---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Tue, 7 Jan 1997 18:44:07 -0800 (PST) From: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com> To: fight-censorship@vorlon.mit.edu Subject: If guilty of a lesser crime, you can be sentenced for a greater The Supreme Court ruled on this sentencing case yesterday. Kennedy and Stevens -- hardly known as civil libertarians -- dissented. The Court reversed the 9th Circuit, ruling the lower court was wrong to say that such a practice "would make the jury's findings of fact pointless." The court declared: "Sentencing enhancements do not punish a defendant for crimes of which he was not convicted, but rather increase his sentence because of the manner in which he committed the crime of conviction." Double jeopardy? What's that? Of course it was a drug crime. The defendant, Vernon Watts, was convicted of cocaine possession with intent to distribute. To paraphrase another saying: "'Drug Trafficking Offense' is the root passphrase to the Constitution." -Declan ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Tue, 7 Jan 1997 17:41:35 -0800 From: Jim Warren <jwarren@well.com> Sender: owner-fight-censorship@vorlon.mit.edu Did you read about the U.S. Supreme Court's recent decision? Seems they decided it was acceptable for a judge to use crimes for which a jury has found a defendent *NOT guilty*, to justify imposing greater penalties than the judge could otherwise, for a lesser crime for which the jury found the defendent guilty. (It's quite common to prosecute someone for multiple crimes, and have the jury find them innocent of some charges, but guilty of others.) Now, all a judge has to do is opine that, in his or her unilateral opinion, there is a "preponderance of evidence" of guilt of the more serious crime -- in spite of the unanimous finding by every member of the jury, that the defendent is NOT guilty of that crime, beyond a reasonable doubt. The Supreme's *unsigned* 7-2 opinion says than a finding of NOT guilty, "does not prove that the defendent is innocent; it *merely* proves the esistence of a reasonable doubt as to his guilt." [I.e., all U.S. citizens now risk being penalized as theough they are guilty, unless they can PROVE they're innocent!] Much worse, the basis for *criminal* guilt and associated penalties -- charged, prosecuted and imposed using the massive powers and resources of the State -- has now functionally changed from proof "beyond a reasonable doubt," to the much lesser standard of, "preponderance of evidence," which used to be limited only to civil litigation prosecuted between private attorneys for feuding plaintiffs. Who says the practices of the Third Reich didn't survive!? --jim, Amerikan citizen Jim Warren (jwarren@well.com) GovAccess list-owner/editor, advocate & columnist (Govt.Technology, MicroTimes) 345 Swett Rd., Woodside CA 94062; voice/415-851-7075; fax-for-the-quaint/<ask> [Also blind-cc'ed to others.]