Apparently the jury had the option of convicting for murder or for voluntary manslaughter. The quote from the one holdout makes me wonder if 11 were voting murder and 1 was voting manslaughter. That at least gives me some hope a second trial will be successful. :/

His infrastructure plan is bogus too - it’s entirely tax credits for private developers, so nothing for infrastructure that can’t turn a profit and no reason to think they won’t just be taken for existing projects.

“from my understanding, is the legal definition of being competent to stand trial.” What you’re thinking of whether someone is not guilty by reason of mental illness. Competency to stand trial is about the defendant’s state of mind now and their ability to understand what’s happening and assist in their own defense.…

No, “conjugal” means marriage, so they’re discussing the portion of the women surveyed who have experienced violence from their partner rather than a parent or something.

Caught on fire MULTIPLE times, in fact.

Sadly, no. Getting a cop charged in the first place is still unusual.

I don’t think you missed it, for whatever it’s worth. I live in this metro area and the dash cam footage wasn’t reported until today. I assume the county held it back while they were investigating.

Sadly, the prosecutor is probably going for the slam dunk. I’m not a legal scholar so I can’t attest for this personally, but a lot of the commentary around the Freddie Gray acquittals was that they had overcharged the cops and probably could have gotten a conviction on lower charges.

Don’t be obtuse. I clearly referred to the 6 years he worked with a republican congress. It just happens that the Dems controlled for 4 prior to that, the last 2 years of Bush and the first 2 years of Obama.

Manning isn’t asking for a pardon, just a commutation to time served (6 years). She would still have this same conviction on her record. And she was acquitted of the only capital offense she was charged with.

Hmmm, I wonder what the Clinton team was actually seeing. In my quite reliably blue state, we had 2 Clinton doorknockers the week before Election Day, but none prior. They may have been less deluded than the Romney camp

6 years. Dems controlled both houses from 2006-2010

Quite a few did, actually - that’s why the compromise that created the EC was needed in the first place.

The electoral college got support for a few reasons, but the primary one was to keep the slaveholding states on board, since at the time they wielded a disproportionately large influence given the 3/5 Compromise.

... That’s not the case. People could buy health insurance privately prior to ACA; my parents have bought their own insurance their whole lives since they’re freelancers

“they tried to succeed”

Your divisor is registered voters (210M), the original comment was eligible voters, which is a little higher (240M). It appears turnout was 53% of al eligible.

Absolutely. Hopefully someday when we have a functional Congress they can come up with a new method to determine pre-clearance coverage. Hell, that could end up strengthening voting rights, since there are certainly areas of this country that weren’t covered under the old formula but should be based on their more…

Small comfort, I know, but VRA has not been struck down. Pre-clearance wasn’t even struck down in and of itself. What the court said was that the existing method of choosing which areas are subject to pre-clearance was no longer valid. (The existing method was based on which areas had low minority registration in a…

It’s not so much that they are restricted as that they only last until the next session opens. And since SCOTUS only makes decisions during its session, you’d need a lot of calendars to line up right for a recess appointment to have any effect.