I hope you don’t mind that I have no fucking clue about what you’re driving at here.
I sure missed this part. Could you quote the specific language where they said this?
No question about it. I would be appalled if any court of law in a civilized country applied a different set of rules. Again, your point?
Of course not. And…???
How about if, as a non-lawyer, and as a person not in a position where I am expected to apply the law to anything beyond my own personal conduct, I express an opinion that someone should go to jail. For instance, suppose I say the surviving Tsarnaev brother should rot in prison for the rest of his life.
If I do that, please don’t go apeshit because I haven’t assumed his innocence until his guilt is proven in a court of law. Because rules about how courts of law operate apply to what transpires in courts of law. We’re not in one.
And not only will I hope you not go apeshit over my failure to assume his innocence, but I would hope that you would not expect me to produce the specific Massachusetts statute I believe he violated. I don’t have to find the murder statute in the Massachusetts legal code to have an idea that he might have violated the laws against murder.
“But which murder statute,” Bricker would have asked in the past. “If his brother planted the bombs, maybe he’s just guilty of something less than murder one, so even if we assume that he did indeed help his brother out with the bombings, saying he should rot in jail for life is unjustified, unless you can back it up with the specific statute and why you’re sure it applies, given what we know and don’t know. How do you know the law and the facts support a sentence of life in prison in his case?”
It’s gotten to the point where everybody expects this ridiculous and absurd Spanish fucking Inquisition.
But fortunately, Bricker has now washed his hands of this game. Because if he were to ever pull this stunt again, I could just ask him, “are you suggesting that there’s no potential criminal law that could have been violated here?”
Because what he’s saying is that it’s OK for Boehner and Jindal, high public officials in charge of writing Federal laws (Boehner) and faithfully executing the laws of Louisiana (Jindal) to say people should go to jail, without having a clue about a specific statute, as long as there is a potential criminal law that could have been violated.
I would certainly expect that Bricker (or anyone else) holds people on a message board to a less strict standard than Boehner and Jindal are held to, with respect to such utterances.
So I’m pretty happy with this thread. I feel like it’s accomplished something useful in terms of bringing an all-too-frequently recurring bit of pedantry, stupidity, and legal nitpicking to an end on this board.
