Yes. Representative government and tyranny are mutually exclusive, but representative government can still opt for tyranny. It happened in ancient Rome, so it’s nothing new.
I am saying that “the majority wants X” is not the kind of argument for the value of X that you can properly bring to the table at a constitutional convention. The political process of ratification post-convention will tell us what the people do or do not want. (Historically, that is how we got the 2nd Amendment and all the rest of the BoR.) As Framers we are obliged to consider much, much more complex considerations than that.
OTOH, the UK has remained a free country despite having a system where there is no written constitution and, in theory, nothing Parliament has not the authority to do. Perhaps the difference says less about political systems than political cultures.
True; and that would be another fine addition to the document. At present, not all rights are enumerated in the Constitution. Either way, though, there is a right to self-defense under common law. See Blackstone, for instance. Here is an overview of some of the 14 or so Supreme Court cases on the matter, all of which recognize a right to self-defense.
Correct, and this interpretation is the one I was advocating in my first post.
That’s for the courts and the legislature to figure out. The First Amendment doesn’t mention libel, plagiarism, or incitement to riot. It doesn’t specify the process for petitioning the government, or what activities constitute the “press”.
I’d suggest the D.C. v Heller interpretation of the Second Amendment.
That’s another approach, and closer to the EU approach. I personally feel that a shorter, simpler Bill of Rights gives some of the beneficial flexibility of an unwritten Constitution, and much of the unwavering firmness of something like the EU charter, while avoiding the drawbacks of each.
So what? It doesn’t negate my claim that the people who commit the majority of violent crimes in this country do not get long enough sentences. Mandatory minimum laws are useless when soft judges are free to use probation as part of the sentence.
At any rate, I’ve never yet encountered a convincing argument for it, and I’ve been to law school, and it is a topic occasionally hashed out here in GD. But, generally speaking, I’ve always favored consequentialist and opposed deontological theories of ethics.
It’s not so much soft judges as that prisons are heavily overcrowded to the point where they have to release people early.
Currently the average person convicted of a crime in the US only serves about half their sentence and for violent criminals I think it’s even lower.
I don’t know if it’s still true, but in Texas you used to be eligible for parole after you’d served a third of your sentence and virtually everyone got parole.
Similarly, in many states, such as California(though I don’t know if it’s still true), every time you have a “good day” you get a day shaved off your sentence. A “good day” meaning a day you weren’t put in “administrative segregation”.
So paradoxically, Texas can execute absurdly high numbers of people, yet routinely put people convicted of rape and homicide back on the street with five or six years.
One of my former neighbors(we weren’t friends) served just six years for murdering his girlfriend.
IMHO, the issue isn’t bleeding-heart liberals(of which I am one) but the fact that we don’t have enough prison space for the people we put in jail and mandatory minimums for a number of non-violent or relatively non-violent offenses as well as three-strikes-you’re-out type laws exacerbate the problem.
Similarly, whenever I hear about people bitching about “plea-bargaining” leading to criminals receiving relatively light sentences(true) I want to point out that everyone I’ve talked to in law enforcement on both sides say that plea-bargaining is a necessary evil since they don’t have nearly the court room space or time to deal with all the trials.
That may be a factor, but it begins with the sentence.
I’ve worked in the criminal justice system for 31 years now and I’ve seen what criminals are getting for sentences. 3 years for armed robbery is common. Multiple convictions result in concurrent sentences. So the convict may be looking at three 40 year sentences, but gets three 3 year sentences concurrent to each other. So instead of serving 120 years they serve 3 lousy years. This has to do with the original sentence, not overcrowded prisons.
So not only do they not feel the sting of consequences for their actions, in a relatively short period of time they are back out victimizing others again. It’s absolute B.S.!
I’m on record saying I’d like to have the Second Amendment repealed, so my answer is pretty obvious.
I’ll add that I’m also on record as saying I would not support any general ban on firearm ownership. I think most people should be allowed to purchase, own, and carry fire-arms. I just think making it a constitutional right creates problems.
You honestly were ignorant of the US tradition of letting violent criminals out of prison early due to prison overcrowding and various mandatory minimums on non-violent offenders?
I though you were a journalist and a lawyer or did I misremember?
As to the original question, I think that the founding fathers would have lots of reservations about other things.
For example, when they drew up the Constitution, the largest state, New York, was only about six times larger, in terms of population, than the smallest state, Rhode Island and, of the thirteen states, the smallest seven still accounted for about 50% of the population.
If they saw the present day US where the 38 smallest states account for only about 20% of the population, I suspect they’d rethink the idea of the Senate.
Yes, they believed, as do I, on checks on majoritarianism, but they certainly never imagined just how large the US would become and what the population disparities between states would be like.
From a 2003 paper on “Comparative International Rates of Incarceration: An Examination of Causes and Trends” Presented to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (available here as a pdf: www.sentencingproject.org/doc/.../inc_comparative_intl.pdf)
And
Wikipedia has another cite, a book this time, saying the same or similar thing (fn 19 goes back to the NY Times article above):
I didn’t make anything approaching an exhaustive search. Nothing like it. But I didn’t find anything suggesting US prisoners spend less time in prison than the prisoners in other countries. I could have looked in the wrong place and/or these articles and paper could be incorrect, but I don’t think it’s a given that you are accurate in your claims.
Once was the one, am now the other. But I asked for a cite for your quite astonishing assertion that violent criminals spend less time in prison in the U.S. than they do in other countries.
If that is the truth, and we still have a proportionally-greater incarcerated population than any other country (which we have, cites already provided in this thread), then that says something really, really disturbing about the criminal tendencies of the American people.