Daniel Ryan Balderas

The trouble with the Bill of Rights, he argues, is that it emphasizes process and procedure rather than principles. The Declaration of the Rights of Man says, Be just! The Bill of Rights says, Be fair! Instead of announcing general principles—no one should be accused of something that wasn’t a crime when he did it; cruel punishments are always wrong; the goal of justice is, above all, that justice be done—it talks procedurally. You can’t search someone without a reason; you can’t accuse him without allowing him to see the evidence; and so on. This emphasis, Stuntz thinks, has led to the current mess, where accused criminals get laboriously articulated protection against procedural errors and no protection at all against outrageous and obvious violations of simple justice. You can get off if the cops looked in the wrong car with the wrong warrant when they found your joint, but you have no recourse if owning the joint gets you locked up for life. You may be spared the death penalty if you can show a problem with your appointed defender, but it is much harder if there is merely enormous accumulated evidence that you weren’t guilty in the first place and the jury got it wrong. Even clauses that Americans are taught to revere are, Stuntz maintains, unworthy of reverence: the ban on “cruel and unusual punishment” was designed to protect cruel punishments—flogging and branding—that were not at that time unusual.

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Adam Gopnik | The Caging of America

1. someone told the new yorker about the prison-industrial complex and it’s expectedly weird 

2. but i’m all about bill-of-rights-bashing

3. even if it ends up being declaration-of-the-rights-of-man-dick-licking (to use a technical term)

4. lol at appeals to essential notions of ‘justice,’ ‘compassion,’ ‘crime,’ ‘common sense,’ et cetera tho, also giving credence to any analysis of the PIC that doesn’t foreground race

5. some asinine criminologist quoted saying, asininely, “Remember, nobody ever made a living mugging. There’s no minimum wage in violent crime.” somebody just get this dude some biggie albums or something, fuck. also dude defends stop-and-frisks, saying there is a “nice” way to do them. uh

6. gopnik’s intervention seems to be: “prisons are bad”—which, yr not wrong, but also, ugh, be more right