jsburbidge | Entries tagged with law and justice

This is hoisted out of a comment thread in response to a reference regarding the effectiveness of tort law: an idealized view (not shared by the author of the reference) of the common law, and tortious (or similar) remedies as being entirely adequate if only left to themselves.

First-year law students are given a set of required courses to take and (at my school and the other ones I know about) there are three courses on true common-law topics: Property, Contract Law, and Torts. (The topics of other courses, like Criminal Law and Civil Procedure were once common-law but underwent extensive statutory revision in the late 19th Century: Canada now has (as of 1954) no common-law criminal offences [1] and civil procedure was so heavily transformed in the late 19th Century by statute as to become unrecognizable ("special pleading" has now no concrete referent).)

Unlike property (about types of land tenure) and contracts (the outgrowth of the old action on the writ of assumpsit), in principle, torts have no real unity. They are a grab-bag of items based on a number of older causes of action.

In about 1800 torts were a minor branch of the law, and at the time trespass to property (trespass proper and conversion) would probably have been the most important, followed by assault and battery (trespass to the person). Actions lying in negligence were rare, though negligence was also an important concept in the law of nuisance and in some criminal writs.

By the time I was taking torts, the nominate torts got about one week. The rest of the year was spent on negligence.

Negligence is now a widespread and important legal cause of action, but that is somewhat accidental and in neither of the two important branches is it well-suited to the social ends which it is being used to serve.

Negligence is based on the idea of the care which would be taken by "the reasonable man" - generally, not an exceptional person, "the man on the top of the Clapham omnibus", although in professional contexts an elevated duty of care is required. But suits in negligence have by now long become a means of addressing issues where negligence can be invoked only by straining at gnats and swallowing camels, under the broad heading of "distributive justice".

The most obvious case is what happened with the development of the automobile. There were accidents involving horse-drawn vehicles - unlike an automobile, a horse can be spooked and can also be vicious. But the advent of the car as a force-multiplier and a speed-multiplier generated a world where not only were there many more deaths and injuries but where the majority of them could be attributed in some sense to negligence - either prior negligence (driving too fast, following too close, drinking) or immediate negligence (letting your attention wander). And while the dead need nothing, injuries in automobile accidents generate long-lasting treatment and alleviation scenarios.

What emerged was an odd way of dealing with the financial costs of the injured. (The dead are, at common law, cheap. Damages for wrongful death do not exist at common law (unless you want to revert to wergild); they are a creation of statute. Paraplegics are expensive, and damages may also accrue for lost potential earnings. As one of my teachers said, from a civil law perspective, if you run over somebody who is young, well-off, and badly injured, it makes sense to back up and ensure he or she is dead; it's much cheaper. The criminal law does have a different view...) Everybody buys mandatory automobile insurance giving the insurers rights of subrogation. Traffic accidents generate civil suits in negligence even in cases where the standard test would, if actually applied, collapse. (A normal individual does not always keep to the speed limit. A normal individual does not have attention which never wanders.) Insurance settlements supply the injured with support based on a standard which is feasible only because, in effect, the entire adult population (to a reasonably close approximation) is subsidizing the injured through mandatory insurance. Even then, the remedy is a single lump sum.

That's the solution tort law has developed. Analogous approaches have developed to professional malpractice. (Surgeons make mistakes. They are insured to prevent those mistakes from beggaring them.) Occasionally there are situations where negligence can be absolutely shown not to exist. (Previously unknown and unknowable risks, acts of God, cases where injury can be shown to be entirely the plaintiff's fault.) There regularly ensues indignation that there is nobody to sue, nobody responsible.

A better solution would be a minimum guaranteed income plus public long-term support for the injured. Allocation of resources is much more effective when it can be planned, and when the process is no longer funnelled through insurance companies and lawyers, who take their own cut of the proceeds. And road safety would be better served by setting and enforcing serious standards (driver training, road safety, road construction, speed limits) rather than having lax standards with a notional motivation to improvement provided by liability.

