Word: legalism
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...writers of the wire are wrong to advocate jury nullification as civil disobedience in the war on drugs [March 17]. These men say they would acquit any drug defendant, regardless of the evidence, if the crime did not involve violence. Their position undermines the legal system--society would collapse if everyone applied this principle for his own social grievance. And it is difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish between "nonviolent" and "violent" drug offenses. The seeds of violence--shattered lives, shattered bodies, broken homes--are sown every time illegal drugs "peacefully" pass from hand to hand. We indeed need...
Removing profits from drug trafficking through decriminalization would be a better solution than jury nullification. Before Prohibition, many of the drugs ruled illegal today were legal. We didn't have the problems then that we do today--no profit motive, no economic engine driving the illegal-drug economy and fewer people being sent to prison...
Chantal Sébire is dead, but the debate she ignited over French laws prohibiting victims of terminal diseases from receiving euthanasia is certain to live on. Just 48 hours after a Dijon court rejected Sébire's request that doctors help her end her agony-stricken life without risking legal punishment, the 52 year-old was found dead in her home Wednesday night. Initial tests Thursday were unable to determine whether Sébire's death was induced or the result of the rare disease that left her horribly disfigured and in near-constant pain. But news of her passing provoked...
...Sarkozy by indicating he could not sidestep legislation. Ahead of Monday's court rejection of her petition that the law be interpreted to permit active euthanasia, members of France's conservative government similarly rebuffed Sébire's plea with reactions ranging from evident compassion and empathy to cold legal rationalization - and in at least one case, prickly indignation. Housing Minister Christine Boutin declared that she was "scandalized that people can envision granting this woman death because she's suffering and deformed," adding that if France legalizes "the right to kill, we're heading towards a barbarian society...
Even more importantly, however, her case has also gotten many people across France reexamining their attitudes toward the assisted suicides of terminal patients that are legal in Belgium, Switzerland and the Netherlands. France's standing law was written in 2005, after a mother and doctor provoked the death of a young man who no longer wanted to live in his paralyzed, virtually shut-in condition. Marie Humbert - the mother of that man - has continued denouncing the law for only allowing the passive act of interrupting life-sustaining treatment. Some 300,000 people have signed Humbert's petition to depenalize active...