Author: News Polite

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday turned away an appeal from a death row inmate in Texas who said his jury had been tainted by racial bias. The inmate, Kristopher Love, a Black man, had objected to the seating of a juror who had said he believed “nonwhite races” to be the “more violent races.”

The court’s three liberal members dissented, saying the Supreme Court should have instructed the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, the state’s highest court for criminal matters, to reconsider Mr. Love’s challenge.

“When racial bias infects a jury in a capital case, it deprives a defendant of his right to an impartial tribunal in a life-or-death context,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote, joined by Justices Stephen G. Breyer and Elena Kagan.

The majority, following the court’s standard practice, gave no reasons for refusing to hear Mr. Love’s appeal.

Mr. Love was convicted of committing a murder for hire. As part of jury selection in his case, prospective jurors filled out a questionnaire that asked, among other things, “Do you believe that some races and/or ethnic groups tend to be more violent than others?”

The prospective juror in question, who is white, said yes. He added an explanation: “Statistics show more violent crimes are committed by certain races. I believe in statistics.”

He elaborated when he was questioned by the lawyers in the case, saying he based his views on “news reports and criminology classes” rather than his “personal feelings toward one race or another.” The prospective juror added that he did not “think because of somebody’s race they’re more likely to commit a crime than somebody of a different race” and that he would not feel differently about Mr. Love “because he’s an African American.”

Mr. Love’s lawyers asked the judge to strike the prospective juror for cause, but the judge declined. Mr. Love had exhausted his peremptory challenges, and the juror was seated.

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ruled that Mr. Love could not contest the judge’s decision to seat the juror because the judge had earlier granted Mr. Love two extra peremptory challenges. Mr. Love had used those challenges before the juror at issue was questioned.

Justice Sotomayor wrote that “a previously used peremptory strike does not eliminate the need to inquire into the juror’s bias.”

She said that the state appeals court should grapple with whether Mr. Love’s right to an impartial jury had been violated.

“Biases capable of destroying a jury’s impartiality can take many forms,” she wrote. “Whatever the nature of the bias, if a trial court seats a juror who harbors a disqualifying prejudice, the resulting judgment must be reversed.”

Justice Sotomayor added that the questioning of potential jurors played an important role in the effort “to cleanse our jury system of racial bias.”

“Safeguards like this, however, are futile if courts do not even consider claims of racial bias that litigants bring forward,” she wrote. “The task of reviewing the record to determine whether a juror was fair and impartial is challenging, but it must be undertaken, especially when a person’s life is on the line.”

PHILADELPHIA — The city of Philadelphia has become the first major American city to reinstate an indoor mask mandate this spring, responding to sharply rising numbers of new coronavirus cases. The reinstatement, announced last week, took effect Monday.

The mandate requires masks in all indoor public places, though businesses have the option of choosing instead to require proof of vaccination from their employees and customers. It was reimposed a little more than a month after the city lifted it in early March.

The response has been mixed. Some public health advocates applauded the move. A group of business owners and residents on Saturday sued to stop it. The leading Democratic candidate for governor of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro, called such mandates “counterproductive.” Many Philadelphians were not entirely sure what to make of it all.

“There’s really no sense of stability with regards to business,” said Shane Dodd, who co-owns a bistro in the Fairmount neighborhood of the city. Like other restaurant owners, he said it would be a hassle to once again have to confront the occasional stubbornly anti-mask customer. He feared losing business to restaurants in the suburbs, and worried that a nervous public would interpret the mandate as a sign that it was not safe to go out to eat for the indefinite future. “It’s a never-ending story,” Mr. Dodd said.

Philadelphia’s decision to reinstate the mandate comes at a strange time in the pandemic. The Omicron subvariant known as BA.2 has reversed the decline in new-case counts throughout the Northeast. But it is spreading in a country that is better vaccinated now than it was when the Delta variant arrived around this time last year, and one that has more antiviral medication options available than before.

Still, many people have long since lost their appetite for vigilance, and even some of the most cautious have grown weary. Philadelphia, a city that has been broadly compliant with public health directives for the past two years, is a case study in how thin patience has worn for pandemic restrictions, even in a place where thousands of people have died from Covid-19.

“From the kind of larger public health perspective, this is a constant dance that we are in, especially here in the United States, of when to put things into policy,” said Dr. Megan Ranney, an emergency physician and associate dean of the Brown University School of Public Health.

