This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Category: Legal

  • A bad day for the law

    Well, it was a bad day for the law as I see it, anyway;

    A judge threw out the charge of piracy against the 6 Somalis the US Navy fished out of the sea and shipped back to Virginia for trial;

    “The court finds that the government has failed to establish that any unauthorized acts of violence or aggression committed on the high seas constitutes piracy as defined by the law of nations,” Jackson wrote in granting the defense motion to dismiss.

    There are seven more charges of stuff, but piracy brought a mandatory life sentence which would have been nice.

    A link from MEW tells us that a Missouri judge legislated from the bench and nullified a 2006 Missouri law meant to keep the Westboro Baptist Church crowd away from funerals.

    Missouri legislators passed two laws in 2006 in response to protests at servicemembers’ funerals by members of Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kan. The church contends the deaths are God’s punishment for the U.S. tolerating homosexuality.

    U.S. District Judge Fernando Gaitan ruled the laws violate the right of free speech guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.

    Of course the bereaved have no right to express themselves all over the heads and shoulders of the Westboro fucks.

    From the Ninth Circus, (yes, I know it’s Circuit…jeez) we discover yet again that lying about your military service is free speech. Gabriel Malor of Ace of Spades quotes from the decision;

    The Act therefore concerns us because of its potential for setting a precedent whereby the government may proscribe speech solely because it is a lie. … The sad fact is, most people lie about some aspects of their lives from time to time. Perhaps, in context, many of these lies are within the government’s legitimate reach. But the government cannot decide that some lies may not be told without a reviewing court’s undertaking a thoughtful analysis of the constitutional concerns raised by such government interference with speech.

    I wrote about Xavier Alvarez more than two years ago. He claimed he was in the Marines and was awarded a Medal of Honor while campaigning for the office of water commissioner. He was not a Marine, so it follows that he wasn’t awarded any medals.

  • It’s About #$&*^% Time!

    The house “ethics” Committee voted yesterday to put Charlie Rengal on trial for ethics violations.  Not the speediest of events, the trial will be in about two months.  On the other hand, it’s a lot faster than the decision to try Rangel at all.

    Rangel (D-N.Y.) has been under the House ethics committee’s microscope since early 2008 after it was reported that he may have used his House position to benefit his financial interests. Two of the most serious inquiries have focused on Rangel’s failure to declare $239,000 to $831,000 in assets on his disclosure forms, and on his effort to raise money for a private center named after him at City College of New York using his congressional letterhead.

    So, in 2008 it was widely known that he was using his position in congress for his own gain, but allowed to stay there for two friggin’ years?  Well, at least he wasn’t taking gifts from people with business before congress or in a powerful position where he could inflict damage on the country.  Oh, wait, my bad.

    In March, Rangel reluctantly stepped down as chairman of the Ways and Means Committee — a week after the ethics panel ruled in a separate case that he had broken congressional gift rules by accepting trips to conferences in the Caribbean that were financed by corporate interests. The panel said that, at a minimum, Rangel’s staff knew about the corporate backing for the 2007 and 2008 trips — and that the congressman was therefore responsible.

    My question is why isn’t Rangel facing charges in federal court instead of the house?  Of course, he is in good company.

    It has been eight years since the House last opened such proceedings against a member. That happened when Jim Traficant (D-Ohio) rejected the ethics committee’s findings that he violated rules. He was later expelled by his peers. Before that, the last member expelled was Michael Myers (D-Pa.), removed by his colleagues in 1980 as a result of the Abscam scandal.

    We can only hope that a similar fate awaits Charlie.  At 80, I doubt he can launch a recovery effort like Traficant has.

  • Hegseth on Kagan

    Out buddy, Pete Hegseth, the executive director of Vets For Freedom, takes on Elena Kagan, the Supreme Court nominee, in the pages of the Wall Street Journal this morning on her contention that she’s friendly towards the military;

    At her hearing on June 29, Ms. Kagan testified that “The military had full access to our students at all times.” To the contrary, Ms. Kagan persistently blocked its access to the law school’s Office of Career Services and the wide array of services it provides. Almost all students use this office to identify employers, so it’s hard to imagine how Ms. Kagan believes the military had “full access.”

    Moreover, she encouraged students in speeches to protest, and obstruct, the presence of military recruiters. The Army called her actions “stonewalling;” I call them downright discriminatory.

