RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-punishment-is-cruel-and-unusual-for-a-crime-committed-at-17-1537567051

What happens when a state supreme court fails to follow the precedents of the U.S. Supreme Court? Over the past decade, the high court has applied the Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment to limit penalties for juvenile crimes. First the justices barred capital punishment for defendants who committed their crimes—including murder—while they were under 18. Later they barred life without parole for juveniles who committed noncapital offenses, and eventually even for juvenile murderers, unless they were found to be in that “rare” group that “exhibits such irretrievable depravity that rehabilitation is impossible.”

These decisions reasoned that the immaturity of juvenile defendants made such sentences impermissibly disproportionate. Dissenters argued that the Eighth Amendment was written simply to forbid cruel methods of punishment, not to impose a judicially created sentencing proportionality regimen. The dissenters also cited numerous state sentencing laws permitting life without parole for juveniles to show that such sentences weren’t unusual.

Whether one agrees with the majority or the dissenters in those cases—a question on which the authors of this article take different views—a case the high court is now considering for review could unite those positions. In Chandler v. Mississippi, the sentencing judge imposed life without parole after pronouncing the defendant “mature” and noting that 17-year-olds—the age at which Joey Chandler committed the murder in question—may engage in numerous adult activities, from driving to obtaining an abortion. The judge also recounted the story of a 17-year-old who received a Medal of Honor during World War II, adding that he couldn’t have been called “immature.” As a final fillip, in recognition of the Supreme Court’s “talk” about prospects for rehabilitation, the judge pointed out that the executive is empowered to commute sentences.

What the judge did not do before imposing life without parole was consider whether he could find that the defendant was irretrievably depraved. Yet the Supreme Court of Mississippi affirmed the sentence over a strong dissent.

The circumstances of Mr. Chandler’s crime include the social pathology that often surrounds such cases. He shot his 19-year-old cousin in 2003 for stealing marijuana Mr. Chandler intended to sell to support his pregnant girlfriend. As also happens occasionally in such cases, while in prison Mr. Chandler appears to have turned around his life, or what there is of it. He earned a high-school diploma, trained extensively in two trades, married and maintained an unblemished disciplinary record. Lawyers and advocates routinely present that sort of evidence to parole boards in aid of release, often successfully.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-presumption-of-guilt-1537570627

“As Judge Kavanaugh stands to gain the lifetime privilege of serving on the country’s highest court, he has the burden of persuasion. And that is only fair.”

—Anita Hill, Sept. 18, 2018

“Not only do women like Dr. Ford, who bravely comes forward, need to be heard, but they need to be believed.”

—Sen. Maize Hirono (D., Hawaii)

The last-minute accusation of sexual assault against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh is an ugly spectacle by any measure. But if there is a silver lining, it is that the episode is providing an education for Americans on the new liberal standard of legal and political due process.

As Ms. Hill and Sen. Hirono aver, the Democratic standard for sexual-assault allegations is that they should be accepted as true merely for having been made. The accuser is assumed to be telling the truth because the accuser is a woman. The burden is on Mr. Kavanaugh to prove his innocence. If he cannot do so, then he is unfit to serve on the Court.
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This turns American justice and due process upside down. The core tenet of Anglo-American law is that the burden of proof always rests with the person making the accusation. An accuser can’t doom someone’s freedom or career merely by making a charge.

The accuser has to prove the allegation in a court of law or in some other venue where the accused can challenge the facts. Otherwise we have a Jacobin system of justice in which “J’accuse” becomes the standard and anyone can be ruined on a whim or a vendetta.

Another core tenet of due process is that an accusation isn’t any more or less credible because of the gender, race, religion or ethnicity of who makes it. A woman can lie, as the Duke lacrosse players will tell you. Ms. Hirono’s standard of credibility by gender would have appalled the civil-rights campaigners of a half century ago who marched in part against Southern courts that treated the testimony of black Americans as inherently less credible than that of whites. Yet now the liberal heirs of those marchers want to impose a double standard of credibility by gender.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/09/kavanaugh-hearings-dianne-feinstein-senate-should-censure/The Senate cannot let this wrong go unaddressed.

