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US Supreme Court Upholds Indefinite Confinement
An anonymous reader points out the news that the US Supreme Court today upheld a law that allows the federal government to keep prison inmates behind bars beyond the end of their sentences, if officials determine they may be "sexually dangerous" in the future. The case involves one Graydon Comstock, who was certified as "dangerous" six days before his 37-month federal prison term for processing child pornography was to end. The vote was 7 to 2. Three of the justices who concurred with the decision raised an objection to the broadness of the language used in the majority opinion, written by Justice Kennedy.
No, I can't think of any ways this could be abused.
This is how liberty dies. First they claim that terrorists don't have rights, then they claim sex offenders don't have rights. Before you know it, nobody will have any rights.
FTA: "The fact that the federal government has the authority to imprison a person for the purpose of punishing him for a federal crime — sex-related or otherwise — does not provide the Government with the additional power to exercise indefinite civil control over that person," Justice Thomas wrote.
Makes sense to me. If the crime deserves a longer sentence, then impose a longer sentence. But let's not cherry pick after the fact.
The real problem is the sentencing guidelines. A true child rapist should go away for life in prison. Then this wouldn't be an issue. I am not talking about statutory rapists, I mean the ones who really prey on children.
Just like not anyone goes to Guantanamo--they also have to be "enemy combatants." Only "enemy combatants" are sent to Guantanamo, right? So it must be OK.
Due process means appearing before a jury of your peers, or at least before a judge, with an opportunity to face your accuser and to defend yourself - not that some bureaucrat makes out a report and then another bureaucrat throws away the key to your cell.
Furthermore, they're not making the decision to confine on the basis of evidence, they're making it on the basic of assumptions and one person's judgment.
If you aren't scared, you should be. Very scared.
Once you start allowing this sort of action, where's the protection that keeps it from growing into something else?
Are we going to start seeing 18 year-olds locked up forever because they had sex with a girl a few months younger than them?
Undoubtedly. If we can put two 16-year-olds in prison for taping themselves having sex (and not sharing with anyone) as "manufacturers of child pornography", and put at this point hundreds of teenagers on the "sex offender list" for texting each other their private parts, then yes, it is likely that with this decision in the near future we will see teenagers go to prison forever, because they defied their teacher, the cops, or just some prude who couldn't get laid if he/she tried.
Until we figure out a way to legislate in a way that applies some degree of common sense, this sort of thing just can't be allowed.
Well, evidently not only is it allowed, but our highest court agrees also. So I guess you're on the losing side of the issue. Before someone goes through your cache and locates a thumbnail, which has a 17 +364 day old doing naughty things and thus puts you in prison for life, you better get with the program. Cause in a dictatorship of the bureaucracy, you'll find that dissent of any sort will result in the entire collection of laws to be applied to you. And at this point, we've got enough laws to make anyone a criminal, as long as you try hard enough.
That's only the Presidency. Senators don't have a limit on re-elections...
"Once you start allowing this sort of action, where's the protection that keeps it from growing into something else?"
Well, you could look at the rest of the world and see if anybody has tried the experiment for you.
Canada, the UK and Denmark all have dangerous offender laws that allow indefinite confinement. None of them has anything like the prison population the US does, or locks up 18 year olds forever because they had sex with a girl a few months younger than they are (I don't believe that's even mildly illegal in any of the three).
Yeah, I had that argument with someone over the weekend. "Why should people on the watch list be allowed to buy guns?", my response "Why should the Attorney General be able to take away my rights with no due process?" The 5th amendment says that we can't be denied life, liberty or property without due process of law. Somehow I don't think that was meant to cover "The AG takes away your rights but you can appeal his determination if you have the financial resources to do so."
Ah, but it's for the children, so that's ok. Child molestation, DWI, terrorism, etc. All boogieman exploited by those seeking to whittle away at our rights.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
I take it you don't like the decision?
Then you'd better hope we get more justices like the dissenters... Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Justice Antonin Scalia, dissented in the case... (FTFA)
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
The real problem is the sentencing guidelines. A true child rapist should go away for life in prison. Then this wouldn't be an issue. I am not talking about statutory rapists, I mean the ones who really prey on children.
