The Yin Blog

Bill Stuntz's book on American criminal justice

Like many other law profs, I was saddened when Harvard law prof Bill Stuntz passed away earlier this year, given his immensely important insights into American criminal justice. I recently finished reading his book, The Collapse of American Criminal Justice, and I've put a short review on the Amazon site. I'm a little surprised that mine is, so far, the only review there of Stuntz's book, but you can go there and get a sense of what the book is about.

I guess there's a point to the Oregon gas station employee employment law, after all

Oregon law requires that gas pumps be handled by gas station employees. The ostensible reason is safety, I think, but I've always thought it was a sort of employment stimulus kind of law. It turns out, however, that maybe I'm wrong: Gas pump handles top study of filthy surfaces (Reuters).

Gender-specific fitness requirements for state troopers

The Oregon State Police had fitness tryouts today, and a lot of applicants washed out. What's curious are the requirements:

The requirements for a male recruit age 22-26 are: 40 pushups in two minutes, 50 sit-ups in two minutes and a two-mile run in 16:36.

For female recruits at the same age, it's 17 pushups, 50 sit-ups and a time of 19:36.

On average, males have more brute force strength than females do, so it's understandable that the number of pushups would be higher for men than for women. I'm not sure if 40->17 gets it right, but the differential that caught my eye is the 2 mile running time. Two miles in 16:36 is a pace of 8:18, which is not bad but not spectacular either. Two miles in 19:36 is a pace of 9:48. Do the physical differences between men and women really call for an allowance of 1:30 per mile for women? Looking at the top marathon times, the total difference is 12 minutes in favor of men, which is less than :30 per mile over a 26.2 mile run.

Of course, one can wonder whether pushups, situps, and a 2 mile run have a reasonable relation to the job of being a state trooper. But if we're expecting people to be able to do 50 situps in 2 minutes, I don't think asking for a 2 mile run at, say, an 8:48 pace (the :30 differential) is unreasonable.

 

Early thoughts about ABC's "Once Upon a Time"

I wasn't planning on watching ABC's new fantasy drama "Once Upon a Time," but we caught previews of it during episodes of "Castle" the past few weeks, and my wife suggested giving it a try. A subpar review from Entertainment Weekly gave us some pause, but I went ahead and TiVo'd the premeire episode. (I didn't set the season pass, though. It would have to earn that.)

The premise of this show is that all those fairy tale characters who read about as kids -- Snow White, Prince Charming, Gepetto, Pinochio, etc. -- are real, but the Evil Witch "won" by casting a devastating curse that caused them all to lose their memories and to end up in our world, in a town called Storybrooke (in Maine). (I'm told that this has some superficial resemblance to a graphic novel series called Fables.) There, they lead depressingly normal lives, and will continue to do so until an unlikely heroine shows up to lead the final battle against the Witch.

It sounds kind of goofy when I describe it like this, but this has been the first new show this season that's really grabbed my attention. The show alternates between the fairy tale world and Storybrooke, much like "Lost" and its flashbacks (and in fact, there are some shared creator/writers), and the worldbuilding is pretty enchanting. Like "Lost" and other serials, there are about a thousand potential subplots introduced so as to be able to sustain a series over a number of years (if it's successful), so there's a lot to keep track of. But that's also part of the fun, including trying to figure out who in Storybrooke corresponds to who in the fairy tale world.

The other new show that I've been watching is CBS's "Person of Interest," and there's a good comparison there. "Person of Interest" is brutally efficient in the way that CBS specializes in; it's self-contained, it delivers what it promises, and it'll probably last long enough to get a good syndication deal. But it's not particularly inventive. Take away the high-tech surveillance aspect of it, and it's basically the latest incarnation of the "underground hero saves regular people from bad guys that the police can't/won't touch" theme (see, e.g., "The Fugitive," "The Equalizer," "The A-Team," "The Pretender," among others).

