Sure, by a federal court. The state, under the same governor who is still in office today, went to court and argued that Texas had a compelling interest in preventing people from having sex for reasons other than procreation.
Doesn't change the fact that your first statement is not factual anymore. Given time I think we (Texans) can eventually stop / vote out all these morons who think legislating morality is their job - we've been headed that way last few elections anyway.
www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/31/willie-smith-ward-rib-theft_n_3365554.html
That's "justice", Texas style. Better than the Taliban's, I suppose. But not by much.
The sentence is somewhat harsh (eligible for parole in 12.5), but your comparison to the Taliban is absurd.
EDIT:
somewhat harsh in relative comparison to normal American sentencing standards, since the goal is apparently to single out Texas as some horrible place where sentencing is too harsh. I will now point out draconian three-strikes laws in other more progressive states that would have had him in jail for life.
Make no mistake, I think American criminal courts and sentencing are too harsh in general and our prisons are horrible travesties of justice. But the singling out of this state is what I'm calling absurd - all of American criminal sentencing is broken.
However, are you seriously suggesting that 50 years imprisonment is only somewhat harsh?! Taking 12.5 years at the minimum before being eligible for parole for stealing $35 ribs and "threatening" someone?
By the way, saying "I've got a knife" and calling that a threat is both a stretch of what it means to threaten and what it means to call something a "violent act".
$35 food theft != 50 years imprisonment. That is fucking insane, not somewhat harsh.
Why in the fuck does that have anything to do with the severity of the sentence?
Should we start valuing people based on their probability to cure cancer or start the next Google?
I'm not sure about this case, but it could much like the three strike laws mentioned above. He only got five years for the robbery, five years for the threat, and forty years for his habitual criminal activity. As stated, in three-strike territory he possibly would have gotten life simply for the robbery of $35 worth of ribs.
I agree with the above, singling out Texas as some kind of outlier for this type of thing doesn't seem quite right.
Life imprisonment for stealing $35 of food is bullshit. Repeat offender or not.
There's a fundamental problem with a society that is okay with an increasing prison population spending their entire adult lives there because of terminal sentences on the basis of recidivism.
Increasing sentences for recidivism itself is constitutionally debatable, I think, though I'm not sure if it has been challenged on that basis. This is America, though. It'd probably stand cos we like the idea of systemic incarceration as a means to low crime rates.
I don't like to harp on things that have become politicized too often, but this particular case stands in such stark contrast to bankers who made off with billions, none of whom to my knowledge are spending the rest of their lives in a common prison.
That's why the howls of injustice, to quote another commenter. $35 in ribs, taken by repeat offender, is apparently a greater crime against society than the repeat offense of fleecing the entire society.
When will people get the difference between theft and robbery through their heads? One is a property crime. The other is a violent crime.
But sure, just go ahead and say you'll get 50 years for shoplifting. You get more clicks and you can be seen as indignant and virtuous.
EDIT: Ok, so I'm wrong about Ward actually threatening the clerk. But he was a multiple felon, and the jury apparently believed the testimony that he had a knife (which would have been illegal for a multiple felon to carry).
My comments in general still apply to many, many stories that are presented the way I originally described.
If you did, you'd understand that yes, it was shoplifting. He was apprehended after the fact, at which point the shoplifting was discovered. When asked if he had anything else, he replied that he had a knife, but didn't actually show it.
In other words, there was no violence committed or even threatened in the course of the crime. There was no violence committed or credibly threatened after the fact. There was simply a statement, which could easily be seen as a confession, that he had a knife in his possession.
Well we can't all have the outstanding records of quality policing of places like California...
Jeffersonian democrats certainly were against that idea, as evidenced by nullification, which was in issue up until the civil war.
Maybe the federalists, but it sounds extreme even for them.
It sounds like something that the northern politicians had in mind in the late 19th century or maybe early 20th century.
i know its OT, but could you expand on that idea?
That our constitution ended up vague on these issues-- and the existence of the Senate with its state-appointed representitives-- is owed to negotiation and comprimise. Of course, Washington presided over the congress on these issues, he was not himself a delegate, so you don't have a lot of direct quotes on these topics but what we know has been pieced together over the years from his (limited) correspondence and 2nd party accounts.