Civilization is expensive. If it's not worth paying for a trial, it's not worth imprisoning someone. The cost of a jury trial should be incentive for the state to imprison as few people as possible.
You might be right. In either case, it's wrong to deprive him of his right to a trial. If he actually deserves a decade in prison, charge him with that and let a jury decide. If he actually deserves a year in prison, charge him with that and let a jury decide. That's how an actual justice system works. Twisting his arm until you get a confession is just barbarism.
By that token, everything the government does is "Extortion". Taxes included.
Yes, everything the government does is extortion. The whole purpose of government is to apply force to encourage certain behaviors. The difference is that we have a constitution that limits what the government is allowed to extort us into. The right to a trial by jury is one of those limits.
One was optional, the other was not. IRS Scandal was not at the option of those being scandalized by the IRS, while this one was. He had a chance to go to trial, he chose against it.
The tea party groups had a chance to avoid extra attention from the IRS, by forfeiting their right to free speech.
This fellow had a chance to avoid extra charges from the DOJ, by forfeiting his right to a trial.
Exercising your rights is appropriate when your rights are being trampled
Such as being denied a jury trial.
such as when you're being prosecuted for a crime that you didn't commit
You don't know, in a legal sense, whether someone is being prosecuted for a crime they didn't commit until they have been found guilty by a jury of their peers. If you can deny someone of a jury trial because you "know" they are guilty, what's the point of a jury trial at all?
What sort of choice is "exercise your rights and face decades in prison or forfeit your rights"?
Would you say the same if the goverment extorted people out of other rights? e.g. "you're not deprived of your right to bear arms. But if you choose to exercise that right we will retaliate against you"? Is that OK?
He could of plead not guilty.
In which case, he almost certainly would have been facing charges over a decade. That's extortion.
How about maybe he felt bad about what he did and actually plead guilty because he is in fact guilty. Maybe he decided to actually take personal responsibility for his actions and acknowledge in a court of law that what he did was wrong. Since your not his lawyer all you can do is speculate on his reasons for pleading guilty.
97% of federal defendents plead guilty. How credulous do you have to be to believe that the government is right 97% of the time, AND that every one of those defendents suddenly develops a conscience?
No, the only explanation for that kind of statistic is that people are being bullied out of their right to a trial.
That's extortion. If someone were bullied by the government out of their right to criticize the government, would you say "Not criticizing the government avoids certain un-pleasantries"?
The whole point of having rights is that the government cannot make your life more unpleasant for exercising them. Getting extra charges tacked on for exercising your right to a trial is no more just than getting extra attention from the IRS for exercising your right to criticize the government.
Weaver, 22, of Huntington Beach was a third-year business student when he carried out the elaborate plan to win election as president of the schoolâ(TM)s student council in March 2012. He pleaded guilty this year to three federal charges, including wire fraud and unauthorized access to a computer.
Yet another American deprived of his right to a trial. No doubt they would have tried to send him to prison for a decade or more if he decided to exercise his rights.
A year in prison is probably a fair outcome if the story is as described. But he deserves to have a jury decide that, and not face absurd amounts of time in prison if he wants a jury trial.
That is the accumulated case law and legal precedents from 220+ years of jurisprudence
220 years of lies doesn't amount to truth.
There are many situations in which it isn't clear how either the law or the Constitution applies until it is tried in court
Yes, there are. This is not one of them. The 4th amendment is quite clear. It was written in plain English, and ratified by a people who spoke plain English. The meaning of the 4th amendment, both in letter and in spirit is unambiguous. 220 years of perversion by a corrupt judiciary does not change that fact.
And make no mistake, there are many different bodies of law, including some that people either pretend don't exists, or wish didn't exist, such as the Law of War and national security law. They are distinct from ordinary criminal law.
And ALL of them are superseded by the Constitution, the highest law of the land. Any of those laws that conflict with the 4th amendment are invalid. Anyone who enforces a law in conflict with the 4th amendment is a criminal.
Now guess how many gigs either of them have put on here in Japan in the past 12 years.
David Bowie must not need your money very much then.
It's unfortunate for both me and the artists I would be willing to support that I don't live in the continental US or mainland Europe where most concerts seem to be held.
It's not unfortunate for the artists. They are doing well enough that they can leave money on the table by not performing in your country. Good for them, you don't have to feel sorry for them. Save your money and give it to an artist who needs it.
How many of them involve actions by the state to genuinely protect the citizenry except in an Orwellian fashion?
