NEWS: Justice is Served, “Conservatives” are Pissed

Thank God. This shit has pissed me off for a while now.

I always love when some cries "Judicial Activism". It is the courts job to evaluate the constitutionality of a law when it is put before them. Currently it is they war cry of conservatives (but I'm sure liberals will use it too), they bellow when a decision goes against them. Legislating from the bench is just the court doing its job by being the check & balance to the legislative and executive branches.

So, they're Constitutional fundamentalists? Or am I missing something here? I've been wondering about that for a while now.

</blatant threadjack>

The AJC Editorial board conservative? They have been called a lot of names over the years, but conservative isn't one of them.

Let me state for the record that I grew up in Atlanta and worked for the AJC during grad school.

A little history...

The Atlanta Journal & Constitution (AJC) is owned by Cox Newspapers, a division of Cox Enterprises. Cox Enterprises was founded by James M. Cox, the democratic nominee for the 1920 Presidential election against Republican Warren G. Harding. A little known politician (at the time) Franklin Delano Roosevelt was his running mate.

The company has been in the hands of the Cox family since its founding. Anne Cox Chambers and her sister Barbara Cox Anthony were the majority shareholders of Cox, owning 97 percent of the company. Barbara Cox Chambers passed away in 2007 and all shares owned by her were bequeathed to her sister Anne. Anne's son, James Kennedy, is currently the Chairman and CEO.

I say all this because it is important to note that the AJC is one of the most liberal papers in the country. Anne Cox Chambers is a billionaire who donates heavily to the Democrats and the makup of the editorial board at the AJC has always been constructed to reflect democratic ideals. The paper has never endorsed a Republican in a general election and consistently slams Sonny Perdue - the first Republican governor in Georgia since Reconstruction (for those of you who aren't up on your history, Reconstruction encompasses the period of time after the Civil War when the states that seceded from the Union were placed under marshall law by the US Government). [ the previous statement was not intended to be a slam at Reconstruction in the South, but is intended as a simple statement of fact ]

I agree that Wilson was charged under a poorly written law and the State Legislature (controlled by Republicans at the moment) did the right thing in rewriting the law. Those politicians and activists that pressured the state to change the law and to challenge the lengthy incarceation of Wilson did exactly the right thing.

However, the State legislature did not make the change in law retroactive. Why not you ask? Because the judiciary in the State begged the legislature not to. The judiciary was very vocal in opposing retroaction because they were afraid that such a change would generate a flood of appeals for those convicted under the previous law. In short, the new law might be applied appropriately to the Wilson case, but it could then also be applied to a lot of other cases - cases where someone who deserves to be in jail is released. The legislature listened and responded in favor of the judiciary. So, who was right - the legislature or the State Supreme Court? Only time will tell.

The point? Conservatives were responsible for changing the law. A conservative was responsible for signing the bill into law. Everything else related to this ordeal involved liberal Democrats. The State Attorney General, a african-american male Democrat, pressured the parents of the girl in question to press charges, pushed the case through the courts to obtain a conviction, lobbied for a stiff penalty, and fought vigorously to keep the law as it was written. The State Supreme Court, comprised of liberal democrats, found in favor of Wilson and ordered his release. The editorial board of the AJC, comprised solely of liberal Democrats, found issue with this decision and published an opinion saying that the court's decision was "legislating from the bench".

And the response on this site to all of that? "Justice was served, Conservatives are pissed."

In this specific case, it isn't conservatives raising hell. Instead, it is liberal democrats raising hell with each other.

I'm glad for Wilson. I guess he has no chance of any sort of compensation for this, though. That "felon" jacket is always a good way of furthering a person's career.

1) I'm glad that the Cox family doesn't abuse its ownership of this paper.

2) If you want the headline to read differently, write your own articles.

That's interesting. This guy wrote the piece. Sure doesn't seem like a "liberal democrat" to me. You won't find many "liberal democrats" adopting originalism as a constitutional philosophy.

Everything else you said was, again, interesting, but a misread of the story. As bean pointed out, I was railing against Judicial Conservatives and strict constructionists. The headline just read better with the quotations. Deal with it.

