LEGISLATING FROM THE BENCH: U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff has ruled the federal Death Penalty Act of 1994 unconstitutional because juries can make mistakes and that constitutes a violation of due process. Judge Rakoff, who cannot make mistakes and is reportedly able to turn water into wine, pontificated
"on the one hand, innocent people are sentenced to death with materially greater frequency than was previously supposed and that, on the other hand, convincing proof of their innocence often does not emerge until long after their convictions.'' And how many mistaken federal death penalty verdicts compelled Judge Rakoff to issue this edict? Answer: zero. The AP reports that The Divine Jed "based his findings on a number of studies of state death penalty cases. He said he used those studies because the number of federal death sentences, 31, was too small to draw any conclusions...'There is no good reason to believe the federal system will be any more successful at avoiding mistaken impositions of the death penalty than the error-prone state systems already exposed,' Rakoff wrote. "
Rakoff is obviously opposed to the death penalty; that's fine. But he's using the federal bench to advance his own political agenda. If Judge Rakoff were intellectually honest, he would contact his congressman and senators and urge them to repeal the Death Penalty Act. Instead, he has twisted the Constitution to equate due process with a correct verdict, based his rulings on subjective studies unrelated to the statute in question and usurped the legislative power of Congress. The arrogance boggles the mind.
If nothing else, Rakoff has demonstrated that he's amply qualified for elevation to the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
