re:gyro: democracy by another name:leviticus!
gyro: "The Judge told them to make an "individual moral assessment" re sentencing. I gather in your language that means check legal precedent."
My language, gyro, should say to you that I would hope that people look at evidence provided in court, check legal documents and make up their minds according to those documents rather than consulting the "religious documents" which are no documents of any legal standing or authority. Can you imagine what would happen if that jury consisted of six fundamentalist muslims (three sunnis and three shias) and six fundamentalist christians (two catholic, two protestant, two orthodox) all of which were consulting their various sacred texts for an answer? The guy was black. What if six or (worse) seven of those jurors were pointy head-Christians?
There's such a thing as separation of powers, gyro. And that's the very purpose of it. To be able to separate one aspect of your views from another. You obviously don't care whether a decision about a person's punishment was reached through the medium of the bible or the Koran. Is that right? If that is so, it is very disturbing.
