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Sunday, April 06, 2003
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Wired News: Fears About DNA Testing Proposal
A Justice Department proposal to create a database containing the DNA of suspected terrorists has raised fears that the measure would lead to so-called DNA dragnets. The concern is that police could round up people of Middle Eastern origin and other targeted groups to force them to contribute genetic samples to the database.
The Terrorist Identification Database Act of 2003 is buried deep within the department's secretly drafted Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003 -- known colloquially as Patriot Act II. It would empower the attorney general to collect DNA samples for the purpose of "detecting, investigating, prosecuting, preventing or responding to terrorist activities."
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Justice Scalia says rights excessive, can be scaled down in wartime: "U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia had this to say on Tuesday: "The Constitution just sets minimums ... Most of the rights that you enjoy go way beyond what the Constitution requires." According to Scalia, during wartime, "the protections will be ratcheted right down to the constitutional minimum." "
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Tuesday, April 01, 2003
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Friday, March 28, 2003
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Uniting for Peace - Why The U.N. General Assembly Has Authority To Speak on the War on Iraq In the Event of Security Council Stalemate By MARJORIE COHN
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Thursday, March 20, 2003
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Red alert? Stay home, await word: "If the nation escalates to "red alert," which is the highest in the color-coded readiness against terror, you will be assumed by authorities to be the enemy if you so much as venture outside your home, the state [New Jersey]'s anti-terror czar says."
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Tuesday, March 18, 2003
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UN Resolution 1441 Does Not Authorize Force: "According to the UN charter, there are only two possible situations in which one country can take military action against another. The first is in individual or collective self-defence - a right under customary international law which is expressly preserved by Article 51 of the UN charter. The second is where, under Article 42 of the charter, the security council decides that force is necessary "to maintain or restore international peace and security" where its decisions have not been complied with. In other words, where a UN resolution clearly authorises military action. "
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Thursday, March 13, 2003
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China introduces execution vans "The introduction of mobile execution vans, in which condemned prisoners are put to death by lethal injection, has been hailed in Chinese media as "a more humane method of dispatch".
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Wednesday, February 12, 2003
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Principles of the Nuremberg Tribunal: "We sentenced Nazi leaders to death for waging a war of aggression," says International Law Professor Francis A. Boyle of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. By contrast, Prof. Boyle wants merely to impeach George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and John Ashcroft for their plans to invade Iraq and create a police state in America.
[But the alternative looks pretty grim too. See: Order of Presidential Succession]
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Saturday, February 08, 2003
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Justice Dept. Drafts Sweeping Expansion of Anti-Terrorism Act: by The Center for Public Integrity - "The Bush Administration is preparing a bold, comprehensive sequel to the USA Patriot Act passed in the wake of September 11, 2001, which will give the government broad, sweeping new powers to increase domestic intelligence-gathering, surveillance and law enforcement prerogatives, and simultaneously decrease judicial review and public access to information."
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Wednesday, January 29, 2003
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Anti-War Ads Rejected During Bush Speech: "The Comcast cable television company rejected ads that an anti-war group wanted to air during President Bush's State of the Union speech, saying they included unsubstantiated claims. Peace Action Education Fund had spent $5,000 to have six 30-second ads aired on CNN by Philadelphia-based Comcast beginning Tuesday night. "
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Tuesday, December 24, 2002
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Bill Of Rights Pared Down To A Manageable Six: "We're not taking away personal rights; we're increasing personal security," Ashcroft said... thanks to several key additions, the Bill of Rights now offers protections that were previously lacking, including the right to be protected by soldiers quartered in one's home (Amendment III)"
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Friday, December 20, 2002
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Ali Moayedian: Creating a Secure America or Another History of Shame?: "Most of the arrested people have been living in the U.S. for many years now. They have families, jobs (with work authorizations), and are hard-working and peaceful people. Their only "crimes" are being born in the "wrong" countries and being out of status, that is not having a current visa. But this is nothing new. This has been a tolerated and accepted practice by INS to allow people who have applied for permanent residency to stay in the U.S. until they receive an interview date from INS and receive their permanent residency (green card). And these people have naturally been in regular contact with INS and have been here with the full knowledge of INS. These people in a way were given a virtual amnesty until their case is processed by INS."
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Thursday, December 19, 2002
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Jennifer Van Bergen | Bush's Gulag: "The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) wrote in its amicus brief for one of these detainees: "The executive seems to be proposing 'enemy combatant' as a permanent legal category, not limited by the scope of the hostilities or the scope of the authorization to use force." The brief notes news reports that the Department of Defense is considering creating detention camps"
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Mass arrests of Muslims in LA: "US immigration officials in Southern California have detained hundreds of Iranians and other Muslim men who turned up to register under residence laws brought in as part of the anti-terror drive. Reports say between 500 and 700 men were arrested in and around Los Angeles after they complied with an order to register by 16 December. "
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Wednesday, December 18, 2002
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The Quality of the President's Mercy: "Almost two years into his presidency, George Bush has yet to grant a single pardon or commute a single prison sentence. This unusual record may reflect a certain indifference to the value and purpose of executive clemency...
The framers of the Constitution understood the president's power to pardon not as a personal privilege but as an obligation of office. They understood that the president had a duty to be merciful, to mitigate the sometimes harsh results of the legal system. A president who uses his pardon power courageously and creatively can bolster public confidence in the overall morality of the criminal justice system. "
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Tuesday, December 17, 2002
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Personal Truths and Legal Fictions: "There are two legal versions of what happened in the courtroom last week. The first is that what Justice Thomas did is unforgivable; by hijacking the argument into the murk of personal experience, he did violence to the disinterested, lucid distance necessary for justice to be achieved. The second version is that he recognized, and his colleagues chose to respect, that some questions cannot be answered dispassionately, especially ones as fraught as, "Can symbols constitute threats?" In this version, personal narrative in appellate decision-making is ignored only at the peril of true justice. The latter conclusion is troubling. It suggests that the Supreme Court will never do "true justice" until there's a Holocaust survivor, a gay abortionist and a blind monk on the bench. "
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Saturday, December 14, 2002
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Tuesday, December 10, 2002
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New Tools for Domestic Spying, and Qualms: "across the country, sometimes to the dismay of civil libertarians, law enforcement officials are maneuvering to seize the information-gathering weapons they say they desperately need to thwart terrorist attacks. From New York City to Seattle, police officials are looking to do away with rules that block them from spying on people and groups without evidence that a crime has been committed. They say these rules, forced on them in the 1970's and 80's to halt abuses, now prevent them from infiltrating mosques and other settings where terrorists might plot. At the same time, federal and local police agencies are looking for systematic, high-tech ways to root out terrorists before they strike. "
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Monday, December 09, 2002
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Why Confess to What You Didn't Do?: " if the convictions are ultimately thrown out, what does that say about the ease with which investigators can persuade an innocent person to confess? "Reform in this area has been extremely slow in coming because law enforcement generally have refused to acknowledge that their interrogation techniques themselves can produce false confessions," said Steven A. Drizin, a professor at Northwestern University School of Law. More verdicts are being reversed every year because of advances in the use of DNA evidence. As a result, there may have been more research in the area of false confession in the last 10 years than in the previous century. The very nature of interrogation is antagonistic, accusatory and focused on leading questions rather than on open lines of inquiry. Many of those methods have been upheld by the courts. Interrogators sometimes lie. They claim to have evidence that they don't really have or confessions from accomplices. The more compliant, naïve or cowed by authority a suspect is, the more likely that person is to confess -- honestly, or falsely. Suspects who are young or mentally ill are particularly vulnerable to pressure."
