"I'm not a weakling and a censor like you."

"And I actually wish I could interact with what you have if it had some value beyond your typical Althouse is being stupid again. (Really intelligent to come up with that, little schoolboys.)"

(Careful, with the link within the link that I link to at that link. That's the blog I'm punishing with traffic starvation.)

"Officials in Poland are in an uproar over photos showing a group of young teens licking cream off a priest's knees."

"The school said the initiation ritual was a long-standing tradition at the school, and no one had ever complained about it before."

"Tech-savvy disabled teen, being beaten for using a website not approved of by hyper-luddite father who's a FAMILY LAW JUDGE..."

"... films it and uses that footage as retaliation to (probably) destroy his career? If you gave me that plot as a TV movie, I'd tell you it was too much."

(NOTE: Clicking the link will not take you to the video, but you will find a link to the video. I clicked through, but instinctively turned it off after about 5 seconds, without seeing any of the beating.)

"I do say that I am in favor of the return of the guillotine and that is for the worst of the worst of the guilty."

Roseanne Barr is a comedian. It's irrelevant whether you find this funny or not. She's laboring in the field of comedy:

"I first would allow the guilty bankers to pay, you know, the ability to pay back anything over $100 million [of] personal wealth because I believe in a maximum wage of $100 million. And if they are unable to live on that amount of that amount then they should, you know, go to the reeducation camps and if that doesn't help, then being beheaded," Barr said with a straight face.

Comedy is hard. She's cranking up the hyperbole to higher and higher levels, maintaining the deadpan all the way. Do not revile her in her suffering.

ADDED:

If the government took 100% of your income above $100 million, at what point would you slack off?
	I'd go on and on, making money, even once the government began taking every dime.
	I'd work right up to the $100 million, and then, no more.
	I'd start slacking off at around $80 million and shutting down at $90 million.
	I'd arc toward about $40 or 50 million and then lose focus on the earnings game.
	If the game is rigged like that, it would affect my pursuit of wealth from Day 1.
pollcode.com free polls

"Abolishing capital punishment in a kind of despair over its fallibility would... would tell the public that our laws and courts and juries are fundamentally incapable of delivering what most Americans consider genuine justice.."

Ross Douthat write:

It could encourage a more cynical and utilitarian view of why police forces and prisons exist, and what moral standards we should hold them to. And while it would put an end to wrongful executions, it might well lead to more overall injustice.

I've never understood why people who don't trust convictions agonize over the death penalty but blandly accept life imprisonment.

"Widener Law School goes Soviet, demands law professor undergo psychiatric evaluation."

The continuing saga of Lawrence Connell, who "was vindicated on a wide range of charges," but found to have violated a policy against "retaliation" for the way he responded to the accusations that had been made against him — for defending himself. The remedy sought by Widener Law School Dean Linda Ammons?

Professor Connell will undergo a psychological evaluation by a psychiatrist or psychologist of his choice selected from a list of four individuals provided to him by the University. The purpose of this evaluation will be to determine his fitness for his teaching position, particularly in view of his retaliatory response to the student complaints lodged against him.... Professor Connell will comply with all conditions and recommendations issued by the psychiatrist/psychologist, including, without limitation, appropriate counseling and anger management, prior to the lifting of the suspension and his return to teaching duties. Not earlier than sixty (60) days prior to the end of the term of Professor Connell’s one year suspension, his psychiatrist/psychologist must send to the Dean and Vice Dean an evaluation assessing Professor Connell’s fitness to return to duties, completion of courses or training, if applicable, and a follow-up treatment plan. if any.

Plus he's supposed to apologize.

ADDED: David Bernstein withdraws from "a Widener-sponsored project," saying "I can’t in good conscience have my reputation associated in any way with Widener Law School."

"A physician was to drop acid... into the eyes of Majid Movahed... to punish him for throwing acid in the face of Ameneh Bahrami seven years ago."

