Christopher Simmons assured his friends they could “get away with it” because they were minors. Christopher Simmons knows our court system well. The Supreme Court decided the case Roper v. Simmons on March 1. In a 5-4 split, the majority (Ginsburg, Stevens, Breyer, Souter, and Kennedy) scrapped their own precedence (Stanford v. Kentucky) and the laws of nineteen states by considering the execution of juveniles (under 18 at the time of their crime) to be “cruel an unusual” and thereby offensive to the eighth amendment. The case at hand was of Simmons, then 17 and a half years old, who in 1993 proposed to two friends (15 and 16) to rob a house and murder the occupant by binding her and throwing her off a bridge.

Meeting at 2:00 AM, they broke into the house and awoke its single occupant, a Mrs. Crook, who was in her bedroom. Simmons and one minion entered her bedroom and ordered her to stand; when she refused, they assailed her and, using duct tape to close her mouth and eyes, bound her with electrical tape and stowed her in their van. They drove to a state park and, once exiting the van, reinforced Mrs. Crook’s bindings by wrapping a towel around her head. They marched through the night’s gloom to a railroad trestle spanning the Meramac River, wrapped her entire head in duck tape, and pushed her over the bridge into the water below. The following day, Simmons bragged about his predatory talent, telling his friends he had killed a woman, “because the bitch seen my face.”

Enter contemporary, that is to say liberal, constitutional law. Justice Kennedy, author of the majority opinion, always had a platitudinous style, but he here wrote some of the most sentimental bile ever to pass for legal reasoning. In fact, the Court’s liberal majority no longer cares to cloak their unlawful decisions in Constitutional inference. Kennedy openly admitted that he used world opinion to back up his feelings that it was cruel to execute murderous youth. Moreover, he went on to say “the reality that juveniles still struggle to define their identity means it is less supportable to conclude that even a heinous crime committed by a juvenile is evidence of irretrievably depraved character.” I’ll translate: A Supreme Court justice thinks you may have to kill an elderly woman to find your identity sometimes, so to support your self-discovery, he’ll allow a legal double standard until your 18th birthday.

Kennedy goes on in his opinion to contradict his opinion. “Drawing the line at 18 years of age is subject, of course, to the objections always raised against categorical rules,” he says, “The qualities that distinguish juveniles from adults do not disappear when an individual turns 18. By the same token, some under 18 have already attained a level of maturity some adults will never reach. For the reasons we have discussed, however, a line must be drawn.” Well hell’s bells! So some juveniles actually do have adult level maturity, which ones could they be? (Think Kennedy, think real hard. . .) Maybe predators like Simmons have the maturity to rationally plot, organize, and execute a nocturnal raid as he did? If so, then how do you defend him on the basis of categorical immaturity? Sweepingly generalizing from the category to the particular while ignoring the exceptions—and Simmons is a premier case for the exception to juvenile “immaturity” that Kennedy allows for—is the mark of a very weak mind; or it is the mark of someone sloppily advancing an agenda. And get this: these are the same justices who hold that a 14 year old girl is “mature” enough to decide to have an abortion without parental consent.

This is but a taste of the lunacy of the liberal mind. This is also why in a democratic republic, if you are to have an independent branch of government called the Judiciary, explicitly conservative judges are a political necessity. That is, judges who constrain themselves to the text, logic, and original understanding of the law are the only ones who can do Law. If a judge adopts any other standard (the “evolving standards of social decency”) you no longer have the rule of the law, but the rule of sociological evidence, polling data, or scientific information filtered through the brain of a lawyer.

For some time, we have been a country under the rule of a politburo, an oligarchy of nine, because liberal judges feel no loyalty to reasoning from the Constitution. Liberal judges (since the New Deal days) have had result-driven opinions; anything to get them to their pre-held conclusions. And now, they have winked at murder. Christopher Simmons thought he’d get away with murder because he was a minor, and he almost didn’t. But thanks to our left-wing courts, he got away with it. Clean away.

I agree totally. What enrages me about the whole issue is that these CHILDREN should know that killing is wrong, especially by the time they are 17. This is going to set a precedent that I do not want to see. While I feel that children (under 18) are not afforded the rights in the constitution, rights that I feel are a tenet of adult citizenship in our country, I do believe that in cases where they commit violent or major crimes that they should be able to be tried and sentenced as adults. With murder, I would set the minimum age at 12, with other serious crimes a little older. These kids would not immediately go to adult prison, but a juvenile facility, and, upon reaching age 18, would go to an adult facility to serve out the rest of their sentence. In the case of capital murder, the kid would be sent to death row at 16, and, unless executed before their 18th birthday, would have to be executed within a certain period of months after turning 18. Being young is not an excuse not to pay for your crimes. I condemn the Court for their liberal decision.