"Once Upon a Time" is trying to be different from anything else on TV right now. True, the fairy tale characters in the real world idea has been tried before, though as a sitcom rather than a drama. And that was over 20 years ago. I think shows that strive to be unique should be given more of a chance to flourish, compared to those that recycle old formulas or that try to rip off another show's success (I'm looking at you, NBC's "The Playboy Club"). My biggest concern about "Once Upon a Time" is that the last time I felt this excited about the freshness of a show's premeire episode was . . . ABC's "Flashforward." That was a SPECTACULAR pilot, but then it totally crashed and burned. I really hope "Once Upon a Time" avoids that fate. For now, though, it's definitely earned its season pass on my TiVo.

Like "Super Size Me" but more extreme

Morgan Spurlock's crazy "eat nothing but McDonald's for 30 days" diet turned out well for him, as his documentary "Super Size Me" vaulted him into a bit of stardom.

But that's nothing compared to this guy's plan. As a superfit athletic trainer, he's decided to gain a bunch of weight to see what it's like to be overweight and how hard it is to lose weight, and to show how one can lose a lot of weight.

Yikes.

Wow, that Star Trek episode where Kirk et al age rapidly -- there's really such a disease???

Remember the original Star Trek episode "The Deadly Years," where Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Scotty, Chekov, and a redshirt return from visiting a planet, and they all start aging rapidly, except for Chekov? (Strangely, the aging disease did not make Captain Kirk look much like Denny Crane.)

The aging in the episode was caused by radiation, but it turns out there's a real-life version of this disease:

Some have argued that the condition is lipodystrophy - a rare syndrome that causes a layer of fatty tissue beneath the surface of the skin to disintegrate while the skin itself continues to grow at a startling pace.

The syndrome with no cure leaves its victims with loose folds of skin all over their bodies, wrinkled faces and the gaunt features of people decades their senior.

The condition is extremely rare and out of around seven billion people on the planet, only 2,000 are thought to have lipodystrophy.

Scary!

Selective enforcement in Portland?

So apparently, if you want to set up a camp in downtown Portland but don't want to get cited for violating the city's anti-camping ordinance, you need to have a catchy title for your group, something like "Occupy Portland" and be vaguely connected with some national movement. But if you're just a bunch of homeless people, and you happen to be on someone's private property with that property owner's permission, you get cited! (Not to mention that the property owner has nothing better to do with that downtown property because of the city's zoning regulations.)

Lifetime's "After the Runway"

I just watched the first episode of "After the Runway," which is a companion to "Project Runway" where the remaining contestants gather together for a behind-the-scenes talk show. If you aren't a "Project Runway" fan, this show obviously would make no sense and would bore you to death.

For a first episode, the producers definitely hit a home run. This is because the former winner (season 3's Laura Bennett) they brought in made one of the contestants (Joshua) totally lose it. Bennett's been blogging on the network's site about this season, and she absolutely lit into Joshua for his reprehensible conduct. On the show, she brought up his bad behavior to him. Maybe that was a bit uncool, but all he had to do was respond blandly (if insincerely) with something like, "I'm an intense competitor, and sometimes I let my desire to do well get the best of me." Instead, he attacked her, declared at the end of the show, "I hope we never meet again, and if we do, it won't be pretty," and then stalked off the set.

Awesome! It doesn't get better than that.

Mukasey on targeted killing vs detention

Former Attorney General (and former Chief U.S. District Court Judge) Michael Mukasey has an op-ed in today's Wall Street Journal that poses an important question: is the Obama Administration's heavy reliance on targeted killing via unmanned aerial vehicles potentially compromising national security by eschewing the possibility of capturing targets and interrogating them for actionable intelligence?

I think it's a good question, and one that doesn't need to presuppose the availability of waterboarding or other forms of torture. People like former FBI Special Agent Ali Soufan have, in fact, gathered coercion-free confessions and intelligence from captured al Qaeda members since 9/11.

Yet, Mukasey notes persuasively that the Obama Administration's reflexive decision to delegitimize the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay has made it harder for it to capture detainees, for GTMO was the most feasible detention location. Thus, we find ourselves in the position where, perhaps, it's easier to kill than to capture, and so we kill blasting away with Predator drones.