Jail for seatbelt scofflaws; leniency for whiny heroin smugglers. Discuss...

-- Paulineee (paulineee_@hotmail.com), April 25, 2001

Answers

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-- Paulineee (paulineee_@hotmail.com), April 25, 2001.

Well, as one of the Supremes said, there was no Consitutional issue involved here, the officer was a total jerk, etc., but that isn't a question of constitutional rights. This is one of the reasons, however, why I am much more comforatable with local law than federal law: the woman in question (who was also quite a jerk herself) should have worked to raise hell politically on a local level. (Here in Rhode Island a bill has been introduced in state legislature to ban arrests for that kind of a violation... of course our state legislature is a huge collection of crooks, so...)

On related notes in Rhode Island schools -- a teenager wore pajamas to school, school suspended him for dress code violations, his mother has lawyer arguing this is constitution issue of self-expression -- in another school a student created a sexually explicit song about having sex with one of his female teachers and used Napster to make it available for download on Internet, at least 100 copies downloaded, finally another student burned it to a cd and gave it to teacher... school suspended student for 10 days, parents have lawyers saying this violates student's constitutional right to free speech and besides which it didn't happen in school building so school has no jurisdiction anyway, student says he realizes he should not have put it on the Internet but he really sees no reason to punish him for doing it, school system says it amounts to sexual harrassment.

-- Jim (jimsjournal@yahoo.com), April 28, 2001.