SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the making-it-up-as-they-go-along dept.
The World Socialist Web Site reports
On January 9, the US Supreme Court issued a unanimous summary ruling reversing a decision by the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals and upholding qualified immunity for a police officer who shot and killed Samuel Pauly in an attempt to investigate a traffic incident near Santa Fe, New Mexico in October 2011.
Prior to the shooting, Samuel's brother Daniel was involved in a non-violent road-rage incident in which he stopped his car and confronted two women who he claimed had been tailgating him. Daniel subsequently drove home, where he lived with Samuel. Samuel was at home playing video games and had not been involved in the confrontation. Meanwhile, the occupants of the other vehicle called the police, who were able to locate the house where the brothers lived.
At that point, no crime had been committed and there was no legal justification to arrest anyone or to enter or search any house. While the frequency of "road-rage" incidents is not a healthy sign, they do constitute a fairly common occurrence in American social life.
According to Daniel, when two police officers arrived at the brothers' house they failed to identify themselves. Not realizing that it was the police, and believing that they were being burglarized, the brothers armed themselves with weapons. The brothers warned, "We have guns!" The encounter escalated and there was an exchange of gunfire in which no one was struck. Then a third officer arrived and, without warning, shot Samuel dead.
The phrase "qualified immunity" refers to a judge-made doctrine that has no basis in the text of the US Constitution, notwithstanding the claims by various Supreme Court justices to be handing down the Constitution's "original" meaning. In recent decades, this doctrine has quietly been built up to huge proportions within the judicial system, largely without significant media commentary or public discussion. It now plays an important role in blocking civil rights cases and encouraging the ongoing epidemic of police brutality.
According to this authoritarian and anti-democratic doctrine, a judge can unilaterally decide a case in favor of a police officer--even if the officer's conduct violated the Constitution--if the judge determines that the police officer acted "reasonably" in light of previous Supreme Court decisions. If qualified immunity is awarded to the police officer, the case can be thrown out of court, never going before a jury, and costs can be imposed against the victim or the victim's survivors.
[...] The Supreme Court held that the officer who killed Samuel "did not violate clearly established law" because "existing precedent" had not "placed the statutory or constitutional question beyond debate".
[...] In the written opinion, the justices went out of their way to complain that the lower courts were not granting qualified immunity to police officers often enough.
Clearly, having appointments made by Democrat presidents doesn't lessen Authoritarianism in the USA.
(Score: 3, Touché) by RS3 on Saturday January 21 2017, @08:05AM
I'm not a lawyer at all, but smart enough to read for myself.
You're surely combative enough to try out for a spot.
Bad analogy- well written code is also well documented and anyone with a little bit of brains and motivation can understand it.
I don't know what context you're talking about or need- it's all there in the .pdf. If you would actually read it a bit, rather than ranting on SN, you might have something intelligent to say.
You idealistic philosophers are tiring. You could be hypothetically right, but who's in charge of opinions of what's important?
Einstein, name me 1 reporter, analyst, or any person who can be trusted to correctly analyze and summarize _anything_ without spin, bias, slant, misunderstanding, ulterior motive, etc.
Since you're AC I don't know much about you, but I know this: people like you are the problem with the US. You're not willing to understand the system of laws and courts, but I'd bet you have strong opinions about everything. I hope you don't vote, and if you do, please stop until you've spent more time reading actually important documents, and less time reading reporters' inaccurate drivel.
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 21 2017, @08:02PM
For what it's worth (different AC here), I find most SCOTUS rulings to be VERY readable and well written. If I don't think I really have a good grasp on the ruling, there are some very good legal blogs who comment on the rulings.
I agree that the AC is the kind of person that is wrong with the US today, and around the world. They have VERY strong opinions on issues that they've never bothered to even try to understand, like this one because there's too much reading involved, so they get their deep understanding from their "trusted" sources, like Sean Hannity or other acknowledged Constitutional scholars. We're now beginning to pay the price over the next four years because of such well informed citizens has he. Look, only hours after delivering a speech proclaiming himself the champion of the lost middle class, THE VERY FIRST act signed by Trump was one targeted at struggling middle and lower class people, the mortgage rate reduction for FHA loans. He made it is FIRST act was to screw the same people who supported him; usually it is done much more subtly than that, but this kind of thing just wizzes by our ignorant AC friend here because to understand that issue, he would have had to do a bit of reading or watching analysis outside of Fox and Friends.
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 21 2017, @11:22PM
I agree that the AC is the kind of person that is wrong with the US today, and around the world. They have VERY strong opinions on issues that they've never bothered to even try to understand,
Fuck you.
EVERYBODY trusts sources because none of us are experts.
Its idiots who think they can understand stuff without the guidance of experts that are the problem.
Hannity is no expert on anything but Hannity.
Fuckface up thread thinks that non-programmers can understand code just because its commented for an audience of programmers.
Here's the problem. Programming is 10% code and 90% domain knowledge. Comments don't give you domain knowledge any more than footnotes in the a scotus ruling give you domain knowledge either.
