Dude, how old are you?
When I was a little boy in the 60s, my Great-Grandmother protestd against my childhood lawyer-plans, & suggeested stealing dogs.
Fascinating.
And irrelevant, since David Iglesias was not a prosecutor in Arizona. So why are you comparing Arizona’s 100,000 cases to an unknown number of cases in New Mexico?
I’ll ask again: of the 100,000 names purged form the voting rolls, how many of those names were later found to have been purged in error. You made a big deal of how horrible this 100,000 name purge was. I want to know how bad it was. If 98,500 illegal voters were purged and the process caught 1,500 legal voters, who by federal law can always cast a provisional ballot and then clear up their legal status… that seems very reasonable to me. But if the 100,000 voter purge dumped 98,500 LEGAL voters in an effort to catch 1,500 illegal ones, obviously that’s a huge problem.
So which was it?
Yes, and the cop raises a true, but I think irrelevant, point.
His claim is that the law will interfere with police investigations. And he’s right: since the law mandates inquiry as to immigration status during any legal contact, illegal immigrants will be much less inclined to talk to the police when they are witnesses, or worse, victims of crimes. That’s undeniably true.
But as far as a reason for a court to overturn the law, I’m afraid I don’t see how it this reason might work.
If you wish to fantasize that the problem of voter fraud is completely absent in New Mexico yet rampant as pre-marital sex next door in Arizona, that’s your prerogative. Fortunately, no one is required to take your fantasies seriously.
To show a problem with the 100,000 in Arizona, you need merely show us 10 or 100, or 1000 convictions. We can run the percentages on that, and decide for ourselves whether the striking of so many names was a legitimate effort to decrease voter fraud, or a Republican voter suppression effort. I think any reasonable person would agree that a conviction rate of under 10% indicates a voter suppression campaign rather than a voter fraud crackdown. 10% would be 10,000 convictions. If such exists, surely it would show up in AZ newspapers or prison building contracts oe at least in judicial budgets, would it not? There’s no evidence whatsoever of such a massive bump following the voter purge.
Lawyers, including some in my own family, are constantly telling me that I should go to law school; they say I would make a great lawyer.
Sometimes, when I start to believe they may be right, I come here and read posts of some of the lawyers, especially Bricker. And I come to my senses.
So what’s worse - letting someone who isn’t eligible vote, or blocking someone who is eligible? If one’s worse than the other, what’s a good ratio, i.e. preventing one is worth allowing ten cases of the other.
Hey, Bricker, question for you. Would you be willing to surrender your own right to vote to be able to catch a few illegal voters?
Not meaning to junior mod, but for those seriously interested in Bricker’s view on the voting issue you might want to join us at No Such Thing as Voter Fraud? - Great Debates - Straight Dope Message Board.
This will prevent Bricker from having to defend himself in two forums and allow this thread to get back to the immigration law.
It is kinda whipsawy for him, isn’t it?
He’s probably pining for the good old days, when Clinton was president. 
If I was enforcing the law in that state, you bet that’s how I’d look at it. I wouldn’t FOLLOW the idiot thing, but I WOULD interpret that I could pull over anyone who ‘looked’ illegal.
Like the choice of Usernames.
I’m a Foglio fan, myself.
I would presume that every department will issue guidelines to its officers to prevent the sort of misunderstanding seen above.
Your naivete is charming.
OMFG good news everybody! I just rolled my eyes so hard it changed the tilt of the earth. More spring! (sorry Australia)
In other words, Bricker you actually think that’s a misunderstanding? You seriously think some bigot who happens to be a cop is gonna be stopped from making Driving While Hispanic a crime because of “guidelines”?
By that logic there must currently be no guidelines prohibiting theft, brutality, the taking of bribes, coersion or collusion with criminals because cops do these things now.
Seriously, get out of your own head and walk around. The are more good cops than bad, but when there’s a bad one, he can get away with an awful lot of bad things before there’s justice, and even then there’s rarely justice for the victims, just for ‘the people’ as a whole.
Which brings us to another ghastly consequence: the effect this has on the good cops. I’ve met some, and I can easily say I am in awe of them, they really mean it when they say “protect and serve”. We cannot possibly have too many of those people. Met the other kind too, and one is too many of them.
They want to help the Hispanic community, but are hampered by the suspicion of the very people they want to help. And they are notoriously and understandably hampered by loyalty to “their own”. Laws that put more discretionary power in the hands of the individual officer do more harm than good, they place an extra burden on the good, and empower the wicked.
Again, I suspect that most everyone realizes these things, I suspect that few if any ever really expect these laws to be upheld. Its pure grandstanding: an opportunity to be seen as “tough on illegals” without having to face the economic consequences of losing that cheap labor pool, they get to posture as tough guys without anybody blaming them when lettuce is five dollars a head.
These are clearly proscribed by law. Above, people are pointing to areas of supposed ambiguity and suggesting that cops will take advantage of that ambiguity.
The fact remains: no one can ask a court to overturn a law on the basis that even though the law is on its face proper, at some point in the future, it will be abused.
So your imagined parade of bad cops will have to be replaced by actual instances of bad cops to have any persuasive effect.
And how many years of experience do you have working in the criminal justice system?
Well, you see, the reason we try to prevent bad things from happening is so that they *don’t *happen. We have had bad cops in the past, are you suggesting that they are all gone now? Have you any basis for that astounding speculation?
I assert that if you nail your pecker to a tree and set the tree on fire, you will regret it most assuredly and profoundly. I do not recommend you perform an experiment, as it is not entirely necessary to see the results in order to judge the action.
And “parade of bad cops”? Did you just finish a course in Spin 101?
And I’m going to ignore that bit about years of experience, you know as well as I that there are people in law enforcement with more experience than you who agree with us. By now, you’re probably already embarassed to offer such a weak-ass retort. Go, and spin no more.
I’m suggesting that the number of bad cops won’t change as the result of this law. That is: if your gripe is with the harm bad cops do, this law doesn’t appreciably change it one way or the other.
I suggest that you concentrate on such well-thought-out efforts as boycotting Arizona products.