Talk:United States v. Miller

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Why is advocates "italicised" (pardon my spelling, if I mispelled that) where it explains how each side took the case to support their side? I have little experience editing encyclopedias, but is there a reason behind that?

[edit] Background on this case

As I have indicated in another talk page, this matter came to the Supreme Court after a timely posed demurrer by one or both defendants at trial. Therefore, a likely explanation regarding the lack of evidence might be that no evidence to the aforementioned effect had even been presented at the trial -- the defendants' demurrer may have been sustained by the trial court before anybody could get around to presenting evidence. (For non-lawyers, what this basically means is that if the trial court threw out the case before the defendants had a chance to present "evidence" there obviously would have been no such "evidence" in the record on appeal for the Supreme Court to even talk about. In other words, this may have been a case where the defendants were "too successful," or their initial success at the trial court essentially may have backfired once the case was appealed.)

The Supreme Court hears and decides questions of law but does not normally decide questions of fact (i.e., does not normally hear "evidence"). Appeals courts such as the U.S. Supreme Court do look at "evidence" in certain technical ways, but not in all the same ways that a trial court looks at evidence. Generally, the Supreme Court and other appeals courts look only at evidence presented at the trial court proceeding.

If the Supreme Court considered the question of whether the firearm in the case was "ordinary military equipment" for purposes of the statute to be a question of fact, then the Court could easily have taken the lack of "facts" in the trial court's record as a lack of "evidence." By contast, if an appeals court such as the Supreme Court considers a particular question decided by a trial court to be a question of law, the court will have no problem re-examining that question.

The Court also noted that it could take no judicial notice that the weapon was part of ordinary military equipment. This seems to support the argument that the Court did indeed treat the question as a question of fact -- one requiring "evidence" to be presented at the trial court -- and apparently none was presented, because the defendants were successful in having the case thrown out first.

If you don't present "evidence" at trial, you are basically out of luck. Under our legal system, the Supreme Court and other appeals courts generally do not consider or look at "evidence" unless that evidence was at least presented at the trial court level. So, even if the defendants or their lawyers HAD shown up at the Supreme Court, any "evidence" they didn't try to put into the trial court record would generally not be regarded by the Supreme Court anyway. Yours, Famspear 15:24, 29 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] True Lies

I removed the paragraph about the "frequent claim" that the government lied in stating that the shotgun in question was never used in connection with a militia. It is unsourced, and in any event a factually true statement made as part of a legal argument does not become a lie simply because the statement is (arguably) irrelevant. Bob92 17:37, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

What people are saying is that the judge didn't know half-barelled shotguns was military arms. If he had knew it was used, in coherency with the rest of military arms that would have been ruled lawful to posses as well. This trial is a little bit hard for a layman to understand as the definition of a militia is anyone over 18 years of age. Hence anyone over 18 can posses military arms for their protection. Lord Metroid 13:14, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

Metroid, the Supreme Court protected ownership of military weapons by those enrolled in militias. It wouldn't matter if the sawed-off shotgun really were a military weapon or if the court had known it, because there was no militia involved. The definition of militia is not "anyone over 18 years of age," as you say. The Constitution and the court define it very clearly as, among other things, "well-regulated" and organized, armed, and disciplined by Congress. The court wrote that "the Militia comprised all males physically capable of acting in concert for the common defense. 'A body of citizens enrolled for military discipline'" -- that doesn't mean that everyone over 18 was a militiaman automatically because he turned 18, it meant that everyone over 18 was obligated to enroll in the militia and be subject to its discipline. Short answer: whatever the law is, the court in this case named two requirements, not one, for the enjoyment of the Second Amendment's protection: (1) a military-style weapon and (2) enrollment in a militia. Knowing the trivia of the military's use of sawed-off shotguns would not have changed the court's decision. --Yawnz1 13:40, 22 March 2007 (UTC)