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Wednesday, December 04, 2002
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The Legacy of Lewis F. Powell Jr.: "Justice Powell's particular legacy illustrates a somewhat different point: that on a court composed of human beings, biography matters. The fact is that Lewis Powell, who died in 1998 just short of his 91st birthday, was a person of a particular time and place, a patrician son of the Old South, who transcended his origins in some ways and not in others, and who drew particular lessons from some singular life experiences. The same could be said of many people, if not most. The difference is that Supreme Court justices, including those now on the court and any future appointees, may be in a position to apply their life lessons in shaping the law for an entire country."
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Tuesday, December 03, 2002
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Texas Death Row Appeals Lawyers Criticized: "Death row inmates in Texas are often assigned incompetent or unqualified state appellate lawyers who do not raise legitimate constitutional arguments and who fail to unearth facts that could prove the innocence of their clients, according to a new study by an advocacy group for capital defendants. The group, Texas Defender Service, examined the state habeas appeals of nearly every death row inmate in Texas since 1995 and found that those inmates had a one in three chance of being executed without their cases being adequately investigated or argued by a competent state appeals lawyer. "
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Saturday, November 30, 2002
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In Harvard Papers, a Dark Corner of the College's Past: 1920: "A group of students were brought before the Court for interrogation about their sex lives. So were some local men who were not students, despite the Court's lack of jurisdiction. Most of the students found "guilty," one a congressman's son, were told to leave not only the college but also the city of Cambridge. Two students convinced the Court that they were heterosexual but were forced to leave anyway because they had associated with some of those identified as gay. The dean also ordered that a letter be added to the student files of all those ousted, which dissuaded the college's Alumni Placement Service from "making any statement that would indicate confidence in these men." Two of those men later committed suicide."
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Administration Begins to Rewrite Decades-Old Spying Restrictions: "The Bush administration, in its fight against terrorism, is slowly chipping away at the wall that has existed for nearly three decades between domestic law enforcement and international intelligence gathering in an effort that senior officials said was vital to waging war against Al Qaeda and other terror networks."
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Wednesday, November 27, 2002
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False Confessions and the Jogger Case: "Every minute of interrogation should be videotaped. This simple procedural reform will deter police coercion, deter frivolous defense claims of coercion, and enable trial judges and juries to assess the veracity of taped confessions. The best way to ensure and determine the truth of a confession is to record and see the entire picture."
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Justice Dept. Seeks to Seal Vaccine Papers: "Lawyers for the families said they were outraged by today's move. They said the government was trying to prevent families from obtaining damaging information about the preservative, which could later be used against drug companies in civil courts."
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Judging a Mother for a Crime by Someone Else: " Illinois Supreme Court overturned Ms. Pollock's conviction, saying the prosecution's theory -- that she should have known that her boyfriend, Scott English, who is serving a life sentence, was going to murder her child -- has no basis in the law.... Ms. Pollock will go free only because a student plucked her letter from among the 17,000 that the law school clinic at Northwestern University receives every year, and the clinic persuaded the Supreme Court to hear an appeal filed after the deadline had passed. The court reversed the conviction outright rather than order a new trial."
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Monday, November 25, 2002
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'Reversible Errors': Presumed Guilty: "''Reversible Errors,'' the latest addition to the Turow oeuvre, may well offer us the richest blend yet. At the center of ''Reversible Errors'' is a confession made by a suspect, Rommy Gandolph, that results in his conviction in a murder case. The plot of the novel moves along on two converging tracks: the events of 1991 leading up to Gandolph's conviction, and the events of 2001 involving his new lawyer's attempt to save him from imminent execution."
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Prison Class: What Ma Barker Knew and Congress Didn't: "prison education programs were radically undermined during the 1990's, when Congress made convicted felons ineligible for Pell grants, the federal tuition aid program aimed primarily at the poor. The government also limited the flow of money to prisons for adult and special education -- a move that turned out to be seriously self-destructive. Researchers have discovered and rediscovered, over and over again, that inmates who attend vocational training or college classes are more likely to stay out of jail once they leave."
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Saturday, November 23, 2002
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Agency Weighed, but Discarded, Plan Reconfiguring the Internet: "Pentagon research agency that is exploring how to create a vast database of electronic transactions and analyze them for potential terrorist activity considered but rejected another surveillance idea: tagging Internet data with unique personal markers to make anonymous use of some parts of the Internet impossible. The idea, which was explored at a two-day workshop in California in August, touched off an angry private dispute among computer scientists and policy experts who had been brought together to assess the implications of the technology. The plan, known as eDNA,"
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Thursday, November 21, 2002
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How War Left the Law Behind: "How can the council's decision bind Iraq but not the United States?... Absent Security Council approval, the United Nations Charter prohibits the use of force except for self-defense. NATO, which led the Kosovo war, never seriously claimed a defensive rationale, and the United States has yet to advance such a justification concerning Iraq. Given the contradiction between the mandate of the Charter and the prevailing American view on Iraq and Kosovo, what has happened to the law? It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the Charter provisions governing use of force are simply no longer regarded as binding international law.... since 1945, dozens of member states have engaged in well over 100 interstate conflicts that have killed millions of people. This record of violation is legally significant. The international legal system is voluntary and states are bound only by rules to which they consent. A treaty can lose its binding effect if a sufficient number of parties engage in conduct that is at odds with the constraints of the treaty. The consent of United Nations member states to the general prohibition against the use of force, as expressed in the Charter, has in this way been supplanted by a changed intent as expressed in deeds. The United States is therefore correct: it would not be unlawful to attack Iraq, even without Security Council approval. It seems the Charter has, tragically, gone the way of the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact which purported to outlaw war and was signed by every major belligerent in World War II. "
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Wednesday, November 20, 2002
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TidBITS: The Evil That Is the DMCA: "Much has been written about what's wrong with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). After all, it's been used to jail programmers, threaten professors, and censor publications, and because of it, foreign scientists have avoided traveling to the U.S. and prominent researchers have withheld their work. In a white paper about the unintended consequences of the DMCA, the Electronic Frontier Foundation argues that the DMCA chills free expression and scientific research, jeopardizes fair use, and impedes competition and innovation. In short, this is a law that only the companies who paid for it could love."
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Senate Votes, 90-9, to Set Up Homeland Security Department Geared to Fight Terrorism: "Eight Democrats voted against the bill: Senators Daniel K. Akaka of Alaska, Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia, Russell D. Feingold of Wisconsin, Ernest F. Hollings of South Carolina, Daniel K. Inouye of Hawaii, Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, Carl Levin of Michigan and Paul S. Sarbanes of Maryland. Senator James M. Jeffords, Independent of Vermont, also voted against it, and Senator Frank H. Murkowski of Alaska was not present."
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Byrd, at 85, Fills the Forum With Romans and Wrath: ""That Department of Homeland Security will not add one whit of security in the near future to the American people," he said. "In the meantime, the terrorists are going to be very busy. I'm concerned that in our drive to focus on the war in Iraq and the Department of Homeland Security, we're going to be taking our eyes off what the terrorists may do to us." Mr. Byrd advocated slowly creating the department, with Congress overseeing the process, and he pulled out the ever-present copy of the Constitution from his breast pocket to make his point. "We're being recreant in turning over to this president the power shift that is included in that bill," he said.... Mr. Byrd, who will celebrate his 50th anniversary in Congress in January, said he had no illusions that his oratory was going to change the outcome of the final vote. So why was he on the floor day after day? What was he accomplishing? "To me, that question misses the point, with all due respect to you for asking it," he said. "To me, the matter is there for a thousand years in the record. I stood for the Constitution. I stood for the institution. If it isn't heard today, there'll be some future member who will come through and will comb these tomes."