The other major modern branch of negligence law is in product liability. Until the 1930s, generally, product liability was a contractual matter, with remedies in damages or restitution under the common law or under its codification in the Sale of Goods Act (UCC in the US). Donoghue v. Stevenson changed that, and a whole elaborate case law regarding tortious product liability derived from that.

Under contract law, goods not fit for use get their price refunded, or a substitution of goods fit for use. The appropriate remedy for a bottle of ginger beer with a decaying snail in it would be the price of another bottle of ginger beer. Under the law of torts, damages may be had for physical and mental distress.

It has its own problems. Damages get awarded for cases where warnings are not provided for the use of something in an inappropriate and unexpected manner. (Lawnmowers now come with warnings not to use them for hedge trimming because some idiot once won a lawsuit after doing so, despite the fact that it's hard to square that with the reasonable man test.) Court actions are expensive, and many cases on product liability are viable only as class action lawsuits unless the victim has deep pockets.

Again, though, if the aim of society is to have products match expectations and to minimize poor outcomes, this is a very poor tool. Detailed regulatory conditions specific to an industry are a much better one: detailed regulatory conditions with the enforcement being requiring conformance to the law rather than simply fines for breaking it.

One fundamental problem with negligence is that the only relief a suit in negligence will bring is damages, and very occasionally restitution. If a person or a company with deep pockets feels that the costs of an occasional lawsuit are worth it, they can just keep on going what they want to. (Mr. Toad and motor cars come to mind. And it may be cheaper to skimp on quality control and pay occasional damages than impose elaborate quality control mechanisms.)

(I will note in passing that the above does not apply to nuisance cases. You can get injunctive relief in nuisance, and in riparian rights cases, and so forth, which involve property rights. But historically, where legal rights of those sorts would actually have the effect of constraining popular activities - manufacturing, railways, etc. - the strict rights under the law tend not to be generally applied, even before they get constrained by statute.)

In practice, there is no true common law left. The process was deep-sixed in the late 19th Century on both the civil and criminal sides. Almost everything else has had so much legislation applied that common-law rights are a vague substratum. (There are a few remaining areas: commercial contracts of certain sorts; some commercial leases; suits for trespass and assault.) Torts look like their common-law ancestors but they are so constrained by other legislative conditions - mandatory automobile insurance, mandatory professional insurance, legislation directly addressing balance of proof, etc. - that they really have no similarity to their roots.

There's a reason for that. The common law (not just the law of torts) was a complex maze of rules organized around a set of causes of action which hadn't been updated since before the Tudors, and which really had no obvious organizing principle relevant to how the world has been organized for the past century and a half, let alone for the past few decades.

Some "common-law principles" remain - adversarial as opposed to inquisitorial procedure, for example, though even that is blurred by certain types of administrative tribunal. And the Anglo-Canadian model of stare decisis is still alive and kicking. But the idea that the common law is part of an ideal past is naive.

[1]I have a family connection here, as it was a great-great uncle who codified Canada's common-law criminal offences (based on English work by Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Virginia Woolf's uncle), which work became the basis of the first Criminal Code.

I recently became aware of a single pattern in two different and separated historical periods.

Patrick Wormald's The Making of English Law makes a careful argument, based on detailed consideration of all of the surviving codes of law up to the edge of the reign of Henry I as well as surviving records of actual law cases, that the various codes, although both proclaimed and accepted widely, played almost no role in the actual settlement of cases. They seem to have been important primarily as a way of asserting the identity, or the continuation of identity, of a people. The same is true in northern France and the areas of Germanic law generally; only in areas still governed by Roman Law was there a continuation of the relation between published legal codes and actual practice.

Law-giving was part of the template of what a king was like, not only based on Germanic inheritance (represented by the Laws of Ine) but also on the scriptural record associating the king with the dispensation of justice. It allowed the modern king to emulate not just ancient kings, but also God himself.

