When I read it I thought “So finally they are learning from Chavismo, right?”
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I wonder why this wasn’t brought up during the Malheur takeover?
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We already have a red starbucks cup featuring prominently in the latest rounds of The War On Christmas™
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Questioning the meaning of life? Existential terrorist!
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It’s a fair cop. Take me away to the FEMA camp
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I don’t see how that’s related.
That has been applied to non-citizens who are not in the U.S… If they decide to charge you with terrorism in the U.S. there will be a trial. Hyperbolic FUD notwithstanding.
Read the article.
specifically this bit.
While US citizens thus no longer have much real access to their courts in many civil and regulatory matters, you might think they would still have meaningful access in criminal cases, which are beyond the jurisdiction of any administrative court, let alone private arbitrators. But in reality, the real decisions in criminal cases are made by the prosecutors, not the courts. This is because, as a result of draconian and often mandatory penalties imposed by both Congress and most state legislatures during the last decades of the twentieth century, it is much too risky for any defendant, even an innocent one, to go to trial.
Instead, over 97 percent of those charged in federal criminal cases negotiate plea bargains with the prosecution, and in the states collectively the figure is only slightly less, about 95 percent.2 In most cases, as a practical matter (and sometimes as a legally binding matter as well), the terms of the plea bargain also determine the sentence to be imposed, so there is nothing left for either a judge or a jury to decide. While the immediate result is the so-called mass incarceration in the United States that has rightly become a source of shame for our country, the effect can also be seen as just one more example of the denial of meaningful access to the courts even in the dire circumstances of a criminal case.
And note also
Prosecutors can choose to make sentences even longer for drug defendants who have prior drug convictions. In the past, many prosecutors threatened defendants with the 851, which could double the mandatory minimum and/or bring a life sentence, if they insist on going to trial or, in some cases, if they just decline to provide substantial assistance [to prosecutors]. One of Holder’s interventions was to discourage prosecutors from using the 851 to get guilty pleas, and I could see that going away under Sessions.
I get that you may not get the best lawyer or that they may try to lay excessive penalties but my comment was in regards to the government attempting appeal in the case of acquittal. The fatalistic nature of the article notwithstanding, I think it speaks more to the side of fear. Do you not suppose that the first attempted case of economic terrorism wouldn’t be an interest to the ACLU or any lawyer wanting to make a national name for themselves?
Except for the US citizen who was killed by a drone strike by executive order without any legal process.
Yes, it was one person, and yes he was not in the US at the time. If Trump surrogates are trying to use Japanese internment camps as precedent to talk about what they might do to Muslims, I think it’s fair to say they might use things the previous administration did as precedent to circumvent the constitution and go after Americans.
I’m not saying they are going to send drones to shoot missiles at protests on American soil. I’m saying that I find it fanciful to think that courts and the constitution are going to protect protesters. They already don’t do a good job of that.
ETA: Anyway, I feel I’ve sucked up enough oxygen here. I don’t think that America’s courts are going to do a good job of protecting Americans because to me it looks like they haven’t been doing that up to this point. You have more confidence in them. Hopefully you are right.
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Pretty much. The whole push to defining everything as a matter of national security is to do away with inconveniences such as due process, trials, oversight, etc. People charged with such a crime might well never even get a lawyer.
A similar thing happened on a state level about 100 years ago during the first “red scare”. But the current federal police state apparatus makes it worse.
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Oh don’t be silly; rules can be changed, laws warped and reinterpreted, judges found with bags of cocaine under their car seats…
The truth is, we all live supported by a thin bubble of mutually agreed upon civility, a set of rules termed “the social contract”.
It has no force of it’s own, save that which we give it. And it isn’t given much strength at all.
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You say that like xmas shouldn’t die in a fire.
That’s true, but is it in any way relevant?
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I’m just trying to say that even if it doesn’t happen here, the words are in the mad mind of the GOP now and will crop up again sooner or later.
And the reasoning you use to argue against it ever happening is faulty because those rules can be changed, warped, bought, threatened…
It’s not the magical power of the law that protects from such things, it’s mutual assent between those with power.
Didn’t. But you have a good point. Just because we think we know what the First Amendment means, doesn’t mean Chief Justice Trump, Justice Trump, and Justice Trump Jr will agree on that interpretation.
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