acknowledge that abuse is a mainstream part of Catholic history, rather than something marginal. When the most recent Pennsylvania grand jury report on clerical child abuse dropped this past August, I was at a retreat center, some forty-five minutes outside of Denver, at a training camp for Indigenous activists—as one of just a few “settler” participants. As I compulsively scrolled through social media on my phone during supper, I was bombarded by a deluge of posts, subtweets, and links to and about the report. Since I was still at camp for several more days, my engagement with the outside world was limited—maybe happily—to brief spurts of online communication and texting. I continued to be struck by the contrast between the palpable and sometimes explicit shock voiced by many (it should be noted, white) academic colleagues—several of whom are established experts in U.S. Catholic history, and the utter lack of surprise that I was met with whenever I mentioned the report to my Indigenous activist colleagues. Among the many other projects—mundane and supernatural, virtuous and duplicitous—that Catholicism has been enmeshed in throughout a half-millennium in the Americas, violence against Indigenous peoples has been one part of that [End Page 16] history, as Pope Francis acknowledged during his 2015 visit to Bolivia.33 This collective memory and lived religious experience of Catholic traditions of various forms of abuse informed Indigenous activists’ lack of surprise to news that nevertheless continued to shock me and other non-Indigenous scholars of Catholicism. Peter Steinfels has written an extensive, and at times palpably disdainful, reflection on the outrage machine that followed the Pennsylvania grand jury report, based on what he sees as a common lack of critical reading of the document itself.34 But at least some of the passionate response is tied to collective historical consciousness, and the concomitant horror and grim familiarity that the report elicited, imperfect exegesis or no. One of the most pernicious aspects, it seems, of the apparatus of clerical abuse has been its resilient capacity to present abuse as hyperlocal—particular to discrete times and places—rather than as endemic throughout Catholicland. So, after thirty years of revelations of diocesan conspiracies, there can still be a sense of novelty every time we are reminded that abusers find safe haven within the fold of clericalism. In a sense, the isolation that abusers use to control and silence their victims is replicated on a macro scale by the parochialism of the diocesan structure—encouraging a focus on individual priests, priest rings, bishops, and dioceses, rather than the church as a whole. Centering Indigenous communities—the original inhabitants of the Americas—within American history, rather than as something peripheral to the conventional triumphalist narrative of European expansion, means becoming receptive to reckoning with Indigenous dispossession at the hands of Christian (Catholic and otherwise) settler colonialism.35 For much of the evolution of the discipline, historians have cast Catholics as quintessentially American, as both outsiders to mainstream Protestant power who assimilate into the U.S. melting pot, and by virtue of their antiquity as the among the first wave of European settlers. The former narrative is a vessel for earnest American Dream immigrant fantasies, while the latter is more morally fraught with the overt implications of empire. But, of course, as David Treuer notes, settlers were not the only...

ESSAY: A Closer Look at the Eric Garner Incident: The New York Police Department Should Review Its Policy Instead of Trying Its Police Officer

After an examination of the death of Eric Garner, existing laws and current practices of the New York Police Department (NYPD) come into question. A step-by-step breakdown of the events after the death of Eric Garner explains the outcome of legal decisions of the criminal process against Police Officer Pantaleo made by the Richmond County District Attorney’s Office and the U.S. Attorney’s Office. An explanation and the likely outcome of the NYPD’s upcoming administrative trial are presented from an insider’s point of view. The author argues that the likely conviction of Officer Pantaleo on administrative charges, resulting in his termination, will not produce its intended effect and may be counterproductive in the effort to prevent future deaths of persons in police custody. Suggestions to change NYPD enforcement policy and training, in addition to current New York State law involving access to Grand Jury transcripts and evidence, are presented.

