Final installment of NYTimes 'The Hard Part'

Today you can find the last installment of The Hard Part by Andrew Jacobs in The New York Times. For those of you who haven't had the chance to read the series, it has chronicled the early part of Mayor Cory Booker's attempts to steer the city of Newark in the right direction.

Today piece, titled In Newark, the Mayor’s Crusade Gets Personal, follows Booker and his mentoring of 3 troubled city youths. And for those of you quick to criticize the mayor, and being a cartoonist, this is usually my modus operandi, I hope you give him a chance and read this article, because it's really touching in the way that Booker make himself accessible to these kids, and the larger public, in a way that his predecessor, the indicted Sharpe James, couldn't even dream of.

Here are some of the best pieces of the series:

Face Time With the Mayor (video)

Access to Mayor Doesn’t Solve All Problems

New Mayor Tests His Promises on Newark’s Reality

In Newark, the Mayor’s Crusade Gets Personal

Who deserves the blame?

Not much time to chat right now. Maybe I'll expand on this cartoon a bit later.

Here's the sketch:

Night court

The Attorney General's Office and the state judiciary have launched inquiries into how the men charged in the Newark schoolyard slayings was out on bail at the time of the shootings.

Dick Codey criticized the lowering of bail for one of the suspects, Jose Lachira Carranza, whose bail was reduced in a child-rape case. "It is our understanding that Jose Carranza's bail was reduced from $300,000 to $150,000 as a unilateral decision by the judge, without allowing any input from the prosecutor's office, which is simply unacceptable," Codey said in a statement.

Why would Superior Court Judge Thomas Vena's have decided to lower his bail to $150,000 from $300,000? A chronology released by the office of Essex County Assignment Judge Patricia Costello said the bail was lowered with the consent of Margarita Rivera, the assistant Essex County prosecutor handling the sexual assault case. According to the Star-Ledger, the prosecutor's office said that it never gave such consent.

And on MSNBC last night, they showed footage from the courtroom where Vena asked Carranza for his social security number, and Carranza responded, "I don't have it." The prosecutor clarified the statement, saying Carranza didn't have a social security number. No flags were raised. Nothing.

Of course, with Newark being a major metropolitan city, cries of overbooked courtrooms and overflowing prisons are the norm, but something this egregious shouldn't have been swept aside so easily.

And now 3 boys have paid the price of a system's incompetence.

Criticism spurs probes of slaying suspect's bail