Only the Second Amendment is important...

I guess only the second amendment to the Constitution of the United States is important. Because all of the people who railed against gun control are the same people who are now insisting that we execute the Boston terrorism suspect without due process.

The fourth amendment protects the accused against unreasonable search and seizure. Only this appears to not apply under the Patriot Act. We have no actual footage of him committing a crime, but we are fairly sure his brother did. Both he and his brother exchanged gunfire with police. It’s fairly obvious that he is guilty of some crimes, but we have zero idea of what crimes. Oh people are guessing, but they don’t know.

The suspect is an American citizen. Whether that status is in jeopardy in the future is irrelevant. He is a naturalized citizen now and he has rights. If this boy’s rights are not respected, then America is meaningless. Why don’t people understand that?

The fifth amendment guarantees that a defendant not be forced to incriminate himself. The suspect has not been indicted by a grand jury, and since he is an American citizen and will almost definitely be tried in a Federal court the charges probably won’t come for weeks if not months. His sixth amendment rights to a speedy trial are definitely going to be tested.

The American justice system is meant to protect both the guilty and the innocent. We have no idea of his motivations, how he became radicalized, if he was radicalized and his brother wasn’t, if it was the other way around, if or who he was helped by, did he help others? Literally thousands of questions.

Learning what he did is important, but learning why he did what he did is probably much more important.

It reminds me of the Central Park Five. People called for the public lynching of five men who were denied due process, convicted, and served over a decade each in prison. Yet each of them was exonerated. Their lives were destroyed by the court of public opinion. Of idiots like Donald Trump who called for their execution.

If we are truly the greatest country on earth, then shouldn’t we prove it to the world?

"Every now and again, we get a look, usually no more than a glimpse, at how the justice system really works. What we see before the sanitizing curtain is drawn abruptly down is a process full of human fallibility and error, sometimes noble, more often unfair, rarely evil but frequently unequal, and through it all inevitably influenced by issues of race and class and economic status. In short, it's a lot like other big, unwieldy institutions. Such a moment of clear sight emerges from the mess we know as the case of the Central Park jogger." -Sydney H. Schanberg Tuesday, Nov 19 2002