It's also true that such a law could become a free pass to every national security bureaucrat trying to cover his mistakes, as well as the ultimate enforcement mechanism for the government's spin machine, compelling everyone in national security offices to stay "on message" under threat of prosecution.
This principle was famously enunciated in the mid-1980s in a case involving sports newscaster Warner Wolf, now a CBS icon whose uniqueness appears to depend on his authoritative rendering of "Let's go to the videotape!" For large nationwide companies, these huge differences among the states, and the absence of any federal rules, represent the ultimate enforcement problem.
But from a broader perspective, these are just different ways to measure a monopolist's threat to consumers, the protection of whom was the ultimate goal of antitrust enforcement in the old economy and remains so in the new.
They may have been banned and burned, censored and convicted, but a major element of them will always be untamable: the psychopathic puppet Mr Punch who kills the devil himself; Judge Dredd, the ultimate nightmare of law-enforcement in a fascist future; Guy Fawkes, reincarnated through V for Vendetta, his mask now a global icon adopted by Occupy and other protest groups.
If neither the Justice Department nor the Attorney General will budge, it falls to the President, who bears ultimate public responsibly for law enforcement, to do what is right.
He also gives ample time to those who seek closure from the enforcement of the ultimate sanction, allowing them to argue that the death penalty is a sort of crucible of evil through which some good may come.
In the past, CCA officials have stressed that the federal government, not local law enforcement, makes the ultimate decision on which undocumented immigrants should be detained.
To safeguard that independence, the Court of Final Appeal was set up as the ultimate guarantor of the even-handed enforcement of the law.No one can be so sure about that now.
Many, like Geoffrey Hawthorne, an officer from Ramapo, N.J., said they came to honor what law enforcement officials commonly call "the ultimate sacrifice".
"I think some is straight retribution and some is feeling like he ought to support law enforcement by going for the ultimate penalty in the worst cases".
Thus, while the public health investigator's aim is to collect data that will withstand the scrutiny of subject matter experts and the global scientific community, with the ultimate goal of developing effective control measures, the law enforcement investigator's goal is gathering evidence that will meet constitutional standards and withstand legal challenges to obtain a conviction.
