Social Justice - A Conversation

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of this program does not reflect the views or opinions of 91.5 jazz and more the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, or the Board of Regents of the Nevada System of Higher Education.

Charles Stanton 0:18
Good evening. This is Professor Charles Stanton, I'm a professor of Boyd School of Law,

Blanca Pena 0:23
and my name is Blanca Pena. I am a third year law student at the Boyd School of

Charles Stanton 0:26
Law, and this is Social Justice a conversation, a conversation. Good evening, everybody, and welcome back to social justice a conversation. My name is Professor Charles Stanton, as you probably know, and I've been, I've been graced by the presence of my new partner for this year, Blanca Pena, who is a student at the UNLV Boyd School of Law. And perhaps Blanca could tell us a little bit about yourself and introduce yourself to the audience?

Blanca Pena 0:58
Yes, of course. Thank you so much for having me, professor, as Professor Stanton already mentioned. My name is Blanca Pena, and I am a third year law student at the Boyd School of Law. Quick little introduction about me. I was born in Chihuahua, Mexico. I immigrated to the US when I was about four years old. I've been raised in Las Vegas ever since I went to unlv for undergrad, where I got my criminal justice degree, and my goals for after law school are to become a criminal defense attorney.

Charles Stanton 1:28
Okay, great, yeah, well, it's certainly a field that needs principled people. That's for sure, agreed, I wanted to get into starting our program tonight with a few things that you know came across my desk during the week. First thing having to do with health care in our country, and particularly the person who's in charge of the Health Department, which is Mr. Kennedy, and listening last week to his testimony at the hearing, which I think by any standard, was what is was extremely disturbing as to not just the content, but his approach and his whole demeanor. And it seems to me symbolic in many ways, of a number of the nominees who have been appointed by the President to run these agencies who lack seemingly any experience in the field that they're supposed to be regulating and as well as just the temperament and character that's required in such A job with enormous responsibility. And as I was watching this, and I was watching, like, his whole attitude and being questioned by the senators, it almost like see he seemed like he was deliberately trying to turn everybody off. That was in this, in the in the in the panel. I don't know how you reacted to it?

Blanca Pena 3:02
Yeah, I think to start, I think it's enough to say that this administration has been a complete letdown from the beginning, even back in 2016 but it has definitely gotten worse than I didn't think it could. Starting with RFK, I think he's definitely a great example of how disappointing these people in power are, especially because you expect these people who have these titles, who earn these salaries and benefits and fame, you'd expect them to at least know what they're doing at the very minimum. Yet we see these interviews, and we see them speaking either to Congress, to the public and the media, and they seem all over the place, for a lack of a better phrase in reference to the interview from last week to have the secretary of the Health Department not even know how many Americans died from covid is jarring. That is something that should have been in the manual day one you know of appointment, and for him to not even know that, and to expect him to be kind of the one at the helm for these things is very scary, because us being common folk down here, we don't have the power to do much except watch and criticize.

Charles Stanton 4:31
Yeah, well, that's very well put. A few things struck me that were very troubling, the job of being the health secretary, like being the defense secretary is a job of enormous responsibility. It calls upon the person who has that job to be very conversant with a lot of matters that the ordinary person would not be conversant with or lacking that. To get up to speed about a lot of the things that needed to be done to protect the country's health from having talked to a number of people in the medical field who were astounded that he was picked in a job like that. At a minimum, you should be a physician, if you're in addition to that, you could you should probably be a virologist or an immunologist, a person who has specialty in infectious diseases, a person who's written papers, a person who's been conversant in, you know, the history of our health culture for a long time. He has none of those things. But instead of, you know, trying to get get up to speed and trying to reach out to people who preceded him, like Dr Fauci and other people of that stature. He just basically does whatever he wants to do, and then he makes decisions based on no science at all. Right, which is, which is really frightening. My concern is, and I probably share this with you. My concern is, particularly with covid, is what happens when only a very small part of the population gets a vaccine, and as it is now, basically it's people over 65 only. So in this university where last week, there was supposed to be a fair, and the students would come and the faculty would come to get vaccinated. That was canceled. I think that's that's a really scary thing, because this thing gets started again, we're going to be in big trouble. People have short memories. I remember, you know, when I was teaching here and during covid, and it was, it was a very unsettling experience. And even with, even with the fact that vaccines were eventually developed miraculously, and I say miraculously, because in many cases, with these diseases, the vaccines are never, never really created, we lost close to a million and a half people. So now we're basically saying, Well, we're going to throw science out the window, and we're just going to, you know, ignore the reality of it.

