#code reform

[cnu-newurbanism]

A primer on Missing Middle Housing

AARP, an interest group representing older Americans that claims 38 million members, has increasingly become involved in housing issues (including ongoing work with CNU on code reform). AARP has released a useful primer on “Missing Middle Housing,” with architect and urban designer Dan Parolek of Opticos Design. 

The report, called Discovering and Developing Missing Middle Housing, is available as a free download. The report explains missing middle housing, why it is missing, its benefits, and tips on its planning, design, and development in communities. 

Read more.

[gruzjagal]

[gracebethartacc]

I woke up and was haunted by visions aka Mlp redesign/rewrite ideas yayyyy :3

[catspawcreates]

The Kill Code Tribute is Done!

My labor of love. When I latched onto KC I felt very alone in this niche, but I am so grateful to have found others and spread the KC love.

There’s definitely more art and writing to come! I’ll post stills later in the week.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

This nation was founded on a simple yet profound principle: No one is above the law. Not the president of the United States. Not a justice on the Supreme Court of the United States. No one. But the Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision on July 1 to grant presidents broad immunity from prosecution for crimes they commit in office means there are virtually no limits on what a president can do. The only limits will be those that are self-imposed by the person occupying the Oval Office. [...] On top of dangerous and extreme decisions that overturn settled legal precedents — including Roe v. Wade — the court is mired in a crisis of ethics. Scandals involving several justices have caused the public to question the court’s fairness and independence, which are essential to faithfully carrying out its mission of equal justice under the law. For example, undisclosed gifts to justices from individuals with interests in cases before the court, as well as conflicts of interest connected with Jan. 6 insurrectionists, raise legitimate questions about the court’s impartiality. [...] First, I am calling for a constitutional amendment called the No One Is Above the Law Amendment. It would make clear that there is no immunity for crimes a former president committed while in office. I share our Founders’ belief that the president’s power is limited, not absolute. We are a nation of laws — not of kings or dictators. Second, we have had term limits for presidents for nearly 75 years. We should have the same for Supreme Court justices. The United States is the only major constitutional democracy that gives lifetime seats to its high court. Term limits would help ensure that the court’s membership changes with some regularity. That would make timing for court nominations more predictable and less arbitrary. It would reduce the chance that any single presidency radically alters the makeup of the court for generations to come. I support a system in which the president would appoint a justice every two years to spend 18 years in active service on the Supreme Court. Third, I’m calling for a binding code of conduct for the Supreme Court. This is common sense. The court’s current voluntary ethics code is weak and self-enforced. Justices should be required to disclose gifts, refrain from public political activity and recuse themselves from cases in which they or their spouses have financial or other conflicts of interest. Every other federal judge is bound by an enforceable code of conduct, and there is no reason for the Supreme Court to be exempt. All three of these reforms are supported by a majority of Americans— as well as conservative and liberal constitutional scholars. And I want to thank the bipartisan Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States for its insightful analysis, which informed some of these proposals.

President Joe Biden for The Washington Post on Supreme Court reforms (07.29.2024).

President Joe Biden wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post this morning about his plan to reform the Supreme Court. His plans to fix the nation’s highest court include 3 key items:

Term limits of 18 years.

Binding code of ethics.

Constitutional Amendment that states Presidents cannot have immunity for crimes committed while in office.

These plans are supported by the majority of Americans.

[empirearchives]

Torture during the Napoleonic era

Torture was abolished in France in 1808 in the Code d'Instruction criminelle (Clémence Zacharie). Napoleon had earlier said on the issue of torture:

“The barbarous custom of having men beaten who are suspected of having important secrets to reveal must be abolished. It has always been recognized that this way of interrogating men, by putting them to torture, produces nothing worthwhile. The poor wretches say anything that comes into their mind and what they think the interrogator wishes to hear.”

Napoleon to Berthier, 11 November 1798, Corres., V, no. 3606, p. 128

[thegreatyin]

i feel like i need to share this part of the scoundrel's response to the FL OC census with the rest of the class. it's just. what can i even say, really.

[racefortheironthrone]

Hi, diferent anon here. Once you said that the Iron Throne should create a system of itinerary judges who would travel all the country and enforce the king's law over the lords', but I have a few questions: from where would this judges come from, who would they be and how would they get to know the king's law? Would they come from the same regions they would oversee (like a northman for the North, for exemple) or from different regions? Would they be lords, maesters or common man? Would women be allowed to be judges?

Those are good questions!

