In a landmark ruling that affirms the right of individuals to own guns for self-defense, the Supreme Court stuck down laws that ban individual ownership of guns.
It’s nice to know that the right of self-defense still has some value in this country.
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was interviewed and profiled on 60 Minutes last night. He calls his judicial philosophy “originalism.”
At 72, Justice Scalia is still a maverick, championing a philosophy known as “orginalism,” which means interpreting the Constitution based on what it originally meant to the people who ratified it over 200 years ago.
Scalia has no patience with so-called activist judges, who create rights not in the Constitution - like a right to abortion - by interpreting the Constitution as a “living document” that adapts to changing values.
Asked what’s wrong with the living Constitution, Scalia tells [Lesley] Stahl, “What’s wrong with it is, it’s wonderful imagery and it puts me on the defensive as defending presumably a dead Constitution.”
“It is an enduring Constitution that I want to defend,” he says.
Scalia makes a convincing argument that in a democracy like ours, the people through their representatives should make laws, not judges sitting in courts.
“I’m surprised at how many people really, really hate you. These are some things we’ve been told: ‘He’s evil.’ ‘He’s a Neanderthal.’ ‘He’s going to drag us back to 1789.’ They’re threatened by what you represent and what you believe in,” Stahl remarks.
“These are people that don’t understand what my interpretive philosophy is. I’m not saying no progress. I’m saying we should progress democratically,” Scalia says.
Back at the Oxford Union, Scalia told the students, “You think there ought to be a right to abortion? No problem. The Constitution says nothing about it. Create it the way most rights are created in a democratic society. Pass a law. And that law, unlike a Constitutional right to abortion created by a court can compromise. It can…I was going to say it can split the baby! I should not use… A Constitution is not meant to facilitate change. It is meant to impede change, to make it difficult to change.”
[...]
“The public sense of you is that [you] make your decisions based on your social beliefs,” Stahl says, with Scalia shaking his head. “That is the perception.”
“I’m a law-and-order guy. I mean, I confess I’m a social conservative, but it does not affect my views on cases,” Scalia says. “On the abortion thing for example, if indeed I were, you know, trying to impose my own views, I would not only be opposed to Roe versus Wade, I would be in favor of the opposite view, which the anti-abortion people would like adopted, which is to interpret the Constitution to mean that a state must prohibit abortion.”
Scalia says he’s against that.
Scalia says that his social conservatism doesn’t effects his views on cases. He later says that his Catholicism doesn’t effect how he rules. Yet he admits to having an “interpretive philosophy” that people don’t understand. It would be of no concern to them except that it is the driving force behind his rulings. I found him very dishonest on these points and Stahl doesn’t challenge him on this.
He also commented about his fellow justices that he would not be able to change their legal philosophy which they have held for many years.
There’s an admission that philosophy influences their decisions while he’s denying it at the same time. That’s the kind of contradiction that you get from mystical thinking.
Religion allows people to make up their own self-serving reality. It allows them to discard evidence. This same type of mystical thinking is the foundation of our government and legal system. In the end, those who believe they have a right to impose their own philosophy on others by law at the point of a gun will inevitably trample on basic human rights whether they do it through a legislative or judicial mandate. Once individuals have granted themselves that power over others they can justify just about anything, especially when they get a majority of people to agree with them. (For more, read my book.)
It also makes no difference if an individual has his rights stripped away by a federal court or a state court or whether he has his freedom taken away by national vote or state vote. That is just a matter of scale. The important thing is to protect individual liberty. Voting and laws tend to strip freedom from the individual to serve the whims of some majority. The job of the courts in a free country is to prevent that.
In applying his philosophy of originalism to the Constitution, Scalia asks himself whether a particular right exists in the document or not. He’s making binary judgments about what exists and what doesn’t exist in the Constitution.
As a thinker influenced by mystical premises, Scalia and the other justices do not apply the same process to reality as a rational thinker does. A rational thinker asks himself if something exists in reality, in nature, or not. He knows that if it doesn’t exist in reality, there’s nothing that can be known about it and therefore it cannot be discussed rationally. A rational is an “originalist” when it comes to reality.
Allowing premises rooted in the supernatural and superstitious to serve as the foundation for our legal system makes it a religion, which is prohibited by the Constitution.
Prosecutors had wanted a much longer sentence but Kimberly Forder got off with just 27 months under a plea deal. With credit for time served she will soon be released from jail.
She had been charged in the death by abuse of one of her foster children, Christopher. (Abuse allegations were detailed here.)
She was given a short sentence largely because another adult son in jail for the rape of a family member recanted previous sworn testimony against her.
A 24-year-old Seabeck man who’d agreed to testify in the homicide by abuse trial of his mother in exchange for a shorter sentence in his own criminal case has recanted on previous statements, according to Kitsap County prosecutors.
