In many of his books, Thomas Sowell criticizes how the Warren court's rulings on criminal justice allegedly led to a great spike in crime. For example, the requirement to give Miranda warnings or to provide people who cannot afford a lawyer one free of charge.
While Sowell claims that these rulings had no basis in the Constitution, which may well be the case, I'd like to discuss the substance of the matter.
Given the persecution being faced by Derek Chauvin, Donald Trump and the January 6 protesters, I wonder if the Warren court protects the rights of defendants enough, because it does not seem to be doing much to protect people's rights.
The government can spend tens of millions of dollars 'investigating' you, frivolously indict you, and if you manage to beat the charges, you have bankruptcy to show for your pains. Because if you have been a responsible citizen and saved money, you won't count as impecunious and the government isn't going to pay for an ineffective lawyer for you. So you lose all your money as well as years of your life being dragged through a court.
Basically, they can destroy a man de facto if not de iure, and that only if they do not manage to find a sympathetic judge and jury.
Counterarguments could be of course, to point out in Sowellian style that more rights for criminal defendants is not a 'solution', but merely a trade-off. While you hedge against tyranny and make fewer innocent people go to jail, you also further undermine the ability of the government to prosecute legitimate criminals who terrorize neighborhoods.
I admit I'm not super knowledgeable on that. I will say I have mixed feelings on compelling Miranda notification. I don't like the law tricking people and trying to bypass their rights, but the idea that they have to tell you of your rights is also kind of silly. That said, I don't see a huge problem with it, as long as it's not abused. Law enforcement holds massive power over us, requiring them to inform people of the system, responsibilities, and rights isn't a terrible idea, considering they're about to subject an innocent-until-proven-guilty citizen to that system.
As to whether or not defendant protections are strong enough, that's not the issue. The law is overseen by humans, no protection will be absolute enough to protect everyone from abuse by the system, because they have the power...they'll always screw you if you're one of the Enemies. Just look at treatment around the 2nd Amendment; it's pretty fucking absolute (shall not be infringed), and they've still trampled all over it repeatedly, for decades. It's illegal. No one in power cares.
Look at them letting out outright murderers if they're the right skin color, look at them letting out rioters and looters if they have the right politics, look at them looking the other way when the elite class does wrong.
So the treatment of J6 people isn't a failure of the law, it's a failure of the system. There are protections in place to give these people fair treatment...the current arbiters are just ignoring them. There are laws in place to lock up the murderers and rioters...they're just being ignored. No amount of law will fix that, because the people currently in charge are anarcho-tyrannical bastards who hate us.
The law is being bent and broken to go after regime opponents. Just like how you can write all the laws you want, and criminals won't follow them, the law isn't he issue, enforcement is.
There could probably be a few more protections in place to protect people from the governments in certain scenarios, and to fix a few glaring issues we have. Asset forfeiture can fuck right off. And the leftists are partly right, although exaggerate, about for-profit prisons. There are certainly areas where we can rein in the government and empower the accused. But, when you get right down to it, the problem is the politicians, lawmakers, and courts. We need to clean out the bad apples before we can start patching the system.
The whole idea of (American) republicanism is to set up such a system that bad men would do good for the country. It does not speak well if things have evolved to such a point that you desperately need good people to be in positions of power, because you're never, ever going to get "good" people.
I'll have to challenge some of your points. I agree that they try to evade the law as much as they can. But they are not disappearing people off the streets (yet?). Is it because of the law, or is it because society has evolved to such a point as to not tolerate it?
And even though they violate the Second Amendment on the margins, do you doubt that they would love to abolish it in its entirety? But they haven't, because they haven't been able to do that. Why? Is it because of the law, or is it because America has so many gun owners to make that impractical? Remember that we in Europe have zero gun rights, and while I'm not pro-gun compared to people here, I am appalled by Europeans who make derogatory, ill-informed comments about Americans having guns. Our constitutions generally provide zero protections, because they all have 'exception' clauses that allow the government to violate them basically whenever they want. And they're easy to modify anyway. So is it true that law, in this case the constitution which is the highest law, has afforded you no protections? If not 'no protection', it's not being ignored entirely, but rather evaded as much as they can. How can we prevent them from doing it - assuming that the most evil people imaginable will be in office, as they always are?