quote:

agree totally. What enrages me about the whole issue is that these CHILDREN should know that killing is wrong, especially by the time they are 17. This is going to set a precedent that I do not want to see. While I feel that children (under 18) are not afforded the rights in the constitution, rights that I feel are a tenet of adult citizenship in our country, I do believe that in cases where they commit violent or major crimes that they should be able to be tried and sentenced as adults. With murder, I would set the minimum age at 12, with other serious crimes a little older. These kids would not immediately go to adult prison, but a juvenile facility, and, upon reaching age 18, would go to an adult facility to serve out the rest of their sentence. In the case of capital murder, the kid would be sent to death row at 16, and, unless executed before their 18th birthday, would have to be executed within a certain period of months after turning 18. Being young is not an excuse not to pay for your crimes. I condemn the Court for their liberal decision.

Nice toss-in at the end, there! It's a decision you don't like, therefore it's liberal. One could just as easily argue that it is a conservative decision -- enforcing the structure of families that kids are not merely autonomous units, "little adults", but have a special, subservient place that befits them some protections.



From a utilitarian perspective, I'd ask myself, "What changes when a child is younger?". I don't give a damn about justice for reasons of retribution -- I care about making the best of a bad situation once the crime's been done. What's the recidivism rate look like for these young offenders? Is it for factors we *can* have some effect on, or factors we can't?

See, I don't really get into the whole "They knew what they were doing!" bandwagon, because to my mind, most people I know *don't* know what they're doing. About much of anything. This goes for adolescents, college kids, the middle-aged, men, women, all races, etcetera.

People, in general, are irrational *enough* that at any given moment, they may or may not be trustable not to endanger your personal safety.

So, maybe the kids knew what they were doing. Maybe they didn't. Is that the public policy here? Not at all. It's entirely irrelevant.


Either way, the death penalty is a blight on our society and generally a useless institution. Better to be rid of it, by whatever incremental means, than to keep it around.

To have faith that the death penalty somehow makes society run better is, to borrow a phrase from the playbook you like to use, "liberal naivete".

To respond to the myriad flaws in the original post...

quote:

posted March 03, 2005 11:42 PM
Christopher Simmons assured his friends they could “get away with it” because they were minors. Christopher Simmons knows our court system well. The Supreme Court decided the case Roper v. Simmons on March 1. In a 5-4 split, the majority (Ginsburg, Stevens, Breyer, Souter, and Kennedy) scrapped their own precedence (Stanford v. Kentucky) and the laws of nineteen states by considering the execution of juveniles (under 18 at the time of their crime) to be “cruel an unusual” and thereby offensive to the eighth amendment. The case at hand was of Simmons, then 17 and a half years old, who in 1993 proposed to two friends (15 and 16) to rob a house and murder the occupant by binding her and throwing her off a bridge.

Meeting at 2:00 AM, they broke into the house and awoke its single occupant, a Mrs. Crook, who was in her bedroom. Simmons and one minion entered her bedroom and ordered her to stand; when she refused, they assailed her and, using duct tape to close her mouth and eyes, bound her with electrical tape and stowed her in their van. They drove to a state park and, once exiting the van, reinforced Mrs. Crook’s bindings by wrapping a towel around her head. They marched through the night’s gloom to a railroad trestle spanning the Meramac River, wrapped her entire head in duck tape, and pushed her over the bridge into the water below. The following day, Simmons bragged about his predatory talent, telling his friends he had killed a woman, “because the b***h seen my face.”

The crime is heinous. Relevance? You talk about sentimentality, but talking of the heinous nature of the crime is entirely irrelevant to the issue at hand - of whether or not the death penalty should be applied to children.

quote:

Enter contemporary, that is to say liberal, constitutional law.

Invoke the dreaded L-word! Always good to start off with non-substance.

quote:

Justice Kennedy, author of the majority opinion, always had a platitudinous style, but he here wrote some of the most sentimental bile ever to pass for legal reasoning. In fact, the Court’s liberal majority no longer cares to cloak their unlawful decisions in Constitutional inference. Kennedy openly admitted that he used world opinion to back up his feelings that it was cruel to execute murderous youth.

The constitution says, "Cruel and unusual". Who defines that? The court. You've not given a convincing argument for where the court should, and shouldn't, turn to decide what 'cruel and unusual' is.

quote:

Moreover, he went on to say “the reality that juveniles still struggle to define their identity means it is less supportable to conclude that even a heinous crime committed by a juvenile is evidence of irretrievably depraved character.” I’ll translate: A Supreme Court justice thinks you may have to kill an elderly woman to find your identity sometimes, so to support your self-discovery, he’ll allow a legal double standard until your 18th birthday.