Regardless of the fate of Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination, the Senate should censure the ranking Democratic member of the Judiciary Committee, Dianne Feinstein. Her deception and maneuvering, condemned across the political spectrum, seriously interfered with the Senate’s performance of its constitutional duty to review judicial nominations, and unquestionably has brought the Senate into “dishonor and disrepute,” the standard that governs these matters. As a matter of institutional integrity, the Senate cannot let this wrong go unaddressed.

Article I, Section 5 of the Constitution provides that each House of the Congress may “punish its Members for disorderly Behaviour.” Nine times in American history the Senate has used that power to censure one of its members. Feinstein has richly earned the right to join this inglorious company.

The senior senator from California not only disgraced herself personally in the underhanded and disingenuous way she dealt with the sex-assault charge against Judge Kavanaugh, but she also misused her position on the Judiciary Committee and broke faith with her fellow committee members. She was further, to quote the San Francisco Chronicle, no less, “unfair” to Judge Kavanaugh — manipulating the public disclosure of the charge so as to maximize the adverse publicity Judge Kavanaugh received and minimize the judge’s opportunity to defend himself. Censure is appropriate in this case for the Senate to defend its procedures and institutional reputation.

By her own account, Feinstein was aware of the charge shortly after President Trump nominated Kavanaugh, nearly two months before her committee opened its hearings. She came into possession of the letter making the charge by virtue of her position on the Judiciary Committee. We don’t know what contact she had thereafter with the accuser or the accuser’s Democrat-activist Washington lawyer — but we do know that Feinstein kept the information from her Senate colleagues, ensuring it was untested and unmentioned in the committee’s hearings. This, even though the hearings were accompanied by loud complaints from Democrats that the administration’s document production was insufficient. Indeed, as this is being written, while yet another Judiciary Committee hearing has been scheduled, she still has not released the unredacted text of the letter that made the charge.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/09/brett-kavanaugh-nomination-stop-stalling-and-vote/

This is about preventing a conservative justice from being added to the Supreme Court, nothing more.

Senate Democrats’ blatant abuse of the hearing process, their “delay, delay, delay” strategy, continues to pay dividends. Putting a stop to it would be long overdue.

Thursday was the day Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s manifestly meritorious nomination to the Supreme Court should have been voted out of the Senate Judiciary Committee and sent to the full Senate. Instead the nomination languishes because of an eleventh-hour stunt pulled by committee Democrats — led by ranking member Senator Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.).

Notwithstanding that Feinstein was well aware almost three months ago of a flimsily supported allegation against Kavanaugh — to wit, that 36 years ago, as a 17-year-old high school student, he groped and tried to force himself on a 15-year-old girl at an underage beer party — the senator sat on the information rather than submitting it to the hearing process. Although she met face-to-face with Kavanaugh and later questioned him when he was under oath at the hearing, Feinstein did not utter a word about the ancient, unverifiable claim to Kavanaugh.

Instead, the senator referred the allegation to the FBI, without identifying the self-proclaimed witness, despite knowing that:

1) The FBI had no jurisdiction to investigate a state-law assault claim.

2) Even if the FBI had had jurisdiction, it is federal practice not to investigate and prosecute minors, especially for offenses that state authorities have jurisdiction over, except in rare circumstances involving heinous crimes.

3) Even if the FBI had had jurisdiction over the offense, the bureau would never have opened an investigation of a 36-year-old allegation, even if the evidence were strong.

4) Even though the FBI had jurisdiction to conduct a background investigation of Kavanaugh, such investigations are not occasions to trigger full-blown criminal investigations of crimes the Justice Department has no jurisdiction to prosecute, but rather result in a flagging of allegations for the Senate’s consideration (which has been done here).

5) Even though Maryland state and local authorities (to whom neither Senator Feinstein nor the alleged victim apparently referred the allegation) have jurisdiction over any conceivable statutory offenses in question, they would never have opened an investigation based on a sketchy allegation of 36-year-old misconduct for which the statute of limitations lapsed decades ago (i.e., a case it would be impossible to investigate and prosecute).