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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (159003)	1/27/2003 3:38:54 PM
From: tejek	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1580148

Please explain why Mr. Pickering seemingly was unconcerned with the 17 year old's lack of a sentence even though he had shot into the couple's home and was the ringleader but instead Mr. Pickering was most concerned that Swan who was not even his client get a sentence that was proportional to the 17 year old's who got off scott free? I'm not sure exactly what you are getting at. As far as I know Mr. Pickering didn't intervene in the 17 year olds case. If the 17 year old did fire a gun in to the house that should have been a seperate charge which depending on the circumstances of the case could have been anything from some sort of illegal discharge of a firearm charge to attempted murder. If you are wondering why the 17 year old wasn't charged with that I would ask the prosecutor not the judge. According to Mr. Pickering in his testimony to Congress, he was trying to do the fair thing when it came to D. Swan. If you follow that line of reasoning, one would have to conclude that the 17 year old got off very easily and should have been given a jail sentence........and yet, Mr. Pickering does not appear to have minded or objected to that grave error in justice. In fact, Mr. Pickering was so committed to helping D. Swan, he violated another judicial law......ex parte contact.......when asked, he barely remember doing it and blew it off as inconsequential. Isn't it surprising that he was willing to violate the laws he is expected to uphold in order to help out Mr. Swan with his case. Talk about going the extra mile. The only charge I heard about was the "hate crime"/cross burning crime. For that 7 years if far to harsh. The 17 year old had shot into the home of the interracial couple in question on several occasions prior to the cross burning. And those are the acts of violence we know about. Earlier in his career, he voted twice to fund an organization committed to stopping integration and when he left the dem. party, he stated that one of his reasons was the party's support on civil rights initiatives. Certain civil rights initatives I would oppose, nothing obviously racist about opposing such initatives. Funding the organization you talk about is the only piece of actual evidence that links him in any way to racism. And that link is tenous indeed. He voted on a proposal to fund a group. There is a good chance that it was not a seperate bill to fund some group but part of a larger bill. Such bills are very common in the legislative process. Often the people voting for them don't know all the details of the large unweildy bills they are voting for. Also this orginization wasn't as openly racist as something like the KKK. It hid behind the idea of state's rights, and idea that is not itself racist. Someone who supporting following the original constitutional idea of what roles are appropriate for the states and what roles belong to the federal government could vote to fund the organization without even knowing that it was racist. He blocked the implementation of the 1965 Civils Right Voting bill for a number of years; consequently, Mississippi's legislature remained all white until 1980 in spite of the fact that Mississippi was 35% black. There are other signs that Pickering is not a racist. In 1959, he wrote a law review article analyzing a Mississippi statute that criminalized interracial marriage that helped push the state legislature into amending the law. In 1967 he testified against Sam Bowers, a Ku Klux Klan leader who was being tried for the firebombing death of Vernon Dahmer Sr., a civil rights leader who was helping blacks register to vote. This testimony helped cost him his bid to be reelected as a local prosecutor. The Washington Post, in an article arguing against confirming Pickering said "Pickering's entire record is not that of a committed -- if now closeted -- segregationist; nor did the Senate find him to be such when it unanimously voted to confirm him as a district judge in 1990. " Other fact about Pickering - "Pickering was first appointed to the U.S. District Court by President George H. W. Bush in 1990. He was unanimously approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee and confirmed unanimously by the Senate as a whole. Now, after amassing a record of more than 11 years on the federal bench, he has received the American Bar Association's highest "well-qualified" rating," That quote and the answers to some other questions about Pickering can be found at nationalreview.com And there are more signs that his position on the races is at best ambivalent: www.blackelectorate.com ted Enter symbols or keywords for search: QuotesStock TalkChartsNewsPeople Symbol Lookup Subject Titles Only Full Text Go to Top Terms of Use