A INFLUÊNCIA DA MÍDIA SOB O GRANDE JÚRI

The objective of this article is to analyze the way in which the media network is used in the present day, and how it controls the information proliferated to society, and in particular, as treated in this study, to the grand jury. Although this is an uncommented issue, the existing power and the speed with which the messages are transmitted in this way is undeniable. However, many of the messages conveyed are biased, because they collect some data, although they have some truth, they are incomplete, so it is not possible to formulate a concrete and fair opinion about the matter dealt with. And after that, the media of dissemination of information, proliferate ther own truth, having to as absolute, and because of the range that it obtains, these facts can change the opinion of the people, making them not care much, and even disregard other facts, though they are concrete and consistent.

Alternative Facts & Fake News

Research Article| October 01 2018 Alternative Facts & Fake News Departmental Editor: Douglas Allchin Douglas Allchin Departmental Editor Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar The American Biology Teacher (2018) 80 (8): 631–633. https://doi.org/10.1525/abt.2018.80.8.631 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Douglas Allchin; Alternative Facts & Fake News. The American Biology Teacher 1 October 2018; 80 (8): 631–633. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/abt.2018.80.8.631 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentThe American Biology Teacher Search “Mendacity!” Big Daddy repeatedly exclaims in Tennessee Williams's classic drama Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. “Do you know what that is?” he continues in his deep Southern drawl. “It's lies and liars!” Big Daddy was talking about hidden family secrets, but he might just as well have been talking about anti-vaxxers, climate change deniers, or other purveyors of public disinformation. The discounting and outright dismissal of facts has become big business of late. The process of finding and confidently ascertaining facts is central to science. But also outside of science. For example, investigative journalists probe current events, often seeking newsworthy information that certain interests try to hide from public view. Military intelligence experts seek credible testimony and evidence about national security risks. Grand juries hear from witnesses and assess evidence in pursuit of criminal justice. They all rely on the same methods as science – to justify claims... You do not currently have access to this content.

Restoring Confidence in the Roman Catholic Church: Corporate Governance Analogies

Events of the Summer 2018 brought the long running sexual abuse crisis in the Roman Catholic Church back onto the front pages, highlighting the role of diocesan bishops in covering up the scandal and enabling abusers. In response to these developments, the Church is again considering reforms to protect victims and punish abusers and enablers. This article proposes that the Church create a system for laity to anonymously report allegations, enact strong protections for whistleblowers, and impose a mandatory whistleblowing requirement on priests. As a 2018 Pennsylvania grand jury report demonstrates, however, the laity was reporting the abuse to the Church but the hierarchy buried those reports in secret files. The ultimate problem thus is not so much the lack of reporting, as it was the lack of action after the report. Accordingly, the article’s principal proposal is the creation of both diocesan and national disciplinary bodies led by expert lay members as the ultimate authorities in sex abuse cases. The proposal draws an analogy between these bodies and corporate audit committees and argues that a number of aspects of how audit committees function can be usefully adapted to the proposed review bodies. This version of the article has been revised to take into account developments at the February 2019 Vatican summit on the sex abuse scandal. Those developments do not change the recommendations made herein.

Arkema indicted for chemical releases

A grand jury in Houston indicted Arkema and two of its executives on criminal charges that they “recklessly” released chemicals from a plant near Houston last year during catastrophic flooding from Tropical Storm Harvey. Reactive organic peroxides decomposed and caught fire after floodwaters knocked out power and disabled refrigeration at Arkema’s Crosby, Texas, plant. The chemicals must be kept cool to remain stable. In addition to the company, the Aug. 3 indictment names Richard Rowe, CEO of Arkema’s North America operations, as well as plant manager Leslie Comardelle. If convicted, Arkema could face $1 million in fines and the executives could face five years in prison. “Responsibility for pursuing profit over the health of innocent people rests with the leadership of Arkema,” Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg, whose office sought the indictment, said in a statement. The defendants’ attorneys said the indictment has no legal, factual, or historical basis.

The excessive use of force against blacks in the United States of America

ABSTRACTThis paper examines the disproportionate killings of Blacks in the United States of America by the police. I argue that the legal standards in the United States regulate the use of force by police officers, are tainted with bias and do not comply with international law. I further argue that that the grand jury process and prosecutors involved in prosecuting police officers who kill blacks are tainted with implicit bias. This results in impunity for these killings. I conclude with several recommendations on how to combat police brutality against blacks.

