Now this is horrible….

USA Today Reports:

PORT MORESBY, Papua New Guinea (AP) — A mob stripped, tortured and bound a woman accused of witchcraft, then burned her alive in front of hundreds of witnesses in a Papua New Guinea town, police said Friday after one of the highest profile sorcery-related murders in this South Pacific island nation.

…

Kepari Leniata, a 20-year-old mother, had been accused of sorcery by relatives of a 6-year-old boy who died in the hospital the day before.

She was tortured with a hot iron rod, bound, doused in gasoline, then set alight on a pile of car tires and trash…(source)

Viva Hatuey!

On this day in 1512, the Spanish killed Hatuey, the Taíno chief.

He led an armed insurrection in Hispaniola for about 10 years, and then in 1511 he and 400 resistance fighters landed in Cuba, hoping to raise an armed insurrection against the Spanish.

The Dominican priest Bartolomé de Las Casas documented Hatuey’s motivation: “The intruders worship gold, fight and kill, usurp our land and makes us slaves. For gold, slaves, and land they fight and kill; for these they persecute us and that is why we have to throw them into the sea.”

Hatuey’s forces had little chance to get organized, when Spanish troops led by Diego Velásquez landed in Cuba. As well-organized and well armed as they were, Hatuey’s men managed to keep them contained in their fort at Baracoa for three months. After a season of containment, the Spanish broke out and captured Hatuey.

On Feb. 2, 1512, Hatuey was burned at the stake at Yara.

Before being put to death, a priest asked Hatuey if he would accept Jesus and go to heaven, informing him that if he accepted, he would be saved and enter the kingdom of heaven. Of course, if he declined, he would suffer eternal damnation and torment in a sea of fire.

Hatuey asked the priest if all Christians went to heaven. The priest assured him that they did.

Hatuey then contemplated the Christians he saw before him, and had encountered to date. Hatuey decided that if he would find Christians in heaven, that he preferred to go to hell.

Required Reading – Jordan Rushie on Wisdom

Jordan Rushie writes about what a moron he was as a young associate in, Hubris.

I must confess some bias here. I represent Rushie in one little matter. I am co-counsel with him on multiple matters. But, this piece is why I am proud to call him a colleague. Achievements are great. I have had enough of them to know that they sometimes come from perfectly executed plans. But, I also know that achievements are sometimes the result of bad plans, bad decisions, and dumb luck.

A lawyer earns my respect more when he tells me about his fuck-ups and what he learned from them. Rushie has my respect.

Rushie’s post is a lesson that you can’t learn in law school — not because law school can’t teach it, but because law schools REFUSE to teach it.

Social media prohibition held unconstitutional

By Andrew J. Contiguglia

The 7th Circuit court of appeals Wednesday declared an outright ban on social media usage by convicted sex offenders to be a violation of the First Amendment. At the crux of the arguments is the public’s right to be protected from convicted sex offenders and the offender’s right to send and receive information – a core, fundamental concept under the First Amendment. The 7th Circuit recognized this conflict, but ruled that an outright ban on such information, even to sex offenders, violates the First Amendment. The court stated,

The state initially asserts an interest in “protecting public safety, and specifically in protecting minors from harmful online communications.” Indiana is certainly justified in shielding its children from improper sexual communication. Doe agrees, but argues the state burdens substantially more speech than necessary to serve the intended interest. Indiana naturally counters that the law’s breadth is necessary to achieve its goal.

The Sate of Indiana agreed that the goal of its statute was to curtail communication between convicted sex offenders and minors. However, the Court did not believe the statute was tailored in a fashion to limit such conduct, but instead cast a broader net, restricting speech that did not meet the ends of the Indiana law.

Turning to the Indiana statute, the state agrees there is nothing dangerous about Doe’s use of social media as long as he does not improperly communicate with minors. Further, there is no disagreement that illicit communication comprises a minuscule subset of the universe of social network activity. As such, the Indiana law targets substantially more activity than the evil it seeks to redress. Even the district court agreed with this sentiment, stating the law “captures considerable conduct that has nothing to do” with minors. Indiana prevents Doe from using social networking sites for fear that he might, subsequent to logging on to the website or program, engage in activity that Indiana is entitled to prevent.

I have followed cases like this one for quite sometime. The general consensus among the appeals courts is any form of “blanket prohibition” on Internet, or social media usage, will be a violation of the First Amendment. This issue has not directly been decided by the US Supreme Court, but the consensus among the circuit courts of appeal, and many state supreme courts, indicates a blanket prohibition will likely be overturned.

Here’s the opinion.

Richard Marx takes on small time blogger… Marx wins.

Small time blogger writes something mildly lame about Richard Marx. Richard Marx appears to get overly bent out of shape about it. Marx and blogger go back and forth.

And, just when you think you want to root for the little guy, just when you think this is a case of someone being thin-skinned, Richard Marx wins you over… or at least he won me over.

