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You have yet to explain the before/after distinction which troubles you about this law. Your first complaint was that it required law enforcement officers to enforce laws with which they might not be in agreement. Above you are admitting that this has always been the case.
So...what is the basis for your complaint? They are now doing what they have always done....
The fight against the Fugitive Slave Law was not handled among those Northerners charged with enforcing it, they had no choice. It was handled by nullifying Northern juries who could...and did..do something about it. Regardless of the evidence in a case, regardless of proof of ownership and establishing the slave status of the "fugitive", Northern juries refused to convict.
All that makes jury nullification sound like a valuable weapon for a democracy, except of course it also was employed for less glorious causes. Throughout the Jim Crow period, Southern juries tended to ignore all evidence which supported a black person's claims in a trial, as well as ignoring all flaws, no matter how obvious, in the testimony of white people.
The true issue which you have raised here is the eternal conflict which arises between justice and the law. The law is the tool we have crafted in order to bring about justice, but what do we do in a situation where the application of the law will result in an injustice? Are we obligated to use the tool no matter the outcome, or are we free to disregard the tool when it seems unsuitable for the desired outcome? And if we are free to ignore the tool when we think an exception needs to be made, does that not reduce the value and meaning of the tool to almost nothing?
There is no happy resolution for the above, only perpetual argument and the serial introduction of examples where nullification produced a just, or unjust, outcome.
I'm always non selected for jury duty because I raise the above issue when I am asked if I would have any problems following the judge's instructions. I tell the court that I believe my highest duty is to the goal...justice..and that if I found myself in a situation where I thought that the law and justice were in conflict, I would ignore the law in favor of justice. In short, I'm telling them that I plan to treat instructions from the bench as optional and the laws as suggestions. It is always.."Thanks Mr. Stander, see you later" after that.
I have no problem what so ever with the law. If it meets constitutional muster, so be it we must obey it. a law can't be good or bad it just has to be constitutional. Having said that will, we forever and ever look at South Americans who walk across the US border as criminal? What I am thinking about is more philosophical in terms of who we fear, i.e., criminals. Technically this law has always been in effect in my state or other states were I have been stopped for resembling an individual who committed a crime. I was stopped detained checked out and let go, it’s no big deal if the law allows it.
Last edited by thriftylefty; 04-30-2010 at 02:42 PM..
It seems they are both constitutional on the surface, based on the status on a person, and require a local law enforcement to work for the federal government. They also require an officer to enforce a law he may be morally against.
First off, do you know anything about the new Arizona law? This very well might be like the Healthcare Laws, people complained about it, but most people didn't know anything about it. If they would have known, they really would have complained.
Not the same with the new Arizona law, it merely makes enforcing existing laws easier. and requires police officers to do some checking if they have certain suspicions. If they don't have suspicions, they don't have to do anything.
May surprise you to know that most State Police Officers don't have to enforce any laws they don't want to enforce. In Oregon the only law an officer is required by law to enforce is one against gambling devices. Yep, sounds kinda funny, but if he see's a murder, nothing in the law requires him to do anything about it. If it were found out that happened and he did nothing he would loose his job, but he wouldn't be breaking any laws by doing nothing.
New York Times printed in part the following info about the new Arizona law.
ON Friday, Gov. Jan Brewer of Arizona signed a law — SB 1070 — that prohibits the harboring of illegal aliens and makes it a state crime for an alien to commit certain federal immigration crimes. It also requires police officers who, in the course of a traffic stop or other law-enforcement action, come to a “reasonable suspicion” that a person is an illegal alien verify the person’s immigration status with the federal government.
Predictably, groups that favor relaxed enforcement of immigration laws, including the American Civil Liberties Union and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, insist the law is unconstitutional. Less predictably, President Obama declared it “misguided” and said the Justice Department would take a look.
Presumably, the government lawyers who do so will actually read the law, something its critics don’t seem to have done. The arguments we’ve heard against it either misrepresent its text or are otherwise inaccurate. As someone who helped draft the statute, I will rebut the major criticisms individually:
It is unfair to demand that aliens carry their documents with them. It is true that the Arizona law makes it a misdemeanor for an alien to fail to carry certain documents. “Now, suddenly, if you don’t have your papers ... you’re going to be harassed,” the president said. “That’s not the right way to go.” But since 1940, it has been a federal crime for aliens to fail to keep such registration documents with them. The Arizona law simply adds a state penalty to what was already a federal crime. Moreover, as anyone who has traveled abroad knows, other nations have similar documentation requirements.