Philadelphia’s reinstated mask requirement is based on its own Covid mitigation guidelines, which differ from those of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The mandate kicked in automatically because the average number of new cases reported in the city had risen above 100 a day, and more significantly, had increased by more than 50 percent in 10 days.

The latest C.D.C. guidelines place more emphasis on hospital admissions and occupied hospital beds, which are measures of the strain on health care systems rather than direct gauges of infection risk; those metrics tend to lag several weeks behind the trend in new cases. By the C.D.C.’s lights, Philadelphia was still solidly in the “low” category when the mask mandate was reinstated.

“The thing is, I could be wrong — people two weeks from now could be laughing at me,” Cheryl Bettigole, the city’s health commissioner, said in an interview. “But if I manage to save lives because I’m right, that’s worth the risk.”

To the Editor:

Re “After Toying With Twitter, Musk Now Wants It All” (front page, April 15):

What a disaster it would be for Elon Musk to acquire Twitter and open it up to disinformation and lies from Donald Trump and other right-wing activists.

Misinformation, unconstrained by any need to be accurate or honest, is psychologically seductive, and countering it by fact-checking is often ineffective. That is why the right wing is in full support of Mr. Musk, cynically claiming that it’s a “free speech” issue.

Twitter would likely return to broadcasting anti-democratic misinformation about elections, with devastating consequences. In the face of intense voter suppression, gerrymandering and partisan attacks on election boards and secretaries of state, America’s grasp on democracy is already very shaky. The country just barely survived a coup attempt on Jan 6. A return to a complete free-for-all on Twitter is a frightening prospect.

Gary M. Stewart
Laguna Beach, Calif.

To the Editor:

In a stunning move, Elon Musk has taken action into his own hands by offering to take over Twitter for more than $40 billion. The world’s richest person, in a letter to Twitter’s board chairman, stated his primary goal: to transform Twitter, the de facto town square, “to be the platform for free speech around the globe.”

It should be a given that all social media platforms, including Twitter, should adhere to free speech principles, but sadly that is not the case. In addition, social media should make life better. Its hallmarks should be open communication, respectful dialogue and the good-faith, free exchange of ideas and information. It should be part of the solution, not the problem. Again, this is not the case.

Social media today has become a source of hostility, lack of civility, distrust, propaganda, alienation, misinformation and cancellation. Mr. Musk’s efforts should be applauded and celebrated. Just as his other endeavors have revolutionized industry, I am confident that he’ll do the same for the social media sector.

A meaningful and fundamental transformation of Twitter is required. A mere change in management, financial structure or algorithms will not suffice. Can it be done? Yes.

It’s not a mission to Mars. But what Elon Musk is suggesting can be a giant leap forward for our society.

Dan Rubino
New York
The writer is the founder and executive chairman of ImpactWayv, a media and technology company created to disrupt and transform business and philanthropy.

To the Editor:

Elon Musk’s offer to buy Twitter is understandably creating much consternation, particularly among those who worry about concentrating too much power over public media in one person’s hands. I wonder if there might be a way to revise the F.C.C.’s media cross-ownership rules, which were designed to avoid a single corporate entity from owning multiple types of media companies, to somehow reduce Twitter’s power over the global messaging landscape.

These rules were conceived long before the advent of social media, so they could not have foreseen platforms like Twitter and Facebook that consolidate audiences at a global level and concentrate messaging power in such dramatic fashion.

Maybe it’s time for the F.C.C. to dust off the cross-ownership rules and figure out how to make them relevant to our current media landscape.

Tom Short
San Rafael, Calif.

What the Allies Can Do in Ukraine

To the Editor:

The United States has been understandably reluctant to undertake military actions, such as a no-fly zone over Ukraine, that would entail initiating attacks on Russian forces. But the barbarism of Vladimir Putin’s invasion requires that we do far more to enable the Ukrainians themselves to repel the aggressors.

Let us move powerful allied military forces — including those from the U.S., Canada and Britain — into several of the large blocks of territory that Russia has not yet penetrated or from which it has been repulsed. At the very least, let us establish large, well-defined defensive perimeters around Kyiv and Odesa, and across a wide swath of Ukraine’s western border.

Any direct confrontations between the allied and Russian forces would have to be at Mr. Putin’s initiative — as a result of Russian attacks — and he should be as reluctant as President Biden has been to take such risks. But the presence of allied forces would free more Ukrainian forces to confront the Russians on the active fronts, and it would guarantee safer corridors by which military and humanitarian equipment could reach the beleaguered nation.

