Human Rights – Page 16 – Marquette University Law School Faculty Blog

Department of Justice Files Fair Housing Act Suit Against City of New Berlin

Post author:Garrett Soberalski
Post published:June 27, 2011
Post category:Eastern District of Wisconsin Human Rights Milwaukee Poverty & Law Race & Law

On Thursday, the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) filed a complaint against the City of New Berlin. The complaint arises out of a series of events that led to the City’s denial of a “workforce” housing development proposal made by MSP Real Estate, Inc. (MSP). The DOJ alleges that the City of New Berlin ultimately denied the proposal on the basis of racial discrimination, in violation of Section VIII of the Fair Housing Act.

According to the complaint (which can be viewed here), on March 10, 2010, MSP submitted a development application to construct 180 units of affordable housing in what is known as New Berlin’s “City Center.” The proposal stated that the development would include 100 elderly units and 80 workforce housing units. The development was intended to be financed in part by the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit program, a program that allows a developer to sell tax credits to investors in exchange for the promise that the developer will rent the apartments for below-market rates to tenants who qualify. For this specific development, MSP was going to rent to individuals who made 40 to 60 percent of the median household income in New Berlin. In New Berlin, the median income as of 2000 was approximately $70,000, which means the proposed development would rent to individuals who made $28,000 to $42,000 a year.

Do Criminals Count?

Post author:Michael M. O'Hear
Post published:May 27, 2011
Post category:Criminal Law & Process Human Rights U.S. Supreme Court

Do criminals count? Are they really “one of us”? That is the big question that hangs over all of the Supreme Court’s Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause cases, including the Court’s decision earlier this week in Brown v. Plata, which affirmed a lower-court order requiring California to reduce its prison population. Do we regard criminals as fellow citizens, or at least fellow human beings, who are entitled as such to some irreducible minimal level of decent treatment? Or does a person, by virtue of a criminal conviction, fall to some qualitatively lower moral status, such that decent treatment is purely optional?

The latter view is hardly foreign to the American legal tradition. The Thirteenth Amendment expressly contemplates that convicts will be treated as slaves, and courts routinely characterized prison inmates as “slaves of the state” until the 1970s. Mandatory minimum sentencing laws are, I think, in much the same spirit — they proclaim that criminals are unworthy of individualized consideration at sentencing and will be presumed irredeemably dangerous.

In the realm of constitutional law, the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause offers the only real counterweight — this is the one provision of the Constitution that is expressly written to provide rights to convicted criminals.

Ratner: Even Osama Should Have Had Criminal Rights

Post author:Alan J. Borsuk
Post published:May 17, 2011
Post category:Civil Rights Criminal Law & Process Human Rights President & Executive Branch Prisoner Rights Speakers at Marquette

Michael Ratner would have treated the pursuit of Osama bin Laden as a law enforcement matter, not as a matter of war. He would rather have seen bin Laden arrested, brought to trial, and given the rights of a criminal defendant than shot on the spot by Navy SEALS.

This almost certainly doesn’t put Ratner in the mainstream of American opinion, but it is consistent with what Ratner has advocated as president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, a New York-based non-profit organization, and as an attorney who has played key roles in defending the legal rights of prisoners at the military prison at Guantanamo Bay and in opposing interrogation techniques Ratner considers torture.

Ratner visited Eckstein Hall last week to speak to about 20 people at a lunch session of the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy, Milwaukee Lawyer Chapter.

Ratner realizes where the preponderance of American opinion lies on the killing on May 1 of bin Laden. “No one really cares whether he was lawfully killed or not,” he said. “People wanted him killed.”