A thirst for injustice 166

Five judicial nominations have been submitted for confirmation by Obama. The names are:

  • Robert N. Chatigny, a federal district judge from Connecticut,
  • Federal magistrate Edward M. Chen of San Francisco
  • University of California at Berkeley law professor Goodwin W. Liu
  • Former state Supreme Court Justice Louis Butler of Wisconsin
  • U.S. District Judge John J. McConnell, Jr., of Rhode Island

According to the Washington Times –

All five nominations were held up for months because not even many Democrats want to go on the record voting for their confirmation. The nominations officially lapsed when the Senate recessed for more than 30 days in August. Rather than letting them die quietly and without embarrassment, the president renominated them – as if to emphasize his utter disdain for the usual American norms of justice.

Of Robert N. Chatigny, the editorial reports that he showed “bizarre sympathy for a serial rapist-murderer, saying his ‘sexual sadism’ was a ‘mitigating factor’ rather than reason to punish him to the extent of the law.” It quotes him further as saying:

He [the rapist and murderer] is at Cornell, he had this classmate, this petite Asian girl who is sweet, and he likes her, and he winds up killing her because he has this affliction, this terrible disease. [It was] this awful, uncontrollable impulse to sexually brutalize this person he liked and then kill her. … Michael Ross may be the least culpable, the least, of the people on death row.

So Ross was the victim of his own impulse! There is no question in the judge’s mind of holding him to moral responsibility. But isn’t that precisely what a judge’s business is – to hold people accountable for their actions?

A man who thinks as Chatigny does is either insane or deeply evil. Either way, he should be locked up, not promoted to a higher position in the judiciary where he can do more harm.

Next, Edward M. Chen is against neutral justice:

He once explained that a judge should “draw upon the breadth and depth of their own life experience. … Inevitably, one’s ethnic and racial background contributes to those life experiences.”

In other words, your judgment should be guided by your own predilections and prejudices.

Of Professor Goodwin W. Liu the paper tells us:

He has argued that the judiciary should be “a culturally situated interpreter of social meaning”…

Whatever that means. It sounds sinister, and has never before been part of a judge’s job description.

Liu also believes in “a constitutional right to welfare“. That is to say, redistribution, though such a notion is nowhere to be found or even hinted at in the actual Constitution.

Finally, there is this on Justice Louis Butler and U.S. District Judge John J. McConnell, Jr.:

They each argued in separate cases that paint manufacturers should be held liable for lead poisoning in children today for paint made decades ago even if there’s no evidence the poisoning came from paint actually made by the manufacturer in question. This is such a departure from evidence-based law – and beyond guilt by association, into an even worse guilt by insinuation – that it makes a mockery of the judicial system.

Collectively they are against personal accountability, objective justice, the constitutional role of the judicial branch, and evidence-based law.

Obama must have had scouts scouring the length and breadth of America to find these radicals for him. Such specimens must be rare. At least we hope they are.

All five are revolutionaries. They invert the values and principles on which America was founded. They are barefaced enemies of the Constitution. Even worse, they negate  justice itself.

Posted under Commentary, Law, revolution, United States by Jillian Becker on Saturday, September 18, 2010

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