In reality, how many actions of the state genuinely protect the citizenry? Protecting the citizenry is nothing more than an excuse to get away with profiteering, cronyism, and ever expanding bureaucracy. e.g. Micheal Chertoff and his back scatter machines.
Moving from fiction to history and current events reveals that the difference between free societies using surveillance to protect themselves is in marked contrast to unfree societies
Free societies don't use surveillance at all.
Nobody went to prison for 10 years at hard labor for simply calling George Bush, "Chimpy McHitler," while he was President
When you rule as a strong man, your power is genuinely threatened by people making light of you. But when power is as systematicaly entrenched as it is in the US, it's no threat at all. What are we going to do, vote for the other guy whose policies are 99% identical? Those who control the political process in the US don't care which figurehead is president, as long as the rich keep getting richer.
The reason satire is tolerated in the US is because it can't change anything.
The two parties do in fact have meaningful differences between them in terms of policy and goals
Such as? Obama's biggest achievement was implementing Romneycare.
There are some areas of common agreement though
Such as complete disregard for the constitution.
Both parties uphold the American system of a Democratic Republic
Yes, both parties give lip service to nationalism.
Neither party wants to be the one that lets large numbers of Americans be killed through negligence or inaction against al Qaida.
Is it better to let large numbers of Americans be killed, and vast amounts of wealth be wasted, through action? The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have cost us more than 9/11 ever did. If we had a functioning democracy, we'd have a party that recognized that.
There is little doubt that the Bush administration would have defended DOMA before the courts instead of forcing the House to do it.
That is not a meaningful policy difference. That is a minor quality of life issue for a small fraction of the people. A major policy difference would be pushing for single payer health care, ending the war on drugs, bringing all the troops back home, prosecuting bankers for fraud, breaking up banks that are too big to fail, bailing out the people instead of the banks, etc., etc..
If you care about any of the above *meaningful* issues, you don't have a voice in America. Elections are about trifles, like DOMA, that distract us from the important issues on which the people can exert no control whatsoever.
When was the last time a soldier refused to obey an illegal order, and what happened to him? As far as I'm aware, only one refused to participate in the illegal war in Iraq, and he was court martialed.
The real problem is misuse, not use for finding terrorists.
Even if this program were 100% targeted towards terrorism, it would still violate the 4th amendment. That's a real problem. If the government needs increased surveillance powers to keep the people safe, it must amend its constitution. Anything else is a crime.
And Carlin's right. There is no creator that endows us with rights. Rights are fiction, but they are a useful fiction.
Consider what happens if we take the other position and assume that rights only exist as granted by the state. It immediately follows that anything the state does is OK, as long as it is legal. If the government passes a law that calls for execution of every jew, there's nothing wrong with that. The jews were breaking the law by being jewish, they don't have any right to be jewish except as granted by their government.
We know this is wrong. So we pretend that rights exist, since the alternative is too horrible to consider.
The fourth amendment's applicability is only certain in the minds of privacy advocates. Legally, the fourth amendment is generally held to mean that the government can't disrupt your life with its searches
That "legal" interpretation is the one that exists only in the minds of certain government lawyers. The 4th amendment is unequivocal. No warrants shall issue without specifically describing the places to be searched or the things to be seized. Generalized surveillance can never comply with this restriction.
The NSA's sniffing is legally comparable to a police dragnet checking door-to-door for a suspect - it infringes privacy, but the impact on any particular person's life isn't unreasonable.
That's also blatantly unconstitutional. If you don't have probable cause to believe the person you want is in my house, you don't get to search my house.
The "legal" arguments you are putting forth here are incompatible with the actual text of the Constitution. This needs to stop.
The real question is, what counts as violence? Sure, mugging a guy in a dark alley is violent. But so is voting for politicians that engage in wars of choice, or imprison hundreds of thousands of harmless individuals.
Most of the problems our society faces is not due to violent street criminals. It's due to ostensibly well meaning politicians making policy that hurts people. That's violence too.
Guns are life-saving devices when used by the police or military.
Only in the ideal case. In the real world, police and the military misuse guns regularly and cannot be trusted. I'm not arguing for disarmament, but eternal vigilance. It's all too often you read of someone calling the police because a loved one is suicidal, only to have the police kill the person they were called to protect. Or, you know, that whole war in Iraq thing. How many lives did that save?
No need in turning this into some partisan debate especially with the opposing party being supportive of the program.
