What does Oregon ballot measure 112 actually do? Section 31, Article 4 of the Oregon constitution says: There shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the State, otherwise than as a punishment for crime, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted. Measure 112 removes the italicized clause, but it adds: Upon conviction of a crime, an Oregon court or a probation or parole agency may order the convicted person to engage in education, counseling, treatment, community service or other alternatives to incarceration, as part of sentencing for the crime, in accordance with programs that have been in place historically or that may be developed in the future, to provide accountability, reformation, protection of society or rehabilitation. (emphasis added) Doesn't this basically mean that convicted criminals can't be required to work, but they can be required to work?
The previous constitutional provision, which copies the wording of the 13th Amendment to the US Federal Constitution, would in theory have allowed a converted criminal to be sentenced to lifetime slavery, or to a long period of indentured servitude, although this has not commonly been done. This language has allowed convicted criminals to be sentenced to many years of hard labor in a prion setting, including under circumstances where the convicts are rented out to private employers. I take it that such practices would be forbidden by the new language, and that only a limited period of &quot;community service&quot; would be allowed, not under prison conditions, and not designed to benefit private employers. It is not clear to me just what the limits of &quot;community service&quot; are, in intensity or duration. But the suggestioinb seems to be that they would be much less intense, in both aspects, than traditional &quot;chain gang&quot; sentences.
The actual method of amending the Constition is spelled out in Article V – originalism would reject the position that there are other ways to amend it. We can see the result in the ratified amendments. Originalism is a theory of interpretation, not a theory of drafting, and it hold that the words of the law, be it the Constitution or a particular statute, are to be understood as would be understood by people originally. (There are numerous versions of originalism, so one can't be more precise than than until you decide whether you mean original understanding or original intent, the latter now being a minority viewpoint). It does not hold that new laws should be drafted in the language as it existed in the 18th century, as indeed they are not. Thus the 26th Amendment is written in contemporary style befitting the fact that it was drafted recently, and the 27th Amendment is written in older style befitting the fact that it was drafted in 1789. As for "changing values", each ratified amendment represents some change of values, whereby originally a right was not recognized (or was), and by the amendment, that value changes. The 18th Amendment represents on change in values, and the 21st reflects a change in that value, though not back to the status quo.
Can the prosecutor and/or the judge be sued for dereliction of duty, and for non-uniform application of the law? No. Judges and prosecutors have absolute immunity from civil liability for their actions in the course of their duties in connection with the court process. Prosecutors have effectively absolute discretion in their charging decisions and in their decisions to reduce the charges sought against a defendant (prior to jeopardy attaching when a jury is sworn in). Can the outcome of a bench trial be appealed on grounds that the judge did not inform the defendant of his rights Yes. or that his rights were taken away by unwarranted modification of the charges? No. Incidentally, there is no federal constitutional right to a jury trial in a case where six months or less of incarceration is sought as a penalty, and there is no federal constitutional right to counsel unless incarceration is a possible penalty. The Utah State Constitution distinguishes between criminal matters and non-criminal matters in several respects mostly found in the state's bill of Rights (Article I of the State Constitution) in Sections 8, 10, 12, 13, and 19. But, it is fundamentally the right of the state through its prosecutors to decide what charges to press against someone, and they are well within their rights to change their minds. Often, this will be in your favor because reducing an offense to a civil infraction rather than a misdemeanor will have far fewer collateral consequences related to having a criminal record.
At half a million I would expect it is qualifies as &quot;felony or other crime&quot; - the U.S. Constitution (Article IV Section 2) requires that: A person charged in any State with Treason, Felony, or other Crime, who shall flee from Justice, and be found in another State, shall on Demand of the executive Authority of the State from which he fled, be delivered up, to be removed to the State having Jurisdiction of the Crime.
