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Posts Tagged ‘Bill of Rights’

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Supreme Court Unleashes Censors and Betrays Democracy

Posted by M. C. on September 30, 2024

Bizarrely, the court denied standing even after conceding that it “may be true” that social-media platforms “continue to suppress [plaintiffs] speech according to policies initially adopted under Government pressure.”

But so why is this not a problem? Did the court decide to hold the government innocent unless there were signed confessions from White House and FBI officials, or what?

Supreme Court Unleashes Censors and Betrays Democracy

by James Bovard

On the eve of the first presidential candidate debate, the Supreme Court gave a huge boost to Joe Biden to help him “fix” the 2024 election with maybe its worst decision of the year. It remains to be seen whether the court’s refusal to stop federal censorship will be a wooden stake in the credibility of American democracy.The whole point of the Bill of Rights is to hamstring would-be federal tyrants.
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The court ruled in the case of Murthy v. Missouri, a lawsuit brought by individuals censored on social media thanks to federal threats and machinations. Court decisions last year vividly chronicled a byzantine litany of anti–free speech interventions by multiple federal agencies and the White House. On July 4, 2023, federal judge Terry Doughty condemned the Biden administration for potentially “the most massive attack against free speech in United States history.” A federal appeals court imposed injunctions on federal officials to prohibit them from acting “to coerce or significantly encourage social-media companies to remove, delete, suppress, or reduce … posted social-media content containing protected free speech.”

State censorship

The decisions documented how the FBI, Biden White House, U.S. Surgeon General, and other federal agencies have sabotaged Americans’ freedom of speech. If you tried to complain about COVID lockdowns, or school shutdowns, or even about whether mail-in ballots caused fraud — your online comments could have been suppressed thanks to threats and string-pulling by the feds or by federal contractors. Conservatives were far more likely to be censored than liberals and leftists.

But the Supreme Court in late June decided to overlook all those abuses. There will be no injunction to stop the White House or federal agencies or federal contractors from suppressing criticism of Biden or his policies before the 2024 election. In a 6–3 decision, the Supreme Court gave the benefit of the doubt to federal browbeating, arm-twisting, and jawboning, regardless of how many Americans are wrongfully muzzled.

The Biden censorship industrial complex triumphed because most Supreme Court justices could not be bothered to honestly examine the massive evidence of its abuses. The majority opinion, written by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, whined that “the record spans over 26,000 pages” and, quoting an earlier court decision, scoffed that “judges are not like pigs, hunting for truffles buried in the record.”

Will that line catch on with school kids? When asked whether they did their homework, they can quote Justice Barrett and tell their teachers that they are “not like pigs hunting for truffles buried in the record” of all their class assignments.

“Lack of standing” a total cop-out

Rather than swine groveling in the muck, the Supreme Court instead disposed of this landmark case on a quibble, putting their legal pinkies up in the air like a white-wine drinker at a cocktail reception. The court ruled that the plaintiffs — including two state governments and eminent scientists banned from social media — did not have “standing” because they had not proven to negligent justices (how many pages in the files did they actually read?) that federal intervention and string-pulling injured them.

Bizarrely, the court denied standing even after conceding that it “may be true” that social-media platforms “continue to suppress [plaintiffs] speech according to policies initially adopted under Government pressure.”

But so why is this not a problem? Did the court decide to hold the government innocent unless there were signed confessions from White House and FBI officials, or what?

Lack of standing was the same legal ploy the Supreme Court used in early 2013 to tacitly absolve the National Security Agency’s vast illegal surveillance regime. After the Supreme Court accepted a case on warrantless wiretaps in 2012, the Obama administration urged the Justices to dismiss the case, claiming it dealt with “state secrets.” A New York Times editorial labeled the administration’s position “a cynical Catch 22: Because the wiretaps are secret and no one can say for certain that their calls have been or will be monitored, no one has standing to bring suit over the surveillance.”

Cynical arguments sufficed for five of the justices. Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority, declared that the Court was averse to granting standing to challenge the government based on “theories that require guesswork” and “no specific facts” and fears of “hypothetical future harm.” The Supreme Court insisted that the government already offered plenty of safeguards — such as the FISA Court — to protect Americans’ rights. “Lack of standing” didn’t prevent former NSA employee Edward Snowden from blowing the roof off the NSA.