Who said anything partisan? He's the chief executive, the buck stops with Obama. He's also Commander in Chief, and the NSA is an arm of the military. Obama is responsible for these crimes, just as Romney, McCain, or Bush would have been if they were president.
The program may be unconstitutional but Obama is not betraying our government for a foreign power.
The president is sworn to defend our constitution against its enemies, foreign and domestic. Those who support this program are domestic enemies of the constitution.
Personally, I think Snowden should return to the US to face charges of improperly disclosing classified information.
In an ideal world, yes he should. But in that ideal world, Obama would be impeached and imprisoned along with hundreds of civil servants who aided and abetted him. Until that happens, I don't see how you can blame Snowden for escaping from our oppressors.
If that mechanism exists, does it really achieve its goal?
Of course it doesn't. We're still violating the 4th amendment rights of every American. Obama has shown absolutely no remorse for his crimes. If being shamed publically can't convince Obama to obey the law, why would you think he would respond to secret complaints?
In the end, I think he would like to come home more than being (in)famous.
I agree with you here. If he thought there was a chance of him getting a fair trial, I bet he would come back. If you want to convince Snowden that he'll get a fair trial, make sure Obama gets a fair trial too.
See? The etc etc in your reply are the plentiful details where we'll continue to disagree.
Then what has he done that comes close to helping this country as much as he's hurt it by not prosecuting bank executives or war criminals from the Bush administration? Obamacare? That's a gift to the insurance industry.
There are many things that Obama can't do without the cooperation of Congress
But he does have complete control of the DOJ. The same DOJ who thinks people like Thomas Drake deserve years in prison, but people like John Corzine don't.
It proves that he's out of his league. Might be a great constitutional lawyer, but the moves I've seen say: very establishment.
The entire purpose of a Constitutional lawyer is to stretch the constitution until it means what your client wants it to mean. I don't know what you expected.
And like you said, Obama is a very establishment politician. Romney was also a very establishment politician. Nothing is going to change as long as you keep voting for the establishment.
Slashdot Mirror
Civilization is expensive. If it's not worth paying for a trial, it's not worth imprisoning someone. The cost of a jury trial should be incentive for the state to imprison as few people as possible.
You might be right. In either case, it's wrong to deprive him of his right to a trial. If he actually deserves a decade in prison, charge him with that and let a jury decide. If he actually deserves a year in prison, charge him with that and let a jury decide. That's how an actual justice system works. Twisting his arm until you get a confession is just barbarism.
By that token, everything the government does is "Extortion". Taxes included.
Yes, everything the government does is extortion. The whole purpose of government is to apply force to encourage certain behaviors. The difference is that we have a constitution that limits what the government is allowed to extort us into. The right to a trial by jury is one of those limits.
One was optional, the other was not. IRS Scandal was not at the option of those being scandalized by the IRS, while this one was. He had a chance to go to trial, he chose against it.
The tea party groups had a chance to avoid extra attention from the IRS, by forfeiting their right to free speech.
This fellow had a chance to avoid extra charges from the DOJ, by forfeiting his right to a trial.
The situations are exactly analogous.
Exercising your rights is appropriate when your rights are being trampled
Such as being denied a jury trial.
such as when you're being prosecuted for a crime that you didn't commit
You don't know, in a legal sense, whether someone is being prosecuted for a crime they didn't commit until they have been found guilty by a jury of their peers. If you can deny someone of a jury trial because you "know" they are guilty, what's the point of a jury trial at all?
Do you honestly think that any sane person would roll the dice on that when maybe facing 10+ years if the jury convicts?
That's exactly why plea bargains must be abolished. Because no sane person can exercise their right to a trial anymore.
He chose not to fight the charges.
What sort of choice is "exercise your rights and face decades in prison or forfeit your rights"?
Would you say the same if the goverment extorted people out of other rights? e.g. "you're not deprived of your right to bear arms. But if you choose to exercise that right we will retaliate against you"? Is that OK?
He could of plead not guilty.
In which case, he almost certainly would have been facing charges over a decade. That's extortion.
How about maybe he felt bad about what he did and actually plead guilty because he is in fact guilty. Maybe he decided to actually take personal responsibility for his actions and acknowledge in a court of law that what he did was wrong. Since your not his lawyer all you can do is speculate on his reasons for pleading guilty.
97% of federal defendents plead guilty. How credulous do you have to be to believe that the government is right 97% of the time, AND that every one of those defendents suddenly develops a conscience?
