JUSTUS with Jack & Gonzo

Ohio lawmakers want to prohibit gender affirming care for children who are trans. Never mind what physicians, social workers and teachers might have to say about the needs of  trans kids, lawmakers think they know better. Instead of focusing on the care trans kids needs, lawmakers fixate on problems that don’t exist. Our guest, Melissa McLaren, has a teenage child, Connor, who was born a boy...

Ohio lawmakers recently passed legislation that allows teachers to carry firearms in the classroom with just 24 hours of training. Teachers, educators and law enforcement testified against the bill. Still, HB 99 passed. Why do our lawmakers think teachers should serve double duty as security guards—with minimal training? Ohio lawmakers have also proposed in HB 616 that teachers be prohibited from...

The human mind is not readily disposed to accepting facts as they are, which explains election deniers and QAnon believes. Our belief systems have great power in determining how we assess reality, and phenomena such as cognitive dissonance, confirmation bias and consensual validation determine what facts we accept and what facts we might disregard or manipulate. The mind is always in the process o...

In the Dobbs case, the U.S. Supreme Court found there is no constitutional right to abortion and that the issue of abortion is better left with the states, but state legislatures have gerrymandered their voting maps so that the power in party controls the vote. But that’s just one problem. Another is that the “textualist” approach favored by many of the justices on the court is dependent on an his...

Remember the movie, “No country for old men?” America is becoming, “no country for statesmen.” John Glenn is one of the last great American heroes—combat veteran, astronaut, senator, statesman and a gentleman in every respect. Regrettably, the days when he served in the senate—when the paradigm was that country came before political party—are long gone. Political party demands now dominate, a prob...

The NRA tells us the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. How’s that working for us? Americans own more than 300,000,000 firearms, and we suffer over 40,000 gun homicides and suicides annually. Does the Second Amendment provide unbridled gun rights? Can limits be imposed without running afoul of the Second Amendment? Why doesn’t the background check system cover pri...

Why is voting in America difficult, and what’s behind the recent efforts by Republican controlled state legislatures to make it even more difficult? Barriers to voting and the common perception that voting results in little change create frustration and cause many to feel disenfranchised. Listen to our conversation with Jocelyn Armstrong, a Columbus lawyer who works to promote diversity and inclus...

What does the law say about a police officer’s obligations when stopping and questioning someone for possible criminal conduct? What does a police officer have to consider before making the stop? Does racial bias enter the equation? Are citizens required to comply? How is it that sometimes these stops end with violence, sometimes a shooting? Listen to our conversation with Robert Meader, a former...

The U.S. Supreme Court is taking on the trappings of being a political body. By carefully appointing justices, a president and the senate can accomplish things they can't make happen through the legislative process. Recent decisions from the court reflect too closely what the Republican party wants. And the public is losing confidence in the court. Its approval rating has decreased from 62 percent...

We want to believe the criminal justice system convicts the right person and allows the innocent to go free. It’s a nice thought, but it doesn’t always work that way. Memories are malleable, eyewitness identification is often unreliable, witnesses and suspects can be manipulated, and sometimes the prosecution withholds important evidence. And judges and prosecutors are often blind to these problem...

Ever thought about what it’s like to be homeless? It’s not just a matter of having no place to call your own. It’s a state of crisis where your whole world is turned upside down. There’s no certainty in your life, no sense of security or well-being. You have virtually no control over your life. And being homeless likely means you had no one in your life to whom you could reach out for help before...

Something’s not right in America. The democracy we should all cherish and want to protect is under attack. State legislatures, guided only by partisan politics, control the maps for congressional and state voter maps, meaning representatives pick their voters, instead of voters their picking representatives. States are passing laws to restrict voting access under the false premise that voting secu...

After you finish your prison sentence and pay your debt to society, you should be eligible for work, right? Not exactly. If you want to work in a field where a license is required, you’ll likely hit a brick wall, as many licenses are not available to felony offenders. On top of that is the matter of company policy. As it turns out, paying your debt to society doesn’t mean you can get through the e...

