So, either I support the plain reading of the text, in which case I am a textualist, or I support the ruling of the Court, whereupon I am an originalist.
I do. Though not because it’s Arpaio. Just because I think the Sixth Amendment mandates it - and because there is no non-arbitrary reason to distinguish between distinction between a requested sentence of 366 days and one of 364.
I’m hardly an Arpaio fan, but I hope they treat him the same way that they treat any other prisoner once he’s convicted. Anything more - poetic or not - is just revenge fantasy.
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I don’t know who Jack Wilenchik is but Dennis has been in Arpaio’s hip pocket and been defending him (on the public teat) for over a decade now. Here is one of his milder self-important interactions but it points to others, and here he tried to get the IP address of everybody who had been on the Phoenix New Times website to bring before a grand jury. I suppose in today’s alternate facts world he thinks the judge is lying.
I hope the case *does *go before a jury, who finds him guilty and recommends two to five instead of a paltry six months. Meanwhile, here is PNT’s current article with Arpaio’s victims’ reactions.
Wilenchik is a Republican hack who has long been associated with Arpaio and former Maricopa County Attorney Andy Thomas. Thomas was the former DA (Arizona calls them County Attorneys rather than District Attorneys) for the greater Phoenix area who was disbarred for abusing the power of his office to criminally charge a sitting state judge with crimes for which there was no evidence (among other things). Thomas and Arpaio were close political allies and [URL=“Wilenchik's a Liar, and There's More | News | Phoenix | Phoenix New Times | The Leading Independent News Source in Phoenix, Arizona”]Wilenchik, during Thomas’s tenure, even served as a special prosecutor for the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office](http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/blogs/dennis-wilenchik-of-andy-thomas-fame-taken-to-the-woodshed-by-judge-roslyn-silver-6502104) while he was in private practice to specifically go after the Phoenix New Times newspaper for publishing Arpaio’s home address and revealing the existence of grand jury subpoenas that Wilenchik issued in the course of the investigation into the publishing of Arpaio’s address. Before running for County Attorney, Thomas used to work in Wilenchik’s firm, which explains their alliance.
And ultimately, no matter how many people wish to interpret it so, the question of whether individuals have a blanket constitutional right to a trial by jury for all misdemeanor offenses is a fairly settled “no.” This also has the virtue of being practical, since guaranteeing the right to a jury trial for people who are charged with any misdemeanor would break the court system. If everyone who is charged with mere criminal speeding for driving 10 or more miles above the speed limit or for misdemeanor assault (called battery or assault and battery in some places) for merely pushing someone has a right to a jury trial, the relatively quick one day judge-alone trials are now transformed into multi-day affairs with the jurisdiction on the hook now for paying several hundred more jurors daily and sending out several magnitude more numbers of jury summons daily. There would not be the physical space necessary for jurors for every single criminal judge to be in a jury trial every single day, even aside from the financial costs involved, and the resulting backlog in all of the demands for a jury trial would also stretch the length of delay before trial to unmanageable levels. This then would cause exponentially greater speedy trial problems.
But I would argue that the rule SHOULD be that the potential for confinement triggers the jury requirement. That keeps the low level offenses tried at the bench, but provides a jury when jail is in play.
BTW how frequent is it that sheriffs are still serving at 85 or older ? I have mentioned my preference that judges leave the bench at 60, and I would think the same should apply to law enforcement officers.
His Wiki entry has many fascinating facts, such as that he is of entirely Italian parentage from Massachusetts and that in the 1980s he sold Space Flights to tourists.
Rather than a specific age for mandatory retirement from public offices, it should be more based on the age of the population.
Say, once you are 2 standard deviations away from the average population’s age, you are no longer eligible to serve, or whatever would work to give a number in the mid 60’s to 70’s now, I’d have to get a bunch of population data and remeber my statistics class from 25 years ago to give a more precise value.
Then, as medical science lets us live longer, and we are all living to be 300, we don’t get forced out of public office when we are still young’ns in our 80’s.