Before President Trump picked him to be part of a federal commission that sets policy on how to punish criminals, William Otis spent years staunchly advocating for harsher penalties and a larger prison population.About what you'd expect from this president. What else do we know about Otis?
In several public testimonies and years of published commentary, Otis decried a criminal justice system that he says has favored criminals over victims. He hailed the tough-on-crime approach of the Reagan and Bush administrations — one that Trump, through his attorney general, is resurrecting. “Increased use of incarceration and reining in naive judges,” he once told NPR, “has worked” to curtail crime.
Otis ... is ... known in the legal community for his commentaries on the Crime and Consequences blog....I'd like to say that Otis is the kind of fringe-dweller who wasn't welcome in polite society until Trump entered politics, but that's not true:
Some of his writings are racially tinged. One example is a 2013 post titled “The PC Attempt to Intimidate Judges.” Otis defended a judge who was criticized for saying that minorities are more violent than white people.
“Thus, when Fifth Circuit Judge Edith Jones said at a University of Pennsylvania Law School talk that blacks and Hispanics are more violent than whites, a consortium of civil rights organizations filed a complaint,” Otis wrote. “The complaint calls for stern discipline on the grounds that the remarks were ‘discriminatory and biased.’ ”
He added, “So far as I have been able to discover, it makes no mention of the fact that they’re true.”
Scroll down to the comments section of that post, and you’ll find that Otis talked about Asians, too: “Orientals have less incidence of crime than whites. ... The reason Orientals stay out of jail more than either whites or blacks is that family, life, work, education and tradition are honored more in Oriental culture than in others. Values, not race or skin color, influence choices.”
Otis [is] a former federal prosecutor who’s now an adjunct law professor at Georgetown University....We're told that our elite universities are run according to a merciless regime of political correctness that exacts punishment for even minor deviations from left-wing dogma, but here's Otis's Georgetown Web page -- where, among other things, he links an article at Laua Ingraham's LifeZette in which he's quoted saying this:
It's encouraging that a large majority of all voters, 70 percent, understand that black-on-black violence — an ugly, everyday occurrence in American cities — wreaks far more damage than police abuses. While such abuses must be honestly confronted and curbed using all the tools of the law, reality is what it is.Somehow, this man has not been silenced by progressive totalitarians on campus.
We're also told that the Trump administration is comfortable with bigotry in a way that would have been unthinkable in previous Republican administrations. However:
Otis served as a special counsel to President George H.W. Bush. He was also a counselor for the Drug Enforcement Administration under George W. Bush.Why, you'd almost think that people like Otis established a foothold in American society years before Trump turned to politics, and that the problem of PC silencing is greatly exaggerated. But that can't be possible, can it?
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