Mr. Putin is on a “holy” cause: to restore the sway of the czarist and Soviet empires. Further inconveniences targeting the oligarchs he has created and the masses he dominates will not deter his efforts to establish his “heroic” place in history as the 21st-century heir to the czars and the commissars. Only a solid military defeat can shatter that evil dream.

Peter Eckstein
Ann Arbor, Mich.
The writer is the retired research director of the Michigan A.F.L.-C.I.O.

The Utter Sincerity of Bernie Sanders

To the Editor:

Re “Still Feeling the Bern,” by Maureen Dowd (column, Sunday Review, April 17):

Bernie Sanders never had my vote, but he had — and still has — my admiration. It’s not because of what he thinks, although I’m in favor of some of that, but why he thinks it.

Bernie Sanders is that rare politician who clearly, truly believes in and cares about what he says. It’s awful that sincerity of that kind should be remarkable. But it is.

More and more politicians today say whatever they think will get them elected, whether it’s expressing devotion to Donald Trump or dissing vaccinations. If only these people had some kind of Oscar they could strive for. We could probably even count on them not to slap anybody.

Betty Rollin
New York
The writer is a journalist and the author of “First, You Cry” and “Last Wish.”

Preying on People of Color

To the Editor:

Re “For-Profit College Preyed on Black and Female Students, Suit Says” (news article, April 12):

The class-action lawsuit against Walden University that claims the for-profit college overcharged Black women more than $28.5 million for costs and credits is a welcome challenge to an industry that preys on people of color. But education is far from the only sector where racial and gender discrimination is systemic.

It’s well established that the U.S. economy was built from the legacies of slavery and Jim Crow, where the exploitation and occupational segregation of people of color led to a two-track economy, progressing at vastly different speeds.

“Reverse redlining,” for example, is on the rise in housing, as minority neighborhoods are targeted with higher prices or unfair lending practices. Black homeownership has declined more drastically than for any other ethnic or racial group in the U.S.

We need strengthened civil rights laws and enforcement, and more lawsuits like the class-action suit against Walden, to bring those who profit off economic discrimination to justice, and make them pay.

Christian F. Nunes
Washington
The writer is president of the National Organization for Women.

Bret Stephens: Happy Easter, Gail. The news has been so depressing lately. A crazy guy opens fire in a subway in Brooklyn. The Russians are committing atrocities in Ukraine and are about to start a major offensive in the east. And my tuna melt on rye costs $21 at a not-much-to-look-at New York City diner, not including the tip.

Anything cheering you up?

Gail Collins: Happy holidays to you, Bret. This is one of the many times in recent years when I’ve appreciated the role professional sports play in our lives. You meet a friend who starts listing all the things about the world that could plunge anyone into depression, and at some point you can break in with: “But say, how about those Mets?”

Bret: The Mets are off to a strong start, but give them a few months and they’ll be depressing you as well.

Gail: Otherwise, I guess it’s reasonable to at least note that winter’s over, job openings are way up in the past year, and the subway shooting was miraculously — miraculously! — without fatalities.

I admit that the last one is not an ideal example of cheery news.

Bret: “Crazy Guy Aims, Shoots, Misses” could also be a contender for the next Russian national anthem.

Gail: Love the way you think.

Bret: The strong employment numbers are obviously good news. But let me put the dark cloud inside your silver lining: The Wall Street Journal reports that roughly three million Americans have dropped out of the work force, often for health reasons, and that that labor shortage is going to keep inflation high. This strikes me as yet another good argument for offering every Ukrainian refugee a green card.

Gail: Even before the pandemic, we were moving into an era in which our birthrate was just not providing enough future workers to keep the economy going. Immigrants shouldn’t just be tolerated; they should be welcomed with marching bands.

Bret: The other big story of last week, Gail, is Elon Musk’s offer to buy Twitter at $54.20 a share. Half the punditocracy seems to think this would be great; the other half thinks it’s the apocalypse. Where do you come down on this?

Gail: Am I nuts to think this is not going to happen?

Bret: You’re not nuts. The Twitter board seems determined to stop him, and Musk has been known to pull stunts like this before. Also, the 4.20 in $54.20 is an inside joke about getting high.

Gail: Lord help us. Even if Twitter tanked, wouldn’t there be some new post-Twitter communications system coming around the bend soon? You’re 10 times smarter than me about this stuff, so tell me what you think, and I’ll adopt it as my theory. At least for the spring.