As a result, Michael V. Forder, 24, was given an 8 1/2-year sentence for second-degree rape of a family member Feb. 26 in Judge M. Karlynn Haberly’s court — instead of the 36-month reduced sentence prosecutors had recommended in exchange for his testimony at his mother’s trial.
His mother, Kimberly Ann Forder, 44, is charged with the homicide by abuse of her 8-year-old adopted son Christopher Forder in 2002 — in incidents Sheriff Steve Boyer called “torture” — and is slated to go on trial in April.
The Forders worked as Christian missionaries in Africa and had several adopted children.
I’m getting kind of tired of having to point out things that those in mainstream media don’t ever report or comment on. The fact is they get paid a ton of money and I do this for free. It seems an additional burden to have to focus on things that are not pleasant simply because others don’t do the job.
The problem is that these things just pop out at me. They slap me in the face and then seem to scream in my ear until I do something about them.
Yesterday I saw a story on the TV news about a judge who sentenced a man who raped a completely defenseless paralyzed woman in a health care facility. Then I saw the story in the Seattle Times again this morning.
A former nursing assistant who raped a paralyzed stroke victim at a North Seattle long-term-care center last year was sentenced Friday to 8 ½ years to life in prison.
King County Superior Court Judge Julie Specter said if she had her way, she would sentence Lamin Darboe to life behind bars.
“I can’t think of anything more violative than raping a helpless, paralyzed woman,” Specter told Darboe. She said the case was one of the most shocking betrayals of trust she’s seen in her courtroom.
“If it were up to me, I would never release you into our community,” Specter said.
Darboe, 40, had entered a modified guilty plea, known as an Alford plea, to one count of second-degree rape in October. In an Alford plea, the defendant does not admit guilt but acknowledges he likely would be convicted if the case went to trial.
According to charging papers, Darboe was working at Kindred Hospital in North Seattle in the summer of 2006 when he fondled and raped a now-33-year-old woman who was paralyzed and couldn’t speak as the result of a stroke. The woman used an alphabet board to tell authorities about the rape, according to charging documents.
Can’t think of anything more violative than raping a helpless, paralyzed woman?
That statement shows such an irrational bias, it would seem to me that it would serve as grounds for an appeal. Wouldn’t murder be more violative? Or how about sending an innocent man to jail for decades for a rape he didn’t commit? That has happened all too many times in our legal system, especially in cases where the defendant is black and the victim white as in this case.
What about child rape? The holocaust? Are they worse than the rape of an incapacitated woman?
Previous reports (also here) on this case state that Darboe has been accused of inappropriate sexual advances on female patients in other facilities. He had been previously accused of rape but not convicted. He was fired multiple times but for some reason this did not keep him from getting the job which provided another opportunity for an assault.
Is the state’s failure to protect patients from such attacks violative as well, especially when there are so many red flags? The woman’s trust was betrayed by the facilities that were supposed to care for her as well as the state agencies in charge of licensing.
I only had to flip a few pages to find the story of a woman who tortured a girl in her care by sticking hypodermic needles in her eyes, beating her and scorching her hands on a hot stove.
But Cayce said a report from Western State Hospital, where Kabbelliyaa was evaluated, indicated she knew what she was doing when she punished the child and then tried to hide her from authorities who came to her home to investigate.
“She’s manipulative and cruel,” said Senior Deputy Prosecuting Attorney Corinn Bohn. “Her level of torture is incomprehensible.”
Kabbelliyaa, who also goes by the last name of Lewis, abused and tortured the girl she had cared for since the girl, who is her cousin, was 5. Police and prosecutors said Kabbelliyaa routinely punished the girl by burning her tongue with a heated fork, beating her feet with dumbbells and sticking a needle into the girl’s eye, telling her she would be blinded if she moved.
The girl suffered permanent vision loss.
According to charging documents filed in King County Superior Court, Kabbelliyaa had been the girl’s licensed foster mother since the girl was 5. She was arrested last year after Child Protective Services was called by someone acquainted with the family who reported seeing Kabbelliyaa punch the girl, hit her with an umbrella and lock her in an outside storage unit for hours.
The girl was 14 when police arrested Kabbelliyaa.
Physicians examining the foster girl found serious damage to the girl’s right eye, scarring, bruising and a severely burned tongue.
Charging documents also state that Kabbelliyaa would turn on the stove’s burner until it was red hot before pressing the girl’s palm onto the burner.
While these are both horrible crimes, torturing a child for nine years in such a brutal way tops raping a paralyzed woman in my book. But that’s not really my point. The point is that many of us can think of things we think are more violative crimes with more permanent damage than the rape of a paralyzed woman. But apparently Judge Specter can’t even think of obvious examples like murder or the brutal years-long torture of a child.
So how can we know that the defendant got a fair trial?