Blanca Pena 7:11
Yeah, and this continues to touch on, at least my thing theme that I'm gaining from all this, which is just the fact that that we're so powerless right now, ignorance in the country has grown exponentially, and it's going to continue to grow so long as these people continue to choose to not be educated, continue to Choose the ignorance and their cult like mentalities when we have herd immunity with the vaccines, everything is fine, then you tie in people who choose not to become a part of that sort of community effort. We lose we lose that, and in turn, we lose people, we lose lives. And I remember when I chose to get vaccinated, when vaccines came out, I actually got vaccinated here on campus, but having conversations with people over and over again and them expressing that, you know, they're not safe, or they're not good, or it's all a scam. It's a chip. They're gonna implant a chip in you, right? As if we don't have cell phones that already track our every move. And the people that I would hear these things from, you know, they engage in nicotine addictions, or they eat $1 ramen noodles all the time, and it's like, Well, do you really care about your health if that's what you're willingly putting into your body all the time. And who are we to question scientists? Who are we to kind of see this wealth of data and research and say, No? Who are we to do that? Yeah, and you know, you go back to RFK, someone who is not educated or qualified, seeing him up there in that position makes me as a minority, very angry, because growing up, I am told that I need to earn my place in environments. I need to earn the ability to take up space, and the only way to do that is to educate myself and to work really hard and to put in the time to be able to propel myself in whatever direction I want. Yet, there are people who are just born into the privilege already, and they don't either, they don't have the ability to grasp that privilege and do something with it, or they just don't care, and they enjoy where they're at, and they don't seem to have any sort of desire to change. And if we take something like a global pandemic, and we combine the ignorance. With the I want to say willful blindness of privilege and all of the disparities. And where do we go from there if we can't even see eye to eye on something like science?

Charles Stanton 10:13
Yeah, yeah. Well, it's interesting what you say. It's interesting what you say, because there is in our country the malignancy of denialism, where you could lay out facts to people, you could get the most brilliant minds that we have in our country, people who have come from all over the world to study here and be part of the American experiment. And they will lay out, and I've talked to some of these people, they will lay out for you, factually, scientifically unquestioned facts as to what the ramifications are of not following proper protocols. And a large part of the population, unfortunately, will not listen to them, and that denialism has extended throughout our society. You know, a lot of people who are part of a part of our experiment, people are now shocked by what's been happening over the last six, seven months. But why should anybody be shocked? Because project 2025, clearly showed what was going to be going on if, if the President was re elected, we had four years of experience with him, and what he did the first time. The problem that you have now, though, which is which makes the situation much more serious, is, in the first term, at least, you had people who were who were checks on that. You had people in experience, in the Defense Department, in the health department, like Dr Fauci and people like that, who sort of reined in a lot of the worst impulses that that we're seeing now. Now, basically it's anything goes. You don't know from day to day what the policies are going to be. And that's that's a very, very frightening thing, because if you don't, if you, if the country is not secure health wise, what's going to be the future? You know, yeah, and they don't, they don't think of that though you mentioned interesting enough about privilege and everything, and privilege is really a responsibility. If you, have, you've been given all these gifts. Then use them wisely. Use those gifts to, you know, make society better. And you see, you see, there are people like that in the universities and the medical schools who came from, you know, a good background, affluent background, and they've devoted their life to, you know, public health and all the rest of the stuff. And then you have other people who treat it like a joke. Yeah. So, you know, that's disturbing. I think the other thing that's disturbing, though, too, to me, as you know a person who was in politics for a number of years is the other branches of our government, and almost like Rip Van Winkle, where they're asleep, the Congress, the congress first, the congress first, because the Congress has the power of appropriation and money and all the rest of this stuff. And one of the, one of the sad things to me that I noticed over the last week, 10 days, what have you, is the situation with Jeffrey Epstein, and how you have all these women who are coming to Washington who were victimized by Jeffrey Epstein, who were harmed by Jeffrey Epstein and harmed by the woman who was his in effect, business partner, or recruiter, or whatever you want to call her just Lane Maxwell. And all of this evidence has been laid out in at least two documentaries that I've seen, and also Julie Brown's book, who writes for the Miami Herald. So all this stuff is laid out. These women did not get justice. Okay? They were deprived of justice because this man got a sentence in his initial trial, which was basically, you can go home at night and spend the night at home in a basically an insecure lockup. Okay? Then, of course, he supposedly committed suicide, which I wouldn't bet the ranch on that either, and then she basically was finally convicted, the woman winds up in prison. Okay? So then you have a situation where all these people who were harmed want to get some form of justice now, from having done work in that field, maybe there is no justice that could ultimately equalize what happened to a person who was who was harmed like that, but at least there should be some form of society making a statement as to the horrors of that and all the rest of it, but you, but you don't, but you. Don't see that. So these women go to Washington, and they go to the Congress, and they make a very simple request. They're not, you know, requesting anything that's out of the ordinary or extraordinary. They're saying, we need to get all the records, all the papers, all the files on what this man did, who he associated with, who are his clients, and all the rest of that stuff seems to me open and shut. As an attorney, I don't, I don't see any problem with it, and neither did the people who are representing these women. But now, now they're go, they have to go around begging to find two or three more people in the Congress, a congress of 535 members that these people will be able, and not just just not the victims, but the public itself, will be able to see exactly what went on. Yeah, and it's like pulling teeth, because nobody wants to do it. They had one woman who was supposed to be one of the women who was going to vote like that, and they were all they were all afraid. They're all afraid of this man. It's a very bizarre thing. It really is a very bizarre thing. There's like a terror of what he can do to them. And votes change very quickly when he, you know, he speaks his voice,

