So says the Supreme Court. What it takes is a finding that the prisoner is "mentally ill" and then they can be locked away until they die, no matter how long it has been since they nominally completed their sentence.
I understand that sexual offenders, especially pedophiles, have an extremely high rate of recidivism. And no, I feel no sympathy for such predators.
What I am concerned about is the precedent that the Supremes have set. I would be willing to wager that the majority of those prisoners get little to no mental health services during their incarceration. It is only when they are approaching their release date that somebody says: "Oh, this guy is so mentally ill, we really must hold him so we can treat his illness."
Yeah, right.
Beyond that, what is to stop the governments from deciding that anyone who has committed a few crimes or has engaged in political dissent just has to be mentally ill? Some paid lackey of a psychologist, just like the ones who signed off on the use of torture at GITMO, would be more than happy to sign a stack of verification forms to hold anybody that the powers that be wanted to hold.
The use of mental health rationales to hold people in prisons and "hospitals" indefinitely was one of the darker abuses of the Soviet Union. It is sad to see that we are now treading forcefully down the same road.
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When even the house negro (Clarence Thomas) objects to an expansion of government power when he's usually a rubber-stamp, you know it's abhorrent. Sad to say, the remaining robes seem to have no qualms about putting their finger up in their air, noting that the vast majority of Americans not only have no objection but actually want a police state, and ruling accordingly. Same reason why Plessey v. Ferguson ("Separate but Equal") got decided the way it was decided...
Unfortunately, I'm now stumped. Given that the majority of Americans not only don't have an objection to living in a police state, but actually want to live in a police state, where do we go from here?
- Badtux the Pessimistic Penguin
One more thing - the dude in question who filed the lawsuit was convicted of downloading a pedophilic photo from the Internet, not of actually raping a kid or anything. While possession of child pornography is a crime and probably should remain so, to treat it as a disease that requires someone to be locked up for the rest of his life in some hellhole for the criminally insane in order to protect the rest of Americans from, err, having him download another pornographic photo, is, well, insane. So it goes in Soviet America though, where we have no problem with "disappearing" people forever... as long as they're *those* people, who aren't like us.
- Badtux the Sovok Penguin
Remind me just who it was that had such a fucking problem with "Activist Judges" again?
Of course, this being the "Supreme Court", there is no appeal.
I can't wait for that fat bastard Alito to have a very serious heart attack, a stroke would be even better.
This wasn't an Alito thing, 'Nucks. Two(2), yes, only *TWO*, of the crows in black robes had the slightest problem with this decision, and that was Justice Antonin Scalia and Justice Clarence Thomas, two of the conservative justices who are likely to be replaced by liberals (all of whom voted for this law). The result is as appalling as Plessy v. Ferguson, which enshrined apartheid as American law for over fifty years via a 8 to 1 decision in favor of apartheid. The U.S. Supreme Court has now ruled that you, or I, could be imprisoned for the rest of our lives on nothing but the say-so of a government-employed psychiatrist that we're nuts... and 7 of 9 Supreme Court justices had no problem with that.
- Badtux the Sovok Penguin
Busted, only Scalia and Thomas fully dissented.
Roberts, Alito, Ginsberg, Stevens, Breyer, Sotomayor and Kennedy all think it is just peachy to hold someone in prison forever because some corrupt quack with a M.D. after his name says so.
BadTux, I don't know where we go from here. The Teabaggers clearly will not give a shit; they only care about constitutional rights if it directly effects them.
What I do know is that liberty and freedom took a heavy blow today.
States already hold that they can keep sex offenders past their release dates. This ruling is for federal courts. Ruling either way wouldn't have changed the state law.
It was about congressional power under the constitution.
The decision lays a path to defend the constitutional power of congress to enact health care reform.
http://www.latimes.com/features/health/la-na-court-offenders-20100518,0,5369429.story
Dennis, I don't give a shit about whether or not this decision means that HCR is constitutional. The concerns on HCR are a bullshit smokescreen thrown up by the Teabaggers to obscure their real concerns about President Obama: (a) He's a Democrat; and (b) he's Black.
This decision means that in every state which has opted for civil commitment of sex offenders has been done, the Supremes have signaled that they have no problem with it.
It also signals that if a sate decides that some other crime is a "mental illness", that offenders can be warehoused forever.
Just the way that the Soviets used to do it.
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