Apparently, in Colorodo it is unlawful for a jury member to reference God's law in coming to a verdict.

During oral arguments before the Supreme Court last month, defense attorney Kathleen Lord said the jurors had gone outside the law. "They went to the Bible to find out God's position on capital punishment," she said.

On a spiritual level, the source of law is God Himself. Our framers attributed our very rights as "endowed by our Creator". As a Constitutional matter, this is quite scary, even if you don't believe in the Bible. I don't know much about jury rules (maybe [Matt] can help with this one), but it seems to me that in a free society, part of the beauty is that citizens bring with them their beliefs and who they are to the jury room. They are expected to objectivly deliberate about what they believe is true or not true about the case, however the sentence under the law can not be separated from their personal view of justice. For government to separate a persons beliefs and opinions from their actions is, according to James Madison (Federalist Paper #10), is to remove liberty itself. Faireness does not come from government stepping in, it comes from competing factions within the jury room. It is in by encouraging free and competing thoughts that freedom is ensured, not by mandating one faction (in this case Atheism).

RE: [20 years in the electric chair]

I assume the failure rate of dna testing is miniscule, when accurate samples are gathered. But what if the reverse were true. What if someone was set free if they couldn't be proven guilty by DNA? Do we want science to determine a persons fate without the a jury? Its really a tough problem in my mind. Man is fallible, and yet man has to determine the truth of the charged. On the other hand, at any point in time, the accuracy of science is limited by man's current understanding of it. And certainly man is involved in collecting the DNA, and processing the results.

Ultimately, it is my faith in God's sovereign justice that allows me to sleep at night. Whether it be science, a jury, or a freak accident, belief in a good God is the only thing that gives me peace. I don't know what I would do without that. I guess I would trust in science.

I decided to write my final paper for my MS in Criminal Justice on wrongful conviction and the death penalty. Keep in mind that I am all for capital punishment for murders, rapes, child molestations and such.

However, I am not fully convinced that the process is as accurate as it could be. What bothers me is that between 1973 and 2000 there have been 130 people exonerated on death row due to DNA evidence. There has been roughly 6,000 people sentenced to death during this time period. That is a small percentage of innocent people. But all of the exonerations have occured roughly in the last 10 years as DNA testing has been a relatively recent process. To complicate matters half of the exonerations come from Illinois and New York-the first two states to allow postconviction DNA tests. In other words, if other states did what Illinois or New York did, and allow DNA testing after the conviction, the number of exonerated would be higher than 1%.

David Blunkett in Britian was found innocent of an IRA bombing. He was in prison for 16 years. He was then charged 3,000 pounds for every year that he was in jail.

"The logic is that the innocent man shouldn’t have been in prison eating free porridge and sleeping for nothing under regulation grey blankets."

Wow, you get wrongfully convicted and then you are forced to pay for your incarseration.

Read it all here:

http://www.sundayherald.com/40592

I went to the Victorville Gun Show today. I walked away the proud owner of an Airsoft MP5. (Basically a BB gun.) It did remind me of the, ahem, Democrats stomping their feet about the "gun show loophole."

Gun control proponents argue that people can go into gunshows and walk out with guns that day. This is true (to some extent) but fails to give the whole picture. State laws are generally stricter than federal laws. For example, in California where I live the state requires that all transfers of guns require a 15 day waiting period. In other states only the primary transfer of a gun (sales from the dealer) has a waiting period and that secondary sales (from a private party) has no waiting periods and no background check. So, yes you can go to a gunshow and buy a gun from a private party, but then again you could do it at a streetcorner as well and still be legal.