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Monday, November 18, 2002
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After Conviction of Boy, Prosecutor Switches Sides: " It was not simply a change of heart. As a South Florida prosecutor, Marc Shiner had always considered himself liberal and right thinking, he said. Just a man doing his job. But then he won a murder case against Nathaniel Brazill, who shot his favorite teacher when he was 13. That is when Mr. Shiner decided he had had enough. Now he is preparing to handle a case in which a 16-year-old girl stands accused of murdering her newborn daughter. This time, however, Mr. Shiner is on the other side of the courtroom. He is a defense lawyer now, representing the girl, and making the broader point that children should not be tried as adults"
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Thursday, November 14, 2002
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You Are a Suspect: Wm Safire - "If the Homeland Security Act is not amended before passage, here is what will happen to you: Every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine subscription you buy and medical prescription you fill, every Web site you visit and e-mail you send or receive, every academic grade you receive, every bank deposit you make, every trip you book and every event you attend -- all these transactions and communications will go into what the Defense Department describes as "a virtual, centralized grand database." To this computerized dossier on your private life from commercial sources, add every piece of information that government has about you... This is not some far-out Orwellian scenario. It is what will happen to your personal freedom in the next few weeks if John Poindexter gets the unprecedented power he seeks. "
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Update on 'Arming America' - The Nation: "Michael Bellesiles, the historian accused of research falsification in his book Arming America, a study of gun culture, announced on October 25 that he was resigning from Emory University, citing a "hostile environment" [see Jon Wiener, "Fire at Will," November 4]. His resignation, effective at the end of the year, came the very afternoon that Emory released the report of a three-person external board that had been asked to review some of the charges.... if Bellesiles is right in his reply, then those distinguished historians are guilty of some of the same sins they accuse him of committing: suppressing inconvenient evidence, spinning the data their way, refusing to follow leads that didn't serve their thesis. "
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Wednesday, November 13, 2002
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The Chronicle: 8/2/2002: Copyright as Cudgel: "When Congress brought copyright law into the digital era, in 1998, some in academe were initially heartened by what they saw as compromises that, they hoped, would protect fair use for digital materials. Unfortunately, they were wrong. Recent actions by Congress and the federal courts -- and many more all-too-common acts of cowardice by publishers, colleges, developers of search engines, and other concerned parties -- have demonstrated that fair use, while not quite dead, is dying. And everyone who reads, writes, sings, does research, or teaches should be up in arms. The real question is why so few people are complaining."
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Ashcroft's Narco-Terror War: "Announcing the arrest last Wednesday of suspects in two drugs-for-weapons deals, Attorney General John Ashcroft declared, "The war on terrorism has been joined with the war on illegal drug use." One could almost hear him lick his lips, savoring the thought of it....
The drug war and the war on terrorism do resemble each other in important ways, although not those that Ashcroft emphasizes. Both efforts are open-ended, or maybe never-ending. Both lend themselves to broad extensions of government power, and thus, if not carefully controlled, both can lead to violations of fundamental rights. But in trying to combat terrorism the government has at least chosen a worthwhile opponent.
The drug war is not just a conspicuously unsuccessful war, it is a misguided one. Reviving it under the guise of fighting terrorism--and possibly making it more war-like in the process--will only make matters worse."
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Inquiries on Gun and Ousters Focus on Health Dept. Official: " Federal officials said today that they were investigating whether the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services had kept a gun in her office without authorization and whether she violated personnel rules by ousting career employees.... Mr. Grassley said Ms. Rehnquist's dismissal, demotion or reassignment of 19 senior executives could "hinder the performance of an office that has a stellar reputation for fighting fraud, waste and abuse in federal health care programs." The federal government spends more than $400 billion a year on the largest of those programs, Medicare and Medicaid, which provide health insurance for 70 million people who are elderly, disabled or poor.... Ms. Rehnquist, a former assistant United States attorney who is the daughter of Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, refused to discuss the accusations. "
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Tuesday, November 12, 2002
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Pentagon Plans a Computer System That Would Peek at Personal Data of Americans: "The Pentagon is constructing a computer system that could create a vast electronic dragnet, searching for personal information as part of the hunt for terrorists around the globe -- including the United States. As the director of the effort, Vice Adm. John M. Poindexter, has described the system in Pentagon documents and in speeches, it will provide intelligence analysts and law enforcement officials with instant access to information from Internet mail and calling records to credit card and banking transactions and travel documents, without a search warrant. Advertisement Historically, military and intelligence agencies have not been permitted to spy on Americans without extraordinary legal authorization. But Admiral Poindexter, the former national security adviser in the Reagan administration, has argued that the government needs broad new powers to process, store and mine billions of minute details of electronic life in the United States.... Before taking the position at the Pentagon, Admiral Poindexter, who was convicted in 1990 for his role in the Iran-contra affair, had worked as a contractor on one of the projects he now controls. Admiral Poindexter's conviction was reversed in 1991 by a federal appeals court because he had been granted immunity for his testimony before Congress about the case."
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Monday, November 11, 2002
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British Judges Criticize U.S. on the Prisoners Held at Guantánamo: "A panel of three senior British judges used extraordinary language in a ruling this week to criticize the United States' detention of prisoners from Afghanistan at Camp X-ray in Guantánamo Bay in Cuba. The three judges, ruling in a case involving a British subject held at Guantánamo, said detention of prisoners at the United States naval base there appeared to be a violation of both international law and the concept of habeas corpus developed centuries ago in England. Although the judges said the holding of prisoners at Guantánamo with no recourse to a court created an unacceptable "legal black hole," they acknowledged that they could do little about it. But it appeared evident that the judges were intent on sending a message to an appeals court in the United States that is considering the same issue."
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The Murder of Emmett Louis Till, Revisited: "A new documentary by 31-year-old Keith Beauchamp could well cause this case to be reopened. There will be a private screening of the film, "The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till," on Nov. 16 at the New York University Cantor Film Center"
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Monday, September 09, 2002
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In Guantánamo: By Joseph Lelyveld. "On February 7 the President decreed that Taliban captives would be treated humanely "in accordance with the Geneva convention." He had the grace not to say that it was better than they and their al-Qaeda brethren deserved and that we are prepared to hold the lot of them at Guantanamo until the distant day, if it ever comes, when Islamic terrorist networks have been universally uprooted; but that, basically, appears to be the administration's position."
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Group 4 security firm pulls guards out of West Bank "The security conglomerate Group 4 Falck, which pioneered the private contracting of detention facilities and prisons in Britain, has decided to withdraw the private guards employed by one of its offshoots at Israeli settlements in the West Bank after the Guardian raised questions about their behaviour and the legality of their role. The company, the world's second biggest security firm, took a controlling stake earlier this year in an Israeli security company, Hashmira, which employs at least 100 armed guards at settlements. A Guardian investigation in the settlement of Kedumim showed that Hashmira's guards work closely with Israel's military and security apparatus. In the name of "security" the guards, many of whom are settlers, routinely prevent Palestinian villagers from cultivating their own fields, travelling to schools, hospitals and shops in nearby towns, and receiving emergency medical assistance. "
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'In America's Court': A Lawyer Reflects on Injustice: "Geoghegan portrays American law as a creature of politics. From 1910 to 1940, it was shaped by the right, then by the left and most recently by the right again. ''I finally realized the Constitution, American law, is not enough,'' he declares. His solution is that American courts should be governed by the principles of human rights exemplified in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights.... He wants a new Constitution that on the model of the United Nations declaration would include ''the right to health care, the right to be educated, the right to a good job.'' "
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Friday, August 23, 2002
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Secret Court Rebuffs Ashcroft: "The secretive federal court that approves spying on terror suspects in the United States has refused to give the Justice Department broad new powers, saying the government had misused the law and misled the court dozens of times, according to an extraordinary legal ruling released yesterday."
