Is Justice Jay Bybee (9th Circuit Appellate Court) a sociopath?

Question

Forget about the torture memos, I'm not thinking about those. So he thinks torture is normal and reasonable. A lot of people do actually. 

But he has been faced with choices toward an outcome that betray him. 

A man putting water out for migrants crossing the Arizona desert was accused of disposing of "garbage, refuse sewage, sludge, earth, rocks, and other debris" in a national wildlife refuge.

Another part of the same statute makes it illegal to abandon property there, or to place certain property in a refuge without a permit. 

He chooses the garbage clause even though the water is new and sealed when the other clause would have had the same effect. 

The guy also marks with GPS and picks up his bottles. 214 human remains have been found so far this year and two days before his arrest the guy even found a dead 14 year old Salvadoran girl.

Why "water == garbage" and not "abandon property in a refuge clause"? It was a choice.

Phil · Accepted Answer

He shows that neocons on a bench will vote the way they want without regard to the law, just as they claim "activist" liberal judges will. However in this case the government chose what part of the law to charge as a violation. Bybee just agreed that fresh clean water was "sewage, refuse, garbage" etc. The other judges on the panel properly found in a ruling limited to the exact cricumstance of the case (thus not activist at all) that the government could not convict the man who left water of disposing of refuse...

And yes it's about saving lives. Illegal border crossing does not carry the death penalty and we are humane enough (though just barely, it seems) to say people dying of thirst literally should not.

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Is Justice Jay Bybee (9th Circuit Appellate Court) a sociopath?

1 Answer