This fits nicely into arguments like that of Bisson's The Crisis of the Twelfth Century, that there was a fundamental shift towards order from quasi-anarchy at just this time: there is a shift towards legislation having a practical effect (though by no means complete: Magna Carts has much of the same declarative character).

What caught my eye though, a little more recently, was a passage pointing out that the so-called law codes of the ancient near East, of which the Code of Hammurapi is the best known, were not what we think of as law codes at all. "Being stylized collections of typical cases, there is no question that these 'codes' were ever intended to be comprehensive in their scope or sufficiently precise in their formulations. The literary and non-legislative character of these collections is further indicated by the fact that neither the Laws of Hammurapi not the other legal corpora are cited as precedents in the many legal tickets and protocols which have been preserved..." (Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel).

So the same pattern appears in Germanic Europe of the late first millenium and the laws of the near East in the first and second millennia B.C.E. The period between, that of the Greeks and the Romans, of Solon and Aristotle and Cicero and the Ten Tables, was a period of what we would recognize as rule of legislated law, culminating in the Code of Justinian and continuing in the Mediterranean basin throughout. (Though late Roman jurisprudence in the East reverts to the precedence of the immediate imperial decree over any written precedents; there is none of Bracton's "The King is under the law because it is the law which makes him a king".)

But this sort of law, law which lawyers would recognize as opposed to "palm-tree justice", is clearly a learned thing, and learned with difficulty. What most people want in most cases is decisions which make them feel good at an immediate gut level, independent of and frequently at odds with more general concerns. This shows up most obviously in criminal and tort law, which correspond broadly to the domains of both sets of codes: you can see it in media reports. In criminal law this tends to take the form of overweighing victim impact statements above the other principles of sentencing (most notably rehabilitation); in tort law, of wanting large settlements where plaintiffs are seriously impacted but where there is little to no evidence of negligence.

At this level, legislation is effectively a form of declarative performance. At its extreme in modern societies, it's statutes declaring something illegal with no mechanism of enforcement, or which enables actions which will have little effect beyond the symbolic (consider Trump's wall). In the ancient world it was legislation as a form of explicit tradition, a way of defining who a given people was - not necessarily by designating boundaries in the way notable in the Hebrew Torah (no mixing fibers, no meat from cloven hooved animals which do not chew the cud, no shellfish) but by asserting a link to an earlier foundational figure. (In the case of the originating figure, Hammurapi or Ine, the agenda is more one of memorializing a reputation as a just judge by recording decisions associated with the ruler.)

A National Post opinion piece begins: "... Maybe that's because I grew up in Canada before it had one [a constitution]",

Whereby the author not only displays complete ignorance but is self-disqualified in an own goal from writing about it.

It's not that this was obscure: it was part of High School History, even Grade 8 history: Canada had a constitution under the name of the BNA Act (actually, BNA Act, 1867 and a series of following BNA Acts, such as the one that admitted Newfoundland in 1949), renamed in 1982 to Constitution Act, 1867 usw.

(I was in graduate school in 1982: I remember perfectly well what we were taught prior to that time.)

Showing that you weren't competent or interested enough to pay attention to basics like this disqualifies you forever from writing about anything in that domain.

Even if the writer was this ignorant, it should not have got by the copy-editor. It's not a big surprise: it's the Post, after all.

The beginning of July had a number of cases of Doug Ford's Tories effectively cancelling legislation which had been passed by the legislature without having to go back to the legislature.

With a few exceptions where they come into effect on assent, most statutes come into effect on a date stated directly or indirectly in the legislation. It may be set out explicitly in the legislation itself, but it has become much more common, especially where there are elements of a regulatory framework under the statute in question to be developed, for the statute simply to say that it will come into effect on a date to be determined by the Governor in Council, i.e. the Cabinet; this not only provides general flexibility but allows regulations under the statute to be developed in the interim.

