Prosecutorial Misconduct and Core Problems of Social Justice

In this San Francisco court case against police officer Terrance Stangel, once again, we have Brady Violations-- suppression of exculpatory evidence by prosecutors and police-- rear their ugly head. In this case, evidence is being suppressed by a District Attorney against an accused cop for almost certainly political reasons. This is one of the dangerous misapprehensions of the "systemized racism" narrative for justice reform. Many of the cases I post (usually in snippets on social media) where exculpatory evidence is suppressed are against minority (or indigent) defendants. Certainly, Harris' scandal related to suppression of evidence as a Drug War prosecutor primarily affected indigent and minority defendants. Cases I've commented about in Missouri happen in both Democrat-dominated St. Louis and the Republican portions of the state, often affecting minority and indigent defendants (especially with our dysfunctional public defender system). But that is not what it is about.

[Let me pause here for a moment for the disclaimers that 1) I am making no statement here about either the guilt or innocence of the officer accused, merely about the conduct in pursuing the case, 2) I am expressing purely personal opinion, not that of any group or organization.]

Brady Violations-- and prosecutorial misconduct more generally-- are primarily a political tool. They are used to drive arrests and convictions so that people see police and DAs "doing something". We naturally want police to make arrests and DAs to get convictions in order to keep our communities safe, but we (ought!) want them to arrest and convict the right people, the people actually guilty, not just anyone who can pad the numbers. Political pressure, however, inevitably tempts police and prosecutors-- both consciously and unconsciously-- to push for the victory in front of them, to convince themselves that the suspect they have is the guilty person and rationalize "whatever it takes" to "get them." If our officials were not subject to this kind of temptation, they would be superhuman. We know from Madison that in fact neither our citizens nor our officials are angels and they never will be. That is why we need both police/prosecutors and checks on their behavior, checks like the Brady Rule.

Rules are useless, however, when not enforced. That is true of criminal law and it is true of rules governing the government. So, what happens in most cases where Brady Violations are uncovered? Often just what appears to be happening here: nothing whatever.

"[Investigator] Hayashi said [on the stand and under oath] she was pressured to sign the affidavit after the comment from the witness was removed."

And the response of the judge?

"The judge indicated that because there was other evidence similar to what Hayashi did not disclose, there was no clear indication of evidence being suppressed."

So, because not all of the exculpatory evidence was withheld, no harm, no foul. Never mind that an Investigator has expressed under oath that she experienced habitual pressure to sign (questionable) documents for fear of being fired, and that we therefore have no idea what else might have been suppressed, amplified, or even strategically delayed to harm the defense's case. The judge further says, "the DA is not on trial". Sure, nor are they ever likely to be. That is the problem. If the judge does not deal with misconduct in the case before them, it will almost certainly never be raised anywhere else: is the very prosecutor creating an environment of pressure to suppress evidence likely to voluntarily bring charges against his or her own employee for doing their bidding? Of course not. The idea is laughable.

But the defendant here is hardly minority or even indigent (the common overlap between those categories is another fruitful topic for discussion, one that Sowell explores). They are, in fact, in a category many in politics profess to be immune from this kind of shenanigans. But that is exactly it: no one is immune. It is not 'systemic racism' but run-of-the-mill politics. The DA made a campaign promise to prosecute cops and is delivering on that, no different from the DA who promises to "get drugs off the streets" What's a little rule-bending for such a worthy goal? Eggs and omelettes, after all.

We are, each one of us, a world in an eggshell.

The problem is political, not racial. Systemic, yes, but not "systemically racist". Politics shifts. The categories of people who are valid political targets flop around in the political winds and the attention of the mob, a theme Hannah Arrendt builds around in her works on Totalitarianism. The victims of tomorrow are not predictable from the victims of today, only the attitude that political blood-letting is acceptable-- even necessary--  remains and-- if we allow it to-- builds to the combustion point. In the end, that is everyone's problem, like a fire loose in a packed neighborhood.

As Thomas Sowell frequently points out, a clear view of a problem is necessary to exploring solutions. A politicized view of the problem obscures the deeper truth that it is the political blood-letting itself to blame, the society that not merely tolerates but demands hyperpartisan competition for retribution, where Republicans and Democrats scheme to outflank each other to be "tough on X". That is where CRT fails. That is where the War on Drugs and the War on Terror fails. It is where the present War on Police and War on Trump Supporters fails. It is, ultimately, per Arrendt, where the "Jewish Question" lead. They are all symptoms of the same phenomenon.

