Category Archives: Law: Everything Else

The Miami Herald's best columnist, Carl Hiassen, The An arbitrary deportation campaign writes about the Aschroft Justice Department's assinine campaign to deport productive, legal, US residents:

So this is the new America. Our government wants to deport an Oregon woman who was convicted 11 years ago of growing six marijuana plants.

Kari Rein, a Norwegian citizen, had never been in trouble before, and hadn't been in trouble since. That changed Dec. 30.

She, her husband and two children were returning from a vacation to Norway when she was questioned at the Seattle-Tacoma Airport by officers of the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

They had run Rein's name through a computer and found the old marijuana conviction. They asked her to step into a private room.

''And that,'' says her husband, James Jungwirth, “was the last time we saw her for three weeks.''

The sentencing judge didn't even think six pot plants for home use merited a jail sentence. But the loonies in Main Justice don't care. The husband and two kids are US citizens. But Main Justice doesn't care.

Remember folks, all this is being done in your name by your government. Be proud. Or throw the rascals out.

And, as Karl Hiaasen says,

Don't think it couldn't happen to someone you know. This is the new America.

My erudite colleague David Abraham, himself a guest worker at Princeton this semester, has a great column at the top of the New York Times op-ed page today, American Jobs but Not the American Dream.

In it, he persuasively describes the Bush proposal as “a classic guest worker program on the European model” and then sets out all the ills that flow from adopting guest worker programs — “drawbacks [that] far outweigh their advantages.”

Among the problems — large foreign low-wage populations tend to create ghettos; once people set down roots, they don't want to go home; making residence depend on employment tends to create opportunities for exploitation by the employer; the US's lack of strong labor unions makes this problem likely to be even worse here than it was in European countries such as Germany that tried the guest worker concept.

And, as David so eloquently put it,

President Bush has clearly expressed his intention to put employers in charge: guest workers will be selected by employers and will be able to remain in the United States only so long as they stay with the employer who brought them. This is a sure recipe not only for the exploitation of these “guests” but also for the depression of American wages generally, especially among those who can least afford it — many of them immigrants.

The United States has always been a “welcoming country,” as the president said, “open to the talents and dreams of the world.” But this plan is an abandonment of America's ideals, not an expression of them. It values immigrants' talents over their dreams. Instead of hope, it offers them simply a job.

Missteps Seen in Muslim Chaplain's Spy Case. This New York Times story doesn't actually say much that is new (cf. Case Against Capt. Yee Starts to Smell Like a Train Wreck almost a month ago), but it's nice to see it on the front page.

The only things in the article that I hadn't heard before are (1) that the regulars are pointing the finger at the reservists as the cause of the erroneous and/or botched prosecution: “Reservists serving as counterintelligence officers at the camp were apprehensive that they might miss some sign of infiltration of the base but were relatively inexperienced in how to handle such matters” and (2) the lurid details of just how nasty the conditions of confinement were when Capt. Yee was in solitary.

Even if all the charges against Capt. Yee are dismissed, his marriage has been perhaps irretrievably damaged, he spent weeks in solitiary in shackles, treated worse than the inmantes in Gitmo (who are at least told the direction of Mecca), and his career as an officer—probably not irrelevant to a West Point graduate?—is presumably finished. And it's hard to see how he'll get out of the adultury charge in light of the testimony (put into public evidence first in order to cause him the maximum personal damage). Ok, this isn't the modern Dreyfus Affair, but it's not a good advertisement for US military justice either.

FEC Fines Ashcroft's Senate Bid For Breach … and ….

Judge Rebukes Ashcroft for Gag Violation. Personally, I think this deserved much more than a slap on the wrist. The AG should be held to the highest standards and ought to set a better example than this.

Please understand: there have been a lot of bad AG's over the years. Ed Meese. John Mitchell. But there have also been a lot of good ones. We shouldn't have to settle for this.

Prosecutors Say It's Unclear Papers Chaplain Carried Were Classified. You can never be sure about a legal case you read about in the papers. There's so much texture and detail that gets lost in even the best newspaper report. That said, the case against Capt. Yee is giving off a certain stench of shambolic military CYA.

Would a white Christian chaplain get smeared with accusations of being a spy, get threatened with the death penalty, get locked up in solitary for three months, all over documents that the government isn't even sure are classified? As for the adultery charge, note that it's an offense only if it interfered with discipline—and apparently the affair was neither in the chain of command nor at all public. And by getting that testimony in first, then recessing the trial, the government manages a second round of strafe-and-smear.

Based on the news coverage, it sure looks like some combination of three things is going on: (1) Major government vindictiveness against someone who was effectively ministering to the Gitmo detainees and/or major government anti-Muslim bigotry [plus shades of Wen Ho Lee?]; (2) All that, plus the government is now throwing up whatever charges it can to cover up the fact that it smeared an officer without reason; (3) the prosecutors really think he's guilty but cannot prove it and/or are totally incompetent.

The information that is public makes the 'really guilty' story seem much the least likely alternative.

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Spotted via Dan Gillmore (“As a colleague said when he sent this link out in an e-mail, he had to double check the date of this posting to make sure it wasn't an April Fool's joke.”): Digital Photography Review reports on Microsoft's FAT charges:

Microsoft will soon be charging manufacturers of flash memory card devices and those which use them $0.25 per unit or up to $250,000 to use the FAT filesystem. For those who are unaware the FAT file system was developed by Microsoft back in 1976 and has become the standard file system for all digital still cameras. Microsoft owns patents to the FAT File System but for many years hasn't even hinted that it may one day decide to charge for it. These new licenses appear to come into effect immediately and specifically make mention of 'compact flash memory cards' and 'portable digital still cameras'.

Patents, unlike copyrights, are only for a limited time. Even so, there's something unsavory about creating a de facto industry standard, never once suggesting you might charge for the use of it, sitting back and watching everyone adopt it, then sending out bills. I don't know any patent law, but there ought to be some sort of equitable limit on this for not just sleeping on your rights, but actively allowing the world to think a standard is in the public domain.