Omniquity

I am thoroughly disgusted by the US Government’s blatant and continued disregard for human rights in connection with the “war” on terror. The link below is but the latest example. Either we believe in them or we don’t. The excuses about Guantanamo or Bagram being outside the jurisdiction of this law or that treaty are lame and pathetic.

In addition to not doing what is right, every day we cede more moral high ground to those who are in fact our enemies. This can have nothing but bad long-term consequences.

President Cheney…er, Bush…may have started this, but Obama is fast pulling close in the blame department by perpetuating the practices. He needs to stand up and say clearly and directly that what we are doing is wrong, is against everything that America stands for, and that he is putting an end to it immediately. Not Guantanamo-style immediately, but immediately.

To the protestations that “this is more complicated than you think” or “these are dangerous men”, well, you should have thought about that before you started this mess. These are not new laws or moral principles that have been dumped on you in the middle of the conflict. They have been around for hundreds of years and you knew the rules going in. That you chose to ignore them and now find yourself in a dilemma is no one’s fault but your own. Instead of devoting your best legal minds (a chilling thought in itself) to developing clever legal arguments to flout the rules, you should have focused those minds on compliance instead. The time is past. Fix it.

(Source: The New York Times)

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Yesterday the US Supreme Court ruled that tracking a car for 28 days with a GPS device is a “search” for Fourth Amendment purposes, thus requiring the police to get a warrant before undertaking that type of activity. The grounds for decision were somewhat narrow, but comments by a few justices indicate they are prepared to apply 21st-century principles, not just “18th-century legal concepts[,] to 21st-century technologies.”

Thus there is a glimmer of hope that the Fourth Amendment still has meaning in the face of American law enforcement’s unrelenting assault on this aspect of citizens’ rights. Of late, law enforcement’s motto seems to be “if it’s possible it must be legal”. Fortunately, the Constitution is still interpreted to disagree. There is much in this line of jurisprudence yet to play out, but this is unquestionably a positive result.

(Source: The New York Times)

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Further to my earlier post on the death penalty, a case in point:

http://fieldnotes.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/09/21/7880191-two-versions-of-justice-in-troy-davis-case

Seven of the nine witnesses who testified against Davis later recanted or changed their statements. Several claimed police coercion. One of those witnesses, Jeffrey Sapp, said, “I got tired of them harassing me… I told them that Troy told me he did it, but it wasn’t true… I didn’t want to have any more problems with the cops, so I testified against Troy.”  Davis’ defense also claims a lack of physical evidence. The murder weapon was never recovered.  All of it was presented during previous appeals and attempts at a retrial. Those attempts failed.

I’m mystified how the police or prosecutors can look at this case and feel good about themselves or the jobs they are doing. This is not justice, it is the state wielding its ultimate power to satisfy some primal urge for revenge-any revenge. Shameful.

Coincidentally, if ever there were a case to be made for the death penalty, this would be it:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44613428/ns/us_news-crime_and_courts

A horrible, horrifying, remorseless crime. Did he “deserve” the death penalty? In some cosmic sense, probably yes. But there are equally horrible criminals who committed equally horrifying crimes who are not facing the death penalty. When a penalty so severe, so uncorrectable, so final, is administered so randomly, it cannot be seen as just.

(Source: tumblr.com)

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We Homo Sapiens tend to think that we are masters of our domain, and in many respects we are. But I have concluded there are some things that are simply beyond the present powers of humans to implement safely and fairly. For those things, the stakes are too high, the risks are too great, and our social systems are too weak. The product of those factors inevitably leads to disasters.

Nuclear power - disasters on a large scale. Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Fukushima. What’s next? Nuclear power is like playing with the ultimate fire. There are two main problems with nuclear power today. First, I don’t believe that the economics of operating a nuclear power plant will support the implementation of a truly safe design (if in fact one exists). Second, our political and legal systems are incapable of ensuring that a safe design would be implemented properly and that the resulting plant would be operated according to prescribed standards. There is too much money involved and money corrupts everything. The regulators are in the pocket of the industry and are toothless, which means regulations are both weak and weakly enforced. Greedy contractors and owners look for ways to cut costs and understaffed, underfunded regulators (because taxpayers are cheap, too) are incapable of discovering their shortcuts and mistakes, or of forcing corrections if they are discovered. The volatile mix means that a disaster of epic proportions is waiting to happen at every nuclear power plant.

The death penalty - disasters on a small scale. Justice derives its legitimacy from fairness. I’m convinced there is no justice system in the world that is capable of implementing the death penalty fairly. The problem, again, is money. How many rich people get the death penalty? In the US, virtually none. They have the resources to hire the best lawyers and bring the most pressure to bear on the (understaffed, underfunded) government. The death penalty is thus visited disproportionately on the poor. Even if everyone sentenced to death “deserved” it in some cosmic sense, it would be unfair because many other rich people who similarly deserved it are spared because they can essentially buy their way out of it. But far worse are the many people wrongly convicted and sentenced because they can’t afford to hire a competent lawyer. [I’m proud to say that my law school, Northwestern University, has established the Center on Wrongful Convictions (http://www.law.northwestern.edu/cwc/), founded by my classmate Larry Marshall (http://www.law.stanford.edu/directory/profile/40/), and that they have to date successfully overturned 13 such wrongful convictions that had resulted in death sentences. But the fact that the Center exists only supports my point.] If the legal system is incapable of administering a penalty fairly across the entire population of wrongdoers, and is incapable of administering the ultimate penalty with virtual 100% assurance of a proper conviction, then that penalty should not be part of the legal system.

My views on both nuclear power and the death penalty have changed over time. My original support for both them was predicated on beliefs that people generally conduct their affairs in good faith and that the justice system (in America, at least) could be relied on to achieve a fair result. Sadly, I’ve learned that when the stakes are high both of those beliefs have turned out to be wrong. The instinct for greed is overwhelming in big business and the only check on that instinct is correspondingly powerful regulation. When the regulation isn’t up to the task, bad things tend to happen (see, Global Financial Crisis). And the American justice system, which I still believe is the best in the world, is capable in theory of administering the death penalty fairly and correctly, but is incapable in practice. Thus, I believe nuclear power must be phased out as rapidly as possible and the death penalty should be abolished immediately.

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