So what is the solution? Arendt outlines boundaries between private action, public (social) action, and government action, in some ways analagous to but subtly different from the public/private spheres our Framers wrote about. Conduct which is healthy and desirable in one sphere (say the social) is actively dangerous when it crosses into an inappropriate sphere (say government). This is true even if conduct in its proper sphere cause strife and controversy. When we enact government solutions to social strife, we escalate violence and enable totalitarianism. The same happens if we push private solutions to what are criminal offenses properly under government (vigilantism). Brady Violations, along with a whole host of related prosecutorial and police misconduct, often stem from a boundaries problem. Our system contains a fundamental principle that prosecutors are officers of the court, not merely partisans in a contest: it is not their job merely to 'win' but to seek a just outcome. It is most certainly not the prosecutor's job to seek "social justice", not for any interest or faction. The very idea of "social justice" in that meaning is totalitarian and unacceptable. Whatever social justice this mob or that mob thinks is good and desirable at the moment, the behavior of withholding exculpatory evidence simply does not belong in the government sphere of a free society

These boundaries are seldom enforced in the justice system and, to a large degree, that is because too many people-- inside and outside government-- believe misconduct is desirable. We simply get the government we ask for and deserve.

Looking Down From the Hill: Roe v Wade revisited before the Supreme Court

The purpose of courts is to resolve disputes in order to allow the Public Peace to remain. Those resolutions do not need to be to the liking of both parties-- or necessarily of either-- but they must be such that society can live with them. In a fallen world with imperfect and perennially messy human beings, that is often the best we can do. It is the sworn duty of justices to carry out this task, not for their own sake or their ambitions or political preferences, but for the maintenance of the Public Peace under Public Law within the limits of the federal ("of equals") Constitution on top of the framework provided by our great Declaration which itself bows to the laws of "nature and nature's God".

Roe v Wade transparently, empirically, objectively, undeniably accomplished none of this. Rather than resolving a dispute under the Constitutuon, the majority simply made its own law in the guise of a compromise over "viability" that the court never kept and seemingly never intended to keep. Rather than resolve or dampen conflict, it has become the incessant flash point for strife and violence for decades.

<<Even pro-abortion advocates do not defend Roe on its merits. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg publicly criticized the decision for its invented doctrine and judicial overreach. Pro-abortion advocates have drafted an entire book of faux-Roe opinions that aim to replace Roe’s reasoning with something more defensible (it’s called “What Roe v. Wade Should Have Said”). Indeed, the only justice ever to defend Roe’s original reasoning in writing is Justice Harry Blackmun —  Roe’s author.  >> ( https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/12/01/courts_legitimacy_depends_on_overturning_roe_v_wade_146809.html )

The initial-- "victorious"-- plaintiff, Norma McCorvey neé Jane Roe, has expressed intense regret over the outcome and had begged the court to reopen the case by filing a (failed) "motion for relief from judgement" in 2003. ( https://www.nysun.com/editorials/roes-regrets/77677/ )

Roe was a bad decision. It needs to go. It threatens the legitimacy of the court and the survival of our nation like a cancerous ulcer, open and fetid.

What we replace it with is a much bigger and tougher question. As a society, we need to come to grips-- well, that bare phrase, "come to grips" would cover such a multitude of societal ills right now, but specifically-- with both the horror of abortion and the rights of bodily autonomy in some way. Of course, it is plain that we have done neither under the framework of the abortion that was the Roe decision. We today honor neither "life" nor "choice", neither unborn children nor medical autonomy (to say nothing of children who survive to be born). Ironically, it is often the same political elites who advocate the denial of both of these things.

Like many of these questions, it comes down to fundamentals. "All human activity is aimed at +some+ good..." But which good, how "good" a good? Do we have the foggiest idea, the most tenuous consensus, of what law is for? Of what it is supposed to accomplish? That is where we ought start, ought begin every public act and deliberation.

