March 6, 2010 | 4:42 p.m.
Reporting from Washington - According to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, a prisoner who was allegedly slammed to a concrete floor and punched and kicked by a guard after asking for a grievance form -- but suffered neither serious nor permanent harm -- has no claim that his constitutional rights were violated.
Thomas objected when the high court, in a little-noted recent opinion, said this unprovoked and malicious assault by a North Carolina prison guard, if true, amounted to cruel and unusual punishment.
The court's decision came a few days after Thomas' now-famous former law clerk John C. Yoo was charged with flawed reasoning, but not professional misconduct, as a Justice Department lawyer when he applied much the same view toward the treatment of Al Qaeda prisoners.
In the so-called torture memos in 2002, Yoo reasoned that subjecting prisoners to simulated drowning or "stress positions" in cold cells was not illegal torture because it did not cause the intense pain of a serious injury, equivalent to "death or organ failure."
Thomas' consistent record of dismissing claims of prison brutality, most of them joined by Justice Antonin Scalia, shows that Yoo's view of torture was not that of a rogue lawyer. Instead, it represents a strain of conservative thinking that looks back in history to define cruelty and torture, rather than toward what the court has called the "evolving standards of decency."
more:
http://www.latimes.com/news/nation-and-world/la-na-thomas-yoo7-2010mar07,0,3782840.storyYet another reason to despise the man....
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