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Convictions: Slate's blog on legal issues
Thursday, May 15, 2008 - Posts
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The California same-sex marriage decision is unquestionably a landmark. The question is: Will this extensive opinion affirming same-sex marriage be an opening to new found respect and accommodation or acrimony and division? There is much to applaud, much to study, and a great deal of reassurance still needed on both sides. Read More...
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Today's California Supreme Court decision is certainly momentous and worthy of celebration, for obvious reasons. It will, I think, come to be seen as part of the grand tradition of that court, as exemplified in its bold 1948 decision in Perez v. Sharp Read More...
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The California Supreme Court has just announced its decision in the gay-marriage cases, finding that the state marriage laws that "exclude same-sex couples from access to the designation of marriage" are unconstitutional. Opinion is here . Read More...
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Am enjoying today's discussion of U.S. military commissions. But I fear the jumping-off point for the discussion, an endorsement of France's prosecution of Farid Benyettou et al . , rests on shaky ground. It's dangerous to try to draw parallels between Read More...
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One last point to Phil. France uses the inquisitorial system of criminal justice: no jury, greatly relaxed rules of evidence, including the absence of a hearsay rule. (There is no need to worry about confusing the jurors or animating their biases—the Read More...
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Eric writes : "We are agreed, yes? That procedural protections in civilian courts are too high for war-on-terror prosecutions? ... If yes, then there is just an empirical question of whether we should demand that federal judges relax procedural protections Read More...
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Phil, what puzzles me is why people are so sure that reducing procedural protections in civilian courts is superior to constructing an alternative system of military courts with lower procedural protections. We are agreed, yes? That procedural protections Read More...
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Also , our point wasn’t to issue any sort of blanket indictment of military justice, or American justice, as a whole. To the contrary. Same government, yes, but very different rules—and in the traditional court systems, it’s the courts that make those Read More...
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At 10:00 today Pacific time (that's 1:00 Eastern), the California Supreme Court will issue its long-awaited same-sex-marriage decision. (Briefs and oral argument here .) The question presented is this: Does California's statutory ban on marriage between Read More...
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Eric , I don’t think you’ve correctly stated the Bazelon/Lithwick standard here: It’s not that all Pentagon balking is per se evidence of crap commissions. It’s that the balking, plus the seven years of after-the-fact tinkering (the CSRT “do-overs” or Read More...
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Eric, we're fast approaching the end of my French vocabulary, and I really don't want to resort to using Google's translator to keep up with this conversation. But I think you're misapplying the Catch-22 standard to the French sentencing decision announced Read More...
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Phil, The French trial also fails the Bazelon/Lithwick/ Heller standard, which I would rephrase as follows. If the government takes an action on the basis of secret evidence and the publicly visible outcome serves the government's interest (e.g., conviction), Read More...
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Eric, I think Joseph Heller would agree with the Catch-22 scenario you've described for the commissions at Guantanamo Bay. They truly are damned if they proceed and damned if they don't. Perhaps unintentionally, I think you've arrived at the right conclusion: Read More...
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Emily and Dahlia think so: Key actors are declining to play their part in a piece of theater designed to produce all convictions all the time. These refusals, affecting two trials this week, suggest that the whole apparatus-seven years and counting in Read More...
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