People are concerned that overturning Roe v Wade will lead to civil strife; they shouldn't be. We do not have peace now, we won't and we cannot as long as that opinion stands in the way. Overturning it is not a guarantee of success, but letting it stand does guarantee failure. If this experiment in self government is indeed destined  to "perish from the earth", then, on-demand abortion, like chattel slavery, is a fit instrument for its demise.

I would rather we come through this crisis as a people, bruised and chastened but better for it. If we cannot, if we do not have the will and fortitude-- not to magically fix this persistent evil but-- to even start on the long and difficult road to a better, higher good, then perhaps we deserve to fail here, on this hill. At some point, one hill may be as good as another...

--Written on this First Day of Advent, in the Year of Our Lord, Two Thousand Twenty-Two.

Defending the Boston Massacre- when "due process" hurts

I am going to put two closely-related posts back-to-back here, both of which make me vaguely ill about the way the 1/6 Riots are being handled. I will reiterate here that I have little problem with people being charged with appropriate crimes for rioting and, upon a fair conviction, punished-- as long as process is received as due and enforcement is even-handed: rioting is against the law, and it ought not change according to the people doing the rioting.

As this article mentions and I have discussed before, John Adams set the standard for due process in our fledgling nation when he personally took on the defense of British soldiers from the Boston Massacre because no one else would and he believed strongly in fair process: even (perhaps especially for) for an enemy. This is why a team of lawyers in the ACLU is called the "John Adams Group". This group, among many others, provided representation, usually pro bono, for prisoners at Guantanamo Bay accused of collaborating with terrorists generally and with the plotters of 9/11 particularly, in short, of being conspirators in mass murder on a historical scale.

This was a good thing. If you doubt that, pick up a copy of David Cole's and James Dempsey's "Terrorism and the Constitution" (@FIXME: link) to see documentation of a constant stream of missteps and abuse in handling terrorism cases in our history generally and the "War on Terror" specifically. Or watch the recent film, "The Mauritanian", or download a free copy of the guy's hand-written manuscript that he wrote in his years at Gitmo (@FIXME: add link). These people needed fair representation, no matter what they were accused of (some still do @FIXME: link). I have defended and advocated for this in the past and have caught a great deal of flak for it here and there. I fully supported activists on the Left fighting for these causes, even as we disagreed on other policy issues. This is why I strongly support certain left-leaning people like David Cole and Glenn Greenwald in the first place. I believe strongly enough in what thry do that I would willingly place my body between them and danger if it came to that.

Sometimes the issues are more personal. Our local unit was called up by the Sheriff's Office a few years ago for a manhunt. A prisoner had escaped custody during transfer, injuring a deputy from another county. He was on the run somewhere in Mount Vernon. We had volunteers in the field in six minutes from the first text alert, including myself. I was out there with a flashlight paired up with a volunteer who later became mayor. But this wasn't just any escaped prisoner. This was the man accused of the brutal murder of a friend of ours, a disabled gentlemen who grew plants for the farmer's market and sold them in the booth next to ours. I had... 'feelings'... about that, but they didn't matter. My job out there was not to convict or punish the guy, just to help locate and recapture him so that +someone else+ could decide those issues a touch more objectively. In the end, he was caught (not by us). My wife and I saw him dragged back to the jail (she at the time, had not yet realized just who it was we were after-- whose murder he was accused of). It was not that I was not angry over what happened or that some part of me didn't want an opportunity to hurt him, merely that my commitment to a fair process, the honor of the uniform I was wearing (little as that honor might be!), was greater than my need for retribution. It is the same for people accused of terrorism or, even, say, of the person who shot up my school so long ago and is still in prison.

So... how is the 1/6 riot being treated by these modern successors of John Adams? Not at all. As the link below describes, none of the law firms who were so eager to help (accused) global terrorists are interested in helping people held in unconscionable conditions accused of trespass or "interference with an official proceeding" (none are charged with insurrection, treason, or terrorism, but we'll get to that in the next post). None of the prominent political figures who provided attorneys or bail money for Antifa or BLM rioters are rushing to the aid of 1/6 detainees. In fact, the left has been interfering with people who are trying to help: shutting down donation pages, harrassing attorneys, or calling for investigation into those who donate or offer services. Many of the same people who shouted "Defund the Police!" are taking federal agents at their word, voting to expand the Capitol Police budget by $2 billion and expand its jurisdiction nationwide, taking a rather incomplete and puzzlingly-contradictory report on a officer-involved-shooting at face value, attacking people who ask questions about the shoot/no-shoot decision.

