Lawrence Douglas

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‘Without directly affecting the outcome of an election like it did in Bush v Gore back in 2000, today’s court still could swing a Trump win.’ Photograph: Alon Skuy/Getty Images

MundoAmérica, ,

On Monday, the US supreme court unanimously overturned the Colorado supreme court’s decision to remove Trump from the Republican primary ballot. The highest court in the land predictably concluded that the “insurrection clause” of the 14th amendment did not authorize state enforcement “with respect to federal offices, especially the presidency”.

A contrary ruling would have been a recipe for chaos, and, worse still, would have done nothing to safeguard the nation from a potential Trump victory in November. I say this because presumably the only states that might have barred Trump from their ballot would have been those of the solidly blue variety – states Trump was going to lose anyway.…  Seguir leyendo »

Irmgard Furchner, 97, appears in court for the verdict in her trial on Dec. 20 in Itzehoe, Germany. (Christian Charisius/AP)

EuropaUnión Europea, , ,

This month, a German court convicted Irmgard Furchner as an accessory to the murder of 10,505 people. From 1943 to 1945, Furchner served as the secretary to the commandant of Stutthof, an SS concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. Bizarrely, because the 97-year-old defendant had begun her secretarial duties at 18, she was tried in juvenile court. Partly for this reason, the court gave a lenient sentence of two years, suspended. Furchner might be the last person convicted of taking part in the Nazis’ annihilation of 6 million European Jews.

The legal reckoning with the Holocaust began early, even before the war ended, with the Soviet trials of perpetrators of mass murder in Krasnodar and Kharkov in 1943.…  Seguir leyendo »

ReflexionesSocial,

Fifty years ago in Frankfurt, German prosecutors tried 22 former Nazi SS soldiers at Auschwitz in what remains the most famous Holocaust trial staged in Germany.

At the time, Fritz Bauer, the German-Jewish attorney general of Hessen, expressed the simple hope that "sooner or later, one of the accused would step forward and say: 'What took place -- it was horrific, I'm sorry.' Then the entire world would exhale, as would all the survivors of those killed at Auschwitz, and the air would be cleared". Sadly, Bauer observed, "it has not been uttered, nor will it be".

The refusal of perpetrators to own up to their guilt remains one of the most disappointing aspects of Holocaust trials.…  Seguir leyendo »