Free Scooter
 

If Armitage told Woodward about Plame, does that mean Libby didn't perjure himself? I'm not following.

Why is it that you conservatives don't take perjury seriously?

Free Scooter
 

Who you callin conservative?

What is the perjury charge, I forgot? I thought it was obstruction.

Free Scooter
 

I think it's just an identity--Deep Throat lite. Since armitage isn't a reporter, it doesn't help Libby. That is, unless Woodward called Libby to confirm the tip, at which point Libby figured 'the information is out there'. But since Libby could have explained he heard it from Woodward, but didn't, even that defense isn't going to work.

And thus we come full-circle. The people who complain about the Exclusionary Rule (Spanky) are also the tort-reformers (Spanky) who would be the first to prevent the reforms that would be necessary to eliminate it.

Though apparently we can resolve the problem with better TV shows.

Your arguments would be more persuasive if you used statistics instead of television shows.

We need tort reform - badly - but that reform does not include something as absurd as a rollback of the exclusionary rule.

I have and in two different countries.

I think that comment should be directed at your self. You are projecting.

There are innumerable differences between us and the European countries but the issue is how those differences effect this one specific issue. These differences don't effect other issues like Democracy, respect for human rights and Free Markets. All those issues cross all European national boundaries and ours. In addition, all these European countries are totally different in their Geography, culture etc. yet they all seem to get along fine without the exclusionary rule. Every single one of them. And that does not include all the other developed countrys around the world (Japan) or almost developed countrys (Chile, Argentina). Democracy, Free markets, and a respect for human rights are common among all these countries, but some how they are all the same and we are different when it comes to the exclusionary rule? Please, All these different cultures, Geographies etc have Democracy, Free Markets, respecrt for Human rights - yes. Exclusionary Rule - No. That formula works for all of them. But for us the only formula that works is Democracy, Free Markets, Respect for Human rights, - yes. Exclusionary rule - yes. Why are we similar to all those countries on those other issues but need to differ on the exclusionary rule? The answer is we don't.

In addition, you are making a completely speculative argument bereft of practical application and I have evidence and practical application to back up my argument. You say that it would be a disaster for Human rights in this country if the Exclusionary rule were eliminated. Yet you can't point to one practical example of a country that had human rights, and then when they dropped the exclusionary rule, it all went to hell. On the other hand, when I say that human rights will still be respected and won't be a total disaster if the exclusionary rule is dropped, I can point out that every other developed nation in this world gets a long fine without the exclusionary rule.

Again, I think you are projecting here.

I have been investigated by the FBI - have you?

How about every Dirty Harry movie, Charles Bronson Movie etc. All these movies make the criminal justice system out to be totally broken because of the exclusionary rule. Can you name one movie or TV show that has ever praised the exclusionary rule? In addition, I have given a great many political speeches in my time, and the one statement that always gets everyone excited (except for the lawyers) is the elimination of the exclusionary rule.

If you state: Valid and probative evidence should not be excluded from a criminal trial based on technicalities. The exclusionary rule is not in the US constitution, and the courts should stop pretending it is.

Huge applaus every time. Sometimes a standing ovation if you say it right. Except for extremely liberal or conservative audiences, works for both Dems and Repubs.


If I am guilty of what they are accusing me off, absolutely. If I am innocent the exclusionary rule won't do me much good. (In addition, if the FBI is going after me someday, I will want the FBI to be eliminated, but that doesn't make my opinion in that particular circumstance the same as what is good for general public policy?)

They can do this without the exclusionary rule, and the exclusionary rule does not prevent them from doing this. Wrong remedy for the problem.

Again, projecting.

How does perjury relate to the exclusionary rule? Perjured evidence is not probative evidence. I don't think non probative or non reliable evidence should be in. I just think probative evidence should be allowed in, even if the cops screwed up in getting it.


Again this problem will exist with the excusionary rule. And the exlusionary rule won't help me much. I would much prefer remedies against the police department for their misconduct. The exclusionary rule does not help me if they perjur themselves, doctor evidence, misrepresent evidence, it only helps me if they screw up when finding probative evidence that actually shows I am guilty. Innocent victims of police misconduct are never helped by the exclusionary rule.

These are not hard facts.

And this pisses me off. (spree: wapo article)

If you actually did real crim defense, you'd understand that a defendant needs every available tool in the arsenal. Probative evidence is NEVER precluded. In the years I did crim defense, I never saw it happen. I've seen every judge find a way to keep it in. Courts don't operate like machines. A judge knows when someone is likely guilty, and he uses every trick he can to get the evidence to cook them into the record (and he knows the appellate court will back him up on it).