    Her backers say Ms. Kagan supports the military because she has praised them publicly and hosted dinners for veterans. A handful of veterans have defended her, and I concede that she has had good things to say about our troops, which I appreciate. But actions always speak louder than words. Ms. Kagan’s actions toward recruiters while wars were raging trump her rhetorical support.

    Kagan is like all liberals who pay lip service to their support of the troops, but their actions don’t match their noise. We’re going to get Kagan on the court (thanks Lindsay Graham), the only thing we can do now is replace the guy who appoints judges.

  • 11 Russian spies

    Of course, that is the story that’ll suck the air out of everything else this week. The Holder Justice Department finally found some foreigners that they’ll round up and announce their evil intentions on the TV. The Washington Post reports;

    The operation, referred to by U.S. investigators as “the Illegals program,” was aimed at placing spies in nongovernmental jobs, such as at think tanks, where they could glean information from policymakers and Washington-connected insiders without attracting attention.

    Whether it succeeded was unclear Monday. Federal law enforcement officials portrayed their operation as a spectacular counterintelligence success that uncovered a group of spies capable of doing great damage to U.S. national security. “I can’t remember a case where we’ve been able to arrest 10 intelligence officers from a foreign country in one fell swoop,” one official said. “This network in the United States has now been completely compromised.”

    But other officials said the Russian network appears to have accomplished little, if any, of its espionage aims, even though some of the suspects had lived in this country for up to two decades.

    That’s all well and good, three administrations unraveled the spy ring – but where were they when Nidal Hassan was making noise while he was in uniform making disparaging remarks about the US operations in the Middle East – just before he shot a bunch of soldiers in Fort Hood? Where were they when Carlos Bledsoe was making trips to the Mideast for training before he shot two soldiers in Arkansas?

    Russian spies are easy – two people named Murphy speaking Russian to each other. How hard was that?

  • Gun rights for everyone

    The Supreme Court has decided that Americans all have gun rights, not just Americans who don’t live Chicago, New York City or DC. This from the Washington Post;

    The Supreme Court held Monday that Americans have the right to own a gun for self-defense anywhere they live, advancing a recent trend by the John Roberts-led bench to embrace gun rights.

    By a 5-4 vote, the justices cast doubt on handgun bans in the Chicago area, but signaled that some limitations on the Constitution’s “right to keep and bear arms” could survive legal challenges.

    See that? It’s John Roberts who guarantees our right to own firearms, not the Constitution, somehow. The fact of the matter is that these recent cases are the only cases that have made it to the Supreme Court in recent years so that the Supreme Court could actually have a voice in the matter. It has nothing to do with John Roberts, it has to do with the law.

    It does bother me, however that the four dissenting voices are so stupid, though. The law says what it says and denying it isn’t a matter of opinion – it’s a matter of illiteracy. Do they have a literacy requiremnet in the Supreme Court? Thise four couldn’t even bring themselves to get this much right;

    Monday’s decision did not explicitly strike down the Chicago area laws. Instead, it ordered a federal appeals court to reconsider its ruling. But it left little doubt that the statutes eventually would fall.

    Still, Alito noted that the declaration that the Second Amendment is fully binding on states and cities “limits (but by no means eliminates) their ability to devise solutions to social problems that suit local needs and values.”

    Leftists are so doctrinal and cleave so tightly to their dogma, not a sliver of daylight or a moment’s rational thought gets between them. If the decision was to issue every American a gun, they might have a point, but to deny that all Americans have the same rights is just ignorant. Let’s hope one of the five don’t die before 2013.

  • 1 man, six votes

    Toothlessdawg sends us this article about a judicial decision to correct a nonexitent problem;

    Voters in Port Chester, 25 miles northeast of New York City, are electing village trustees for the first time since the federal government alleged in 2006 that the existing election system was unfair. The election ends Tuesday and results are expected late Tuesday.

    Although the village of about 30,000 residents is nearly half Hispanic, no Latino had ever been elected to any of the six trustee seats, which until now were chosen in a conventional at-large election. Most voters were white, and white candidates always won.

    Federal Judge Stephen Robinson said that violated the Voting Rights Act, and he approved a remedy suggested by village officials: a system called cumulative voting, in which residents get six votes each to apportion as they wish among the candidates. He rejected a government proposal to break the village into six districts, including one that took in heavily Hispanic areas.

    Furano and his wife, Gloria Furano, voted Thursday.

    “That was very strange,” Arthur Furano, 80, said after voting. “I’m not sure I liked it. All my life, I’ve heard, `one man, one vote.’”