Regulatory legislation is typically more extensive than statutory legislation. Some statutes basically simply set up a framework for the creation of regulation. (A classic example is the federal Transportation of Dangerous Goods Act, which is entirely dependent for effect on the Regulations published under it.) Even globally, they're more extensive: IIRC, when I was a law student the Consolidated Regulations of Canada were longer than the Consolidated Statutes of Canada, and I expect that the ratio has widened since.

In all the cases in question the dates of coming into effect had been set by the previous government's Order in Council but had not yet occurred. At their first cabinet meeting the Tories passed a set of Orders in Council suspending those dates. (They also passed a whole set of Orders in Council making appointments to, and setting salaries for, some high-level positions just below Cabinet level.)

On their own these are essentially procedural tricks. The legislation remains on the books, and if it had already come into force it could not be suspended without an act of the provincial legislature. If the situation were to extend for some time one could make noises about the role of the legislature, but it's probably pointless to get upset about this particular aspect of it this time, as the Tories will almost certainly repeal or revise the statutes in question once the Legislature sits, whether in the current session or the next one.

(This, of course, does not address the what the actual hell? aspect of those suspensions. I mean, coming out on the side of ticket scalpers? Blocking legislation regarding police which had strong support from actual police departments after extensive consultations (regardless of unpopularity with the unions)? And without providing any narrative context? Does this make any political sense? Plus: what matters is what voters remember four years from now. There is no need to shoot from the hip (followed by probable flailing, as is already happening on the education front) when what voters will remember is that far away.)

More important is the general insight that governments can get away with far more, less publicly, in regulations than they can in statutes, which come under full parliamentary scrutiny. The Federal Conservatives under Harper, for example, were able to modify / twist / gut (depending on your perspective) the entire set of SSHRCC and NRC grants for research by regulatory revision (directing the funds to "practical" rather than fundamental research).[1] (Also, it's really easy to block statutory schemes by either regulation or ministerial fiat - requiring impossible conditions for implementation, shifting funding around internally, reassigning staff, pushing dates of implementation off...) If you want to keep an eye on what Ford's Conservatives are doing, it's worth keeping an eye on the province's page where they publish Orders in Council.

[1]This despite lots of evidence that it tends to be more abstract research that really tends to pay off even by a commercial measure. The Harper Conservatives really did not like actual scientists, and held the humanities and cultural disciplines in contempt.

In the last few days I've seen a number of completely misconceived comments referencing "innocent until proven guilty" in connection with Jian Gomeshi; I saw it similarly referenced in the discussions about WisCon and Frankel; I'm sure it came up regarding René Walling.

So let's clarify what's involved.

First of all, there is no real legal maxim about being innocent until proven guilty, at least not if these are taken to be the only two binary states. If you're charged with a serious crime, the state can put you in jail for months to years (depending on how busy the courts are) while awaiting trial and then even if you're not found guilty seized property may not be returned, while you will never receive full recompense for what happened to you during that time. And that's in Anglo-Saxon countries where habeas corpus applies; in many continental countries you can be thrown in jail for a period without even having a charge laid. This is not being treated as "innocent".

What the law actually has is two concepts: presumptions and weight of proof required. When transferred outside the specific context of the court system these mean something considerably different than most people think.

Let's take presumptions, first.

Under normal circumstances, an accused benefits from a presumption of innocence, and a defendant from a presumption of non-liability in the trial itself, and in any related hearings. What that means is that the onus is on the accuser to make a case, rather than the case being presumed and the onus being on the defendant to rebut it. It does not say anything about the nature of the case. (In some specific circumstances, there may be statutory reversals of proof on specific matters. For example, in a civil suit for personal injury in Ontario between a motor vehicle and a pedestrian, where it has been established that the pedestrian was in fact hurt by the motor vehicle, there is a reverse onus on the driver to prove lack of negligence as a causative factor. This means that the driver will have to lead evidence to rebut negligence rather than relying on the plaintiff having to prove it.)

