Filthy Lucre

A guy in Davenport, Iowa is going to spend a week in jail for contempt of court. His crime: he tried to post a $100.00 bond in dirty pennies and singles.

When the man opted to go to trial on a case of driving with a defective tire, the court required him to post a $100.00 bond. So he arrived at the courthouse with a box of allegedly bug-ridden bills and a bucket of gooey pennies. The clerk of the court said they had to use rubber gloves to count out the filthy lucre. When the judge found out what was going on in the clerk's office, she ordered the guy arrested for contempt of court.

Here is the Iowa statute defining acts of contempt:

665.2 ACTS CONSTITUTING CONTEMPT. The following acts or omissions are contempts, and are punishable as such by any of the courts of this state, or by any judicial officer, including judicial magistrates, acting in the discharge of an official duty, as hereinafter provided:

1. Contemptuous or insolent behavior toward such court while engaged in the discharge of a judicial duty which may tend to impair the respect due to its authority.

2. Any willful disturbance calculated to interrupt the due course of its official proceedings.

3. Illegal resistance to any order or process made or issued by it.

4. Disobedience to any subpoena issued by it and duly served, or refusing to be sworn or to answer as a witness.

5. Unlawfully detaining a witness or party to an action or proceeding pending before such court, while going to or remaining at the place where the action or proceeding is thus pending, after being summoned, or knowingly assisting, aiding or abetting any person in evading service of the process of such court.

6. Any other act or omission specially declared a contempt by law.

So which one of these subsections does posting a filthy bond come under? The only ones it might conceivably be stretched to fit under would be 1 and 2. But then there is the problem of intent, which the statute requires in its plain terms: who deliberately keeps a box of yucky money around, just in case they want to express their displeasure at having to post a trial bond? And if you charged with contempt every single person who comes into the court clerk's office with bad hygiene or a complicated, time-consuming problem, you'd have to let all the real criminals out of the jails to make room for them.

I remember, when I was eight or nine years old, my parents bought a Chevy pickup, and made the down payment almost entirely in singles they'd saved and kept in an old wine jug. Lucky for them the auto dealership didn't have contempt powers.

Saving Us from Ourselves

Idaho police are going to start cracking down on people who don't wear seatbelts. Idaho law requires people to wear seatbelts, although (a) the cops have to have some other reason to pull you over besides a seatbelt violation, and (b) the fine for not wearing a seatbelt is only $10.00. Citing statistics on deaths related to the failure to wear seatbelts, police all over the state are launching a campaign to make everybody buckle up, or else.

Are there people whose lives have been saved because they wore a seatbelt? Undoubtedly. Are there people who have died because they didn't have a seatbelt on? Sure. Is wearing a seatbelt a good idea? Of course. But does the fact that something is a good idea give the government the right to make it compulsory? The state has the duty to protect the rights of individuals against encroachment by others, and to punish those who commit such encroachments; but who told the state it had the right to interfere with the freedom of individuals to risk their own safety?

It is true that we are not morally justified in unnecessarily assuming grave risks. Whether not wearing a seatbelt falls into that category is debatable: riding in a car is always a dangerous proposition, even with a seatbelt. Just getting up in the morning is fraught with perils, visible and invisible, to which we must either expose ourselves or fritter away our precious time on earth trying to avoid them. But people who don't want the state to be a moral arbiter in the arenas of, say, sex and marriage are prefectly prepared to have the state encroach on our free will when it comes to our personal safety, even where the moral stakes are less clear.

Freedom has consequences that we must be prepared to live with, and one of these is that individuals might choose to do stupid things to themselves. If we are not prepared to live with the consequences of freedom, then the only alternative is tyranny.

Or, as Benjamin Franklin is said to have commented, those who are prepared to trade liberty for security deserve neither and will lose both.

A Gold Mine of Legal History: The Proceedings of the Old Bailey

Diogenes at Catholic World News has uncovered a remarkable website containing a searchable archive of what is known as Proceedings, a sort of magazine published under various titles and formats from 1674 through 1913. It is an informal record of nearly two and a half centuries of proceedings at London's Central Criminal Court (the Old Bailey), containing summaries of trial testimony, verdicts and sentences from selected cases. Begun as a form of entertainment, the Proceedings at first covered mainly sensational or amusing cases; although it always had to be selective for reasons of cost, the coverage expanded, and ultimately came to be relied upon by judges and lawyers, among other things, as a handy summation of cases under review. The Proceedings is a fascinating record of criminal cases, from R. v. Susan Grimes (1725), in which a prostitute was accused (and acquitted) of stealing a gold watch from an Irish customer (whose drunken testimony was recorded phonetically), to R. v. Hawley Harvey Crippen (1910), a notorious case in which an American doctor was convicted and executed for murdering and dismembering his wife for another woman.

The Proceedings also (unwittingly) renders the signal service of testifying to the fortitude of the Catholic clergy at a time when it was considered high treason for a priest to function in England. Plugging the word "Romish" into the search engine brings forth, as Diogenes puts it, a cloud of witnesses.

Could It Happen?

Somebody brought up an interesting possibility today in regards to the Democrat ticket: could Bill become Hillary's running mate?

Whether it's a realistic possibility in political terms is not the purpose of this inquiry (though I rather doubt it will happen). From a legal standpoint, however, barring some case law I haven't found, it could happen. Clause 1 of the 22nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, limiting presidential terms:

No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once. But this Article shall not apply to any person holding the office of President, when this Article was proposed by the Congress, and shall not prevent any person who may be holding the office of President, or acting as President, during the term within which this Article becomes operative from holding the office of President or acting as President during the remainder of such term.

Note that it says, "No person shall be ELECTED" to the office of President, etc.; it does not say, "No person shall HOLD the office of President" more than twice. If Bill were Hillary's Vice-President, and Hillary became incapacitated, such that the Vice-President had to take over as President, then Bill would have attained to the office of President by a means other than being elected; as such, he would not come under the purview of the Amendment.

The way I see it, the 22nd Amendment does not operate to bar Bill Clinton from occupying the bottom spot on the Democrat ticket. My cursory research doesn't turn up any case law, but I am subject to being proved wrong.

It should be remembered, though, that just as Bill and Hill were a package deal in 1992, so they are still a package deal in 2008, even if Bill doesn't appear on the ticket. Think about it.