Bahrami, who was blinded, had insisted on the eye-for-an-eye punishment, under Islamic law:

"However in the last minute, Ameneh changed her mind and asked the proceeding to be halted," the Islamic republic's Fars state news agency reported.

This week marks the beginning of the holy month of Ramadan in the Islamic world, and pardons and commuted sentences commonly occur as a show of compassion leading into the holiday....

The sentence was to be carried out in May 2011, but a court postponed it after Amnesty International protested against it on the grounds of cruelty.

Bahrami forgave her attacker in part for her country, she told state news agency ISNA, "since all other countries were looking to see what we would do."

"Don’t call my bluff."

It's what Obama said when he stormed out of the debt-talks yesterday. Let's analyze it. Glenn Reynolds says:

UM, ISN’T THIS A CASE OF CALLING YOUR OWN BLUFF?... I mean, I’m not a big poker player, but I thought the point of a bluff is not to admit it’s a bluff . . . .

UPDATE: “I’d love to play poker with him. Does he know that it’s played with cards?”

I'd say the biggest problem with the poker metaphor is that it characterizes the talks as a game... and, more particularly, a game in which, on any given hand, somebody wins the whole pot. At the point in poker where you make a comment like "Don’t call my bluff," you are trying to lure the other player into making the wrong decision so you can win it all. In the ultra-serious debt negotiations, where supposedly the 2 sides are engaging in give and take to reach a consensus for the sake of the people, it's bad to reveal that you see it as a game and you're trying to win it... for yourself.

Now, there's also the question whether someone who plays poker competently would use the phrase "Don’t call my bluff." Glenn is right that you don't want the other player to know when you are bluffing, but saying "Don’t call my bluff" isn't admitting you're bluffing. Indeed, if you were playing with someone who thought it was, saying "Don’t call my bluff" would be a great way to get them not to fold when you have an excellent hand. You could just as well say the opposite — "Call my bluff" — in the same situation for the same reason. The other player has the same problem he has when you don't say anything at all — when you keep a poker face: He doesn't know what you have.

Think about when someone outside of a poker game might use the phrase "Don’t call my bluff." Meade and I were talking about that and he said: It's something a father would say. "Son, don't call my bluff." In other words: Do you think I'm kidding? Try me. Within some father-son relationships, that's a very powerful move. The father is demanding obedience, and the son is afraid of what will happen if he does not accede to his father's demands. The father isn't saying what the consequence will be, but the fear of the father's power is enough to make the son comply. He can't risk finding out. It's a test of parental authority.

And we know Obama would like us to see him in that fatherly role. He would like to have our compliance because he knows best. Eat your peas.

"Certainly my defense of flogging is more thought experiment than policy proposal."

"I do not expect to see flogging reinstated any time soon. And deep down, I wouldn't want to see it. And yet, in the course of writing what is, at its core, a quaintly retro abolish-prison book, I've come to see the benefits of wrapping a liberal argument in a conservative facade. If the notion of tying people to a rack and caning them on their behinds à la Singapore disturbs you, if it takes contemplating whipping to wake you up and to see prison for what it is, so be it! The passive moral high ground has gotten us nowhere."

Says Peter Moskos, who's written a book called "In Defense of Flogging."

What liberal arguments wrapped in a conservative facade have you seen lately? Is it also sometimes efficacious to wrap a conservative argument in a liberal facade? Examples, please.

"It was just a pro se prisoner petition in a big stack of IFPs that normally would be short-formed with a quick 'Splitless, factbound, I recommend DENY.'"

Orin Kerr puzzles over Justice Sotomayor's "rather remarkable dissent from denial of certiorari in Pitre v. Cain, a pro se Eighth Amendment case brought by a prison inmate whose case was dismissed as “patently frivolous” by the trial court and affirmed by the Fifth Circuit in a short one-paragraph order.