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Deadly Decisions : Presented by American RadioWorks: "While the states have adopted new instructions to guide jurors in making life or death decisions, many jurors appear to be just as confused about the law as they were when the high court put the death penalty on hold. "
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Friday, July 26, 2002
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A Professor's Activism Leads Investigators to Look Into Possible Terrorism Links: "to law enforcement officials who have investigated him for seven years, Mr. Al-Arian was a major fund-raiser for a terrorist group that funneled money to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Based in Damascus, Syria, and supported by Iran, the group has conducted suicide attacks in which scores of Israelis, and at least one American, have been killed or wounded. According to previously undisclosed Justice Department documents, federal investigators have been trying since 1995 to trace at least $650,000 that Mr. Al-Arian and several associates helped send overseas in the late 1980's and 1990's. They suspect, but have not been able to prove, that some of the money went to the Islamic Jihad, and they have asked Israel to help track the funds. "
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Revised View of 2nd Amendment Is Cited as Defense in Gun Cases: "Scores of criminal defendants around the nation have asked federal courts to dismiss gun charges against them based on the Justice Department's recently revised position on the scope of the Second Amendment. The new position, that the Constitution broadly protects the rights of individuals to own guns, replaced the view, endorsed by the great majority of courts, that the amendment protects a collective right of the states to maintain militias. While the challenges have been rejected by trial court judges, based largely on appeals court precedent, supporters and opponents of broad antigun laws say the arguments have forced the Justice Department to take contradictory stances. "
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Thursday, July 25, 2002
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Ashcroft's Terrorism Policies Dismay Some Conservatives: "Many religious conservatives who were most instrumental in pressing President Bush to appoint John Ashcroft as attorney general now say they have become deeply troubled by his actions as the leading public figure in the law enforcement drive against terrorism."
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Wednesday, July 24, 2002
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U.S. to Block U.N. Torture Vote: "Concerned about the possibility of independent visits to U.S. civilian and military prisons, the United States sought Wednesday to block a vote on a U.N. plan meant to enforce a convention on torture. The United States wants negotiations on the plan reopened, a move human rights groups say could kill the proposal, which they believe is essential to ending torture around the world."
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Sunday, July 21, 2002
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Citizen Snoops Wanted: "Early last week, the program's Web site indicated that Operation TIPS, which stands for Terrorism Information and Prevention System, would begin in selected American cities next month. It would be fundamentally different from tip systems already set up in many cities, since it would take advantage of the access these workers have to people's lives, rather than simply solicit tips from anyone with something to report. Not surprisingly, the American Civil Liberties Union fumed that the plan amounted to the creation of an unlicensed security force conducting warrantless searches of people's homes."
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Wider Military Role in U.S. Is Urged: "Bush administration has directed lawyers in the Departments of Justice and Defense to review the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 and any other laws that sharply restrict the military's ability to participate in domestic law enforcement. Any changes would be subject to Congressional approval."
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Friday, July 12, 2002
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The Anthrax Files: "When someone expert in bio-warfare mailed anthrax last fall, it may not have been the first time he had struck. So while the F.B.I. has been unbelievably lethargic in its investigation so far, any year now it will re-examine the package that arrived on April 24, 1997, at the B'nai B'rith headquarters in Washington D.C."
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Thursday, July 11, 2002
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Monday, July 08, 2002
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Friday, July 05, 2002
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'Combatants' Lack Rights, U.S. Argues: "Prisoners [even citizens] declared enemy combatants do not have the right to a lawyer and the American judiciary cannot second-guess the military's classification of such detainees, the Justice Department argued yesterday in a brief to an appeals court."
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Wednesday, July 03, 2002
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WW3 Lynne Stewart Interview: "Veteran Radical Attorney and War on Terrorism Defendant speaks about her case, Islamic fundamentalism and the struggle for Constitutional rights after 9-11 "
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Friday, June 14, 2002
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Activists Win Award in False Arrests: "Radical environmentalist Darryl Cherney said past targets of the FBI -- from the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to Hollywood radicals -- share in a court victory by him and another Earth First! activist over law enforcement officials. Twelve years after Cherney and Judi Bari were arrested in the bombing of their own car, they were awarded $4.4 million Tuesday in a federal suit claiming they were framed by Oakland police and FBI agents. After 17 days of deliberations, jurors awarded the money to Cherney and the estate of Bari, who died of cancer in 1997."
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Saturday, June 08, 2002
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Dubya calls for US Gestapo - The Register "US President George Dubya Bush took to the airwaves last night in an appeal for the establishment of a new cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security, to keep us all safe and snug in our beds... The real purpose, clearly, is data acquisition, mining and manipulation on a gargantuan scale."
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Sunday, June 02, 2002
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Prison Boom Has Not Deterred Crime, Report Suggests: "Despite the prison-construction boom of recent years, the rate at which inmates released from prison committed new crimes actually rose from 1983 to 1994, suggesting that the increased number of criminals put behind bars has not been an effective deterrent to crime, according to a Justice Department study released today. "
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Thursday, May 30, 2002
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Judge Rejects U.S. Policy of Secret Hearings: "The decision was the third time that the Justice Department had failed to convince a court that national security would be harmed by the disclosure of information about the 1,200 Muslim immigrants arrested in the weeks after the terrorist attacks. The Justice Department was expected to ask for an immediate stayfrom the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in Philadelphia. The New Jersey lawsuit was filed by the American Civil Liberties Union; The New Jersey Law Journal; and the North Jersey Media Group, which owns The Herald News of West Paterson and other papers. They argued that the government's blanket closing of deportation hearings amounted to a violation of the detainees' due process rights and the public's right to monitor the actions of government officials."
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Government Will Ease Limits on Domestic Spying by F.B.I.: "As part of a sweeping effort to transform the F.B.I. into a domestic terrorism prevention agency, Attorney General John Ashcroft has decided to relax restrictions on the bureau's ability to conduct domestic spying in counterterrorism operations, senior government officials said today. Mr. Ashcroft and Robert S. Mueller III, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, plan to announce on Thursday a broad loosening of the guidelines that restrict the surveillance of religious and political organizations, the officials said. The guidelines were adopted after disclosures of domestic F.B.I. spying under the old Cointelpro program, and for 25 years they have been among the most fundamental limits on the bureau's conduct."
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Wednesday, May 29, 2002
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In Similar Cases, One Inmate Is Executed, One Wins Stay: "Napoleon Beazley, 26, of Texas, and Christopher Simmons, 26, of Missouri, both committed murder when they were 17. They filed identical claims before federal and state courts, arguing that executing an inmate who was younger than 18 at the time of his crime violates the Eighth Amendment's provision against cruel and unusual punishment. Today the Missouri Supreme Court granted Mr. Simmons, who was to be executed next week, a stay pending the outcome of a related United States Supreme Court case that will be decided by the end of June. Mr. Beazley was put to death by lethal injection in Huntsville shortly after 6 p.m. after the United States Supreme Court refused to hear his petition and the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals denied his motion for a stay, and after the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles voted 10 to 7 against clemency. "
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Justices Expand States' Immunity in Federalism Case: "In ruling that the [state-owned] port was constitutionally immune from having to defend itself before the [Federal Maritime] commission, the court significantly enlarged the scope of the 11th Amendment, which grants immunity to states from private lawsuits. The Supreme Court had never before applied the 11th Amendment, which limits "the judicial power of the United States," beyond the courtroom to immunize states from the actions of executive branch agencies. As have other federalism rulings during the last seven years, this decision revealed a deep disagreement among the justices about the nature and source of governmental authority in the United States."
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Monday, May 27, 2002
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Man Who Killed at 17 Is Scheduled to Die: "Napoleon Beazley, 26, whose case has prompted debate over the execution of those who commit murder before the age of 18, is scheduled to die by lethal injection tomorrow night in Texas. The Supreme Court on Friday denied Mr. Beazley's request for a stay and review of his case. His lawyers had argued that executing Mr. Beazley, who was 17 when he killed John Luttig, 63, in a botched carjacking, would violate the Eighth Amendment's provision against cruel and unusual punishment. The lawyers also argued that executing an inmate who was under 18 at the time of his crime would violate international treaties on civil and political rights."
