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: Governing Through Crime

"The unneccessary cruelty of the law"

By Jonathan Simor

The words of the Honorable Jack B. Weinstein, one of the last great lions of the federal judiciary; a living example of what judges were like before governing through crime (see chapter 4) made the very nature of the judicial role (equity, rationality, deliberation) appear subversive in our "war on crime." Weinstein is not, apparently, the first judge to be quesy about mandatory federal sentences for child pornography of at least five years in jail to a person whose only misconduct is having a sexual attraction to children and addressing that attraction by possessing child pornography. He is, however, one of the very few to criticize the law, which suggests that life-tenure is not enough to assure a robust defense of legality, the imagination itself can be crushed by the politics of crime fear...continue to full post

Full post as published by Governing Through Crime on May 22, 2010 (boomark / email).