In Dissents, Sonia Sotomayor Takes On the Criminal Justice System.
'The Supreme Court term had barely gotten underway in early November when Justice Sonia Sotomayor issued her first dissent. A police officers rogue conduct, she wrote, had left a man dead thanks to a shoot first, think later approach to policing.
Justice Sotomayor would go on to write eight dissents before the term ended last Monday. Read together, they are a remarkable body of work from an increasingly skeptical student of the criminal justice system, one who has concluded that it is clouded by arrogance and machismo and warped by bad faith and racism.
Only Justice Clarence Thomas wrote more dissents last term, but his agenda was different. Laconic on the bench, prolific on the page and varied in his interests, Justice Thomas is committed to understanding the Constitution as did the men who drafted and adopted it centuries ago.
Justice Sotomayors concerns are more contemporary and more focused. Her dissents this term came mostly in criminal cases, and were informed as much by events in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014 as by those in Philadelphia in 1787.
She dissented again in January, from Justice Antonin Scalias final majority opinion. Joined by no other member of the court, she said the majority in three death penalty cases might have been swayed by the baroque depravity of the crimes.
The standard adage teaches that hard cases make bad law, she wrote. I fear that these cases suggest a corollary: Shocking cases make too much law.'>>>
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/05/us/politics/in-dissents-sonia-sotomayor-takes-on-the-criminal-justice-system.html?
malthaussen
(17,195 posts)... is committed to understanding the Constitution, as written or otherwise. They're being nice. As for Sonia Sotomayor, I agree with her completely, and think her skepticism about the police is more in line with what the Framers thought than otherwise. There is a reason those guys tried to make police work as tough as possible.
-- Mal
Igel
(35,309 posts)No provision for an income tax.
The "unreasonable search" and warrant requirements were constraints on the federal government, Not local police. They only devolved to local governments later.
No standing army or navy provided for. And if it had troops mobilized, it couldn't do so on the cheap by billeting them with the population.
Limits on imposing constraints on what can be said, and on government control of printing presses. Or freedom of assembly, or worship. Or self-defense.
The founders wanted local control to be a limiting factor on federal control. Local officials would be much more subject to what the local population wanted. For good for for bad, that's democracy.
bemildred
(90,061 posts)Once they had to run a government. And we still have deep disagreements about local control.
The 10th Amendment in particular, which is largely ignored, seems to aim directly at what you said, and is very popular among the anti-government types of the left and right.
cprise
(8,445 posts)Thanks!