A Change Will Do Us Good

 Posted by  Bill of Rights, Legal Reform  6 Responses »
Feb 282008
 

I am certainly against the “marriage” amendment to the Constitution, and I have some serious qualms with the anti-abortion amendments that get proposed. But the constitution does need to be amended. I believe that the second amendment ought to be rescinded, and that the gray area between presidential and congressional war powers ought to be clarified to account for a country with a standing army. But I recognize that those are tough issues that can’t be easily amended. But there is one change that can be made immediately, and ought to have been made a long time ago.

In particular, Article II, Section 1, Paragraph 5 currently reads:

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Primaries Are Elections Too

 Posted by  2008 Election, Legal Reform  5 Responses »
Jan 152008
 

Michigan’s primary is today, as you may have heard. As you may have also heard, neither Barack Obama nor John Edwards appear on the Michigan ballot, and no Democrat has campaigned at all there. Neither has any Democrat campaigned in Florida, which holds their primaries in a couple weeks. The Democratic Party, in fact, has vowed to not count the presidential votes of either candidate come convention time. On the Republican side, Wyoming held its primary earlier, and designated all six of their delegates (half their usual number). Michigan, Florida, and several other states have also had their delegate totals cut in half this year.

Why aren’t these votes being counted? Because the states, in an attempt to become more politically relevant, moved their primaries up until January. This is also what lead Iowa and New Hampshire to hold their primaries while most cities were still picking old Christmas trees up off of curbs. Essentially, when states began threatening to move up their primaries, the national parties both threatened that any state who held their nominating primary or caucus before February 5th would be cut off at the national convention, except for Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada. A few states tried to call that as a bluff. As a result, the voters in those states have been effectively disenfranchised in the primary system, to one degree or another.

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Conservative Irony

 Posted by  Crime, Immigration, Legal Philosophy, Legal Reform  No Responses »
Jul 202007
 

One of the great ironies of the Scooter Libby trial was that the same conservatives who have for years fought for high mandatory minimum sentences–and against allowing judicial discretion to reduce those sentences–ended up complaining that the sentence given to Mr. Libby based on those sentencing guidelines was too harsh.  Now we have the second verse of that song, although this time the “overly harsh” sentence is being doled out to two dirty border patrol agents.

There is a lot of debate about what happened.  The story told by conservative talk-radio, not to mention Lou Dobbs, Sean Hannity, WorldNetDaily, etc. starts with two of our heroic border patrol agents who see a suspicious van near the border just outside of El Paso–a van that is currently being used to smuggle hundreds of pounds of marijuana across the border.  As they approach, the smuggler gets out of the van and runs away.  At some point, the story goes, he reaches behind himself and half-turns, as if to point a weapon back at the heroic border patrol agents.  This makes sense, because we all know that drug smugglers are well-armed, for the most part.  The agents open fire, but the man keeps running and manages to get back across the border.  Shortly thereafter, the Mexican government demands that the border patrol agents be brought up on charges for shooting an unarmed man.  The US attorney, Johnny Sutton, bows to that pressure, and throws the book at the heroic border agents.  He misleads the jury into convicting them, and goes out of his way to fight for the maximum sentence possible by charging them with the use of a gun to perpetrate a felony–a charge that carries a mandatory 10 year minimum sentence.  He also gives the drug smuggler “victim” immunity from the original drug charge, and gives him a visa to be able to come to the trial–which the drug smuggler uses to smuggle marijuana once more.  Of course, given this storyline, conservatives are demanding a pardon and/or reinstatement for the border patrol agents (who were “just doing their jobs”), and are bucking to have Mr. Sutton fired.

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Cowardice and a Catch-22 from the Sixth Circuit

 Posted by  Abuse of Power, Bill of Rights, Judicial System, Legal Reform, Terrorism  4 Responses »
Jul 092007
 

The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals failed us last Friday.  The court ruled that citizens of the United States do not have standing to sue the government if they cannot demonstrate direct harm to particular individuals,  even if the government acknowledges violating some people’s civil rights.  The issue in question was whether the warrantless wiretapping program, ordered by the Bush Administration and administered by the NSA, is Constitutional.  Just to remind you, the Fourth Amendment protects us from “unreasonable search and seizures”.  In other words, if the government wants to know what you keep in your closet, or what you say to your cousin in private letters, they need a warrant to do so.  The courts have, rightly, extended this argument to include electronic communications.

The primary check on this power is through the criminal courts; in particular, the government cannot use any evidence it collects in violation of the Fourth Amendment in any criminal proceeding.  Although we have been taught by innumerable cop and lawyer dramas that this only leads to the release of guilty men on “technicalities”, the effect is to deter the government from prying too over zealously into our personal lives–at least without convincing a judge that such action is warranted.  Moreover, if you do happen to catch the police bugging your phones or searching your garage, you can sue the government to force them to stop.  All in all, it’s not a perfect system, but it works well enough.

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Rape and Consent

 Posted by  Abortion, Issues, Judicial System, Legal Reform  4 Responses »
May 162007
 

This story is about a week old now, but I just had it come to my attention yesterday, and I was curious if any of my readers here had an opinion about it. The case revolves around an alleged rape that happened between a girl and her boyfriend’s brother. According to the girl (the brother had a different story) here’s what happened:

At about 3 AM a man climbs into bed with her, while she’s sleeping in a dark room that she shares with her boyfriend. She says her boyfriend’s name, but gets no response. They man starts to have sex with her, and while she’s groggy, she willingly complies. Afterwards, the man walks out of the room, and she sees his face when he steps into the lit hallway and realizes that it isn’t her boyfriend, it is in fact her boyfriend’s brother. (The boyfriend, by the way, claims that she came and got him in the middle of the night, took him back to her bed, and instigated the sex; that’s a moot point, however, as you’ll see.) She decided to press rape charges against the brother, arguing that while she consented to have sex, she would have never consented to have sex with him, if she knew who he really was. The case went all the way to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, which ruled that (in Massachusetts) no rape occurred because the sex act itself was not coerced. This has caused a bit of an outrage, and there are legislators trying to change the law here in Massachusetts.

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