It is uncertain whether the prisoners are protected by the Constitution here since the matter was never resolved in Rasul v. Bush. She compares it to places like Puerto Rico, where the inhabitants are not quite citizens but also not aliens. In spaces like these, the Constitution is not used consistently and citizens are not fully protected by the state; they are in limbo between living good lives and living bare lives. The Supreme Court’s inability to reach a concrete decision in Rasul gives the state more power and more ability to decide for themselves who will be awarded good lives and who will live bare lives. The State of Exception is mentioned in this article as well; Kaplan describes the entire area as being subject to it instead of just individual cases. This State of Exception is backed by the Justice Department, who maintains that the prisoners have no constitutional protections and therefore there is no exceptions needed to revoke their rights. Every governmental system has made decisions and statements that has reinforced the state’s…
Romer v. Evans is a case brought to the Supreme Court by Richard G. Evans (Respondent), a gay employee of the mayor of Denver against then Governor Roy Romers, The Attorney General of Colorado, and the State of Colorado (Petitioner). The case was centered around an amendment to the state constitution that prohibited “the state of Colorado… at any level of state or local government from adopting or enforcing any law or policy which provides that homosexual, lesbian, or bisexual orientation,…
ballots were not properly punched, causing a large number discrepancy on who the voters wanted to vote for, and developed a distrust that some of the members of the ballot counting committee were not being honest in the tally of votes. Later, the case was turned over to the U.S. Supreme Court, and Gore was thought to be the clear win in his case that the ballots were to be manually recounted. Unfortunately, the result was in favor of Bush, and claimed that having a recount would violate his…
Section A. Shelli Rose Dewey, Petitioner, v. Carolyn Myles, et al., Respondents. On September 12th, 2004, Shelli Rose Dewey, a Nevada resident, called Elko County Police frantically stating that her husband, Steven Dewey, was stabbed by an unknown assailant. Upon police arrival, Dewey was moderately intoxicated. Witnesses stated that the couple had been at a nearby bar earlier in the day when the bartender asked the two to leave. Thirty minutes following their ejection from the bar, witnesses…
detention facility has been a controversial topic ever since its creation in 2001 by President Bush. It was a symbol for success against the War on Terror as the US filled it’s cells. After the initial year, people began to question who these prisoners were, why they were imprisoned, and what would happen to them. In the years to follow its conception, Guantanamo Bay would become a symbol not of the War on Terror, but of an astounding legal catastrophe. Ever since Guantanamo Bay became the main…
Gitmo: The Dark Chapter Mohamedou Slahi was wearing blackout goggles. A guard dragged him onto a boat and someone forced him to drink seawater. “It was so nasty I threw up...They stuffed the air between my clothes and me with ice cubes from my neck to my ankles...every once in a while one of the guards smashed me, most of the time in the face” (Davee-Attlee). Slahi paints a horrifying picture of life as an inmate in Guantanamo. He depicts the many beatings, humiliations, and treacheries he was…
Standard interrogation procedures failed to produce what the Administration deemed to be “actionable intelligence;” consequently, the Administration ordered detainees being held in Guantanamo, the Abu Ghraib prison, and the Bagram Air Force Base be forced to endure degrading tactics, such as waterboarding and sleep deprivation, to coerce confessions and produce information. The 2002 Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) memorandum, which defined “torture” very narrowly, was…
The race for the presidency in the year 2000 was very controversial. Now after watching the movie Recount it is obvious that George W. Bush illegitimately won the election. Firstly, older voters were confused on how to fill out the ballot, which ended up in a significant amount of dimpled chad that were not counted by the machines, therefore robbing thousands of people of their right to vote for the president they wished to be in office, not to mention that it may have costed Gore the…
The concentration of votes within a certain state should not matter because it is the total vote of the people nationally that should determine who will be president. Which state the votes come from does not matter. On the other hand, voting is one of the most important individual rights given to the people. Voting is ranked alongside the Bill of Rights. However, the Electoral College does not just diminish voting rights and disregard the phrase “one person, one vote”, the Electoral College…
this, a candidate could feasibly lose the popular election while winning the necessary number of Electoral votes should they win key states, thus securing the Presidency. This ‘electoral crisis’ (Spilerman & Dickens, 1974) can give rise to situations such as in the 2000 election where VP Al Gore won the popular vote by approximately 500,000 votes, yet lost the election to George W. Bush (Grofman & Feld, 2005). Another example illustrated in an electoral simulation (Nelson, 1974) whereby a…