Brett Kavanaugh Remains As Incorrigible as Ever
This nitwit again? Is he really trying to equate Kavanaugh's lack of actions - are somehow the same as murder? And therefore the courts should look at murderous actions as these indiscretions?
And a reminder, that was accused as they say, had no merit and it was all BS. So it's bullshit compared to murder. Idiot.
---
Brett Kavanaugh Remains As Incorrigible as Ever
In a recent decision, the man who argued he shouldn’t be judged by his youthful indiscretions had no problem sending young people to prison for life without parole.
In 2005, Brett Jones, a 15-year-old white kid from Mississippi, was convicted of murder. Jones claimed self-defense, but a jury found him guilty of murdering his 67-year-old grandfather, with whom he lived. Jones was sentenced to life without parole, the mandatory sentence in Mississippi at that time. Later, in the 2012 case Miller v. Alabama, the Supreme Court ruled that mandatory life-without-parole sentences for juveniles were unconstitutional. Jones appealed his sentence, but the judge again sent him away for life without parole, this time noting he was doing so despite the option of offering a lighter sentence.
In 2016, the Supreme Court issued a follow-up decision making Miller retroactive for those who had been sentenced before the case was heard. The justices reiterated that “a lifetime in prison is a disproportionate sentence for all but the rarest of children, those whose crimes reflect ‘irreparable corruption.’” (The legal term of art is “permanent incorrigibility,” which allows judges to sound like they’re debating whether Tom Sawyer should be sent to bed without dinner.) In light of that additional ruling, Jones again appealed his sentence. This time his case made it all the way to the Supreme Court. But the court ruled that Jones, now 32, should stay in prison for the rest of his life without the possibility of parole.
The justice who wrote that opinion condemning a man to life in prison for a crime he had committed before he finished high school was the same justice who was accused of trying to rape a girl while he was in high school: Brett Kavanaugh.
The first thing that strikes you about Kavanaugh’s opinion is the nerve of the thing. The ruling against Jones was 6-3, with all of the conservatives sticking together. Their reasoning: There is no requirement that judges engage in actual fact-finding to determine “incorrigibility” before sending a juvenile away forever. Any one of those conservatives could have written the majority ruling. For Chief Justice John Roberts to assign this case to Kavanaugh, and for him to accept that assignment, is just part of the long-term conservative project to pretend that Kavanaugh’s checkered and disgusting past does not exist.
But Kavanaugh does have a past, and knowledge of his predatory baggage is impossible to memory-hole as you read his opinion weighing Jones’s fate. Every argument Kavanaugh made in his own defense at his confirmation hearing should have redounded to Jones’s benefit in this case.
Kavanaugh, you’ll remember, asked to be judged by the man he’s become—the high school girls’ basketball coach who hires women as his law clerks—not the beer-loving alleged attempted high school rapist he was. He argued, in angry, sneering tones, that his youthful indiscretions (the ones he admitted to, at least) should not bar him from getting a lifetime job. But having been gifted that lifetime power, he turned around and argued that Jones’s youth was no bar at all to a lifetime of imprisonment.
Rest - https://www.thenation.com/article/so...nile-decision/
Reply With Quote
Originally Posted by Gunny
