Should the Supreme Court include defense attorneys?

Trippy Trekker said:

Thank you. I stand corrected in having attributed SCL instead of MCL status at HLS to Raphael Cruz.

Click to expand...

Harshaw said:

Never claimed anything of the sort.

But when you want people jailed (or otherwise legally harassed) for saying things you don't like, as various prominent Democrats and other "progressives" have proposed for "climate change deniers," or those who push for "hate speech" laws, or actually introducing a Constitutional amendment to partially repeal the First Amendment, you've got real, palpable hostility to free speech. :shrug:

Click to expand...

MaggieD said:

I don't much care. I do think that, whoever that defense atty appointee might be, he/she would face a gauntlet of unprecedented rancor from Democrats. Defense attys defend guilty people. Can you just imagine how he would be attacked? I sure can.

It wouldn't be pretty...

Click to expand...

disneydude said:

They also defend innocent ones....and cases that are overcharged. Prosecutors prosecute guilty people but they also prosecute innocent ones. Its too bad that there is a double standard.

Click to expand...

Deuce said:

Jailed, eh? Go ahead. Support this ****in straw man.

Click to expand...

Kennedy Jr. accused skeptical politicians of “selling out the public trust.” “Those guys are doing the Koch Brothers bidding and are against all the evidence of the rational mind, saying global warming does not exit. They are contemptible human beings. I wish there were a law you could punish them with. I don’t think there is a law that you can punish those politicians under.”Kennedy saved his most venomous comments for the Koch Brothers, accusing them of “treason” for “polluting our atmosphere.”
“I think it’s treason. Do I think the Koch Brothers are treasonous, yes I do,” Kennedy explained.
“They are enjoying making themselves billionaires by impoverishing the rest of us. Do I think they should be in jail, I think they should be enjoying three hots and a cot at the Hague with all the other war criminals,” Kennedy declared.
“Do I think the Koch brothers should be tried for reckless endangerment? Absolutely, that is a criminal offence and they ought to be serving time for it,” he added.

Click to expand...

At what point do we jail or execute global warming deniers
June 2, 2009, 9:42PM
What is so frustrating about these fools is that they are the politicians and greedy bastards who don’t want a cut in their profits who use bogus science or the lowest scientists in the gene pool who will distort data for a few bucks. The vast majority of the scientific minds in the World agree and understand it’s a very serious problem that can do an untold amount of damage to life on Earth.
So when the right wing ****tards have caused it to be too late to fix the problem, and we start seeing the devastating consequences and we start seeing end of the World type events – how will we punish those responsible. It will be too late. So shouldn’t we start punishing them now?

Click to expand...

Those denialists should face jail. They should face fines. They should face lawsuits from the classes of people whose lives and livelihoods are most threatened by denialist tactics.

Click to expand...

I am writing to you today because I am concerned that these companies' contradictory
public statements may have violated securities laws - specifically, they may potentially have
violated Section 17(a) of the Securities Act of 1933,2 Section lO(b) of the Securities Exchange
Act of 1934,3 and SEC Rule 1 Ob-5.
4
Broadly speaking, these securities laws prohibit companies
from misleading investors about facts that could affect their business and their stock price.
Corporate interests have become accustomed to saying whatever they want about
Washington policy debates, with little accountability when their predictions prove to be
inaccurate. 5 But the information we have obtained raises questions about how, in this specific
case, the companies could have knowingly provided such dramatically different public
statements about the impact of the DOL Conflict of Interest Rule - in one example, saying
almost simultaneously that the rule would be "unworkable" and that the rule would not be "a
significant hurdle" - without misleading investors.

Click to expand...

Thankfully, the government had a playbook, too: the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO. In 1999, the Justice Department filed a civil RICO lawsuit against the major tobacco companies and their associated industry groups, alleging that the companies “engaged in and executed — and continue to engage in and execute — a massive 50-year scheme to defraud the public, including consumers of cigarettes, in violation of RICO.”

Tobacco spent millions of dollars and years of litigation fighting the government. But finally, through the discovery process, government lawyers were able to peel back the layers of deceit and denial and see what the tobacco companies really knew all along about cigarettes.

In 2006, Judge Gladys Kessler . . . decided that the tobacco companies’ fraudulent campaign amounted to a racketeering enterprise.

Click to expand...

disneydude said:

They also defend innocent ones....and cases that are overcharged. Prosecutors prosecute guilty people but they also prosecute innocent ones. Its too bad that there is a double standard.

Click to expand...

antiquity said:

That is what juries are for. To weigh the evidence and decide which side has proven their case.

Click to expand...

antiquity said:

That is what juries are for. To weigh the evidence and decide which side has proven their case.

Click to expand...