MissTyrios dot com

In a decision that made me want to make out with certain Justices, the Supreme Court has issued a bitch slap to Bush, ruling that using military tribunals for prisoners at Guantanamo Bay violates both the Geneva Convention and American military law.

In the majority opinion, Justice Stevens declared flatly that “the military commission at issue lacks the power to proceed because its structure and procedure violate” both the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which governs the American military’s legal system, and the Geneva Convention.

Justice Stevens rejected the administration’s claims that the tribunals were justified both by President Bush’s inherent powers as commander in chief and by the resolution passed by Congress authorizing the use of force after the Sept. 11. There is nothing in the resolution’s legislative history “even hinting” that such an expansion of the president’s powers was considered, he wrote.

I not only love the substance of this opinion (due process is sort of an important concept to me), but I truly love that the Court put Bush and his dangerously enormous head in its proper place. Michael Greenberg, a terrorism law professor, told the New York Times that the decision could have come out the same way based on “technicalities,” demonstrating that the Court chose to make a statement by so broadly rebuking Bush and his abuse of executive power.

My guess is that most of the talking heads are going to start spewing crap about terrorists and threats to the American people and that they should be punished, for fuck’s sake! But that just misses the point entirely - if the prisoners are the horrible terrorists that the administration claims they are (and there is a lot pointing to the fact that they are not), then come to that conclusion through the proper process of law. Bring them to trial, with lawyers, evidence, and all the processes that the American legal system has in place. If a fair trial results in a finding of terrorism, then deal with it then. But proclaiming them to be terrorists is not enough. To just say they are terrorists and are thus not deserving of legal processes is to puke on the Constitution and the American legal system in its entirety. And thankfully, the Supreme Court has recognized that.

Today, the United States Supreme Court simultaneously boosted my faith and broke my heart. Sadly, my anger at the decision that the Kansas system of imposing the death penalty was constitutional far outweighed my slight happiness that the Sixth Amendment right to counsel was expanded just a hair.

In 2004, the Kansas Supreme Court struck down the state’s practice of allowing the death penalty to be imposed even when a jury finds that mitigating circumstances are exactly equal with the aggravating circumstances in a capital case. Call me crazy (and liberal!), but I think that if the needle is precisely in the middle, the state should err on the side of “not death.” But no, they don’t have to, according to the US Supreme Court. And the swing vote was none other than newbie Alito, a practicing member of the Catholic Church (which, last time I checked, tended to frown upon the death penalty wholeheartedly). But, oh, Justice Souter - I adore your fighting, geriatric heart. You refuse to give up.

“In the face of evidence of the hazards of capital prosecution,” he said [in dissent], “maintaining a sentencing system mandating death when the sentencer finds the evidence pro and con to be in equipoise is obtuse by any moral or social measure.”

Scalia, who wrote the majority opinion, apparently took exception to this passion, stating that there has never been a single case of an innocent person being executed. Great, Scalia - so as long as the person is guilty and the mitigating circumstances of his or her situation are exactly equal to any aggravating circumstances, it will be your thumb on those scales of justice, sending him straight to the gallows (or the surgical table with a needle as the case may be). I’m glad you can be so righteous about that.

In one of the other cases the Court decided today, though, the Justices held that a criminal defendant who has been denied their choice of lawyer and forced to have another one can have a conviction overturned. The Court held that the Sixth Amendment right to counsel (one of my personal favorites) is so basic that such a denial can only be remedied with the resulting conviction being overturned. In a bizzaro world of SCOTUS, Scalia wrote this decision as well, stating that the right to counsel “commands, not that a trial be fair, but that a particular guarantee of fairness be provided — to wit, that the accused be defended by the counsel he believes to be best.” Perhaps Scalia can sleep because he is so satisfied that he is ensuring the fairness of proceedings that, if it comes down to death anyway…bring it on.