In the United States, we rightly pride ourselves on many things. Yet it turns out that the United States is behind countries such as Namibia, Mali, Estonia, and Papua New Guinea in one very important area.
Reporters Without Borders have recently released their Press Freedom Index for 2011-2012, and the U.S. is 47th, just below Taiwan and tied with Argentina. For a country that gave birth to the Bill of Rights this ought to be at the very least embarrassing, and at the worst, shameful.
The report cites the response to protests in 2011 as justification for the United States’ poor ranking. In the space of two months more than 25 journalists were arrested, escorted off premises, or beaten for ‘inappropriate behavior’, ‘public nuisance’, and lacking accreditation. Instances like this are now easy to document thanks to modern technology, and some of the videos of such instances are depressing and bemusing in equal measure. These infringements would be worrying enough for First Amendment advocates, but the recent fiasco with SOPA and PIPA are also cause for concern.
The last decade has seen an unacceptable number of abuses of U.S. citizen’s rights. The right to privacy and the protection against unreasonable searches and seizures as codified in the Fourth Amendment is being slowly chipped away through invasive legislation such as the Patriot Act (renewed by President Obama) and NDAA. The right to keep and bear arms is being turned into an almost prohibitive bureaucratic nightmare in some parts of the country, as Emily Miller of the Washington Times has been chronicling. The Fifth Amendment has seen its own fair share of wear and tear, being ignored or treated as an obstacle by overbearing politicians in the name of security.
The Constitution of the United States is a piece of political genius, and it is a shame to see the rights it establishes being so brazenly reduced. Countries that until recently were ruled by dictators that often killed journalists are considered a more open environment in which to practice journalism than the U.S. Perhaps we should be doing a better job at reclaiming our intellectual and political heritage, and reminding the politicians of the document they swore to uphold and protect.
Image from Shutterstock/Scott Rothstein
daddysteve 
Christopher Ryan 
MattSwartz 
MIke MacLeod 
MikeyrInFL 
Sean 
“The Constitution of the United States is a piece of political genius..:” – it is, by the standards of the 18th or 19th century. Not by modern standards, though. This uncritical veneration of the Constitution in the US blinds Americans to its flaws, such as
- lack of effective protection against excessive punishment. The 8th amendment protects against “cruel and unusual” punishment and against excessive fines, but not against excessive prison terms, not even ridiculously excessive ones.
- lack of effective protection against highway robbery in the form of asset forfeiture
- lack of protection against politicized justice. If federal prosecutors serve “at the pleasure of the president”, what are the chances they will be independent? In which (other?) civilized country would all torture victims be denied a day in court on the grounds of “state secrets” and “executive immunity”? If in such matters justice is the five-dollar-whore of power, this is also the fault of the constitution
- lack of protection against arbitrary and eccentric criminal laws.
- lack of protection against indirect subversions of the rule of law. What good are the procedural rights the Constitution confers if the lawyer of a poor defendant in a murder case gets a flat fee of $ 1.300 paid by the state, as is the case in some States? How effective will the defense be?
- lack of protection against prosecutorial misbehaviour. What good is the Constitution if prosecutors can violate the Brady rule with impunity?
- the absence of clauses relating to the principle of proportionality
And there would be more to say.
To an outside observer, the US criminal justice system and the political system look dysfunctional. The Constitution ist partly to blame for that.