Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer To Retire

[BillStime]

3 minutes ago, Demongyz said:

Who packed the court?  As far as I can tell that is in reference to creating additional seats on the court, not filling the seats, though I suppose if you lived under a rock and just crawled out from under it, I can see how you could get those mixed up.

 

Also Laura Ingram is a moron.  Boo hoo if the supreme court doesn't agree with you.  They are on the court and you aren't, now piss off.

 

Also Ted, you're a pos too.

 

Who packed the court?

[Demongyz]

1 minute ago, BillStime said:

 

Who packed the court?

NOBODY!

[BillStime]

19 minutes ago, Demongyz said:

NOBODY!

 

[BillStime]

On 3/22/2022 at 4:34 PM, DRsGhost said:

 

 

 

 

[aristocrat]

35 minutes ago, BillStime said:

 

 

 

 

Milwaukee County trained Thicklen not to have sex with inmates and how to avoid invitations to have sex with inmates, Manion wrote.

"The undisputed facts and reasonable inferences point ineluctably to the conclusions that Thicklen’s abhorrent acts were in no way actuated by a purpose to serve County," Manion wrote. "He raped (the inmate) for purely personal reasons, the rapes did not benefit County but harmed it, he knew the rapes did not serve County, and the rapes were outside the scope

[716er]

Cherry picking nuanced cases from either Barrett or Jackson to disparage their rulings when the ABA gave them both outstanding ratings is kind of silly.

[BillStime]

10 minutes ago, 716er said:

Cherry picking nuanced cases from either Barrett or Jackson to disparage their rulings when the ABA gave them both outstanding ratings is kind of silly.

 

Agreed... but the Party of Hypocrisy had specific talking points to deliver for Fox News and its cult...

 

 

[Chef Jim]

16 minutes ago, 716er said:

Cherry picking nuanced cases from either Barrett or Jackson to disparage their rulings when the ABA gave them both outstanding ratings is kind of silly.

 

What are those ABA ratings based on? 

 

Hopefully nothing like the bond rating agencies in the mid 2000's.  Yikes.  

[SoCal Deek]

27 minutes ago, 716er said:

Cherry picking nuanced cases from either Barrett or Jackson to disparage their rulings when the ABA gave them both outstanding ratings is kind of silly.

That’s not the point. Virtually everyone in these hearings is a lawyer. The senators and the candidate! They are practicing their craft and seeing/testing how the candidate formulates his/her responses. This is mental gymnastics to see how her mind will break down FUTURE cases. Don’t focus on the question itself. 

Your homework is to watch The Paper Chase this evening. Great movie from the 1970s. “You’ll enter the class with a mindful of mush and leave thinking like a lawyer.”

[dpberr]

22 minutes ago, SoCal Deek said:

That’s not the point. Virtually everyone in these hearings is a lawyer. The senators and the candidate! They are practicing their craft and seeing/testing how the candidate formulates his/her responses. This is mental gymnastics to see how her mind will break down FUTURE cases. Don’t focus on the question itself. 

Your homework is to watch The Paper Chase this evening. Great movie from the 1970s. “You’ll enter the class with a mindful of mush and leave thinking like a lawyer.”

Speaking of writing rules and winning games, virtually everyone in these hearings are millionaires.  Jackson's net worth = $23 million dollars.  That's astonishing.  It's a bougie club and we're all not in it.  That ain't just a judge's salary.  

 

Brett Kavanaugh is living with us peasants in comparison.  At the time of his hearing, his net worth was a "paltry" 1.2 million.  

[BillsFanNC]

What she said. 

 

Left cultists = pure evil.

 

 

[Demongyz]

2 hours ago, BillStime said:

 

Agreed... but the Party of Hypocrisy had specific talking points to deliver for Fox News and its cult...

 

 

And he ***** should be locked up!

 

What is your point loser?

