On my jury site, a juror in the John White trial posts a long and impassioned account of his experience. (John White is a black New Yorker who was recently convicted of shooting a white teenager after the teenager and his friends confronted White outside of his house one night. The trial was long and became a media spectacle and source of much controversy.)
Law
Thimerosal-Autism Stupidity
In the post below Kurt9 take me to task for not discussing the link between thimerosal and autism in a post about the morality of vaccination.
That’s because there isn’t any link, and until some trial lawyers pays me gobs of cash I’m not going to say there is. Tons of research have been done on the subject. No one who doesn’t stand to make a lot of money from lawsuits maintains that any link exists between thimerosal and autism.
I won’t recapitulate this well worn debate. (Quackbuster provides a good summation.) I will simply point out the last piece of evidence that puts the nail into the entire fraud once and for all.
No Wires to Tap
Instapundit links to an article by Melanie Scarborough that purports to show that either a telecom engineer or the Bush administration is lying about the domestic “wiretapping” with the clear implication that Bush is the liar.
Unfortunately, her premise is based on a complete misunderstanding of how modern telecommunication works. Both parties are telling the truth.
Reading the 2nd Amendment
The meaning of words evolves over the centuries. This evolution causes confusion when contemporary readers try to understand the original meaning of old writing.
The verb “resent” for example, once meant to express emotion, good or bad, in response to the actions of others. In the 17th Century, a person might write honestly to a friend, “I deeply resent the wonderful box of chocolates you sent me.” A modern reader could easily misunderstand the meaning of “resent” in that sentence and believe that the writer felt angry at his friend.[1]
I think this same problem bedevils contemporary discussions of the 2nd Amendment. The meaning of key words and phrases in the passage evolved over the last two centuries. Applying modern definitions of these words obscures the original clear meaning of the amendment.
Military Justice and the War
Interesting article. NPR tries to spin it against the Bush administration, but it seems to me that the controversy reflects more the politicization of and conflicting goals being pursued by today’s JAG corps. On the one hand the govt biases the Haditha trial in favor of the prosecution. On the other hand (the only side of the issue NPR notices) there are complaints about detainees in Guantanamo — men who could have been summarily executed without legal controversy when they were caught on the battlefield — who are being prosecuted based on confessions extracted by means that would be unacceptable under domestic law.
The controversy over Guantanamo confessions is really the smallest part of a much larger issue, which NPR ignores and whose resolution is not yet clear, about how we should treat hostile war detainees who don’t fit old legal categories such as POW or civilian internee. The anti-war Left pretends that the only question is whether Bush plays by the rules. But the more important question is how to modernize rules which don’t fit current reality and which make it harder for us to fight. The question of how to modernize these rules, if not resolved, will dog any coming Democratic administration as much as it does the current Republican one. Pretending that Bush is the problem only delays the inevitable reckoning.
It seems that the JAG community lags the rest of our military in addressing these issues.