When it comes to staffing a system of justices in eyre, there are competing imperatives: on the one hand, the judges have to be figures of prestige in order to gain compliance from local lords and commoners alike. This is one of the reasons why, for example, the "great eyres" of the justices started with a massive public ceremony that local nobles and royal officials would be summoned to in which they would offer up their insignia of offices and do homage to the judge in his full regalia, as if to the King in person, because the justice was considered to be a kind of avatar of the King. For this reason, you want someone of equal social rank to the nobility - if not a lord themselves, then the younger son of a lord, for example.

On the other hand, you also want the judge to have (or at least have access to) legal expertise so that they can apply the royal legal code and the relevant legal precedents correctly, read and understand the legal documents brought before the court by both parties, and follow the arguments put forward by the lawyers. This is why I have suggested that Westerosi justices and sheriffs be either accompanied by a maester or half-maester or have undergone training as a half-maester in law themselves. While we certainly have examples of nobility studying at the Citadel and gaining links with and without becoming maesters, I imagine it would be more common for half-maester justices to come from burgher families who have the money to send their children to school and who need education in order to achieve upwards economic mobility.

However, I would imagine that it would be much harder for a justice from even a wealthy smallfolk background to gain compliance from the local nobility. So I imagine you would also need the sheriffs with their more paramilitary responsibilities to be knights at the very least, and to accompany the justices on their circuits to ensure that the judges' decisions were being upheld and their writs honored, as well as delivering accused criminals and outlaws to the justices for trial.

[sp4mja]

I have many thoughts about this lore stream but I'll focus on Madagio first (using they/them for now)

So. Madagio, a literal God that acts like one. What I mean with this is that we saw just how different their fancy speech patterns and polite passive-aggressiveness is from Fit's rude talk.

We saw how Madagio acts in front of one of the lost souls of 2b2t.

And what I saw was a God being amused by a mortal.

Madagio felt so much like they were observing Fit's every move. It felt like someone observing an exotic animal in its natural habitat, Madagio was looking for someone so broken it could be of use to them, and they found the perfect specimen.

And the cats as an extension of their body was the perfect touch of surrealism we needed, it just shows how weird and unhuman their thinking and acting is, are those cats a clone of themselves? Puppets? Real or mere illusions?

And they have been sending Fit these cats for a while, how long had Madagio been observing him during and after Quesadilla?

I cant wait to see the extended of Madagio's powers, if they said they can go help Fit, just how powerful are they?

[cuppatealove]

Hey so did I ever show you guys the secret code I made up in high school to write all my angsty little thoughts in my angsty little margins?

[personal-blog243]

It’s a long shot but let’s hope some of this gets passed!

[cnu-newurbanism]

Top code reform priorities for the housing crisis

A widespread shortage of affordable housing is causing local jurisdictions to amend their land-use regulations. Here’s a list of 10 highly effective reforms, with notes on why they are needed.

Read more.

[solitarelee]

Oh sure Jesus metaphor this and Jesus metaphor that but no one tells you how hard it is to de-Jesus a character. This is what I fucking get for making the space dragons catholic.

[sick-dragons-word-hoard]

you fuckin losers on april fools day when my silly ass is a fool all year round even leap years

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"Should Habitual Criminals Be Caged For Life?" Star Weekly (Toronto). March 26, 1966. Pages 1 to 4. ---- A crime against criminals. That's what one MP called the law that can leave a man CAGED FOR LIFE ---- by PETER SYPNOWICH Star Weekly staff writer photographs by Chuck Diven --- "The mood and temper of the public with regard to the treatment of crime and criminals is one of the most unfailing tests of the civilization of any country."

-Winston Churchill, 1910

At 52, John Hadden might be called a burnt-out criminal, except he really Anever was much of a criminal. He went to prison at 16 and since then has spent most of his life in custody. Like most drug addicts, he has no violence on his record. As a youth in Edmonton he tried burglary a few times, but at 25 he began taking morphine and it soon finished him. In 1947, after six sentences for vagrancy and drug possession, he broke into a barber shop and stole two clippers, for which he served. three years. That was his last burglary. He kept getting penitentiary terms, as drug addicts do in this country, but when he moved to Vancouver in the early 1950s. he was just a petty shoplifter trying to sup port an addiction. In 1961, at the age of 48, he finally gave up morphine. Then came barbiturates, which he got on prescription because he suffered from severe leg ulcers. He received five light jail terms for shop- lifting over the next two years. Then, one afternoon in 1963, he pilfered a $2.98 can opener from Woolworth's, and fell victim to the ultimate incarceration.

John Hadden was prosecuted as an habitual criminal under Section 660 of the Criminal Code, which carries a sentence of in definite preventive detention. The underworld knows Section 660 as "the bitch," and nowhere is it more dreaded than in Vancouver, where city prosecutor Stewart McMorran has brought more habitual cases to court than all other prosecutors in Canada put together. Hadden was in Oakalla Prison, serving a seven-month sentence for stealing the can opener, when McMorran notified him he would be prosecuted under Section 660. On March 16, 1964, when Hadden had finished his prison term and was some- where at large, large, he was declared an habitual criminal and sentenced in absentia. Nine weeks later he was picked up in Edmon ton and taken to the B.C. Penitentiary. There, with scores of men like him. John Hadden will spend the rest of his life unless he is paroled.

