Is America Really Free Essay
When people come to America and decide to live here one of the first things that they think of is that this is “the land of the free.” In reality, it is not so simple. A person’s freedom in America is limited by many different factors. Citizenship, gender, race, religion, class all play a part in how free one can be. We are not all equal. In recent years, this question of how free we should be has come up again and new limits to our freedoms have been created. After the World Trade Center was attacked by terrorists on September 11th, 2001, President Bush signed the Patriot Act six weeks later. In a state of panic, Congress rushed to give the government more power so that they could try to catch terrorists and protect the American people. However
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Padilla, a citizen of the U.S and was sentenced to seventeen years and four months in prison by a federal judge in Miami on Jan. 22, 2008. Under the sixth Amendment it states that due process is needed for a criminal process. This story shows that this poor man was held without being given a trial so he could not defend himself and explain his innocence.
Some people believe that the Patriot Act is a good thing because it keeps us safer. It is worth it to sacrifice our freedoms in order to prevent terrorism. These people might say that arresting Jose Padilla was a good thing because it prevented him from potentially setting off a bomb. In many ways the Patriot Act has made government investigations against terrorism easier to target by allowing them to more power. It has also made it possible for the law to violate our privacy and keep up with technology in everyday life.
The problem with this argument is that many people are being made less safe by the Patriot Act since they are being held in jail without trial. It is stated in the Constitution “No citizen shall be imprisoned or otherwise detained by the United States except pursuant to an Act of Congress” http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/4001 This shows that the way the government reacted to Jose Padilla and others like him was very
Padilla, a citizen of the U.S and was sentenced to seventeen years and four months in prison by a federal judge in Miami on Jan. 22, 2008. Under the sixth Amendment it states that due process is needed for a criminal process. This story shows that this poor man was held without being given a trial so he could not defend himself and explain his innocence.
Some people believe that the Patriot Act is a good thing because it keeps us safer. It is worth it to sacrifice our freedoms in order to prevent terrorism. These people might say that arresting Jose Padilla was a good thing because it prevented him from potentially setting off a bomb. In many ways the Patriot Act has made government investigations against terrorism easier to target by allowing them to more power. It has also made it possible for the law to violate our privacy and keep up with technology in everyday life.
The problem with this argument is that many people are being made less safe by the Patriot Act since they are being held in jail without trial. It is stated in the Constitution “No citizen shall be imprisoned or otherwise detained by the United States except pursuant to an Act of Congress” http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/4001 This shows that the way the government reacted to Jose Padilla and others like him was very