I'm not sure myself what the 'correct' answer to these questions is. But whatever it is, it will provide clues as to how you can resist a regime bent on becoming as tyrannical as it can be.
The 2nd amendment is difficult to repeal because it's part of the Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights was framed with the deliberate intent that it should be difficult to make deep and wide sweeping alterations without a vast majority of representatives within the government body agreeing to the changes.
Obviously though, there's not exactly much that the constitution could've included to account for an elite class that goes ahead, almost totally ignoring any rule of law, and doing whatever the fuck they want without any penalty.
The judicial system SHOULD be doing something to hold government officials accountable, but they're "almost" as pozzed (or toothless) as the other government bodies in the US, with a few notable exceptions who've still managed to provide at least some deterrent to illegal leftist actions.
Because it's "evolved" to become something that it wasn't set up to be. That evolution was helped along by both good and bad people. It's the nature of the state.
That, and the government was—despite the Enlightenment-era optimism of its founders—designed for a particular people at a particular time. It worked for a country whose people were Christian, who primarily came from the British Isles, and who were largely predisposed to self-governance and independence. We today—almost a quarter of a millennium later—are none of these.
So... the old fall of empire?
The solution is to stop pretending the left is at all anything other than malicious.
No matter what system exists, they'll abuse power and fuck us.
Democrats fuck us, Republicans fuck us, here in Europe, all 10 parties in any given country fuck us.
The question is: how do we prevent them from abusing power and fucking us? And please don't tell me "get people into office whom I like". Yeah, I'd like morally perfect philosopher kings to be in power as well, but we're not getting that now or ever. The only thing we can do is to try to design such systems, institutions and societal responses that the very bad men who are inevitably in power will be forced to do the right thing.
Have a MAD situation with the entire population where everyone has access to enough weaponry to level a city block./s
The non sarky answer, you can't. Humanity simply cannot handle large scale population leadership and control without going full authoritarian and/or rule by fear. You'll have a few exceptions in history but that just proves what a miracle it is to find ONE person capable of doing that.
It'd be better if democracy was limited to towns scale only and have everything else done by AI because they at least work on logic.
You’re dismissing “good leaders” as impossible and then immediately asking for the impossible. There is no such thing as a government that is suitably empowered to carry out its core functions while also having no vulnerability to corruption and liberalism.
Obviously, invulnerability to corruption and 'liberalism' (the US Constitution being liberal, I assume you mean modern liberalism) is impossible. But you can make a state at least somewhat resistant to it.
However, good leaders are indeed impossible. I think we'll all admit that Trump is not 'good' in the traditional moral sense, as good as he may be in office. And even there he's an extreme outlier. Most who claim they'll be good in office won't be, and I'm generous because I'd rather say 'all'.
Which is why the solution is to eliminate the worst of the problem in order of how shit they are, and leftists are the biggest issue today.
The harsh truth is that people with that kind of power can rarely be uprooted and kept at bay for long unless you have sufficient power to stop them.
Or, are clever and devious enough at least to distract or otherwise deter them through trickery. Though this has its obvious limits.
Which book does he talk about this? A major problem is that Jan 6 defendants and Chauvin are literally political prisoners. Very interesting topic. I have to get back to work but I’m going to chew on this for a while
I believe it's Vision of the Anointed, where he takes several examples of phony 'crises' that were used to push an agenda that actually made things worse.
The Warren Court did a lot of stupid shit outside the really obvious stuff that has stuck around. Remember that they banned the death penalty, it was repealed by the states.
