Category Archives: Law

Holder Messes With Texas Because … He Can

Barack Obama, Federalism, Law, Racism, States' Rights

This administration is obliterating what’s left of the federal scheme: Attorney General Eric Holder’s Justice Department is moving against the states and end-running the Courts, first in the Zimmerman case and now with respect to the Supreme Court’s decision regarding election rules in Texas.

Apoplectic over the high court’s weakening of laws that privilege protected groups , Holder, reports Fox News, “asked a San Antonio-based federal court to force Texas to get permission from the federal government before it can make any additional changes to its voting and election laws.”

Other than Fox News, the news and cable networks appear not to be reporting this.

The administration has a tradition to uphold. In 2010, The Hildebeest herself announced the intention of the Obama Administration to sue Arizona and Gov. Jan Brewer for insisting it had a right to pass Arizona’s immigration-enforcement law, SB 1070.

What Ever Happened To Debtor’s Jail?

Affirmative Action, Britain, Debt, Government, Justice, Law

Judge Rosemary Aquilina is hoping to suspend reality in Detroit with her gavel.

Aquilina is “an Ingham County Circuit judge,” who “ordered Friday that Detroit’s federal bankruptcy filing be withdrawn,” reports the Detroit News. “Aquilina said the Michigan Constitution prohibits actions that will lessen the pension benefits of public employees, including those in the City of Detroit.” (Imagine: The state’s constitution works against Michigan taxpayers.)

The Library of Economics and Liberty remarks that “Early English bankruptcy laws were designed to assist creditors in collecting the debtor’s assets, not to protect the debtor or discharge (forgive) his debts.”

This was the wise, ancient common law. The latter is not the concern of Wikipedia, when it talks about the “debtor declaring bankruptcy to obtain relief from debt,” which “is accomplished either through a discharge of the debt or through a restructuring of the debt.”

That the US even allows Chapter 9—“municipal bankruptcy; a federal mechanism for the resolution of municipal debts”—says a lot.

Governments should not be availed of the legal instruments meant to protect private-property owners. How about debtor’s jail for politicians who defraud taxpayers?

Perhaps Aquilina worries that the fat cats (Detroit’s political class) will obtain relief at the expense of the little guy (public-sector workers) to whom the politicians and the unions promised the world?

The sooner the oink sector is disabused of its delusions, the better.

Last week’s column introduced readers to the Colosseum of courtroom cretins. In a word, a dumbed down courtroom commentariat that is incapable of separating politicized constructs (racism) from facts admissible in a court of law.

Judge Rosemary Aquilina is another of this idiocracy’s many exhibits.

UPDATE III: The Colosseum of Courtroom Cretins (Walter Block Adjudicates)

Affirmative Action, Crime, Criminal Injustice, Intelligence, Law, libertarianism, Paleolibertarianism

“The Colosseum of Courtroom Cretins” is the current column, now on WND. An excerpt:

… In the course of doing her journalistic due diligence, Van Susteren stumbled upon another falsity peddled by the administration’s front man, Attorney General Eric Holder, mass media and the rest of the “Racial Industrial Complex.”

The slick-tongued Holder had told his primary constituency, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, that “people who feel threatened have a duty to retreat,” and that “‘Stand Your Ground’-style laws —such as the one that figured into the George Zimmerman case—’undermine public safety,’ and ‘create dangerous conflicts in our neighborhoods.'”

Why then did the “Instructions read to the Zimmerman jury by The Honorable Debra S. Nelson, Circuit Judge,” state the reverse? Again, I excerpt from Justice Nelson’s instructions on the “Justifiable Use of Force”:

“If George Zimmerman was not engaged in an unlawful activity and was attacked in anyplace where he had a right to be, he had no duty to retreat and had the right to stand his ground and meet force with force, including deadly force if he reasonably believed that it was necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself or another or to prevent the commission of a forcible felony.”

It just so happens that Zimmerman was unable to retreat. As the facts showed, conclusively, Tryavon Martin was atop, pounding Zimmerman into the ground. By trial’s end, the prosecution no longer disputed this unassailable fact.

