Repeatedly in writing, Thomas and Scalia have questioned the integrity of their colleagues; and accused them of arrogance, lawlessness, license, illegitimate abuse of power, basing decisions on no more than their own personal values, contempt for the Constitution, sowing confusion rather than providing clarity, hypocritically pretending to defend the weak against the powerful while actually favoring the powerful at the expense of the weak, protecting “inconsequential” expression while disdaining the “heart” of the first amendment (the right to criticize officeholders), poisonous and pernicious racism and sexism, belief in black inferiority, placing at risk the lives of good innocent people in order to save the lives of the most vicious and depraved, placing the welfare of terrorists above the lives of soldiers combatting them, mandating “infanticide” (the barbaric killing of “human children”), and numerous other sins.
Murder and execution – Very distinct moral differences. New Mexico
Everyone should have justified sympathy for Muina Arthur, whose son Karl Eugene Chamberlain was executed. Chamberlain was executed because he raped and murdered 30 year old Felecia Prechtl.
However, she was in error, by saying: “I am the survivor of a murder victim,” meaning her son’s execution.
Death Penalty Costs: Maryland
SUMMARY: The cost errors, within the Majority Report, are so substantial that their cannot be considered reliable. Is it possible that a properly managed death penalty system could be less expensive than a true life sentence? Read on.
Some observations on the Urban Institute (UI) Cost of the Death Penalty in Maryland (1) as well as on the Majority Report.
Death Penalty Costs: California
NOTE: Clark is a Calif. ACLU activist and The California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice’s (CCFAJ) is a Calif. government commission.
Clark’s/CCFAJ’s cost review is wildly inaccurate and misleading. I doubt that there is any more veracity to the death row costs than with their lifer cost evaluations. None of Clark/CCFAJ’s numbers can be relied upon.
Clark/CCFAJ says: “In total, California’s death penalty system costs taxpayers $137 million per year. Contrast that with just $11 million per year if we replace the death penalty with permanent imprisonment.”
Pro-Murderer Mindset of The New York Times
A stunning 7,900-word New York Times article paints a murderer as a sympathetic victim, with little concern for murder victims and their loved ones. The pro-murderer movement hits the big time.
A recent 7,900-word New York Times article singularly illustrates the huge gulf between victims of barbaric crime and the zealous rationalizers of their victimizers. Strongly suggesting that a prisoner’s being “sorry” for the premeditated murder of both his parents should be “enough” to free him, the article would likely repulse most survivors of violent crime, including loved ones of murder victims and others who care about them.
Repulse, but not surprise.
JUDICIAL ACTIVISM AND IRRATIONAL SENTENCING
Something is painfully wrong when a person with no prior record can receive a harsh sentence, but someone serving life cannot be penalized for the most barbaric new crimes because he is already permanently incarcerated for the worst depravity.
With no criminal record, Thomas Prusik Parkin recently was sentenced to serve a prison term of 14 to 41 years. His crime included having dressed in his mother’s clothing to deceive others to believe she was still alive, so that he could maintain possession of her home, collect her social security checks ($44,000) and receive rental assistance ($65,000).
Carlos DeLuna: Another False Innocence Claim?
No one can, responsibly, accept what the Liebman/DeLuna report, ”Los Tocayos Carlos: Anatomy of a Wrongful Execution,” says, without fully fact checking it, as well as evaluating bias.
It is unwise to, blindly, accept any study.
High Court Humpty Dumptys
At least as far back as Woodrow Wilson, progressives and liberals have seen our anti-tyranny Constitution as an obstacle to imposing their self-presumed superior morality and wisdom on everyone else. So it was unremarkable when, in February, The New York Times disgorged an article trashing the Constitution as an unworthy model for the rest of the world. Remarkable is what was omitted from the responses, which focused on Justice Ginsburg’s urging drafters of new foreign constitutions not to consult the one she took an oath to defend. She and others complained that it did not provide sufficient “rights.”
Unanswered by various critics was law professor Sanford Levinson’s claim that “the U.S. Constitution is the most difficult to amend of any … in the world[.]”
Actually, because justices must be lawyers, the Constitution is easy to amend.
The Odd Victim Sympathies of Liberal Justices – What Makes Activists Mad — and What Doesn’t
An unbridgeable values chasm exists between victims of the worst crimes and the zealous devotees of their depraved victimizers.
Last month, 18-year-old Alyssa Bustamante, protected from capital punishment by five U.S. Supreme Court justices undemocratically imposing their unrepresentative moral values, was sentenced to mislabeled “life in prison” for the October 2009 murder of 9-year-old neighbor Elizabeth Olten. Four months before that murder, the Court devoted 44 pages to the “embarrassment” of Savana Redding, a 13-year-old searched for illicit drugs.
These and other cases graphically shed light on unelected justices who run our lives.