Twenty States Allow Pre-Conviction Pardons The default rule is that states follows the federal rule that a crime can be pardoned any time after it is committed, but cannot be pardoned before it is committed. It appears that this is the rule in 20 U.S. states (a compilation of state clemency laws and procedures can be found at this website and a compact chart for all 50 states is here). Admittedly, this evaluation relies on a third party summary that may not capture every fine nuance of the process or exception to the general rule. Four States Where Pre-Conviction Pardons Are Allowed Don't Actually Grant Them Under A Policy Which Is Actually Followed This list of 20 states include states where the Governor or Board or both working together, have the power to grant clemency in a very broad array of circumstances, but have adopted policies for how the current Governor or Board will handle applications that are more restrictive than the legal authority that the person issuing pardons has to grant them. In Indiana, Massachusetts, Minnesota and Nebraska, the pardon power is legally very broad but recent Governors, as a matter of personal pardon power policy, have refused to consider applications for pardons by people who have not completed their sentences many years earlier (5 years in IN; 7 years in MN; 10-15 years depending upon the offense in MA; 3-10 years depending upon the offense in NE). In addition to these four states, North Carolina's Governor has an informal five year from completion of sentence waiting period. But, North Carolina is not included because in practice, the Governors of North Carolina have granted almost all pardons awarded in cases where the Governor is commuting sentences due to a likelihood of actual innocence of a crime, notwithstanding this policy. Commutation Of Sentences And Pre-Conviction Pardons Are Very Rare In practice, however, commutation of a sentence for crimes, or pardons of people who have not completed sentences for their crimes of conviction are very rare in every state, although the frequency with which pardons are granted varies wildly from state to state. For example, in Alaska, the pardon power is legally very broad, but has been exercised only three times since 1995, while in Pennsylvania the hybrid Governor-Board pardon power is theoretically more narrow but about 150 pardons are granted per year (a rate about 1000 times greater before adjusting for population, and more than 30 times greater after adjusting for population). The vast majority of pardons are issued to people who have been convicted of a crime and served their sentences and shown good behavior after their release in order to relieve the applicants of the collateral consequences of having a criminal record, such as ineligibility for occupational licenses and loss of gun ownership rights. Pardons for people who have not been convicted of a crime and commutations of the sentences of people who have been convicted of crimes and are still serving their sentences are extremely rare in every state, and pardons for people who have not been convicted of a crime at the state level are less common than commutations of people who are currently serving sentences for crimes they have been convicted of by courts. There are probably fewer than twenty such pardons or commutations per year in the United States on average (excluding several cases in which a Governor has commuted the sentence of everyone sentenced to death to life in prison). The number of pardons of people who have not been convicted of a crime at the state level is probably less than five per year on average in the entire United States - although there are occasional spikes (e.g. in the case of pending prosecutions where serious doubt has been cast on a common source of evidence like a state informant or a crime lab). Most of the notable instances of pardons of people who have not been convicted of crimes (e.g. President Carter's pardon of Vietnam era draft dodgers) involve categorial pardons of a class of people rather than case by case evaluations of individuals, and resemble a legislative amnesty process to serve a political goal, rather than an individualized quasi-judicial consideration of a particular individual's case in the interests of justice tempered by mercy. Immunity From Prosecution On the other hand, even when a state limits the pardon power to persons who have been convicted of a crime in a court of law (which many appear to), there is something almost equivalent to the pardon power for people who have not been convicted of crimes that is routinely used by executive branch DAs (i.e. a grant of immunity from prosecution for a crime, for example, in exchange for testimony or cooperation with an investigation). This practice is quite common, although so far as I know, there are no comprehensive statistics available regarding immunity from prosecution grants, although there may be some estimates of how many are made in the academic literature. Governors v. Pardon Boards v. Hybrid Systems While it doesn't go to the thrust of your question, it is true, however, that while every state has a pardon power, not every state vests that power in the Governor of the state on the federal model. Many states (e.g. Georgia, Texas and Oklahoma) require the involvement of a Board of Pardons and Paroles (or an equivalent body) to be involved any time that a pardon is sought, sometimes independently of the Governor, and sometimes in coordination with the Governor. Wikipedia states that nine states have Boards of Pardon and Parole or the equivalent with exclusive power over pardons. In the other forty-one U.S. states the pardon power is vested either in both the Governor and a Board, or is vested entirely in a Governor. The pardon power of the President extends only to offenses recognizable under federal law. However, the governors of most of the 50 states have the power to grant pardons or reprieves for offenses under state criminal law. In other states, that power is committed to an appointed agency or board, or to a board and the governor in some hybrid arrangement (in some states the agency is merged with that of the parole board, as in the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board). Nine states in the United States have Boards of Pardons and Paroles that exclusively grant all state pardons. These states are: Alabama (Board of Pardons and Paroles), Connecticut (Board of Pardons and Paroles), Georgia (Board of Pardons and Paroles), Idaho (Commission of Pardons and Paroles), Minnesota (Board of Pardons), Nebraska (Board of Pardons), Nevada (Board of Pardon Commissioners), South Carolina (Board of Probation, Parole and Pardon), and Utah (Board of Pardons and Parole). In states that vest the pardon power in part or in full to a Board of Pardons and Paroles, as opposed making it a plenary power of the Governor personally which is not subject to review or limitation as in the federal model, as a practical matter, it is much harder to fit into the Board's bureaucratic process for processing pardon applications when there is not a conviction that has been entered, than it is in the less bureaucratic case when that power is vested solely and personally in the Governor on a plenary basis. The pardon board process in many states, at least as a practical matter, makes it impossible to obtain a pardon until there has been a conviction and in most cases, also a sentence imposed and sometimes a waiting period after a sentence has been fully served. For example, many states prohibit applications to the pardon board from being made until a sentence has been completed or until a certain number of years after a sentence has been completed (effectively limiting the power to restoration of civil rights rather than commutation of a sentence, or relief for someone who has not been convicted).