See the rest here

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Bill of Rights? … Israel’s Netanyahu Calls For Crackdown On American Protestors

Posted by M. C. on April 27, 2024

If you think BN believes he runs the show, it’s because he does.

The Ron Paul Liberty Report

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The Stronger the Government, the Weaker the Nation

Posted by M. C. on February 16, 2024

Unfortunately, however, it’s difficult for a weak people — people who are frightened of their own shadows and deeply afraid of losing their dole — to overthrow a big and powerful government that has made them that way.

by Jacob G. Hornberger

https://www.fff.org/2024/02/13/the-stronger-the-government-the-weaker-the-nation

For all of our lives, it has been the aim of most Americans to make the federal government stronger, especially with respect to the warfare state. The principal justification for an ever more powerful government is that it keeps the American people safe from the likes of terrorists, drug dealers, communists, illegal immigrants, Russians, Chinese, Iranians, North Koreans, and Muslims. Moreover, it is argued, a powerful military-intelligence establishment enables the U.S. government to violently police the world and thereby earn respect and credibility from foreign regimes.

What hardly anyone notices about this big-government shibboleth is the price that is paid for it: a weak nation.

Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

For example, no one can deny that the American people, despite living under the most powerful government in history, are among the most frightened people in the world. This phenomenon was perfectly manifested after the 9/11 attacks, when most Americans eagerly and willingly traded away their freedom for the aura of “security.” Examples include the support for the USA Patriot Act, the TSA takeover of airports, the unconstitutional invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the torture center at Guantanamo Bay, the power to torture and assassinate American citizens, and the illegal telecom surveillance scheme.

See the rest here

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Bill of Rights: The Ignored History of Why it Exists | Tenth Amendment Center

Posted by M. C. on December 20, 2022

Why don’t they teach this history?  We can only guess, but I personally think it has plenty to do with the fact that the bill of rights wasn’t about granting rights to people – or having a central government to protect us – but instead – it was about opposition to centralized power.

https://tenthamendmentcenter.com/2022/12/15/bill-of-rights-the-ignored-history-of-why-it-exists/

By: Michael Boldin

Today is “Bill of Rights Day” – commemorating ratification on Dec. 15, 1791.

But what the government-run schools – and supporters of the monster state – “teach” about the Bill of Rights has almost nothing to do with the foundational principles which motivated the people who supported – and demanded it.

They want us to focus on inane trivia – and they definitely present things as if the Bill of Rights “granted” our rights, or were meant to create a nationwide liberty enforcement squad in the federal government.

No, it was – you guessed it – about the principles behind what was ratified as the 10th Amendment. Drawing a line in the sand, as Samuel Adams put it, “between the federal Powers vested in Congress, and the sovereign Authority belonging to the several States.”

Richard Henry Lee – who on Sept 27, 1787 in the Confederation Congress proposed adding a Bill of Rights to the Constitution drafted by the Philadelphia Convention – BEFORE sending it to the states for ratification, agreed. He said that drawing that clear line between expressly delegated power – and those reserved is “the great use of a bill of rights.”

The same thing happened in a number of state ratification documents, starting with Massachusetts, then South Carolina, New Hampshire, Virginia – and New York.

I covered this in some detail in an episode of Path to Liberty, here:
https://blog.tenthamendmentcenter.com/2021/12/bill-of-rights-the-untold-story-of-why-it-exists/

In early 1788, ratification of the Constitution was almost certain to fail in Massachusetts – home of Samuel and John Adams, Theophilus Parsons, John Hancock – and so many others. A loss there – Federalists understood – would send them reeling in states where it was expected to be a very close call at best – like New York and Virginia. In other words, the entire proposal was close to being doomed.

But – as advised by Richard Henry Lee months earlier, Samuel Adams and John Hancock went along with a plan to ratify, but only with the option of including recommended amendments as well. On Feb 6, 1788 – they did just that, and the very first recommended amendment from the Sons of Liberty will probably look familiar to any reader of the Tenth Amendment Center:

First. That it be explicitly declared, that all powers not expressly delegated by the aforesaid Constitution are reserved to the several states, to be by them exercised.

South Carolina followed their lead with this:

This Convention doth also declare that no Section or paragraph of the said Constitution warrants a Construction that the states do not retain every power not expressly relinquished by them and vested in the General Government of the Union.