“Reasonable suspicion” is a meaningless term that will permit police misconduct. Over the past four decades, federal courts have issued hundreds of opinions defining those two words. The Arizona law didn’t invent the concept: Precedents list the factors that can contribute to reasonable suspicion; when several are combined, the “totality of circumstances” that results may create reasonable suspicion that a crime has been committed.
For example, the Arizona law is most likely to come into play after a traffic stop. A police officer pulls a minivan over for speeding. A dozen passengers are crammed in. None has identification. The highway is a known alien-smuggling corridor. The driver is acting evasively. Those factors combine to create reasonable suspicion that the occupants are not in the country legally.
The law will allow police to engage in racial profiling. Actually, Section 2 provides that a law enforcement official “may not solely consider race, color or national origin” in making any stops or determining immigration status. In addition, all normal Fourth Amendment protections against profiling will continue to apply. In fact, the Arizona law actually reduces the likelihood of race-based harassment by compelling police officers to contact the federal government as soon as is practicable when they suspect a person is an illegal alien, as opposed to letting them make arrests on their own assessment.
It is unfair to demand that people carry a driver’s license. Arizona’s law does not require anyone, alien or otherwise, to carry a driver’s license. Rather, it gives any alien with a license a free pass if his immigration status is in doubt. Because Arizona allows only lawful residents to obtain licenses, an officer must presume that someone who produces one is legally in the country.
State governments aren’t allowed to get involved in immigration, which is a federal matter. While it is true that Washington holds primary authority in immigration, the Supreme Court since 1976 has recognized that states may enact laws to discourage illegal immigration without being pre-empted by federal law. As long as Congress hasn’t expressly forbidden the state law in question, the statute doesn’t conflict with federal law and Congress has not displaced all state laws from the field, it is permitted. That’s why Arizona’s 2007 law making it illegal to knowingly employ unauthorized aliens was sustained by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
In sum, the Arizona law hardly creates a police state. It takes a measured, reasonable step to give Arizona police officers another tool when they come into contact with illegal aliens during their normal law enforcement duties.
And it’s very necessary: Arizona is the ground zero of illegal immigration. Phoenix is the hub of human smuggling and the kidnapping capital of America, with more than 240 incidents reported in 2008. It’s no surprise that Arizona’s police associations favored the bill, along with 70 percent of Arizonans.
President Obama and the Beltway crowd feel these problems can be taken care of with “comprehensive immigration reform” — meaning amnesty and a few other new laws. But we already have plenty of federal immigration laws on the books, and the typical illegal alien is guilty of breaking many of them. What we need is for the executive branch to enforce the laws that we already have.
Unfortunately, the Obama administration has scaled back work-site enforcement and otherwise shown it does not consider immigration laws to be a high priority. It is any wonder the Arizona Legislature, at the front line of the immigration issue, sees things differently?
Kris W. Kobach, a law professor at the University of Missouri at Kansas City, was Attorney General John ********’s chief adviser on immigration law and border security from 2001 to 2003.
Did you really suppose that you could raise this topic without having it turn into a modern political debate, thrifty?
I'm not a lawyer, but I don't think your laws really compare in most aspects. Those at whom they are directed are in vastly different situations and are, if apprehended, presented with vastly different outcomes. In the antebellum period, the persons apprehended were natives of the country, considered property (like a wagon or a pitchfork), and apt to be compelled against their will to perform further uncompensated labor. Today, the persons apprehended are not natives of the country, are no one's property, and at worst, will receive free transportation home. In the older case, escaped slaves had committed a crime (probably theft by stealing themselves, I'd hazard a guess), and would actually be punished for it. In today's case, illegal aliens will not only not be punished, but will be rewarded with a free service. The relative harshness is far out of proportion.
