2017 Lower Manhattan Attack

On October 31st, 2017, Sayfulla Saipov drove a rented pickup truck into cyclists and runners for 1 mile of the Hudson River's Park bike path in New York City. This attack killed 8 people and injured 11 others. After driving down the bike path, Saipov crashed into a school bus full of students with special needs and he exited the vehicle holding two guns (a paintball gun and a pellet gun). He was later shot in the stomach and was arrested. Saipov had ties with the terrorist group, ISIL. They found a flag and a document that related to this group, and also when he was in the hospital he asked if an ISIL flag could be hung over him while he stayed there. ISIL is a terrorist group that stands for the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant and they are a jihadist militant group that is fighting in the Iraqi and Syria civil wars. What do you guys think the US should do to prevent further attacks like this? 

The Importance of Civil Court Cases

Usually the big cases with the big consequences are from the criminal court part of the justice system. Nevertheless, the civil case end of the system has importance as well. For example, the OJ Simpson case that we endlessly went over in class didn't seem to give justice to the Goldman family. Since they felt that way, they took him to a civil court and was able to sue him for millions of dollars in damages to their family. They intended on ruining his life because of what he "may have" did to their son. The civil court helps them achieve that justice in their minds and it allows a different way to look at a situation by forcing the defendant to take an interview on camera and also be forced to take the stand and lose the 5th amendment privilege. I feel like if the civil case came first in many situations, it would be very beneficial to the criminal case and provide solid evidence.

OJ Armed Robbery

OJ Simpson's second trial for armed robbery though is seen by some people as justice and was deserved, I believe it was a horrible misconduct of power by the judge and court, along with the people that went along with the ruling and supported the cases outcome. In the documentary they state how a normal person would get away with two years for all rulings. However this case was proven to be payback for the misruling on the first double murder case. There was several aspects that point to the judge misfairly ruling against OJ Simpson. There were even things that people noticed that might have been quincidences but were interesting that they landed on this ruling, like how it was the murder case anniversary the day of the armed robbery ruling. As well as the judge ruling the max sentence on every one of the rulings. This in my opinion was a unfair use of power that the judge used her small case to get what she believed was the proper ruling on another sentence that she had nothing to do with.

Why defend a guilty man

A lot of us get angry at the defense for defending someone who, to us, is obviously guilty. Some of the defense lawyers for OJ received death threats and criticisms from citizens for years after the trial. People would ask them how they could live with themselves knowing that they set an innocent man free. I somewhat agreed with those people until I heard their reasoning. The job of the defense is to force the prosecution to convict him beyond reasonable doubt. They said in law school they were taught that “ten guilty men set free is better than one innocent man convicted”. This completely changed how I viewed what they did and made me understand that especially for such a high profile case they had to make sure that he was guilty beyond reasonable doubt. After hearing their points I blame the prosecution for what happened. They did many things wrong and although some of them were traps set by the defense, they still made plenty of their own mistakes and should not have fallen for the traps.

What Should and What Shouldn't News Publications Publish?

We've been working on the first amendment case research paper, and the case that I chose was the 1971 Case of New York Times v. United States. In this case, the New York Times published 4,000 pages of classified documents relating to the Vietnam War, dubbed the Pentagon Papers. They acquired the papers through a former white house employee who stole and leaked it to the New York Times.

This made me wonder, what should news publications publish? Is it morally/ethically right for them to publish these papers even if they were stolen from the White House? Does the public have the right to know what their government is doing?

I personally think that news publications not only have the right to publish what they want (The Supreme Court agrees) but also should publish these things. I believe that news journalism should be a way to give the public information that they would have previously never had access to, or would have a hard time accessing. News publications, in my opinion, have this responsibility. To me, even if these papers are stolen, they still have the responsibility to publish it, so that they can adequately inform the public.

But what do you guys think? I'm interested to hear what ya'll say.

Was OJ deserving of his long sentence for armed robbery and "kidnapping"

OJ Simpson walked away from a double murder, and it left a lot of people upset. Upset with him and the Justice system, and they wanted him to pay for what he did. When Simpson was convicted of armed robbery and kidnapping, he got a controversial sentence. He was given an extremely long sentence for his crimes, 33 years. There has been some conspiracy over this sentence because of it "coincidentally" relates to his 33 million lost in civil court. Was this supposed to be a message? Was this how they made OJ pay for his double murder?

Social Media Threatening

I thought that this was a pretty interesting topic that is covered by my Supreme Court case that we are writing papers on in small group. To summarize what is happening in the case, a man recently got divorced from his wife and she took the kids AND he got fired from his job at the amusement park. Pretty much his life is going to crap and then he takes his "rapping" career to Facebook and posts some lyrics. The issue is that what he posted was thought to be threatening to his family and he got arrested for it. Obviously, it is a federal crime for threatening someone. Mr. Rapper backed it up by saying he had no intent to threaten the people and that it was a joke. The Supreme Court didn't buy it and he ended up getting 44 months in jail. The Supreme Court said that if the victims feel that it was directed towards them in a threatening manner and the victims are in a reasonable mind then it is justified. One judge put it this way, "There is nothing absurd about punishing an individual who, with knowledge of the words he uses and their ordinary meaning in context, makes a threat," Justice Thomas said. "For instance, a high school student who sends a letter to his principal stating that he will massacre his classmates with a machine gun, even if he intended the letter as a joke, cannot fairly be described as engaging in innocent conduct." ¹ This shows the Supreme Court's view on the matter and it seems valid. My only question would be if the person who would be the victim in this case really doesn't believe it was written with threatening or malicious intent, could they still get away with charging the defendant with the crime? The way it looks is that in this scenario, the victim has a lot of responsibility to tell the truth and not much of a way to tell if they actually feel the way that they do. I am curious to see what y'all say about this.

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1 http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A418869585/OVIC?u=los42754&xid=77e9cc23.^↩