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Tuesday, May 21, 2002
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Right to Counsel Expanded by a Divided Supreme Court: "The Supreme Court expanded the right to counsel today, ruling 5 to 4 that a state may not impose even a suspended sentence â014 in which eventual imprisonment may be only a remote possibility â014 on an indigent defendant for whom it has not appointed a lawyer." - O'Connor swings "left", expanding Gideon.
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Thursday, May 09, 2002
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Death Penalty Moratorium in Maryland: "Gov. Parris Glendening imposed a moratorium Thursday on executions in Maryland until the state completes a study of whether there is racial bias in the use of the death penalty. Glendening issued a stay on the execution of Wesley Eugene Baker, who was scheduled to die by injection sometime next week, and said he would stay any other executions that come before him. Only one other state that has capital punishment, Illinois, has imposed a similar moratorium. Baker is one of 13 men - nine of them black - awaiting execution in Maryland."
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Wednesday, May 08, 2002
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U.S., in a Shift, Tells Justices Citizens Have a Right to Guns: "The position, expressed in a footnote in each of two briefs filed by Solicitor General Theodore B. Olson, incorporated the view that Attorney General John Ashcroft expressed a year ago in a letter to the National Rifle Association. Mr. Ashcroft said that in contrast to the view that the amendment protected only a collective right of the states to organize and maintain militias, he "unequivocally" believed that "the text and the original intent of the Second Amendment clearly protect the right of individuals to keep and bear firearms.""
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Truetype embedding-enabler : DMCA threats: "The distribution of this program, whether for free or for a fee, infringes my client's federal copyrights in their TrueType programs. This infringement carries the strong possibility of very substantial statutory damages, the imposition of a federal injunction, and an award of attorneys' fees. Demand is made upon to you to immediately remove this program from your website and to contact me so that we can discuss remaining issues between you and my clients. "
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Monday, May 06, 2002
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U.S. Says It Will Not Support International Criminal Court: "Bush administration officials said today that the new International Criminal Court should not expect any cooperation from the United States and its prosecutors will not be given any information from the United States to help them bring cases against any individuals."
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New Details Emerge From the Einstein Files: "The Einstein File: J. Edgar Hoover's Secret War Against the World's Most Famous Scientist," by Fred Jerome, who sued the government with the help of the Public Citizen Litigation Group to obtain a less censored version of the file.... The new material spells out how the bureau spied on Einstein and his associates and identifies some of the informants who said he was a spy."
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Saturday, May 04, 2002
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The Conservative Cabal That's Transforming American Law "With 25,000 members plus scores of close affiliates nationwide--including Supreme Court justices Thomas and Antonin Scalia, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch, and University of Chicago brainboxes Richard Epstein and Frank Easterbrook (also a federal appellate judge)--the Federalist Society is quite simply the best-organized, best-funded, and most effective legal network operating in this country. Its rank-and-file includes conservative lawyers, law students, law professors, bureaucrats, activists, and judges. They meet at law schools and function rooms across the country to discuss and debate the finer points of legal theory and substance on panels that often include liberals--providing friction, stimulus, and the illusion of balance. What gets less attention, however, is that the Society is accomplishing in the courts what Republicans can't achieve politically. There is nothing like the Federalist Society on the left."
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Friday, May 03, 2002
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Ricky Johnson to be executed today at 6 pm: "Despite a natiowide outcry against this travesty of justice, the State of Carolina plans to move forward with the ultimate punishment on a man that may well be innocent and who is definitely not a danger to those around him. "
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Wednesday, May 01, 2002
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When Letter of the Law Does Not Spell 'Clarity': law of war is at once an oxymoron and highly developed. Various conventions and protocols lay out numerous rules for acceptable conduct in military operations. But applying them in densely populated towns like those on the West Bank can be difficult. Even if a neutral inquiry found that one side or the other had violated the law, the enforcement tools are few. Neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians are likely to subject themselves to an international court.
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Lindh Lawyers and Prosecutors Spar Over Secret Witness: "whether a secret government witness should be required to testify for the defense. The question boils down to whether the government can prevent someone from testifying on grounds of national security, even if that denies the defendant his right to a fair trial. "
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Tuesday, April 30, 2002
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Club Happiness Case Is First Test of [New York]'s Death Penalty: "the first death penalty case to reach the state's Court of Appeals since the new law took effect. And it is providing the judges with scores of arguments. Though some are narrow and technical, there are also sweeping challenges arguing that the death penalty is cruel and unusual punishment under the New York Constitution and that the state's lethal-injection method of execution is inhumane."
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Vote in House Strongly Backs an End to I.N.S.: "The House voted overwhelmingly today to abolish the Immigration and Naturalization Service and divide its functions between two new bureaus, one for immigration services like the handling of citizenship applications, the other for enforcement. The lopsided vote, 405 to 9, reflected lawmakers' frustration over the agency's missteps before and after Sept. 11."
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Fatal Flaws in the Justice System: " the whole debate about the death penalty can sometimes seem like a distraction. The reality is that for every person on death row, there are many more who will die before completing their sentences. They will die alone in their cells or in the prison yard. They will die from jailhouse violence or natural causes hastened by stressful conditions and substandard medical care. The main causes of these virtual death sentences are three-strikes laws and mandatory minimum sentencing."
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Judge Throws Out Case Against Jordanian Student: "The government's jailing of material witnesses for a grand jury investigation of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks is unconstitutional, a federal judge ruled Tuesday in throwing out a perjury case against a Jordanian college student. The ruling, if upheld, could have far-reaching implications for the government's crackdown on terrorism. Dozens of people have been jailed as material witnesses since the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. In a rebuke of Attorney General John Ashcroft, U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin said: ``Relying on the material-witness statute to detain people who are presumed innocent under our Constitution in order to prevent potential crimes is an illegitimate use of the statute.'' Scheindlin threw out perjury charges against Osama Awadallah, 21, a Grossmont College student in El Cajon, Calif., who was accused of lying about his associations with two of the Sept. 11 hijackers."
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Justices Hear Arguments on Searches of Bus Riders: "police searches of long-distance bus passengers and their luggage in an effort to find drugs and weapons. Because such searches take place without a warrant and usually without any reason to suspect a particular passenger of wrongdoing, the police must obtain the passengers' consent..... whether their acquiescence to the search amounted to consent under circumstances that a federal appeals court found, in overturning their convictions, to be inherently coercive."
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Civil Rights Group to Sue Over U.S. Handling of Muslim Men: "A class-action lawsuit prepared by the group, the Center for Constitutional Rights, accused the government of arbitrarily holding Muslim detainees in prison for months on minor immigration violations, with no hearings to determine whether the government had probable cause to hold them."
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Monday, April 29, 2002
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'Virtual' Child Pornography Ban Overturned: "Affirming that free speech principles apply with full force in the computer age, the Supreme Court today struck down provisions of a federal law that made it a crime to create, distribute or possess ``virtual'' child pornography that used computer images of young adults rather than actual children. The law, the Child Pornography Prevention Act of 1996, ``prohibits speech that records no crime and creates no victims by its production,'' "
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Justices Review Judges' Role in Deciding Death Penalty: "Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg framed the issue: "Tell me how one would explain to a citizen that you can't get five years added to a sentence without a jury making the critical finding, but you can be sentenced to death" when the crucial factual finding is made by the judge."
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Justices Plan to Re-examine Two Legal Weapons in Protests: " The Supreme Court agreed today to use a long-running lawsuit against disruptive anti-abortion groups to decide whether the federal laws against racketeering and extortion can be invoked to stop and to punish political protests that use tactics like blockades and sit-ins."