There are a few stalwarts, people who feel it is right to care about due process with accused Muslim terrorists AND 1/6 rioters, or who support (peaceful) free speech and assembly whether it is BLM, Antifa, or Trump supporters, who want all officer-involved deaths explained. They asked questions about police use-of-force with George Floyd and Ashli Babbitt. They are withstanding hate and vitriol from politicians, media, ordinary people for doing so. Again, that is why I continue to support them.

https://thefederalist.com/2021/10/26/law-firms-that-raced-to-defend-terrorists-in-gitmo-leave-j6-defendants-out-to-dry/

(Next post, involving the apparently very real conspiracy to breach the US Capitol, in a bit.)

Smallpox Variolation in 17th Century Turkey and It's Introduction In England

Reading more of the 18th century "Commonplace Book of William Byrd of Westover", came upon this interesting item regarding the history of inoculation:

<<...of ingrafting or inoculateing the small[pox was fir]st brought out of the northern part of Ne[. . .]a into Turky, where it has now been in [use] about 70 years. At first they kept a Register [at Con]stantinople of all Persons who under went Inoculation, and out of all that number, there was only one old woman miscarryd by being very disorderly and ungovernable, and now this practice is grown so universal in Turky, that they have left off keeping any Register of them.>> https://www.scribd.com/book/322769715

The page in Byrd's notebook is damaged and the entry is unsourced, but, as Byrd wrote this likely in the 1720s (and the source may be a bit older), this would put variolation in Turkey in the mid-17th century and in "Ne[...]a" earlier than that.

It turns out that variolation was brought out of Turkey by a Lady Mary Wortley Montague after her travels there from 1716-1718. Byrd was an avid reader of travel narratives and may have read of the procedure from her accounts. On her return to London she demonstrated the process by having one of her children inoculated in the presence of the royal court.

<<The English aristocrat and writer Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762) is today remembered particularly for her letters from Turkey, an early example of a secular work by a Western woman about the Muslim Orient. When Lady Mary was in the Ottoman Empire, she discovered the local practice of variolation, the inoculation against smallpox. Unlike Jenner's later vaccination, which used cowpox, variolation used a small measure of smallpox itself. Lady Mary, who had suffered from the disease, encouraged her own children to be inoculated while in Turkey. On her return to London, she enthusiastically promoted the procedure...>> but its spread was limited to high society for some time. ( https://muslimheritage.com/lady-montagu-smallpox-inoculation-england/ )

It is also likely that Byrd read about it in reports to the Royal Society of London, published in the society journal. Byrd was a member of the Royal Society when he was in London and later corresponded with it in Virginia.

<<Variolation was also practiced throughout the latter half of the 17th century in Turkey, Persia, and Africa. In 1714 and 1716, two reports of the Turkish method of inoculation were made to the Royal Society in England...>> (ibid)

This history is drscribed in more detail in a 2007 piece, "The introduction of variolation 'A La Turca' to the West by Lady Mary Mantagu and Turkey's contribution to this" published in "Vaccine" (abstract: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264410X07002770 ; PDF: https://www.academia.edu/12549034/The_introduction_of_variolation_A_La_Turca_to_the_West_by_Lady_Mary_Montagu_and_Turkeys_contribution_to_this ).

The struggle in variolation was to reliably cause enough of an infection to generate lasting immunity without causing full-blown smallpox or causing a local outbreak. Some 18th century practitioners were extremely good at this, others less so. Abigail Adam's, who, like Lady Montagu, made sure her family was inoculated, describes recovering from the process in a 1776 letter. The eventual replacement of smallpox variolation with cowpox "vaccination" largely solved this problem.

