The NYT op-ed page features six legal writers coming up with a total 30 questions for Samuel Alito.
Leonard A. Leo, the executive vice president of the Federalist Society, asks the one that Robert Bork gave his most damaging answer to: "why do you want to be on the Supreme Court?" (Bork said he thought it would be "an intellectual feast.")
Lawprof Stanley Fish has the most interesting questions, including: "Is the fictional world of Philip K. Dick's story "Minority Report"- in which people are arrested for crimes they have not yet committed - becoming a reality in the United States?" (He's concerned about the way we treat sex offenders who have already served their sentences.)
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Not just sex offenders, but many divorced fathers, and some divorced mothers are also subject to having their rights violated, specifically their right to due process, and their right to innocence until proven guilty.
How about a little sensitivity to the rights of authors? That's too long of a quote. I deleted it.
It's okay that you delete them, I'd prefer that to your taking me to court for annoying you while using a pseudonym.
Mein President, George Bush now, worried about criticism has just signed into law the Use a Pseudonym, Go To Jail Bill.
(On the otherhand, I linked, and I believe it was clearly a fair use. But truly, since this is 2005 and not 1776, and Constitutional Law Professors have not supported the EFF and ACLU as they should have, I do worry about my right to anonymous speech.)
why just have this for sex offenders and not for other offenses?
I would tend to agree with you on civil commitment after sentences are served...that's why I support parole programs.
BUT, just focusing on your question above, I would venture to say that sex offenders have some unique characteristics.
They are driven by compulsion rather than circumstance. This probably drives up their recidivism rates.
What a sex offender takes can't be replaced. You can't make restitution on a child's innocence.
Their victims tend to be the most vulnerable in society. It's logical that society would go to the farthest lengths to protect them.
And the right to troll was just erased by the President last week, apparently.
Wait, is Stanley Fish a law professor? I thought he was just a literary theorist who commented on law (and anything else) in his spare time.
Even worse is the third-class treatment visited upon an ex-con who was actually innocent of the offense, since he cannot enjoy special privileges accorded to those who have shown remorse or undergone "rehabilitation." Our justice system is just plain sick.
Sorry to contribute to the continued creep of the thread away from the original topic, but I read the Cnet article referenced several times above, then read through the pertinent part of the bill. I could not find the exact language the author quotes in Section 113, was anybody else able to?
Anyway, it looks like the Violence Against Women act was appended to the Justice Reauthorization Act. I don't find that particularly troubling although the author does. It looks like the intent of the referenced section was to extend to the internet the same constraints that now apply to telephone harassment in the setting of sexual harassment and stalking.
I doubt the intent of this act was to secretly find a way to punish annoying internet posters, as some on here seem to imply. It looks like the language needs to be cleaned up and better defined, though.
It is not impinging on the rights of sex offenders to track them.
First of all, we limit the rights of convicted felons generally-- for example a convicted felon doesn't have the same second amendment protection that you or I have if we want to buy a gun. Since sex offenders are felons, ergo, we as a society have a right to restrict their rights if necessary to protect ourselves.
There is ample evidence that they are a chronic threat-- very few sex offenders that we know of have managed to quit being sex offenders. Think about it. If you, not being a pedophile, don't find kids sexually interesting, then it would be almost impossible for you to wake up one day and decide that for that day you will quit finding adults intersting sexually and be attracted to kids. Well, pedophiles are in the same boat, but the reverse. So, if we let them out it makes sense to monitor. The problem is we don't do it the right way (think Martha Stewart.) and if we consider life in prison an appropriate sentence for murder, then doesn't it follow that life on parole is (which essentially is what monitoring is) is appropriate for rape or pedophilia?. As a matter of fact, I also support constant monitoring of chronic drunk drivers-- for the same reason, they are a menace.
Now, I've blogged on this topic and some closely related ones at length. To avoid having Ann delete this as too long, I will post some links:
on tracking sex offenders
tracking this sex offender could have saved yet more lives (a follow up to the first post)
the prison that follows prison (on how we fail to help felons in general find a way to become productive, gainfully employed citizens when they finish their sentence).
contrasting monitoring criminals with recent monitoring of people by the Bush administration
If someone on a sex offender registery moves next door to you, aren't you being punished for no justifiable reason? Are you being asked to serve as an unpaid prison guard for the un-rehabilitated? What are you supposed to do with that knowledge that you should already be doing?
I can't wait for savvy real-estate agents to put up "sex offender lives here" signs in order to do the block busting so typical of 1950s Chicago. It would be a great repeat of poetic justice to hoist the oppressors by their own petards.
PD Shaw:
The sex offender (who has obviously fulfilled his prison sentence) has as much right to move next door to you as a paroled armed robber, a murderer who has served his sentence, an embezzler, a volunteer worker with the all-saints society, a police officer or the pope, if he wants to.
The only difference is, that the sex offender has to register, so you know he is a sex offender.
What else do you want? Keep in mind that no matter where he moves, SOMEBODY will be his neighbor.
The real solution for pedophiles, who do have a sky-high recidivism rate, is to never let them out. Ever. "One strike and you're out."
I happen to agree that it's wrong to continue to punish someone after they've served their sentence. But in the absence of effective sentencing of these repeat-repeat-offenders, I'm with Eli---monitor them forever if that's what it takes.
It is especially risky to let them out, as the victims of pedophiles are the pedophiles of tomorrow. Not all of them, certainly, but it perpetuates the cycle.
Yeah, how'd Stan Fish become a law professor. His PhD is in Lit (on Paradise Lost, I think.)
Used to hang with Stan a bit when I was at Duke....
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