Welcome to my blog! I'm Victoria, and I love liberty, individual rights, and writing about politics, trials, and current events. Read more about me here.
Alleged Craigslist killer Philip Markoff will go to trial on March 14, 2011 according to Suffolk County D.A. spokesman Jake Wark. The trial date was set at a brief hearing today, which Markoff did not attend.
The trial was originally supposed to start this month. I am still going to try to attend the trial in March and blog about it, but whether I’ll be able to or not depends on my schedule at work. I’ll keep you all posted!
The Supreme Court ruled today in McDonald v. Chicago that the Second Amendment applies to state and local governments in addition to the federal government. The case centered around Chicago’s ban of basically all handguns, which will likely be repealed as a result of the ruling.
The decision is not perfect – it allows some state and local gun restrictions, just not those that ban handguns entirely. Paul Helmke, the head of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Handgun Violence, was “reassured that the Court has rejected, once again, the gun lobby argument that its ‘any gun, for anybody, anywhere’ agenda is protected by the Constitution.” But this is still a victory for liberty because the court has upheld one of our fundamental rights, the right to bear arms, and sent a message to state governments that they cannot trample all over people’s freedoms just because they aren’t the federal government.
Ilya Shapiro of the Cato Institute wrote as much:
“The Fourteenth Amendment, coming on the heels of the Civil War, says clearly that never again would the Constitution tolerate state oppressions and that all individuals possess certain fundamental rights. And it is equally clear that the right to keep and bear arms is one of those deeply rooted fundamental rights, not least because the Framers thought so highly of it as to enumerate it in the Second Amendment.”
Otis McDonald, the Chicago grandfather and community leader who brought the lawsuit against his city, brought up another positive aspect of the decision, in addition to preserving freedom:
“This will make criminals think twice. If you have the right to have a handgun in your house, even if you don’t have a gun, that will give criminals a second thought, a third thought about breaking in to your house.”
Full text of the decision (PDF)
Gun pictures thanks to Adams Guns
On Cinco de Mayo, two high school students in California wore American flag t-shirts to school. The principal told them to either take the shirts off or wear them inside out, calling them “incendiary.” Now the two boys and their parents are suing the school system, claiming that the school’s actions violated their constitutional rights:
Kendall and Joy Jones; John and Dianna Dariano, parents of Matthew Dariano; and Kurt and Julie Ann Fagerstrom, parents of Dominic Maciel, are asking a judge to rule that what happened May 5 at Live Oak violated the First and Fourteenth amendments, and that the school district’s policy regarding student speech is too vague.
The suit also asks for “nominal damages” and to award attorneys’ fees.
The Morgan Hill Unified School District, Live Oak Principal Nick Boden and Assistant Principal Miguel Rodriguez are named as the defendants.
Some people might call this lawsuit frivolous, but I think it has merit. No one should be banned from showing pride in their country, even during the holiday of another country. So many teenagers try to be cool and fit in at all costs that it’s a breath of fresh air to hear about teens showing their patriotism and standing up for what they believe in. It’s too bad that the Fourth of July doesn’t fall during the school year, because it would be interesting to see if the school allowed students to wear Mexican flag t-shirts on America’s holiday.
Complaint (PDF), thanks to KSBW-TV via the Examiner
President Obama recently gave a speech praising the recently passed version of health insurance reform and warning insurance companies not to use the new law as an excuse to raise prices. But unless strong measures are taken to prevent this, “Obamacare” will actually cause the price of health insurance to rise.
I oppose Obamacare, primarily because it requires all Americans to have health insurance. In my opinion, this violates everyone’s rights because people have the right to decide how they want to spend their own money, as long as they don’t do anything that violates the rights of anyone else. But according to economic theory, the individual mandate has a bad side effect as well – it makes the cost of health insurance go up.
If you haven’t studied economics before, here are the basics:
Usually, the higher the price of a good, the less the demand. Makes sense, right? Also, the higher the price of a good, the higher the supply, because producers are more willing to make a product if they can sell it for a high price. The supply and demand curves (or lines) can be shown on a graph. The point where the two lines intersect is called the equilibrium. This represents the quantity and price that will be produced in a free market.
However, by requiring everyone to purchase a product (in this case health insurance), the government stops demand from responding naturally to price. The degree to which demand for a good responds to price is called price elasticity of demand. People will buy necessities such as food, water, or insulin for diabetics regardless of their price. In economics-speak, the demand for these goods is inelastic. The demand for things such as lattes, CDs, and stuffed animals is elastic, because people can live without them and therefore tend to buy less of them if the price goes up. When demand is perfectly inelastic, the demand curve looks like a vertical line.
By forcing everyone to buy health insurance, the government makes the demand artificially inelastic. The problem with this is that when demand is perfectly inelastic, price basically approaches infinity. If consumers are going to buy something no matter what it costs, you can bet that producers are going to charge a lot.
