Nirej Sekhon on Illegal Searches, Jamila Michener on Expanding Voting Rights

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This week on CounterSpin: In her forceful dissent from a ruling on the admissibility of illegally obtained evidence, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the decision “implies that you are not a citizen of a democracy but the subject of a carceral state, just waiting to be catalogued.” The defendant in Utah v. Strief is white, but the suspicionless stops at the case’s heart disproportionately affect black and brown and poor people, marginalized in media as elsewhere. The press are quoting Sotomayor’s words, but do they really hear the message? Nirej Sekhon is associate professor at Georgia State University College of Law. He’ll join us to discuss the ruling.

Transcript: ‘Minority Communities Bear the Brunt of Police Abuses’

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Also on the show: Though corporate media often use the terms “electorate” and “public” interchangeably, the truth is people don’t cease to be political when they don’t vote. That elision erases a lot of people—from those truly opting out of the process, to people excluded or discouraged from it for a variety of reasons worthy of exploration. Our guest asks what it would mean to shift focus from resisting the chipping away of voting rights to pushing for robust expansion of the franchise. Jamila Michener is assistant professor in the Department of Government at Cornell University. She’ll talk with us about that.