[aristocrat]

3 hours ago, BillStime said:

 

 

 

I’d also ask who the judge who sentenced the guard to three days in prison. That’s th worst part of the story. Guy should have gotten a bullet in the head 

[BillStime]

 

[LeviF]

5 hours ago, 716er said:

Cherry picking nuanced cases from either Barrett or Jackson to disparage their rulings when the ABA gave them both outstanding ratings is kind of silly.

I’m sorry if I’m too thick to understand, but what exactly is nuanced about being convicted of jacking it to videos of children being raped?

[Chef Jim]

25 minutes ago, LeviF said:

I’m sorry if I’m too thick to understand, but what exactly is nuanced about being convicted of jacking it to videos of children being raped?

Well according to her it’s how they got the porn.  Supposedly it’s worse if you get it through the mail vs the internet?   WTF gets porn via mail these days?  😳

[The Frankish Reich]

Sentencing is messy. I'm making a general point here, not anything specific about these recent nominees.

There are many cases where multiple counts run about the sentence to something absurd. I know this personally from cases I've been involved in (and never on the defense side). Here's an example from a prominent case in my neck of the woods:

 

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/policing/2022/01/19/truck-driver-sentenced-110-years/9108405002/

 

Truck driver, not sufficiently experienced, from Cuba, driving on the steep descent from the Colorado mountains, onto an off ramp that (having driven it many times) is not very well designed. Barrels into other vehicles, huge crash, cars exploding, four innocent people killed. It was probably what we'd call recklessness, not intentional harm-doing. Some nonlawyers would consider it just an accident - negligence, sure, but not some kind of hardened criminal. I thought it was appropriate that he was criminally prosecuted, but I realize that's more about the horrific result than horrific behavior - with a little luck he would have flipped over his own truck and injured himself rather than killing four other people. He went to trial and was convicted on all counts. The sentencing guidelines: 110 years.

It was crazy, and even law and order types like me thought "this can't be right." Ultimately the governor stepped in and commuted the sentence to something more fitting the crime: 10 years. The end result makes sense to me.

 

It's just something to keep in mind when someone gets what seems to be an excessive sentence, or a far too lenient sentence. The guidelines are just that: guidelines. I can't tell you what someone like this truck driver should get in a perfectly fair world, but I can tell you there are gradations of creeps in all of the kinds of cases KJB passed sentences on. I've tried to avoid those cases because they are just too personally disturbing to me on many levels, but I have had some tangential involvement over the years. Judges try to do what's right. There's often a conflict between the individual case (a sad, creepy loser with no prior record), the judge's lack of total certainty about whether or not he may reoffend (often there's no evidence of a long pattern, but does this mean he just hasn't been caught before?) and the general idea that we need a strong deterrent to make anyone so inclined to go out looking for this stuff to think twice before he does it.  And yes, the number of images multiplies, and each one can be a separate count. It can give a prosecutor tremendous leverage in securing a plea deal conviction, something that I think is valuable in general but that everyone should agree raises some liberty concerns when prosecutors overcharge to gain that leverage. We see this in drug cases too, where everyone seemed to reach a consensus (even Kim Kardashian and Donald Trump) that maybe the scales had tilted too far in the prosecutor's favor.

 

Bottom line: sentencing is messy. There are some judges who are just too gullible, but almost all of them I've known are doing the best they can, so I give them the benefit of the doubt.

[The Frankish Reich]

11 minutes ago, Chef Jim said:

Well according to her it’s how they got the porn.  Supposedly it’s worse if you get it through the mail vs the internet?   WTF gets porn via mail these days?  😳

Her idea -- and it's correct from my experience -- is that the possession guidelines dated from a time when people actually DID get this garbage from creeps sending it through the mail. That put kind of  a practical limit on the number of images you could be convicted of possessing. When it all went to the dark web, prosecutors were able to charge a count for every temp image recovered from a hard drive. So what was once in the two digits can easily be in the three digits now. Or more.