The opinion begins:

Petitioner Anthony Pitre, a Louisiana state prisoner, stopped taking his HIV medication to protest his transfer to a prison facility. He alleges that respondents at the facility punished him for this decision by subjecting him to hard labor in 100-degree heat. According to Pitre, respondents repeatedly denied his requests for lighter duty more appropriate to his medical condition, even after prison officials twice thought his condition sufficiently serious to rush him to an emergency room.

This is the empathy we heard about, is it not?

The Magistrate Judge concluded that Pitre had been “‘hoist by his own petard’”...

And that's not empathy.

What did Rick Warren have in mind when he asked does evil exist and what do we do about it?

A segment from my new Bloggingheads with Bob Wright is almost all about evil (but look at the tags to get an idea of the subjects covered):

China sentences Wu Dianyuan, 79, and Wang Xiuying, 77, to "re-education through labor."

For the crime of not taking "no" for an answer.

So the government set up "protest zones" in various parks for people who wanted to protest during the Olympics. But you had to apply for a permit, and all the applications — reportedly 77 — were turned down. Wu and Wang made repeated applications.

3 arguments.... 1 logic error.

But can you explain the error?

The Washington Post says the Supreme Court's mistake requires it to reconsider the ban on the death penalty for rape of a child.

It's absolutely right:

The majority determined that capital punishment for child rape was unconstitutional, in part because a national consensus had formed against it. As evidence, the court noted that "37 jurisdictions -- 36 States plus the Federal Government -- have the death penalty. [But] only six of those jurisdictions authorize the death penalty for rape of a child." Actually, only two years ago, Congress enacted a death penalty for soldiers who commit child rape, as part of an update to the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ). Irony of ironies: The court has cast doubt on the constitutionality of an act of Congress based on the erroneous claim that the statute did not exist....

The Supreme Court's legitimacy depends not only on the substance of its rulings but also on the quality of its deliberations. That's why we think the court needs to reopen this case -- even though we supported its decision. The losing party, Louisiana, still has time to seek a rehearing, which the court could grant with the approval of five justices, including at least one from the majority. The court could limit reargument to briefs on the significance of the UCMJ provision. We doubt the case will come out much differently; we certainly hope not. But this is an opportunity for the court to show a little judicial humility. Before the court declares its final view on national opinion about the death penalty, it should accurately assess the view of the national legislature.

The opinion doesn't cohere as written. The dissenting opinion doesn't cohere. It's an egregious mistake that throws all the reasoning out of whack. Fix it!

ADDED: Has the Supreme Court case ever used the expression "out of whack"? No. The word "whack" only appears once in the Supreme Court's cases, in a one-sentence rejection of jurisdition in a case called Whack v. Maryland, 450 U.S. 990 (1981).

Is it "out of whack" or "out of wack"? If you go by Google hits, you'll think it's "out of wack" — but that's "out of whack." "Wack" means crazy. It's a back-formation from "wacky." As a noun, it means "a person regarded as eccentric." "Whack," as a noun, is a "a sharp, swift blow." I know, it makes little sense to say the reasoning is out of a person regarded as eccentric or out of a sharp, swift blow, but trust me, the standard, idiomatic expression is "out of whack."

Here's some history:

At one time, [whack] could mean a share in a distribution, a portion; this sense was originally thieves’ cant — Francis Grose, in his Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue of 1785, has “Whack, a share of a booty obtained by fraud” (could physical violence have been involved in some cases?). British English has a couple of phrases that retain that sense. One is pay one’s whack, to pay one’s agreed contribution to shared expenses. Another is top whack, or full whack, for the maximum price or rate for something (“if you go to that shop, you’ll pay top whack”).