That you think the exclusionary rule is a widespread problem - or that most people are even familiar with it - shows a galling lack of understanding for the subject matter. Its one thing to pontificate, its another to bloviate as though one has omniscient understanding of all facets of the subject matter on which he's blathering. I'm not projecting anything. You sound like a posturing dilletante on this issue.

A member of my immediate family was investigated by the feds. Fucking pricks accused em of insider trading. They dropped em from a target list after a few months, but refused to tell em, despite numerous inquiries from em's lawyer.

Pop culture
 

It would if it wan't so one sided. I am trying to argue what the view of the exclusionary rule is in pop culture as opposed to the legal culture. If I can't come up with one show in popular culture that reflects well on the exclusioary rule and more than I can count that critisize it there isn't much of argument. And you can't tell me that movies and TV don't have a serious impact on pop culture, and that Movie producers and TV producers don't reflect pop culture prejudices and "conventional wisdom" opinions to make money.

Hollywood uses the public attitude towards and hatred of the exclusionary rule to make money. I have never seen a show that uses the love of or respect for the exclusionary rule to make money.

If I took the time to find an opinoin poll of the exclusionary rule among the general populace, the support of it would probably be in the teens or even single digits. Do you think I am wrong?

Pop culture
 

I think that you should talk to Dean Nancy Rapoport about the law and pop culture and then get back to us.

For pete's sake, man, will you please stop this?!?

I believe "pete's" should read "Pete's."

That is one of the most obvious statements I have ever read, and at the same time, one of the most irrelevent statements I have ever read.

Then why do we need the rule if it is never used? The purpose of the rule is to preclude probative evidence. Non probative evidence is already thrown out because it is non probative.

I was a witness in a murder trial where probative evidence was excluded because of the exclusionary rule.

Why make the judges go through all these crazy contortions and force them to make patently absurd ruling and statements to avoid the negative consequences of the rule? Why not just drop it?

Interesting and tragic, but what does this have to do with the exclusionary rule? How did the exclusionary rule help that member of your immediate family?

Rubbernecking........
 

You are like a religious conservative complaining about the sex and violence on TV. If spelling etc. is so important to you, don't read my posts.

The exlcusionary rule is a check against police abuse of power. Without the fear that evidence might be kept out, cops would willy nilly do whatever they liked in regard to searches and seizure.

By removing the rule, you'd encourage police abuse. They'd feel that they have nothing to lose - as long as they got what they needed, the ends would justify the means. How do you not see that as problematic?

If probative evidence is never excluded it is not much of a deterrence is it? It sounds like there needs to be a system to deter the police that the judges are willing to enforce.

See above.

Rising Health Care Costs
 

Those damn pesky trial lawyers!

• A Cancer Drug's Big Price Rise Is Cause for Concern
  
  
  
  
  By ALEX BERENSON
  Published: March 12, 2006
  
  On Feb. 3, Joyce Elkins filled a prescription for a two-week supply of nitrogen mustard, a decades-old cancer drug used to treat a rare form of lymphoma. The cost was $77.50.
  
  Skip to next paragraph
  Enlarge This Image
  
  Chris Pietsch for The New York Times
  Jeffrey Malavasic, 58, says that now that his cancer ointment is more expensive, he will use less of it.
  On Feb. 17, Ms. Elkins, a 64-year-old retiree who lives in Georgetown, Tex., returned to her pharmacy for a refill. This time, following a huge increase in the wholesale price of the drug, the cost was $548.01.
  
  Ms. Elkins's insurance does not cover nitrogen mustard, which she must take for at least the next six months at a cost that will now total nearly $7,000. She and her husband, who works for the Texas Department of Transportation, are paying for the medicine by spending less on utilities and food, she said.
  
  The medicine, also known as Mustargen, was developed more than 60 years ago and is among the oldest chemotherapy drugs. For decades, it has been blended into an ointment by pharmacists and used as a topical treatment for a cancer called cutaneous T-cell lymphoma, a form of cancer that mainly affects the skin.
  
  Last August, Merck, which makes Mustargen, sold the rights to manufacture and market it and Cosmegen, another cancer drug, to Ovation Pharmaceuticals, a six-year-old company in Deerfield, Ill., that buys slow-selling medicines from big pharmaceutical companies.
  
  The two drugs are used by fewer than 5,000 patients a year and had combined sales of about $1 million in 2004.
  
  Now Ovation has raised the wholesale price of Mustargen roughly tenfold and that of Cosmegen even more, according to several pharmacists and patients.
  
  Sean Nolan, vice president of commercial development for Ovation, said that the price increases were needed to invest in manufacturing facilities for the drugs. He said the company was petitioning insurers to obtain coverage for patients.
  
  The increase has stunned doctors, who say it starkly illustrates two trends in the pharmaceutical industry: the soaring price of cancer medicines and the tendency for those prices to have little relation to the cost of developing or making the drugs.
  