Words have meaning in context and its idiots like you who think they can figure out that meaning without that context who end up believing in pizzagate, spirit cooking and a billion other conspiracy theories built on nothing but ignorance, coincidence and gullible partisanship.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 22 2017, @06:14PM
Holy cow, you are decidedly ignorant. Some of us are ignorant on topics we are unfamiliar because of some barrier of understanding, such as not having a mathematical or science background, or because something is expressed in a language or terminology that is wholly unknown to us. But you make an active effort to remain ignorant. Go follow that link to the judgement. It is only 9 pages, with one of them a one page concurring opinion by Ginzberg. Half of that PDF lays out, very clearly, the background of the case in a step-by-step manner. The remaining few pages address the reasoning behind the judgement. It is very clear and uses very plain language. You can only give a man the tools, you can't make him use them.
Personally, I try to limit my very strong opinions to things that I am reasonably sure about. You might want to try that some time, or at least in this case, try reading the 6th grade level language in the summary and express why you don't agree with it. Supreme Court rulings are not highly technical requiring an understanding of very fine points of law. That's what lower courts are for. The Supreme Court takes on carefully selected cases to clarify general legal positions. Other than a very few latin words that are descriptive words for certain kinds of cases and rulings, the rulings are written simply and clearly by design.
The More You Know!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 23 2017, @08:08PM
> Holy cow, you are decidedly ignorant.
And you are WILLFULLY ignorant.
At least I am smart enough to know that I don't know everything.
> It is only 9 pages
Wooosh!
It isn't the 9 pages that matter. its everything else that is not in the 9 pages. All the contextual knowledge that is acquired through the course of a lifetime in the legal profession. That's what the judges draw on, its what guides them to pick the arguments they pick and discard the arguments they discard.
> Personally, I try to limit my very strong opinions to things that I am reasonably sure about.
You are doing a shit-ass job of it. Thinking that everything you need to know about a SCOTUS ruling is contained in just 9 pages. If it were really that simple it would not have had to go to the supreme court of the land to get worked out.
You are arguing against the value of expertise. How very trumpian of you.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 21 2017, @11:33PM
Einstein, name me 1 reporter, analyst, or any person who can be trusted to correctly analyze and summarize _anything_ without spin, bias, slant, misunderstanding, ulterior motive, etc.
Do you demand perfection of everybody in your life?
If you do then your life must be one of unending disappointment.
Idiots like you who make the perfect the enemy of the good end up enabling the worst.
Bad analogy- well written code is also well documented and anyone with a little bit of brains and motivation can understand it.
Terrible fucking rebuttal. Nobody documents code to include all the domain knowledge around it. Try it. Give your best written code to someone in your life who knows nothing about what your work and ask them to tell you what the code does and more importantly all the reasons for the choices you made in the code. Like why did you chose quicksort rather than a bublesort? Why did you chose a TCP socket over a UDP socket? Why did you choose to use C instead of Java?
Go ahead do it, show them and ask them to explain it all to you without any prompting from you.
Or pause for a second and realize just how fucking stupid your theory is,
Reading legal rulings is the same damn way. You don't even know what you don't know. You get false sense of confidence that you understand it all just because you've got no concept of the unmentioned choices that are obvious to all the experts.
(Score: 1, Troll) by RS3 on Saturday January 21 2017, @11:52PM
I hope you copy down your moronic rantings, and some day years from now you read them and see what a fool you were. I can only hope you will somehow develop some wisdom. Like I said before, you just like conflict, being argumentative, and combative. Please go kick a pit bull.
It's ironic you're accusing me of demanding perfection! You're one of those people who sees everything black or white. So only 100% software experts can understand someone else's code? Then you must be right and I'm 100% idiot because I've had to trash other people's code and start from scratch because even they couldn't understand their own code. I fact I've received huge compliments on my code because of its commenting- from people who had done very little coding, and not at all in the languages I used.
Life is not black or white. It's not about someone 100% understanding legal documents, or code, or how to assemble a bicycle.
But I see you're just one of those people who love to dig and dig and dig into something, like this stupid off-thread, and you've completely lost sight of the big picture.
My statement stands, and most intelligent and sane people will agree: if we don't stay involved in our government, then we will be ruled by a very few, power-hungry control freaks who will obfuscate laws, rules, codes, orders, judgments, and government in general to the point that most of the people will be sheep and goats being herded. If you want that world, PLEASE LEAVE.
You know what, I take it all back. Stay stupid and I'll get involved in government and rule over people like you. Just please don't cry when I take your candy.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 22 2017, @12:27AM
> I hope you copy down your moronic rantings,
Ditto you self-righteous dumbass.
> It's ironic you're accusing me of demanding perfection!
No irony about ir. You literally just did it.
> So only 100% software experts can understand someone else's code?
Wooooosh!
> Life is not black or white.
And yet you JUST demanded absolute perfection from anyone whose job it is to explain and interpret.
> My statement stands, and most intelligent and sane people will agree:
I like how you claim that smart people agree with you, like you have the great secret of enlightenment.
You sound a helluva lot like buzzard, runaway and jmorris.
The club of sanctimonious duning-krueger idiots.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Tuesday January 24 2017, @07:44PM
Legal definitions can vary quite significantly from common definitions, so the OP does have a valid point. Sure you *think* you understood it, but what you understood may be very different from what a lawyer would understand, because a lawyer would be using a completely different dictionary than you do.
It's not like giving code to a non-coder; it's more like giving Java code to a C++ developer and telling them it's C++. It looks somewhat similar, and depending on the code segment provided it'd certainly be possible for the C++ developer to think he knows exactly what's going on. Until the C++ dev starts pointing out memory leaks all over the place or something because he doesn't actually know what he's looking at.