Woah, my hypocritical bullshit detector just flashed defcon 5...
You should a child rapist be put in prison for any longer than any other sort of rapist? How is it any more acceptable to rape a 21 year old woman than it is a child? This sounds like a typical 'OMG, we must protect the children' hysteria that clouds and distorts this sort of discussion. I don't care if you rape a 3 year old girl or a 35 year old man who is a master of 14 martial arts, a persons degree of ability to defend themselves does not mitigate the crime.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Right... so if you're going to rape someone, you might as well kill them afterward... fewer witnesses that way.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
It's NOT limited.
The U.S. government believes it can imprison, kidnap, torture, or kill anyone, anywhere. The only necessary condition is that the government apply a label to that person. Sample labels: Enemy combatant. Possible terrorist. Sexually dangerous. Other labels that may be secret. Sometimes no proof is considered necessary.
The U.S. government believes it can spy on anyone, anywhere, and spends more taxpayer money on spying than any government anywhere.
The U.S. government believes it can lie to taxpayers.
Some departments of the U.S. government believe the government can kill anyone, anywhere, for any reason, or no reason at all, or no reason a normal citizen would consider a real reason.
The U.S. government has killed more Iraqis than Saddam Hussein, by a factor of more than 10. The U.S. government called Saddam Hussein cruel.
The U.S. government has a 6 times higher percentage of its citizens in prison than any country anywhere.
The U.S. government has more debt than any country anywhere, in the entire history of the world.
The U.S. government has invaded or bombed more than 24 countries since the end of the 2nd world war.
The U.S. government believes it can interfere with the governments of other countries. For example, in 1953 the U.S. government removed democratically elected Iranian Prime Minister Mosaddegh.
The government has engaged in violent activity toward another country each year, except one, for more than the last 100 years. Apparently all of that violence was to increase private profit.
I'm not sure it's possible to praise justices Scalia and Thomas on Slashdot without be marked as a Troll, but I'm about to.
There is a lesson in this to be learned by all of those who rail against justices like Scalia and Thomas when they vote contrary to your personal beliefs about social issues.
This is at the core of the difference between tyranny and a constitutional republic.
As Edward Kennedy recently put it, are we a nation of laws, or a nation of men? Today we see again that we are merely a nation of men, ruled by the arbitrary will of an unelected few, rather than by a constitution designed to protect at all costs the liberty of the few from the will of the many.
If you don't like the constitution, we have process in place to change it for exactly that reason. We have many times before. That's the agreement you and I have as members of a civilized, free society. If you think you can walk all over the peoples' document when it becomes an obstacle to your social agenda: FUCK YOU.
Who defines the criteria, though?
Apparently, based on TFA, the possession of child pornography is enough to be classified as "sexually dangerous".
I fear that this opens up for classifying anyone with a sex-related conviction as "sexually dangerous", and anyonen with a deviance or kink as "mentally ill". I.e. a potential for becoming a rubber stamp for extending incarceration beyond the sentencing for anyone who the voters consider especially disgusting.
When I agree with Scalia and Thomas and no one else on a Supreme Court decision. You cannot change the rules of incarceration. There is a sentence. If you want to hold prisoners longer make the sentence longer. You could even make the possibility of additional comfinement, but you can't make the sentence a court gave them any longer without a new trial.
Well I guess you can now. Who the fuck cares about the Constitution? No one. No one who matters anyway.
If you're a juvenile. That's an important distinction.
There are ways to get life without parole if you are an adult and you do enough bad things.
Regarding the other case, I have to side with the SCOTUS minority. If you want to keep child molesters locked away for ever, then pass laws that require longer sentences, rather than sentencing them to ten years then holding them forever.
And for god's sake, if you skip a safety regulation and 29 coal miners die, be prepared to be charged with manslaughter, at the very least. The day a CEO of a coal company who causes 29 death does the same amount of time as a 19 year-old caught with a pound of reefer, then we can pretend we have a country based on the rule of law and not the rule of money.
