Nowadays the news is full of examples of the expansion of freedom by the multiplication of rights.
A Miami judge has struck a mother lode of hitherto undiscovered rights. Seems homeless people have a right to “safe zones” where they can sleep, cook, eat, defecate and do other things the judge calls “harmless” and “inoffensive” involuntary and life-sustaining acts. He says anti-vagrancy laws and some other measures by which the community tries to maintain order violate the homeless peoples’ rights to equal protection, due process and freedom from cruel and unusual punishments.
New York’s highest court recently minted a new right, ruling that Domingo Antommarchi was improperly convicted because he was not present when the judge spoke with some potential jurors during jury selection. The New York Times reports:
“It was not good enough, the court ruled, that Mr. Antommarchi’s lawyer was present, and it did not matter that Mr. Antommarchi never asked to be included in the conferences near the judge’s bench. Mr. Antommarchi, who was sitting a few feet away in the courtroom, had a constitutional right both to hear the discussions and to see the facial expressions and demeanor of the potential jurors, the court said.”
This new right may result in overturning thousands of criminal convictions, including those in the Central Park jogger attack, the Happy Land Social Club fire that killed 87 and the subway knifing that killed a Utah tourist. And what of the community’s interest in safety? It is only that, a mere “interest,” not a right, and so must yield.
Small wonder life is stressful nowadays. However, people have expanding rights to compensation for stress. The Wall Street Journal reports that Florida has recognized a right to disability benefits for a woman who complained of stress from working alongside “large black males.” The Journal also reports:
“In California, lawyers prowl outside factories after layoffs have been announced, trying to recruit stress cases. Workers only have to claim that 10 percent of their anxiety is job-related to collect benefits. One L.A. clinic even offers the workers’ comp equivalent of frequent flyer miles-a free trip to Las Vegas for anybody who visited the clinic 30 times in three months.”
A Duxbury, Mass., fireman savagely clubbed his wife, fracturing her skull, severing an ear and leaving her partially deaf. A judge decided the clubber had been temporarily insane and acquitted him. But the fire department fired him. Big mistake. David Frum reports in Forbes magazine that the clubber filed a complaint and seven years of litigation produced a ruling from the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination: the clubber was a victim of “handicap discrimination” because his aberrant behavior wasn’t his fault. The commission ordered him rehired and paid $200,000 plus 12 percent interest for back pay and emotional distress (which he had a right not to suffer).
The drug violation-his seventh-that earned Yankee pitcher Steve Howe a “lifetime” ban from baseball? Not his fault. An arbitrator says Howe has a right to play because his cocaine use is somehow a result of hyperactivity.
A 17-year-old Maryland girl tried out for the football team. If school authorities had prevented her, or perhaps had even tried to dissuade her, her rights would have been violated and she could have sued. In the first scrimmage she was hurt. She is suing the school district for $1.5 million on the ground that no one told her “of the potential risks of serious injury inherent in the sport.”
The Wall Street Journal reports that a student is suing Princeton because of injuries received from high-voltage machinery when he climbed onto the roof of a railroad shuttle that serves a station owned by the university. Brown University spent two years and upwards of $50,000 fending off a suit by a young woman who sought $700,000 because she hurt her arm on a broken soap dish while showering in a dormitory with her boyfriend. (A janitor says the dish was intact before she got into the shower.)
In the 1960s the cry of student liberation was “no more in loco parentis!"-colleges should not take the place of parents in supervising students’ comportment. Today the demand is for the right of anyone to do anything he or she pleases, and the right to be compensated for any unpleasant consequences. According to today’s entitlement mentality, this is just a facet of the general right to risk-free life. Thus the University of Alaska at Fairbanks was ordered to pay $50,000 to a man injured when he and a woman slid down a snowy hill on an inner tube and hit a tree. The woman died. The court held that the school’s warning signs, which the two ignored, were insufficient. (Perhaps the ignoring of them proved the insufficiency?) The case on behalf of the woman’s estate is pending.
A man paralyzed while playing football for Texas Christian University in 1974 is claiming a right to workers’ compensation-retroactive and ongoing-because he says college athletes are like employees. The Supreme Court is being asked to decide whether a prisoner’s right to be free from cruel and unusual punishment is violated if he is denied a smoke-free environment. And …
Sorry, no more space for other examples of America’s expanding menu of rights. Only room for one question. Feel freer? Me neither.
