Discussion about government?

Question

Briefly discuss your position concerning the growing belief that criminal almost appear to have more rights than their victims.

Answer 1

Mark D: The first 10 amendments were ratified Dec 15,1791.  Read tenth amendment.

The Supreme Court cannot issue an opinion or judgment without being petitioned to intervene.

I believe that they do have more rights than their victims: The law allows the death penalty for murder (in most states) and the method for execution was left up to the states. Until the courts were petitioned to decide if that means were cruel and unusual punishment......here's the rub......was it cruel and unusual to take the life of his victims using his method.

Why is it not cruel and unusual punishment to let a person with a fatal disease suffer through the pain and agony,waiting for death.

A person can commit the most vial of crimes,tried by his peers,sentenced. It takes (in some cases) twenty yrs. or more before that sentence can be carried out. While the victim is executed within minutes.

With the science of crime investigation being as it is today. They can put the defendent at the scene and able to say yes he did or didn't do it.

I think the rules of sentencing should be changed .

To wit:  any defendent convicted of a felony crime mandating the death penalty and date certain been set. shall automatically receive a stay of execution not to exceed 180 days.

By which his council may file briefs for why sentence should not be carried out. If the brief loses. " Shoot the juice Bruce."  Amen! pass the pizza!!

Answer 2

talk to the ACLU.those b******s are the ones letting things get this way.i worked in the prison system for 17 yrs.and the criminals did have more rights then common people do.you go to prison you seem to be able to sue for just about anything.the lawyers are alot of the problem also.all they think about is boy i can make a bundle on this case.it;s not about right or wrong.it;s about how much money i can make.

Answer 3

My first point would be that there is nothing in the U.S. Constitution which protects the "rights" of the victims of crime, whatever the "rights" might be. Everything in the Bill of Rights which is, in some way, an effort to deal with the criminal justice system is designed to protect the rights of the persons accused of crime.

My second point is that the reason there has been a "growing belief" that criminals' rights have been treated more favorably that victims' rights has to do with the history of how the Constitution has been interpreted by the Supreme Court. And my discussion of this point takes two tracks.

For more than one hundred years after the adoption of the Bill of Rights, the Court never issued any rulings which imposed the rules of the Bill of Rights upon the states. In fact, the Court specifically said in 1832, that the states do not have to obey the rights in the Bill of Rights, that only the Federal Government has to respect the rights in the first 8 amendments and obey those rules laid out in those amendments. Rulings that states have to obey the rights in the first 8 amdendments did not start occurring until roughly 1895. (And even once it started, the Court did not say -- it still has not ever said -- that the states have to obey ALL of the rules in the Bill of Rights.)

Furthermore, also for over a hundred years -- for over a hundred and forty years in fact -- the Court never issued a ruling that any individual criminal's rights had been violated. Based on what I've read, it seems to me that the first time the Court ever ruled that a criminal conviction had to be overturned because of how the accused criminals had been treated by the justice system was in 1932, with a case that involved a group of illterate, teenaged blacks who were put on trial for rape but who were denied their right to counsel during their trial. From that ruling forward, for the next roughly 36 years, the frequency with which the Court ruled in favor of "civil liberties" (understood as the rights of the accused) steadily increased.

It is that growth in the Court's case law on the topic of "civil liberties" that has caused a "growing belief" that there was supposedly something "wrong" with the system.