Bret: Maybe in the distant future a big media company will create a platform in which non-unhinged adults can exchange ideas, air their disagreements without rancor, make a few jokes, have their claims fact-checked before they are published and then go out for a friendly drink.

Gail: Hope he’s listening.

Bret: I’m sympathetic to the idea that social-media companies should try to honor the spirit of the First Amendment, even if they aren’t legally bound by it. But the idea that Twitter is a good forum for speech is silly. Trying to communicate a thought in 240 characters isn’t speaking. It’s blurting. You don’t use Twitter for persuasion. You use it for insults and virtue signaling. A healthy free-speech environment depends on people talking with each other. Twitter is a medium for people to talk at others. The best thing that could happen to Twitter isn’t an acquisition, by Musk or anyone else. It’s bankruptcy.

Gail: Wow, I’ve always pretty much avoided Twitter, but it was mainly out of laziness. Now I’m cloaked in righteousness and am deferring to you on all Twitter topics.

Don’t suppose you’d be willing to respond by deferring to me on health care?

Bret: You’ve laid a trap, Gail. What’s on your mind?

Gail: I appreciate Joe Biden’s call for increasing government aid to those who don’t have good private coverage and putting a lid on the prices pharmaceutical companies charge for drugs people have to buy whether they want to or not. This would bring me back to my cheer for limiting the price of insulin to $35 a month.

Bret: The high cost of insulin is a national scandal. But I don’t think price controls are ever a good answer. The biggest roadblock is the dearth of so-called biosimilars, which is largely a function of regulatory and legal roadblocks, including abuse of the patent system by some of the big pharmaceutical companies, as well as insufficient pricing transparency.

Here is the moment I can almost hear our readers screaming, “Price controls are how other countries do it!” But that almost inevitably leads to health care rationing and wait lists. Would you rather us be Canada?

Gail: You know, I’ve heard that Canada threat for decades, and generally my reaction is, “That’s our worst danger?” Obamacare did a lot to make our health care system more efficient, but the system is still way too clogged with duplicative management and other administrative failings.

Bret: Obamacare’s many problems are the high road toward Medicare for all, which is why I was opposed to it in the first place.

Gail: Go, Bernie Sanders!

I guess we should move on to politics for a bit. Next month there’ll be big Senate primaries in places like Ohio — where Republicans will have to choose between the newly anointed Trump favorite J.D. Vance of “Hillbilly Elegy” fame and a bunch of noncelebrities — and Pennsylvania, where they’ll have the option of selecting Trump’s man, Dr. Oz of Oprah fame, or a half-dozen alternatives without reality-TV careers.

Anybody you’re rooting for? And what’s the chance the Republican Party is going to become the Home for Unwillingly Retired Entertainers?

Bret: My favorite Republican these days is the governor of New Hampshire, Chris Sununu, who recently described Donald Trump as “crazy,” with a pungent modifier to go with it. Being able to say that out loud should be a litmus test for any serious conservative. Other litmus tests include the willingness to connect the words “evil” with “Putin,” “legitimate” with “2020 election,” “president” with “Biden” and “supercilious twerp” with “Tucker.” All the rest is commentary.

Gail: Ah, Bret. Your vision of unshackling the Republican Party from Trump is stirring and about as likely as a snark-free Twitter.

Bret: Of course it’s easy to make fun of Republicans for their insanity. But isn’t it the Democratic Party that could use a bit more introspection as it heads into what looks like a wipeout in the midterms?

Gail: Well, things certainly don’t look good. It’s ironic that the Democrats’ huge flaw is an inability to get anything serious passed in Congress — because of the, um, lack of Democrats in the Senate. Which will probably cost them several more Senate seats.

But one of the other things Republicans seem to be counting on is a right-wing revolt on social issues, especially abortion. Is there any way for the pro-choice faction of the party to combat that, or is it just way too much of the Republican brand now?

Bret: Political parties often lose when their cultural values get too extreme for the mainstream. That’s what happened to Democrats in 1972 (“amnesty, abortion and acid”) and to Republicans in 1992 (Patrick, J., Buchanan). Right now it feels as if Democrats have become the party of wokeness, which is how they got hammered in last year’s governor’s race in Virginia and why they are losing votes over antipolice posturing. But that could change if the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade. As we discussed last week, that decision will be bad for women but probably good for Democratic candidates, since most Americans still want abortion to remain legal.