Gotta agree with you there!

Yes. That's exactly it, in a manner of speaking. They are people who believe that the Constitution should be interpreted only through the lens of what the framers of the document believed. Of course, there's no way of knowing what they believed and no standard "belief" even if there was, but that doesn't stop them from inserting their own ideas of what that belief is.

They also now control 4/9ths of the Supreme Court, despite the fact that they are very much a fringe legal philosophy.

They're actually Constitutiofascists.

That confirmed my suspicions. Thank you.

WHAT SCHOOL DID YOU GO TO!?!?!

I was really happy last Friday when I read he was getting out.
Sometimes justice prevails, even in Georgia.

Ya, I've heard about that outbreak, even watched the video on it. And as much as I'd hate to admit this because I like to think better of those in charge, there is definitely some racism here. However, one thing about the Rockdale incident is that there was interracial sex going on along with everything else (and I will not go into detail as I hadn't even heard of some of the shit they were doing). I think the difference in this case over the case in Rockdale is that it was caught on film. Without the film that could be used as proof of his guilt, there probably would have been no case. So to conclude, if you're going to have consensual sex with someone who is legally a minor, turn the camera off.

Note* The author of this post in no way condones the act of sex with a minor.

I'm sure sombody has already beaten me to it, but +1

Took the words right out of my fingers.

This blows.

what I meant is that people, black or white/whatever that are the victim of a hate crime (specifically a particularly racist hate crime), might feel scared of other people of the same race or feel justified to hate them all for what their attacker(s) did to them. EmotedCreation hit the note...people of old that are familiar to being the target of racism might hold a grudge against people of the race that targeted them decades ago. I know several people down here that are like that. They still go around calling African Americans "colored people", and it disgusts me.

as stated in the article, Bean, "the Georgia state legislature amended their child molestation law to insert a "Romeo and Juliet" provision. The provision made an exception where if the "assailant" was less than four years older than the "victim" and the sex was consensual, the crime would be treated as a misdemeanor rather than a felony. But when they enacted the law, they specifically declined to make the law apply retroactively." which as I understood it, meant that other young people in Wilson's same situation were s.o.l. because the court didn't want to deal with numerous past cases. That's what I meant by "red tape". Being that it's not retroactive, is an appeal even possible?

If I misunderstood, I apologize. That was just my interpretation of it.

These "people of old" were the target of racism decades ago and that is why they go around using "colored people", . . .and you are disgusted?

wow, just wow.
Your statements are so contorted I don't even know which part to address. I think you've been told before but I'll start with , Your anecdotal stories are meaningless and generally have been making you look like a blithering idiot. Maybe it you just cut them from your posts you could be more comprehensible.

It's a wandering pronoun problem.

In short, she's saying "racism begets racism," and that's probably true as it goes, but neither is it a phenomenon solely from "days of old," and grrowler seems a little confused on that. On the one hand, she made the valid point that most of the people viewing the firehosing of demonstrators (though she didn't mention the firehosed themselves) are still alive. We are roughly a generation and a half removed from a time when people were terrorized against their right to vote.

On the other hand, she has lost me a little bit on her latest point, which may just be parallel to her last point.

grrowler: Not to be a dick, but when words like "they" and "them" are being employed to refer to different entities within the same sentence--or, really, the same paragraph--the meaning can become very confused.

No, you got it right. If other's have exhausted their appeals, they're screwed. If they haven't they can appeal to the Georgia Supreme Court (or maybe even SCOTUS, a lawyer will have to fill in the specifics on the appeals process) and have it reviewed as a violation of the "cruel and unusual punishment" clause. I'm guessing the reason why the judiciary didn't want it applied retroactively is because the percentage of individuals who deserve to be in jail (i.e. actual sexual predators) far outweighs the individuals to whom a "C/UP" standard could be applied. Thus, just making it easier to just review unique cases such as Wilson.

What makes your comment confusing is where and how you placed it into you comment as a whole IIRC either that or the conclusions you drew from it. I don't really remember and don't really care to go back an look.