The New York state court of appeals has acted on its own motion (without a petition from someone) to remove all further proceedings in the “stop-and-frisk” law from Judge Shira Sheindlin.
Geoffrey Toobin writes in The New Yorker magazine:
The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit just chastised Shira Scheindlin, the trial judge in the case challenging the constitutionality of the N.Y.P.D.’s stop-and-frisk policy, for speaking out about the issue while the trial was going on. In a ruling today, the appeals court said Scheindlin’s statements suggested that her “impartiality might reasonably be questioned.” As a result, all further proceedings in the case, in which Scheindlin found that that city residents’ rights had been violated, will be transferred to another trial judge. The appeals court, in a footnote, in particular cited Scheindlin’s statements to me in a piece for The New Yorker, as well as to the AP and the New York Law Journal.
Judge Scheindlin is the classic liberal: she learns nothing, and self congratulation is the basis of her public policy. That hundreds of lives have been saved by cracking down on gun crime matters nothing to her, because enforcement of the law gave the correct impression that blacks and Hispanics were more likely to carry guns than whites for the commission of crimes. You cannot have a law which gives rise to disparate racial impact in the US, even if the results save lives, and are manifestly proportionate to the actual statistical behaviour of the groups involved.
The disparity between what everyone knows and what the political class allows to be used as the basis of public policy will be the ruin of constitutional democracies before long.
Thomas Sowell’s Vision of the Annointed will inform you of this tendency in the liberal intelligentsia.
Addendum:
Steve Sailer has some interesting thoughts on how Judge Scheindlin came to be removed.
My impression of discrimination rulings is that they are full of this kind of bias and partiality, but the liberal judges almost always get away with it. Sometimes they get overturned, but almost never are they publicly humiliated like Judge Scheindlin.
Why the difference?
I don’t know, but one guess might be that these other judges didn’t cross crime-fighting billionaire Michael Bloomberg over the core of his legacy as mayor.