Crime Without Punishment
In common parlance, “getting away with murder” is a metaphor for doing something wrong without suffering deserved adverse consequences. Getting away with actual murder has meant that the killer did not get caught, or else he avoided conviction or appropriate punishment thanks to a good lawyer (often taking advantage of judge-concocted rules favoring guilty defendants).
Dudley Sharp on the Thom Hartmann show – Should the death penalty be abolished?
Dudley Sharp talks on the Thom Hartman show about the death penalty on Amnesty International’s “International Day of Action for Troy Davis” day. Troy Davis is the convicted murderer of Officer MacPhain in Georgia who was recently put to death.
THE ELITE RULING CLASS WAR AGAINST VICTIMS
INTRODUCTION
Because some occupations are hazardous, risking injury and death, Congress enacted the 1970 Occupational Safety and Health Act to protect workers. While no sane person would advocate avoidable unsafe working conditions for the law-abiding, this sensible view has been grotesquely perverted into an illustration of Justice Benjamin Cardozo’s famous reminder (51) of “the tendency of a principle to expand itself to the limit of its logic.”
Troy Davis: Worldwide anti death penalty deceptions, rightly, failed
“Smoke and mirrors” – that is what the federal judge called Davis’ innocence claims, after he held the innocence evidentiary hearing ordered by the US Supreme Court.
Troy Davis: misleading anti death penalty campaign
Based upon the evidence presented in the June, 2010 hearing, it was clear that the federal district court would rule against Davis and that SCOTUS would not intervene.
This shouldn’t have come as a surprise to anyone who knew the facts of the case.
Anti death penalty folks, were, of course, fed a bunch of nonsense by their leadership and they simply accepted it.
1) Debunking the Myths Surrounding The Murder of Officer Mark MacPhail Sr. and the Conviction of Troy Anthony Davis”
http://www.fop9.net/markmacphail/debunkingthemyths.cfm
2) Innocence claims will offer no reprieve for Troy Davis
Dudley Sharp, 6/25/10
Based upon the media reports, alone, of the two day hearing of June 2010, just as I suspect Davis’ attorneys have known all along, the appellate case cannot prevail in overturning the findings that Troy
Davis is guilty of the murder of Police Officer Mark Allen MacPhail.
What happened in the two day hearing was very ordinary, if you are aware of anti death penalty nonsense. (1)
THE MODERN ELITE RULING CLASS NOTION OF JUSTICE
THE MODERN ELITE RULING CLASS NOTION OF JUSTICE Cruel and Unusual Punishment of Victims By Lester Jackson, Ph.D. DOWNLOAD FULL ARTICLE
Repeal of death penalty backfires in Illinois
“Jitka Vesel, 36, was stalked and murdered by a rejected boyfriend from Canada who, before killing her, did research to determine that Illinois had ended the death penalty, according to DuPage County State’s Attorney Robert Berlin.” (1)
Linda Greenhouse’s Hatchet Job On Justice Scalia.
In a vitriolic column employing the very style for which she attacks Justice Anonin Scalia, Linda Greenhouse repeats the old banal “bad-boy” narrative of a long hostile media. This unanswered charge is misleading in the extreme.
What Greenhouse Wants Readers To Believe
Greenhouse asserts Scalia utterly lacks “pragmatism,” is “angry,” “enraged,” “furious,” “inflammatory,” “bomb-throwing,” “intemperate,” “self-indulgen[t],” “bullying,” and prone to “insults,” “put-downs,” “lashing out,” publicly “thrashing…a junior colleague” and, indeed, “undermin[ing] the court’s … legitimacy.”
Does Forensic Science Comm. have any jurisdiction in Willingham case?
Regarding the jurisdiction, by time, of the Texas Forensic Science Commission in the Willingham case:
It seems clear that the TFSC has no jurisdiction in this case. But, that is why we have AG opinions.
The question in not why the TFSC has submitted questions to the Texas AG for his opinion, now, but why and how the TFSC could have spent all of the time, money and other resources on the Willingham case, without being responsible enough to get an opinion from the AG, prior to all of those expenditures.
Rebuttal to Barbara Keshen, “On death penalty, state bucks the trend”, Concord Monitor (12/31/10)
Ms. Keshen, staff attorney, New Hampshire Civil Liberties Union, needs to review the evidence, again.
A rebuttal to Ms. Keshan’s four points.
1) countries with no death penalty law: 95
countries with the death penalty: 102 (1)
The One-Sided Media Coverage of Justice Stevens.
Last April’s retirement announcement by Justice John Paul Stevens occasioned an outpouring of adulation: Champion of the Powerless. The Greatest Justice, etc. His absence from the new Supreme Court term renewed the love fest, evoking honor and award for his “open mind.” Liberal judicial activists depict him as an authoritative hero and saint (most recently: 60 Minutes’ Scott Pelley and The New York Times’ Adam Liptak).