Christopher Soghoian puts it succinctly
Christopher Soghoian puts it succinctly:
I’ve had two conversations in the past few days - where I have sought advice from super intelligent and seriously kickass legal experts - and both of them have ended with me receiving a sharply worded (yet friendly) warning:
The law is not a machine. You cannot find a loophole in it in the same way that you would with a computer algorithm. The law is pliable, and if a judge wants to rule against you - he’ll find a way.
As plain and simple as this may be, I’m still struggling to get my head around it.
(emphasis mine)
I suppose it’s true, and I also have had other people try to explain this to me, but I’ve also had a hard time getting my head around it.
I’ve mentioned before how Ed Rosenthal and the city of Sacramento turned a federal law on it’s head. The law was an attempt to allow local police deputize someone so that they could buy and use drugs undercover to facilitate those big newsworthy drug busts. Instead, Ed was duly deputized and then proceeded to grow and distribute medical marijuana to medical patents. Everything was done legally under state laws, and arguably under federal laws too. However, during the trial, the defendants counsel were forbidden to mention their specific legal theory, and the judge impaneled a jury of meat-bots [1] and he was convicted. Yet the outcry afterwards was so loud that when sentencing came around, the judge broke the law that required a minimum mandatory sentence of five years, and gave Ed his freedom back with only time served.
That’s just one example. So it pretty much means that our legal system, designed to be “of, by, and for the people”, is horribly broken. Even if you’ve got the Constitution on your side and can afford the expert that can deduce the precise legalese language, cross all the eyes and dot all the tees on your writ of habeas corpus, it all usually doesn’t mean a damn thing if the judge or the state wants to take you down.
Since this lay-person’s efforts to grok our justice system is a reoccurring theme in my blog, I’ve decided to make a new category, “A government of laws and not of men”, and more than likely move some of my previous post over there too.
[1] Click for more of what I mean by “meat-bots”.
