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Originally posted by PirateCat:
I was kid when that all happened. I lived a couple counties away. He is a real piece of work. And yet in the mid 70s some woman married him. What's with women falling for these monsters. There were no hippies that murdered his wife and kids. He just killed his wife then the kids so they couldn't testify against him. The MPs blew the crime scene.

"Battle of Serenity, Mal. Besides Zoe here, how many-" "I'm talkin at you! How many men in your platoon came out of their alive".

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Originally posted by PirateCat:
JSF, Well you and PN are the only two I know that believe he is innocent.

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My name is Jeffrey Deskovic. At age 17, I was wrongfully convicted of murder and rape, a conviction that was based upon a coerced, false confession, the fabrication of evidence, prosecutorial misconduct and fraud by a medical examiner. I was cleared 16 years later -- almost three years ago -- when DNA evidence proved my innocence, while also identifying the real perpetrator, who subsequently confessed to the crime. Since my release, I have made it my life's mission to battle against wrongful convictions and fight for legislation that would minimize the chances of what happened to me happening to someone else. It is this fight that compels me to speak out about Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor.


Before I was exonerated, I sought out every legal avenue I could to win my freedom. I defended my innocence before the New York Appellate Division, raising such proof as the fact that the physical evidence found did not match me and arguing that the police violated my rights by coercing a false confession from me at the age of 16. The court ruled against me 5 to 0, concluding that there was nothing wrong with my interrogation and stating that there was "overwhelming evidence of guilt," despite the fact that there was no evidence beyond my forced confession. In truth, the DNA and the hairs found on the victim's body were evidence of my innocence.

When my lawyer was denied a chance to reargue the case on the grounds that the court's decision ran counter to the law and to the facts, we moved to the Court Of Appeals, the highest court in New York. I filed a Writ Of Habeas Corpus, in which I argued that my conviction was a violation of the U.S. Constitution. The year was 1997. The year before, Congress had passed Bill Clinton's Anti-Terrorism-Effective-Death-Penalty Act (often called AEDPA in legalese), which mandated that from then on, all state prisoners would have only one year to appeal to a federal court after being denied an appeal by their state's highest court. As a result, there was some confusion in the federal courts regarding the filing procedure; it was not clear how this new law would apply to cases already in the system. Different jurisdictions were answering the question in different ways; my lawyer called the court clerk and asked whether it was enough that my petition be post-marked on the due date, or if it had to physically be filed and in the building on the due date. The court clerk told my attorney that it was enough that it be postmarked. That information turned out to be false. Consequently, my petition arrived four days too late.

Westchester District Attorney Jeanine Pirro seized on the late petition, arguing that the court should dismiss my case without even considering my innocence claim. The court sided agreed. I then appealed my case to the 2nd Circuit. It was there that I first met Judge Sonia Sotomayor.

Judge Sotomayor condemned me to serve a life sentence for a murder and rape that I did not commit....

www.jeffreydeskovicspeaks.org

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Sotomayor Would Not Concede a Right to Self-Defense

When Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) asked Wednesday whether citizens have a right to self-defense, Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor told the Senate Judiciary Committee, “I don’t know.”

Coburn had asked, “As a citizen of this country, do you believe innately in my ability to have self-defense of myself – personal self-defense? Do I have a right to personal self-defense?”

In reply, Sotomayor said that, “I’m trying to think if I remember a case where the Supreme Court has addressed that particular question. Is there a constitutional right to self-defense? And I can’t think of one. I could be wrong, but I can’t think of one.” She then went on to explain that self-defense rights are usually defined by state law.”

Unsatisfied, Coburn continued, “But do you have an opinion, of whether or not in this country I personally, as an individual citizen, have a right to self-defense?”

Sotomayor responded, “I – as I said, I don’t know.”

Later in the exchange, Coburn said, “I wasn’t asking about the legal question. I’m asking your personal opinion.”

“But that is an abstract question with no particular meaning to me,” Sotomayor relied.

William van Alstyne, a professor at the William and Mary School of Law, said that Sotomayor was technically justified in her answer. “It’s actually a more subtle and elusive question than most people would even reasonably understand,” he said.

Van Alstyne told CNSNews.com that the issue has not come directly before the Supreme Court, and states do indeed have different laws regarding when a person has a right to use deadly force (some say there is a “duty to retreat” if retreat is a safe alternative to deadly force, others say there is not).

However, van Alstyne also said that the court has made rulings that indicate a basic right to defend one’s life.

“Interestingly enough,” van Alstyne said, “I think you may find it, as I would, in the court’s abortion cases.”

He asserted that, “even under Roe v. Wade and all of the other decisions, once the fetus has hit the seventh or, at latest, eighth month, it is deemed quote ‘viable.’”

Continuing this line of reasoning, he stated that, “the woman may, nevertheless, get a physician’s willing help to off the fetus – the viable offspring – if it’s necessary to do so either to save her own life or merely to keep her physical health unimpaired.”

“The Roe court,” van Alstyne claimed, “and the current court, in the majority opinion has taken the position that your right to ‘protect your own life’ as a woman gives you an entitlement to kill the viable human being that you carry.”

“That’s an approximate decision,” he concluded, “that’s at least relevant in the discussion you and I are holding.”

As for his own personal opinion, van Alstyne said that, “for the most part, in my own view, the dicta of the court, the history of the treatment of self-preservation, and of constitutional reasoning and text, inevitably lead to the sensible conclusion that indeed there is a fundamental right to save your life by killing another if those are the alternatives confronting one.”

Van Alstyne also expressed the idea that the right to self-defense is so basic as to be implied by the very nature of the Constitution itself.

“If you go back to the philosophic grounds of the Constitution, a social compact, the theory is that we yield power to others, namely a democratic majority, because it’s necessary so that we don’t live according to a law of the jungle – but if government is unable to protect us from the threat of others to kill, why then we never gave to government the power to deprive us of our natural right of human self defense.”

“So,” van Alstyne concluded, “it is always implicit in the social compact that indeed, if it’s necessary to save our lives those of our family, why then we revert to that natural right, and it is protected by the Constitution.”

www.cnsnews.com/public/content/article.aspx?RsrcID=51222

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