A poor translation. His entire point was not that these actions are part of defining one's identity (as your mediocre attempt at wit asserts), but that children who do heinous things are not necessarily broken -- they are, in the court's opinion, more retrievable than adults.

At least at this juncture, that's one whopper of a specious and debatable assertion, but you haven't really offered anything to challenge it. You've just misrepresented the dude's point.

quote:

Kennedy goes on in his opinion to contradict his opinion. “Drawing the line at 18 years of age is subject, of course, to the objections always raised against categorical rules,” he says, “The qualities that distinguish juveniles from adults do not disappear when an individual turns 18. By the same token, some under 18 have already attained a level of maturity some adults will never reach. For the reasons we have discussed, however, a line must be drawn.” Well hell’s bells! So some juveniles actually do have adult level maturity, which ones could they be? (Think Kennedy, think real hard. . .) Maybe predators like Simmons have the maturity to rationally plot, organize, and execute a nocturnal raid as he did? If so, then how do you defend him on the basis of categorical immaturity? Sweepingly generalizing from the category to the particular while ignoring the exceptions—and Simmons is a premier case for the exception to juvenile “immaturity” that Kennedy allows for—is the mark of a very weak mind; or it is the mark of someone sloppily advancing an agenda.

Either that, or what you fail to grasp is that it's making a very simple tradeoff:

-If you set an arbitrary number, even the best arbitrary number will give the 'wrong' outcome in a number of cases because people are unique and do not fall along this arbitrary guideline.

-If you *don't* set an arbitrary number and leave it up to people's discretions, even the best discretions will give the 'wrong' outcome in a number of cases because people are fallible and any number of factors may lead to a miscarriage of justice.


Shock of shocks -- this is much the same argument that the fights over whether or not we should allow the death penalty boil down to!


It's almost like there are fundamental unresolved issues here that you didn't touch, or something.


In the case of the death penalty for children, I'd argue that we're better off with the arbitrary rule than leaving it up to the distributed discretion of jurors and judges in each case. I trust the discretion of the Robed Nine on this issue (to set the arbitrary boundary) a hell of a lot more than I trust the discretion of Joe Six-Pack Juror (to use judgement in each case in absence of an arbitrary standard).

quote:

And get this: these are the same justices who hold that a 14 year old girl is “mature” enough to decide to have an abortion without parental consent.

Yeah. Almost like it's not really about maturity, in that case, but about the best outcome for society!

quote:

This is but a taste of the lunacy of the liberal mind.

Ad-hominem.

quote:

This is also why in a democratic republic, if you are to have an independent branch of government called the Judiciary, explicitly conservative judges are a political necessity.

Why are they a necessity? They'd just enact bad policy, as you've so pointed out. With the court we have, we got an obviously preferrable outcome.

Or are you arguing that the continuance of the death penalty is a favorable outcome? Perhaps you should actually *make* that argument, first.

quote:

That is, judges who constrain themselves to the text, logic, and original understanding of the law are the only ones who can do Law. If a judge adopts any other standard (the “evolving standards of social decency”) you no longer have the rule of the law, but the rule of sociological evidence, polling data, or scientific information filtered through the brain of a lawyer.

Well, if that's what you want to do, then the Constitution is a piss-poor arbiter of arbitrary phrases such as "cruel and unusual". It's almost as if the text, as it stands, *begs* for human subjective qualities to come into play!

Not that the intent of the framers matters one iota, but if they had truly wanted a document that did not require a good deal of subjective interpretation for the operation of pretty much any facet of a modern society, they should have written a different document.


As it is, they tried to have their cake and eat it too -- they made it subjective, then wrote a good deal of commentary on their opinions of how the subjective parts should be interpreted.


Problem with that is, there's no force of law to their interpretations -- and as time goes on, we see that some of their interpretations make for a society that isn't as good as the one we've got. So, rightly, we toss their interpretations aside.

Did they honestly think their idea of how the constitution should be read would stand up without it being explicitly written in? If so, they made a big mistake.

quote:

For some time, we have been a country under the rule of a politburo, an oligarchy of nine, because liberal judges feel no loyalty to reasoning from the Constitution. Liberal judges (since the New Deal days) have had result-driven opinions; anything to get them to their pre-held conclusions.

That's not "liberal". That's called "how everyone does it, regardless of how they speak to the contrary".

The world is a results-driven system. Anything else you tell yourself is generally an effort to make yourself feel good.

quote:

And now, they have winked at murder. Christopher Simmons thought he’d get away with murder because he was a minor, and he almost didn’t. But thanks to our left-wing courts, he got away with it. Clean away.

Life in prison probably does not qualify as cruel and unusual. That's the system of justice for cases such as these that you should be advocating for.