No, the only explanation for that kind of statistic is that people are being bullied out of their right to a trial.
Pleading guilty avoids certain un-pleasantries.
That's extortion. If someone were bullied by the government out of their right to criticize the government, would you say "Not criticizing the government avoids certain un-pleasantries"?
The whole point of having rights is that the government cannot make your life more unpleasant for exercising them. Getting extra charges tacked on for exercising your right to a trial is no more just than getting extra attention from the IRS for exercising your right to criticize the government.
Yet another American deprived of his right to a trial. No doubt they would have tried to send him to prison for a decade or more if he decided to exercise his rights.
A year in prison is probably a fair outcome if the story is as described. But he deserves to have a jury decide that, and not face absurd amounts of time in prison if he wants a jury trial.
That is the accumulated case law and legal precedents from 220+ years of jurisprudence
220 years of lies doesn't amount to truth.
There are many situations in which it isn't clear how either the law or the Constitution applies until it is tried in court
Yes, there are. This is not one of them. The 4th amendment is quite clear. It was written in plain English, and ratified by a people who spoke plain English. The meaning of the 4th amendment, both in letter and in spirit is unambiguous. 220 years of perversion by a corrupt judiciary does not change that fact.
And make no mistake, there are many different bodies of law, including some that people either pretend don't exists, or wish didn't exist, such as the Law of War and national security law. They are distinct from ordinary criminal law.
And ALL of them are superseded by the Constitution, the highest law of the land. Any of those laws that conflict with the 4th amendment are invalid. Anyone who enforces a law in conflict with the 4th amendment is a criminal.
The fact that the Supreme Court is thoroughly corrupt does not change the Constitution. It only makes our government illegitimate.
Now guess how many gigs either of them have put on here in Japan in the past 12 years.
David Bowie must not need your money very much then.
It's unfortunate for both me and the artists I would be willing to support that I don't live in the continental US or mainland Europe where most concerts seem to be held.
It's not unfortunate for the artists. They are doing well enough that they can leave money on the table by not performing in your country. Good for them, you don't have to feel sorry for them. Save your money and give it to an artist who needs it.
How many of them involve actions by the state to genuinely protect the citizenry except in an Orwellian fashion?
In reality, how many actions of the state genuinely protect the citizenry? Protecting the citizenry is nothing more than an excuse to get away with profiteering, cronyism, and ever expanding bureaucracy. e.g. Micheal Chertoff and his back scatter machines.
Moving from fiction to history and current events reveals that the difference between free societies using surveillance to protect themselves is in marked contrast to unfree societies
Free societies don't use surveillance at all.
Nobody went to prison for 10 years at hard labor for simply calling George Bush, "Chimpy McHitler," while he was President
When you rule as a strong man, your power is genuinely threatened by people making light of you. But when power is as systematicaly entrenched as it is in the US, it's no threat at all. What are we going to do, vote for the other guy whose policies are 99% identical? Those who control the political process in the US don't care which figurehead is president, as long as the rich keep getting richer.
The reason satire is tolerated in the US is because it can't change anything.
The two parties do in fact have meaningful differences between them in terms of policy and goals
Such as? Obama's biggest achievement was implementing Romneycare.
There are some areas of common agreement though
Such as complete disregard for the constitution.
Both parties uphold the American system of a Democratic Republic
Yes, both parties give lip service to nationalism.
Neither party wants to be the one that lets large numbers of Americans be killed through negligence or inaction against al Qaida.
Is it better to let large numbers of Americans be killed, and vast amounts of wealth be wasted, through action? The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have cost us more than 9/11 ever did. If we had a functioning democracy, we'd have a party that recognized that.
There is little doubt that the Bush administration would have defended DOMA before the courts instead of forcing the House to do it.
That is not a meaningful policy difference. That is a minor quality of life issue for a small fraction of the people. A major policy difference would be pushing for single payer health care, ending the war on drugs, bringing all the troops back home, prosecuting bankers for fraud, breaking up banks that are too big to fail, bailing out the people instead of the banks, etc., etc..
If you care about any of the above *meaningful* issues, you don't have a voice in America. Elections are about trifles, like DOMA, that distract us from the important issues on which the people can exert no control whatsoever.
When was the last time a soldier refused to obey an illegal order, and what happened to him? As far as I'm aware, only one refused to participate in the illegal war in Iraq, and he was court martialed.
The NYPD arrested 700 protesters for exercising their first amendment rights in Oct 2011.