  Genentech, for example, has indicated it will effectively double the price of its colon cancer drug Avastin, to about $100,000, when Avastin's use is expanded to breast and lung cancer patients. As with Avastin, nothing about nitrogen mustard is changing but the price.
  
  The increases have caused doctors to question Ovation's motive — and left lymphoma patients wondering how they will afford Mustargen, which is sometimes not covered by insurance, because the drug's label does not indicate that it can be used as an ointment. When given intravenously to treat Hodgkin's disease, its other primary use, the drug is generally covered by insurance.
  
  "Nitrogen mustard has been around forever," said Dr. Len Lichtenfeld, the deputy chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society. "There's nothing that I am aware of in the treatment environment that would explain an increase in the cost of the drug."
  
  Dr. David H. Johnson, a Vanderbilt University oncologist who is a former president of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, said he had contacted Ovation to ask its reasons for raising Mustargen's price.
  
  "I'd like to have some evidence from them that it actually costs them X amount, so that the pricing makes sense," Dr. Johnson said.
  
  "It's unfortunate that a price adjustment had to occur," Mr. Nolan said. "Investment had not been made in these products for years."
  
  Ovation, a privately held company, also needs the money to conduct research on several new drugs for rare diseases, Mr. Nolan said.
  
  He acknowledged that Merck still made Mustargen and Cosmegen, an antibiotic that is used to treat a rare childhood kidney cancer, for Ovation. He said he was not sure when Ovation would begin producing the drugs, and a Merck spokesman said that Merck would continue to provide the drugs to Ovation as long as necessary.
  
  But people who analyze drug pricing say they see the Mustargen situation as emblematic of an industry trend of basing drug prices on something other than the underlying costs. After years of defending high prices as necessary to cover the cost of research or production, industry executives increasingly point to the intrinsic value of their medicines as justification for prices.
  
  Last year, in his book "A Call to Action," Henry A. McKinnell, the chairman of Pfizer, the world's largest drug company, wrote that drug prices were not driven by research spending or production costs.
  
  "A number of factors go into the mix" of pricing, he wrote. "Those factors consider cost of business, competition, patent status, anticipated volume, and, most important, our estimation of the income generated by sales of the product."
  
  In some drug categories, such as cholesterol-lowering treatments, many drugs compete, keeping prices relatively low. But when a medicine does not have a good substitute, its maker can charge almost any price. In 2003, Abbott Laboratories raised the price of Norvir, an AIDS drug introduced in 1996, from $54 to $265 a month. AIDS groups protested, but Abbott refused to rescind the increase.
  
  And once a company sets a price, government agencies, private insurers and patients have little choice but to pay it. The Food & Drug Administration does not regulate prices, and Medicare is banned from considering price in deciding whether to cover treatments.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/12/bu...=1&oref=slogin

Son, you've got this right. The one good thing about Mississippi Burning was that those Justice Department yankees sure did know how to violate constitutional rights. Why, I was ready to cheer them on when they had that good ole boy thinking his private parts were going to be dogmeat.

Son, I've just got one question for you here. What's wrong with the cops doing whatever they like in regard to searches and seizures?

And also, I'd suggest you watch phrases like "willy nilly" or we'll all think you're one of those "girly" boys.

Originally posted by Spanky


This is an excellent point.

However, you were asking about other countries.

Ever see a James Bond movie? He trounces on individual rights, walking into suspects' homes, shooting them, and frequently fucking their wives. Ever watch a Hong Kong police movie? Chow Yun Fat has killed thousands as a cop. Jackie Chan will climb into your window even if you live on the 30th floor, but never a warrant in sight.

To my mind, these are fine, fact-based examples of what happens in countries that lack the Exclusionary Rule.

And don't even get me started about Inspector Clouseau's disregard for individual rights.

You say that like the CIA doesn't do the same thing.

Rising Health Care Costs
 

How's this stuff taste on roast beef?

Exclusionary Reel
 

Just for the hell of it, and because I'm tired of working already this week, I did a little googling and such.

This is an interesting article:

http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-319es.html


Of course, it fails to take any Bronson movies into account. And it's from the screaminigly liberal Cato Institute, so what can you expect?

Based on the movies I've seen, they certainly do. And they are not really affected by the Exclusionary Rule, as the CIA does not develop cases for court. Don't you see a connection?

Incidentally, has anyone actually seen a Bronson or Eastwood cop movie recently? I don't remember the Exclusionary Rule being a big factor. I remember, much more, the problem of judges handing out ridiculously light sentences for serious crimes. (By "ridiculously", I mean far lighter than any real judge would be likely to do in real life.)