Blanca Pena 16:24
yeah, I would like to think that humanity evolves and we look back at our history, and we look back at the Founding Fathers, for example, and their idea of what the United States was going to Be represent and look like for years to come, and we were supposed to be on an upwards trajectory right yet, I don't think we're we're there, and I think these are all very stark examples of that, because we have people like Donald Trump, who we we didn't expect him to become what he is now, because we would look at people like Hitler and say, never again, right? And then it's like, under our noses, we have this, this new modern man coming in and essentially taking up all the power in the same ways, right? Fear mongering, you know, making sure that no one points the finger at him, but that everyone points the finger at each other, so no one can unite against him. And it's sad what what we're seeing in the government, you know, we're supposed to have these checks and balances. I remember learning about that in high school and being like, wow, that's such a cool system that we have. You know, not one branch or entity can become more powerful than it should or needs to be. And now we have what seems like on my side of things, this man who was just taking up all of the power possible, and no one is there to stop his tracks. You know, the stuff with Jeffrey Epstein is only one thing. But I remember even a few years ago, there was a bipartisan bill that was supposed to address the immigration issues, where they were going to put more money into the border wall and at the same time, work on immigration reform for people that were already here, and that was Republican backed, and that was Democrat backed. And what is now common knowledge is because this all happened under Biden Trump did not want that bill to pass because he did not want the Democrats to say that they got that win, he wanted to make that one of his campaign platforms for the 2024 election. He wanted to say, hey, there's still this problem, and I'm going to do something about it, right? And so he put his own self interest above 300 million people, because that is just the kind of person that he is. And what did he do? He called up a bunch of Republicans. He said, Don't vote for that bill. Don't solve this issue. I need to do something about this myself, because I want to take credit for these things. And Bill died, and Congress lost, I think, a lot of power in doing that, because they allowed a member of the member of the executive branch to dictate what they do and dictate how they vote, even if they were behind the bill, it didn't matter, because Trump said no, yeah. And you know, with with Jeffrey Epstein and everything, I think you know, it's important to to acknowledge that it was, it was all very terrible things. I was too young to kind of see it happen for myself when it all went down in the in the public eyes, you know, with his suicide and everything or alleged suicide, we don't know, but I did watch some of the videos from the victims on Capitol Hill last week and how. They described everything, and I don't know how we can make them whole, unfortunately, because it seems like we are so far gone and there's only so much we can do. The damage has been done. I would love to be able to have some sort of power to help them out, but it goes back to the powerlessness, but I'll digress on that issue for now. But you know the justice system, being from a Criminal Justice background and having some personal experience with situations like this, it's almost like a system that was meant to help actually wasn't meant to help at all, because from personal experiences, you go out of your way to stand up for yourself, to report someone, to go to the police to get some help. You know, you put yourself in a very vulnerable position when you tell people that you don't even know things that you've been through and they expect you to kind of they expect you to have. They expect you to be a perfect victim, and that includes having all of the evidence right, like, like, Stone Cold evidence of this person doing this. If not, they won't even prosecute. They won't even pursue anything much less. When it's someone like Jeffrey Epstein, a person with a lot of money, a lot of influence, their network is incredibly vast, and it's full of high end people and all of these elites, right? It's like, Who would want to prosecute that? Right? Obviously, I would. But would the people already in the system meant to do this? Are they going to do that? Well, we've seen that. They have it, and we have these victims having to stand up for themselves. And I remember seeing the comments on those videos of women, jarringly enough, being like, Well, why didn't they come out sooner? Why now? And the whole victim blaming, and it goes back to this. Is why these people stay in power, because we're all too busy down here, fighting each other, blaming each other, and it's like, okay, yeah, can we just meet somewhere and then go from there?

