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Faulty investigation leads to execution

Discussion in 'Sports and News' started by buckweaver, Aug 26, 2009.

  1. Pancamo

    Pancamo Active Member

    The arson investigators should be executed. Sickening and sad.
     
  2. deskslave

    deskslave Active Member

    The main investigator's already dead. Wouldn't be opposed to digging him up and slapping him around a few times though.
     
  3. Nice to see one of our Supreme Court justices on record as basically saying, even if this does happen, too bad, so sad.

    Putting the word "actually" in quotation marks is a particularly nice touch, Antonin.
     
  4. waterytart

    waterytart Active Member

    Many people don't understand how defense attorneys can represent clients whom they know to be guilty. The rote response is, "There was a trial. There was a verdict. The system worked."

    Fewer people seem to question that prosecutors subscribe to the same mindset. "It's an adversarial system. I was just doing my job."

    Given that prosecutors have a responsibility to truth not shared by defense counsel, their jobs are not mirror images. Too few prosecutors get that.
     
  5. deskslave

    deskslave Active Member

    An outcropping, I think, of the fact that 'innocent until proven guilty' is a filthy lie in much of the American criminal justice system, and certainly in Texas.
     
  6. The Big Ragu

    The Big Ragu Moderator Staff Member

    The problem is this isn't a judicial issue. It's a legislative one. When you rely on the courts to make the laws, or in this case, put a good housekeeping of approval on the law, this is what you get. You don't just get the judicial activism that you 'actually' like, from the judges whose politics agree with yours (justice shouldn't be politicized). You get the stuff that you don't like, too. There is nothing unconstitutional about the death penalty, unless you want to start parsing "cruel and unusual punishment." So the answer isn't to leave it to a judge (in modern-America, judges aren't judges; they are unelected legislators who follow their own agendas, not what the Constitution 'actually' says). The answer, if the majority people think the death penalty is wrong (and unfortunately they don't) is to either get the Constitution amended or to have the people we elected (legislators) get rid of those death penalty laws. Scalia should never figure in the equation. But this is a reap what you sow thing; because of how ass-backward our courts have become.
     
  7. BTExpress

    BTExpress Well-Known Member

    It certainly doesn't make sense taken at face value.

    The "presumed innocent" defendant (often) wakes up in a jail cell and returns to the cell when court is adjourned for the day.

    How can anyone be expected to abide by the court's words, when its actions say the opposite?
     
  8. Scalia thinks the death penalty is constitutional? Fine.

    Mocking death row inmates by putting "actually" in quotation marks is beyond the bounds of good taste.
     
  9. PopeDirkBenedict

    PopeDirkBenedict Active Member

    Why?
     
  10. The Big Ragu

    The Big Ragu Moderator Staff Member

    I'm not sure he intended to mock anyone, but I agree it came off poorly. I am against the death penalty and don't see why anyone would be cavalier when it comes to people living or being put to death.

    I think you realize, though, I was saying Antonin Scalia should be irrelevant in the discussion. He should be irrelevant in 99 percent of the discussions he is a part of. Antonin Scalia shouldn't be deciding affirmative action, abortion, the death penalty or whether a kid with drugs in his locker can stand on his head in front of a Christmas tree while drug-sniffing dogs bark at him. Neither should Stephen Breyer. We elect people for those things--which aren't even remotely touched on in the Constitution--but the courts have become second legislatures. Unelected ones.

    Most of the stuff that goes before the Supreme Court today isn't remotely addressed by the Constitution. But we have nine justices with social agendas making up BS to rationalize the laws they make from the bench. In many ways, they are more powerful as legislators than our elected Congressmen are. They can't point to this amendment or that amendment in many decisions anymore, and most of the time, they don't bother to even try to ground what they do in the actual Constitution. No one forces them to.

    It's how ass-backward we became at some point last century, that we turned the judiciary into an unelected legislature because people didn't like the laws the actual legislatures (from the people we elected to represent us) were giving us. Instead of addressing it as a legislative issue, though, they created the mess we have today. Once you opened the barn door, the horses got out. And along with the judicial activism you might actually like, you now have to accept the judicial activism (Scalia's brand) you don't like.

    Justice isn't justice or upholding the actual Constitution. It's politics and social agendas and judges having more power than elected legislators. Throw checks and balances out. It is one way our country has gotten slightly derailed.
     
  11. 2muchcoffeeman

    2muchcoffeeman Well-Known Member

    Update:

    Texas Gov. Rick Perry, the man who didn't know that his state---indeed, the entire nation---just went through a long recession, and also the man who refused to delay Cameron Todd Willingham's execution for 30 days in order to examine new evidence, has replaced the head of the commission which was/is going to review the investigation. The new commission chairman, one of the most hard-line conservative prosecutors in Texas, promptly canceled the hearing.

    http://tinyurl.com/ye69qtb (link to USA Today's On Deadline blog)
    http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/latestnews/stories/100109dntexperryarson.1cf2d2edb.html
     
  12. sportsguydave

    sportsguydave Active Member

    I couldn't get the link to open. But it's not surprising that Perry would try to just make the issue go away. Hopefully people down there will hold his feet to the fire. But I'm not holding my breath.
     
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