Recently in Justice Category

One of the recent shocks in my life, like when I discovered that the overwhelming majority of librarians are political left-wingers, was to be presented the fact that the church to which I belong, the Roman Catholic Church, is against the private ownership of handguns.

It's stuck with me for a couple of days, showing I think it needs a wide reading. His points are not clearly understood by the vast majority of the electorate. And he's right about Obama in his piece "I will not vote for pro-death president."

Boston has recently announced it's going to throw out the written portion in its promotion exam for cops and replace it with, ahem, oral interviews--at a cost of an additional $2.2 million.

From what I'm reading, the movement is also afoot in New Hampshire to do similar shenanigans. All in the talismanic name of...DIVERSITY.

I'm reminded we're taking ten steps backwards. Remember the improvements by progressives in the 1920s to do away with patronage and cronyism and institute professionalism, such as using objective measures for hiring and promotion instead of the old way, "So who sent you? Who do you know?" We're going from civil service exams back to nepotism.

This is a bad dream, a joke in a saner world (where whites had some healthy self-pride and weren't so spineless); and the assertion that everyone makes from the U.S. Supreme Court to my retired neighbors, liberals from New Haven, Conn., is the following: "Diversity is a good thing."

Prove it. Real diversity is not accidents of birth, it is what we do with our lives, what we put in our brains, how far we've come through adversity. I attended UNH as a proponent of constitutional monarchy, making me very unique indeed. Where was my promotion? As far as I knew I was the only such advocate. Ah, silly me, I was born wrong. The wrong sex and race. White male. Not very good for much these days.

What am I supposed to tell my three white sons? Is it any wonder my brother and best friend both married women of partial hispanic origin. It's prophylactic on the resume for their offspring.

Wait. Does my half-Sicilian wife count? Hey, it worked for Lizzie Warren.

Diversity. It's always asserted without an effort at proving it. And from Robert Putnam of Bowling Alone fame, we now have evidence that diversity lowers social capital and trust. It hurts civic life! And he's a lib.

That's the whole point of the exercise, ladies and gentlemen: to screw over whites in favor of more politically advantaged groups. Community organizing has come to town.

And by doing an end-around objective, unbiased written tests to ones more biased, less objective, more unfair--such as the oral interview where it's much easier to cover up deficiencies--we will certainly see less qualified applicants being promoted. You can bank on that assertion. Is that what we are all about?

A co-worker sent this to me. It has to be one of the more interesting attempts (and a successful one) for beating a traffic ticket. This is something right out of the old TV show Numbers.

I can attest to the fact that math can help you beat a ticket.

On one occasion in the distant past I received a speeding ticket in the town of Braintree, Massachusetts. The police officer who cited me said I was doing 65mph in a 40mph zone. There was only one problem: the car I was driving at the time would have had to been able to accelerate from 0 to 65 mph in under 4 seconds. (I had just pulled out of a side street and onto the road in question a couple of hundred of feet from the officer's cruiser. But since I was driving a 1979 Dodge Omni with a 1.7 liter 4-banger, that feat of acceleration was impossible.

As the officer was writing up the ticket I noticed his radar was still on and more than once in a 1 minute period registered speeds well in excess of 40mph along the road in question. I found that interesting considering there was not one single vehicle on the road when the radar displayed the speeds. Looking closer at where the officer was set up I realized what was happening.

After getting permission to leave my vehicle for a moment, I pulled out my ever present 100' tape measure and started taking some measurements, specifically the distance of his cruiser from the side of the road (he'd flagged me down), the distance from the side of the building he'd used to shield his presence from cars coming down the road, and the distance of that building from the elevated highway behind and to one side of where he'd parked his cruiser. I also asked the officer for the make, model, and serial number of the radar system he was using to measure speeds. (Fortunately he didn't seem to mind. I guess he thought I was just wasting my time.)

To make an already long story short, I decided to fight the ticket.

The day of my court appearance arrived and I showed up with my ammunition: two poster boards- one with a diagram of the 'scene of the crime', showing the distances of all of the pertinent objects including the side street I'd pulled out of, the location of the cruiser, the building he'd been next to, and the distance to the highway; and the other with the same diagrams now overlaid with lines of sight and some equations. I also had a copy of the data sheet for the radar unit the officer used, some other literature from the manufacturer, and a textbook, in this case Skolnick's Radar Systems Handbook.

When my case was called, I made my presentation to the judge after the prosecuting officer made his case. After explaining my diagrams, the measurements I made, and asking the police officer if he thought the diagram was reasonably accurate (he admitted it was), I brought out the second poster board with the second set of diagrams and equations and showed how the officer's radar wasn't measuring speeds along the road I'd been traveling, but the highway behind him. The diagram showed the width of the beam emitted by the radar, how more than half of the radar energy was being reflected back to the elevated highway, and that the speeds the officer was measuring was that of the traffic on the highway.

At this point the judge asked me my profession.

"I'm a radar systems technician for [Really Big Defense Contractor]."

I was found not guilty.

