Free Republic

GREENVILLE, S.C. - Republican presidential contender Fred Thompson said Monday that while Osama bin Laden needs to be caught and killed, the terrorist mastermind would get the due process of law.

A query for the FR legal eagles: DOES THERE EXIST a FEDERAL Statute or Public Law mandating grand and petit jury service? If yes, can you provide citations? ( I realize some state constitutions co so ) The reason I ask is that my 86 year-old mother passed me an AP article from the AJC relating how sheriff's deputies in NC literally went to a grocery store parking lot and presented random people with jury summons (with a 1 hour or else ultimatum from the judge) so that the county's jury pools could be filled. Is this due process? WHAT...

The father of 24-year-old Beth Sprankle, who was shot to death in February at a Greenwood day care center by her estranged boyfriend, has started an effort to put more teeth into Blair County’s protection-from-abuse system. Jeffrey L. Sprankle, a Pennsylvania state constable known as “Spanky,” says a PFA order “has got to be more than a piece of paper.” He is recommending a 24-hour cooling-off period be instituted locally in emergency cases, which would mean the offending party would spend 24 hours behind bars. Sprankle says in some cases, individuals believed to be dangerous should have to wear ankle...

California Supreme Court Overturns Car Seizure Ordinance The California Supreme Court says cities may no longer seize automobiles from people merely accused of a crime. In a 4-3 opinion yesterday, the California Supreme Court ruled illegal the city of Stockton's program to seize automobiles from motorists not convicted of any crime. Under the city's ordinance, police could impound the vehicle of anyone accused of using it "to solicit an act of prostitution, or to acquire or attempt to acquire any controlled substance." The city could then hold the car for up to a year without hearing, trial or any finding...

Now, how would one disarm the American population? First of all, federal or state laws would need to make it a crime punishable by a $1,000 fine and one year in prison per weapon to possess a firearm...... The disarmament process would begin after the initial three-month amnesty...... Special squads of police would be formed and trained to carry out the work. Then, on a random basis to permit no advance warning, city blocks and stretches of suburban and rural areas would be cordoned off and searches carried out in every business, dwelling, and empty building. All firearms would be...

The Belmont (CA) City Council is considering drafting an ordinance that declares secondhand smoke “a public nuisance” and extends the city’s current ban on smoking in workplaces and most public areas to any residence except a single-family detached home. The proposal, aimed at multi-unit apartment buildings, is meant to address the health concerns of elderly apartment residents who complained of complications caused by second-hand smoke, according to The Associated Press. The City Council of this Silicon Valley suburb of San Francisco is expected to enforce the ordinance by relying on civil suits brought by citizens or the city, and by...

Man Beaten To Death In Low-Security O.C. Jail (CBS) SANTA ANA, Calif. A Mission Viejo man awaiting trial on suspicion of possessing child pornography for sale was beaten to death in a jail unit for low-security inmates, an Orange County sheriff's representative said Friday. John Derek Chamberlain, 41, was "murdered by an inmate or inmates while in the shower" at the Theo Lacy jail in Orange, the department's Jim Amormino said. Guards got a call of a "man down" about 6:30 p.m. Thursday, and Chamberlain was declared dead at a hospital about an hour later, Amormino said. Investigators were interviewing...

DETROIT - A federal judge threw out conspiracy and money laundering charges Tuesday against three Texas men once accused of plotting a terror attack on Michigan's iconic Mackinac Bridge. U.S. District Court Magistrate Charles Binder in Bay City ruled that federal prosecutors failed to present enough evidence to justify bringing them to trial on charges involving the buying and resale of prepaid cell phones. They were cleared earlier of the terror charges. Defense lawyers claimed the men — Louai Othman, 23, his brother Adham Othman, 21, and their cousin Maruan Muhareb, 18, all of Mesquite, Texas — were targeted because...

WASHINGTON - Rep. John Kline, R-Minn., apologized Monday to the Marines under investigation in the killings of two dozen civilians in Haditha, Iraq, last November, saying that statements he made about the case were taken out of context and that he did not mean to imply the Marines were guilty of wrongdoing. Kline issued the apology as part of an agreement with lawyers for Marine Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich, who alleged Kline had damaged Wuterich's reputation. Wuterich has denied any wrongdoing in the Haditha case. None of the Marines involved has been charged. Wuterich took the unusual step earlier this...

<p>"Was this My Lai?" Matthews interjected, referring to the slaughter of more than 300 civilians by American soldiers in Vietnam in 1968. "Was this a case of--when you say cold blood, Congressman, a lot of people think you're basically saying you have got some civilians sitting in a room [or] out in a field and they're executed."</p>

COMMENTARY ON THE RIGHT… “What we have here is (a) failure to communicate.” That famous line from the 1967 Paul Newman classic, “Cool Hand Luke,” might well apply to Iraq today, and specifically, to Haditha, where U.S. Marines are alleged to have massacred innocent Iraqi civilians last November. Not only do we not know what happened in Haditha, but we’ve failed to communicate effectively to the rest of the world what we do know: that our Marines always deserve the benefit of the doubt. And that if something did go terribly wrong in Haditha, it was a rare exception. The...

Jack Kelly: Rushing to judgment Shame on John Murtha for presuming Marines' guilt in Haditha Sunday, June 04, 2006 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Jesse Macbeth, a self-styled "special forces ranger," regaled moonbat audiences with tales of the atrocities he committed in Iraq: "Fallujah is where we slaughtered people in mosques," he said. "We would dig holes and leave mass graves of children, women and old men."           Unfortunately for Mr. Macbeth, he made a video which was seen by actual veterans. In it, he is wearing his beret improperly ("like a pastry chef," said an Army spokesman). He's...

Yep, Judge John Murtha, one time war hero, Democratic activist, anti-war recidivist, former Marine, Kerry crony, and the latest golden boy in the liberal press, has pronounced that the activities in Haditha, Iraq, constitute a war crime and that all the participants are guilty of murder. Further, just to make sure that my father’s generation is riddled with war criminals as well as the Vietnam generation, whose veterans were so successfully sullied by the likes of John Kerry and Oliver Stone, with additional help from Ms. Jane Fonda nee Hanoi, Mr. Murtha also announced a bit ago that the Allies...

FORT LAUDERDALE — Marcie Wyrobeck graduated from the Philadelphia College of Art and worked in sales and for an arts and crafts store. She had no formal legal training. Yet, for nearly a decade, she was a state hearing officer who decided the appeals of people whose drivers licenses were suspended in drunken-driving cases. When a difficult legal question came up in one of those hearings, Wyrobeck said she and other Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles hearing officers — some with only high school educations — routinely asked the agency’s lawyers for advice about how to rule. “It...

Does the Fourteenth Amendment make the entire Bill of Rights a restriction against the States? If so, which amendments or clauses? What did both "due process of the law" and "equal protection" mean to the Congress who produced the Amendment? Does the Fourteenth Amendment guarantee State paid education to aliens? [snip] I hope everyone reads this because for me it was the most important reading of the year. One of the most wonderful discoveries you will find from reading is where equal protection of the laws came from and how it was defined to mean by the author of the...

The FBI came calling in Windsor, Conn., this summer with a document marked for delivery by hand. On Matianuk Avenue, across from the tennis courts, two special agents found their man. They gave George Christian the letter, which warned him to tell no one, ever, what it said. Under the shield and stars of the FBI crest, the letter directed Christian to surrender "all subscriber information, billing information and access logs of any person" who used a specific computer at a library branch some distance away. Christian, who manages digital records for three dozen Connecticut libraries, said in an affidavit...

A couple of weeks ago, Robert Blake was on CNN's 'Larry King Live' talking about his recent murder trial, and the manner in which he's been treated since his wife's death from gunshot wounds in 2001. "There's a whole litter of lunatics out there, pig-face bags of rat guts that are telling all kinds of lies, and the media's soaking it up," the 72-year-old actor said during the interview. I certainly can't argue with that, however, it has since occurred to me that Mr. Blake's rather colorful characterization better suits certain "civil rights" lawyers I've become aware of over the...

The battles in Congress over the appointment of even lower court federal judges reveal a recognition that federal judges are now, to a large extent, our real lawmakers. Proposals to amend the Constitution to remove lifetime tenure for Supreme Court justices, or to require that rulings of unconstitutionality be by more than a majority (5-4) vote, do not address the source of the problem. The Constitution is very difficult to amend--probably the most difficult of any supposedly democratic government. If opponents of rule by judges secure the political power to obtain an amendment, it should be one that addresses the...

Jonathan Bean is a popular professor at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale — even though his libertarian politics don’t always coincide with his students’ views. A historian, he was just named Teacher of the Year in the College of Liberal Arts. But in the last two weeks, he has found himself under attack in his department — with many of his history colleagues questioning his judgment for distributing an optional handout about the “Zebra Killings,” a series of murders of white people in San Francisco in the 1970s. His dean also told his teaching assistants that they didn’t need to...

Cecil Circuit Court Judge Dexter M. Thompson Jr. decried lawyers' arguments that a child custody hearing should be closed to the public Wednesday, saying such a move would be akin to creating atmospheres similar to historically totalitarian states. The heated exchange came at the start of a hearing in which the county's social services department attempted to retain custody of John Joseph Dougherty's three daughters. Dougherty, 53, faces a second-degree murder charge after police found his brain-damaged wife dead on a mattress, surrounded by moldy food and her own excrement. "Maybe we should be more like Germany or Russia," the...