There are some other old figurative senses, including a bargain or agreement (which evolved out of the idea of a share), and an attempt at doing something (“I’ll take a whack at that job”). These are mostly American, and it was in the US that the sense you refer to first appeared, in the latter part of the nineteenth century. There seems to have been a phrase in fine whack during that century, meaning that something was in good condition or excellent fettle. (It appears in a letter by John Hay, President Lincoln’s amanuensis, dated August 1863, which describes the President: “The Tycoon is in fine whack. I have rarely seen him more serene and busy. He is managing this war, the draft, foreign relations, and planning a reconstruction of the Union, all at once”.) It doesn’t often turn up in writing, though, so there’s some doubt how widespread it was.

To be out of whack would then have meant the opposite — that something wasn’t on top form or working well.

What if federal law allows the death penalty for raping a child and the Supreme Court analyzed "evolving standards of decency" without noticing?

It happened!

A military law blog pointed out over the weekend that Congress, in fact, revised the sex crimes section of the Uniform Code of Military Justice in 2006 to add child rape to the military death penalty. The revisions were in the National Defense Authorization Act that year. President Bush signed that bill into law and then, last September, carried the changes forward by issuing Executive Order 13447, which put the provisions into the 2008 edition of the Manual for Courts-Martial.

Anyone in the federal government — or anywhere else, for that matter — who knew about these developments did not tell the court. Not one of the 10 briefs filed in the case, Kennedy v. Louisiana, mentioned it....

Dwight Sullivan, a colonel in the Marine Corps Reserve who now works for the Air Force as a civilian defense lawyer handling death penalty appeals.

Mr. Sullivan was reading the Supreme Court’s decision on a plane and was surprised to see no mention of the military statute. “We’re not talking about ancient history,” he said in an interview. “This happened in 2006.”

What an immense shame and embarrassment for everyone involved in this case — especially for all of the Justices of the Supreme Court!

Castrate rapists? Bobby Jindal is on the same page as radical feminists.

TPM has this:



This is one of those places where the right wing is on the same page as radical feminism. I immediately thought of a poster I saw years ago in Amsterdam. This was back in the days when I carried a sketchbook instead of a camera:



Click here to enlarge. Here's the relevant detail:



To be fair, Jindal would use chemicals instead of scissors. (And I know the scissors are lopping off the wrong body part.)

McCain on the child rape/death penalty case. UPDATE: Obama's opposes the decision too!

"As a father, I believe there is no more sacred responsibility in American society than that of protecting the innocence of our children. I have spent over twenty-five years in Congress fighting for stronger criminal sentences for those who exploit and harm our children. Today’s Supreme Court ruling is an assault on law enforcement’s efforts to punish these heinous felons for the most despicable crime. That there is a judge anywhere in America who does not believe that the rape of a child represents the most heinous of crimes, which is deserving of the most serious of punishments, is profoundly disturbing."

UPDATE: So that was McCain's response, and Obama opposes the decision too:

"I have said repeatedly I think the death penalty should be applied in very narrow circumstances, for the most egregious of crimes... [But] I think that the rape of a small child, 6 or 8 years old, is a heinous crime, and if a state makes a decision that under narrow, limited, well defined circumstances, the death penalty is at least potentially applicable, that does not violate our Constitution."

So, Obama has (cleverly or sincerely) deprived McCain of an issue, it seems. And yet the most relevant question is Supreme Court appointments. You might think that it's rather predictable that Obama, given the opportunity to nominate a new Justice, will choose someone who would almost surely have joined today's majority. Ask him: You've said you oppose the Supreme Court's decision in Kennedy v. Louisiana, but does that mean you will try to pick Justices in the mold of Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, and Alito. See? You don't need to ask. You already know the answer. But don't be too confident that McCain would choose Justices who would have joined today's dissent. I wouldn't bet on that either.

"We cannot dismiss the years of long anguish that must be endured by the victim of child rape."

"It does not follow, though, that capital punishment is a proportionate penalty for the crime."

