Exclusionary Rule In Trouble

The police are supposed to be our protectors, but in the control of a despot, they are oppressors. The Supreme Court formally recognized early in the 20th Century that the police could not be allowed to get away with crimes in order to find and convict the guilty. Thus was born the Exclusionary Rule. Prosecutors and law enforcement officials have, on the one hand, complained about the rule, and on the other hand, managed to provide generally strong protection against criminals without having to violate it. According to this article by the New York Times, the United States is unique in its adherence to the rule. The article goes on to say that we may not adhere in the same way for long.

While it might sound reasonable to allow a judge to hold a hearing to determine whether or not tainted evidence should be allowed, we should remember that the rule is there to protect us against wanton police abuse and corruption, that the government has a vast amount of coercive power, and that it incredibly hard to identify abuse, absent the rule. A police officer already has enormous abilities to cite, arrest, and search individuals, pragmatically speaking without cause. Now the Court will consider weakening protections against those cases where the situation is blatant.

Keeping in mind that no rule is perfect, and that some criminals have been able to use the exclusionary rule to get their cases dismissed, the Court should tread carefully in an area where despotism looms, especially when we can argue that the rule has done its job well.

Let’s Outlaw Religion before outlawing homosexual marriages

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One of the odd “advantages” of being married and gay in San Francisco must be that couples get to have weddings every couple of years. At first San Francisco passed a domestic partner law back in the 1990s and then they started issue marriage licenses under Mayor Gavin Newsom. At some point those were invalidated and now couples can once again get married. But wait, California has an initiative on the ballet to overturn the legality of those marriages. Presumably this debate will seesaw from one side to the other, and each time it becomes legal to do so, a gay couple can marry. The county clerk’s office makes out like a bandit until everyone gets tired of the game in the process.

Here’s the problem: each time a law is passed that forbids gay marriage, someone’s rights are taken away, in this case the right to be recognized as married, to have spousal rights, and to take advantage of other perqs only offered to married couples.

If the government is going to discriminate in such a way, we should ask either who it helps or who it hurts if they don’t. One could easily see why the government might need to restrict movements of someone with an infectious illness. One could agree with the argument for not giving driving licenses to the blind. But here, who is hurt if a marriage license is given to a gay couple? Nobody. Absolutely nobody.

It might make a person feel good to take someone else’s rights away, until that person has his or her rights taken away. Suppose we forbid the practice of religion? I could argue that there are immense social benefits to doing so. In fact I might continue that line of thought in the future. But keeping in mind the Spanish Inquisition, the recent abuse children in the Catholic church, and everything that went on in between (including standing by while many died in WWII), we could make a strong argument that religion is harmful, because we’ve seen evidence of it being harmful. We cannot say the same with gay marriages.

So let’s outlaw religion first, at least for a while, and see if the abuses curb. If not, then let’s agree to keep government out of the church. But let’s also agree to keep government out of the bedroom.

Viva La France!

France

Happy Bastille Day!

It was on this day in 1789 that The Bastille itself was stormed, it having become a symbol of oppression where many folks lost their heads. Let’s take a moment to recount just a few things the French have brought the world (and for now we’ll exclude french fries, french toast, and frenching).

French Wine— France offers a wide variety of reds and whites, including some interesting sparkling reds. Chateua Nuef de Pape, Cotes du Rhone, and the big ones like Pomerol are something they’ve given me.
Bread— Nobody does a better croissant than France. Napoleon even erected a fort in the Alps to keep the Italians from stealing all the good bread. Italians need to learn how to make bread like the french.
The Statue of Liberty— a remarkable lady whose purpose seems forgotten in this unkind time.
The United States of America— Without Lafayette there would have been no U.S.A.
The Citroen— without this peace of junk, there is no way the big three could have lasted as long as they have.
The Crepe— need I say more.

So Happy Birthday, France! Salut!

The Do Nothing Presidency

Smoke Stack

Yesterday, the Bush Administration released a long awaited report by the Environmental Protection Agency, that says that Carbon Dioxide can and should be regulated. One would think this a remarkable departure for an administration that has done everything within its power to destroy the environment, through drilling in fragile environmental areas, unmitigated logging, and the failure to protect endangered species. There’s a catch: the Supreme Court ordered the EPA to develop the report, and in releasing it, in the same breath, the administration argued that regulation by the EPA to protect our children will hurt business and industrial growth.

Let’s review our tally for this administration:

Housing — Failure to properly regulate the housing market has led to a massive series of bank failures.
The Energy Market — we are suffering from inflation due to a massive increase in oil prices, which itself is in part due to an inability of Americans to conserve. The administration has done absolutely nothing to reduce consumption, or for that matter offer fuel alternatives. Instead, they’ve argued that drilling in wilderness refuges will offer some form of relief, a claim that is disputed by every expert in the field, because it will offer no short term relief, while medium and long term relief are by no means at all assured.
Security— having gone to war twice and wasted billions of dollars on meaningless programs, the administration has managed to alienate America from the rest of the world, reducing people’s desires to visit, impacting tourism, and reducing our national credibility. At the same time the Taliban has rebuilt itself, and we’ve lost our allies in Pakistan and now, seemingly Iraq (not that Prime Minister Maliki was every clearly an ally).
Education— No Child Left Behind has meant that our children haven’t gone forward as a group. Our public education system remains in a shambles due to lack of incentives for good teachers, buildings that are falling apart, and a general willingness by this administration to divert funds to religious programs.
Public Transportation— our skies are more dangerous than they have been since the creation of the FAA. More runway incursions, more close calls in the air, disgruntled workforces, and disgruntled passengers have left our air transportation system in a mess, while we’ve invested nearly nothing in ground public transport.
Public Welfare— with a remarkably lame response to Hurricane Katrina, the administration demonstrated that they could not be trusted with emergency crisis management.

In short, they did nothing except collect pay checks. Perhaps Americans will pay more attention to our civic responsibilities the next time we hand someone the keys.

Voting Machines: Thank Heavens for Academia

vote button Often times it is said that the purpose of academic research is to seek the truth, no matter where it leads. The purpose of industry representatives is often to obscure the truths they do not like. Such apparently was the case at a recent hearing of the Texas House of Representatives’ Committee on Elections. These are the guys who are nominally supposed to ensure that each citizen of Texas gets an opportunity to vote, and that his or her vote is counted. The committee provides oversight and legislation for electronic voting.

How secure is your electronic vote, compared to a paper ballet? Can you have an electronic hanging chad? A group of researchers have spent a fair amount of time answering that very question. Drs Ed Felton & Dan Wallach, as well as others, have looked at numerous different voting systems, and found all sorts of little problems. For instance, some voting machines are susceptible to virii, and if they get it they can give it to their peers. That’s not a problem, according to the manufacturers’ spokesmen. But who are we to believe? An academician whose purpose is to advance the state of the art and find truths, or a spokesman, whose purpose is to obscure them?

There are mistakes made in many, if not all elections and surveys. Here are just a few questions:

What is an acceptable rate of error? As 2000 demonstrated, even a hand count of paper ballots can have problem.
Rather than prevaricate, why shouldn’t the vendors of these voting machines fix the problems that have been reported?
What sort of regulations are appropriate? The spokesmen all but demanded a common standard in as much as they complained that there was none.

Conveniently Dr. Wallach has an answer to that last question. His testimony recommends just that.

For what it’s worth, as an expatriate I do not expect to use a voting machine for quite some time, but rather a paper ballot.