#NeotericRacism: Exploring race-based content in social media during racially charged current events

Research regarding the expression of race-based content on social media is sparse. To contribute to this understudied area in psychology, a qualitative study was conducted to explore messages used in social media during racially charged events. In the current study, content analysis was used to explore how Twitter users expressed raced-based content following the grand jury decision in the racially-charged case of Michael Brown. A total of N = 101 tweets using the hashtag Ferguson were analyzed and coded. Five categories emerged including content related to racial hatred, support of systems enacting racial injustice, racial epithets, opposition to racism, and news coverage. Categories formed three themes: a) content related to racism, b) anti-racists content, and c) news coverage. Implications are discussed and the paper culminates with recommendations for psychologists considering ways to utilize and integrate social media into their professional roles.

A study on legislative directions of newsmen’s privilege and obligation to truthfulness of press

취재원의 보호는 자유로운 언론과정을 보호하기 위한 것이다. 취재원 보호 없이는 정보의 자유로운 유통을 기대할 수 없다. 전문가로서의 언론인의 직업적 양심과 의무가 전제된다면, 취재원은 보호되어야 한다. 오늘날 학계의 주류적인 입장도 취재원이 보호되어야 한다는 것이며, 다만 취재원이 보호되어야 한다는 전제에서 더 나아가 취재원 보호범위의 확대 문제가 논의되고 있다. 취재원보호와 관련된 언론인의 특권은 반드시 공적 관심사와 관련한 보도에 국한할 필요는 없다. 또한 취재원의 보호가 자유로운 언론과정의 보호에 있다면 보호범위를 전문적․직업적 언론인에게 한정할 필요는 없다. 전문적 언론인 외에도 새로운 미디어나 시민언론에게도 그 범위가 확대될 수 있다. 물론 취재원 보호의 확대는 조심스럽고 신중하게 접근해야 한다. 취재원의 보호와 확대에 관한 문제는 입법적 해결이 가장 바람직한 방법이다. 법률의 부재는 언론인의 특권과 자유로운 정보의 유통을 약화시키며, 잠재적 정보원은 정보제공에 소극적일 수밖에 없다. 입법적 해결은 정보제공자와 언론인 간의 언론과정의 예측가능성을 보장해 줄 수 있기 때문에 안정적인 정보유통을 촉진시킨다. 만약 입법적 해결을 기대할 수 없는 경우라고 하더라도 헌법상 언론의 자유의 의미와 가치를 인식한다면, 사법행정당국은 법집행에 있어서 취재원의 보호를 위한 노력이 필요하다. 미국은 1970년 이후 언론매체에 대한 소환장을 발부할 경우 법무부 가이드라인을 제정하여 이에따르고 있다. 미국 법무부의 가이드라인은 법집행에서의 취재원의 보호를 위한 일정한 지침을 제시해 준다는 점에서 이를 고려할 필요가 있다.Newsmen’s privilege is that of journalist, reporters and other news gatherers to claim a qualified privilege against disclosure when faced with a court order to produce material and/or the names of sources during a judicial or investigatory proceeding. This privilege is a necessary precondition to achieve true and fair reporting of press. In America, the protection of the newsmen has been issued since the establishment of the country. In Branzburg v. Hayes, the Supreme Court addressed for the first time whether the First Amendment provided newsmen with a privilege against disclosure of sources during a Grand Jury proceeding. The majority opinion held that courts may not provide news gatherers with a privilege to withhold their sources during a Grand Jury proceeding conducted in good faith and the court declined to interpret the First Amendment to grant newsmen a testimonial privilege that other citizens do not enjoy. And in Zurcher v. Stanford Daily, the majority opinion judged that search warrants as well as subpoenas, are permissible in proper circumstance and it does not make a constitutional difference in our judgement. In Germany, Federal Criminal Procedure Code(StPO) Article 53, Section 1, Clause 5 and Federal Civil Procedure Code(ZPO) Article 383, Section 1, Clause 5 prescribes the right not to testify(Zeugnisverweigerrungsrecht). In Korea, there is no clear Article which protects the newsmen’s privilege. The prevailing opinions in Korea have to recognize the right for newsmen not to testify, because newsmen’s privilege is the essential part of free speech. Therefore by protecting newsmen’s privilege, we can enhance the free press. If we accept that free press is indispensable to a free society, we need to discuss the issues to expand the protection of sources of news. If so, for example, newsmen’s privilege could be qualified for the professional journalist as well as none professional journalist. However the expansion of newsmen’s privilege should be considered very carefully. The best way of expansion of that is legislative solutions. If not, it is necessary to take a consideration of administrative such as Code of Federal Regulations of United States or judical guideline.

