Reply #45: This is the issue that originally disillusioned me with Dean [View All]

[Feanorcurufinwe]

Reporter Peter Freyne, now one of Dean's great supporters, asked his readers at the time to "Remember (Dean's) the guy who once said 95 percent of people charged with crimes are guilty anyway so why should the state spend money on providing them with lawyers?"
http://www.counterpunch.org/jacobs08292003.html


Neither does Dean's logic. According to Dean's own account, the sex offender had never been convicted of a previous capital crime. And, in the eyes of the law, he wasn't even convicted of one of them -- one man's "technicality" being another's constitutional abuse. Whatever the case, the death penalty played no role.

It's not that Russert wasn't persistent. He went after Dean time and time again, finding only a bowl of fudge sitting opposite him -- a man so desperately in search of a rationale that ultimately he stood American jurisprudence on its head. Going on about felons getting out of jail and then killing, say, "15- and 12-year-old girls," he added, "That is every bit as heinous as putting to death someone who didn't commit the crime."

In all my years writing about the death penalty, I have never heard any politician admit that he would countenance the death of an innocent person in order to ensure that the guilty die. Dean is maybe the first to acknowledge the unacknowledgeable. For that, I suppose, he ought to be congratulated. But by equating the murder of one individual by another with the murder of an innocent person by the government -- the unpreventable with the preventable -- he has casually trashed several hundred years of legal safeguards.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A1907-2003Jul2


Dean said Wednesday he believed that the attacks and their aftermath would "require a re-evaluation of the importance of some of our specific civil liberties. I think there are going to be debates about what can be said where, what can be printed where, what kind of freedom of movement people have and whether it's OK for a policeman to ask for your ID just because you're walking down the street."

Dean said he had not taken a position on these questions. Asked whether he meant that specific rights described in the Bill of Rights - the first 10 amendments to the U.S. Constitution - would have to be trimmed, the governor said:

"I haven't gotten that far yet. I think that's unlikely, but I frankly haven't gotten that far. Again, I think that's a debate that we will have."
http://rutlandherald.nybor.com/News/Story/33681.html

Someone who does not apparently believe in the presumption of innocence, who is unconcerned about innocent people being executed by the state, who believes constitutional safeguards like the right to a fair trial are 'technicalities', who is willing to examine the idea of trimming the Bill of Rights -- that is not someone I want appointing judges to the Supreme Court.