RoR: Forum

The original posting that motivated this quote was related to the national sex offender registry. Registry legislation places an additional burden on a class of criminal post-incarceration. The above quote and underlying principle doesn't seem relevant to the legislature adding an additional burden for a specific class of criminal, who did in fact receive judicial process. It seems to me this is more geared toward things like Jim crow laws or "atheists must pay a higher tax to combat the spread of their heathen ways", not "many experts have determined that commission of this crime is often a pathological behavior and requires close monitoring to determine that the underlying mentality is under control." Those quotes are given as examples of lines of the reasoning I belive to be underlying these laws, not actual quotes from legislation. It also doesn't seem unreasonable, nonobjective, or arbitrary to impose an absolute ban on certain locations for such a criminal, tried by he judiciary, due to the probable pathological nature of the crime and the criminal's easy access to totally defenseless targets at such sites, until such a time that the criminal can make a reasonable case to the judiciary that he is no threat. The above principle doesn't seem to be a bill of attainder because the legislation applies an additional burden or penalty only after the target of the legislation is convicted of a specific class of crime by the judiciary.
In effect, the legislature is legislating the punishment for a crime, one of it's intended functions.

The above opinion does not, of course, apply to the retroactive application of such a burden. That's a stickier question as rights must be protected, but it seems unreasonable to simply wait for child rapes and murders to reveal which percentage of criminals were pathological, but were unmonitored due to the lack of knowledge on the subject at the time of their sentencing. I'm honestly not sure of the answer.

Post 1

Thursday, October 1, 2009 - 6:31am

Ryan for whatever it's worth I came across some information on a recent Supreme Court decision that said sex offender registries are not punitive and therefore constitutional:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_v._Doe

Post 2

Thursday, October 1, 2009 - 6:55am

SO, it is not true that the authorities �forced� anyone to live in a tent, not true that it is �virtually impossible� for them to find a legal place to live, and not true that they are victims of unconstitutional or unobjective laws. They�re back to being plain scum-bags. Shucks.

Post 3

Thursday, October 1, 2009 - 7:15am

Honestly, who really considers a supreme court decision to actually reflect the constitutionalty of anything. I think my reasoning is sound though. I welcome opposing argument if we can all manage to keep our big boy pants on and not act out.

Post 4

Thursday, October 1, 2009 - 9:05am

Of course your reasoning is sound. They were found by the tens of thousands nationwide to be repeating their crimes from locations such as their front porch, across the street from a school, twelve feet by which children walked on their way home.

It�s as though no one thought of suspending air pilot licenses as well as driving licenses in a law that provides license suspension after three drunk-driving convictions. Then huge numbers of them are crashing their airplanes into things.

�But that wasn�t part of the punishment on the day that George did his third DUI, so it�s unconstitu�� Come on.

Post 5

Thursday, October 1, 2009 - 9:17am

This quote was motivated by the relevance to liberty of the principle it expresses. "A bill of attainder . . . includes any legislative act which takes away the life, liberty or property of a particular named or easily ascertainable person or group of persons because the legislature thinks them guilty of conduct which deserves punishment."

Is this a principle you want to declare invalid?

If you are going to hijack this thread to repeat your points from here,, then at least get your issues right. The argument is that the Georgia law is ex post facto, and that taking away people's right to live somewhere by legislative fiat is attainder and double jeopardy. This has nothing to do with whether a state wants to maintain a list of facts that are already in the public record.

Frankly, this traveling circle jerk of yours is bizarre. What is the need to make irrational arguments on yet another thread? What do you need to prove? How does the need to appear tough entail the need to abandon reason? No one here or on the other thread has said that sex criminals shouldn't be punished. You can't show otherwise. No one has said that the punishments shouldn't be more severe than they are. You can't prove otherwise. The objection has been that they proper way to deal with these people is not to abandon objective and constitutional law because of the emotions they evoke in us.