Jonathan Isaac Interview Regarding Covid Vaccination

Attached to this article by Glenn Greenwald is a short and excellent video interview with NBA player Jonathan Isaac explaining why he has declined to vaccinate for Covid-19. As a lead in to that, GG makes this personal statement with which I fully agree:

<<That the unvaccinated are inherently primitive and stupid troglodytes was always a claim as baseless and offensive as it is counter-productive. Although I personally took the vaccine the first day it was available to me — as I repeatedly said I would in every forum where I speak, including Fox News — it was always clear that there were cogent reasons why those with different circumstances and risk factors (age, health, prior COVID status) might assess their own risks differently and reach a different conclusion. And what made me most comfortable about my choice to get vaccinated, or to decide whether my kids should, was precisely that it was my choice, after informing myself: the idea of forcing someone to do it against their will, or condition people's rights and privileges on vaccine compliance — as both President Biden and the ACLU astonishingly advocated — always struck me as inconceivable.>> ( https://greenwald.substack.com/p/an-nba-star-and-new-yorks-governor )

[Direct link to the interview for convenience of the reader: https://youtu.be/xVS6aUWAWDg ]

Having been vaccinated myself, let me emphasize two words he uses here to describe +coercion+ to vaccinate, "offensive" and "counter-productive". The attempt to force people to vaccinate is inherently offensive to the people who have or have not yet vaccinated as it violates their bodily autonomy and their moral authority to make their own medical decisions for themselves, privately. As the author here notes, it is also offensive (or darn well ought to be!) to those of us who vaccinated willingly because it denies our choice, violates our medical privacy in being required to furnish proof of vaccination status, and enlists us to participate in an unethical scheme to coerce others. Because this scheme is inherently offensive, it is extremely counter-productive: vaccination rates have plummeted since Biden's mandate was announced.

In the video, Isaac explains his choice clearly and well. At his age and in his condition, having already had and recovered from Covid, his personal danger of severe illness from Covid-19 is tiny and the chance of side-effects from the vaccine are low but also non-zero. Is it possible that vaccinating may have a benefit in improving immunity beyond natural immunity? Sure, some results suggest this, but not all, it is not scientific certainty and it HIS call how much benefit it is to him that a vaccine could move his risk of severe disease from near-zero to slightly-nearer-to-zero.

OK, so that is his personal choice. Being at higher-than-normal risk for severe disease, my internal calculus was a bit different. What about a duty to those around him?

<<But the attempt to suggest that some type of societal good justifies denying Isaac the right to choose quickly falls into incoherence. To whom is an unvaccinated Jonathan Isaac a threat? The reason vaccines have become so celebrated — the reason I took it — is based on the claim that they offer enormous protection against serious illness or death in the event that one contracts COVID. When President Biden addressed the nation about COVID on September 9, he said that “the vaccines provide strong protections for the vaccinated” and, for that reason, “this is a pandemic of the unvaccinated.” In other words, according to Biden, the vaccinated are no longer endangered.>> (ibid)

So, now, Biden, having "lost patience"(*), is taking the rather contradictory view that because the chance of severe illness among the vaccinated is "not zero", the unvaccinated are an existential threat to society and need to be forced. But, as Isaac points out, the chance of side effects is also "not zero" and there is no credible scientific reason to believe that any amount of coercion will reduce the risk of severe disease to "zero", especially since even those vaccinated can still spread the virus!. It has not halted spread in totalitarian China or Australia. It has not in vaccine-mandate Israel. It has not in US prisons. Having been vaccinated personally, my risk is not and will not be zero, even if I successfully held a gun to the head of everyone around me. So why would I feel the need to soil myself to that end?

And this is to say nothing of the "difficult optics" of a largely white upper-crust allegedly-"progressive" social elite trying to say that someone like Jonathan Isaac (who happens to be black) doesn't have the unfettered right to his own body.

(*) Biden and "lost patience": nu, and I should care?

The Commonplace Book of William Byrd II of Westover and Colonial Literacy

Having recently visited Colonial Williamsburg, Jamestown, and Yorktown and listened to an audiobook on Colonial Virginia history on the way there, I have become interested in William Byrd II of Westover, who was born in 1674. He was an author, businessman,  and statesman of the early 18th century. He left behind several diaries and a "commonplace book". A "commonplace" is a journal for random notes rather than a sequential account like a diary. The owner writes quotes, literary snippets, and discovered facts often with some kind of subject markings which can then be referred to later, further explored,  or copied out and filed elsewhere. A commonplace gives a running narrative, not of events in a person's life but the course of their self-education and research. These days, I use a tablet application to make and file very similar entries. The surviving commonplace of Byrd's is apparently only one of a number of such volumes he kept, posthumously transcribed, edited, and published.