    First of all, why is it so distressing that an Hispanic person hasn’t been elected to the council? And if that’s the goal, instead of giving everyone six votes, why don’t they just appoint an Hispanic to the council and do away with all the camouflage to subvert voters rights to elect the most qualified candidate?

  • Holder=coward

    After sending weeks disparaging the new law in Arizona allowing law enforcement officers to check the immigration status of arrestees, Attorney General Eric Holder, according to Stephen Dinan of the Washington Times, admitted yesterday to a Congressional panel that he hasn’t even read the law yet;

    “I’ve just expressed concerns on the basis of what I’ve heard about the law. But I’m not in a position to say at this point, not having read the law, not having had the chance to interact with people are doing the review, exactly what my position is,” Mr. Holder told the House Judiciary Committee.

    This weekend Mr. Holder told NBC’s “Meet the Press” program that the Arizona law “has the possibility of leading to racial profiling.” He had earlier called the law’s passage “unfortunate,” and questioned whether the law was unconstitutional because it tried to assume powers that may be reserved for the federal government.

    The video;

    Dinan reports in another Washington Times article that Holder is also reticent about pointing out that many of the attempted attacks on the US are easily blamed on radical Islam;

    “There are a variety of reasons why people do these things. Some of them are potentially religious,” Mr. Holder told the committee Thursday, though he would not go further than saying people who hold radical views may have “had an ability to have an impact” on Faisal Shahzad, the man the Justice Department says tried to detonate a car bomb in Times Square.

    “Potentially religious” is his escape hatch for the Left – so he can blame “right wing extremists” that don’t seem to be able to mount an attack in the last seventeen years. Holder is a coward who has been cowed by the political Left and his boss. The attorney general is supposed to act independently of politics and his boss – Holder can’t do that. He should resign before someone dies because of his incompetence.

  • ACLU, law community undermine our security

    If you haven’t read Debra Burlingame’s article at the Wall Street Journal entitled “Gitmo’s Indefensible Lawyers “, you really need to read the whole thing. Ms. Burlingame recounts the story of lawyers from Paul, Weiss legal firm’s distribution of Amnesty International-manufactured propaganda to their clients in order to undermine order and discipline among their clients in Guantanamo. The same propaganda that Anthony Camerino endorses for his own work with ACLU.

    Majeed Abdullah Al Joudi, the detainee in whose cell the brochure was first found, told guards he received the brochure from his lawyer. An investigation by JTF-GTMO personnel revealed that Julia Tarver Mason, a partner at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, had sent it to Al Joudi and eight of the firm’s other detainee clients through “legal mail”—a designation for privileged lawyer-client communications that are exempt from screening by security personnel. Worse, the investigation showed that Ms. Mason’s clients passed it to other detainees not represented by Paul, Weiss lawyers. In all, more than a dozen detainees received a copy.

    The Amnesty International brochure, handed out at a human rights conference in London, was a political advocacy screed in clear violation of that order, which was formulated to protect force security. Maj. Gen. Hood made a command decision. He banned the Paul, Weiss lawyers from access to Guantanamo. The DOJ notified the firm.

    In fact, from al Qaeda’s perspective, the Amnesty International brochure was better than the Manchester Manual. It cued detainees that the abuses at Abu Ghraib “were not an aberration.” The brochure told them that images from the Iraqi prison were consistent with “numerous allegations of torture and ill-treatment reported from detention centres in Afghanistan, Iraq and at Guantanamo Bay.”

    The message to the detainees was clear: If you want to claim you are being tortured, here is a vast menu of examples from which to choose.

    And of course, it can only get worse under the current administration who are only too willing to capitulate to their friends, the litigation-hungry cretins at the powerful law firms.

    Other incidents listed in the FOIA material included: a lawyer who was caught in the act of making a hand-drawn map of a detention camp’s layout, including guard towers; a lawyer who sent a letter to his detainee client telling him that “we cannot depend on the military to do the right thing” and conveying his message of support to other detainees who were not his clients; lawyers who posted photos of Guantanamo security badges on the Internet; lawyers who provided news outlets with “interviews” of their clients using questions provided in advance by the news organization; and a lawyer who gave his client a list of all the detainees.

    Makes you wonder why we even allow these imbeciles near detainees, doesn’t it?

    ADDED: At Ace of Spades, DrewM sets the lawyers of the John Adams Project straight.