The Idiots They Publish In The Paper

I went on a business trip last week and the guy at the parking garage gave me a copy of the Baltimore Sun. If it had not been free I would not have possessed it. The Sun is part of the media wing of the democratic party and they are as left as can possibly be. The strange thing is they always say they are fair. They proclaim this while demonizing the republican governor of Maryland at the same time they are protecting and defending the democratic mayor. The Sun hardly ever endorses a republican candidate. Now if they were really a fair publication one would think they could find at least a few republicans that they could endorse. Anyway, I was reading the editorial section and I was not disappointed by the stupidity of the people who wrote in to share their wisdom with the populace of Maryland. Here is what Eric Dale Smith of Baltimore had to say about the Senate’s apology for not enacting laws making lynching a federal crime:

So the U.S. Senate has formally apologized for the crime of lynching or, more specifically, for its failure to enact the more than 200 bills offered that would have made it a federal crime-a failure that cost the lives of thousands of African-American men, women, and children between the end of the Civil War and 1968.

I will stop after the first paragraph to spare you any more stupidity. See. Mr. Smith thinks that enacting laws making lynching a federal crime would have saved thousands of lives. I guess the fact that murder is against the law never figured into it. See, people who lynched blacks did not care much about the law. They would have committed the crime any way. If the local police were not apprehending the criminals for the lynchings what makes any one think they would do so just because the law was “federal”? Laws, in and of themselves, do not stop criminal behavior. They provide us a means of redress as a society when someone does something wrong. There are thousands of gun laws yet people who are not legally allowed to have them use them each and every day to commit a crime. Cocaine, illegal yet it is bought, sold, and used all the time. The other thing I do not understand is why a big deal is made that people who were not in the Senate then apologized for behavior they had nothing to do with. Mr. Smith seems to think this apology will end racism. There will alway be racism. Fortunately, it is no where near as bad as it was then or as bad as Jesse Jackson and his ilk would have you believe today.

Here is a piece from John Holter of Baltimore who was obviously upset with the Michael Jackson verdict:

I am against trial by jury. Watching the outcome of the Michale Jackson trial and thinking of my own experiences in the jury box have convinced me that there is nothing that a jury can produce by its presence in a courtroom that is better than the decision of a judge.

A judge is better qualified to call on his or her experiences as a professional and has much more understanding of a case than a lay person does.

The current jury system can not be justified because a judge is already in the courtroom for the same job.

More cases could be resolved by the courts more quickly and efficiently if we discontinued the awesome burden of corralling regular citizens to carry out an antiquated duty.

Well, Mr. Holter, forgetting that pesky thing called the Constitution for the moment, let us look at a few other things that make the process of having a jury an important one. The judge is one person and though he is supposed to be impartial, this is not usually the case because judges are human beings. If the judge does not like the defendant or it is a high profile case with pressure to get a guilty verdict the defendant would be at the mercy of one man. The idea of having 12 people is that no one individual can make the decision. It must be a unanimous decision. This is important because it helps prevent innocent people from going to jail. Yes, some criminals get off but it would be more tragic for an innocent person to go to jail. Now, that Constitution. Pesky thing that it is, we can not just dismiss the jury on a whim. Each person has the right to be judged by a jury of his peers. A judge is not your peer. He looks at law and interprets the law. Your peers look at you, the situation, and the evidence and they decide if you are guilty or not. It is common for the left to want to dismiss the Constitution when they do not like things. Look at their uproar over the electoral college.

As for the Jackson case, the prosecutors did not put on a good case and the jury found Jackson not guilty. What we should be asking is why so many people were outside supporting this man when a large number of them believe that he has molested little boys in the past. Why is it they feel it is perfectly OK for him to get away with these things because he is a celebrity? Will they retry Michael until they get the verdict they want like they did with Edgar Ray Killen? Here is a guy that was found not guilty 41 years ago but was retried recently. I don’t imagine there will be cries from the ACLU to have this overturned because of 41 years of pretrial publicity. Now we have an 80 year old man who is in poor health sentenced to 60 years in jail thereby guaranteeing the US taxpayer will pick up the tab for his health care for the rest of his life. At this stage of the game I don’t care if he did it. A jury found him not guilty a long time ago. The time to retry the case was then. Now we have an old man in jail costing us money. So Mr. Holter, the jury system is not perfect but the judicial system is no better. Would a judge have been under any less pressure to return a guilty verdict. At least with 12 jurors Killen had as much fairness as one could expect given the circumstances. Regardless, the system is the best we have so learn to live with it.

It is amazing what the Sun, and other papers for that matter, will print. Of course, they let me have a blog so I should not complain too much…..

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