PUBLIC ORDER VS. INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes' formulation of liberty is that "each individual should have the maximum liberty consistent with the equal liberty of all other individuals" (Tarr, 63). America is founded on the value of the individual and that value is often expressed in the right of to privacy. Today, we are faced with the threat of terrorists who can hide within our borders and kill scores of citizens in a single act. The government must have the ability to discover the presence of terrorists and to stop them before they commit such acts as the attack September 11. Thus the issue of privacy must be looked at in light of the question of national security - the security of every citizen of the United States (Wilkinson, 208).

One of the terrorists who participated in the attacks on September 11, 2001, had been put on a "terrorist watch list" after he was spotted meeting with known al-Qaeda terrorists in Malaysia. In fact the FBI had agents

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econd only to the arms trade (State Dept., 21). Organized, internationallybased drug traffickers with vast financial resources pose a serious threat to the stability and security of the international community. They operate without concern for national boundaries, and individual nationstates are often illequipped to prosecute and punish the perpetrators. The war on terrorism needs to also be a war on drug-trafficking, because more and more the people involved in both activities are the same (McConville, 83). USE OF THE DEATH PENALTY: One very strong way of enforcing public order would be the increased use of the death penalty - both in terms of crimes for which the death penalty would be an outcome, and for the actual use of the punishment, which nowadays takes upwards of 10-20 years before all appeals have been exhausted in the attempt to protect individual rights. People by that time have forgotten what the person did, which limits the effectiveness of the death penalty in deterring crime. For the sake of argument, let us assume that the death penalty  despite all our best efforts, despite all the safeguards and caution built into the system  leads to the deaths of a few innocent people. Is that a good reason to do away
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Approximate Word count = 2134
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)

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