The Missing American Jury: Restoring the Fundamental Constitutional Role of the Criminal, Civil, and Grand Juries

The Missing American Jury: Restoring the Fundamental Constitutional Role of the Criminal, Civil, and Grand Juries

The Grand Jury of New Zealand in The Nineteenth Century

The grand jury of New Zealand existed for 118 years, but virtually nothing is known about its operation. This article shows that the grand jury of New Zealand developed from an imported institution in 1844 to one that somewhat more closely reflected New Zealand's needs. Nevertheless, from the first there were voices calling for its abolition and considerable diversity of opinion about its aims and usefulness. It was never comprehensively overhauled to meet local conditions. A survey of its make-up and functions is given along with a survey of the judicial charges given to it and the presentments it made on matters of public importance. Often, and especially in the first few decades of the grand jury's existence, the impression is given that making presentments on a great variety of topics of public interest was the most important function of the grand jury, eclipsing its role in the criminal law proper. There is special consideration of grand juries and Maori people. The analysis concludes with a conspectus of the grand jury towards the end of its existence (1961) along with the debates surrounding its demise.

Expanding the Search for America's Missing Jury

A review of Suja A. Thomas, The Missing American Jury: Restoring the Fundamental Constitutional Role of the Criminal, Civil, and Grand Juries.

Anti-Catholicism in Arkansas: How Politicians, the Press, the Klan, and Religious Leaders Imagined an Enemy, 1910–1960 by Kenneth C. Barnes

