On Thursday, the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit overturned the murder conviction of an Arizona man who confessed his guilt to the police when he was 17 after being interrogated for twelve hours in the absence of an attorney or parent. Considering the coercive nature of the persistent questioning and the boy's age, the court decided (pdf) the confession was involuntary and should not have been used as evidence. The decision represents a victory for the Constitution as well as his appellate lawyer, Alan Dershowitz.

The principle that the police cannot induce a confession by using coercive tactics to overcome a suspect's free will is particularly significant when the suspect is a juvenile. Children are easily influenced and therefore need greater protection to assure they make a voluntary choice to respond to police questioning. What, then, were the police in Apache County, Arizona thinking when they interrogated an 8 year old about the shooting of his father without arranging the presence of an attorney or adult relative to protect the child's rights?

That blunder may explain a prosecutor's decision to dismiss one of the murder charges he had filed against the 8 year old. A second charge is still pending. [more ...]

You know, I have to say that I have been pretty pleased with the Change President-elect Obama has been delivering so far. Indeed, since dropping the Post Partisan Unity Schtick since the Democratic Convention, I have had virtually nothing to complain about. Except one thing - John Brennan. But I am quite pleased to see that the Left blogs have refound their voice and have universally expressed their concerns about Brennan.

[Let me add good for my friend David Sirota for expressing his unhappiness that he is NOT getting the CHANGE he wants.]

It would be asking too much of me to not note that I was "the moron" who was one of the first to voice concerns about Brennan.

This is an Open Thread.

By Big Tent Democrat, speaking for me only

Hillary says yes to State. Geithner to be tapped for Treasury. Richardson to get Commerce.

Gators rule! Just sayin'

One last thing, I can't help but laugh at the teeth gnashing in some quarters on the fact that Barack Obama is - it turns out, a mainstream Democrat. In March, I wrote:

The trumpeted 2004-05 "reforms" of New York's notoriously harsh Rockefeller drug laws did little to help the state's inmates who had been unfairly sentenced. Anthony Williams, for instance, is 17 years into a 25-to-life sentence. He can't get relief because his offense was too insignificant.

Ironically, he was too small a fish in the ocean of the illicit drug trade to benefit from what have since proven to be anemic legislative charades. Most of the drug offenders who were re-sentenced and released under those incremental "reforms" had convictions for the possession or the sale of large quantities of illegal narcotics. But treacherous, counterintuitive twists in the "reform legislation" actually made it impossible for many low-level offenders to get retroactive relief.

Low level offenders serving potential life sentences are exactly the population that sentencing reform measures should target. It's time for real reform, not window dressing. [more ...]

Here's a half truth:

An irrelevant Republican Party does no one any good.

Assuming "irrelevant" in this context means powerless, here's the other half: An irrelevant Republican Party does no one any harm. It's not as if a "relevant" Republican Party did any good for the nation as a whole.

The Republican Party is viewed favorably by 34 percent of Americans, while the Democratic Party is viewed favorably by 55 percent. It seems that lying about war, mismanaging the economy, letting New Orleans drown, bullying voters with endless threats about terrorist villains, and covering up scandals involving corruption or bad behavior have set the public against the GOP. Should that surprise us?

If Republicans want to become relevant again, the formula is simple. Learn to govern. Learn to behave. Learn to tell the truth. After the GOP does those things, it can consider another attempt to be relevant to the nation's future.

The prosecution of five alleged terrorists charged with conspiring to attack Fort Dix is plodding along. Thirteen days of testimony by paid government informant Mahmoud Omar revealed how the defendants trained for their mission: they played paintball. If you don't have any real guns to train with, paintball seems like a sound alternative. Besides, it's fun.

Omar has been a less than impressive witness, but that's what you'd expect from a criminal who was being paid $1,500 a week to act as an informant (reaping a total of $240,000), not to mention the free pass he received for his own crimes. To keep the paychecks coming, Omar had to give the government a plot, even if he had to make it up as he went along.

Omar's testimony against the five alleged conspirators veered off course when he acknowledged that two of the five didn't know anything about the plan to attack Fort Dix. [more ...]

And here I thought that the atomic bomb had definitively proven e=mc2. Turns out to be not the case, at least for mathematicians/physicists. Now, apparently, it has been proven:

It's taken more than a century, but Einstein's celebrated formula e=mc2 has finally been corroborated, thanks to a heroic computational effort by French, German and Hungarian physicists.

. . . According to the conventional model of particle physics, protons and neutrons comprise smaller particles known as quarks, which in turn are bound by gluons. The odd thing is this: the mass of gluons is zero and the mass of quarks is only five percent. Where, therefore, is the missing 95 percent? The answer, according to the study published in the US journal Science on Thursday, comes from the energy from the movements and interactions of quarks and gluons.

High school readability? Take that, blog analyzer.

In all the talk about Hillary at State, I have been remiss in giving President-Elect Obama real credit for performing an incredibly important task for the Democratic Party - his rebuke of Clinton Derangement Syndrome. Via Digby (whose post is also a must read), Eric Boehlert wrote a great piece on the matter:

Politico (and Andrea Mitchell at NBC) say so:

President-elect Barack Obama is "on track" to name Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) as his secretary of state shortly after Thanksgiving, two senior Obama aides said. Financial disclosure issues have been worked out, aides said. The officials said they expect her to accept.

I think this is right and I think it has been a done deal, subject to the Bill Clinton financial stuff, since last Thursday. Basically, when the President asks you to serve, you can not say no. I think a lot of the drama was folks on the Obama side hoping to torpedo the idea and hoping that Bill Clinton would provide the excuse. Bill Clinton knew this and made sure that it was perfectly clear that he would do whatever was necessary. On a related note, I agree with Josh Marshall on this:

As elected Democrats decide how to invest in the nation's infrastructure, they should remember this: bridges and roads and trains and buildings are all important, but so are drug and alcohol treatment programs, shelter and service providers for the abused and homeless and mentally ill, and reintegration services for newly released inmates.

The nation's infrastructure is more than a collection of the things we build and the surfaces we pave. Governing Democrats need to recognize that people are part of our infrastructure. Bridges are more easily repaired, but restoring productivity to the citizens we now discard will yield a better return on our public investment.

Democrats should also remember that the criminal justice system is part of our infrastructure. They should restore meaning to the phrase "equal justice for all" by helping states improve their woefully underfunded public defender services. [more ...]

Dr. Pepper promised to give a free soda to everyone in America if the Guns & Roses album "Chinese Democracy" (delayed since 1994) saw a 2008 release. It goes on sale Sunday and is streaming on MySpace now.

Beginning Sunday at 12:01 a.m., coupons for a free 20-ounce soda will be available for 24 hours on Dr Pepper's Web site. They'll be honored until Feb. 28.

I'm more of a Pepsi guy, so my coupon is up for grabs.

Update: "The attorney general is conscious, conversant and alert. His vital statistics are strong and he is in good spirits," according to a Justice Department spokesperson.

original post:

This is frightening:

Attorney General Michael Mukasey collapsed during a speech Thursday night and lost consciousness, a Justice Department official said. ... Mukasey was delivering a speech to the Federalist Society at a Washington hotel when "he just started shaking and he collapsed," said Associate Attorney General Kevin O'Connor. "They're very concerned."

Mukasey began slurring his words during the speech before collapsing and losing consciousness. He was taken to George Washington University Hospital.

We send our best wishes to the Attorney General.