So writes Justice Kennedy in Kennedy v. Louisiana. Searching for "evolving standards of decency," Kennedy expresses concern about the sheer number of crimes that would be subject to the death penalty:

In reaching our conclusion we find significant the number of executions that would be allowed under respondent’s approach. The crime of child rape, considering its reported incidents, occurs more often than first-degree murder. Approximately 5,702 incidents of vaginal, anal, or oral rape of a child under the age of 12 were reported nationwide in 2005; this is almost twice the total incidents of intentional murder for victims of all ages (3,405) reported during the same period.

Why isn't the high incidence of child rape a reason to up the penalty so that fewer children will be raped? Now that the death penalty for child rape has been held unconstitutional, will we see the number of rapes increase?

With respect to deterrence, if the death penalty adds to the risk of non-reporting, that, too, diminishes the penalty’s objectives. Underreporting is a common problem with respect to child sexual abuse. ...

The experience of the amici who work with child victims indicates that, when the punishment is death, both the victim and the victim’s family members may be more likely to shield the perpetrator from discovery, thus increasing underreporting....

In addition, by in effect making the punishment for child rape and murder equivalent, a State that punishes child rape by death may remove a strong incentive for the rapist not to kill the victim. Assuming the offender behaves in a rational way, as one must to justify the penalty on grounds of deterrence, the penalty in some respects gives less protection, not more, to the victim, who is often the sole witness to the crime.... It might be argued that, even if the death penalty results in a marginal increase in the incentive to kill, this is counterbalanced by a marginally increased deterrent to commit the crime at all.

So isn't this the sort of balancing that is normally left to legislative choice? Kennedy says it's still a factor that the Court should take into account in analyzing whether the death penalty is constitutional.

ADDED: In dissent, Justice Alito (joined by the Chief Justice and Justices Scalia and Thomas) emphasizes the breadth of the decision:

The Court today holds that the Eighth Amendment categorically prohibits the imposition of the death penalty for the crime of raping a child. This is so, according to the Court, no matter how young the child, no matter how many times the child is raped, no matter how many children the perpetrator rapes, no matter how sadistic the crime, no matter how much physical or psychological trauma is inflicted, and no matter how heinous the perpetrator’s prior criminal record may be. The Court provides two reasons for this sweeping conclusion: First, the Court claims to have identified “a national consensus” that the death penalty is never acceptable for the rape of a child; second, the Court concludes, based on its “independent judgment,” that imposing the death penalty for child rape is inconsistent with “ ‘the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.’ ”

AND: Alito notes that the Court's decision in Coker v. Georgia (invalidating the death penalty for the rape of an adult woman) created uncertainty and impeded the states development of the law and distorted the evidence of "consensus":

When state lawmakers believe that their decision will prevail on the question whether to permit the death penalty for a particular crime or class of offender, the legislators’ resolution of the issue can be interpreted as an expression of their own judgment, informed by whatever weight they attach to the values of their constituents. But when state legislators think that the enactment of a new death penalty law is likely to be futile, inaction cannot reasonably be interpreted as an expression of their understanding of prevailing societal values.

The majority is really imposing its own "evolving standards of decency" to the question, Alito says. In this context, he questions whether it is"really true that every person who is convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death is more morally depraved than every child rapist.""

Consider the following two cases. In the first, a defendant robs a convenience store and watches as his accomplice shoots the store owner. The defendant acts recklessly, but was not the triggerman and did not intend the killing. See, e.g., Tison v. Arizona, 481 U. S. 137 (1987) . In the second case, a previously convicted child rapist kidnaps, repeatedly rapes, and tortures multiple child victims. Is it clear that the first defendant is more morally depraved than the second?

(Wouldn't anyone voting with today's majority have voted with the dissent in Tison?)

... I have little doubt that, in the eyes of ordinary Americans, the very worst child rapists—predators who seek out and inflict serious physical and emotional injury on defenseless young children—are the epitome of moral depravity....

Alito elaborates the harm.

It's important that the majority also took the harm very seriously. This was not like Coker, where the Court was clueless enough to write, about the 16-year-old "adult" victim: "Mrs. Carver was unharmed."

Justice Kennedy does not gloss over the horrific harm to the child:

Petitioner’s crime was one that cannot be recounted in these pages in a way sufficient to capture in full the hurt and horror inflicted on his victim or to convey the revulsion society, and the jury that represents it, sought to express by sentencing petitioner to death....

An expert in pediatric forensic medicine testified that L. H.’s injuries were the most severe he had seen from a sexual assault in his four years of practice. A laceration to the left wall of the vagina had separated her cervix from the back of her vagina, causing her rectum to protrude into the vaginal structure. Her entire perineum was torn from the posterior fourchette to the anus. The injuries required emergency surgery....

[T]he victim’s fright, the sense of betrayal, and the nature of her injuries caused more prolonged physical and mental suffering than, say, a sudden killing by an unseen assassin. The attack was not just on her but on her childhood. For this reason, we should be most reluctant to rely upon the language of the plurality in Coker, which posited that, for the victim of rape, “life may not be nearly so happy as it was” but it is not beyond repair. Rape has a permanent psychological, emotional, and sometimes physical impact on the child.... We cannot dismiss the years of long anguish that must be endured by the victim of child rape.

Nevertheless, in Kennedy's view, capital punishment is not "proportionate" to the crime in light of "evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society."

It is an established principle that decency, in its essence, presumes respect for the individual and thus moderation or restraint in the application of capital punishment....

[We] insist upon confining the instances in which capital punishment may be imposed....

As it relates to crimes against individuals, ... the death penalty should not be expanded to instances where the victim’s life was not taken....

[T]here is a distinction between intentional first-degree murder on the one hand and nonhomicide crimes against individual persons, even including child rape, on the other....

It's very hard to find any argument about the depravity of this criminal act. What I see in Kennedy's opinion is mainly opposition to the death penalty and a fear of expanding it into a new area where it would need to be constrained by the kind of "narrowing aggravators" that restrict the death penalty in murder cases. Kennedy is particularly concerned that the crime of child rape "will overwhelm a decent person’s judgment," that this crime — more than murder — will make juries irrational and arbitrary. In any case, he tells us, the process of juries evaluating aggravating factors is well established. It's one thing to accept that, quite another to extend the process into a whole new area.

So, for the death penalty and child rape, juries cannot be trusted, and legislatures cannot be trusted. This is one decision that the Court has seen fit to place in the judicial domain.

Nutraloaf, the punitive food that prisoners argue violates their constititional rights.

Can it be "cruel and unusual" to serve a prisoner nothing but a nutrition loaf? Maybe you don't think the answer depends on how bad it tastes, but in case you do, here's Arin Greenwood taste test. He cooks up the Illinois, Vermont, and 2 versions of the California nutraloaves and swerves serves them to a bunch of "friends and relatives" (half of them lawyers):

I picked some off my plate with my fingers. It tasted a bit like vegetarian chili. Not bad. My cousin Steve, a mortgage broker who had sampled the California loaf with meat, disagreed. "It's what you imagine Alpo tastes like," he said. Lori said she liked it and said she'd even consider making it again, though she'd use more spices. Lee, a lawyer and her husband, asked her not to....

As the night went on, and wine washed away the taste of loaves, we discussed the Eighth Amendment and how bad food would actually have to be in order to be unconstitutional....

This was an okay article — good enough to blog — but I'd much rather see this material in the form of a film documentary. There is a dimension here — the social setting and attitudes of Washington lawyers and others — that seems fascinating, but that Greenwood barely lets us glimpse. How did they really talk about law and prison and their own fussy tastes?

UPDATE: Uh-oh:

[T]he arts and culture writers at The Onion's A.V. Club did this same stunt last April!

The A.V. Club story of the Nutraloaf stunt is more entertaining, because it has more unappetizing photos and even a little video! ... They all agreed that it was gross, so this Slate version could've been much more Slate-y if they'd decided it was actually delicious.