Prior to Shelley v. Kramer, racial covenants were considered to be outside the scope of the 14th Amendment, because as stated in Corrigan v. Buckley, &quot;the prohibitions of the Fourteenth Amendment 'have reference to state action exclusively, and not to any action of private individuals'&quot;. Therefore, a private agreement to exclude blacks does not run afoul of the 14th Amendment. The Shelley court also noted: But here there was more. These are cases in which the purposes of the agreements were secured only by judicial enforcement by state courts of the restrictive terms of the agreements. This leads to the primary holding of this case: We hold that, in granting judicial enforcement of the restrictive agreements in these cases, the States have denied petitioners the equal protection of the laws, and that, therefore, the action of the state courts cannot stand. That is, the racially-restrictive agreements are not themselves forbidden by the 14th Amendment, but enforcement of such agreements is forbidden. An obvious question is, why had nobody advanced that argument before, but legal arguments often suffer from the forest / trees disability. As far as I have been able to determine, that part of the Oregon Constitution excluding blacks became a legal nullity when the 14th Amendment was ratified, though it remained in the Constitution until 1926. The various anti-Chinese laws which were enforced were not enforced against Chinese who were citizens, see US v. Wong Kim Ark.
No The Texas suit alleges that significant changes were made to the election rules in the various defendant states, and that these were not approved by the legislatures of those states, but were made by administrative or court decisions. It also claims that differences in local practice and polices made absentee or mail-in voting easier, or invalid votes less likely to be detected, in some counties than in others, meaning that voters in some parts of those states were treated differently than voters in other parts. Note that this theory has not yet been accepted, or in any way passed on, by SCOTUS. But even assuming that the theory were to be accepted, it would require, at most, strict adherence to the election statutes of each state, and that changes or variances be approved by the state legislature. It would have nothing to say about the actual content of the various state laws, unless those laws treated different parts of a state differently, in which case there would be an equal protection violation. The Electors clause, cited in this suit, gives to the legislature of each state the power to &quot;direct&quot; how electors are to be appointed. This is done through laws, statutes. The suit cites this clause as a source of authority, and nothing in it could be taken as suggesting a requirement of national uniformity in election law. I have not yet seen the response to this suit, if indeed one has been filed. It may be that a response would argue that the changes were, in fact, authorized by provisions of the various state laws granting authority to officials. No one knows how the Court will respond to this suit. But even if it were to rule for the plaintiff Texas, that would not impose a national standard, nor permit one state to challenge the provisions of the law of another. It might permit one state to challenge how well another state had applied its own law.
What a statute means can be difficult to determine. There are several approaches to statutory interpretation that could be helpful: Textual: The plain meaning doesn't confine "use" to a few particular types of uses. The plain text provides an expansive prohibition on any use of an electronic communication device. Legislative history/legislative intent: The previous version of the subsection did limit prohibited uses to only composing, sending, or reading electronic messages. Given the amendment, it seems that the legislature no longer desired that limitation. When the bill was introduced, Rep. D'Amico stated the purpose of the bill was to "[expand] the prohibition on driving while using an electronic communication device to include uses beyond composing, sending, or reading an electronic message." During debate, when asked what a person should do that doesn't have Bluetooth, Rep. D'Amico suggested "You put it on speaker phone". When asked, "Where would you place the phone?", Rep D'Amico replied, "Wherever you feel like; just not next to your ear." During the same debate, D'Amico described the bill: "What House Bill 1247 does is ban handheld cell phones while driving a vehicle." In my opinion, the declaration of the bill's sponsor, and the debate surrounding the bill treated it as expanding the prohibition from including only texting and email to also include voice conversations. As far as I can tell, the full scope of "using" under this statute hasn't been tested in court, but I could see this going either way. The plain text provides an expansive prohibition on any use of an electronic communication device. However, a court might also be convinced by the legislative intent that only aims to add handheld voice communications to the previous list of prohibited activities (or it least it could be argued that this is the case). Further, under a purposive construction, a court could even look beyond the explicit legislative intent and find that the core purpose was to prevent distraction, in which case "using" could include any activity on your electronic device that distracts you as if you were texting, or making a phone call (eg. selecting the next song to play in your music app).