Of course, society responded to that problem quite effectively, and now we have people rotting in prison, at a cost of billions every year, for crimes like possession of tiny amounts of marijuana, or stealing a $10 clock radio from the home of a dead person*, or shoplifting a video, etc.

This, to me, illustrates the problems with evaluating society's problems based on action movies and cop shows.



*Actual third-strike case I briefly handled on appeal.

yet you're saying retention of the exclusionary rule is absolutely critical.

I didn't take Spanky to be saying that cop shows prove his point.

Are you saying that cop shows overemphasize the problems with the exclusionary rule? That's probably true, because what makes such shows interesting is that a guilty person goes free or an innocent person is jailed, not when an obviously guilty person is convicted.

Anyway, so what if they overestimate it. If the rule isn't a problem in that it doesn't often set people free, then why are you worried about changing it? In fact, it makes spanky's argument even stronger, beacuse it suggests that innocent people bear the brunt of bad police work, but are unable to benefit in any way, because they can't sue for damages.

One poor dumb bastard's third strike in Texas was shoplifting a Snickers bar. I'm not sure where in the appeals process it is, but surely it's winding its way through.

Why is there all the fuss on this, because it's a snickers bar rather than a serious crime? The law is put in place for just this type of person--they keep committing crimes, despite incarceration. At some point, it seems reasonable to say "fuck it, we've had enough of your bullshit" and put them away.

Because no one can resist that tempting combination of nougat, nuts, caramel and milk chocolate?

Well, and the cops routinely ignore everything and hunt down and kill "bad guys" in most cop movies. Lethal Weapon, Bad Boys, LA Confidential.

Don't even get me started on the corrupt "Animal Cops" on the Discovery Channel. Those motherfuckers trudge all over due process, all in the name of little puppies, kittens and the occasional emaciated horse.

I can't bear to watch that show. It's too depressing.

The reason why I bring these up is not because these movies reflect reality, it is because they reflect the publics perception of reality. My statement that the exclusionary rule diminshes people confidence in the criminal justice was questioned.
When it comes to peoples opinions about the criminal justice system you are not talking about facts you are talking about people's perceptions.

Most people see our criminal justice system as screwed up, and most of the gripes revlolve around the exclusionary rule. Of course they don't know they are talking about the exclusionary rule, they just refer to it as evidence being excluded because of technicalities.

This disrepsect of the criminal justice caused by the exclusionary rule is pervasive throughout the popular culture and you would have to be blind not to see it.

The Star Chamber (Michael Douglas) was completely focused on the exclusionary rule.

In regards to Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson you have a poor memory. Just off the top of my head, in one dirty harry movie Clint Eastwood threatens the bad guy until he tells Eastwood the location of the girl he kidnapped and was torturing to death. They find the girl where he said she was but she was dead. But the guy gets to walk because none of the evidence surrounding the girl could be introduced as evidence.

The entire of plot of the Dirty Harry movie where the rookie cops (Mr. "Don't give up on us baby" is one of them) are dispensing justice on their own terms revlolves around cleary guilty criminals getting off because of the exclusionary rule.

The list goes on and on.......

Uh, have you seen a movie in, say, the last 15 or 20 years? I realize that Republicans don't like Hollywood these days, but this is sort of ridiculous.

Most lawyers in movies break some rule of professional ethics, up to and including Atticus Finch. And our clients watch those movies and think that's what good lawyering is. That doesn't mean that we, as as a profession, are off the hook from those rules, even if they prevent us from doing the best for our client.

If that's what we're talking about it seems to me the public's perception that we're fucked if attacked by aliens (Independance Day) or even that aliens have hidden ships under our roads (War of the worlds) would be a much bigger problem. What percentage of the budget goes to our outer space defenses?

Putting aside the presumption that Hollywood accurately recognizes the public's perception of anything, I agree. We should start passing laws based on the Everyman's perceptions.

First up will be a trial of Saddam Hussein for his involvment in 9/11. If half the country thinks he was behind it, we must have a trial, no?

Then we can close the museums, which offend the bible belters who think the universe is 5000 years old. Maybe we can compromise and just throw away the dinosaur stuff.

Does that list include any movies made in the past 20 years? I mean, leaving aside the overall stupidity of this discussion, the fact that you are relying on movies that were old when I was in grade school is particularly silly.



eta: Aarhgh!! STP.

But, let me add -- the Dirty Harry movie you are talking about Magnum Force, I believe it was -- involved a bunch of psycho-cops using the Exclusionary Rule and other "soft- on crime" bugaboos to justify their desire to gun criminals down on the street.

You suggesting we rewrite the law to suit that sort of person?

Spanky doesn't watch movies now. Fear of inadverant funding of the liberal Hollywood establishment. You just have to rub it in, eh?

It's not just movies. Did you ever notice how often the prosecution was stymied on Night Court?