Free Republic

A Sacramento federal judge has struck down as unconstitutional the part of California's so-called Victims' Bill of Rights that governs parole revocation. The law, enacted by voter approval of a 2008 ballot initiative known as Proposition 9, was a sweeping amendment to the state constitution, conferring a long list of entitlements on crime victims. The sections dealing with parole revocation were made part of the state's Penal Code. U.S. District Judge Lawrence K. Karlton ruled Tuesday that those sections fall short of providing the minimum due process guaranteed by the Constitution and two U.S. Supreme Court decisions, Morrissey v. Brewer...

Like the slime-creature from a '50s science-fiction film (“Kill it, before it multiplies!”), federal judges are seemingly unstoppable – a malignant, mutating entity determined to conquer the planet. Which is another way of saying that another activist judge has decided that God is unconstitutional. Judge Lawrence K. Karlton (not surprisingly, a Carter-nominee) based his opinion on a fiction – which, come to think of it, isn’t surprising, either. Karlton said he was bound by precedent to find that recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance with the words “one nation under God” violated the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause. The precedent Karlton...