More thoughts on the Larry Craig scandal

• The principle of "innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt" still applies in our criminal courts (despite the worst efforts of George II). However, it does not appear to apply to the court of political public opinion. As a result, the career of Larry Craig was doomed, rightly or wrongly, from the moment of his arrest -- no matter what legal avenues he pursued or did not pursue.


• That said, in retrospect it was utterly stupid of Craig not to fight the charges against him, because a decent lawyer could very easily argue that based upon the officer's statement there was no crime committed and no charges should have been brought in the first place. (At least one law enforcement officer has come to the same opinion on one of the blogs spawned by this event.)


• Of course, that is easy for me to say now but undoubtedly it would have been impossible for someone in Craig's position to say at the time, unless prepared for the possibility of arrest in advance, because incredible pressure is brought to bear on the targets of these stings to cop a plea deal and not to involve legal counsel. Couple that with the fact that the Senator was away from home and may not have had access to a local attorney, and you have a model for railroading someone into confessing to anything.


• From a purely legal perspective, it seems that solicitation of an otherwise legal act should never constitute a crime merely because such solicitation occurs in a public place (of course, the act being solicited needs to occur in private to be legal). Any other interpretation would logically make a mockery of the First Amendment (as applied to the states by the Fourteenth). Sting operations then would merely need to be allowed to proceed to the point where the target exposes himself to the officer. If the target smells a rat and breaks off contact because the officer doesn't go first, the operation still has achieved its purpose of deterrence, without necessarily resulting in criminal charges.

Labor Day

After spending most of the weekend on-call for work, I got done at 10 AM Monday. gmjambear and I spent Labor Day watching the final game of the Tacoma Rainiers' season vs. the Colorado Springs SkySox, which the Rainiers won by a score of 5 to 2. I caught a foam baseball that the "Fun Squad" tossed into the stands between innings. Afterward we went to Bremerton and caught the tail end of the Blackberry Festival. (That refers to the fruit, not the electronic device some call addictive. I left the latter at home.) We had dinner at a taqueria across the street from the ferry terminal and milkshakes at Cold Stone Creamery next door to the terminal. On the ferry back I noticed a lot of folks crashed out on the benches. All in all a fun day.