The judges are under no obligation to follow sentencing guidlines.
Getting a new set of them from attorney’s mean very little. Just one part of the puzzle they look at when sentencing a person convicted.
Personally I like Utah’s system. It’s what’s calle an indeterminent sentence. Example a certain charge if convicted the person will get 3 to 8 years in prison. Judge can not change that in most cases (in some they can issue a suspended sentence and issue probation. If at anytime during the probation, they break the rules (agreement), they will be sentenced to the 3-8 years from the time of the new sentencing.)
What happens next? Convicted person MUST spend at least 3 years in Prison. The probation and parol board then sets a parol hearing. That board will decide at that hearing, or future one’s if the person should be released on parol. If they break parol, then back to prison they go, the board can set another hearing. Whatever happens, once the 8 years is completed, they have to be released (unless the commite future crimes in the prison).
You should read Scalia’s decision in Heller. As a judicial activist he rewrote 2A in that decision to the NRA’s widhes but left the door wide open for restrictions such as background checks.
He did no such thing. First of all, he wasn’t saying anything new there. The vast majority of people already understood it wasn’t completely unrestricted. At least I have never seen anyone actually advocate we allow inmates or even people in criminal court be armed.
Secondly, saying it can be restricted is not remotely sanctioning any restriction you care to dream up.
Find one prior court decision that held that 2A conveyed an individual right to bear arms, independent of the militia. Scalia was rewriting the Constitution on the fly – like the conservative judicial activist he was.
And then Scalia wrote: “Like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited. . . The right was not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose. . . Nothing in our opinion today should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms"
which completely undermines the knee-jerk reaction that any gun control legislation violated 2A.
Completely unsupported. No, not any, longstanding. As for rewriting the constitution, the plain language of the document thoroughly supports his ruling. He didn’t rewrite the constitution, he brought the court into line with it.
The reason you cannot answer my question – find one decision that supports your interpretation – is that for two centuries judges ruled on the basis of the actual amendment, including the militia clause and knew, historically that the militia clause was inserted to get the slave states to accept the Federalist insistence on a standing army.
Constitutional jurisprudence rests on prior decisions one can cite, not on personal preference.
Any good history of the Constitutional convention will clue you in to how 2A was rooted in the desire to protect slavery. Embarrassing but true.
The question was to find one decision in the history of 2A jurisprudence that supports your interpretation, which you cannot find.
The Constitution is a complex document, built on compromises and leaving quite a bit subject to interpretation. The history of Constitutional jurisprudence is that interpretation. When a judge tosses the wisdom of all prior judges in favor of their decision that is “judicial activism” since no judge has a direct line into some mythical consensus that all the framers of the Constitution shared.
The best guides to what the Constitution means are the Federalist Papers and the debates in the Convention… summarized well in two Library of America volumes. Well worth the time of anyone who opines on what the Constitution means.
No mythical consensus necessary, it’s right there, in the constitution, in plain language any rational person can read. The constitution trumps precedent.
The 2nd Amendment is the only Amendment in the Bill of Rights that has a justification written into it in plain language any rational person can read. All the other Amendments described rights that required no justification. So go back and read it and explain why the reference to a “well regulated militia” was included and why, in a blatant act of interpretation, that clause does not appear over the entrance to NRA headquarters.
Any reading of the Constitution is an interpretation – which is why precedent – accumulated wisdom – is so important. It takes quite a bit of arrogance to announce that after 230 years you suddenly have it right.
Perhaps he should note section nine of the recommendations for corrective action in the Horowitz report, where it states the performance of those involved in this case should be reviewed for “any action deemed appropriate”.
And then the statement in Appendix 2 where the FBI states how they have complied with the IG recommendations, specifically that they reviewed the performance of many of those involved in this case and “Notably, many of the employees described in the report are no longer employed at the FBI.” My guess, all those “no longer employed at the FBI” are part of the “former justice officials” who want Barr to resign.