Reviewed by: Anti-Catholicism in Arkansas: How Politicians, the Press, the Klan, and Religious Leaders Imagined an Enemy, 1910–1960 by Kenneth C. Barnes David T. Mitchell Anti-Catholicism in Arkansas: How Politicians, the Press, the Klan, and Religious Leaders Imagined an Enemy, 1910–196. By Kenneth C. Barnes. ( Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2016. Pp. x, 266. $34.95, ISBN 978–1-68226–016-6.) In the past sixty years, scholars have written a number of good books on Catholic-Protestant relations in the United States, but until recently, cursory attention has been given to anti-Catholicism in the South. In his 1938 biography [End Page 200] of agrarian rebel turned anti-Catholic bigot Tom Watson, C. Vann Woodward created a seminal interpretation. Woodward concludes that while white southerners like Watson fostered religious bigotry, their actions revealed curious but extraneous truths about the South's history. Kenneth C. Barnes's book on anti-Catholicism in Arkansas has attempted to reframe this narrative, shifting the lens to the people and institutions that made religious bigotry their prime concern. The lion's share of Anti-Catholicism in Arkansas: How Politicians, the Press, the Klan, and Religious Leaders Imagined an Enemy, 1910–1960 is devoted to an eighteen-year period, beginning in 1910 with the publication of Tom Watson's Watson's Jeffersonian Magazine (an anti-Catholic tour de force) and ending with the anti-Catholic campaign against 1928 Democratic presidential candidate Al Smith. The focus is noteworthy. In Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (New Brunswick, N.J., 1955), an important study of America's nativist past, John Higham contends that the South's fixation with Catholicism began in 1910, with Watson contributing to paranoia. Barnes credits Strangers in the Land for providing a foundational framework for understanding anti-Catholicism in Arkansas, but he aligns with more recent scholars of anti-Catholicism who argue that anti-Catholicism was not primarily about ethnic identity but rather "essentially about a religion" (p. 4). One glaring omission is Andrew S. Moore's recent work on Catholic-Protestant relations in Georgia and Alabama. Seven chapters are organized chronologically. Chapter 1 provides a brief introduction to America's and Arkansas's anti-Catholic past, detailing how the anti-Catholic fringe element connected with a rural, religious, and conservative base. Chapter 2, perhaps the best chapter, uncovers the connection between anti-Catholicism and sexualized gender. For a brief time, anti-Catholic leaders created a paranoid, sex-obsessed frenzy, fueled by fictional accounts of convent abuses. Robert Randolph Posey, a notable zealot and Arkansas state representative, sponsored convent inspection bills twice. After it was passed, the Convent Inspection Act of 1915 required "religious institutions such as convents, monasteries, hospitals, orphanages, asylums, seminaries, or schools to submit to an inspection by the county sheriff or a grand jury upon the request of a judge or a petition of twenty citizens" (p. 25). Chapter 3 addresses how liquor issues and World War I influenced religious antipathy. In highlighting the work of Arkansas Baptists, Barnes convincingly links religiously motivated prohibition with anti-Catholic sentiments. The second part of the chapter examines how wartime anti-German sentiments fueled hatred against Catholics as another point when nationalism and ethnic identity trumped religious conviction. Chapter 4, "Catholics and the Ku Klux Klan, 1921–1925," emphasizes how the state's Klan leadership fueled jingoistic fears about immigration, public school control, and political conspiracy. Echoing other recent Klan histories, Barnes finds that these organizations attracted middle-class, urban, and educated leaders who wielded enormous political influence. Chapters 5 and 6 cover how the citizens of Arkansas debated the possibility of a Catholic president of the United States. In 1928 Democratic presidential candidate Al Smith picked Arkansas senator Joseph T. Robinson as his running [End Page 201] mate, creating a fissure between culture warriors who were fighting against a pro-alcohol, pro-evolution, and Catholic presidential candidate and those who supported a ticket that included Arkansas's "favorite son" (p. 164). Although anti-Catholicism did not disappear, Barnes sees 1928 as the pivotal year when it began a steady decline. John F. Kennedy's 1960 election marked the end of politically organized anti...

The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas

266 CLA JOURNAL Book Reviews Thomas, Angie. The Hate U Give. New York: Balzer & Bray--Harper Collins Publishers, 2017. 464 pp. ISBN: 978-0062498533. $18.99 Hardcover. Angie Thomas’s debut novel, released in February 2017, is a timely and wellexecuted book for young adult audiences. The strengths of Thomas’s novel are evidenced in her contemplation of culturally relevant themes like activism, police brutality, and code-switching, which unfold in a first-person, fast-paced narrative. The novel offers readers an engaging story that examines violence against black bodies, micro-aggressions, racism and non-violent protest movements like Black Lives Matter. The novel balances hard hitting moments with familiar cultural references that result in an authentic and genuine portrayal of the challenges of navigating two opposing worlds: white, elite private school, suburban life and an urban, black, close-knit but economically challenged community. The novel’s protagonist, Starr Carter, straddles two lives, her poor, black, and gang riddled neighborhood and the suburban, mostly wealthy, white prep school she attends. Starr keeps her two lives strictly divided, her school friends, including her white boyfriend, don’t meet her neighborhood friends and, likewise, her Garden Heights friends never meet her at the suburban Williamson Prep. All of that changes, however, when Starr witnesses the brutal murder of her childhood friend Khalil by a local police officer. The national news coverage, following real life trends, paints Khalil as a thug and drug dealer.While she grieves with the members of her community, her relationships with her Williamson Prep friends suffer. The local police force rallies around the officer, and the members of the Garden Heights community, angered by the lack of progress in Khalil’s murder investigation, take to the streets in protest. Through all of this, Starr struggles with her anger, fear, guilt and grief as the novel progresses, and she decides whether or not to come forward to testify before the grand jury on Khalil’s behalf. When discussed within the larger discourse of African-American popular culture texts, The Hate U Give would have benefitted most significantly from greater character development. There is a reliance on cliché and all too familiar tropes among the novel’s secondary characters. Other challenges include Thomas’ approach, which reflects moments of 90s nostalgia that many of today’s teens may dismiss as dated. Additionally, The Hate U Give mirrors the code-switching Starr frequently enacts at Williamson Prep, black-splaining rather than smoothly transitioningintocomplexdiscussionsof race.Whenexaminedbesideatextsuchas Jason Reynold’s Long Way Down, a novel in verse that successfully navigates topics of race and gun violence, Thomas’ novel could expand important discussions. Ibi Zoboi’s novel American Street, a National Book Award Finalist for youth literature, likewise tackles issues of race, police violence, and identity through strong and nuanced characters. CLA JOURNAL 267 Book Reviews At the same time, Angie Thomas’s The Hate U Give has been widely accepted, leading to the 2018 Morris Award for a debut author. The novel was on the National Book Award long list for youth literature and was a Coretta Scott-King and Michael L. Printz honor book. Timelessness is among the criteria for most of the Youth Media Awards, and given the novel’s first-person narrative voice, accessible language and subject matter, the reasons for the book’s accolades are clear. Ultimately, readers will find The Hate U Give an enjoyable introduction to conversations about police brutality and, arguably more importantly, how teens can become their own advocates and speak out against institutional oppression. Latrice Ferguson is a Ph.D. student at the University of Pennsylvania where she studies Children’s Literature. She holds masters degrees in Library Science and Children’s Literature and is former librarian for the Chicago Public Library. ...

