Free Republic

A Dutch airline passenger told The Post how he leapt into action when an alleged Muslim terrorist tried to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner packed with 300 people just moments before landing. Chaos erupted as alleged terrorist Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab, 23, tried to set off a sophisticated explosive device strapped to his body. "Suddenly, we hear a bang. It sounded like a firecracker went off," said Jasper Schuringa, a film director who was traveling to the US to visit friends. "When [it] went off, everybody panicked ... Then someone screamed, ‘Fire! Fire!’"

In 1997, a vicious thug entered the home of a pregnant Alabama woman. He raped and repeatedly stabbed her, then fled, leaving her to die in a house with three other children. Police acted swiftly and caught the attacker, Renaldo Adams, literally red-handed with blood. After a fair trial, Adams was convicted of rape and murder and given the death penalty. It took the jury less than 30 minutes to recommend his execution. As an assistant attorney general under then Attorney General (now U.S. Sen.) Jeff Sessions, I helped prosecute Adams and was satisfied the Alabama jury chose the punishment...

References to foreign law in Supreme Court opinions have become controversial.... True, the references have increased somewhat, but they remain rare, and no one suggests that the court has directly based any of its interpretations of the Constitution on foreign authority. As the issue was framed recently in a debate between Justices Stephen Breyer and Antonin Scalia, it comes down to this: The former says that if a judge abroad has dealt with a similar problem, "Why don't I read what he says if it's similar enough? Maybe I'll learn something." Yet the latter would exclude such material as wholly...

The United States has long been regarded, and has long regarded itself, as different from other nations. This belief is a natural heritage for a country that regarded its founding not just as the start of one new nation, but as a "New Order for the Ages." Likewise, Americans have long considered the terms "New World" and "Old World" to be more than just geographical connotations. America is a country that set out to be different, to pioneer a way that the rest of the world could follow -- an individualistic way towards liberty, justice, and republican democracy. America had...

Top of the fold -- Judicial Supremacists and the Despotic Branch... The U.S. Constitution suffered some serious setbacks this week. The future of liberty and the rule of law suffered likewise. It's bad enough that Democrat obstructionists are once again denying President George Bush's federal-bench nominees their constitutionally prescribed up-or-down vote by the full Senate. In a fine example of why we need those nominees on the bench, Leftists on the Supreme Court are, again, "interpreting" the so-called "living Constitution" as a method of altering that venerable document by judicial diktat. Worse yet, these Left-judiciary Supremacists -- Justice Anthony Kennedy...

In Roper v. Simmons, the U.S. Supreme Court decided 5-4 yesterday that capital punishment is cruel and unusual punishment to those individuals who were under 18 when they committed the crime, and therefore, unconstitutional. Just 15 years ago the Supreme Court found that the statute in question was constitutional. However, they state that because 18 of the 38 states that have death penalty laws forbid executing minors (at the time of the crime), this represents an emerging national consensus. When will the courts begin interpreting the law rather than writing it? Additionally, they rattled off a list of foreign laws...