lindajoy Loc: right here with you....

A must... ~~

When the world goes mad, one must accept madness as sanity; since sanity is, in the last analysis, nothing but the madness on which the whole world happens to agree.

George Bernard Shaw

slatten49 Loc: Lake Whitney, Texas

"I'm for open-mindedness and tolerance. I'm against any form of fanaticism, fundamentalism or zealotry, and this certainty of 'We have the t***h.' The t***h is far too large and complex. Nobody has the t***h".

- Philup Pulllman

RandyBrian Loc: Texas

That's funny!
Reminds me of when two Biden supports died and went to hell.
They ask why are we HERE????
"Because you supported four years of lies and actions against a President, and embraced anything and everything to get rid of him" said Satan.
"But....but.....we wanted what was best for America! That's not FAIR", they cried. "Our intent was good!"
"Correct," said Satan. "It absolutely is NOT fair." Then he grinned, "But the end justifies the means."

fullspinzoo

Now that's funny!

RandyBrian Loc: Texas

A judge's place is not to figure out what is right. That is the purpose of the legislature. The judge should objectively be applying the law. No r****m. No predetermined opinions. And little or no "empathy" on how the poor perpetrator or victim feels. Just the law. THAT is why it is so vitally important that we have Constitutional judges, at all levels, and not activist judges who want to determine right and wrong in each case, and reward those they like and punish those they don't. That was exactly what Ruth Bader Ginsberg did her whole career. She was no doubt a nice lady with good intentions. But she was a BAD judge who violated her oath of office in the vast majority of cases. She was no hero, except to the left who liked her advocacy policies.

fullspinzoo

What happened to Justice Roberts? (especially ACA). Did they make threats against his family? "Ends justify the means" pretty much opens the reasoning up for big debate. The Obamacare decision was a shocker and my bet is there was some sort of underlying cause.

RandyBrian Loc: Texas

I don't think anyone but Roberts, and whoever is blackmailing him, know for sure. All we can do is guess. But he was selected based on his principals, which he then dumped into the toilet.

fullspinzoo

Exactly. He showed his true colors after the ACA ruling. Leans much more to the left than was expected.

slatten49 Loc: Lake Whitney, Texas

As it had been agreed earlier than humor is good for the soul, yours is also kind'a funny. After all....

"Laughter is the closest distance between two people". - Victor Borge

"The wonderful thing about laughter is that it just destroys any kind of system of dividing people". - John Cleese.

LAPhil Loc: Los Angeles, CA

Linda:
I asked you this earlier, but I guess you missed it. That's the trouble with this forum, you often don't see your replies without reading all the way through the comments. You indicated that you had some contact with the Supreme Court after their refusal to take the Texas case where you expressed your displeasure with their non-decision. Can you tell us more about that?

JohnCo

Yes, those (supple minds, etc.) would be good qualities for judges. They'll always be human though. I'd like to see tape recorders, freely used, so that the record will be more thorough and also more dependably true.

son of witless

When you reverted to your usual dogma instead of addressing what I said, I knew our conversation was hopeless. I admit to being tempted to restate my argument and to try to get you restate your argument into something I could work with. However, I am past caring. Have a pleasant tomorrow.

slatten49 Loc: Lake Whitney, Texas

"You have been weighed...you have been measured...and you have absolutely been found wanting". Thus, given your untenable stance/position, you have done the right thing.

For tomorrow, I also wish for you a pleasant day.

son of witless

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4APbwb3meU

So I am the Heath Ledger character ? Unless you have another obscure reference, that is not the worst thing I have been referred to as. Wait, I must confess that I have not seen that movie in some time. I seem to remember the roles being reversed later on. So then I am the villain ? Well I like a good movie villain so again that is not near as bad as I am usually called on OPP.

Anytime I am not called a r****t or have my name pasted into an obscene picture on OPP, it's a good day.

JohnCo

That does look like a well-considered perspective, though perhaps a little extreme. Judges are given some flexibility, called "judicial discretion". (But I don't know how this may vary across the different kinds of courts.) Some judges abuse their power; maybe they are exercising some wrong kind of discretion.

Though I'm no expert, I'll offer a scenario anyway -- something I've seen in the news somewhere:

There is a "3-strikes" law. A wide array of crimes appear to qualify as "strikes". If someone committed armed robbery and severely wounded a few people, in three such incidents, then we'd want a severe penalty because the crimes are repeated and severe. However, some people get "strikes" for minor offenses, leading to very severe penalties for very mild offenses.

I'm looking it up now: I find this: https://www.mintpressnews.com/supreme-court-strikes-down-unconstitutional-three-strikes-law/207222/. The final line in it is: "[N]o one should [serve] a life-sentence for bouncing checks!"

Now, the really proper way to address this, I think, is that legislatures should have passed better laws in the first place, and when they passed 3-strikes laws, they didn't get it quite right. The legislative remedy is that the legislature would have to revise the law as soon as possible and probably apply the revision retroactively. I believe the legislatures are sometimes rather slow to correct their mistakes.

Now, given that there is such a law which sometimes leads to over-severe consequences, and the law is written such that the over-severe consequences (very long prison terms) are mandatory in a wide array of circumstances, then I would like there to be, at least, some judicial discretion in the sentencing, such that the sentence might be softened if the offenses were minor or had mitigating circumstances. (I'm imagining this as a bench trial -- I'm not sure how this would play out in a jury trial, but the principles should be the same.) But if the legislature wrote mandatory very-severe sentences with no flexibility, in the law, then the judge would have no choice but to apply the extremely severe sentence, hence it's been characterized in that article as "a life-sentence for bouncing checks".

I wish I didn't have to trust a judge with anything, however, I'd prefer judicial discretion rather than a completely rigid "life-sentence for bouncing checks" kind of situation.

Another scenario is (historically, and depending on which state one is in) very long prison sentences for possessing small amounts of marijuana -- I think there needs to be some way to ease up on those kinds of nonviolent offenders, even when legislatures passed really draconian laws about them.

There are lots of situations where a person might be found with small amounts of marijuana, even some situations where the person didn't even know it was there.

Not only do I wish I didn't have to trust judges (nor juries), I also don't trust some of these legislatures to get everything right. The whole government is just something we have to work with because we'd be worse off without a government. So we need measured amounts of trust, and we continually try to make the government and laws better somehow.