Preventive detention is the harshest penalty in the Criminal Code, short of hanging, and it has been a source of continuing controversy. When Parliament passed the measure in 1947, one MP, Maurice Hartt of Montreal, called it "a crime against criminals." Toronto lawyer Arthur Maloney, president of the Canadian Society for the Abolition of Capital Punishment, says it is "inhuman and cruel," and when he was an MP in 1958 he urged its repeal on grounds that it was "alien to some of the most ancient and sacred principles of our criminal law." Last year, when McMorran's prosecutions began attracting national attention, MP David Orlikow of Winnipeg told Parliament: "I find it amazing that we have a crown prosecutor of this type in Canada in the year of 1965. I think he would have been more suitable a couple of hundred years ago. At the time of the Inquisition I can see him turning the screw or putting somebody on the rack. In the Middle Ages I can see him chopping off somebody's hand because he stole a loaf of bread." (To which McMorran replies, "Why should I be pilloried? I haven't committed any crimes.")

There does seem to be something wrong when tired old men like John Hadden, whom we've been locking up all their lives, are put into prison on a permanent basis. It smacks of the dungeon. The idea behind preventive detention, on of of course, is that if men are not reformed after successive prison terms they must be locked up indefinitely for the protection of society. But what if these men are not violent, dangerous criminals, what if they are cringing drug addicts and defeated old burglars who pose no threat to life or limb? If they are still pilfering and taking drugs after repeated imprisonment, perhaps there is something wrong with prisons. The fate of John Hadden, and others like him, raises some important questions about crime and punishment.

Stewart McMorran, prosecutor ever since he was called to the bar in 1946, thinks juvenile delinquents should be put to work scrubbing decks on a training ship off the B.C. coast. Otherwise, prisons are his answer to the crime problem - providing the inmates don't get too many luxuries. "We give them everything these days except booze and women," he says. "There should be a lot more hard discipline. Prison should be a place where they don't want to go. The only way men can be convinced that crime doesn't pay is through fear of continued incarceration.

McMorran says there has been a 2% per cent reduction in indictable crime in Vancouver since he won his first conviction under Section 660 in 1962. He concedes that his prosecutions may not have been responsible. There are real doubts as to whether the persistent offender is deter red; in one case the accused was let off with a warning-he was declared an habitual criminal but not committed to detention- and nine days later he was back in court for stealing a sweater (again being found an habitual criminal and again escaping committal). But if criminals cannot be deterred from committing crimes, they can be frightened away to commit them elsewhere or they can be locked up so they can't com mit them at all. And on this basis, McMorran is using Section 660 against every eligible offender. Up to the end of 1965 he had taken 106 cases to court, obtaining 60 preventive detention sentences an and 25 other convictions in which detention was not imposed. Elsewhere in Canada, habitual criminal cases average three a year, in Vancouver they now are going to court at the rate of one a week. "We're still in the posse stage out here," McMorran says.

Under Section 660, preventive detention "may" be imposed "if the court is of the opinion that because the accused is a habitual criminal it is expedient for the protection of the public." To be declared an habitual criminal, the accused must, prior to his latest conviction, have been convicted on three occasions since the age of 18 of offences punishable by five years or more. He must also be "leading persistently a criminal life." In McMorran's office hundreds of dossiers are maintained on people believed to be leading criminal lives. The evidence in one prosecution included these words uttered by the accused two years previously when checked by a policeman at 4 a.m. in an alley: "Hell, son, I've been in and out of jail all my life. I haven't had time to work."

Section 660 departs from traditional notions of justice in in several ways. The accused cannot be tried by a jury. It is not required that he be present for his hearing. He is imprisoned not only a second time. for offences of the past but also for of fences he might commit in the future. He is condemned with a label that he wears until the day he dies. Once sentenced, he need never again appear before a court; his fate is in the hands of officials to whom he is forever accountable even if released on parole. And finally, the law is unevenly enforced because prosecutions are made with the consent of provincial attorneys general.

Section 660 is based on a 1908 British law, the Prevention of Crime act (later incorporated in the Criminal Justice act), which, besides providing a maximum term of 14 years instead of indefinite detention, was aimed only at "dangerous criminals engaged in the more serious forms of crime." This law was copied by the Nazi regime of Adolf Hitler but in Britain itself it was a dead letter by the 1930s. In 1938 its adoption in Canada was urged by a royal commission headed by Mr. Justice Joseph Archambault.