Often seen as a threat, Black youths are denied healthy adolescent development. They’re subject to suspicion and arrest for the most ordinary adolescent activities—shopping for prom clothes, playing in the park, listening to music, wearing the latest fashion trend. While research shows Black youths are no more dangerous or impulsive than their white counterparts, but there’s a tremendous differenc...

Why are employers reluctant to hire ex-offenders? Is that reluctance always justified? Can employing ex-offenders work out well for both sides? Turns out, ex-offenders are often good employees, have a good work ethic and a strong sense of loyalty. Find out what Evan Williams, president of Franklin International, and Joe DeLoss, president of Hot Chick Takeover have to say about the ex-offenders the...

If you don’t know what critical race theory (CRT) is, don’t feel bad. Neither do the folks in charge of K-12 education in Ohio. In October 2021, the state board of education put the brakes on implicit bias training and, apparently guided by nationwide misconceptions, determined that CRT has “no place in K-12 education.” The board also condemned programs that promote “collective guilt, moral defici...

Author and lawyer Bryan Stephenson says, “It’s better to be rich and guilty than poor and innocent.” A nice of saying the system is rigged. Find out what Stevenson means by listening to Tim Young, Ohio’s Public Defender, who has focused his career on protecting the rights of the indigent.

The new Texas abortion law is controversial because it bans abortions after the sixth week of pregnancy, a time limit that is unprecedented. But the new law is controversial for another reason as well. It appears to have been purposefully designed to thwart a constitutional challenge. Listen to what constitutional lawyer Mark Brown has to say.

Gerrymandering was supposed to end in 2021 for Ohio’s congressional and general assembly maps, by virtue of constitutional amendments approved by over 70 percent of Ohioans. But a Republican controlled general assembly has drafted maps the Ohio Supreme Court has held to be unconstitutional. Are the amendments unworkable, as Republicans argue, or are Republicans simply refusing to do what the law r...

Columbus suffers from a lack of housing, and especially affordable housing, a problem that hits low income neighborhoods the hardest. Those same neighborhoods also lack resources–think libraries, YMCAs and community centers. How do we engage the residents of those communities to consolidate their voices to gain access to more resources, and how we get those in more affluent neighborhoods to be emp...

The majority of Americans who are behind bars are not serving a sentence; they’re awaiting trial. Many of these people were arrested for minor drug possession or driving with a suspended license and couldn’t afford bail. Micah Derry of Arnold Ventures, a philanthropy that seeks to minimize social injustices, talks with us about people spending an average of 28 days in jail while awaiting trial on...

Ohio State University Associate Professor Joni Acuff talks with us about what critical race theory actually is—as opposed to how it’s described by its critics—and gives examples of racial inequality being imbedded in society. The three of us discuss legislative efforts to ban critical race theory. Legislators say they want students to be presented with the facts and make their own decisions, but t...

Sara Denny, M.D., a pediatrician, talks with us about why teenagers and adults in their early 20s make bad decisions. It’s simple–their brains aren’t fully developed. As a consequence, they’re more vulnerable to pressure and stress and not thinking things through. If teens and very young adults are not wired to think maturely, what does that mean for how we should treat them in the criminal justic...

A  prior guest on our podcast, Jonathan Groner is a pediatric surgeon and the medical director of the Center for Pediatric Trauma Research at Nationwide Children’s Hospital who regularly treats Columbus children for gunshot wounds. For Groner, gun violence isn’t some distant problem to debate from the comfort of his home. For him, it’s very personal. Listen to him describe the prevalence of g...

As a state representative, Jim Petro helped draft Ohio’s death penalty law in 1981. During his watch as attorney general from 2003 to 2007, the state of Ohio executed 18 men. But now, Petro thinks it’s time to repeal the death penalty. Listen and find out why. We’re running a brief survey for our listeners, and we’d love to hear from you.  Go to lawyerupcolumbus.com/survey and give us your in...