Holder’s lie was compounded by the fact that, as Van Susteren discovered in the course of digging in federal statutes, the law generally recognizes the right of the person who is not the aggressor to stand his ground. …

The complete column is “The Colosseum of Courtroom Cretins.” Read it on WND. .

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UPDATE I: Greta Van Susteren is investigating “The Zimmerman arrest affidavit, belatedly, about which a Colorado law-enforcement officer wrote the following last year:

“…is so deficient in properly sourced factual information and full of unsubstantiated, unsourced conclusions, I am appalled that a State’s Attorney would even give it a second look. …”

MORE.

UPDATE II: JIMMY CARTER. I would have expected that an old “white guy” like Jimmy Carter would have a bit of the Cartesian logic in him and come down on the side of the fine jury Zimmerman had. Indeed, here is Former President Jimmy Carter on the George Zimmerman trial:

“I think the jury made the right decision based on the evidence presented,” Carter told Atlanta station WXIA-TV.
“The prosecution inadvertently set the standard so high that the jury had to be convinced that it was a deliberate act by Zimmerman that he was not at all defending himself.” he added.
“It’s not a moral question, it’s a legal question and the American law requires that the jury listens to the evidence presented.”

MORE.

UPDATE III: Walter Block Adjudicates The Law In A Just Society Over at Economic Policy Journal:

Zimmerman was akin to a private (hence justified) cop. He had every right to do what he did. Martin had no right to resist. The only problem I have with this is that Zimmerman should have had some sort of uniform, or badge. Let’s change [the] scenario slightly. Suppose Zimmerman was a real (unjustified govt) cop. There’s no doubt there would not have even have been a trial.

Black Criminality Is Not Part Of The One-Sided ‘Conversation’ On CNN

Crime, Justice, Law, Race

“Any candid debate on race and criminality in this country would have to start with the fact that blacks commit an astoundingly disproportionate number of crimes,” writes the Wall Street Journal’s Jason Riley in “Race, Politics and the Zimmerman Trial”:

Liberals in general, and the black left in particular, like the idea of talking about racial problems, but in practice they typically ignore the most relevant aspects of any such discussion.
Related Video

Political Diary editor Jason Riley on why black civil rights leaders focus on white racism instead of personal responsibility. Photo: Getty Images

Any candid debate on race and criminality in this country would have to start with the fact that blacks commit an astoundingly disproportionate number of crimes. African-Americans constitute about 13% of the population, yet between 1976 and 2005 blacks committed more than half of all murders in the U.S. The black arrest rate for most offenses—including robbery, aggravated assault and property crimes—is typically two to three times their representation in the population. The U.S. criminal-justice system, which currently is headed by one black man (Attorney General Eric Holder) who reports to another (President Obama), is a reflection of this reality, not its cause.

“High rates of black violence in the late twentieth century are a matter of historical fact, not bigoted imagination,” wrote the late Harvard Law professor William Stuntz in “The Collapse of American Criminal Justice.” “The trends reached their peak not in the land of Jim Crow but in the more civilized North, and not in the age of segregation but in the decades that saw the rise of civil rights for African Americans—and of African American control of city governments.”

The left wants to blame these outcomes on racial animus and “the system,” but blacks have long been part of running that system. Black crime and incarceration rates spiked in the 1970s and ’80s in cities such as Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago and Philadelphia, under black mayors and black police chiefs. Some of the most violent cities in the U.S. today are run by blacks. …

The homicide rate claiming black victims today is seven times that of whites, and the George Zimmermans of the world are not the reason. Some 90% of black murder victims are killed by other blacks.

“Do you know that Negroes are 10 percent of the population of St. Louis and are responsible for 58% of its crimes? We’ve got to face that. And we’ve got to do something about our moral standards,” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. told a congregation in 1961. “We know that there are many things wrong in the white world, but there are many things wrong in the black world, too. We can’t keep on blaming the white man. There are things we must do for ourselves.

MORE.

Still more in “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa.”