SNARLS

Fast on the heels of Mondays monumental traffic jams caused by the rain and "you know who",
the commander in chief, Barak Obama will be here Tuesday afternoon, just in time for rush hour. 


One is the loneliest number:
DOM has the close up details of why Onan would have been much better off being represented by the Federal Public Defender's Office of the Southern District and having his case decided by the 11th Circuit instead of a biblical injunction against...certain deeds better off done alone in the privacy of your home, but legally accomplished nonetheless in a waiting room of a VA hospital with an attractive veteran nearby. Confused? Click here. 

Citizens dis-united: 
The U.S. Supreme court is might satisfied with the political landscape the$e day$ with billionaire$ able to drop tens of millions of dollars into campaigns with no oversight and no disclosure.  The court made that abundantly clear in its per curiam (latin for "you didn't just lose, you got creamed") decision in American Tradition v. Bullock in which the court said the holding in Citizens United  applies to Montana (and presumably the other 49 states). The dissent by Breyer is interesting.  with Sotomayor, Kagan, and Ginsburg joining (that's a 5-4 per curium affirmed for those of you keeping score at home). 



As Justice Stevens explained, “technically in­dependent expenditures can be corrupting in much the same way as direct contributions.”...
Moreover, even if I were to accept Citizens United, this Court’s legal conclusion should not bar the Montana Su­preme Court’s finding, made on the record before it, that independent expenditures by corporations did in fact lead to corruption or the appearance of corruption in Montana. Thus, Montana’s experience, like considerable ex­perience elsewhere since the Court’s decision in Citizens United, casts grave doubt on the Court’s supposition that independent expenditures do not corrupt or appear to do so.


So money doesn't corrupt politics. Duh!
  

It's Torture: 
For those of you firmly in the "Scalia is really a friend to the criminal defense bar camp" note that he had no trouble concurring with Justice Thomas's view of the eighth amendment  in his dissent in Miller v. Albama:
As I have previously explained, “the Cruel and Unusual Punish- ments Clause was originally understood as prohibiting torturous methods of punishment—specifically methods akin to those that had been considered cruel and unusual at the time the Bill of Rights was adopted. The clause does not contain a “proportionality principle...  
In short, it does not authorize courts to invalidate any punishment they deem disproportionate to the severity of the crime or to a particular class of offenders. Instead, the clause “leaves the unavoidably moral question of who ‘deserves’ a particular nonprohibited method of punishment to the judgment of the legislatures that authorize the penalty...

Lets us interpret the Thomas dissent for you:

The eighth amendment cruel and unusual prohibition applies to the manner of punishment, not the length. Torture is prohibited. Getting fifty years for stealing a candy bar is not, so long as a bunch of yahoo legislators approve such a law. 

A friend in need, is a friend indeed. 

See You in court.