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Supreme Court curbs power of government to impose heavy fines and seize property
In a unanimous decision, the Supreme Court on Wednesday ruled to drastically curb the powers that states and cities have to levy fines and seize property, marking the first time the court has applied the Constitution's ban on excessive fines at the state level.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who returned to the court for the first time in almost two months after undergoing surgery for lung cancer, wrote the majority opinion in the case involving an Indiana man who had his Land Rover seized after he was arrested for selling $385 of heroin.
"Protection against excessive fines has been a constant shield throughout Anglo-American history for good reason: Such fines undermine other liberties," Ginsburg wrote. "They can be used, e.g., to retaliate against or chill the speech of political enemies. They can also be employed, not in service of penal purposes, but as a source of revenue."
Also at National Review, SCOTUSblog, and NPR.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Thursday February 21 2019, @12:10PM (1 child)
Selling drugs you didn't manufacture yourself is a very serious crime, you are working for the most explicit face of the system. I'd suggest the Duterte therapy.
Having said that, civil forfeiture just breeds corruption so I agree with the vote. Kavanaugh voted same as Ginzburg? who would have guessed, he being so eeeeevil.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday February 21 2019, @01:21PM
Gonna get all Pascal's Wager[*] on your rusty tin ass!
Given that both:
- he knew being his true evil self would not affect the outcome, so had the cost of showing he was evil, and no gain;
- pretending to be not evil had the cost of having to spend 10 seconds on internal moral dialogue, and the gain of having people who thought he was evil thinking that maybe he wasn't so evil after all;
there's a clear dominant strategy that an evil person would not hesitate in taking.
[* And like Pascal's Wager, the above is logically unsound, I'll leave it as an excercise to the reader to find its flaws.]
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