Byrd was responsible for creating the largest library in Virginia at the time, some 4,000 volumes. Although we have a record of the books he collected, it is not necessarily known that he read and studied all of them. The commonplace gives us information about what he actually delved into, at least during the time this one volume was written. The breadth of subjects Byrd explored, referenced, and quoted is stunning. This was made easier by his early education at Felsted Grammar School in Essex starting at 7. Based on what we know of the school and Byrd's later writings:

<<He learned Greek, Latin, and Hebrew as well as mathematics, history, and other subjects. His mastery of these ancient languages is evident in his lifelong habit of reading Scripture and the classics in the original languages nearly every day.>> [Introduction to "The Commonplace Book of William Byrd II of Westover" https://www.scribd.com/book/322769715 ]

He had mastered these subjects before "university"-- in other words, as a teenager. I have not, at middle age (though I'm working at it.) Nor was this one school or single student an anomaly. Literacy during the Colonial and Founding period was very high. Many prominent men (John Adams, say), had little formal education, were largely self-taught or were simply handed books and expected to learn them, were multilingual, had a strong command of classical works-- ++and this was not thought very remarkable++. Colonial women were also highly literate-- well-read and writing frequent correspondence, often managing ledgers and farm records, here and there fully managing estates and businesses as widows. Literacy among Colonial women is thought to have reached 90% by the Revolution. Women's organizations in Northern textile mills drove and spread the literature of the Abolition movement during the early-to-mid 19th century as well as organizing for wages and labor conditions. Literacy tended to be lower in the South than the North by the Civil War, yet Confederate soldiers passed around battered copies of "Les Miserables" they read in the French.

So why are we so poor at learning/educating today? Why in a world where we have the lion's share of the collected works of humankind a few keystrokes away are we by and large +less literate+ than a day where a library of 4,000 volumes was a generational undertaking and many people still dipped pens in ink they boiled from oak galls and walnut hulls? Clearly it isn't because we need more education +money+ or more laptops/tablets in schools. Thomas Sowell (among others) writes at length of the complete lack of correlation between education funding and education +success+. Certainly schools in the US today can afford the resources available to a 17th, 18th, or early 19th-century student when books were so precious that they were named individually in wills and probate documents!

Somewhere, we have made a seriously wrong turn.

Rosh Hashannah Reflection: The ritual of Christian baptism as reported in Acts was (mostly) familiar to the period Jewish audience

So, I have been working through an in-depth commentary on the book of Acts as I have been learning and copying Acts in Latin. This passage on Pentecost and Baptism is particularly relevant right now during Rosh Hashannah 2021 (the Hebrew "New Year" preceding the Day of Atonement) as baptism, vis, ritual immersion in water as a symbol of atonement, was particularly practiced during the New Year, not inconceivably by Jesus of Nazareth Himself. It is, of course, recorded that he underwent baptism by John the Baptizer. John practiced and particulary emphasized atonement-by-immersion but hardly invented the practice.

My copy of the commentary, "El Libro de Hechos" por F.F. Bruce is in Spanish. "The Book of Acts" by F.F. Bruce is also available in English, I just don't happen to have it (nor have I the foggiest idea whether page numbers match), so I'll copy the relevant short bits of Spanish here and provide my own translation. Any mistakes are my own, almost certainly not that of F. F. Bruce. The  passage refers to Acts 2:38-41, the events immediately following the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost (an existing Old Testament Holy Day). Given here in English:

BSB  ³⁸ Peter replied, “Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.
³⁹ This promise belongs to you and to your children and to all who are far off, to all whom the Lord our God will call to Himself.”
⁴⁰ With many other words he testified, and he urged them, “Be saved from this corrupt generation.”
⁴¹ Those who embraced his message were baptized, and about three thousand were added to the believers that day.

