Andy9o8

I didn't say it's a full-blown pandemic (nice try), just that stop & identify laws, in conjunction with their close cousin, stop & frisk policies, have replaced the use and abuse of vagrancy laws to perpetuate the long-standing propensity for police to abuse the Constitution by providing an excuse to use profiling to harass people, and to criminalize non-compliance. For example, This Article discusses this: Or, see this law journal article: Unreasonable seizure: "stop and identify" statutes create an illusion of safety by sacrificing real privacy (criticizing the majority's ruling in Hiibel).

In all fairness and balance: There was also a separate Clinton-Bush Haiti Fund, co-founded (with Bill) by George W. Bush, which has been subject to similar criticism. It's also the case that "Since leaving office, ... former president [George W. Bush] has made more than $15 million in speaking fees, apparently charging between $100,000 and $150,000 per speech." Source. All of this is deserving of criticism, not just some of it.

It was mentioned, but: upheld in 2004 in a 5 to 4 decision. Hiibel v. Sixth Judicial District Court of Nevada (2004).

Let's see if this works. I really am trying to keep this on-topic. Anyhow, the recent-ish trend of states passing stop & identify laws was to fill a gap in the means by which police were able to harass and intimidate "undesirables" once their old standby means of doing so - vagrancy laws - were deemed mostly unconstitutional by the federal courts in the early 1980's. One or 2 states experimented with a stop & identify statutes, other states' legislators and lobbyists figured "hey, that's a great idea", and so other states' legislatures acted similarly. (That's actually a fairly common way that similar laws seem to spread from one state to another over a relatively short period of years.) Here's the history of what I'm referring to. In 1983, in the case of Kolender v. Lawson, the US Supreme Court struck down California's vagrancy law, which basically criminalized walking around with no apparent purpose, and refusing to produce identification when asked to do so by a police officer. The defendant, Edward Lawson, was a black man who wore his hair in long dreadlocks, who made a point of challenging the vagrancy law by wearing an ostentatious white suit and walking around wealthy white neighborhoods late at night. He wasn't doing anything else- just walking, so there was no "reasonable suspicion" element other than the collision of race and geography. When challenged by police, he would refuse to show any ID, whereupon they'd arrest him. He was convicted of vagrancy several times, and the case eventually went to the SCOTUS, which struck down California's vagrancy law in a ruling that pretty much sounded the death knell for vagrancy laws and ordinances all over the country. In response to this, as I said above, various states, now lacking enforceable vagrancy laws, then started to pass various stop & identify laws, slightly more specifically tailored to overcome some of the vagueness issues that controlled the Lawson case. But the net effect is the same: to allow police a legal means to use profiling to target people for harassment, and to criminalize people who decline to comply because their civics training as Americans leads them to feel that they are within their constitutional rights. You ask whether stop & identify laws, the topic of this thread, have had a real-world negative effect over the past 10 years or so. I say it has, especially given the propensity for civil rights and liberties to be eroded post 9/11.

I see what you did there.

I answered once. It went away. I'm getting on with my life.

Need a bit more stop in that rip-stop, eh?

This has nothing to do with tort reform. That's just completely incorrect. Rather than giving you the basics of American legal procedure, why not just let MHS's attorneys grapple with that? This thread could use more signal, and less noise.

Yes, I see that now. The reversal was based on erroneous trial court instructions to the jury, so the remedy is proper instructions.

I'm trying to think of any remaining potential charges from this scenario that wouldn't run afoul of double jeopardy.

Yeah. That proves absolutely nothing other than This. It proves a lot. Chicken little screams the sky is falling. Well chicken little has been screaming that for 10 years and yet the troposphere remains in place. That's because years of chicken little screaming resulted in regulations to reduce the use of chlorofluorocarbons, thereby mitigating the damage to the ozone layers. Anyone who thinks that civil liberties have not been eroding in the US, especially post-9/11, is naive. Comparisons to the 1950s and 60s, when civil liberties were commonly trampled by government and law enforcement in the name of, for example, anti-Communism, are most apt. Mongered fear is contagious. History is replete with dumb ideas spreading from one state legislature to the next, to the next. They don't become less dumb just because they become virulent. Baaaaahh!!

