Oh justice!

My layman understanding of matters of justice and law. Most of the extracts below (italicised) taken from NYT "In Steps Big and Small, Supreme Court Moved Right":

Fully a third of the court’s decisions, more than in any recent term, were decided by 5-to-4 margins. Most of those, 19 of 24, were decided along ideological lines...

Once again proving that Justice is not blind, but it certainly wears blinkers.

In its most important patent ruling in years, the court tilted away from patent owners and made it easier to find that a patent had been improperly issued for an invention that was “obvious” and therefore undeserving of patent protection.

Finally. The list of patented 'inventions' in the US is a bit too long methinks.

The court made it easier for prosecutors in death penalty cases to remove potential jurors who express ambivalence about the death penalty. Writing for the 5-to-4 majority, Justice Kennedy said appeals courts must defer to a trial judge’s decision on whether a potential juror would be able to overcome qualms about capital punishment and be open to voting to impose a death sentence. The dissenters, in an opinion by Justice Stevens that Justices Souter, Ginsburg and Breyer also joined, said this set the disqualification bar too low and would skew juries toward those most likely to vote for death.

Hmmm... On one hand a person who is, in principle, opposed to the death penalty has no place in a jury deciding whether a defendant should receive the death penalty. On the other hand, we're talking about ambivalence towards the death penalty. My gut feeling is that any person who is violently opposed to the death penalty would be disqualified without much controversy. So the question is whether this results in a tendency to disqualify those who merely feel hanging someone is distasteful (which is, I must add, the proper and normal human reaction), meaning that you end up with the probability of having a jury of rednecks who're too ready to bay for blood. (Yes yes... stereotypes! I admit!) I tend to lean liberal on the death penalty, and therefore the prospect of a jury of rednecks terrifies me. You see what secondary school Lit does to you? (I'm looking at you, Harper Lee.) I don't really know much about law (have I mentioned this already?), so I guess the answer might be obvious to the brilliant legal minds out there already. Ah well.

A deadline for filing a federal appeal could not be excused by the fact that a federal judge had given an inmate’s lawyer the wrong date, the court held in a 5 to 4 opinion by Justice Thomas.

This sucks. The poor guy is penalised because the federal judge screwed up? Punishing innocents for mistakes/crimes that are not their own sucks big-time.

Unfortunately that happens in Singapore too. I've talked a lot about the case of Amara Tochi elsewhere, so I won't say too much about this again. Suffice to say that he was put to death (killed, murdered) for bringing drugs into Singapore, even though he (almost certainly) didn't know that they were drugs. And it's not a case of a judge ruling overly harshly, or a mistake made in the sentencing (even though that would also suck). It's just the way it works in Singapore. I would encourage you to look at the section on the trial if you follow the link to the Wiki article.

What is justice and what is the law? Sometimes if you think about it, the divergence between the two is chilling.