Leftists get just as outraged at the rich. Fundamentalists get just as outraged at atheists. Environmentalists get just as outraged at people with SUV's. Since when has outrage or lack of "sympathy" been a proper justification for determining how to run a political system? Is the constitutional protection of minorities from the punishment of the legislature something we really want to abandon?

If you really care about this issue, then why not try to find a constitutional way to address it? To argue in one breath that supreme court decisions are irrelevant, and then to say that courts have decided that sexual predatory registries are not punishment is not only irrelevant (no one has objected to lists) it's self-contradictory. The purpose of discussing politics in an Objectivist forum is to find rational, objective and constitutional ways to achieve proper political ends. If your response is that these are sexual predators, therefore "so what?" about the constitution, then take your arguments to dissent.

Post 6

Thursday, October 1, 2009 - 9:57am

Circle jerk? Couldn't keep it mature, could you, Ted?

Who are you even talking to? You address a thread with 3 other posters as "you".

I'll address two points I could chisel out of your pissed off adolescent wall of text that I think were probably aimed at me.

The discussion of this quote has similar themes because it was posted as a result of that other discussion. I doubt you marked today in your calendar to inform us of what a bill of attainder is. Its only natural that discussion of the quote would relate to issues and context relevant to the quote raised the day before. Don't get pissed off at a little thread spillover, as this entire quote and motivations for posting it spilled over from that thread. The first one to repeat a point from the other thread was you when you started the read. You did want to discuss the quote like the little blue hyperlink says, right. Or was it just that you had some need to stamp the exact same quote you posted yesterday on the front page as an attention tactic. Let me know next you don't intend to discuss quotes you post within the context you posted them. I don't have any other way to tell if this is Ted the erudite intellectual inspiring a conversation or little Teddy throwing his toys out of the play area for attention.

My supreme court comment reflected that I don't hold "the supreme court says so" to be a definitive argument. Their decisions are binding, but they are not necessarily correct. I'm here to listen to argument, not authority.
(Edited by Ryan Keith Roper on 10/01, 10:07am)

Post 7

Thursday, October 1, 2009 - 12:09pm

Just to clarify, I did not presume to say the Supreme Court has ultimate authority over morality or that they always get it right. Of course they can get these things wrong, but you'll notice I did not say that they did get it wrong or right, I just said whatever it's worth, here's some more info on the topic. I also never made any appeals to the Constitution on the original thread that motivated this quote posting to begin with, since I didn't presume to know all the facts about the Georgian law or how the Supreme Court has ruled on the past on these issues (the article never even delved into that or provided any legal context or facts on the particular cases it addressed). Ted's original objection wasn't even on the issue of Constitutional legality but was rather a question of how it "benefited the state", and his concerns over how outrageous punishments would lead to turning these sex offender into "desperados" All of a sudden now it's an issue of the constitutionality of it! Nice goal post change.

So, no reason to read anything more than what I wrote. It's a legal issue, and I'm not a lawyer, so I thought it would be beneficial to provide a link that shows some of the legal reasoning here that may enlighten some of us on the topic since Ted turned it into one. I'm assuming no one here is an attorney? So is there a problem to sourcing some info on Supreme Court decisions?

Post 8

Thursday, October 1, 2009 - 4:12pm

Bills to Defund ACORN Face Legal Hurdles, Experts Say

In an effort spearheaded by Republicans, the House and Senate voted earlier this month to sever ACORN's federal funding after a series of undercover videos showed some of the group's employees offering advice to a couple posing as a pimp and prostitute on how to skirt tax and immigration laws.

But some legal experts say that the provisions of the bills may be unconstitutional. And the House bill in particular, they say, risks alienating defense contractors, who are longtime allies of Republicans.

The bills are illegal, some skeptics say, because their intent -- to cut off funds to a single group -- violates the constitutional guarantee that lawmakers may not punish a person or group of a crime without a trial, a legal concept known as a bill of attainder that has been reinforced by the Fifth Amendment.

Post 9

Thursday, October 1, 2009 - 4:26pm

I don't understand the point of posting that article. But defunding ACORN is not a bill of attainder anyways since defunding an organization is not a punishment.