Read Richard Marx hates my guts

Drunk Driving Permits

Councilor Danny Healy-Rae

In Ireland, County Kerry Councillor Danny Healy-Rae proposed changing the law to allow drunk driving permits to rural inhabitants. (source)

Crazy?

Crazier still, it PASSED!

Mind you, I don’t really think it is crazy. In fact, I think that Mr. Healy-Rae is brilliant. I don’t know much about Ireland’s drunk driving laws, but I know that ours are a constitutional abomination. Lawrence Taylor’s The DUI Exception to the Constitution is a must read.

I think that we should follow Healy-Rae’s move here, in the United States. We should restore sanity to the drunk driving laws.

Despite what MADD wants us to believe, drunk driving never was the “carnage” they want us to believe in order to justify their existence and their funding.

My co-Satyriconista, Charles Platt summed it up:

State laws used to [allow] police to make a judgment call about impairment, based on their observations. But that wasn’t good enough for Candy Lightner, whose daughter had been killed by a drunk driver. In the wearying tradition of family members who want to make the death of a loved one seem more meaningful by inconveniencing everybody else, Lightner started Mothers Against Drunk Driving. The name of this brilliant campaign guaranteed its success. Who could possibly disagree with Mothers (that most sacred category of human being) who wanted to protect their children from alcohol-crazed hit-and-run maniacs? Alas, it ended up criminalizing the people whom it was supposed to protect. (source)

As Platt and Taylor remind us, there was a time when the law punished “impaired” driving. Now, it doesn’t matter if you are “impaired” or not — it matters if a breathalyzer, calibrated to the “average” person says you have a certain blood alcohol content. That measurement is garbage, since if you do not match the “average” calibration, you’re already screwed. Even so, at one time, the law said that .15 BAC was ok. Then, not enough convictions for MADD, so the limit dropped to .12, then .10, then .08, and there are pushes to get it even lower.

Blood alcohol content does not measure “impairment” – it measures BAC, and does not even do it very well. Meanwhile, as Taylor eloquently informs us, we have a swelling body of precedent creating exceptions to our most important constitutional protections, because of this paranoid fear that a drunk driver is waiting (along with a terrorist and a child molester) around every corner.

I do not advocate driving while too impaired to do so. I’ve done it. I worked my way through a few years of college by driving a taxi. I’d lease the cab for 36 hours, and sometimes I would drive for all 36 of them. Yes, I would swing in to Logan Airport and pick up some unsuspecting family after being awake and driving for 35 straight hours. If they had any idea how impaired I was, they would have jumped from the cab while I was weaving and swerving down Storrow Drive. Meanwhile, if a cop pulled me over for suspicion of driving while intoxicated, I’d blow a perfect 0.00 on the breathalyzer. If you talk on a cell phone (hands free or not) you are just as “impaired” as if you were over .10. Meanwhile, every car comes with a handsfree bluetooth hookup. Even minivans designed to be full of screaming children.

Put an over-stressed mother behind the wheel of a minivan full of screaming kids, yakking on her cell phone or the same mother, after a restful night’s sleep and three glasses of wine at dinner, and I guarantee you, you’re more likely to be killed by her in the first scenario.

Drunk driving laws have very little (if anything) to do with safety. They are about cheap political points. How do you say no to a grieving father shrieking “STOP THE DEATH ON OUR HIGHWAYS!” You can’t, not if you want to get re-elected in the age of 24 hour news.

But… half kidding, but half serious, why not have an alcohol permit?

You get your license. You drive for a few years. After you drive for 5 years, you get to go to the DMV and take a test. You drink until your BAC measures .10. Then, you drive an obstacle course. Make the test rigorous. Maybe even require you to come back a few times. You pass? You get a .10 permit. Crank it up every year or so until you are actually “impaired.” If you can show that you can drive, consistently, with a .20 BAC, then fine, drive with a .20 BAC.

But, along with that permit, you must buy a purple flashing light that goes on your roof. And, you must drive at 25% lower than the speed limit.

That way, the people who cower in terror at the boogeyman of the drunk driver, can see the “drunk” driver coming a mile away. They can pull over and let him pass if they are really afraid. Or, since he’s going so slowly, pass him.

Either that, or return the law to the state that it was in when it made sense — driving “while impaired” is illegal. Driving “while having measurable alcohol in your system” is not longer illegal. MADD goes out of business. We get rid of the DUI exception to the Constitution. Everyone wins.

H/T: Teresa

Mike Masnick Proven Right!

Masnick, over at TechDirt has a philosophy that, if you oversimplify it, boils down to “even if people give your stuff away for free, you can still make money charging for it if you give superior service.”

Here is proof that he is right.

Well, I dunno… Mike also says stuff like “if you can’t compete with free, [something bad about you].” But, by the way the hippie gets all upset, it looks like the opposite. Free can’t compete with paid!

Meh, lets just stick with Masnick proven right.