It would have been no claim at all, since insurance policies don't cover intentional criminal acts. Of the policy holder. The perpetrator of Sandy Hook would not have been the policy holder. You mean because the guns were owned only by his mom. Well, maybe, maybe not. It would depend on how the policy, and its exclusions, would be worded. But even if he wouldn't have been a "named insured" (i.e., the actual policyholder), he might still have been a "defined insured" - thus precluding coverage - given the fact that he lived in the same household and the mom (the hypothetical policyholder) allowed him access to the guns. It would definitely be a coverage issue that would have to be battled out in court.

It would have been no claim at all, since insurance policies don't cover intentional criminal acts. Just "intentional acts", Big Guy, regardless of whether or not legally defined as criminal.

I'll try to give a straightforward answer. It may not be adequate, but the best I can say is that it's generally seen as more fair and just when liability (whether civil or criminal) requires proof of some manner of wrongful state of mind (whether actual intent, or just extreme recklessness, like your evil twin dropping the TV off the building), and is not just "strict liability", for which wrongful state of mind is not required to be proved. So how to prove it? Yes, through the very imperfect means of persuading juries of ordinary citizens to do their best to get inside the actor's head. But of course, we do that with people all the time, don't we? When your little kid throws his toy across the room and bops his sister on the head, and then protests "I didn't mean for it to hit her", that - getting inside his head to gauge his actual intent - is the skill you bring into play, right? It requires looking at all the circumstances of the case, and then bringing it together with your intelligence, your life experience, and your judgment (your "gut"). Then you make your best call. So, too, with juries. My gut, based on my life experience and my judgment, tells me this guy intended to threaten his wife, and for her to perceive it as a threat and to be terrorized by it. I might be wrong. I'm not clairvoyant, and I don't know him or his wife. But I've been alive for over 50 years, I've felt my own and observed others' demeanors for all that time, and I've been married most of my adult life. And, FWIW, I've seen and heard of lots & lots & lots of unbelievably angry estranged couples, and how they sometimes (all too often) act out that rage. So - that's my best call.

This subject is obviously important to you, for you to revive a 7 &1/2 year old thread that you started 9 years ago. It's certainly a reasonable topic. I admit I haven't gone back and read all 395 posts, but: have you proactively engaged the USPA in an effort to persuade them to revise the D license requirements to realistically reflect the current state of the sport? If so, how have your efforts been received by them?

"Should I skydive?" "You'll probably be fine."

Sigh.

Yeah. That proves absolutely nothing other than This.

Well now.. that explains a few of the posters in the Ukraine threads we had here Indeed it does.

What difference? Good god, what a world.

http://www.byegoff.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/insurance-policy.jpg

I agree that the legal standard is and should be that of "mens rea" ("guilty mind"), i.e, not whether his postings were reasonably perceived by his wife as a direct threat from him to her, but whether he actually intended it to be perceived by her as a threat from him to her - that mere negligence alone is not enough, there must be actual intent. That said, my gut tells me that's exactly what he intended, so I think he deserved his time in stir.

Last night I watched the news from Washington, the Capitol The Russians escaped while we weren't watching them Like Russians do Now we've got all this bloom, we needn't got the room And I hear the U.S.S.R will be open soon As vacation land for lawyers in love -Jackson Browne

Hey. All gelatin is Jello, so just back off.

She didn't say they were on here. In society at large, when civil rights and liberties are compromised, there are those few that do benefit, and there are many more who gullibly give them aid, comfort and enablement by letting themselves be duped into believing that they would not be detrimented. Google the meaning of the term "useful idiots" and see what pops up.