Post 10

Thursday, October 1, 2009 - 4:44pm

If the welfare system decided no more Viagra for the Cobb County Campers, shall we call that an �unconstitutional defunding,� a letter of attainder? Hilarious.

Thank you for clarifying exactly what your legal reading would deliver: the prevention of federal defunding of ACORN.

Post 11

Thursday, October 1, 2009 - 5:11pm

Its an attempt to bait and switch the thread, but I'll bite.

The weird thing about this article is that it seems to imply that ACORN is defining not giving them money as punishment. I hope to hell this thing is crushed as being totally crazy, because once that precedent is set, I can't even imagine all the applications. If the government refusing funding is punishment, wouldn't that imply that private individuals refusing funding to private endeavors are punishing them? The possibilitys of thought policing and economic intimidation are pretty scary.

This whole bill of attainder concept seems to have been horribly twisted and warped beyond all usefulness. If used as alleged by ACORN, it would be unconstitutional for congress to defund anything specific without some kind of trial. Other recent interpretations seem to be based on the idea that legislatures can't pass legislation that punishes criminals, on the basis that criminals are an easily ascertainable and particularly named group.

Then again, these shenanigans with bills of attainder could be useful if it leads to a broad awareness that the gov't shouldn't have been funding any of this crap in the first place, along with systemic nonspecific defunding of all programs of this nature. I can dream.

Post 12

Thursday, October 1, 2009 - 6:38pm

Oh, Jesus Christ. Yes, an attempt "to bait and switch the thread." No, actually it was an attempt to have you investigated as a terrorist by the FBI you silly hypocritical little girl. Talk about dick measuring contests, you have issues Ryan.

Post 13

Thursday, October 1, 2009 - 6:39pm

Yes, John, it is not attainder because being funded by the federal government isn't a right in the first place.

Post 14

Thursday, October 1, 2009 - 6:45pm

Jon, you should have read John's post. How does my quoting without comment an item out of the news amount to my supporting an irrational reading of the law? I assume you read John above you. No property of ACORN's is being seized. Unfortunately, the attainder objection still stands - unless the meaning of "A bill of attainder includes any legislative act which takes away the life, liberty or property of a particular named or easily ascertainable person or group of persons because the legislature thinks them guilty of conduct which deserves punishment" is still unclear.

Post 15

Thursday, October 1, 2009 - 6:52pm

Wow, from angry intellectual to laughing stock in 2 posts. Have you really been holding anger about that dick measuring contest remark for over a week? That joke about getting flagged due to you seeding a thread with the president's name and assassination has stuck in your craw this long? The only issue I have here is that someone I intermittently respect is carrying a grudge through posts all over the forum and showing his ass.

Post 16

Thursday, October 1, 2009 - 7:05pm

"Talk about dick measuring contests, you have issues Ryan." [Ted]

Dick measuring contest? Not fair to you guys.

Let�s compare tents.

How many tents do you all own?

I have three. One can host a dance party of eight. Seriously. All eight can stand and dance. It�s no Qadafi tent, but it does have a reputation.

Since this is a tent-measuring contest, my guess is Ted has none.

How many do you own, Ryan?

(Edited by Jon Letendre on 10/01, 7:09pm)

Post 17

Thursday, October 1, 2009 - 7:12pm

Honestly, I am tentless. Wait, I do have a busted one around here somewhere that my kid uses to camp in the back yard. Its pretty broken down too. I can't freakin stand camping, I'd rather buy electronics and books. I lived outside professionally for way to long to want to do it for fun. Although I have to say I would definetly choose to live in a tent while on probation than stay in a prison.

Post 18

Thursday, October 1, 2009 - 8:16pm

That last sentence says it all. I too would rather live in a tent than be in prison. Yet Bill had pleaded earlier to �reinstitutionalize� offenders who cannot �find a place to live.�

(I wonder if Ted would approve of that solution, that reinstitutionalization.)

Post 19

Wednesday, October 7, 2009 - 4:43pm