Transferred to private life, this means ruling out prejudice (i.e. literally pre-judgement) in assessing a claim regarding bad behaviour made in the media or otherwise. We shouldn't just assume, for example, that because someone is poor he or she is blameless[1] or that all actors are immoral. It doesn't mean that we can't make judgements very early based on a small amount of evidence. That's covered by questions of weight of proof.

The legal system has at least three types of weight of proof which come into play in different circumstances. In ascending order:

A prima facie case. This applies in preliminary hearings (usually before a magistrate. It's the sort of case the police have to meet not to get an arrest thrown out, for example. It's also the sort of case that might be needed for taking preventative measures -- getting warrants of various sorts.

Proof on the balance of probabilities. This applies to civil cases in tort, breach of contract, trespass, etc. In some statutory cases it may apply to regulatory infractions as well.

Proof beyond reasonable doubt. This applies in criminal cases as a general rule. This is what is usually invoked implicitly in rhetorical appeals to "innocent until proven guilty".

The criminal standard is so high precisely because the consequences of criminal conviction are so serious; and because the courts are suspicious of the state (and the police) on general principles. Even with that as a strong standard, there are miscarriages of justice based on circumstantial evidence.

However, we're not sitting in judgement on the people in these reports. Regardless of what I think of Gomeshi, it's not going to matter to him, unless I happen to be one of a small set of people with whom he actually deals. The consequences to him are small. Therefore, the weight of the evidence required to treat him as "guilty" needs to be much less. This still keeps intact the principle of not prejudging, because it's a response to "evidence", not a prejudgement.

Similarly, a harassment policy doesn't need to have a full-scale beyond-all-reasonable-doubt weight of evidence when the consequences are that someone can't go to an annual social gathering.

I sometimes see the position taken that complainants in sexual assault / harassment cases ought always to be believed. That is prejudgement -- anything with "always" in it points in that direction. It cannot be emphasized enough, though, that a policy of weighting a complainant's statement very heavily indeed and putting a reverse burden on the accused harasser makes sense given the actual ratio of false to true accusations. If an accused brings forward evidence that, say, the complainant had a long-standing and well-known grudge against the accused and that he (usually "he") and the complainant were never in private together and that no witnesses attest to any wrongdoing, though, that should be taken into account.

Likewise, although the courts exclude "similar fact evidence" except on very narrow grounds, it makes pre-eminent sense for an organization looking at a harassment claim, or a news consumer assessing reports, to take full considerations of an accused's reputation as regards behaviour. (Gomeshi, Walling, Frankel: all bad).

Oh, and "hearsay" is a really useless concept outside the trial / discovery context. Most of the things we reasonably rely on day-to-day are hearsay by legal standards. Unless you have a course in Evidence under your belt, you should avoid talking about hearsay in this sort of context.

There are other factors which come into play, of course. If you make public claims about somebody which injures their reputation, and they are in fact false, then you lay yourself open to claims in defamation, regardless of how well-justified you think you may be. This should not be confused with "innocent until proven guilty", but it's why media are so careful to spread words like "alleged" around, and why most media outlets have policies requiring them to get as much confirmation as possible regarding negative stories before publishing.

One of the ironies of the WisCon debacle was that if the complaint had been acted on promptly and effectively, and that was the universal norm there wouldn't have been any publicity at all. The original post about how to report harassment (which didn't name Frankel) wouldn't have been necessary if the whole thing had been a socially accepted routine; and even if it had appeared as it was it would have ended up causing far less publicity than the botched process did.

If Gomeshi had been willing to go along with a quiet severance of the "Mr. Gomeshi has decided to pursue other interests" type, competently handled -- leave following his father's death, followed in a few weeks by an orchestrated resignation -- there would have been rumours, but nothing like the kind of publicity that he himself generated by his Facebook entry. Instead he's now being buried by an avalanche of reports which, honestly, are exactly the sort he would have to be really stupid to sue over.

