At first glance, this ruling looked so insane that I knew there had to be some nuances I was missing. So I did a little more digging and read part of the actual ruling.
This Supreme Court Case is about the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act which allows the government to civilly commit someone who is already held in custody and deemed to be "sexually dangerous." In other words, the government can put someone in a mental institution (NOT prison) indefinitely even after they have served their jail sentence. In order to do this, the government must present "clear and convincing evidence that this is a sexually dangerous person." To non-legal people, this seems like a fairly mundane phrase, but lawyers and legal watchers understand that "clear and convincing evidence" and "sexually dangerous" have very strict definitions under the law. "Clear and convincing evidence" is a high standard of proof just below "beyond reasonable doubt." The reason they don't use "beyond reasonable doubt" is because this is a civil, not criminal, case. The government has long had the power to "civilly commit" someone to a mental institution, and it's been deemed constitutional. And a "sexually dangerous person" is defined as one who has engaged in sexually violent conduct or child molestation or is suffering from a serious mental illness such that he or she would have "serious difficulty" refraining from sexually violent conduct.
So in other words, if the federal government can prove by clear and convincing evidence that the defendant is dangerous or seriously mentally ill, it has the authority to hold him in a mental institution after he has served his prison sentence. And they can hold him there until he is deemed no longer dangerous. What you should also know is that this authority already existed. It was just that it used to be only states who could do that. This case says that the federal government can now hold someone if a state refuses to do it for some reason.
I know there is a slippery slope problem here, but it seems to me that the government is being pretty careful about how they define this power. That's why the Supreme Court allowed it.
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Originally Posted by Typhoid
But if it's for anything, I definitely think it should be enacted for murder, because I don't think 'the system' is hard enough on people who kill people.
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That's what the sentence "life without the possibility of parole" is for.