Editor’s Note: Liberty Nation’s Washington Political Columnist Tim Donner and Legal Affairs Editor Scott Cosenza sit down to discuss legal challenges and cases taking place across America. This is the transcript of Liberty Nation Radio heard coast-to-coast on the Radio America Network. A podcast version or a videocast of this program is also available by clicking the links.
Now it is time, some would say beyond time, to talk liberty. That’s why we call this segment Talk and Liberty. It’s when we welcome back in our regular contributor, constitutional lawyer, Liberty Nation legal affairs editor, but more than that, the man who we have dubbed our guardian of individual liberty, Scott Cosenza. Hello, Scott.
Scott Cosenza: Hello, Tim. Thank you so much.
Tim Donner: You’re so welcome. So the Supreme Court of the United States hears arguments on whether a unanimous jury ruling applies retroactively. What’s this about?
Scott Cosenza: Well, last year it was a six-to-three case, I think, written by Justice Gorsuch called Ramos or Ramos. In that case, the court ruled that serious sentences especially require unanimous jury verdicts if it is a jury, which is to say that non-unanimous jury verdicts are impermissible for life sentences. For instance, this was a practice done in the deep South in a way that they could have blacks on juries basically, yet still convict them in a racist manner. That’s kind of a non-disputed genesis of the practice. Now, the question becomes because of its racist genesis, does that mean that it’s a racist practice today or impermissible today? It was ruled that it was impermissible.
Then the question becomes, Tim, well, what about the people who are already serving time and have convictions due to non-unanimous verdicts? Are they entitled to have those cases thrown out or reheard? And that’s what this case called Edwards v. Vannoy concerns. It seems like by the questioning the judges are inclined to rule that people who were convicted by non-unanimous juries will be able to have their cases retried and their sentences thrown out.
TD: Let’s move on to New York City and D.C., where city councils have passed bans on cashless businesses.
SC: Yeah. So if you think that perhaps during the pandemic or as a result of it, you might want to have no cash handling because of the potential for contagions, well you’re not allowed to do that. This is one of these sort of white knight measures that people get to proclaim they’re the sort of like champions and heroes of the downtrodden who may not have access to cashless payments, but it basically becomes a sop to people who just want to go ahead and keep paying cash. In fact, I think both in D.C. and New York, various politicians talk about old people who have access to electronic means of payment, but they just prefer to use cash because it’s their tried and true.
The sad thing is though, Tim, for the business owners who have to suffer the consequences of paying people to deal with that cash on site, managing the risk of theft, and serious crimes that come along with the possession and transfer of that cash, and of course paying for somebody to deal with it. One of the critics, a restaurant owner, said he pays a manager 20 hours a week to deal with their cash from the counting to the management of it and transporting it. It’s just another imposition, Tim, on a business climate that is hostile in both places, that are going to have to compete in both places to retain who they’ve got, much less attract new businesses to these cities.
TD: Meanwhile, the prosecutors down in Palm Beach County, Florida just aren’t going to give up on Robert Kraft. A Florida masseuse has been ordered to pay $31,573, the precision of that is perplexing, after soliciting Mr. Kraft to commit prostitution.
SC: Well they did give up on Kraft because the courts have ordered them to, Tim, but they’re now taking out their justice on the supposed victims of Mr. Kraft.
TD: Right.
SC: You’ll recall Mr. Kraft was arrested and charged with being involved in a conspiracy to engage in prostitution for sex-trafficked victims. That’s why these prosecutors get to stand on their high horse and talk about it. So what’s happened is that the sheriff or, excuse me, the state’s attorney Dave Aronberg and the sheriff William Snyder, what they did to him is they paid investigators to go and get sexual services done at these massage parlors and then videotape others and was later determined to be an illegal warrant violating the Fourth Amendment rights of all involved including, by the way, the victims of voyeurism by the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Department who watched females get undressed and be massaged while nude to investigate sex trafficking.
And just, Tim, to wrap it up with a bow, what do they do? They hammer the poor “victims” of this crime, right? Because she was involved in the video tape sex-for-sale situation and she’s got to pay. The victim of the crime has to pay over $30,000 to the Palm Beach County authorities. Almost every time these things are meted out, Tim, it is the “victims” who are really hit worst. If people want to go ahead and make lives better for sex trafficking victims, the thing they need to do is make a commercial sex work legal so that they have the full panoply of rights that any other person has to assert their right to be free from abuse, whether it’s from customers or law enforcement.
TD: Now, one of the most explosive issues surrounding this election and many over the last many years is voter ID laws. The fourth circuit court of appeals has upheld the voter ID law in North Carolina.
SC: I think this is a very interesting decision, Tim. It comes from a three-judge panel. One of the judges was an Obama appointee and the other two were Trump appointees. They held unanimously that the North Carolina ID statute is constitutional, and what they ruled was that the lower court judge, the district court judge, had essentially ruled that the racist past history of the North Carolina legislature and voting barriers that they erected doesn’t mean that, going forward, they can’t erect anything that might be conceived of as a voting barrier and just have it knocked down because of a history of racism that occurred in previous legislatures. So the district court judge said basically, “Well because North Carolina previously tried all this other racist stuff, I’m not even going to look and see if this thing is racist. I’m basically just going to apply their past history to this current law,” and that’s what the appeals court said was not okay. You have to look at the law itself and whether it is racist or improperly motivated by racism, and this law was not.
TD: Meanwhile, the airlines are having to make a lot of decisions and with the vaccine coming up, there’s talk that you’ll be required to have the vaccine and be able to certify it when you get on a plane, but another part of the reform is new rules for service animals. While you and I, Scott, may like the decision because we’re hopeless dog lovers, what about people who have anything other than a dog that they want to travel with because the airlines are saying dogs only as service animals?
SC: Tim, my dreams of flying around the world with my army of alpaca service animals has been scuttled. Well, that’s true. I look at this as a pro-business decision. There were cases of small miniature horses and pigs and birds and snakes and all manner of-
TD: Service animals.
SC: … service animals. I speak with great sympathy to the afflicted who require or think they need service animals to fly, but also come on. I mean, the idea that airlines should have to just suffer through any persons, no matter how far out their service animal needs, is a bit ridiculous. So airlines are free, Tim, or should be free at least to go ahead and allow different types of service species at their preference, but they shouldn’t be mandated to, I think. So I think it’s probably a good win for liberty in that world.
TD: It’s okay, stewardess. That’s my service snake.
SC: Can’t say stewardess, Tim. My God.
TD: I know.
SC: Write your letters to Tim Donner. Okay? It’s flight attendant, I think, now.
TD: Thank you, Scott.
SC: That’s probably somehow inappropriate too. I just don’t know why yet. You’re welcome.
TD: Well, most of what you say is inappropriate, but we try to just sort of glide over it or edit it out. Thank you, Scott.