I'm not going to complain about Miranda rights, court-appointed legal counsel, making it illegal to shoot non-threatening & fleeing suspects in the back, or such things like that. Those were all quite reasonable.
My Libertarian streak has no problem with this. "Better that 10 guilty men go free". The reason for that is that a corrupt regime will side with criminals, and spend it's time imprisoning the innocent because they were stupid enough to trust the regime.
But if I were to live in a world where I could shoot people to death for property crimes, then the corrupt judiciary and a cuckolded police force is simply not relevant.
That's the issue. I don't trust the government to prosecute criminals, I trust the government to side with criminals except when it is trying to establish it's legitimacy. Prosecutors are some of the most evil, subhuman, savages that have ever roamed the Earth because they very often target the innocent for prosecution, since career criminals (that avoid being regularly caught) tend to be much smarter.
This will always be a major dividing point between Libertarians/Minarchists & Conservatives/Traditionalists: the state is complete and total shit at maintaining social order and public safety. Police forces only emerged in the 18th century, and mostly as a result of mass migration and population density within cities. After their creation, (in the US) they were horrifically corrupt. They have only been genuinely accountable to law and misconduct since the 1970's. The nadir of police excellence was basically in the 2010's.
The problem isn't the rights of the criminals or the defendants, the problem is that it was decided the judiciary and the police could solve social order and reform people; rather than letting the victims defend themselves. "Rights of the criminals" can't be paired with "Defense of the victims" because those are mutually exclusive. What the Warren Court did was create "rights of the criminals", to the point of siding with terrorists and banning the death penalty; while also seeking to isolate victims from doing anything but calling the police and hoping for the best.
Rest assured: the Left is making a horrific mistake because they are pushing policies that push people towards my position. They emphasize that the police won't protect you, and the prosecutors will indict you, and the judges will convict you because you're innocent. That means people will realize the police not only can't, but won't protect them; and that they have to protect themselves. This is why gun control is DOA for the 2024 election; and why first-time gunbuyers are at an all-time high. This is also why even legally questionable self-defense cases are being rebuffed by massive political pressure.
I think this issue, like many issues, can be boiled down to the same thing: institutions cannot survive infiltration by communists. If your government has any power whatsoever, communists will abuse and expand it until they successfully collapse it or you forcibly remove them from it.
In the case of protections for the criminally accused, the rights and laws in place will either be just or horrific depending entirely on who is leveraging them.
In the end, government has more to do with who is in charge rather than any structural considerations.
The problem is that you guys keep calling your opponents 'communists', when they are 'neoliberals'. It's fun to use it as an attack on them the way they use 'Nazi' on us, but it's not accurate. I've seen some ham-fisted arguments to try to justify it, but none of it makes sense.
I'm tended to agree, but at the same time: what would Biden and Garland be doing if there were no safeguards or constitutional protections at all?
You have your chicken and egg mixed up. The traitorous Warren court enabling and coddling criminals and incentivizing iniquity are how the system became as corrupt as it is today.
It all goes back to a successive series of failures to gatekeep.
tyranny of the government against the innocent is a far greater danger than crime by a tiny minority.
virtually all criminal cases plea out because the perps have no defense at all.
You're picking at the margins of the profound truth about liberalism and America. Both have always been deeply authoritarian and always will be. This pairs nicely with your recent comment about Carl Schmitt's friend/enemy distinction.
That is actually an argument that I've seen left-wing historians make, but only about American history. They cite stuff like the bans on German during World War I. But now that their enemies are being suppressed, authoritarianism is very good.
I learned about the friend-enemy distinction 1.5 years ago, from Auron MacIntyre - everything just immediately started making sense. It's funny that after 2400 years, we're right back to Polemarchos' idea of "justice", helping friends and harming enemies.
Why did it take you so long to recognize the friend-enemy distinction? That’s what hypocrisy in politics has always been.
Some things are just blatantly obvious in retrospect. Hypocrisy is easy to spot, but I did not think that it would be baked into the cake of politics, so to speak.