London Calling
 

Uh, spank, we won the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. And we fought them so that we *didn't* have to give a shit about England anymore.

They also don't have jury trials in criminal cases for the most part. I guess if England can live with that, we can, too, eh?

London Calling
 

2. OJ taught us this.


http://www.darryl.com/guilty.gif

Absurdity
 

how can the Court make it a requirement then?

Shouldn't it just have said "rights shouldn't be violated and some consequence should attach when they are." When courts start crafting rrules, isn't that kinda sorta legislative?

Absurdity
 

Why are money damages less of a check than the exclusionary rule? Given the number of times it's violated, it's not like cops are giving it the full weight it deserves?

Exclusionary Rule
 

Sure, but why is it the best way to protect those rights? What if the rule were that any evidence even if seized unlawfully were admissable, but that the cop(s) who obtained it were automatically discharged and put in jail for a year? (and it didn't require a lawsuit by the defendant, but rather just a motion in court) I'll bet you'd have fewer illegal searches that you do now, and you'd put away the criminal.

BREAKING NEWS....
 

more on the buses:

http://aarons.cc/i/i5/no-buses-wtf.jpg

BREAKING NEWS....
 

I am happy to tell you that eventually you collect all your photo shops (the non-porno ones) into a picture book that is a best seller in red state preschools. Congrats!

the publishers do make you keep Teddy and Hil pix out to not "scar" the kids. 10 years later you publish an explicit edition where they're back in.

BREAKING NEWS....
 

How old is Ty now? I think some timelines are getting a bit blurry here.

BREAKING NEWS....
 

From what I understand he was a prodigy.(net.) Got out of lawschool at 19. You can do the math from there.

THIS JUST IN . . . .
 

THIS JUST IN . . . .FINALLY.....
 

The buck stops here, and as your governor, I take full responsibility," Mrs. Blanco


http://www.goodolddogs3.com/blank-o-lookin-stupid.jpg

I wonder when Nagin will come clean on the buses.......

London Calling
 

Yes - if we didn't have jury trials OJ might be in prison right now. I am not all that enamoured with the Jury system either. Having 12 idiots that couldn't get out of jury duty decide my fate doesn't sound all that great to me.

Exclusionary Rule
 

Exactly. Well put.

Penalizing the Cops
 

I had a friend that pointed out that if you put huge penalties on the cops for doing illegal search and seizures they may stop doing them altogther and therefore stop catching criminals. My response to him was that it is a lot less corrosive to the system if the evidence is never found in the first place than if it is found and then ignored.

London Calling
 

2. I invented the OJ response to Not_bob.

BREAKING NEWS....
 

Do you mean your now or my now?

Penalizing the Cops
 

Change my proposal to jailing the chief of police and discharging him. The penalties don't hve to be put directly on the cops--put the penalty on the department, and they'll have an incentive to keep things clean.

THIS JUST IN . . . .
 

Am I on ignore?

THIS JUST IN . . . .
 

We can ignore an admin's boyfriend?

THIS JUST IN . . . .
 

Ask Shifter.

THIS JUST IN . . . .
 

Can't, I have him on ignore. ............... Oh! Okay.

Rove's Stones
 

Couldn't happen to a more deserving guy. I love the 4th paragraph.



"Never mind those planned congressional hearings on the hows and whys of government incompetence in the attempt to cope with Hurricane Katrina.
There were not only logistical and bureaucratic troubles but, astonishingly for the Bush White House, political snafus. Maybe there's a simple explanation: Karl Rove's kidney stones.

Washington insiders have been buzzing that President Bush's guru-in-chief - often called "Bush's Brain" - has been suffering from the painful urinary-tract malady for the past couple of weeks, causing him to miss some key Katrina strategy sessions.

I'm told that the 54-year-old deputy White House chief of staff - who apparently was feeling well enough yesterday to travel outside the nation's capital - visited the hospital, possibly twice, to relieve his agony since Labor Day.

White House officials declined to speak on the record about Rove's kidney stones, due to the extreme delicacy of discussions about internal organs of top presidential advisers.

But the National Institutes of Health define a kidney stone as "a hard mass developed from crystals that separate from the urine and build up on the inner surfaces of the kidney. ... Usually, the first symptom of a kidney stone is extreme pain, which occurs when a stone acutely blocks the flow of urine. ... Sometimes nausea and vomiting occur. Later, pain may spread to the groin."

My esteemed colleague and Daily News Washington Bureau chief, Tom DeFrank, who has also suffered from the condition, yesterday told me: 'The pain, depending on the size of the stone, goes from horrible to excruciating.'

DeFrank added: 'Karl may be a certified political genius, but there's no way he could be in a meeting dispensing advice to anybody. The only thing he could dispense would be low, pitiable moans.'"


http://www.nydailynews.com/news/goss...p-296015c.html

Rove's Stones
 

I am going to hell.

Penalizing the Cops
 

Or an incentive not to investigate, which would be the result if any of these assinine theories were put into practice.

I Love This Idea
 

http://www.breitbart.com/news/2005/09/15/D8CL34SO7.html

[Arnold terminates junk food]

Penalizing the Cops
 

The only reduction in incentives is because the actual cost of poor search tactics is not transparent. It's hidden in evidentiary rulings that make conviction of likely guilty defendants more difficult.

So, what you're saying is that as soon as the public realizes what a terrible job the cops are doing--because they're paying damages instead of reducing the chances of conviction--the cops will stop doing their job altogether. If that is in fact the response, then it seems a) the public should see that attitude and b) those cops should be replaced with someone who will do the job, and do it according to the law.

Rove's Stones
 

I can't believe how happy this sentence makes me.

