Said Roman Martinez a former law clerk to Chief Justice Roberts, quoted in "Supreme Court to weigh if Jan. 6 rioters can be charged with obstruction/Defense lawyers say prosecutors improperly stretched the law by charging hundreds with obstruction of an official proceeding" (WaPo, free access link).
[Martinez] appeared before the Supreme Court a decade ago to defend the government’s use of an obstruction statute similar to the one that is the focus of Tuesday’s argument. He said the court’s decision to take the Jan. 6 case, and look more closely at the statute, is consistent with the court’s recent trend of narrowing the discretion of prosecutors.
Oral argument will be on Tuesday.
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15 comments:
Due process requires advance notice of what is a crime.
Yah. EVERYONE is against prosecutors having too much authority and discretion about charging until their guy's are in power. However when their favored partisans do gain that power the objections about easy dismissals, overcharging, selective prosecutions, and nitpicking "process crimes" all of a sudden disappear. Go figure?
But, muh norms! Muh Democracy!
Get Pelosi and numerous others under oath. Give ‘em a chance to tell their lies in court.
Their whole stated purpose being there was to disrupt an official proceeding.
Violent crime prosecutions suffer from the opposite problem: Public defenders running for DAs and NOT prosecuting. We also have no-bail and judges who never want to keep criminals behind bars. Violent criminals are out in hours while those nonviolent J6ers spend years in solitary, and get biased juries and judges.
It's no so much the discretion, but the opportunity for bias in the application of the discretion that is especially pernicious.
Defense lawyers say prosecutors improperly stretched the law by charging hundreds with obstruction of an official proceeding.
Correct me where I'm wrong here. The proceeding interfered with - permanently - was the challenge to the electors that was in progress. The challenge did not resume when congress reconvened.
Yet, the challenge to the electors itself has been branded as an insurrectionist threat to "Democracy," on the basis of which Jack Smith is trying prosecute Trump.
So, by Smith's logic, didn't the J6 defendants "save Democracy"?
If Roberts is really interested in this, more power to him.
On the other hand, his style always seems to be "write an essay about what the law should be" rather than "use the powers of the Court to stop ongoing abuses".
I fear another case where the government gets to keep doing what they want in return for sitting quietly while he reads his essay.
LLR-democratical Rich: "Their whole stated purpose being there was to disrupt an official proceeding"
Who is "their"/(they)?
How did they monolithically convey "their" intent?
Did they all sign a declaration? Hire a pilot to do a little skywriting?
How many times have we seen protestors "disrupting" official proceedings? How many of those were prosecuted with this clearly corrupted purposeful misreading of the law?
Spoiler: zero
This was a demonstration that turned into a riot. What is unique is the attempt to track down and prosecute every paricipant--in other words, prosecutorial discretion that looks like selective prosecution, particulrly after the lethal George Floyd riots and the ongoing drama and mischief at the Hatfield federal building in Portland OR. Nothing is being done to track down and punish those folks.
Those folks in Washington live in a different world than we do. They got their feathers ruffled, and they want to make sure it doesn't happen again, so they are using the levers available to them to disproportionally punish this set of rioters.
Bah!
Rich said...
Their whole stated purpose being there was to disrupt an official proceeding.
4/13/24, 6:51 PM
Who's?? Code Pinks?? BLM?? Antifa???
Amadeus 48 has it. For them not to prosecute anyone for that nonsense at the Federal Building in Portland says volumes.
Can't be an insurrection without large numbers. Can't show large numbers if the sight seers aren't counted.
Compare the treatment those of the J6 people that wandered around the Capitol taking selfies with the (long rap sheet) multiple violent offenders released without bail.
Their whole stated purpose being there was to disrupt an official proceeding.
You mean like pulling a fire alarm?
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