And on June 21, 1788 – New Hampshire sealed the deal on ratification by also including as their first recommended amendment the same precursor to the 10th Amendment from Massachusetts.

But even after New York and Virginia followed with similar proposals, Federalists in the First Congress stonewalled – and did everything they could to prevent amendments from being considered and sent to the states for ratification.

See the rest here

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I Didn’t Join the Military to Fight for Taiwan

Posted by M. C. on September 22, 2022

When I joined the U.S. Marine Corps Reserves, and later the Idaho Army National Guard, I signed up to protect and defend the U.S. Constitution and our Bill of Rights—not Taipei.

by Dan McKnight

https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/i-didnt-join-the-military-to-fight-for-taiwan/

Are you ready to go to war to “protect” a place, thousands of miles away from our nation, which we have no treaty alliance with and no overriding national interest?

I’m not talking about Ukraine, even though we continue to pump that country full of billions of dollars in weapons and supplies in a proxy war against Russia.

I’m talking about Taiwan, located off the coast of China in the Pacific Ocean.

Joe Biden just promised to defend it with the full military might of the United States.

When I joined the U.S. Marine Corps Reserves, and later the Idaho Army National Guard, I signed up to protect and defend the U.S. Constitution and our Bill of Rights—not Taipei.

Here’s the story.

After the Chinese Civil War ended in 1949, and Chairman Mao consolidated the rule of the Communist Party in Beijing, a small collection of anti-communists flew the coop and established themselves on the island of Formosa, about 100 miles from the mainland.

That’s where they’ve been ever since, developing from a military dictatorship to a parliamentary democracy with two major parties. One wants closer integration with Beijing, the other wants full independence.

Both Taipei and Beijing claim to be the legitimate government of all of China.

In the 1970s, our government normalized relations with the Chinese mainland, and de-recognized the “Republic of China” in Taiwan, severing diplomatic relations and abrogating a defense pact.

For over 40 years since then our foreign policy has been guided by “strategic ambiguity.”

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The Right to Be Left Alone

Posted by M. C. on September 8, 2022

Every move you make
And every vow you break
Every smile you fake
Every claim you stake
I’ll be watching you.
— “Every Breath You Take,” Song by The Police

Today, this is the most violated of personal rights; not by judges signing search warrants for surveillance, but by government officials — local, state and federal — ignoring and evading the natural right to privacy and pretending that the Fourth Amendment does not apply to them. 

By Andrew P. Napolitano

The Right to Be Left Alone

Every move you make
And every vow you break
Every smile you fake
Every claim you stake
I’ll be watching you.
— “Every Breath You Take,” Song by The Police

The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees the right to privacy. Like other amendments in the Bill of Rights, it doesn’t create the right; it limits government interference with it. Last week, President Joe Biden misquoted the late Justice Antonin Scalia suggesting that Justice Scalia believed that the Bill of Rights creates rights. As Justice Scalia wrote, referring to the right to keep and bear arms but reflecting his view on the origins of all personal liberty, the Bill of Rights secures rights, it doesn’t create them; it secures them from the government.

Those who drafted the Bill of Rights recognized that human rights are pre-political. They precede the existence of the government. They come from our humanity, and, in the case of privacy, they are reinforced by our ownership or legal occupancy of property.

The idea that rights come from our humanity is called Natural Law theory, which was first articulated by Aristotle in 360 B.C. The natural law teaches that there are aspects of human existence and thus areas of human behavior that are not subject to the government. Aristotle’s views would later be refined by Cicero, codified by Aquinas, explained by John Locke, and woven into Anglo-American jurisprudence by British jurists and American revolutionaries and constitutional framers.

Thus, our rights to think as we wish, to say what we think, to publish what we say, to worship or not, to associate or not, to defend ourselves from crazies and tyrants, to own property, and to be left alone are all hard-wired into our human natures by God, the uncaused cause. Nature is the means through which God passes along His gifts to us. We come about by a biological act of nature, every step of which was ordained by God. His greatest gift to us is life, and He tied that gift to free will. Just as He is perfectly free, so are we.