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Wednesday, April 24, 2002
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Justices Weaken Movement Backing Property Rights: "The Supreme Court ruled today that a government-imposed moratorium on property development, even one that lasts for years, does not automatically amount to a "taking" of private property for which taxpayers must compensate the landowners. The 6-to-3 decision was a sharp setback for the property rights movement, which has scored many recent successes in the Supreme Court. The ruling came in a case that sought millions of dollars in compensation for a prolonged restriction on development along the shores of Lake Tahoe."
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Wednesday, April 17, 2002
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Ha'aretz - Interview with two American Jews back from the West Bank " "Soldiers are passing by, shooting randomly into the entrance of the camp," answers Quester, 39, a teacher of children with special needs, who had just arrived in East Jerusalem from Al-Azzeh, where he had lived for one week. Lipton, a 43-year-old researcher in the field of public health, nodded. He had just spent 10 days in another Palestinian refugee camp near Bethlehem. When the two men were asked if camp residents knew they were Jews, Lipton says: "I would tell people after I knew them a little, `I'm a Jew.' They would be surprised, but I never felt a threat."
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Sunday, April 07, 2002
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Wednesday, March 27, 2002
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FBI to divulge more Carnivore details: "Privacy advocates have won another round in their fight to gain access to more information about the FBI's Carnivore e-mail surveillance system. "
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For Chilean Coup, Kissinger Is Numbered Among the Hunted: "victims of the Chilean military's 17-year dictatorship are now pressing legal actions in both Chilean and American courts against Henry A. Kissinger and other Nixon administration officials who supported plots to overthrow Salvador Allende Gossens, the Socialist president, in the early 1970's." Wouldn't it be simpler to have Kissinger added to the international terrorist registry?
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Tuesday, March 26, 2002
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Supreme Court Approves Public Housing Drug Ban: "The Supreme Court today upheld public housing agencies' "zero tolerance" policy on illegal drug use, ruling that a tenant can be evicted if a family member or guest uses drugs -- even if the tenant did not know about it. The court ruled, 8 to 0, that the housing authority in Oakland, Calif., was within its rights in moving to evict four longtime tenants whose relatives had used drugs, even if the tenants themselves could be called "innocent.""
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We failed Andrea Yates: Danielle Steel "The verdict in the case against Andrea Yates, and the outrage of the prosecutors (and apparently the jury), is beyond shocking. Every description of Yates' behavior, long before her devastating crime, shouts of deeply psychotic behavior. "
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World War 3 Report: "CIA LINK TO ANTHRAX ATTACKS? A BBC Newsnight investigation has raised the possibility that the fall anthrax attacks were part of a secret CIA project to simulate bio-terror attacks which went "madly out of control." "
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Village Voice - Ridgeway Columbine shootings: "FBI diagrams suggest that the cops themselves were shooting wildly into the school while the students were waiting inside to be rescued.... one student appears to have been shot through the chest while standing outside the school. At least one cop told his parents the boy was killed by police fire. "
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Friday, March 22, 2002
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Out of Jail and Out of Food: "1996 welfare law that denies food stamps and welfare ... for life to anyone convicted of a drug felony. It is doubtful that the members of Congress realized a large part of this burden would fall on struggling women and their young children. A study by the Sentencing Project... estimates that since the ban went into effect in 1996, 92,000 women have been convicted of drug offenses in the states enforcing it. Of these, about two-thirds are mothers, with 135,000 children among them. Obviously, the only people hurt by this denial of benefits are the poor, which usually means a minor offender who is an addict and out of jail trying to make it."
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In Los Angeles, a Traveler's Best Friend: "With little fanfare, bomb-sniffing dogs have become among the most effective, and important, security tools at airports, federal and local airport officials say. They work quickly and have an almost perfect record in separating real explosives from merely suspicious items ... dogs offer reassurance and are far less intimidating than some of the new measures."
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Justice Dept. Wants to Query More Foreigners: "young, mostly Muslim foreign men visiting the United States, saying it would try to track down and speak to an additional 3,000 of them for information about terrorism. The announcement was immediately criticized by civil liberties and Arab-American groups, and it came as the department disclosed that it had been able to locate and interview fewer than half of some 4,800 young men with whom it wanted to speak in the first round of interviews, which began last November."
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Rules Set on Afghan War Prosecutions: "The rules now require a unanimous verdict for the death penalty, let the press cover most proceedings and provide for defendants to have military lawyers at government expense and also hire their own civilian lawyers at their own expense. The rules also say suspects will be presumed not guilty and can see the evidence against them. They require the highest standard of proof, saying that a tribunal can find someone guilty only beyond a reasonable doubt. Officials said the rules on introducing evidence were looser than those in civilian courts, with hearsay allowed, as well as any evidence that would be convincing to a "reasonable person." The rules do not provide a process for independent appeals, a procedure that critics also sought, keeping control of the tribunals in the military chain of command."
Military Tribunals Modified - Safire - "The Pentagon has partly set right the deeply flawed executive order setting up military tribunals, but several problems remain."
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U.S. Behind Secret Transfer of Terror Suspects: "Since Sept. 11, the U.S. government has secretly transported dozens of people suspected of links to terrorists to countries other than the United States, bypassing extradition procedures and legal formalities, according to Western diplomats and intelligence sources. The suspects have been taken to countries, including Egypt and Jordan, whose intelligence services have close ties to the CIA and where they can be subjected to interrogation tactics -- including torture and threats to families -- that are illegal in the United States... In some cases, U.S. intelligence agents remain closely involved in the interrogation"
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Tuesday, March 19, 2002
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Rebel's widow says U.S. officials lied: "Officials of President Bill Clinton's administration knew a Guatemalan guerrilla was being tortured for information the United States found useful, yet lied when his American wife inquired about his fate, the woman argued before the Supreme Court on Monday. The rebel's widow, Jennifer Harbury, says her constitutional right of access to the courts was violated "
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Deciding Who Will Live: Bob Herbert oped "The death penalty can never be administered consistently with any reasonable degree of fairness and equity. Too many prejudices and preconceived notions are held by the inherently fallible humans who operate the system. And there are too many unknowns when complex issues of culpability arise: Who's insane, or not insane? Who's mentally retarded? Who's lying and who's not? Was it self-defense? Was it an accident?"
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Sunday, March 17, 2002
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Mystery swirls around just how deeply angry preacher influenced Andrea Yates: " told Andrea Yates that she was evil, that her children were damned, and that only death could save her. In dozens of letters and personal meetings, he built a foundation of delusions in her mind. Although a jury has decided that Yates should spend life in prison for drowning her five children in the bathtub, little attention is being paid to preacher Michael Peter Woroniecki. Nonetheless, he had a profound influence on her beliefs, words and actions."
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Saturday, March 16, 2002
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Thursday, March 14, 2002
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Judge Who Ruled Out Matching Fingerprints Changes His Mind: "the judge's ruling addressed only F.B.I. print examiners. Most fingerprint experts work for state and local police agencies, which have differing standards. Rob Epstein, the federal public defender whose challenge of fingerprinting in an earlier case formed the basis of the present challenge, said he was puzzled by the judge's about-face. The judge wrote in his opinion that while the proficiency tests that the F.B.I. submitted as evidence of its examiners' accuracy were so easy as to be of little value, no F.B.I. print identification had ever been proved wrong. Mr. Epstein said: "It's not the burden of the defense to show that the error rate is unacceptably high. It's the government's to show that the rate is acceptably low.""
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Panel Urges Rights for Afghan Captives: "A human rights panel that is part of the Organization of American States ruled today that hundreds of Qaeda and Taliban detainees now being held in Cuba should be brought before a formal tribunal to determine their legal status. ... The United States has never considered the panel's rulings to be legally binding, and it has repeatedly brushed aside the commission's rulings on other issues. "
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US is "Threat to the Peace", by Francis Boyle
Writing in the March 10, 2002 edition of the Los Angeles Times, defense analyst William Arkin revealed the leaked contents of the Bush Jr. administration's Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) that it had just transmitted to Congress on January 8. The Bush Jr. administration has ordered the Pentagon to draw up war plans for the first-use of nuclear weapons against seven states: the so-called "axis of evil" -Iran, Iraq, and North Korea; Libya and Syria; Russia and China, which are nuclear armed. This component of the Bush Jr. NPR incorporates the Clinton administration's 1997 nuclear war-fighting plans against so-called "rogue states" set forth in Presidential Decision Directive 60. These warmed-over nuclear war plans targeting these five non-nuclear states expressly violate the so-called "negative security assurances" given by the United States as an express condition for the renewal and indefinite extension of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) by all of its non-nuclear weapons states parties in 1995. Yet this new NPR has delivered yet another serious blow to the integrity of the entire NPT Regime.
Equally reprehensible from a legal perspective were the NPR's call for the Pentagon to draft nuclear war-fighting plans for first nuclear strikes (1) against alleged nuclear/chemical/biological "materials" or "facilities"; (2) "against targets able to withstand non-nuclear attack"; and (3) "in the event of surprising military developments," whatever that means. According to the NPR, the Pentagon must also draw up nuclear war-fighting plans to intervene with nuclear weapons in wars (1) between China and Taiwan; (2) between Israel and the Arab states; (3) between Israel and Iraq; and (4) between North Korea and South Korea. It is obvious upon whose side the United States will actually plan to intervene with the first-use nuclear weapons. Quite ominously, today the Bush Jr. administration accelerates its plans for launching an apocalyptic military aggression against Iraq, deliberately raising the spectre of a U.S. first-strike nuclear attack.
The Bush Jr. administration is making it crystal clear to all its chosen adversaries around the world that it is fully prepared to cross the threshold of actually using nuclear weapons that has prevailed since the U.S. criminal bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Yet more proof of the fact that the United States government has abandoned "deterrence" for "compellance" in order to rule the future world of the Third Millenium. The Bush Jr. administration has obviously become a "threat to the peace" within the meaning of U.N. Charter article 39. It must be countermanded by the U.N. Security Council acting under Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter. In the event of a U.S veto of such "enforcement action" by the Security Council, then the U.N. General Assembly must deal with the Bush Jr. administration by invoking its Uniting for Peace Resolution of 1950.
There very well could be some itty-bitty "rogue states" lurking out there somewhere in the Third World. But today the United States government has become the sole "rogue elephant" of international law and politics. For the good of all humanity America must be restrained. Time is of the essence!
Francis A. Boyle
Law Building, 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave., Champaign, IL 61820 USA
fboyle@law.uiuc.edu
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Wednesday, March 13, 2002
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John Ashcroft's Palmer Raids: Clancy Sigal oped - "The Palmer raids, though long ago, cut deep and left scars on individuals caught up in them and on America's views of how government could be permitted to deal with anyone dissident and different. What scars is our government inflicting today?"
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Unjust Rules for Insanity: "Andrea Yates attempted suicide twice in 1999 and reported suicidal impulses again not long before the day last June when she drowned her children in a bathtub. She was hospitalized several times for mental illness; the last time her psychiatrist had threatened to force her commitment in court. Both the prosecution and the defense in her murder trial in Texas agree that she is severely mentally ill. Yet under Texas law all this was insufficient to produce a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity, and yesterday Andrea Yates was found guilty of capital murder."
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6 Months Late, I.N.S. Notifies Flight School of Hijackers' Visas: " Six months after Mohamed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi crashed hijacked airliners into the World Trade Center, the Immigration and Naturalization Service sent out a routine notice this week telling a flight school that the two men had been approved for student visas to study there. "
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Tuesday, March 12, 2002
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Sunday, March 10, 2002
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Advice and Dissent: "the Senate has a duty to reject anyone whose views are outside the modern mainstream. Judgeships are lifetime appointments. Every nominee should be devoted to freedom of speech and the guarantees in the Bill of Rights, sensitive to the civil rights of women and minorities, and respectful of Congress's constitutional power to safeguard those rights and the environment. If the senators adhere honestly to those criteria, it is likely that they will find a number of the Bush administration's current crop of nominees unacceptable. Senators must then find the courage and the energy to reject the nominations. If anyone becomes defensive about the president's inability to get his judicial picks confirmed, it should be Mr. Bush. "
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Saturday, March 09, 2002
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Will Fingerprinting Stand Up in Court?: "Judge Pollak, who is a former dean of the law schools at Yale and the University of Pennsylvania, also noted "alarmingly high" error rates when fingerprint examiners took proficiency tests; in 1995 only 44 percent of 156 law enforcement examiners could correctly identify all five prints in the test, and in a 1998 study the number improved to only 58 percent. In the coming murder trial, Judge Pollak ruled, fingerprint experts will not be allowed to express an opinion about whether fingerprints match, but will only be allowed to testify as to the points they see as similar. As prosecutors quickly recognized, the judge's ruling calls into question the overall acceptance of fingerprint evidence in our courts."
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Friday, March 08, 2002
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Colin Powell's List : "The list in question, or rather the lists, concern groups that the government labels foreign terrorist organizations, or FTOs, along with funders, supporters and business entities that aid them. ... Taken together, the lists have emerged as a handy tool to suppress dissent, dissuade Americans from backing insurrectionary movements overseas, and deport immigrants tied to the groups. "
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Thursday, March 07, 2002
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A Winning Strategy: Bob Herbert - NY murder rate plummets - "The recipe for success in New York has been more cops, smarter policing, fewer guns, a drastic decline in the use of crack and better behavior by young people"
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Tuesday, March 05, 2002
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Experts Dispute Bush Aide's Criticism of War Crimes Panels: "Secretary General Kofi Annan and international law experts rose to a strong defense of United Nations war crimes tribunals for the Balkans and Rwanda today in response to a broadside attack on them on Thursday by the Bush administration's ambassador for war crimes."
U.S. Official Backs War-Crime Tribunal "he praised both the Balkans tribunal and the Rwanda tribunal in Arusha, Tanzania. Seated next to Carla Del Ponte, the chief prosecutor for both tribunals, Mr. Prosper seemed at pains to temper the criticism he delivered last week "
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Wednesday, February 27, 2002
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Critics Say New Rule Limits Access to Records: FOIA - "Mr. Ashcroft said the Bush administration's standard would be to support withholding documents as long as there was a "sound legal basis" for doing so. The previous standard, issued in 1993 by Janet Reno, ... was to support withholding documents only if "disclosure would be harmful." The change in wording is a significant blow to government openness, some researchers say."
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Supreme Court Eliminates a Barrier to Job Discrimination Plaintiffs: "ruling unanimously that an initial complaint offering a bare-bones statement of the case is sufficient to withstand an employer's motion to have the case thrown out for lack of specific facts. Although technical, the decision had considerable practical importance, enabling employees to proceed to the discovery stage of the lawsuit and acquire the information like personnel records that is usually necessary to win an employment discrimination case."
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Justices Hear 2 Arguments on the Right to Privacy: "whether a city can constitutionally require Jehovah's Witnesses or other door-to-door advocates for religious or political causes to identify themselves to the authorities and obtain a permit."