Charles Stanton 22:09
Yeah, yeah, I said that. And I said that in the class on Thursday, last Thursday, yeah, yeah. Well, from having some experience in that field. I think the mistreatment of women in this country has be, has become almost accepted, in some bizarre sense. I think the system of justice for women who have been harmed by people who commit these kind of crimes is is truly very rare. There are cases when people who commit these crimes are punished for what, for what they did. But he lived in rarefied air, this man, because he was with all these people who were part of the power structure, people who would go on his plane, people who knew him personally, people who went to dinner at his house, etc, etc. So when you're trying to prosecute someone like that, it's very, very difficult. The system of justice in our country is flawed. Now we know, of course, that there isn't equal justice. We know that depending on your economic status, or whatever it is, your color, your color, your heritage, all the rest of that stuff. But what's fascinating to me is that it's almost like the pretense of justice is gone. There used to be some even like they created an illusion for people. And the Dave was used to say, well, Justice would be, if a person's arrested, they got a speedy trial, which sounds like a good thing. Now, you would know from, you know, living in Vegas and everything and being involved with the criminal system, that you've got people in our jails in this city who actually, because they can't make cash bail, will actually spend more time in the jail than they would have been if they had been convicted of the crime. And you got, you got tons of those people. And then the other aspect of the whole thing too is, though, that in the larger picture, in the larger picture, if you think about it, if you asked anybody who's even not politically astute, Can you name one example of a person who didn't want to take advantage of the idea that a person should get quick justice, And that's the president. Because the President, in a way, subverted the whole process. He used the process. He used the legal system. He used the way the courts run, so basically never actually go to trial. Yeah, that you can, that you can stretch it out and stretch it out and stretch it out. But. The other, the other glaring, appalling fact is, yes, the Congress has been deficient. That's without a question, and yes, he's been deficient. But the biggest deficiency is the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court has completely failed as an institution, the granting, the granting of immunity to the president was something that is is based on no law. It's based on no precedent. It's based on no chain of cases. It's something that they came up with. As a result, he's totally freed to do whatever it is that he wants to do, because they have basically allowed him to do it. The problem also is. The problem also is that it's repudiated the Constitution, because if you look at the founders, what was the founders intention when they found when they founded the country, it was a it was a rebuke of the king. It was a rebuke of the monarchy. It was a rebuke of King George. That they would create a system. They would create a system whereby there were checks and balances. You would have a president who was powerful, but you would also have a congress who had the spending power, who could regulate the president. And then you had a justice system that if the President went too far, the justice system could, could regulate that you don't have that anymore, right? So when you, when you, if you go back and you listen to the actual audio tapes of the immunity case, I didn't see any law in it. I remember when I was going to law school, and you know, you might find this amusing, but imagine if you were, you were taking a course, and you said, Well, I don't have any precedence, but I'm Blanca, and that's my word, and that's the way it should be, which is exactly what he's doing, which is exactly what he's doing. The other problem that you have, though, is because of all these things, not merely has the system of justice created, but people's faith in the system of justice has created. Because they see all these things going on, and they say, I would never get that kind of a I would never get that kind of a break. So that's part of the problem as well.

Blanca Pena 27:17
Yeah, just to kind of jump on that really quick, exactly as you said, right decisions are being made without the President being there. If I wrote something like that on the bar exam next year, I'm not passing the bar exam. But here we have people creating laws based on nothing. And meanwhile, you know, this past summer, I spent it at the Clark County Public Defenders. I spent my time dealing with people who are largely underrepresented. They their resources are scarce. Education levels aren't where they need to be, and they're being taken advantage of simply because of the life that they were born into. And they they are kept down by the same system that was supposed to protect them and lift them up, and it's very sad to see you know, people in chains and in handcuffs because they stole food from a convenience store because they were hungry, and now they're facing a misdemeanor on their record. I can't even and this is why I can't be a DA I can't even imagine myself giving someone a felony, because that's completely disenfranchising them for the rest of their lives. Yeah, meanwhile, we have a 34 time convicted felon, yeah, as President, yeah, because he was born into a different life than everybody else.

Charles Stanton 28:37
Yeah. I'm just gonna close with this though, which I think this, and I appreciate what you're saying. The other problem that you have too, though, as far as respect for the law and everything, is, how would people respect the decisions of the Supreme Court when they're the only court in the federal system that doesn't have an ethics code, that they don't want an ethics code, and despite repeated efforts to get them in ethics code, it never seems to happen. So on those sobering notes, I want to thank all of you for listening, and it's a great pleasure to be with my new partner, Blanca. Thank you, and we hope that you will continue to tune in every week, because I think we have something to say, and I think by your listening, you can become part of that as well. Thank you and good night. Thank you all.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai