... where by "he" you mean the PD himself.

Look, public defenders almost *always* encourage their clients to settle, because their compensation structure incentivizes them that way. PDs barely make ends meet, and they get compensated by the number of cases they take on, with very little marginal compensation for taking a case to trial. So they wind up taking on 50, 100 cases at a time. The faster they can get rid of you, the faster they can take on another case.

Notice that the merits of your case didn't appear in the above reasoning chain.

Of course if the client insists on going to trial, the PD is legally obliged to do so--but how many criminal defendants know enough AND have the cojones to argue with their lawyer when their liberty is at stake?

The PD compensation system is b0rkd, and innocent people are in jail because of it.

Wrong. WDs are *ridiculously* dense, with a rho of about 10^6 g/cm^3, so a 1M_sun WD has a volume of like 2*10^31 cubic meters, which means the radius is around 8000 kilometers. R_earth is about 6400 kilometers, so Earth is actually really useful to get an intuitive picture of how these guys look.

The cool thing about WDs is that they shrink in volume when you add mass. Which means they get denser the more mass you add. Even cooler is that lots of them are in a co-orbit with other stars in a binary system, and they steal mass from the other star, so it's not so strange to see WDs gaining mass and getting denser over time.

It turns out there is one special mass at which the electron degeneracy pressure holding the star up is not enough to fight the force of gravity pushing it inward. (This mass is about 1.4 times the mass of the sun, depending on whether the star is rotating.) At that point the thing collapses from the size of earth to about the size of a soccer ball in less than a second, generating one of the most spectacular explosions in nature. I mean this thing is blown apart at around 3% of the speed of light and is 5 billion times brighter than the sun.

This is called a "type Ia supernova" -- a pretty boring name for what is, technically speaking, the awesomest thing in the universe.

Infant comes from a Latin word meaning "speechless". So I guess anything that can't speak (a young baby, an unborn baby, a wet piece of string, a sloth, a carp, an orangutan, a breakfast cereal, a fruit bat) is an infant. :)

Your friend makes a crappy analogy.

I can't legally pay you to have sex with me. But, I can legally pay you to have sex with my friend, film that sex act, burn it to a DVD, make 1 million copies of that DVD and sell those copies to strangers.

So why is making pornography legal? Or why is prostitution illegal?

Because, while they share traits, they are different in ways that we have decided are important. We decided early on in the USA to be damn careful about limiting freedom of expression. It's hard to say how a law against prostitution treads on one's freedom of expression, but it's easy to argue that a law against pornography does so.

We haven't decided yet when a fetus becomes a person. This is a hot topic, and it stays hot because there is no objective way to say that a bag of cells is a person. Conception, heartbeat, brain function, viability, birth: these are all just arbitrary choices we make because we think that they somehow indicate that the bag of cells has become a person.

Until we do decide, the rights of the person carrying the fetus will outweigh those of the fetus itself. It's really the only sensible way to proceed.

OTOH, we all agree that a person in a coma is still a person. Just because we may want to protect hir rights, and give less protection to something we don't agree is a person, does not mean our thinking is flawed.

In fact, it kinda means our thinking is consistent.

Your friend would be better off arguing that the boundary between being a person and not being a person is arbitrary, that there is no magical moment when a fetus becomes a person. But we all agree that after the fetus has been born, it is certainly a person. So since we know that the fetus at some point becomes a person, but we don't know exactly when, we should pick the earliest time at which it is reasonable to suspect that the fetus is a person. And that time is conception [insert reasoning here]. So, since a conceived fetus is a person, we can't kill it because we have a law against killing persons.

The latter argument, while still deeply flawed, is less transparently so. :)

Firstly, they're not looking for things that can bring down an airplane -- they're looking for things that could indicate your intent to bring down an airplane. Though I agree with you that such-and-such a t-shirt is not necessarily an indicator.

In terms of your First Amendment rights, there are two locations that we care about here, and they're treated differently in the law: (1) the airport, and (2) the airplane.

The airplane is simple: it's owned by a private company, so you're on private property. That means your free speech protections are nonexistent: the airline can impose any ban on speech or expression it wants. Sue them on First Amendment grounds all you want: the judge will throw out your case.

The airport is a little more complicated. Under the law, it's a "non-public forum" (which is different than being a private place). The Supreme Court has shaken it out like this: your rights to speech and expression may be restricted by regulation as long as the restriction is "reasonable" (as determined by the courts) and as long as the regulation is not intended to suppress expression simply because it's counter to airport officials' views.

Lower courts have decided that "reasonable" means "in line with the main public purpose for the airport".

As an obvious example, you can't hold a rally in an airport. It creates congestion, which is counter to the interests of the bulk of people using the airport: they want to get to their destination speedily.

So, getting back to the main point, a US airport is within its rights to impose bans on (let's say) t-shirts picturing known terrorists, because such t-shirts could reasonably cause airport delays.