We've seen a few articles dealing with false accusation of sexual harassment or sexual misconduct on college campuses and the rather lax criteria for determining the 'guilt' of the accused by college administrations, in many cases ignoring the evidence presented and even the findings of police investigations that show the accused is innocent. It elicited a response from a Dartmouth alumnus who suffered under just such an accusation even though the accuser was found to have lied about the alleged assault.

That in and of itself is a miscarriage of justice. But it was his experiences and observations that were more telling, especially observations about those who chose to judge him guilty despite overwhelming evidence that no such assault ever took place.

Dartmouth is one of the Ivy League schools, institutions of higher learning that supposed to be a cut above the rest. However, as we have seen over the years, their reputations for churning out the "best and brightest" are showing themselves to be less deserved than in decades past.

One observation of Gonzalo Lira's that struck me as being dead on.

What I didn't realize at the time--because I was too young--and which I would slowly come to realize over the years, was what the episode taught me, about America's elite. About the cowardice of the American elite. A moral cowardice that, I understand now, is far more significant than practically anything else that I learned at Dartmouth College.

The members of the Committee On Standards who sat in judgment of me in the Fall of 1991 were not some lofty group of my "betters", draped in gowns and wearing the wigs of English jurists: They were my peers--run-of-the-mill students of a small liberal-arts college in New England.

But that particular group of run-of-the-mill students is exactly the sort of individual who winds up running the United States. The current Secretary of the Treasury is a Dartmouth alum--Geithner '83. So was the last Treasury Secretary--Paulson '68--as well as a whole boatload of his partners at Goldman Sachs. The current head of General Electric (Immelt '68), the most influential Surgeon General in American history (Koop '37), the current junior senator from New York (Gillibrand née Rutnik '88), the senior White House correspondent for one of the major networks (Tapper '91), the soldier/writer who's experiences in Iraq formed the basis for a major television series on HBO (Fick '99)--

--all Dartmouth alums.

The kind of men and women Dartmouth enrolls and graduates are the bright men and women who find places for themselves in the gears of America society. The men and women on the COS hearing in the fall of 1991 were no different.

And they showed me how fundamentally corrupt the American leadership class really is.

Moral cowardice. I think that sums up the problem we have with those in power. It's more about feelings that about what's right or wrong. They are not willing to take a stand against something that is wrong because of how someone else might feel about it. It seems feelings have replaced morals, have replaced critical thinking. But what do we expect when over the past few decades education has twisted the meaning of right and wrong and replaced it with how one feels about something. (And if you notice, it's never about what someone might think about some event or issue, it's how the feel about it.)

Millions of American young people have been raised by parents and schools with "How do you feel about it?" as the only guide to what they ought to do. The heart has replaced God and the Bible as a moral guide. And now, as Brooks points out, we see the results. A vast number of American young people do not even ask whether an action is right or wrong. The question would strike them as foreign. Why? Because the question suggests that there is a right and wrong outside of themselves. And just as there is no God higher than them, there is no morality higher than them, either.

Could this be why Gonzalo Lira was 'convicted' and suspended by the Dartmouth Committee On Standards for an offense he didn't commit? Was he being punished for the alleged misdeeds of Clarence Thomas against Anita Hill (the Thomas confirmation hearings were ongoing at the time). Did they see him as a proxy for all of those out there that had committed such offenses and gone unpunished because they felt it was right thing to do, regardless of the fact that an innocent man was going to pay the price for others' transgressions?

Along this line are the replacement of morals with feelings which is the reason behind such odious things as political correctness, college "speech codes" that violate the First Amendment in an effort to prevent anyone from being offended by anyone else (except of course those on the Left being allowed to offend those on the Right because they feel it's necessary to show them their place), and a whole host of other actions that cast aside traditional notions of right or wrong. By extension, this also means they have no way of recognizing evil because to them it's all relative. ("There is no right or wrong.") It appears they do not believe that some act or some one can be so totally effin' evil that they do not have a right to exist. They explain away the atrocities of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Kim Il Sung, Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein, and a host of other outright evil persons by claiming others drove them to it (the blame usually laid upon Western Civilization). They truly have no inkling that evil does indeed exist, that it can exist in the form of a single person willing to kill as many people as necessary to get their way. It is that moral cowardice that allows many of the aforementioned genocidal despots to do what they do with nary a protest from the enlightened, "feeling" ruling elite.

And we somehow expect these very same people to have our best interests at heart?

Once again it seems Texas is leading the way.

The Texas legislature passed a "loser pays" bill that, if signed by Governor Rick Perry, will change the nature of lawsuits within the Lone Star State. (Yes, I know I'm a few days behind the news on this one, but I've been busy, OK?)

Essentially, if you bring a lawsuit in Texas and the jury finds against you, you pay the other side's costs (and attorney's fees I assume). If you bring a law suit and win, the defense pays your costs. The goal is to end frivolous lawsuits, and encourage more people to settle short of trial. Both are excellent goals IMO.

Many may argue that this kind of tort reform will do nothing but hurt the little guy. But far too often the little guy gets screwed even if he wins because it is his lawyer who will reap a large payoff. (Many tort lawyers take on clients on a contingency basis, meaning they get a percentage of any money the court awards the complainant, usually a large percentage.)

While "Loser Pays" will likely reduce the number of frivolous lawsuits, it will also see the "shotgun" approach to lawsuits disappear as well. A shotgun suit lists everyone even remotely connected to the case as a respondent based on the idea that some will settle out of court rather spend the money to defend themselves even though they have no real liability. An example: A consumer is injured by a defective product made by the ABC Company. The injured party sues ABC Company and anyone even remotely having anything to do with ABC Company, including XYZ Freight Trucking Inc. All XYZ did was haul ABC Company's product from a warehouse to a number of retail establishments. XYZ didn't design the product. XYZ didn't make the product. XYZ neither sold or marketed the product. All they did was what they were contracted to do - pick up boxes of the product at a warehouse and deliver it to stores someplace else. Yet somehow the complainant's lawyer figures they have as much culpability as ABC Company, so names them as a co-respondent in the injury suit.

As ludicrous as that scenario sounds, it has actually happened and a trucking company was found to be liable for some of the damages even though all they were hired to do was deliver the goods. They had no way of knowing those goods would hurt anyone, nor should they have had to know. But with Loser Pays, such shotgun approaches will be too risky because even if the complainant wins against one respondent, they could lose against the others and have to pay their legal fees, possibly wiping out any awards made by the court.

That works for me.

Listening and reading the reactions of Americans to the news of Osama bin Laden's demise at the hands of US Navy SEALS has been enlightening.

The local TV station here in New Hampshire reported on many of those reactions. Most were positive, meaning they were glad bin Laden had been brought to justice. A few said they took no joy in his death, but understood it. But one stood out, mainly for his total lack of understanding of the situation, labeling Osama's death as "an assassination."

"You hate to see somebody get away with something this downright evil, but two wrongs don't make a right," said Bob Whyman, of Manchester. "In a way, I was sorry to hear he was dead."

Apparently Mr. Whyman didn't understand that the SEAL mission was not a police action. It was a combat mission in a long running war against someone who had openly waged war against the US. He was given the opportunity to surrender but chose death instead. It was by no means an assassination. Bin Laden was a legitimate target and was taken down within the Rules of Engagement. That he chose to die rather than be captured was his decision, period.

I have to wonder if Mr. Whyman was one of those Leftist whiners who considered the attacks on the US back on September 11^th, 2001 as justified because somehow we were at fault for all the barbarism displayed over the years by Muslim extremists. Somehow it wouldn't surprise me to find out that was the case. Thank goodness he is in the minority on this one.

Are these law enforcement personnel out on Long Island using their badges as a means to "harass us and eat of our substance"? Taking a look at the case of Nancy Genovese, I'd have to say yes.

After her arrest for supposedly posing a terrorist threat by taking pictures of a tourist attraction outside a public airport, being subjected to an illegal search and seizure, theft of $5300 in cash, confiscation of her camera and other personal belongings in her car (which have not been returned), being denied her right to an attorney, being imprisoned based upon false testimony by one of the arresting officers, she was interviewed by the FBI and found to be no threat. But the Suffolk County Sheriff's Department still held her in custody for some time, but finally released her, dropping the charge of criminal trespass (the only thing which she was charged). How can someone 'criminally trespass' on a public right of way, to whit, a public road?

Did she take this sitting down? Nope. She filed a $70 million lawsuit against the Town of Southampton, Suffolk County, and various other county and town officers and officials.

Now here's a bit of irony: the Town of Southampton town attorney failed to respond to the suit in a timely fashion, causing the town to default.

How did this happen? According to the now former town attorney "he forgot" to file the town's response to the suit. Genovese asked for a summary judgment against the town, but was denied by the court.

Here's more on the Genovese case, including an overhead view where the 'terrorist' incident took place.

It's bad enough when a prosecutor uses his office to harass a law-abiding citizen. It's even worse when he uses his office to also try and kill the business he manages through malicious and specious criminal and civil cases that have been thrown out of court time and time again.

What makes it even worse than that is when he's doing it at the behest of 'well-connected' abutters to the business, which has been in existence for 84 years.

The business in question? The Kitsap [Washington] Rifle and Revolver Club.

The aforementioned well-connected abutter bought a home near the KRRC and decided he didn't like the noise coming from the club. Never mind that the club has been there decades longer than the abutter's home. Never mind the abutter was aware of the club's existence before he bought the home. Using the Kitsap County DA as his personal errand boy to drive the club out of existence and harassing the manager with groundless criminal prosecutions is in itself criminal and could be seen as violating the First, Second, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments. Maybe it's time for the Washington state Attorney General to investigate this misconduct. And if AG's office won't take action, then maybe the US Attorney should do so.

I have to wonder to which party the DA and the abutter belong. If I had to guess, I'd say it isn't the GOP.

In a blog entry that's been on my mind for several weeks, Michael Medved explains why the title above is true: