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Wednesday, December 12, 2007
Halliburton gone wild
This is just unconscionable. A young woman in Iraq is gang raped by her fellow Halliburton/KBR contractors and then locked in a storage container so she won't talk. A US congressman intervenes to get her released but there are no criminal charges possible because, well, I guess contractors are a law unto themselves. But at least she can bring a civil suit back home, right?
Since no criminal charges have been filed, the only other option, according to Hutson, is the civil system, which is the approach that Jones is trying now. But Jones' former employer doesn't want this case to see the inside of a civil courtroom. KBR has moved for Jones' claim to be heard in private arbitration [where there will be no public record], instead of a public courtroom. It says her employment contract requires it.
So, no jury trial for you, missy. There may be a legitimate reason for contractor criminal immunity (I don't think there is but at least an argument can be made) but the arbitration agreement is just plain old corporate ass covering and it stinks. Yeah, we're not as bad as Saudi Arabia where you can get publicly whipped for the crime of being raped, but as the old saying goes, it's not that we're the same, it's that we're not different enough.
1 comments
Thursday, December 06, 2007
Writs? We don't have to show you any stinkin' writs!
Great closing line from Dahlia Lithwick on the recent Supreme Court oral arguments about whether the writ of habeas corpus (you know, that little rule from the Magna Carta and the US Constitution) still exists:
The one unifying theme today may be that every justice present longs for the good old days of the 14th century. The conservatives because life was better then. And the liberals because even the Middle Ages look better than what the administration is doing now.
Labels: habeas corpus, law
1 comments
Thursday, June 28, 2007
The same f'n 5
Two more crappy 5-4 Supreme Court decisions out today, here and here. I guess that's what happens when you only elect one Democratic president every 27 years. It's not like we need to rehash the "not a dime's worth of difference" argument but is there a single voter left from 2000 that thinks a court with a couple Gore appointees on it would have ruled this way? It's small solace, but it says something about the resilience of (generally) liberal legal principles that even tho Democrats have only appointed two Supreme Court justices in the last 40 years these decisions are still coming in with a bare one vote majority. On the down side, barring a bad case of tainted sushi at Tony Scalia's next birthday party, we'll be getting the same majority for the foreseeable future as none of the 5 look like they're going anywhere.Update:
And yes, they did also decide today that we maybe shouldn't execute insane people (or at least one particular insane person) but that was only because Kennedy defected to the "liberals". The rest of the Fascist Five were gung ho to snuff a guy who thinks
“The Devil has been trying to rub me out to keep me from preaching.” He tried to strip off his prison uniform to show scars from burns that he said John F. Kennedy healed with coconut milk after the sinking of Kennedy’s torpedo boat in the Pacific in World War II.
Labels: law, Supreme court
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Wednesday, June 27, 2007
Office space
With Hammer finally having reached the exalted ranks of middle management I try to picture him in a plush corner office somewhere with leather furniture and a personal secretary to take dictation. (Do people even do dictation any more?) But it also makes me think of my International Law professor when I was doing a summer abroad at the University of Nairobi in Kenya. HIs name was Goth Muigai, he had his LLM from Columbia and sounded much like I would expect John Hausman to sound if he had been raised in East Africa. I don't remember all that much about international law but I will always remember an offhand comment he made. As he was posing a hypothetical situation he said, "Someday you will be meeting with a client in your chambers, and I say chambers because no learned man would work in a mere office..." I often thought of Prof. Muigai as I sat in my cube not long after law school and wondered just what he would think of the situation. I assumed he would have been pretty disappointed in me. (I think the story works best if you can picture his very proper, British inflected voice drawing out "learn-ed" to rhyme, now that I think about, with "they earn it.")
2 comments
Monday, June 11, 2007
More from the Bush Supreme Court
Well, at least they still get a trial.
That's not far removed from Texas law that requires juries made up solely of people who believe "some black guy probably did it."A decision by the Supreme Court on Monday that made it easier for prosecutors to exclude people who express reservations about the death penalty from capital juries will make the panels whiter and more conviction-prone, experts in law and psychology said this week.
The jurors who remain after people with moral objections to imposing the death penalty are weeded out, studies uniformly show, are significantly more likely to vote to find defendants guilty than jurors as a whole.
It has long been the law in every state with capital punishment that only people who are prepared to apply the death penalty may serve on capital juries. Monday’s decision, which involved a juror’s equivocation about the death penalty on learning that life without parole was an option, has the potential to make capital juries even less representative.
“It could give judges the authority to exclude about half the population from service in death penalty cases,” said Samuel R. Gross, a law professor at the University of Michigan. That is because support for the death penalty drops from more than 60 percent to about half when life in prison is the alternative.
Labels: law
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