The decision is another example of there being one law for the rich and another for the rest of us. Haugh says that the Haughey case is extraordinary . But it s not. All that s out-of-the-ordinary about it is the background of the defendant. There is nothing about the offence or about the evidence to be offered which calls for any exceptional measure.
We can add Kevin Haugh to our list of class-biased judges.
The factor being missed is that a trawl through the jurors may make a jury trial impossible. The intention is to eliminate from the panel anyone who has strong views on the case or a connection with any of the parties.
Anyone who is already of the belief that Charlie Haughey is a evil little crook who should have been locked up long ago will be excluded from the panel. But if all of this mind are removed from the list of 1,100, can we be certain there ll be twelve left?
After all, the people, unlike the judges, take an unbiased view of these matters.
Marijuana drives people mad. Any doubt has been set to rest by the jailing of Louis Covar. Louis, 51, frrom Georgia in the US, has been paralysed since breaking his neck in a diving accident in 1967. A quadraplegic, he uses a wheelchair and has no control over any of the muscles from his neck down. He says marijuana is the only drug he s found which relieves the constant pain of muscle spasms.
Louis was convicted of marijuana possession last March in Augusta. The judge gave him seven years probation, telling him that if he intended to continue to use the drug, he should keep it to himself . On February 17th, however, the same judge revoked the probation after police testified that Louis had been dealing. Louis vehemently denies this.
He told the Augusta Chronicle that he had tried every legal drug suggested to him. The most frequently recommended was Valium. I don t know where I am half the time I m taking that. I m already in prison in my body, and they want to put me to sleep all the time.
The amount of marijuana police found at Louis home which convinced them he was dealing was one and a quarter ounces. The only additional evidence against him was the anonymous tip-off which had led them to raid the house.
His father, Louis Sr., said his son spent all of the night after he was sentenced sitting in his wheelchair in Richmond County jail waiting for a prison van to take him to the state prison in Augusta. They just let him sit there in the back cell and they only gave him one Valium for the pain. It just isn t fair.
For as long as our societies persist with a law against marijuana which is immoral in principle and unworkable in practice, such unspeakable injustice will continue.
I wonder if Al Gore is by any chance related to Constance Gore-Booth aka Countess Markievicz.
I d be surprised if he s not by next November, and polling day in the US elections.
The effort under way to deliver the Irish-American vote to the flotsam (Hillary Clinton) and jetsam (Al Gore) of Bill Clinton s administration has reached levels of shamelessness in which nothing can be ruled out.
At a swanky ceremony in New York a fortnight ago, Hillary was presented with a peace prize for her efforts to end violence in Ireland. Ms. Clinton graciously admitted that the cause of Ireland has long been close to her heart.
Meanwhile, Irish-American newspapers have been trumpeting the discovery that it was Al Gore who pushed Bill Clinton into giving Gerry Adams a visa to enter the US and Gore who, on his own initiative, phoned Adams and initiated the first contact between the White House and Sinn Fein. Remarkably, this key aspect of Sinn Fein s very public pursuit of US establishment approval has remained hidden until now.
More: it is not widely known that in 1988 Al Gore co-sponsored a Senate resolution lauding the achievements of the Ireland Fund; that in the course of a speech in September 1991 about EU attitudes to eastern Europe he referred to some of the important participants in the European community (fearing) that they have some kind of political skeletons in their own closet, whether it is a Corsica for the French, Northern Ireland for the British, or whatever ; that in 1992 he co-sponsored a Senate resolution urging the UK government to address Northern Ireland s continuing human rights violations .
All this is now ricochetting around the Internet with the suggestion that it might be recycled in letters to US newspapers and calls to phone-in radio shows.
The usual suspect operators are behind this disreputable exercise. Distraught at the possibility that the invites to black-tie wing-dings at the White House will dry up if the Clinton connection is broken, they are desperate not only that Hillary Clinton and Gore should win, but that they should be aware of the part played by their Irish-American cheer-leaders in securing the victories.
Every week, some party on this side of the Atlantic is accused by an opponent of playing politics with the peace process . A strange charge, given that the peace process is an entirely political matter. But no matter. What s relevant is that here we have a group of self-promoters playing American politics with the peace process.
Who are these people, according to Sinn Fein? Friends of Ireland .
Have they no shame? I suppose not.