Even a dog knows the difference between being stumbled over and being
kicked.
    Justice Kennedy

What the &%@# did THAT judicial wisecrack mean in context?

Do we need conspiracy theories? The dysfunctional legal system broke down in
broad DAYLIGHT.  From Judge Saul's contempt for the best evidence, to
Justice Scalia's twisted sense of "irreparable harm".  Outrageous.   I agree
with Justice Stevens: "Those bastards killed Kenny."

The use of language in the US legal system is surreal.  I have seen another
state supreme court characterize as "sudden and accidental" a biohazardous
chemical spill from a holding tank with an ever-worsening leak, which the
plant operator had known about for more than a year.

It is also a system where process is everything and innocence and right are
nothing.  See the number of inmates on death-row whose executions have not
been stopped, even after conclusive DNA evidence has proved they did not
commit the crime in question.

To bring this around to Pound-- some advice for the Supreme Court:  "have no
twisty thoughts".

Tim Romano


----- Original Message -----
From: <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thursday, December 14, 2000 1:41 PM
Subject: USA elections


> In a message dated 12/14/2000 12:30:54 AM Eastern Standard Time,
> [log in to unmask] writes:
>
> <<
>  A Zimbabwe politician was quoted as saying that children should study
>  the US election event closely because it shows that election fraud is
>  not only a third world phenomena. To illustrate the point, he made
>  the following comments;
>
>  "Imagine that we read of an election occurring anywhere in the third
>  world in which the self-declared winner was the son of the former
>  prime minister and that former prime minister was himself the former
>  head of that nation's secret police (the CIA).
>
>  Imagine that the self-declared winner lost the popular vote but won
>  based on some old colonial holdover from the nation's pre-democracy
>  past (the electoral college).
>
>  Imagine that the self-declared winner's `victory' turned on disputed
>  votes cast in a province governed by his brother!
>
>  Imagine that the poorly drafted ballots of one district, a district
>  heavily favoring the self-declared winner's opponent, led thousands
>  of voters to vote for the wrong candidate.
>
>  Imagine that members of that nation's most despised caste, fearing
>  for their lives/livelihoods, turned out in record numbers to vote in
>  near-universal opposition to the self-declared winner's candidacy.
>
>  Imagine that hundreds of members of that most-despised caste were
>  intercepted on their way to the polls by state police operating under
>  the authority of the self-declared winner's brother.
>
>  Imagine that six million people voted in the disputed province and
>  that the self-declared winner's `lead' was only 327 votes. Fewer,
>  certainly, than the vote counting machines' margin of error.
>
>  Imagine that the self-declared winner and his political party opposed
>  a more careful by-hand inspection and re-counting of the ballots in
>  the disputed province or in its most hotly disputed district.
>
>  Imagine that the self-declared winner, himself a governor of a major
>  province, had the worst human rights record of any province in his
>  nation and actually led the nation in executions.
>
>  Imagine that a major campaign promise of the self-declared winner was
>  to appoint like-minded human rights violators to lifetime positions
>  on the high court of that nation.
>
>  None of us would deem such an election to be representative of
>  anything other than the self-declared winner's will-to-power. All of
>  us, I imagine, would wearily turn the page thinking that it was
>  another sad tale of pitiful pre- or anti-democracy peoples in some
>  strange, faraway elsewhere."
>   >>
>
>