In exercising our free wills, we employ rights. Rights are claims against the whole world. They don’t require approval of a government or neighbors or colleagues. The same rights exist in everyone no matter their place of birth, and each person exercises them as she or he sees fit. The government should only come into the picture when someone violates another’s natural rights. So, if someone builds a house in your backyard, you can knock it down and expel the builders or you can ask the government to do so.

Suppose the builders haven’t consented to the existence of the government? That does not absolve them. Though government is only moral and legal in a society in which all persons have consented to it — this is Thomas Jefferson’s “consent of the governed” argument in the Declaration of Independence — the only exception to actual consent is the use of government to remedy a violation of natural rights.

Professor Murray Rothbard examined all this under his non-aggression principle (NAP): Initiating or threatening force or deception against a person or his rights is always morally illicit. This applies to all aggression, even — and especially — from the government. The folks building a house in your backyard have either used force or deception to get there. Both violate your natural rights and the NAP.

Now, back to the Fourth Amendment and privacy. In a famous dissent in 1928, which two generations later became the law of the land, the late Justice Louis Brandeis argued that government surveillance constitutes a search under the Fourth Amendment and thus, per the express language of the amendment, cannot be conducted by the government without a warrant issued by a judge. He famously called privacy the right most valued by civilized persons and described it as “the right to be let alone.”

Today, this is the most violated of personal rights; not by judges signing search warrants for surveillance, but by government officials — local, state and federal — ignoring and evading the natural right to privacy and pretending that the Fourth Amendment does not apply to them. 

See the rest here

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Most Americans can’t answer these simple questions

Posted by M. C. on July 6, 2022

Sometimes people joke about how little of their own history Americans know, but it’s really bad, folks. It’s worse than you think.

Just the other day, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said it was the job of the president and Congress to keep the Supreme Court in check.

Imagine what an upside-down view of American history you would have to have in order to let those words escape your mouth.

Bryan Caplan, in his provocatively titled book The Case Against Education (Princeton University Press, 2018), points out some truly horrifying results from a basic civics test given to American adults.

Below I’ll share with you a few of the questions that were asked, along with the possible answers (the correct answer will be in bold). Then I’ll share two figures: the percentage who got the correct answer, and the percentage who really knew the answer (in other words, correcting to account for people who got the question right simply by guessing).

(1) Which of the following is not protected by the Bill of Rights?
Freedom of speech
Trial by jury
The right to bear arms
The right to vote

39% got the correct answer; 21% really knew the answer

(2) Which of the following events came before the Declaration of Independence?
Foundation of Jamestown, Virginia
The Civil War
The Emancipation Proclamation
The War of 1812

49%, 26%

(3) The Bill of Rights explicitly prohibits
Prayer in public school
Discrimination based on race, sex, or religion
The ownership of guns by private individuals
Establishing an official religion for the United States
The president from vetoing a line item in a spending bill

26%, 8%

The questions continue, but you get the idea.

The vast majority of American adults are not even entitled to an opinion on major issues in American life.

Now imagine asking these same people — many of whom today fly Ukrainian flags — what happened to the Ukrainian people under communism in the 1930s.

If they think the Civil War happened before the Declaration of Independence, it’s a safe bet that they don’t know about the terror famine in Ukraine under Stalin.

The next course we’ll be adding to our collection of on-demand courses at Liberty Classroom, my dashboard university that teaches the history that was withheld from you, will be on the crimes of communism.

To say that fills a crucial gap would be the understatement of the year.

The whole site is about smashing p.c. and teaching the truth.

In honor of that upcoming course, I’m having a flash sale: for just the next 48 hours, take a full 50% off our master (lifetime) membership when you use coupon code communism:

http://www.LibertyClassroom.com
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Leftists Have It Wrong on Rights

Posted by M. C. on February 7, 2022

Not even the crafters of the Bill of Rights believed that. A careful reading of the First Amendment reveals that it doesn’t purport to give any rights to anyone. Instead, the wording states that Congress (and implicitly the rest of the federal government) is prohibited from infringing on people’s right of free speech. 

Thus when the government enacts a law or adopts a measure that infringes on freedom of speech, leftists are relegated to saying, “We understand that you have given us this important privilege but please be nice and don’t infringe on it.” Libertarians, on the other hand, say, “You have no legitimate authority to do that and so stop it immediately or else we will alter you or abolish you!”

by Jacob G. Hornberger

One of the central defects among leftists (that is, “liberals,” progressives, socialists, or interventionists) is their wrong-headed view of the nature of people’s rights. Their belief on this issue is one of the distinguishing characteristics between leftists and libertarians.