The other big court decision will be on affirmative action. Any thoughts on how that will play out politically if affirmative action is ruled unconstitutional?

Gail: Not sure about the politics, since it’s always easy to sell the idea that the people with the top scores/grades/extracurriculars should be the top choice. But for the country, ending affirmative action would be a disaster. We have to be sure that people from all races, creeds and economic backgrounds are part of the population that’s moving up.

Bret: Agree about the importance of diversity in many walks of life. Disagree that affirmative action is the right way to get there. Looks like we’re going to have to debate this when the decision is handed down.

Gail: There’s one other huge Supreme Court decision coming around the bend: on New York City’s gun control laws. I’m terrified the conservative majority is going to declare the government has no right to prohibit people from carrying concealed weapons in public. Do you think it’ll happen?

Bret: Yeah. And I think the decision will be 5 to 4, with John Roberts joining the liberal wing in dissent on states’ rights grounds. Hey, it’s never too late to move to Canada.

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Russia’s central bank chief warned on Monday that the consequences of Western sanctions were only beginning to be felt, and Moscow’s mayor warned that 200,000 jobs were at risk in the Russian capital alone, stark acknowledgments that undermined President Vladimir V. Putin’s contention that sanctions had failed to destabilize the Russian economy.

The diverging assessments showed how the impact of the West’s sanctions in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — and their ability to weaken Mr. Putin’s grip on power — remains uncertain nearly two months after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began.

While experts say Russia faces an economic time bomb as its inventory of imported goods and parts runs low, Mr. Putin is using the fact that the Russian economy has not yet collapsed to bolster his contention that sanctions will not deter him.

Western sanctions, Mr. Putin said on Monday in a televised videoconference with senior officials, were meant to “rapidly undermine the financial and economic situation in our country, provoke panic in the markets, the collapse of the banking system and a large-scale shortage of goods in stores.”

“But we can already confidently say that this policy toward Russia has failed,” he went on. “The strategy of an economic blitzkrieg has failed.”

Mr. Putin was in part addressing a domestic audience, seeking to reassure Russians who have had to endure worries about cash shortages, a battered stock market and the shuttering of popular Western retailers like Ikea.

Mr. Putin said he was prepared to increase government spending to stimulate the economy, an indication that continued revenues from energy exports are giving the Kremlin the flexibility to soften the blow of sanctions.

Aggressive capital controls imposed by the central bank have helped the ruble recover from its crash in the days after the invasion. And there are few reports of major layoffs or of extensive food shortages in grocery stores.

But contrary to Mr. Putin’s optimism, two senior officials cautioned on Monday that the real economic pain was yet to come. Mayor Sergei S. Sobyanin of Moscow announced a $40 million program to help people laid off by foreign companies find temporary employment and new jobs; according to his office’s estimates, he said, “around 200,000 people are at risk of losing their jobs” in the city of 13 million.

And in an appearance at the lower house of Parliament, Elvia Nabiullina, the chairwoman of the Russian Central Bank, gave a more far-reaching, negative assessment. She told lawmakers that while the sanctions’ impact had largely been on the financial markets at first, they “will now begin to increasingly affect the real sectors of the economy.”

For example, she said, “practically every product” manufactured in Russia relies on imported components. Factories for now may still have them in stock. But because of new Western export restrictions, Russian companies will be forced to shift their supply chains or start making their own components.

“At the moment, perhaps this problem is not yet so strongly felt, because there are still reserves in the economy, but we see that sanctions are being tightened almost every day,” she said. “But the period during which the economy can live on reserves is finite.”

Ms. Nabiullina, an internationally respected central banker who reportedly tried to resign in the days after the war, said about half of the central bank’s $600 billion foreign currency and gold reserves remained frozen because of sanctions. Those reserves that the bank still controlled, she said, were mainly gold and yuan — of little use in trying to stabilize the ruble — forcing the bank to resort to capital controls like limiting how much foreign currency can be taken out of the country.

In his televised videoconference later in the day with Ms. Nabiullina and several other officials, Mr. Putin acknowledged that the Russian economy did face some problems, including inflation. He said he had already directed the pensions and salaries of state employees — part of Mr. Putin’s political base — to be adjusted for inflation and indicated that he supported greater government spending to stimulate the economy.

“The budget should actively support the economy, saturate the economy with financial resources, and maintain its liquidity,” Mr. Putin said. “There are opportunities for this. Of course, we need to act carefully.”