WildBill wrote:MarshalMatt wrote:Again, I think you missed my point about "tough on crime." I want the criminals behind bars, but NOT at the expense of our constitutional rights.
Sorry MarshallMatt, but the slogan "Law and Order" is a hot-button for me. I did get your point and then went on a tangent.
It still angers me that politicians will run on a "Law and Order" platform and, when elected, use law enforcement to spy on and prosecute their political enemies.
That same politician will get on national television and proclaim that he is "not a crook" and then be forced to resign because was guilty of covering up crimes.
As my father used to say, "We could use less law and order and more justice."
I just ran across an H.L. Mencken quote this morning:
H.L. Mencken wrote: “I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave.”
This should inform the perceptions of all concerned in the event of a
possible crime, from the accused, to the defense, to the arresting officers, to witnesses, to prosecutors, to juries, and to judges, whenever they begin to consider the arrest and/or incarceration of another human being.
I'm with WildBill here.... law and order without justice are meaningless. Hitler and Stalin had law and order, but they offered no justice. I believe in these three things, in order of importance: the sovereignty of God, the sovereignty of the individual person, and the sovereignty of the state. State sovereignty is fairly low on my order of priorities, because I only believe in government with the consent of the governed. When the state—whether it be at the street level of an arresting officer, or at the courtroom level in a trial—proposes to take away the liberty of a sovereign person, then it lacks all legitimacy
UNLESS it acts within the sanction of justice. When it departs from justice—as when a police officer manipulates an innocent but upset person into making incriminating but untrue statements in order to secure an arrest, or when a prosecutor seeks to suppress exculpatory evidence, or when a judge uses a trial primarily to make a social/political statement (like running for reelection because he's "tough on crime"), regardless of that statement's impact on the accused before him—then the process lacks legitimacy.
The reason I believe in the primacy of the individual's sovereignty over the state's sovereignty is because states, time and time again, have proven themselves untrustworthy of stewardship over justice. It takes a state to render the Dred Scott decision in the state's highest court, to pass and implement Jim Crow in the halls of Congress and the several state legislatures, and to commit genocide against native-Americans. Even in the pursuit of justice ("social justice"), the state perpetrates injustices upon others through redistributive policies.
Therefore (in my view), the only legitimate exercise of justice the state can perform if it is proposing to take the life or liberty of an individual, is when that individual has manifestly taken the life or liberty from another individual. Only
then can justice prevail. All the rest of it, the made up "crimes" invented for the purpose of controlling and hemming in freedom are simply "law and order without justice."
Personally, I believe that we are under judgement by God as a nation and are being found wanting. I think we have begun seeing the blessings of liberty starting to evaporate as a consequence. The overarching, grasping, all consuming state which grinds up and spits out individual sovereignty is a sign of it, and law and order without justice is a symptom.
“Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.”
― G. Michael Hopf, "Those Who Remain"
#TINVOWOOT
