Tag: law

Guilty for the crime of demanding a day in court:

The jury, which deliberated for more than two days, rejected a bunch of counts against Ravi, including the hate crime charges involving Clementi’s visitor (who testfied during the trial, identified only as M.B.). Because of this selectivity, one juror told the Trenton Star-Ledger, “You feel like justice has been served.” I don’t. Ravi is scheduled to be sentenced on May 21. In addition to a potentially lengthy prison sentence, he faces the likelihood of deportation to India, where he was born. Reprehensible as his conduct was, he does not deserve either of those punishments. Had Clementi not killed himself a few days after what he dismissively called Ravi’s “five sec peep,” leading to the completely unproven conjecture that Ravi’s spying drove him to suicide (a claim the prosecution never made during the trial), Ravi probably would not have faced criminal charges at all, let alone a possible 10-year sentence. Before the trial the prosecutors offered him a deal that involved no jail time and a chance to avoid deportation, which suggests even they do not believe he should be punished as severely as a violent felon. So in addition to all of the questionable crimes for which Ravi is about to be punished, there is one more: insisting on his right to a trial.

Setting aside the absurdity of the “bias intimidation” laws and the idea that the jury was capable of correctly reading, post mortem, the late roommate’s thoughts in the absence of any testimonial or documentary evidence, Jacob Sullum is right to note that the main reason Dharun Ravi is facing jail time is because he refused to be served up as the sacrificial victim demanded by the increasingly gay-influenced mainstream media.

While it makes practical sense to offer criminals far lighter sentencing in order to avoid the time and expense of trying them, it is a complete miscarriage of justice. Such a system rapidly devolves into one where even the completely innocent given massive incentive to plea guilty, not only because they avoid the risk of a disproportionate punishment, but also save themselves the expense of defending themselves.

Glenn Greenwald explains why the law demands hanging the anti-speech champions high on their own scaffold:

In June, 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its 6-3 ruling in the case of Holder v. Humanitarian Law. In that case, the Court upheld the Obama DOJ’s very broad interpretation of the statute that criminalizes the providing of “material support” to groups formally designated by the State Department as Terrorist organizations. The five-judge conservative bloc (along with Justice Stevens) held that pure political speech could be permissibly criminalized as “material support for Terrorism” consistent with the First Amendment if the “advocacy [is] performed in coordination with, or at the direction of, a foreign terrorist organization” (emphasis added). In other words, pure political advocacy in support of a designated Terrorist group could be prosecuted as a felony — punishable with 15 years in prison — if the advocacy is coordinated with that group.

This ruling was one of the most severe erosions of free speech rights in decades because, as Justice Breyer (joined by Ginsberg and Sotomayor) pointed out in dissent, “all the activities” at issue, which the DOJ’s interpretation would criminalize, “involve the communication and advocacy of political ideas and lawful means of achieving political ends.” The dissent added that the DOJ’s broad interpretation of the statute “gravely and without adequate justification injure[s] interests of the kind the First Amendment protects.” As Georgetown Law Professor David Cole, who represented the plaintiffs, explained, this was literally “the first time ever” that “the Supreme Court has ruled that the First Amendment permits the criminalization of pure speech advocating lawful, nonviolent activity.” Thus, “the court rule[d] that speech advocating only lawful, nonviolent activity can be made a crime, and that any coordination with a blacklisted group can land a citizen in prison for 15 years.”

In August of last year, The Christian Science Monitor‘s Scott Peterson published a detailed exposé about “a high-powered array of former top American officials” who have received “tens of thousands of dollars” from a designated Terrorist organization – the Iranian dissident group Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK) — and then met with its leaders, attended its meetings, and/or publicly advocated on its behalf. That group includes Rudy Giuliani, Howard Dean, Michael Mukasey, Ed Rendell, Andy Card, Lee Hamilton, Tom Ridge, Bill Richardson, Wesley Clark, Michael Hayden, John Bolton, Louis Freeh — and Fran Townsend.

For some reason, those who favor an expanded role for government never seem to understand that a government with the power to do things you want necessarily has the power to do a lot of things you don’t want. But it’s hardly surprising that Giuliani, Bolton, and Freeh are legally considered terrorists. They have been for a long time.

It should be interesting to see how National Review reacts to this news in light of their inexplicable cheerleading for the nonexistent political career of John Bolton.