Bottom line: according to traditional economics, the individual mandate will make the cost of health insurance go up.
For the first time since current budget rules were enacted in 1974, Congress will not pass a budget blueprint this year. “It isn’t possible to debate and pass a realistic, long-term budget until we’ve considered the bipartisan commission’s deficit-reduction plan, which is expected in December,” said Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD). Instead, Congress plans to pass a “budget enforcement resolution,” which only concerns next year’s budget instead of planning for the next five to ten years, as a budget blueprint would.
I don’t know about you, but to me, this doesn’t look like a good sign for fiscal responsibility. Minority leader John Boehner (R-OH) seems to agree.
Thomas Mortimer IV was arraigned today at Woburn District Court for the murders of his wife, two children, and mother in law. As I wrote last night, the bodies of Laura Stone Mortimer, 41, Ellen Stone, 64, Thomas Mortimer V, 4, and Charlotte Mortimer, 2, were found on Wednesday in their Winchester home. It is still unclear exactly how they were killed and what the motive might have been if Mortimer is indeed guilty, which certainly hasn’t been proven yet.
I was there at the arraignment and got to get a good look at the defendant during the proceedings and as he was led out of the courthouse (more on that later). Woburn District Court is a small building, and Mortimer’s arraignment took place in what seemed to be the main courtroom on the first floor. After many short hearings and arraignments in much smaller, less important cases, Mortimer entered the room through a side door at around 10:30. He was surrounded by three court officers, and his hands were cuffed behind his back. He was wearing a gray suit and white shirt, and he appeared very calm, looking straight ahead and slightly down, not moving or fidgeting.
The Judge’s name was James Barretto, the prosecutor was Adrienne Lynch (who also prosecuted Alexander Pring-Wilson), and Mortimer’s defense lawyer, appointed by the Committee for Public Counsel Services, was Denise Regan.
The court entered four not guilty pleas on Mortimer’s behalf, and he showed no emotion as the charges against him were read. Throughout most of the proceedings, Regan placed her hand on Mortimer’s wrist or back. Lynch, not surprisingly, asked that he be held without bail, and Regan did not object.
Regan made four motions in court today:
Lynch had no objection to three of the motions, and those three were allowed. She did object to the motion for defense counsel to be present during the evaluation, arguing that this would give the defense an unfair advantage by providing them information about Mortimer’s mental state that would not be available to the prosecution, and also that it would put an undue burden on the Middlesex Sheriff’s department in scheduling the evaluation. Judge Barretto took this motion under advisement.
The arraignment lasted only about 10 minutes. Afterward dozens of photographers, reporters, and spectators gathered around the back door of the courthouse to wait for Mortimer to come out. I decided to join them. After an hour and a half, Mortimer was finally led out of the courthouse and into a waiting van, surrounded by officers, chained, and wearing a bulletproof vest and what looked like it might have been a jail uniform. Two spectators yelled at him, saying that he should have hanged himself and probably would get hanged in jail. I managed to get two (probably not very good) pictures of him with my phone, and I will post them as soon as I figure out how to get them onto my computer. You can see the better one above. Sorry that I stink at taking pictures with my phone - you can see Mortimer all the way back in the doorway.
According to news reports, Mortimer’s parents were in attendance. It was hard to tell who was who in the courtroom filled with reporters, spectators, and defendants and lawyers in other cases, although two ladies sitting near me said that they were friends of Ellen.
Also according to news reports, this afternoon Judge Barretto ordered Mortimer to undergo a psychological evaluation today and allowed Regan to be present.
The next court date is scheduled for August 2. It should be interesting to see what happens as more details about the case come out.
Edit: Here are some links for further reading:
Yesterday (June 16) the bodies of four people were found at 2 Windsong Lane in Winchester, MA. Their names were Laura Stone Mortimer (41), her mother Ragna (sp?) Ellen Stone (64), and her children Thomas “Finn” Mortimer V (4) and Charlotte Mortimer (2). According to Middlesex County D.A. Gerry Leone, the crime scene was especially horrifying, and the victims appear to have died by blunt force trauma or sharp objects. Laura’s husband and the children’s father, Thomas Mortimer IV (43) was arrested this afternoon in Western Mass. According to Leone, he left notes in the home confessing to the four killings.
This case reminds me a little bit of the Entwistle murders 4 years ago. Both involved a husband allegedly killing his wife and child(ren) in a “nice” suburban neighborhood where you wouldn’t expect a crime to take place. Entwistle had been unemployed for months leading up to the murders. Mortimer was unemployed for a while too, but he had recently landed a job as a sales executive at M&R Consultants Corp. Neither Entwistle nor Mortimer had any previous criminal record. And both cases are receiving a lot of media attention.
Mortimer is set to be arraigned tomorrow in Woburn District Court. I am going to try to go, so hopefully I will be back with a first-hand account of the proceedings. Stay tuned for the latest on this sad story.
Further reading: