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Living Room / Re: Don't You Want to be "Safe"?
« Last post by TaoPhoenix on October 27, 2012, 03:59 AM »I'm not even sure what the word 'safe' means any more in the wake of the decision in the case of State of Connecticut v. Fourtin rendered by the wise and benevolent Supreme Court of the State of Connecticut.
I'll provide a link to a good article which also provides links to the actual ruling. But please be forewarned this is one of the singularly most disgusting travesties of justice ever perpetuated by a US court. It involves a rape case. And it's one of those stories about judicial interpretation so extreme and completely divorced from any shred of common decency that it boggles the imagination. If you're easily upset - or not comfortable possibly experiencing a brief episode of blind rage like I did - do yourself a big favor and skip this one.
Excerpt from article below. Link to full article here.
-40hz (October 26, 2012, 10:04 PM)
Okay, I'll cash in one of my goodwill points on this one. I first noticed the source of the article, and it sent an alarm bell in my head, so I spent some time reading the actual case ruling. At issue is what I feel is the much larger theme in all of law of whether courts should (my phrasing coming up) "issue rulings in the spirit of what social decency thinks the law should say", and the more narrow "issue rulings in the sense of what the law does say".
From a historical sense, remember the old Civil War sense called "States Rights"? In one element that's what is going on here too, the downside of States Rights. Basically no one reads actual texts of the state laws until they show up in a court case that goes *against* common decency. I'm in the awful position of saying that the Court might be "technically" correct *because the law has the horrible flaw which produced this result*. So in my view the next thing the activists should do is point at this case to fix the law with enough language that all the parties of this case agree that the outcome would have been what it "should have been". (Maybe something like "When the Recipient of advances has *difficulty communicating*, additional diligence on the part of the Offeror to show beyond a reasonable doubt that the advances were both requested and desired.")
When one of these kinds of cases goes wrong, it would be interesting if someone (some public defense foundation?) triggered a national law review of the exact same case against the laws of all the states in a charts to then see which states have a flaw that should be fixed legislatively.
Whew! No one seems to be saying these Justices are happy about their ruling! My bet is that they saw an even more disastrous loophole lurking if they ruled the other way, and you know that it only takes one bad ruling with a legal shark waiting to find something truly nasty to perpetrate.
(Paraphrasing Scotty from Trek in TNG Relics talking to Geordi La Forge)