I Love This Idea
 

2. Good stuff, especially if he can figure out how to make kids eat broccoli instead. But he's not superhuman.

Penalizing the Cops
 

Not exactly. What I'm saying is that if you put potential personal liability on the cops, the result will be a decrease in investigative success (not a perfect phrase, but I think you know what I mean). No one is going to go out on a limb at their job if it is going to effect them personally, especially at the rates we pay cops.

I Love This Idea
 

It's just going to drive it underground. Shady characters will hang by the fences bordering school property, muttering to kids who happen to stray too close, "Hey, kid, wanna buy a soda? I got Coke, Pepsi, Diet Dr. Pepper? Oh, you wanna do the Dew? That'll cost ya, kid..."



Mountain Dew - legalize it!

depressing blog post of the day
 

Although it's just relating a story from the LA Times:

• MARCHING BACKWARDS. It's long been understood that there are several different strains of insurgency in Iraq. What one would want to accomplish is to weaken the hand of the hard-core jihadis centered around Abu Musab al-Zarqawi through a combination of killing them and making them toxic in the eyes of public opinion. Then, other insurgent groups with less millenarian agendas could be bargained with and incorporated into the political process. But as this LA Times report details, the reverse is happening.
  
  Zarqawi's followers used to be overwhelmingly outsiders, aligned with popular Sunni Arab resistance movements but fundamentally separate from them. But thanks to the combination of ever-growing Sunni alienation from the American-backed government and Zarqawi's superior logistical capacity, native-born Iraqis are increasingly rallying to his standard. On the one hand, this makes Iraq's problems harder to solve. On the other hand, it makes America's global jihad problem much worse. Even if things take a turn for the better in Iraq at some point (which is optimistic) and the insurgency goes away or quiets down, we're not going to be able to trap and kill all of Zarqawi's followers. Most of them will just leave (after all, Iraq's security forces can't be expected to try that hard to keep lethal killers inside their borders), only to strike elsewhere, complete with extensive practical training from the Iraq War.
  
  This is what they call the Class of 2005 problem in counterterrorism circles. But depending on what America does in Iraq, we may well see Classes of 2006, 2007, and 2008 also graduating in years to come with Zarqawi attracting ever-more followers as our presence in Iraq "wrecks the possibility, however remote, of any form of national reconciliation" there.

Yglesias at TAPPED

Penalizing the Cops
 

Which is why I said put it on the police department, not the individual. Use the same internal punishment mechanisms as currently exist for sloppy police work, whatever they may be. Under either system the incentives should exist for the PD to avoid illegal searches because they have costs (whether monetary or lost convictions).

The example of penalizing the cops directly was merely to illustrate that one surely could come up with a system that would create better incentives than the exclusionary rule for police to do their jobs properly. As it is now, the incentives for police to do their job right are very attenuated and their performance is very opaque. Both would change if it's damages actions instead of the exclusionary rule.

ETA: And, btw, you can always indemnify the cops, which gets the same result as putting it on the PD. Bottom line is that the exclusionary rule hides the true costs of poorly handled investigations, with only criminals benefitting.

Penalizing the Cops
 

And I disagree that it's a better incentive.

So an already strapped PD looses additional funds? That seems to me to be an inopposite result. And I don't think it's "criminals" that are benefitting. I think all of us benefit by making sure the G doesn't run ruff-shot over our civil rights.

Penalizing the Cops
 

If they do their jobs well, then no.

And, as I've said before, either approach can be structured to ensure the incentives are to respect civil rights; it's just that one gives the benefit to the least deserving person.

Penalizing the Cops
 

My guess, based on nothing other than a guess, is that most of the time that the exclusionary rule has a real effect is at the margins, so it is not a matter of doing a job well, but rather a matter of taking a risk in the grey area.

I guess I'm focussing more on the down side. Agreed that the criminal that gets off is not deserving, but I think that is better than taking funds away from the PD or de-incentivizing individual cops and thereby hurting us all.

BREAKING NEWS....
 

I think what ncs was missing is that once the intelligent design behind the concept of time travel was discovered, it not only allowed the futurists, like Ty@50 and BillGates@70, to travel back in time, but forward as well, in addition to allowing them to have visits from futurists from a future date beyond their present, i.e Ty@50 has probably been visited by Ty@70, who may be lurking here now (bringing new meaning to the phrase "longtime lurker").

No?

I Love This Idea
 

2. He can cram it down their throats for starters. These kids today need a strong hand lest they grow up to be undisciplined liberal rabble rousers.

depressing blog post of the day
 

Here's a thought, wholesale killing of all the terrorists. Maybe its time to pull out the nukes. Future generations will thank us.......Ty@110 told me so.

depressing blog post of the day
 

That line between Bush conservatism and self-parody is such a thin one.

Penalizing the Cops
 

In the old days, the days of the Founders, the local constabulary had any number of opportunities to become relatively wealthy, and they were positions of much higher respect than they are now. It didn't come in the form of salary, but instead in the form of political standing and access to governmental largesse like land purchases (speculating in frontier land was one of the biggest ways to advance economically).

However, this also meant higher standards and higher penalties. There are plenty of stories of sheriffs literally coming to physical violence when they abused their position, and jailing an officer would not have been unheard of.

I think part of why we're reluctant to put our crime-fighters at risk for abusing their position is that their position really isn't worth the risk. But, that means we're left with Miranda as a solution, and it is not the most logical one.

I think the idea of holding the department accountable is interesting, but it does mean that if you get a crummy police department, it is likely to only get worse as they pay claim after claim. You'd likely need a way to taking over those departments entirely.