In 1947 the Mackenzie King government acted on the recommendation despite protests in Parliament. One opposition MP, Tommy Church of Toronto, pleaded on behalf of what he called "the victims of a vicious, half-baked penal system." MP John Diefenbaker had a similar argument, and also objected to the option accorded provincial attorneys-general.

Now, nearly 20 years after its enactment, when abolition of the British law has been recommended by a Home Office committee, when similar U.S. laws have been renounced by the American Law Institute in its model criminal code, Section 660 is being used in B.C. to clear the province of persistent offenders, by either incarcerating them or frightening them away. Attorney General Robert W. Bonner is quite candid about it. He compares it to the "floater," that dubious small-town tactic of charging unwelcome visitors with vagrancy and turning them loose on the understanding they will leave town. In Bonner's words: "It's like the vagrancy charge. People who are charged with vagrancy have a chance to appear or disappear."

Bonner thinks the other provinces should start wholesale prosecutions under Section 660, too, and he is reported to have urged this on his fellow attorneys-general at their crime conference in Ottawa last January. This could double our penitentiary population, for estimates of the number of eligible offenders range from 3,000 to 10,000. It would not, however, have much effect on serious crime.

"Section 660 doesn't get at the he really dangerous offender," says John Hogarth, research associate at the University of Toronto's Centre for Criminology. "It gets the nuisance type. Police are having problems with organized crime and the petty offender is being used as a scapegoat. Locking him up in a maximum security prison is a terrible waste of the taxpayers' money."

Norman Levy, a case worker with Vancouver's John Howard Society, knows most of the detainees in B.C. Penitentiary, and he says he has yet to find more than a couple who are predatory, scheming, or driven by a profit motive. "The majority are inadequate social misfits," Levy says.

"They are not habitual criminals so much as habitual prisoners." A talk with some of the detainees in B.C Penitentiary confirms all this. They are older men, unmarried, uneducated and unskilled. They may be articulate and even personable in the artificial environment of prison, but their conversation betrays feelings of inferiority, and their records demonstrate their failure in competitive society.

Photo captions: Top spread: Habitual criminals in B.C. Penitentiary meet for weekly group therapy under psychologist Chris Conway (head of table). Sessions began at urging of Robert McGrath (extreme right). Others are, from left: Frank Schlosser, John Hadden, James Atkins, Bill (Red) Henderson and Frank Little. Fourth page: Frank Schlomer, 55, has record of petty theft and assault convictions. He works daily in prison kitchens.

"I've never had any violence on my record," says Frank Little, 48. "All I am is a drug user and small-time thief."

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Morgan Stephens at Daily Kos:

On Thursday, Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon introduced a bill to overhaul the Supreme Court, including adding six justices to the court. It would do this over 12 years by having future presidents appoint one in their first and third years of their term until a total of 15 justices is reached.

The bill, titled the “Judicial Modernization and Transparency Act,’’ would also require a two-thirds supermajority—instead of a simple majority—to overturn laws passed by Congress. Additionally, it proposes a prevention measure to keep senators from blocking a president’s nominee by refusing to hold a vote. That happened in 2016, when then-President Barack Obama nominated Merrick Garland to the high court and then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell blocked it. The bill also aims to build trust between the court and the American public by requiring justices to consider recusing themselves and make their written opinions public.  “I think we can all agree it's time to reform the Supreme Court. As of today, I have the bill to do it,” Wyden said on X.

Wyden’s bill arrives as public opinion of the Supreme Court has fallen sharply. That’s due in large part to the court overturning Roe v. Wade and eliminating the constitutional right to abortion. That decision has led to an increase in women dying during pregnancy, and it’s also dealt a severe socioeconomic blow to women, who, in many states, are now unable to make choices about their education, relationship, careers, and, perhaps most importantly, their health. Further tarnishing the court are numerous reports of conflicts of interest among the justices. Conservative Justice Clarence Thomas reportedly accepted political gifts, including paid international vacations and trips on yachts, from a billionaire Republican donor without disclosing it to the court. And his wife, Ginni Thomas, reportedly praised the anti-court-reform efforts of a far-right political organization.

An upside-down American flag—a symbol of the “Stop the Steal” movement that sought to overturn Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss—was flown outside conservative Justice Samuel Alito’s residence in Alexandria, Virginia. The flag was up when the court was considering an election-related case. The New York Times’ story about the flag prompted unsuccessful calls for Alito to recuse himself from relevant cases. 

On Thursday, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) introduced the Judicial Modernization and Transparency Act that would expand SCOTUS to 15 seats and require a 2/3rds majority on the court to overturn laws passed by Congress.