Expanding the Search for America's Missing Jury

Professor Suja Thomas offers a novel approach in her new book, The Missing American Jury: Restoring the Fundamental Constitutional Role of the Criminal, Civil, and Grand Juries. She begins by recognizing the jury as a constitutionally mandated institution possessing specific powers and limitations in relation to the executive, legislature, and judiciary. She then explains how these traditional government actors have gradually usurped the jury’s unique powers for themselves and so diminished the jury’s constitutional import. Juries are vanishing, then, because the other actors have emerged in their stead. As a solution, she proposes recognizing the jury as a “branch”— a coequal to and a significant check on the traditional branches (p. 5)—and offers a doctrinal approach she calls “relational originalism” to assure this position (p. 8). While The Missing American Jury provides an encompassing look at the jury’s decline, it is not complete. In the introduction, Professor Thomas explains her decision to omit arbitration and settlement from the discussion, choosing instead to focus only on “procedures imposed by the government to which parties do not consent or procedures such as plea bargaining to which a party may unwillingly consent” (p. 3). This omission is a rare misstep. The emergence of binding arbitration and private ordering of public adjudication has tracked and contributed to the decline in the civil jury’s constitutional esteem. The legislature and the judiciary have removed from the jury and vested it in private parties’ hands. In so doing, they have allowed powerful social and economic actors to sideline the civil jury and have shielded their own behavior from public scrutiny. These developments in private civil procedure are a necessary part of the discussion. This Review incorporates private procedure into Professor Thomas’s explanation for the jury’s disappearance. Part I analyzes Professor Thomas’s central premise that the jury has fallen in constitutional esteem due to power grabs by the traditional actors. It also considers her proposal to fill the doctrinal void that has allowed this decline. Part II provides a historical overview of the emergence of private procedure and stresses that this development mirrors those power grabs reviewed in the book. Finally, Part III applies Professor Thomas’s relational originalism doctrinal approach to private procedure.

Public Conversion, Private Reason, and Institutional Crisis

Following the 2018 Pennsylvania grand jury report, which detailed the sexual abuse of clergy members, many have questioned the value of personal institutional commitment to the Catholic Church, preferring instead more individualistic expressions of faith. Alongside the sex abuse crisis, the age of free information makes the Church’s epistemology appear antiquated. This article explores the individualistic versus community-based practice of Catholicism, drawing a distinction between private conversion versus public conversion. The article offers a defense of public conversion, arguing it explains the rationality of conversion and offers a solution to the problem of divine hiddenness. Using details from her own faith journey, Sullivan explores why God graces us with less perspicuous knowledge, causing subluminous conversions, as opposed to the more glaring, which leads to luminous conversions. Sullivan suggests that we obtain knowledge of God by loving one another, which takes place in the framework of the institutional Church. She subsequently uses this Church-making theodicy to offer five ideas about how we might engage the Church institutionally as Catholic philosophers.

