Justice isn't justice when the court doesn't deliver the verdict you want. That's the latest from Republican Washington. The first civilian trial of a Guantanamo detainee has disappointed punishment hawks.
Ahmed Ghailani will face between 20 years and life in prison as a result of his conviction on one charge related to the 1998 embassy bombings in Africa. But because a jury acquitted him on more than 280 other charges -- including every count of murder -- critics of the Obama administration’s strategy on detainees said the verdict proved that civilian courts could not be trusted to handle the prosecution of Al Qaeda terrorists.
"This is a tragic wake-up call to the Obama Administration to immediately abandon its ill-advised plan to try Guantánamo terrorists” in federal civilian courts, said Representative Peter King, Republican of New York. “We must treat them as wartime enemies and try them in military commissions at Guantánamo.”...NYT
Doesn't Peter King really mean that you can count on military commissions to give the benefit of the doubt to the military? Isn't he saying, "Let's dump justice and go for shiny, uniformed and predictable injustice."
Isn't that a smack in the face to both military and civilian courts? Or is it simply another case of uncontrolled arrogance on the right-hand side of our political infrastructure?
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I'm in complete agreement with the judge in this case.
"You deserve a lot of credit," U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan told the jurors after the verdicts were announced. "You have demonstrated also that American justice can be delivered calmly, deliberately and fairly, by ordinary people - people who are not beholden to any government, including this one." ...WaPo
But I'm not as optimistic as Judge Kaplan.
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Trouble is brewing for the Roberts Supreme Court in the form of serious legal criticism of its decisions. The Roberts' court's decisions have already achieved the reputation of being "sweeping and politically polarized." Now there is pointed criticism coming from within the federal court system of "the quality of the court’s judicial craftsmanship."
In decisions on questions great and small, the court often provides only limited or ambiguous guidance to lower courts.
And it increasingly does so at enormous length.
Brown v. Board of Education, the towering 1954 decision that held segregated public schools unconstitutional, managed to do its work in fewer than 4,000 words. When the Roberts court returned to just an aspect of the issue in 2007 in Parents Involved v. Seattle, it published some 47,000 words, enough to rival a short novel. In more routine cases, too, the court has been setting records. The median length of majority opinions reached an all-time high in the last term.
Critics of the court’s work are not primarily focused on the quality of the justices’ writing, though it is often flabby and flat. Instead, they point to reasoning that fails to provide clear guidance to lower courts, sometimes seemingly driven by a desire for unanimity that can lead to fuzzy, unwieldy rulings. ...NYT
