I mean, he was the first republican in congress to support obama’s effort to spend a billion dollars to fight Zika. So maybe he'd spend some money on that too

I mean, is there a coherent way to normally oppose abortion but thinks it’s ok in the case of Zika? Rubio thinks abortion is the equivalent of murder. It would be weird if he came out and said “well, if the child is sick than you can murder it.” And if abortion isn't murder, then there doesn't need to be a Zika…

That’s pretty much how I feel about this. I get that it probably violates Title IX, so I can’t really support it, but at the same time, why is this guy doing this? It’d be one thing if a male student wanted to go into the study area because they had great doughnuts or something, but it seems like the professor wants…

Did any of the eyewitnesses see the fight begin? My recollection was that they only saw the two of them skirmishing on the ground, and then the gunshot

You can believe the evidence in the case was inconclusive while also recognizing that Zimmerman is in fact a racist asshole

Or if you believe the witnesses who said Trayvon was on top

Yup. Presumably he thinks Zimmerman’s interpretation made more sense

The evidence presented at trial?

Sorry, that was the law student speaking. What everyone has said in the replies is correct, and what I was saying is that in order to have a case challenging the constitutionality of the death penalty, the argument has to be made by a cold-blooded murderer who committed a truly heinous crime.

That's true, but you have to get to the Supreme Court, which is hard to do In the meantime, you're screwed in the lower courts

You realize that the only people with standing to challenge the death penalty are people convicted of murder, right? Who else is gonna challenge it?

I realize it’s a death penalty case, so you file every motion you can think of, but it seems pretty hopeless to argue that the death penalty is unconstitutional when there’s a whole bunch of precedent saying it’s not

That is true to an extent, but when you’re a PD you’ll represent plenty of reprehensible people, and I bet you’ll represent plenty more of them than you would as one of those hated private criminal defense attorneys.

I think that the better legal argument would be to argue that either the school’s policies are grossly unfair and violate due process (though it’s a private school so I don’t really think that would work), or to argue that the school has policies to investigation allegations of sexual assault, but ignored them due to…

Think about it this way: for every one person who gets a lenient sentence, there are five people who will get no less than 12 years for helping someone shoplift, thanks to some unrelated prior felonies and bullshit sentencing guidelines

Look, I get we’re upset about Judge Persky, but there have to be better cases to criticize than “the prosecutor offered a plea deal, therefore the judge is biased.” Between this and the Ramirez case, we've now found two cases that have basically nothing to do with the Brock Turner sentencing

A: Neither Trump nor Pence has the power to overturn Roe v. Wade

If your friends believe that abortion is murder, but don’t support laws that outlaw abortion, your friends’ beliefs are incoherent

Blocking the door and saying he knew she was “messed up” definitely makes his likely defense (I didn’t know she was drugged) more difficult. That being said, there's a chance he might get a pretty good plea deal in exchange for testifying against his father. With all those prior felonies, the father could be looking…

That’s not how criminal law works. There’s a long-standing (and in my view, correct) precedent that you can’t be prosecuted unless there is a statute that a reasonable person would understand to outlaw your conduct. Judges also can’t make up crimes anymore; we have had common law crimes for over 50 years.