Scott Bradford: Off on a Tangent

We the Jury Find the Defendant . . .

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After many years of waiting, I finally received a jury summons to serve at the Loudoun County Circuit Court. My date was yesterday, Friday February 10.

I was one of about 25 people who actually had to show up at the court house yesterday (many more were dismissed ahead of time and did not have to appear). I arrived well before the required 8am time, went through security, and proceeded to the jury waiting room where I sat reading my Kindle for nearly an hour. We then received an orientation from the jury coordinator who told us how we were all selected (randomly by computer from voter and DMV records) and what we should expect from the day. She also told us that there was only one jury trial on the schedule for the day, so most of us would be sent home.

The judge in the case requested that only 14 of us go back into the courtroom, so the first 14 of us (alphabetically by last name) were lined up while the rest were dismissed and free to leave around 9:15am.

Once in the court room, the charges were read and jury selection began. The judge asked us all a number of questions (as a group), mostly related to basics like, ‘Does anybody have a problem with the legal doctrine that the accused is innocent until proven guilty?’ After that, an assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney asked us a number of her own questions, followed by a third series of questions from one of the defense attorneys. The defense attorney seemed particularly concerned with whether any of us were biased in favor of law-enforcement officers; we were asked if any close friends or relatives worked in law enforcement, and we were also asked if we felt the testimony of a law enforcement officer automatically has more weight than anybody else’s testimony (it doesn’t, in my opinion).

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Medicine Is Restorative, Not Inhibitory

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The purpose of medical care is always restorative . . . or at least it should be. It is meant to treat the sick and restore them to health, at least as much as possible at our current stage of knowledge and development. A severed arm is reattached, if possible. A malfunctioning thyroid is treated with medicine to restore its natural function. We remove cancers, repair lacerations, fuse broken bones. Medicine is about healing the dysfunction, illness, and injury that interrupts our healthy, natural bodily functions. It is never about the inhibition of our healthy bodily functions; that would run counter to what medicine is about.

Yes, occasionally we remove or inhibit something as part of a medical treatment, but only when it is absolutely necessary. A kidney that is badly diseased and cannot be restored to its natural function because it is beyond the limits of modern medicine will be removed, for example. But even in this case, although the function of the kidney itself cannot be restored, the end goal of the treatment is to restore the body’s overall function as much as possible given the circumstances and prevent the spread of the disease to other organs. The fact that the person’s overall kidney function will be halved is a side-effect brought on by necessity; the inhibition of bodily function is not the goal, but the unfortunate consequence.

How curious, then, that contraception (and even abortion) is now being cynically labeled as health care, as if it is no different than pain killers or thyroid drugs. Except in very rare cases, these treatments are not restorative but inhibitory by their very nature. They interrupt and stymie the body’s natural functions as their primary goal. The reproductive cycle and the bearing of children is a perfectly natural and healthy function of the female human body, no different than the function of the kidney or the thyroid. It is part of who we are as human beings. Blocking that natural function, except when there is a restorative need to do so, is not medicine any more than me arbitrarily wanting to turn off my left kidney would be. I think everybody would recognize the absurdity of a demand that my health insurance plan cover my choice to shut down my left kidney, even if I had the right to do it (which I don’t; apparently some choices about inhibiting natural body functions are more equal than others).

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State of the Union Not-Live Blog

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I missed the State of the Union address this past Tuesday because I had a schedule conflict, which was unfortunate since I really enjoyed live-blogging it last year. Well, I finally got around to watching it (and the Republican response) this evening. So here is what would have been in my live blog if I had been live-blogging it. Think of it as a time-delayed live-blog.

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State of the Union Address Tonight at 9pm

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President Barack Obama (D) is scheduled to give the annual State of the Union address tonight at 9:00 p.m. EST before a joint session of Congress. The address will be followed by a Republican Response to be delivered by Governor Mitch Daniels (R-IN).

As I do every year, I encourage all of my readers to watch both the State of the Union address and the opposition response. I recommend the unfettered and uninterrupted coverage from C-SPAN, but the addresses will also be available on most broadcast channels and cable news networks.

The Constitution requires that the president report to Congress annually on the state of the union, but does not specify the method or form of this report (Article II, Section 3). The in-person State of the Union address has been a tradition since 1913. Transcripts of all 1945-2011 addresses before joint sessions of Congress, including each State of the Union, are available from C-SPAN.

Off on a Tangent will not be providing a live blog of this year’s addresses (due to a scheduling conflict), however I will post a review some time in the following days.

Supreme Court: Warrantless GPS Tracking is Unconstitutional

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In a welcome victory for civil liberties, the United States Supreme Court today unanimously ruled that using a GPS tracking device to monitor a suspect’s vehicle without a warrant is unconstitutional. The ruling in United States v. Jones (10-1259) makes it clear that this kind of warrantless tracking violates Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. The Court stated unequivocally that, “The Government’s attachment of the GPS device to the vehicle, and its use of that device to monitor the vehicle’s movements, constitutes a search under the Fourth Amendment.”

In 2004, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Washington, DC, Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) investigators placed a GPS tracking device on suspected drug dealer Antoine Jones’s vehicle without having first obtained a warrant. They tracked Jones’s vehicle 24-hours/day for four weeks, eventually charging him with a number of drug related charges. Jones was convicted, but that conviction was later overturned by an appeals court because it rested on the unconstitutionally obtained tracking data from the GPS device.

The Jones case is one of two important civil liberties cases Off on a Tangent is monitoring in the court’s current session. Had the court ruled in the government’s favor, it would have been a very serious erosion of our basic civil liberties and damning evidence that we are now living under an extra-constitutional government. I am pleased that the Court ruled solidly in favor of individual rights, and am pleasantly surprised that there were no dissenters. Sadly, civil liberty cases are usually narrow 5-4 rulings these days.

Scott Bradford is a writer and technologist who has been putting his opinions online since 1995. He believes in three inviolable human rights: life, liberty, and property. He is a Catholic Christian who worships the trinitarian God described in the Nicene Creed. Scott is a husband, nerd, pet lover, and AMC/Jeep enthusiast with a B.S. degree in public administration from George Mason University.