John Derbyshire points out that New Jersey is dabbling with throwing out the rule of law on behalf of a sexually aberrant minority and doing so with the full blessing of Republican governor Chris Christie.

[A] year last September, Dharun Ravi and another freshman, Molly Wei, used a webcam to secretly watch Clementi kissing a young man Clementi had picked up…. Three days after that, Clementi committed suicide by jumping from the George Washington Bridge. Whether this had any connection at all to the webcam incident, is not known. That Dharun Ravi thought his prank might drive Clementi to suicide is preposterous; that he intended that result is preposterosity squared.

The homosexualists were up in arms none the less, and every damn fool politician in New Jersey joined in the hue and cry. Chris Christie, who I think less of every time he opens his fat mouth, quote: “I don’t know how those two folks are going to sleep at night, knowing that they contributed to driving that young man to that alternative.” They don’t know that, Governor, and neither do you, and neither does anyone. They played a trivial prank; Clement killed himself; cause and effect are not obvious, certainly not established to any fair evidentiary standards.

I find it no little amusing that a suicide three days after a minor, if potentially emotionally upsetting event is supposed to be conclusive evidence of “murder by reckless manslaughter” whereas when a doctor injects poison into an infant, who goes into seizures and dies within 12 hours, it is considered impossible to determine cause and effect and the very idea that the poison injection might be responsible is scoffed at as unscientific.

This is little more than a show trial, meant to publicly communicate the message that homosexuals are innocent victims of society and injuring their feelings by failing to approve their actions at all times is evil, bordering on criminal. The irony is that Dharun Ravi is obviously far less culpable for Tyler Clementi’s suicide than those individuals who repeatedly urged a psychologically unstable young man to not only indulge his abnormal sexual desires, but to identify himself by them.

I have been saying for years that there is no law in the USA, merely the pretense of law. Now the absence of justice in the so-called justice system is becoming readily apparent to everyone who is paying even casual attention:

Sarbanes-Oxley requires [John Corzine] as the CEO of a company to (1) guarantee that effective risk controls and rules are in place and (2) monitor their compliance. It renders failure to do so — that is, the old-fashioned “I didn’t know” defense that was routinely used after 2000-era failures in the Internet space — a felony.

Now of course Mr. Corzine is entitled to the presumption of innocence and he is entitled to a trial before being pronounced guilty, but the law on this point is clear: Executives, the CEO and CFO in particular, are required under Sarbanes-Oxley to factually know about matters such as this and they are required to attest to that knowledge — and the presence of appropriate and sufficient risk controls under penalty of felony indictment.

It appears that Mr. Corzine has admitted in front of a Congressional Committee that he does not know, and therefore this appears to be a prima-facie admission that he is in direct violation of this law.

If this is not dealt with on an expeditious fashion and the law is not enforced you have just seen proof on national television that there is no longer a rule of law in this nation of any substance.

The incredible thing is that the federal government is prosecuting and jailing hundreds of thousands of people for all sorts of drug “crimes”, but has no interest whatsoever in even arresting a man who admitted to stealing somewhere between $600 million and $1.2 billion dollars.

The USA may not be the most corrupt nation on Earth, but it is certainly among the most structurally corrupted. This is actually a more insidious form of corruption, because the law itself stands in open violation of Natural Law. We rightly condemn National Socialist Germany and Soviet Russia because their governments legalized murder, and while events haven’t yet reached that level of extremis, it should now be clear that the USA has legalized fraud and theft.

Granted it sounds rather like teaching fish to swim:

The University of Illinois acknowledged Monday that its law school reported and/or published inaccurate admissions data in six of the last 10 years. The university, in a prepared statement, said it had determined that Paul Pless, the law school’s former assistant dean for admissions and financial aid, who resigned last week, was solely responsible for the inaccuracies. It also found that the law school lacked adequate controls to prevent, deter and detect such actions, a situation that it said it is taking steps to correct….

The university’s investigation determined that the college reported and or published inaccurate LSAT and GPA data for the class of 2008 and for the classes of 2010 through 2014.

And they’re just heartsick about this ever so embarrassing rogue employee, gosh darn it! The truth is that ALL law schools blatantly lie about the employment prospects of their graduates. All of them. Every single one. And it would almost certainly be a major benefit to the economy and the nation if they were all shut down tomorrow.