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Comment by causi | Hacker News Reader

Any of them? The entire body of the law is based on legal technicalities. Judges don't get to decide "what they really meant it to say" when applying the law.

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Determining legislation's intent is a core function of every appellate court.

Yeah, but you can't ignore the letter of the law to pursue it's spirit. There are precedents supporting that so that laws don't violate strict construction and lenity. That's doesn't mean it doesn't happen - I've seen laws that explicitly call out "reasonable" in them and the courts decide to apply strict liability instead of a reasonable standard, just to make their job easier (increase convictions).

I was in court on a giant mixed docket with name changes to murder indictments. One of the cases was a paternity action involving the state’s new paternity statute.

There was argument over how to interpret the statute and one of the attorneys tried buffaloing the judge with “Well actually judge, I’m on the committee that drafted the bill and our intent,” The judge cut him off and retorted that he didn’t care what anyone intended, he was going to go by what the statute actually said.

I made a mental note to never argue legislative intent in that court.

The judge did not care what the lawyer had to say because it is improper for a lawyer to testify.

He wasn’t testifying, he was arguing. If wasn’t an evidentiary hearing.

And he has no place to state the intent of the committee based upon his own experiences, because it's not an evidentiary hearing

If it was not an evidentiary hearing, then there were two reasons the attorney’s testimony was disallowed.

He’s dismissing someone’s anecdote of what the intent of the law was. Do you not see the difference?

Except it literally is - both the letter of the law, and the spirit of the law are equally important under the American (and English!) legal systems and most interesting precedent is due to ‘edge cases’.

It’s impossible to write any law which covers every scenario and is not either overbroad (penalizes actually desirable or ‘ok’ behavior in some cases), not being possible to get around for bad behavior, or so vague it heavily restricts desired behavior.

Hell, look at the legal battles and drama around murder trials or corporate malfeasance for clear examples. And those are the ones where the bad actors were so clearly being bad that professionals felt they could nail them to the wall in court.

Also, as the old saw goes - ‘if the letter of the law is not in your favor, argue the intent.

If the intent of the law is not in your favor, argue the facts.

If neither the letter nor the intent of the law is in your favor, pound the table.’

Carl Sandburg perhaps?

For example - did someone commit first degree murder or something else (manslaughter, second degree murder?), if they intentionally laid in wait and shot someone they thought was person A - but it was actually person B, who looked similar but they actually didn’t know at all.

After all, they didn’t intentionally commit premeditated murder against person B did they? But they did definitely premeditate something that became a murder!

So was this negligent homicide in fact (they accidentally killed simeone who wasn’t their target due to negligent behavior), or first degree murder (intent) because they intentionally murdered a human being with premeditation - though it was actually an accident they killed that particular human being, and they had no premeditation or intent to kill that particular human?

There was a post with very good “let’s see what the law actually says…” analysis in the last thread we had.

TL;DR there’s definitely room to dispute whether this decision was merely “calling balls and strikes” based on the meaning of the law or kinda a damn stretch.

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