tagged w/ Antonin Scalia
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"Conservative justices repeatedly spouted views closely resembling the tweets and talking points issued by organizations of the sort funded by the Koch brothers."
http://veracitystew.com/?p=33064"Conservative justices repeatedly spouted views closely resembling the tweets and... more
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The U.S. Supreme Court has officially scheduled oral arguments regarding the constitutionality of President Obama’s landmark Affordable Care Act, particularly the healthcare reform’s individual mandate. The announcement confirms earlier speculation that the high court would issue a ruling on the healthcare law next year, during the heat of the 2012 presidential campaign.
http://veracitystew.com/2011/12/19/supreme-court-schedules-three-day-review-of-healthcare-reform/The U.S. Supreme Court has officially scheduled oral arguments regarding the... more
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The NFIB is asking the high court not only to weigh in on the law’s mandate, but also whether the entire law should fall if that provision is deemed unconstitutional. The 11th Circuit ruled against the plaintiffs on that issue and agreed with the Obama administration that the mandate is severable from the rest of the law.
http://veracitystew.com/2011/09/28/supreme-court-officially-petitioned-to-review-healthcare-law/The NFIB is asking the high court not only to weigh in on the law’s mandate, but... more
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This American life of ours has long been pro-violence and anti-sex, unless the two can be merged so that violence is the dominant theme. The U.S. Supreme Court reaffirmed that historical record on Monday in declaring California’s ban on the sale of violent video games to minors unconstitutional while continuing to deny constitutional protection to purely prurient sexual material for either minors or adults.
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/yes_to_violence_no_to_sex_20110629/This American life of ours has long been pro-violence and anti-sex, unless the two can... more
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A recent article in the New York Times asks a question often heard by the Innocence Project: How many people convicted in the United States are innocent?
Observers from across the criminal justice system have weighed in.
Samuel Gross, a law professor at the University of Michigan, has found the rate of wrongful conviction in death row cases to be somewhere between 2.3 and 5 percent.
A recent review of biological evidence in 31 randomly chosen Virginia cases led to DNA testing that could yield results in 22 cases, two of which resulted in exonerations –- a small sample size but an indicator that the rate could be as high as 9 percent.
A couple of years ago, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia cited questionable and discredited calculations from Oregon Prosecutor Joshua Marquis (who divided the number of DNA exonerations by the total number of felony convictions) to make his claim that the wrongful conviction rate is .027 percent. As Gross points in a recent law review article: "By this logic, we could estimate the proportion of baseball players who’ve used steroids by dividing the number of major league players who've been caught by the total of all baseball players at all levels: major league, minor league, semipro, college and Little League -- and maybe throwing in football and basketball players as well."
The Times article notes that while there is disagreement about which calculations might help suggest the magnitude of the problem, there is a consensus that nobody really knows how many innocent people are in prison –- and we may never know.
The Innocence Project has always said that DNA exonerations are just the tip of the iceberg, since only 5-10% of all criminal cases involve biological evidence that can be subjected to DNA testing (and even in those cases, the evidence is often lost, destroyed or too degraded to yield results in DNA testing). But the 215 wrongful convictions overturned to date by DNA testing illustrate the broader causes of wrongful conviction and show the need for reforms that can prevent injustice. As the Times article says:
"… A few general lessons can be drawn nonetheless. Black men are more likely to be falsely convicted of rape than are white men, particularly if the victim is white. Juveniles are more likely to confess falsely to murder. Exonerated defendants are less likely to have serious criminal records. People who maintain their innocence are more likely to be innocent. The longer it takes to solve a crime, the more likely the defendant is not guilty."
Read the Times article at the link:A recent article in the New York Times asks a question often heard by the Innocence... more
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"In the case of Virginia v. Moore, the high court saw no violation of David Lee Moore’s Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, even though his arrest was the result of a series of Keystone Cop-like miscues and an outright violation of Virginia law.
Here’s how it played out: On Feb. 20, 2003, police officers received a radio call that a man known as “Chubs” was operating an automobile on a suspended license. Apparently, one of the officers knew that David Lee Moore went by the nickname of “Chubs.” The officers pulled over Moore’s vehicle and determined that his license had indeed been suspended. Under Virginia law, driving with a suspended license is not an arrestable offense, and the officers were obliged to issue him a citation for a future court appearance rather than take him into custody. Disregarding this clear legal mandate, however, the officers arrested Moore.
They took him to his hotel room where they searched him and found crack cocaine and $516 in cash....
But the most important fact in this case — which was ignored by the Virginia courts, the Supreme Court and the few media accounts of this litigation — is that David Lee Moore is African-American. (Portsmouth, Va., is a city of slightly more than 100,000 people, more than 50 percent of whom are black.)""In the case of Virginia v. Moore, the high court saw no violation of David Lee... more
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