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Rumsfeld Lists Outcomes for Detainees Held in Cuba: "they could be sent to federal court in the United States, tried by military courts-martial, returned to their native countries, released if they were perceived to have no intelligence or to pose no law enforcement threat, or held indefinitely. That final option "would be to just keep them, as you would a person you did not want to get back out there and rejoin a Taliban or an Al Qaeda outfit," he said. Ms. Wedgwood said the Geneva Convention allowed for such "detentive prevention" to keep combatants from returning to a fight. But Michael Ratner, a vice president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which has filed an action against the administration over the prisoners, said, "It's unheard of in American law that you can put people in indefinite preventive detention.""
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From Quiet Nomination to Noisy Test for Future: "Senate Judiciary Committee is moving quickly toward a showdown vote on the Pickering nomination after weeks of the kind of intense politicking more typical of a contested Supreme Court nomination."
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Tuesday, February 26, 2002
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Alabamians Go by an Outdated Book: "What holds Alabama back is its own Constitution, at least according to the growing number of people who want to reform it. Ratified in 1901, the Alabama Constitution has 706 amendments -- so far. It is 315,000 words long, nearly 40 times the length of the United States Constitution. Thicker than the phone books of most Alabama cities, it enshrines an inequitable tax structure, a pauperized education system, racism, and centralization of power in the hands of special interests."
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Monday, February 25, 2002
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An Unworthy Judicial Nomination: NYT oped "In his 11 years as a federal trial-court judge, Mr. Pickering has displayed an undue skepticism toward cases involving civil rights. In voting rights cases, he has been troubled by well-settled legal principles like "one person, one vote" and overly concerned about the burdens that Congress, in enacting the Voting Rights Act, placed on local government. In employment discrimination cases, he has been too willing to accept employers' arguments that such suits are based on disgruntlement, rather than valid claims. He has also shown a hostility to awarding attorneys' fees in civil rights cases; without the fees, few such cases could be brought."
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Sunday, February 24, 2002
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Behind-the-Scenes Clash Led Bush to Reverse Himself on Applying Geneva Conventions: " pressure on Mr. Bush to shift his stance came when the Defense Department agreed with warnings from the State Department that ignoring the treaties could put American troops at risk if they were captured. ... Mr. Bush's first decision to reject the conventions, reached in secret on Jan. 18 and never announced, was based on advice from the Justice Department and from the White House counsel, Alberto Gonzales. Their views reflected the administration's basic reluctance to be bound automatically by international treaties. "
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DANGER IN THE ATTIC: "Hundreds ... have died from exposure to asbestos in Zonolite, which can be found in millions of homes across the country. But the Environmental Protection Agency and other federal health and safety groups ... have failed to warn the public about the potential hazard in their homes. Zonolite came from ore in a now-closed 80-year-old vermiculite mine that was owned since 1963 by W.R. Grace & Co. in Libby, Mont, ... where hundreds of miners and their relatives have died of asbestos-related diseases."
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Wednesday, February 20, 2002
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Former Black Panther's Murder Trial Begins: "the former black-power radical once known as H. Rap Brown,... now a 58-year-old Muslim cleric who changed his name to Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, is on trial for murder in the death of one Fulton County deputy and the wounding of another. Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty."
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Judge's Ouster Sought After Antigay Remarks: "... Chief Justice Roy Moore of the Alabama Supreme Court, who wrote in a child- custody opinion issued on Friday that homosexuality was considered "abhorrent, immoral, detestable, a crime against nature and a violation of the laws of nature and of nature's God." Chief Justice Moore, who was championed by the religious right as a lower court judge after he hung a copy of the Ten Commandments on his courtroom wall, argued in a concurring opinion that homosexuality was an "inherent evil against which children must be protected." He said homosexuals were "presumptively unfit to have custody of minor children under the established laws of this state." "
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Your Thumb Here: Newest ID of Choice at Store and on Job: "A growing reliance on fingerprinting has stirred little public opposition in a nation increasingly troubled by terrorism and identity theft, and even more widespread use of it is on the way. ... Wayne Crews, director of technology studies at the conservative Cato Institute in Washington, said the technology can protect privacy, making it harder for a thief to use a stolen charge card encoded with a thumbprint. But Mr. Crews said that big, compulsory databases, like those for driver's licenses and other ID's that store people's finger or facial images, can be abused by officials, identity thieves or others who find a way into them. "
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Justices to Review Copyright Extension: "The Supreme Court agreed today to decide whether the 1998 law that extended the duration of existing copyrights by 20 years was constitutional. The court's action took the world of copyright holders and users by surprise and held the potential of producing the most important copyright case in decades."
Case Could Shift Balance in Debate on Public Domain: ""If those who defend the public interest in copyright can win this battle," said Siva Vaidhyanathan, an assistant professor of information studies at the University of Wisconsin, "that means the Supreme Court will have once again clearly defined that copyright is supposed to work for the public and not a small set of corporations.""
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Suit to Be Filed on Behalf of Three Detainees in Cuba: "Joseph Margulies, a Minneapolis lawyer who is part of the legal team. "There's never been a situation in which the United States has taken the position that -- without any due process at all -- a person can be held indefinitely, without being notified of the charges they face, without access to counsel.""
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Taking the Fifth Too Often: "This longstanding reading of the Fifth Amendment has warped the separation of powers. When Congress needs facts to determine whether existing laws are working and how they might be fixed, it often meets a Fifth Amendment stone wall." [Using Enron to undermine the 5th?]
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The Great Unwatched: Safire oped "our leaders are protecting our capital at the cost of every American's personal freedom. Surveillance is in the saddle."
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Though Not Linked to Terrorism, Many Detainees Cannot Go Home: "Most of the [87] detainees are Arabs or Muslims, and many have spent more than 100 days in jail waiting to leave the country, with no end to detention in sight. ... Officials said available evidence suggested they had played no role in the Sept. 11 attacks or Osama bin Laden's Qaeda network, and the immigration cases against some of them were resolved as long as four months ago."
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Tuesday, February 19, 2002
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"When contemplating college liberals, you really regret once again that John Walker is not getting the death penalty. We need to execute people like John Walker in order to physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can be killed too. Otherwise they will turn out to be outright traitors." -- Ann Coulter, nationally syndicated columnist, in her address at the 2002 Christian Political Action Conference (CPAC) [Quote of the Week, from SojoNet Publisher of Sojourners magazine http://www.Sojo.net Promoting faith, reason, compassion, and justice in days of violence and fear]
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Monday, February 18, 2002
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DNA Testing in Rape Case Frees Prisoner After 15 Years: "In 1986, when he was 26, Mr. Godschalk was convicted of raping two women, who lived in the same housing complex and sent to prison for 10 to 20 years. For seven years the Montgomery County district attorney's office fought his efforts to obtain DNA testing. Last month, two laboratories, one retained by the prosecution, the other by the defense, found the same results: Both rapes were committed by the same man, and that man was not Bruce Godschalk."
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Chief Takes Over New Agency to Thwart Attacks on U.S.: Iran-Contra felon "John M. Poindexter, the retired Navy admiral who was President Ronald Reagan's national security adviser, has returned to the Pentagon to direct a new agency that is developing technologies to give federal officials instant access to vast new surveillance and information- analysis systems."
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Saturday, February 16, 2002
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The New York Review of Books: The Threat to Patriotism: Ronald Dworkin "Since September 11, the government has enacted legislation, adopted policies, and threatened procedures that are not consistent with our established laws and values and would have been unthinkable before. "
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New Scientist - The Great Giveaway: The open source movement, beyond software to encyclopedias, legal briefs, cola, maybe not music and books? "... rival philosophies in software development has spilt over into the rest of the world. What started as a technical debate over the best way to debug computer programs is developing into a political battle over the ownership of knowledge and how it is used, between those who put their faith in the free circulation of ideas and those who prefer to designate them "intellectual property". No one knows what the outcome will be. But in a world of growing opposition to corporate power, restrictive intellectual property rights and globalisation, open source is emerging as a possible alternative, a potentially potent means of fighting back."
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