The question you are not asking, but perhaps should, is whether this is illegal search and seizure. But no one will ask that in government, because these days we don't even bother with it. The bottom line today is if government wants to search and seize, it does. Here's what it says, in case anyone still thinks it matters:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
The question here is whether asking someone (who isn't doing anything else wrong and is currently minding his or her own business) for identification constitutes 'unreasonable search.' To me, it's not even a question--it is always, in my view, unreasonable for police to demand identification from anyone who is not doing anything wrong. But as you can see, the government makes the rules, and the government isn't going to decide to limit itself, any more than it is prone to decide against itself in any other matter. Moreover, the populace concurs with the government and tolerates its interpretation, which is basically that police have very liberal powers of deciding when it's necessary to require identification. Thus, while this Amendment in my view clearly applies, it doesn't matter. That said, that is a common factor with the Fugitive Slave Law, because the prime reason to suspect someone of being an escaped slave was skin tone, and if one were never a slave, how does one produce papers in 1855 to prove this? That was before the driver's license became our default ID card.
This law has one connection to the fugitive slave laws. Like them it allows people to bypass state government or local communities that refuse to enforce specific laws. Which is what the fugitive slave laws did when states refused to return what was legally property. A provision of the rules permit AZ political units to be sued by citizens when they fail to carry out (or actually hinder) federal immigration rules.
Ignoring that state and local government is not supposed to carry out federal laws.
, how does one produce papers in 1855 to prove this? That was before the driver's license became our default ID card.
There was indeed Papers that a "freeman" was obliged to carry on his person at all time It is my understanding that they were issued to him by a municipality.
There was indeed Papers that a "freeman" was obliged to carry on his person at all time It is my understanding that they were issued to him by a municipality.
You mean a free black person? I'm assuming that freckled illiterate navvies from Mayo named Callahan did not carry around Papers. Was this true nationwide?
This law has one connection to the fugitive slave laws. Like them it allows people to bypass state government or local communities that refuse to enforce specific laws. Which is what the fugitive slave laws did when states refused to return what was legally property. A provision of the rules permit AZ political units to be sued by citizens when they fail to carry out (or actually hinder) federal immigration rules.
Ignoring that state and local government is not supposed to carry out federal laws.
The fugitive slave law also allowed the powerful south to leverage enough power to get the federal government to pass a law that only they would be the beneficiary of. I think it also served their (the South) economic interest. The fugitive slave law would potentially keep the value of slaves from dropping. The North had Irish immigrants (as slaves) by not enforcing this law they could wrest economic power from the South at a time when cotton was king. I think the Arizona law may have some economic beneficiaries too.
You mean a free black person? I'm assuming that freckled illiterate navvies from Mayo named Callahan did not carry around Papers. Was this true nationwide?
a "freeman" was a black person who was not a Slave. All blacks were considered to be Slaves unless they could prove the contary.
It seems they are both constitutional on the surface, based on the status on a person, and require a local law enforcement to work for the federal government. They also require an officer to enforce a law he may be morally against.
Virtually anyone can be morally opposed to any law.
The Arizona is making it illegal to do something that is already illegal..
They're doing it because the federal government refuses to do it's job.
Would you allow police to decide they don't want to enforce any other law they don't agree with? That's not their job. They're hired to enforce laws they like or dislike.
It is very common for police to refuse to enforce a law.
Here's an example. I'm on the "do not call" list. It is unlawful for a telemarketer to call my phone number, and the telemarketer can be prosecuted for a criminal offense if he does. What do you think I will be told if I phone 911 and tell them that I just got an illegal call from a telemarketer?
Furthermore, individual police officers are not free agents. They are supervised through a chain of command, and someone at the top makes priority assignments about what laws are to be enforced and by whom and where and when. Yes, a beat cop in general responds to apparent offenses as they arise. But plainclothes detectives on their way to investigate a crime scene are not obliged to stop along the way and issue tickets to illegally parked cars.
I was once leaving a baseball stadium, an overheard a cop doing traffic control say to another one "Look, that's an illegal window tint. If I were working traffic, I'd run him in."
The mere fact that an officer is authorized to investigate what may appear to be suspicious activity does not compel him to do so. At least, it never did before Arizona.
Under the Arizona law, as I understand it, this scenario can occur. A detective is driving to a crime scene, and at a traffuc light, see a Hispanic man standing on the corner. He proceeds to the crime scene. The Hispanic man later proves to be an illegal alien. The detective can be sued for $5,000 by a citizen for failing to investigate and apprehend where there is "reasonable suspicion".
Last edited by jtur88; 04-30-2010 at 03:52 PM..
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Can the new Arizona law...