Leftists believe that people’s rights come from the government or from the Constitution. As such, they view rights not so much as rights but rather more as government-granted privileges.

Libertarians, on the other hand, believe that people’s rights are endowed in them by nature and God and, therefore, that people’s rights preexist government and the Constitution. We hold that the main purpose of government is to serve as our servant whose job is to protect the exercise of our natural, God-given rights. 

A good example of this leftist mindset was recently expressed in a fundraising letter I received from a leftist group called the Daily Kos. The letter stated that freedom of speech is “one of those rights granted to us in Bill of Rights.” It went on to refer to “our First Amendment rights.”

Not even the crafters of the Bill of Rights believed that. A careful reading of the First Amendment reveals that it doesn’t purport to give any rights to anyone. Instead, the wording states that Congress (and implicitly the rest of the federal government) is prohibited from infringing on people’s right of free speech. 

In other words, unlike American leftists today, our American ancestors didn’t believe that people’s rights come from the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, or from the government. They believed in what the Declaration of Independence stated — that man’s rights come from nature and God and that it is the responsibility of government to protect, not destroy, the exercise of such rights.

We are not just talking about a semantical difference here. The difference between how leftists and libertarians view the nature of rights has profound consequences. 

Given that leftists believe that their rights come from the government, they necessarily put themselves in a position of pleading, or perhaps even begging, that government go easy on them — that is, that government officials give them more latitude in exercising their “rights.” 

Thus, leftists view freedom as living on a leash — they just want the government to let them have a longer leash. What happens when the government begins reining in the leash? Leftists have no principled argument to make against what the government is doing. Since people’s rights come from government, leftists believe, then government can legitimately rein in the leash whenever it wants. 

Not so with libertarians. Unlike leftists, we are not relegated to pleading with or begging the government to treat us nicely. That’s because for us our rights don’t come from government. They preexist government. Government officials are nothing more than our servants whose job is to protect our rights. If they fail or refuse to do so — or if they use their power to destroy or infringe our rights — we have the right to alter or even abolish government and restore its rightful responsibility — the responsibility to behave as our servants whose job is to protect the exercise of our preexisting natural, God-given rights.

Thus when the government enacts a law or adopts a measure that infringes on freedom of speech, leftists are relegated to saying, “We understand that you have given us this important privilege but please be nice and don’t infringe on it.” Libertarians, on the other hand, say, “You have no legitimate authority to do that and so stop it immediately or else we will alter you or abolish you!”

The leftist view of the nature of rights is one reason why you can never count on leftists to protect our rights and liberties. Anyone who wants a genuine defense of our rights and liberties needs to join up with us libertarians. 

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TGIF: Rigged Political Language | The Libertarian Institute

Posted by M. C. on November 21, 2021

https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/tgif-rigged-political-language/

by Sheldon Richman

It’s an old trick: gain advantage over others by hiding one’s meaning behind euphemisms and other forms of linguistic camouflage and misdirection. People do this in all walks of life, but politicians make careers of it. If they engage in straight talk at all, it is by far the exception. The journalist Michael Kinsley defined a gaffe as “when a politician tells the truth – some obvious truth he isn’t supposed to say.”

Obfuscation is the currency of politics. Little has changed since Oscar Wilde’s time: “Nowadays to be intelligible is to be found out.”

Libertarians have emphasized this scam for years. When they say that taxation is theft, they offer an illustration. If you threatened to harm people, say, by imprisonment, unless they surrendered some of their incomes each year, you would be prosecuted for extortion, even if you planned to do good works with the money. Punishment would then follow. Politicians do the same thing, except that taxation is not illegal.

When the government orders people to leave their homes so politicians may put the land to other uses, that is also theft. But it is called by the high-sounding term eminent domain. That euphemism adds to the mystique of the state as it reveals what ought to be a repugnant idea: that the government is the supreme owner of all land in its jurisdiction — even in the United States, whose Constitution implicitly embraces that principle. True, eminent domain is not an enumerated power (so much for the doctrine of the limited power), but it is acknowledged indirectly in the clause about compensation in the subsequently added Fifth Amendment. This shows that the framers thought the power to take private property was inherent in the sovereign.

