Law Enforcement in a Time of Crisis
By Andrew C. McCarthy
March 28, 2020 6:30 AM
There are systemic complexities that addle the administration of justice regardless of whether a catastrophic event is caused by criminal conduct.
The Justice Department wants the power to detain suspects indefinitely without trial. That was the storyline last week. DOJ, you were to believe, was exploiting the COVID-19 crisis to carry out a Constitution-shredding gambit, completely in line with two intertwined media caricatures: Donald Trump’s authoritarian streak and Bill Barr’s long held affinity for executive branch imperialism. If you listened to enough of the commentary around the initial reports, you were pretty sure Trump and Barr were about to lock up Joe Biden, the prime-time hosts at MSNBC, and maybe even the New York Times editorial board.
It should by now go without saying that the distorted story was remote from reality.
The Justice Department made some proposals . . . but it did so at the urging of Congress, not unilaterally. The upshot was to empower the courts, not the executive. In fact, “empower†is an overstatement. The idea was to give judges latitude to deal with due process deadlines that necessarily become problematic when some catastrophic event undermines the capacity of courts to function.
The profound challenge that the COVID-19 pandemic poses to our health-care system, potentially in all U.S. states and territories, is the predominant news story of 2020. Less obvious but all too real nonetheless is the challenge it poses for the criminal-justice system.
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https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/03/coronavirus-pandemic-law-enforcement-in-a-time-of-crisis/