[1]"It's the same the whole world over, it's the poor what gets the blame."

There was a press release by the CAA a while back which their deputation is repeating at the budget hearings in Toronto today. It says that motorists pay for the road system, i.e. are not subsidized.

The problem is that even if all their numbers are correct, it shows only that they don't understand the nature of the revenue system.

They count things like the gas taxes and any vehicle-specific taxes towards their totals. However, these are not user fees; they are taxes which go into general funds.

There are also special excise taxes on alcohol and tobacco, and there are probably other taxes buried elsewhere. There are certainly taxes buried in imported consumer goods on which customs duties are charged. (Excise taxes used to be the largest source of government funds, at one point before the introduction of the income tax during the First World War.) But we don't consider the hefty taxes which are part of the price of a six-pack of beer as money which goes to support, say, the addiction research and health care systems. Governments tax things which people are willing to pay more money for (or else adding taxes would reduce sales and reduce the take from the tax levies), and cigarettes, drink, and gasoline are high up on the list of products where raising prices tends to have a relatively small effect on demand.

Similarly, property taxes do not go into a special fund dedicated towards utility infrastructure costs.

Some of the Ontario provincial gas tax (14.7 cents / litre) is, in fact, not directed towards general funds. It is, however, explicitly set aside for transit purposes, not for supporting the road system. However, this is still a diversion out of general funds, and not a user fee.

Only if the various taxes, collectively, were to be properly characterised as a user fee would the claim made by the CAA make any sense.

One way that this plays out, very practically, points up the difference. The excise taxes go to the federal government (which raises them under its general revenue power under s. 91(3) of the Constitution Act, 1867). The Federal government, however, has no authority over highways and streets, although it can choose to fund provincial initiatives, if it chooses, via its general spending power. The provincial government applies the tax (which is considered a direct tax, even though it is buried in the price) under its direct taxation powers under s. 92(2). The government does pay for provincial highways directly, but other roads are maintained and built by the municipalities. (And there are fewer provincial highways than there used to be, as a result of the Harris government's downloading in the 1990s.) The net effect is that most money is spent on roads by the level of government which does not collect gasoline taxes, and a substantial amount of tax is raised by a level of government which does not maintain roads at all.

It is perfectly normal and legitimate that it plays out this way. Most services provided by government cost money which cannot, practically, be raised by means of immediately offsetting fees. Transfer payments are the obvious example, but consider also (for example) monies for public libraries, hospitals, police, and public schools.

The CAA claim is only suited for some sort of Libertarian polity where all levies are dedicated user fees. The system of government we have never has been organized that way, and never will be, for both practical and political reasons. It is a pure piece of propaganda, and should be treated as such.

When I was taking Criminal Law, I was taught that in general criminal offences required some form of guilty mentality (mens rea: actus non facit reum nisi mens sit rea) -- not necessarily intent, as negligence served this purpose in some cases. You can't assault somebody or steal chattels without intent, and you can't commit manslaughter without being negligent (if you kill somebody purely by accident with no negligence on your part, that's "non-culpable homicide").

However, there is, we were told. a subcategory of what were called "strict liability offences" which required no intent whatsoever on the part of the person committing the offence. The classic example was weights and measures legislation: a merchant can be fined for having a scale which weighs inaccurately with neither intent nor negligence. These offences are generally, but not invariably, offences created as a side effect of regulatory schemes which are not criminal in their principal intent -- so called "quasi-criminal law". (This category is important in Canada, by the way, because it allows provinces, which have no jurisdiction to enact criminal statutes, to attach penalties to violations of regulatory schemes.)

Note that the Municipal Conflict of Interest Act in Ontario is a provincial statute. I'm sure you see where I'm going, here...