Reward the artist by going to see a show and buying some merch. Nothing else really gets back to them in any significant amounts.
The real problem is misuse, not use for finding terrorists.
Even if this program were 100% targeted towards terrorism, it would still violate the 4th amendment. That's a real problem. If the government needs increased surveillance powers to keep the people safe, it must amend its constitution. Anything else is a crime.
And Carlin's right. There is no creator that endows us with rights. Rights are fiction, but they are a useful fiction.
Consider what happens if we take the other position and assume that rights only exist as granted by the state. It immediately follows that anything the state does is OK, as long as it is legal. If the government passes a law that calls for execution of every jew, there's nothing wrong with that. The jews were breaking the law by being jewish, they don't have any right to be jewish except as granted by their government.
We know this is wrong. So we pretend that rights exist, since the alternative is too horrible to consider.
The fourth amendment's applicability is only certain in the minds of privacy advocates. Legally, the fourth amendment is generally held to mean that the government can't disrupt your life with its searches
That "legal" interpretation is the one that exists only in the minds of certain government lawyers. The 4th amendment is unequivocal. No warrants shall issue without specifically describing the places to be searched or the things to be seized. Generalized surveillance can never comply with this restriction.
The NSA's sniffing is legally comparable to a police dragnet checking door-to-door for a suspect - it infringes privacy, but the impact on any particular person's life isn't unreasonable.
That's also blatantly unconstitutional. If you don't have probable cause to believe the person you want is in my house, you don't get to search my house.
The "legal" arguments you are putting forth here are incompatible with the actual text of the Constitution. This needs to stop.
The real question is, what counts as violence? Sure, mugging a guy in a dark alley is violent. But so is voting for politicians that engage in wars of choice, or imprison hundreds of thousands of harmless individuals.
Most of the problems our society faces is not due to violent street criminals. It's due to ostensibly well meaning politicians making policy that hurts people. That's violence too.
Guns are life-saving devices when used by the police or military.
Only in the ideal case. In the real world, police and the military misuse guns regularly and cannot be trusted. I'm not arguing for disarmament, but eternal vigilance. It's all too often you read of someone calling the police because a loved one is suicidal, only to have the police kill the person they were called to protect. Or, you know, that whole war in Iraq thing. How many lives did that save?
No need in turning this into some partisan debate especially with the opposing party being supportive of the program.
Who said anything partisan? He's the chief executive, the buck stops with Obama. He's also Commander in Chief, and the NSA is an arm of the military. Obama is responsible for these crimes, just as Romney, McCain, or Bush would have been if they were president.
The program may be unconstitutional but Obama is not betraying our government for a foreign power.
The president is sworn to defend our constitution against its enemies, foreign and domestic. Those who support this program are domestic enemies of the constitution.
Personally, I think Snowden should return to the US to face charges of improperly disclosing classified information.
In an ideal world, yes he should. But in that ideal world, Obama would be impeached and imprisoned along with hundreds of civil servants who aided and abetted him. Until that happens, I don't see how you can blame Snowden for escaping from our oppressors.
If that mechanism exists, does it really achieve its goal?
Of course it doesn't. We're still violating the 4th amendment rights of every American. Obama has shown absolutely no remorse for his crimes. If being shamed publically can't convince Obama to obey the law, why would you think he would respond to secret complaints?
In the end, I think he would like to come home more than being (in)famous.
I agree with you here. If he thought there was a chance of him getting a fair trial, I bet he would come back. If you want to convince Snowden that he'll get a fair trial, make sure Obama gets a fair trial too.
See? The etc etc in your reply are the plentiful details where we'll continue to disagree.
Then what has he done that comes close to helping this country as much as he's hurt it by not prosecuting bank executives or war criminals from the Bush administration? Obamacare? That's a gift to the insurance industry.
There are many things that Obama can't do without the cooperation of Congress
But he does have complete control of the DOJ. The same DOJ who thinks people like Thomas Drake deserve years in prison, but people like John Corzine don't.
It proves that he's out of his league. Might be a great constitutional lawyer, but the moves I've seen say: very establishment.
The entire purpose of a Constitutional lawyer is to stretch the constitution until it means what your client wants it to mean. I don't know what you expected.
And like you said, Obama is a very establishment politician. Romney was also a very establishment politician. Nothing is going to change as long as you keep voting for the establishment.
Its so in your face that it feels fake which ruins the story.
Do you feel the same way about Amy & Rory's in your face heterosexuality?