Bruce's commentary text for v. 38:

Como en la predicación de Juan, la llamada al bautismo está unida a la llamada al arrepentimiento. Aparentemente el mandamiento de ser bautizados no ocasionó sorpresa. La práctica del bautismo resultaba bastante familiar a la audiencia de Pedro, a quien (como los oyentes de Juan antes que ellos) se les requería recibir el bautismo en agua como señal externa y visible de su arrepentimiento. Pero ahora había dos características nuevas en el rito del bautismo con agua: es la administración “en el nombre del Jesucristo” y se asoció con “el don del Espíritu Santo”. Esta nueva característica enfatiza, en las palabras de G.W.H. Lampe, que el bautismo cristiano “es todavía un rito escatológico, porque apuntaba hacia la redención final, la cual está aún por venir en el regreso en gloria del Señor; pero, considerado en relación a Juan el bautista, representaba la realización y cumplimiento de la esperanza de Israel”

And my rough English:

As in the preaching of Juan, the call to baptism is joined to the call to repentence. Apparently the command to be baptized occasioned no surprise [from the Jews there assembled]. The practice of baptism, it followed, was already familiar to Peter's audience, who (as with John's listeners before them) were called upon to receive the baptism in water as a visible and external sign of their repentance. But now he [Peter] required two new characteristics in the rite of baptism in water: it is administered in the "name of Jesus Christ" and associated with "the gift of the Holy Spirit". This new characteristic is emphasized, in the words of G.W.H. Lampe, that the Christian baptism "is in whole form an escatological [that is, of or concerning the end of days] rite, because it aimed to make that surrender final which is yet to come in the glorious return of the Lord, but, when considered in relation to John the Baptizer, represents the completion of the hope of Israel." [internal citation omitted]

--- Pasaje de: "El libro de los Hechos" por F. F. Bruce. Scribd. https://www.scribd.com/book/350613212 pp 161

As the commentary goes on to describe, both the existing (pre-Christian) ritual of baptism in water and the "gift of the Holy Sprit" whose outpouring that this (Jewish) assembly had just witnessed, are tied inextricably to the honest determination to repent and turn back to YHWH. Second Temple Jews immersing themselves (particularly but not exclusively) on Rosh Hashannah prior to Yom Kippur's communal Day of Atonement did not differ in that respect. Elsewhere, archaeologists have noted that the existence of basins for ritual immersion in water can practically be used to map the post-Diaspora spread of the remnants of Israel and Judea in ancient times.

The accounting imagery (not expressly anchored in scripture but an explanatory doctrine, likely never intended to be taken literally) of the between-time after sundown on Rosh Hashannah and before sundown on Yom Kippur is that YHWH, having closed the books on the previous year is writing his budget for the next, deciding who will be blessed and cursed, who will be written in the Book of Life and who will-- not. "On Rosh Hashannah it is writren; on Yom Kippur it is sealed." This in turn is obliquely, perhaps confusingly, referred to in Christian doctrine regarding the "Book of the Lamb" or "Book of Life of the Lamb" (e.g. Revelation 13:8). To a contemporaneous audience familiar with Rosh Hashannah and its oral tradition, the reference may have been much less opaque. But the expression here is similar to what G.W.H. Lampe is quoted as saying with respect to the essential eschatology of Christian baptism: that it is a poor bargain to endlessly petition to be left in the Book of Life for merely one more year (which many of us scarcely earn) against the chance of being written into the Book of the Lamb as an inheritor of the imminent and eternal Kingdom of the annointed Messiah (which not a single one of us has earned or ever will).

That all being said, the traditional ritual of periodic immersion in water as an external and visible sign of repentence is not without its use, nor is the yearly recognition of the Appointed Times for atonement. To the contrary, we can all of us use every reminder we can get. As linear creatures, we need timely reminders of our nature and duties. These were gifts to fallible forgetful humans intended to help us recognize and walk the steep path we are meant to daily walk. With the gift of the Holy Spirit and the constant help of divine grace, the impossible path becomes possible (though seldom easy). Thus the words of the Aveinu, "Our Father", itself a summary of Hebrew tradition:

Lead us not into temptation,

Yet free us from evil.

Min-hara (מן-הרע) in Hebrew, from (the) evil (one), is a reminder of min-hahar (מן-ההר), from the mountain, merely one letter off, referring to the traditional imagery of the steep path and constant struggle for right action. Sometimes-- no matter the tradition we come from-- we need to stop and wash off the dirt of the mountain to see the image of the divine within.