Quite aside from the general maxim that "ignorance of the law is no excuse" (ignorantia juris non excusat) the Act specifically does not require a fraudulent intent. There's a reason for this: in the execution of public affairs not only is the appearance of probity in public officials important, but one of the very things the law was enacted to deal with was the kind of cozy web of implicit understandings where nobody on the inside thinks that things are really wrong; the same intention lies behind the strict limitations on gifts that public officials can receive from constituents. There are two types of exceptions: some sorts of benefits are not included (e.g. votes on raising the office allowance for councillors give them a pecuiniary interest but would be excluded under s. 4(b); tiny benefits, e.g. participation in a vote that saves you coffee money once a quarter are excluded under s. 4 (k)); and "errors of judgement", which is a much smaller exception than just negligence (s. 10(2)) -- note that this does not mean that the judge will not declare a conflict of interest, but merely that the penalty can be avoided. This is why the defense is playing up Ford's deliberate refusal to pay attention to either his orientation handbook or the Integrity Commissioner or his advisors: it would qualify quite well as wilful negligence, but being Too Stupid To Live can, conceivably, qualify as "an error of judgement" on the defense arguments. (The actual phrasing of the Act is "inadvertence or by reason of an error in judgment").

In the case law on the matter, a typical error of judgement would be to rely on a legal opinion which the court later found to be incorrect. On the other hand, there are cases which state that "the judge could not find inadvertence or bona fide error because, at the very least, in not seeking legal advice, the respondent was deliberately and wilfully blind", which seems to map fairly neatly onto Ford's pattern of behaviour.

I have real difficulty in seeing how any judge can reasonably view the entire pattern of behaviour as an "error in judgment". It might arguably be true of Ford (although the conditions which must apply to his thought processes, if this is true, are such as to make for a strong argument that he should be disqualified from running anything more complex than a hot-dog stand), but it would open up a hole in the statute wide enough to drive a truck through. The statute, especially by pairing it with "inadvertence" would normally be construed as meaning a one-time blip that might happen to a reasonable man, not an ongoing pattern of behaviour; nor can I think that a deliberate refusal to read the guidelines over the course of many years can count as a single "error of judgment". There are cases supporting the view that just not being aware of the rules may mean that removal from office does not occur, but I can't find any cases where this covered a continued and deliberate refusal to acquaint oneself with the rules.

From a CBC report on Ottawa police mistreatment of prisoners:

Russomanno said the video shows no evidence of the alleged assault on Morris and said the case and the Bonds case raise questions about the reliability of police testimony.

Given the current rash of incidents casting doubt on the reliability of police testimony regarding each other, I am beginning to think that there should be a reverse onus on police to prove innocence or perhaps a reduction in the burden of proof to the balance of probabilities in criminal cases against police for violence against civilians. In addition, disciplinary measures against the group when police witnesses to police violence refuse to come forward.

... if the US really wants to convey the impression to the rest of the world that it's being overrun by jack-booted thugs, it's going about it the right way, what with the bill put forward by Lieberman, McCain et al. allowing indefinite detention without trial of its own citizens, and the conviction of Peter Watts on statutory grounds which amount to a Catch-22 set of terms designed to give border guards a free pass to mistreat people and then claim that they are being resisted when the relevant parties are too dazed and confused to respond.

I'm certainly not inclined to go to the States any time soon.

Profile

jsburbidge

April 2025

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
		1	2	3	4	5
6	7	8	9	10	11	12
13	14	15	16	17	18	19
20	21	22	23	24	25	26
27	28	29	30

Syndicate

Style Credit

Style: Neutral Good for Practicality by timeasmymeasure

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

Page generated Jun. 13th, 2025 07:46 am

Sunt Lacrimae Rerum

Entries tagged with law and justice

Torts, Common Law, Social utility

Law as Declarative Performance

Before the Constitution

Regulations

Presumption of Innocence

The CAA's study

Strict Liability Offences

In the news

You know...