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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, @12:21PM
Either you are a regular soldier, with your uniform, or you are an irregular, which is the same as a spy or as a terrorist. Sure you can be more or less moral in your action and you WOULD deserve an appropriate treatment. But, lacking the resources to do that, you should be filled up with pentothal until you spill all beans, and executed. Because YOU, as an irregular soldier you declared a war and brought it to a territory. I know that most of the time it's the weakest one who is more right, while the most wrong is the most strong and can get pretty uniforms as dominant. I don't claim that's fair.
The additional problem. Which makes the above moot, is that the system is already one and wars are not fought with conventional weapons. This is why the system is not hypocrite when it pushes anti-militarism and gun control on one side and spend trillions on arms on the other. Brute force has been superseded by faster and more accurate weapons (finance) or slower and less detectable weapons (demography, immigration, sexual revolution). WW I and II already were wars fought not for territory but for social transformation.
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