The so-called “takings clause” is an odd part of the Bill of Rights. It proclaims that people have a right to “just compensation” whenever the government violates their right to property. That the government pays what it calls “just compensation” does not make eminent domain alright. What makes compensation just in a normal transaction is that the buyer and seller freely agree to the amount. Since sellers are coerced under eminent domain, no compensation qualifies as just.

If we set our minds to it, we could all find many more examples of political euphemisms. The Department of Defense was once called the Department of War. The term free election disguises the fact that voters choose among politicians under duress: they will be coerced by government policy whether or not they participate in the election. Climate policy ought to be called pro-poverty policy. Trade policy would better be known as crony-reward policy. Government intelligence and military justice … well, you get the idea.

Scanning the recent headlines, I notice that many places are enacting so-called gun-buyback programs. What a euphemism that is. You would think that the only thing that the government could buy back was something that it had originally sold. That’s what back means in such a phrase. But state and local governments don’t sell guns to citizens, so how can they buy them back?

I concede that the recent programs appear to be voluntary, although the money paid (sometimes in the form of grocery gift cards) is taken by force from the taxpayers. So the politicians aren’t even buying back with their own money. In the past, however, buyback campaigns were mandatory, and some favor compulsion today. For example, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton spoke favorably about Australia’s compulsory program. Beto O’Rourke, who sought the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, has called for a compulsory “assault weapons” buyback.

See the rest here

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Why Trials Are Better Than Plea Bargains | Cato at Liberty Blog

Posted by M. C. on November 20, 2021

But at least that disagreement will be an informed one based on the evidence presented in a public jury trial, just as the Founders intended. We are deprived of that opportunity for civic engagement every time a case is resolved through a guilty plea instead of the public jury trial that the Constitution wisely provides. The time is long overdue for us to take a fresh look at our decision to pursue efficiency in the adjudication of criminal charges through coercive plea bargaining to the exclusion of every other constitutional value.

https://www.cato.org/blog/why-trials-are-better-plea-bargains

By Clark Neily

Surprising almost no one, the jury in the Kyle Rittenhouse prosecution returned a verdict of not guilty on all charges, including intentional and reckless homicide. The verdict may be unsurprising given how the trial unfolded, with a singularly unimpressive prosecution team making one blunder after another and a trial judge who some perceived to be unduly favorable to the defense, but it will nevertheless strike many people as inappropriate and even unjust in light of all the circumstances.

But as I argue in a piece published in the Washington Examiner hours before the verdict came down, the most important—and unusual—thing about the Rittenhouse case was the fact that it went to trial at all. That’s unusual because more than 95 percent of criminal convictions in our system are the product not of constitutionally prescribed jury trials, but instead of an ad hoc, extra‐​constitutional, and often jaw‐​droppingly coercive process that we refer to euphemistically as “plea bargaining.” As explained in the Examiner piece, plea bargaining has been an absolute train wreck of a policy that regularly produces false convictions and puts the government in the historically squalid and abuse‐​prone role of inducing people to condemn themselves.

Given the sheer amount of attention they devoted to trial by jury (among other things, it’s the only right mentioned both in the body of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights), the Framers’ intent to put citizen participation at the very heart of the administration of criminal justice is unmistakable. It was also incredibly wise because allowing government actors (including particularly judges and prosecutors) to dictate the results of criminal prosecutions represents a short and slippery slope to tyranny. Indeed, in a piece for Cato’s Policy Report, I compared the effect that the near‐​total elimination of jury trials has had on the criminal justice system to the effect that the extinction of a keystone species like honeybees would have on the ecosystem: complete and utter disaster.

In sum, reasonable people can and will disagree about whether Kyle Rittenhouse was guilty or innocent. But at least that disagreement will be an informed one based on the evidence presented in a public jury trial, just as the Founders intended. We are deprived of that opportunity for civic engagement every time a case is resolved through a guilty plea instead of the public jury trial that the Constitution wisely provides. The time is long overdue for us to take a fresh look at our decision to pursue efficiency in the adjudication of criminal charges through coercive plea bargaining to the exclusion of every other constitutional value.

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