So big deal, the United States Supreme Court really showed those horrible child molesters. That's an easy call. Do something hard and apply the same set of rules to the rich and powerful who break laws.
You are welcome on my lawn.
OK maybe I'm dense but this law is by my reading aimed at person's who are mentally incompetent or legally insane such that they are incapable of standing trial, in the case of Graydon Comstock, he served his sentence of 37 months for receiving child pornography, seems to me that if 1. he's mentally capable? of standing trial and serving his sentence that the law does not apply to him and secondly how does receiving illegal pornography make one sexually dangerous? So it's obvious to me they are not only applying the law outside it's bounds and we can't rely on the courts to correct the matter so any reliance on limitations is wishful thinking.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Reading about this today, I found that the scope of this particular decision is less scary than I initially assumed -- it's limited to prisoners who meet a standard as being "sexually dangerous", so they're not just being held without due process. Apparently this applies to about 100 prisoners nationwide.
One of whom had only a 37 month sentence for possession of child pornography. No mention that he had ever touched a child. Extending a sentence from 37 months to life is pretty severe. The potential for abuse of this process is staggering. Who gets to decide if someone is "sexually dangerous"? A doctor? What are the rules of evidence and due process requirements for the forum in which that determination is made? Does someone even have to be convicted of a crime for them to be labelled as "sexually dangerous"? This is by far the most frightening decision I've seen the SCOTUS hand down in my lifetime.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
Are the politicians insane or the people who keep electing them?
Someone offers me a job where every weekend is a long weekend, everybody kisses your ass, you get corporations handing you big sacks full of cash, a six-figure salary and then great health care benefits and a pension after 6 years? Oh yeah, I'm gonna take that job.
Top of all that, you get a fat allowance for an office and staff, which means you can hire an exotic dancer/masseuse as your secretary.
The only bad part is you have to wear a suit and tie. No casual fridays in the Senate. I'd rather be a judge, so I get to wear the black dress and I can be naked under it, like Clarence Thomas. I don't know what it is about Clarence, but for some reason, I get the feeling that he goes commando under the robes. And who could blame him?
You are welcome on my lawn.
As do I. Never before in memory (well, except for Guantanamo) has SCOTUS claimed that the government has the authority to incarcerate someone indefinitely without trial. I think we are seeing almost immediate (and extremely unfortunate and dangerous) results of the precedent that was set in the Guantanamo situation.
... Were the power of Congress to be established in the latitude contended for, it would subvert the very foundations, and transmute the very nature of the limited Government established by the people of America." -- James Madison
Not to mention the question of whether the Federal government has any authority to do that in a non-military context. Murder is embodied in state law. As is rape. Where does the Federal government (and SCOTUS) think it gets the authority to do this? There is nothing in the Constitution that would bestow this kind of power on them. And that includes the general welfare and interstate commerce clauses.
All in all, I think it is pretty damned clear that the majority made yet another BAD decision, much like some of the other bad decisions it has made in the last 10-15 years. I think it's time for new blood in the courts. And I don't mean Kagan; she pushed this law when the court last reviewed it. She would be my last choice for Supreme.
--
"If Congress can employ money indefinitely to the general welfare, and are the sole and supreme judges of the general welfare, they may take the care of religion into their own hands; they may appoint teachers in every State, county and parish and pay them out of their public treasury; they may take into their own hands the education of children, establishing in like manner schools throughout the Union; they may assume the provision of the poor; they may undertake the regulation of all roads other than post-roads; in short, every thing, from the highest object of state legislation down to the most minute object of police, would be thrown under the power of Congress.
I'd like to say those who consider cartoons and drawings to have harmed actual children are the mentally ill ones.... but that goes right over their head.
Allowing the victim to dictate the sentencing of a perpetrator is a fundamental issue that runs contrary to every aspect of modern western justice.
There are discussions of this ranging back to Socrates and Plato, Voltaire, Adam Smith and Thomas Jefferson.
They all agree that this is not a suitable punishment. In the animal kingdom, it is not uncommon for instinct to dictate that an animal who has set foot on your "turf" should be viscerally executed with your bare hands. Obviously this is an extreme example, but it lays the foundation for the deleterious effect that this argument would have on the justice system as a whole.
