OK so this is just one state, and I have no idea how much support it has in the legislature yet. But damn, if they don’t spell out liberal “paranoid fantasies” completely.
Here’s the ACLU’s take and the text of the ammendment.
A quote from the ACLU
Some text from the bill
and furthermore
I hope that the rest of the legislature is more sensible than this, but I can see some lobbyist (like the timber industry, a notable force in Oregon) liking this a great deal.
What do you folks think. A good idea? Could it make it to law?
I agree that this is a bad idea. Every once in awhile the ACLU is right. If this bill passes it will most likely be declared unconstitutional, even before it gets to the Supreme Court.
I don’t understand the term “non-violent”: How are masses of people using force less violent than one person using force on another person. If I stopped Noam Chompsky from getting in his car because I hate Uday Hussein, I get arrested, but when thousands of people force a large group of random commuters to take hours and hours to commute home because they hate George Bush it is called “non-violent”.
Publish all you want, scream all you want from your own property, but do not block roads, divert the attention of police away from more important duties, or damage private property. That I would call non-violent.
djbdjb, I don’t want this to seem like a personal attack on you. But your post is sort of an example of how this bill could cause problems. Who decides what is violent?
Do you really believe that people should be put in prison for a minimum of twenty-five years for intentionally blocking traffic?
Remember, rapists, murderers and child-abusers are already being released when they probably shouldn’t be because there is not enough room for all of the people who should be incarcerated. Mandatory drug sentences are partly to blame. Sentencing requirements which undermine the authority of judges are already creating major problems.
Of course 25 years is excessive. The crime is economic, and can be handled with a fine.
The point I make is that “non-violent” crimes are not non-violent. They are crimes where (usually) large numbers of people all use a little bit of force to cause the same amount of damage as fewer people using more force.
There is no contradiction in being in favor of the civil liberties of being able to think what you want, smoke what you want, have sex with who you want, and in saying that if you block traffic, you must pay a fine.
It has always been an accepted element of civil disobedience that the protesters must be willing to accept appropriaet legal sanctions for their actions, djbdjb. Have you never seen people at sit-ins being cuffed and dragged into police vans?
That said, I can in no way imagine that the penalities called for in this bill are appropriate for acts of civil disobedience. Put me over in the “great big ball of shit” section, please.
I do hope that this bill gets rejected. After all, people are always preaching about “Learning from history and not making the same mistakes over and over again”.
Hmm, so taking out a street light with a BB gun in Oregon could get you 25 years in prison without parole. Hurray for proportionate justice!
In an ironic twist, if the President comes to Oregon during the '04 campaign and sets up his “Free Speech Zones” he could be considered a terrorist for disrupting “The free and orderly assembly of the inhabitants of the State of Oregon”.
We haven’t even scraped the surface of the crapitude of this bill. But since it seems to be a non-starter debate wise. Let me extrapolate something that might.
This bill is sponsored by a state senator who heads the judiciary committee that this bill is being considered in. This wasn’t just some schmoe who got his inbred relatives to vote for him in an underpopulated district. Therefore I think we can conclude from this that he actually represents a certain sentiment that is at least somewhat popular and powerful. If people like this can get elected to his office here they can get elected elsewhere and they can also get elected to be DA’s and judges who interpret our current anti-terrorism laws.
More than the penalties in this bill, I’m disturbed by it’s insistence of using the word “Terrorism” to attack political enemies. Notice also that the bill isn’t even careful enough to suggest that people need to be breaking previous laws to be considered for this crime.
Therefore, I propose that there exist political forces that are actively trying to use the fear of terrorism to suppress political dissent and they just might be powerful enough to do it. It’s obvious here in Oregon, and I think it’s likely to happen elsewhere and even in DC.
The thing is, the way the bill is worded, you could get tossed for 25 years just for standing on the sidewalk outside the Oregon Capitol Building and yelling loudly – after all, someone could claim that you were “disrupting” their daily activities, and making it hard for them to do whatever their tasks du jour were.
Stupid, stupid, stupid legislation. What is it with Republican lawmakers?
Legislators propose idiot legislation all the time. A few years ago here in NC, an anti-death-penalty legislator proposed that we bring back public hangings – he seemed to think that it would turn more people away from supporting the death penalty. He apparently doesn’t realize that its main effect would be to siphon audiences away from Nascar.
You want an actual debate? Ok, let’s see what we can do. The issue here seems to be one of responsibility. The legislators want to be seen as being tough on terrorists/terrorism, but they don’t want to take the responsibility of clearly defining it. This would leave the possibility of loopholes which could let someone off later or letting their political opponents have ammunition in a future campaign(The legislation my opponent sponsored would not punish a terrorist who (insert terrorist act which would slip through loophole here)). So what they do is write some BS, over-broad law and pass the whole thing off on the courts to handle. The courts, at least the first level, are simply screwed. The prosecutors job got a lot harder all of a sudden because they have to figure out which law to prosecute an offender under. The defense’s job got harder because all of a sudden there is some new law a prosecutor could choose to prosecute their client under and finding precedent and mustering a defense would be a much more difficult proposition. Plus they’ll have to fight the propaganda war which is almost a certainty whenever someone is accused of “terrorism”. IF you can even find a defender(aside from a public defender) who is willing to “defend an accused terrorist.”
Now the first string of courts can’t throw out laws, if the DA decides to push for a terrorist conviction the law is written so vaguely that railroading could occur. The letter of the law is so damn vague that judges are virtually FORCED to legislate from the bench. Many judges are reluctant to do that(for good reason) so they take a broad interpretation. Suddenly our mischevious 17 year old with a BB gun is facing 25 years without parole. The appeals courts, in many states, are not there to determine if the findings of the lower court were accurate or not, they are more interested in verifying that the accused did get a fair trial. Questions of the legitimacy of the law may come up here, but most of these courts don’t have the ability to modify laws either. We’ve got to go to state supreme courts to do that.
Anyone who wants to know why the justice system is screwed up has no further to look than chickenshit legislatures who pass laws like this one. The purpose of the legislature is to clearly define laws. Over-broad language in a law, like this bill, is a greater hindrance to Justice in America than pretty much anything else. The entire point of the legislative branch is to create specific laws. Junk like this bill just creates a mess. Moreover it starts us on the slippery slope towards a police state. Certainly not the vision of America the Framers had in mind. With laws like this there literally are no innocent men. There’s something fundamentally wrong with the legal system of a country where 100% of your citizens are criminals.
Even if the intent of this were’nt so scary, the wording is absurd.
If you go to some protest (with a permit and all) , and carefully stay where you are supposed to, and don’t disrupt anything, you can still go to prison because one of the other protestors (a total stranger to you), INTENDS to disrupt something even if they never actually DO disrupt anything?
But! Before a judge ever gets to review it some poor bastard has to be prosecuted under it(and quite possibly convicted as a “terrorist” and/or spending time in jail over it). Judges only review cases, not laws as a matter of course. Now if the state government allows govenors to veto bills(especially line-item veto**) then the govenor should send this guy right down the crapper. Still, this would obviously leave the govenor up for criticism as being “soft on terrorism” by his next opponent, so there is no clear cut view on how this bill will do in the law-making process. It needs to be killed in the legislature, before it has the chance to ruin some poor bastard’s life by branding them a “terrorist” under some dubious definitions and circumstances.
