abuse of power

Honesty: A Concept

Jeff Gamso
October 01, 2011 14:48

But a range of civil libertarians and Muslim-American advocates questioned how the government could take an American citizen’s life based on secret intelligence and without a trial. They said that killing him amounted to summary execution without the due process of law guaranteed by the...

Show Them the Money - UPDATED

Jeff Gamso
September 10, 2011 02:33

Pretend for just a minute that you're a state that favors strict punishment for crimes and where along with prisons that are overcrowded there are local jails holding plenty of folks. Pretend also, that this hypothetical state has no budget surplus.  The money it has goes to education, to...

Sore Loser

Jeff Gamso
November 15, 2010 14:46

Here in the blogosphere (and in the subset that's the criminal defense blawgosphere, which is a truly ugly word), we talk a lot about abuses of power by law enforcement types.  You know, the shootings and beatings and arrests of folks for complaining about a speed trap or for having an...

The Baby & The Bathwater

Rick Horowitz
October 31, 2010 20:16

A few days ago, I wrote about not just our criminal justice system, but our entire country having lost its moorings to our Constitution. I talked about an “instrumentalist” view of the Law, which has transformed our system from one which protected our freedom and our rights into one...

Anger Management

Rick Horowitz
June 21, 2010 04:02

I haven’t written for long enough that the last few days I’ve been jonesin’. The problem isn’t that I haven’t had anything to write about.  Quite the contrary: I’ve had too much to write about.  The problem is that what I’ve had to write about made me so...