My Blog

Category: Law

  • Holder: Your Government Can Kill You

    He said the legal right to kill U.S. citizens overseas without benefit of a trial was based in Congress’ authorization to use all necessary and appropriate force against the perpetrators of 9/11 or those who helped them and the president’s power “to protect the nation from any imminent threat of violent attack.”

    That authority is “not limited to the battlefields in Afghanistan,” Holder said, adding that “We are at war with a stateless enemy, prone to shifting operations from country to country.”

    via Chicago Tribune.

    This is just about the craziest thing I have read in weeks.

    Never before has a presidential administration been so completely inconsiderate of the Constitution.  A United States Citizen’s rights do not simply vanish because they leave the country.  In fact, our courts have held that you are still subject to U.S. laws even when out of the country. When the criminal laws apply so do the protective laws.

    The Constitution provides:

    In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.

    The Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution

    I don’t care what Congress passes; if you want to change the Constitution then you have amend it.  There’s a procedure for that.

    Until that procedure is followed, the 6th Amendment still applies.

    Obama and Holder and just plain wrong, very very wrong on this issue.

  • Gun Owners Need Not Provide ‘Good Reason’

    Good news for those who believe in the Second Amendment:

    Maryland residents do not have to provide a “good and substantial reason” to legally own a handgun, a federal judge ruled Monday, striking down as unconstitutional the state’s requirements for getting a permit.  …

    “A citizen may not be required to offer a ‘good and substantial reason’ why he should be permitted to exercise his rights,” Legg wrote. “The right’s existence is all the reason he needs.”  …

    “People have the right to carry a gun for self-defense and don’t have to prove that there’s a special reason for them to seek the permit,” said his attorney Alan Gura, who has challenged handgun bans in the District of Columbia and Chicago as an attorney with the Second Amendment Foundation. “We’re not against the idea of a permit process, but the licensing system has to acknowledge that there’s a right to bear arms.”  …

    “In addition to self-defense, the (Second Amendment) right was also understood to allow for militia membership and hunting. To secure these rights, the Second Amendment’s protections must extend beyond the home: neither hunting nor militia training is a household activity, and ‘self-defense has to take place wherever (a) person happens to be,’” Legg wrote.

    via Fox News.

    I believe the judge not only reached the correct verdict but did so with the correct logic.  At the end of the day, our right to defend ourselves is given to us not by government but by our creator. i.e. by nature for you atheist folks.

    Before the McDonald case reached the USSC it was heard by the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago.  In that opinion J. Easterbrook wrote:

    Self-defense is a common-law gloss on criminal statutes, a defense that many states have modified by requiring people to retreat when possible, and to use non-lethal force when retreat is not possible.  An obligation to avoid lethal force in self-defense might imply an obligation to use pepper spray rather than handguns.  A modification of the self-defense defense may or may not be in the best interest of public safety—whether guns deter or facilitate crime is an empirical question—but it is difficult to argue that legislative evaluation of which weapons are appropriate for use in self-defense has been out of the people’s hands since 1868. The way to evaluate the relation between guns and crime is in scholarly journals and the political process, rather than invocation of ambiguous texts that long precede the contemporary debate.

    Easterbrook wrongly binds our right to self-defense to criminal statutes.  By this logic the right to self-defense simply did not exist at all until the criminal statutes were but into place.  This is of course absurd.

    Our founding fathers knew this:

    When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolves the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Law of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, …

    (You should be ashamed if you don’t know the source.)

    The powers of the earth together with the Law of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle each and every living thing to defend itself, its progeny, and its kind by whatever means available from any threat.  If you doubt this, go put yourself between a mother lion and her cubs.

    Kudos to J. Everett Legg for at least bringing the self-defense argument front a center when it comes to the Second Amendment.

  • Gun Control Measures Advance

    Yes, this is a few days old:

    Two controversial gun control proposals advanced to the full House Wednesday.

    On a partisan vote, the Democratic-controlled House Executive Committee approved a measure requiring handgun owners to register their weapons with the state.

    The panel also signed off on legislation that would create a special 2 percent tax on ammunition, which would finance trauma facilities that treat gunshot victims.

    Both measures headed to the floor after failing to win support from Republican committee members. They said it remains unproven that such laws will reduce crime. And, they added, downstate gun owners would be unfairly burdened with the changes.

    via The Quad City Times.

    This is of course ridiculous.  I have already written on how gun control registries are expensive and don’t live up to their claims.  But I guess the gun control Nazis don’t care about such things.

    Thanks to the folks over at Second City Cop, I did not a little research and found out that in the U.S. (my previous writing was on the Canadian registry) criminals actually cannot be prosecuted for not registering their weapons.  Really?  Yes, really!

    The USSC (United States Supreme Court) ruled in Haynes v. United States that:

    Miles Edward Haynes was a convicted felon who was charged with failing to register a firearm under the Act. Haynes argued that, because he was a convicted felon and thus prohibited from owning a firearm, requiring him to register was essentially requiring him to make an open admission to the government that he was in violation of the law, which was thus a violation of his right not to incriminate himself.

    In 7-1 decision, the Court ruled in favor of Haynes.

    You see, in Illinois if you are felon you cannot get a FOID card which is necessary to possess — even touch a single bullet — a firearm or ammunition in the state.  So if you don’t have a FOID you cannot register your handgun.  However, because registering your handgun would force you to demonstrate that you do not have a FOID means that you would be incriminating yourself by trying to register.  Therefore, registration would violate your 5th Amendment right against self incrimination.

    So, this registry has absolutely NOTHING to do with getting guns out of the hands of criminals — the don’t have to register them!!

    It’s all about creating a list of law abiding citizens (including police officers) who happen to own handguns.

  • Judge Rules Eavesdropping Law Unconstitutional

    A Cook County judge today ruled the state’s controversial eavesdropping law unconstitutional.

    The law makes it a felony offense to make audio recordings of police officers without their consent even when they’re performing their public duties.

    Judge Stanley Sacks, who is assigned to the Criminal Courts Building, found the eavesdropping law unconstitutional because it potentially criminalizes “wholly innocent conduct.”

    via Chicago Tribune.

    What the story has wrong is that it’s not just illegal to record police officers; it’s illegal to record ANY conversation where all parties to said conversation are not aware that they are being recorded.

    So it’s safe to say that this is not the end of the story.  It’s most likely still illegal to record you telephone calls without letting the party on the other end know.  I wonder what the Illinois legislature will do with this.