Adam has already addressed Jeffrey Lord's attempt to defend his indefensible smear of Shirley Sherrod, but there's so much wrong with it I thought I'd make a few additional points.
First of all, Lord's latest argument is based on his basic ignorance of what the language in Screws v. U.S. means. When William Douglas said (quoting the language of the relevant statute) that the officers who beat Screws to death acted "under the color of law," he was not saying that the officers acted lawfully or that their actions were legally authorized. He was saying that they were acting as agents of the state, which is a necessary condition for a violation of the 14th Amendment under the "state action" doctrine. But the fact that the officers were state agents doesn't mean that they couldn't be guilty of a lynching; this would only be true if they were meting out punishment under ordinary legal processes. To put it mildly, that wasn't the case here. And there was nothing unusual about state agents participating in a lynching; their participation didn't make lynchings not-lynchings.
The rest of the argument is also a non sequitur. As Adam says, although Lord engages in some name-calling of Radley Balko, he doesn't address Balko's key point -- that the facts, as described in this case, would constitute a "lynching" under the language of the proposed 1922 Dyer Act (which required only "three persons" to constitute a "mob"). Moreover, since the Supreme Court wasn't applying an anti-lynching statute, the fact that Screws didn't call what happened a "lynching" is completely irrelevant. The Court was addressing a set of facts -- and that set of facts is consistent with a lynching both under most legal definitions and under most colloquial definitions. It's remarkable, and disgusting, that Lord continues to insist otherwise to smear a woman who has already been smeared more than enough.
--Scott Lemieux
