Actually, what is shameful it the way the courts dance around the obvious intent of the Framers. It is obvious that the people who wrote "Congress shall make no law" in the first Amendment intended the first Amendment restrictions to apply only to the Federal government; and when they left that phrase out of the other Amendments restrictive on government power, they intended the restrictions to apply to the Federal Government and to the States as well. Marshall and Baron notwithstanding, it is pretty absurd to suggest that the various restrictions on how persons charged with a crime can be treated applied only to the Federal Government when the only Federal crime was treason and all those who actually were indicted were charged with violating State laws.
ML/NJ
Which you cannot refute, or even address.
Had the framers of these amendments intended them to be limitations on the powers of the State governments, they would have imitated the framers of the original Constitution, and have expressed that intention. Had Congress engaged in the extraordinary occupation of improving the Constitutions of the several States by affording the people additional protection from the exercise of power by their own governments in matters which concerned themselves alone, they would have declared this purpose in plain and intelligible language.
There were not that many federal crimes at first, but there were some--many more than just treason. The very first Congress enacted a number of criminal laws, including those against perjury, piracy, smuggling and bribing federal officials.