[leh-nerd skin-erd]

6 minutes ago, The Frankish Reich said:

Sentencing is messy. I'm making a general point here, not anything specific about these recent nominees.

There are many cases where multiple counts run about the sentence to something absurd. I know this personally from cases I've been involved in (and never on the defense side). Here's an example from a prominent case in my neck of the woods:

 

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/policing/2022/01/19/truck-driver-sentenced-110-years/9108405002/

 

Truck driver, not sufficiently experienced, from Cuba, driving on the steep descent from the Colorado mountains, onto an off ramp that (having driven it many times) is not very well designed. Barrels into other vehicles, huge crash, cars exploding, four innocent people killed. It was probably what we'd call recklessness, not intentional harm-doing. Some nonlawyers would consider it just an accident - negligence, sure, but not some kind of hardened criminal. I thought it was appropriate that he was criminally prosecuted, but I realize that's more about the horrific result than horrific behavior - with a little luck he would have flipped over his own truck and injured himself rather than killing four other people. He went to trial and was convicted on all counts. The sentencing guidelines: 110 years.

It was crazy, and even law and order types like me thought "this can't be right." Ultimately the governor stepped in and commuted the sentence to something more fitting the crime: 10 years. The end result makes sense to me.

 

It's just something to keep in mind when someone gets what seems to be an excessive sentence, or a far too lenient sentence. The guidelines are just that: guidelines. I can't tell you what someone like this truck driver should get in a perfectly fair world, but I can tell you there are gradations of creeps in all of the kinds of cases KJB passed sentences on. I've tried to avoid those cases because they are just too personally disturbing to me on many levels, but I have had some tangential involvement over the years. Judges try to do what's right. There's often a conflict between the individual case (a sad, creepy loser with no prior record), the judge's lack of total certainty about whether or not he may reoffend (often there's no evidence of a long pattern, but does this mean he just hasn't been caught before?) and the general idea that we need a strong deterrent to make anyone so inclined to go out looking for this stuff to think twice before he does it.  And yes, the number of images multiplies, and each one can be a separate count. It can give a prosecutor tremendous leverage in securing a plea deal conviction, something that I think is valuable in general but that everyone should agree raises some liberty concerns when prosecutors overcharge to gain that leverage. We see this in drug cases too, where everyone seemed to reach a consensus (even Kim Kardashian and Donald Trump) that maybe the scales had tilted too far in the prosecutor's favor.

 

Bottom line: sentencing is messy. There are some judges who are just too gullible, but almost all of them I've known are doing the best they can, so I give them the benefit of the doubt.

Seems like a  reasonable enough explanation.  The issue politically seems to be more about derailing a nominee, bloodying them up for sport, or in extreme cases, destroying them entirely.  It’s a shame really. 
 

That case got quite a bit of coverage nationally.  Seemed like a reasonable outcome to a tragic story, and the 110 year pull seemed very unreasonable.  

[The Frankish Reich]

Just now, leh-nerd skin-erd said:

Seems like a  reasonable enough explanation.  The issue politically seems to be more about derailing a nominee, bloodying them up for sport, or in extreme cases, destroying them entirely.  It’s a shame really. 
 

That case got quite a bit of coverage nationally.  Seemed like a reasonable outcome to a tragic story, and the 110 year pull seemed very unreasonable.  

Thanks - I appreciate the reasonable response. I really like hearing from people with insight into a field that I don't know that much about, so I tend to assume that other people think likewise. And I know something about this kind of stuff.

As someone who's worked as a lawyer with law enforcement agencies in several contexts, something still bothers me about criminal law even after many, many years: we often punish bad results more harshly than evil behavior. The inexperienced truck driver? Irresponsible, yes. But way more unlucky than anything else. Most of the time drivers doing exactly the same thing (including the truckers right behind me on that very exit) don't even cause an accident. Meanwhile someone fires shots on a downtown street at someone and misses and he's charged with a trivial gun possession crime.