"A Bunch of Tough Hombres": Police Brutality, Municipal Politics, and Racism in South Texas

"A Bunch of Tough Hombres":Police Brutality, Municipal Politics, and Racism in South Texas Brent M. S. Campney (bio) "Everybody knew the McAllen police were a bunch of tough hombres, especially the Boys on C shift," reported the Dallas Morning News on March 29, 1981. "Working the midnight-to-8 a.m. shift along the border is like being at war, the cops said. You have to be tough. The Boys on C shift worked at being tough." Many of the "Boys" wore black T-shirts with gold letters bearing "the legend, 'C Shift Animals.' They even had their own slogan: 'Kick…and Ask Questions Later.'" Only days earlier, the public had become aware of their misdeeds, revealed in six years of booking room videos recorded by the McAllen Police Department (MPD) and subpoenaed by a civil rights attorney. On these videos Anglo and Mexican American officers alike confirmed suspicions that they had beaten, kicked, and abused prisoners—in virtually all cases, working-class Mexican Americans.1 Station KGBT in nearby Harlingen played television footage of the beatings, bringing a flood of outrage. "One woman, like many of the callers, was almost in tears when she thanked us over and over again for showing such terrible things going on," noted a representative of the station. "She said as soon as she got through talking to us, she was going to call the McAllen police to demand an answer [as to] why those things had happened."2 She was not alone. "The police switchboard was lit up for hours after the tapes were shown on TV," declared James C. Harrington, the attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which had secured the videos and released them to the media.3 As investigators probed the scandal, some pointed to the mayor—already locked in a heated, racially tinged political race with Ramiro Casso, a Mexican American challenger—as an enabler. On May 3 the News reported that "the federal grand jury investigation of accusations of [End Page 787] brutality by McAllen police has broadened to include the possibility of a cover-up of the incidents by Mayor Othal Brand and other city officials."4 This study tells the story of the 1981 MPD scandal, its impact on the ongoing municipal election between an Anglo incumbent and a Mexican American challenger, and its role in unifying Mexican Americans in South Texas during a period in which they were beginning to seize the reigns of local and regional power. Historians such as David Montejano, Marc Simon Rodriguez, and Brian Behnken have incorporated the issue of police brutality into their scholarship on the Mexican American civil rights movement during the post World War II period. In his discussion of Colorado, for example, Rodriguez found that between "1962 and 1964, police brutality became a significant issue for Mexican Americans in Denver and was the spark that ignited community activism. Several young men had had interactions with the police, and what should have been no more than minor skirmishes led to the young men's deaths."5 Nevertheless, historians have focused on particularly egregious incidents in places like East Los Angeles and Dallas rather than on the issue of police violence more broadly. This study places police violence at the center of the story and addresses its significance in enforcing repression, promoting resistance, and transforming local and regional power relations.6 The study proceeds in five sections. In the first it details the history of police violence against Mexican Americans in Texas and in the Lower Rio Grande Valley (hereafter, the Valley) in the 1970s. In the second section it examines the role in these events of Othal Brand, the so-called Onion King, who owned one of the most powerful agribusiness interests in Texas and served as the mayor of McAllen. In the third it analyzes the MPD scandal, the roots of which dated back to the early 1970s. In the fourth it explores the mayoral campaign, election, and election runoff, all of which not only highlighted the police scandal but underlined racial and class divisions in this South Texas city. In the final section it considers the historiographical implications of its findings. To tell...

Реорганизация устройства и работы городских (районных) судов в связи с реформированием института присяжных заседателей

Реорганизация устройства и работы городских (районных) судов в связи с реформированием института присяжных заседателей