Additionally, the concept of "absolute safety" in society is another significant negative force on personal liberty during the last several decades. The concept that everyone has a "right" to complete safety at all times that trumps various other long-held freedoms is a serious issue that can't be dismissed.
Just like little Polly's father is very angry at the crime, the perpetrator likely has a family who is equally as disturbed at his incarceration. While you can easily dehumanize him by calling him a "monster" or whatever other phrase suits your emotional decorum, you are making an enormous ontological jump to convince yourself that your view is justified.
We have a justice system that dictates punishment, partially for punitive and partially for rehabilitative purposes. Currently, the system in the United States hands out nearly 4-times the prison sentence for this crime as any other western democracy and, yet, we still have the highest rates of all of these victimizing crimes.
Perhaps we should stop to think about what it is in the vengeful attitude with which we approach justice that causes our society to have such high rates of violence and victimization and look abroad. Sweden has one of the lowest rates of child sexual assault in the world. They also adopt a very permissive attitude regarding teen sex and homosexuality and have relatively short sentences, focused on rehabilitation (which appears to be very successful for them). There is no sex offender registry. In fact, a private group set one up last year, and there was a massive public protest in opposition to it. Police forced the owner to take the site down immediately as it violates Swedish privacy laws.
It's interesting to look at countries that adopt a different posture about these issues and try to educate ourselves. Perhaps we might wonder why we have such high rates of violence and why we have such high rates of victimization and then peer at our reactions to those things and question if they are, indeed, legitimate or useful and not simply our slobbering animal instinct lashing out at things we don't understand, or decide are "gross".
Bullshit. Read the article again, and study up on some law.
First, the Federal government has no authority to do this. Whether it says they will be imprisoned forever or not. It's not in their jurisdiction.
Second, "clear and convincing evidence" is FAR lower than the normal standard for incarceration, which is "beyond reasonable doubt". So yeah, it WOULD give the Federal government the ability to incarcerate someone forever, without a proper trial. At least, any kind of "trial" that would be accepted in any other situation.
Third, in the very poster-child case mentioned in the article, the government would have it apply to a "receiver" of child pornography. Note here an important distinction: you may think the person is weird and deranged, but study after study have shown no link between mere "receivers" of child pornography, and actual real-life crimes. The man was not convicted for any crime other than receiving child pornography. He molested no children. In fact, there is ample evidence to show that rather than inciting crime, pornography is cathartic, and that people who might otherwise commit crimes will otherwise take out their obsessions or aggressions on the pornography, rather than real people.
To recap: most "receivers" of child pornography are NOT people who are dangerous to society or children. No matter what the government would have you believe.
Do not misunderstand; I am NOT saying that people who create child pornography are doing mankind a favor. What I am saying is that psychologically, most people who "get turned on" by such stuff would rather deal with it on their own, rather than commit acts they know are completely unacceptable to society.
Further, technically YOU are probably a "reciever" of child pornography, in your emails or internet popups. Whether you want to be or not. That stuff gets stored in your system logs and browser cache, where they can be found later by the authorities. Sure, that doesn't mean you are keeping a collection specifically of child pornography... but it DOES mean that you are in violation of the same laws. Hmmm... maybe we should lock YOU up for 10 years, then change our minds and lock you up for life! What do you think? Is that fair?
No matter how much you think this is "for the children", the fact is that the Fourth Circuit judged properly, and SCOTUS did not. Which just adds to the number of exceedingly bad decisions they have made in the last decade and a half. And even if it were not a bad decision, the Federal government does not have the authority to make it.
This is an ex post facto law. No way around it. Making such a law is outright forbidden - explicitly - by the constitution to both the feds (congress) and the states. The fact that it's aimed at some sex offender is just used to get the foot in the door -- if you remove "sex offender" and put "murderer" or "litterbug" in there, the effect of the law is the same: To increase punishment after the fact.
SCOTUS, out of control, still. Or again. However you want to put it. There's no way to rein in these traitors to their oaths either -- the system as designed is outright broken. The constitution has zero legal teeth.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.