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Comment by RcouF1uZ4gsC | Hacker News Reader

> A federal judge ruled that Belderrain could be tried in the U.S. District Court for the District of Wyoming, despite the Sixth Amendment problem. Belderrain cited Kalt's paper "The Perfect Crime" to explain why he believed it was illegal to have his trial with a jury from a state other than where the crime was committed. The court dismissed this argument.

Judges especially Federal judges are far less impressed by "hacks" and "loopholes" of the system, than most programmers.

There is no chance they will let a premeditated murder go unpunished on the basis of some obscure technicality like this.

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Then why do we even have laws?

Seriously. If they're completely capricious, what good are they?

They're not completely capricious. Laws don't operate under the confines of a strict propositional calculus: you don't follow strict axiomatic derivations to a contradiction and declare yourself finished. Instead, it operates generally on a basis that cases with facts in common should have the same decision (hence the name "common law"). And the law is written with this process in mind: if legislators don't like the judicial interpretation of their text, they can change it by changing the law.

I get that they can change the law. But instead of changing the law, they gave him a plea deal on the condition he didn't contest it at a higher court.

So why not change the law when there's an obvious loophole?

According to the article, at one point the Wyoming senator did try to get it changed but no one was interested.

I expect the answer with this sort of thing is that there are a lot of people in Congress who would roll their eyes and say that they have better things to do than screw around with some weird legal edge case that has basically never actually been a problem. And they're not necessarily wrong.

I mean, I know laws can be interpreted. But we're talking about what seems like a pretty straightforward section of the constitution.

What's even more damning is that there's no interest in resolving the contradiction. If this had been discovered during a murder trial where there was overwhelming evidence of guilt, and simply a jurisdiction loophole, I'd be sympathetic to saying "let's just sweep it under the rug". But if it's known and the response is simply "eh, well if it happens we'll just ignore the constitution because 'common law'", that really reduces my respect for what the law is.

The purpose of a legal system is not preventing people from doing things deemed illegal. Its purpose is the maintenance and expansion of state power. Laws are not designed for your benefit. If you benefit from a law that is merely incidental.

Laws are just a facade to legitimize, in the eyes of the populace, the state enforcing its will.

The state writes the laws in their own interest so that the majority of the time it serves them to remain within legal bounds. And the majority of the times a state violates its own laws are not made public until years later, if at all, negating public outcry. In this way the citizenry remains placid and is willing to overlook the few events in which a state publicly flouts the law.

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