Linkage

• Why Innocent People Plead Guilty (The New York Review of Books) The author, Jed S. Rakoff is as Senior Status Federal Judge
• Electric shock study suggests we'd rather hurt ourselves than others(Science/AAAS)
• The Echo Chamber (Reuters) Unsurprisingly, about 66 well connected lawyers dominate the cases the Supreme Court takes.  You have to figure that there is a lot of back-scratching going on between the lawyers and the Justices.
• The racist, classist origins of broken windows policing (Slate) The person most responsible for the idea, James Q. Wilson, specifically said that it should never be applied to things like white collar crimes, as near as I can figure out, because he did not want it applied to white people.
• Police often provoke protest violence, UC researchers find (SFGate ) Not a big surprise here.  Police (and the St. Louis County prosecutor) have been deliberately provoking protesters to justify brutal tactics.

John Cleese on Stupidity: