Sometimes prosecutors say the worst things about defendants or their counsel during closing argument. Once in a while, an appeals court pays attention.

In a stabbing case that resulted in a second degree murder conviction in Maryland, here's what the prosecutor, then-Assistant State's Attorney Rex Gordon, said in rebuttal after the defense lawyer in closing pointed out discrepancies between the state witness' trial testimony and his prior statement given to police.

"I want you to remember that if any one of you . . . witness a murder and wound up sitting in that witness chair nine or 10 months later, some defense lawyer, somewhere in that trial, would be standing in front of a jury, making the snide and condescending and obnoxious comments about you."

Lynch's objection was overruled, and Gordon continued: "It is just their stock in trade. It is what they do when their client is guilty and there is no defense."

The court's ruling: Gordon's comments attacking defense attorneys as a group were an improper appeal to the prejudices of the jurors. Result: Conviction overturned, new trial ordered.

Is New York City now the safest city in the country?

It is one of the least-told stories in American crime-fighting. New York, the safest big city in the nation, achieved its now-legendary 70-percent drop in homicides even as it locked up fewer and fewer of its citizens during the past decade. The number of prisoners in the city has dropped from 21,449 in 1993 to 14,129 this past week. That runs counter to the national trend, in which prison admissions have jumped 72 percent during that time.

The national trend of lock em' up continues to be disturbing.

Will Leiberman agree? Cuz the McCain Independent Centrist platform seems to call for it:

We must be honest about the war in Iraq. Without additional combat forces we will not win. We must clear and hold insurgent strongholds, provide security for rebuilding local institutions and economies, arrest sectarian violence in Baghdad and disarm Sunni and Shia militias, train the Iraqi army, and embed American personnel in weak and often corrupt Iraqi police units. We need to do all these things if we are to succeed. And we will need more troops to do them.

They will not be easy to find. We should have begun to increase significantly the size of the Army and Marine Corps the day after 9/11. But we did not. So we must turn again to those Americans and their families who have already sacrificed so much in this cause. That is a very hard thing to do. But if we intend to win, then we must.

It is not fair or easy to look a soldier in the eye and tell him he must shoulder a rifle again and risk his life in a third tour in Iraq. As troubling as it is, I can ask a young Marine to go back to Iraq. And he will go, not happily perhaps, but he will go because he and his comrades are the first patriots among us. But I can only ask him if I share his commitment to victory.

Believe it or not, I respect this position more than the Bush fake vctory speeches that we hear now.

Kevin links to Richard Clarke getting to the point:

In The March of Folly, Barbara Tuchman documented repeated instances when leaders persisted in disastrous policies well after they knew that success was no longer an available outcome. They did so because the personal consequences of admitting failure would be very high. So they postponed the disastrous end to their policy adventures, hoping for a deus ex machina or to eventually shift the blame. There is no need to do that now. Everyone already knows who is to blame. It is time to stop the adventure, lower our sights, and focus on America's core interests. And that means withdrawal of major combat units.

Exactly.

Matt Stoller and I are really seeing eye to eye today:

I'm getting quite irritated at the immediate reaction among white male liberal DC kewl kidz (and Maureen Dowd) to discern catty motives on the part of Nancy Pelosi. Digby's noted it before, but it's not stopping. Look at the first two paragraphs in an email that Josh Marshall reprints on Pelosi and the Intelligence Committee from a reader called 'RY'. . . . Left out of the whole nasty and myopic rant is any possibility that Nancy Pelosi might want someone who can chair the Intelligence Committee who can do a good job running the Intelligence Committee. . . . Nonsense aside, the single most important thing Pelosi can do is find a a good Intelligence Chair and make sure he or she has the political capital to fix the mess this country is in. Doing so could require time to find a compromise candidate, or to work with the CBC or Blue Dogs to assuage egos or horse-trade other committee assignments. That's what leaders do. It doesn't always happen fast . . .

And I SUPPORT Harman for Intel Chair. This handwringing from DC Gasbag types is simply idiotic. The Pelosi record will be established by the next two years, not the next two days or the next two weeks. The idiocy is at high levels from the Pundits these days.

I agree with Stoller:

Here's a thought on FL-13 and voting problems. The FL-13 seat will be up to the House of Representatives. This puts both parties in a difficult situation. The Republicans clearly stole the seat and disenfranchised thousands of voters, but at the same time, the Democrats don't want to be seen as partisan in installing their own person through their control of the House. My suggestion would be for Pelosi to cut a deal with the Republicans. The House and Senate will pass, with Republican approval, some hard-core voting reform legislation that mandates all sorts of checks into voting integrity and vote-counting, including same day registration, paper trails, etc. And in return, the Democrats will seat the Republican in FL-13.

I heartily endorse this lemonade formula from Matt.

In light of this, I think it is fair that I take a shot at the very smart Mark Schmitt as well:

It's tempting to make fun of Marshall Wittmann's newest guise, as Lieberman's communications director, as if it were just another twist in one of the oddest careers in Washington. The New York Times has some fun with that theme today. However, it's quite obvious where this is going. John McCain will fail to win the Republican nomination, and he and Lieberman will turn up as a third party presidential ticket. They will have a great shtick: "We were each rejected by the ideological extremists in our parties, therefore we represent the true forgotten center of American politics." The Broders of the world will salivate over the possibility.

Pleeeaaaaaze! Never ever. McCain wants to emulate Teddy Roosevelt by winning the Presidency not by wrecking the GOP nominee's chances. This is simply absurd. Unless it is designed, in the manner of LBJ's musings about his opponents' sexual interests, to make McCain claim to be hard right Republicans by denying these wild stories. In which case, BRILLIANT Mark! Apologies Steve!

There is a new bio added. Less surprising to some than others one imagines. Check it out.

Open Thread.

From the Miami Herald:

The same electronic ballot design flaw implicated in more than 18,300 Sarasota nonvotes might have caused problems for South Florida voters in two well-publicized Cabinet races. Both Broward and Miami-Dade counties recorded more than 34,000 nonvotes in their elections for attorney general and chief financial officer, according to election results from each county's Supervisor of Elections office. The problem was worse in precincts with many older voters. In both counties, the two Cabinet races appeared at the bottom of a voting screen with the higher-profile race for governor and lieutenant governor -- a contest in which seven sets of candidates nearly filled the screen. All races on the page were listed under a general heading.

QED in my estimation. Not software issues is Sarasota - ballot design issues.

Tommy Munford hired Guy Tobias LeGrande to kill Munford's wife. A friend of Munford's knew of the plan and supplied the murder weapon. After the deed was done, prosecutors made a deal with Munford: he could avoid life without parole by testifying against Munford in a death penalty prosecution. Munford's friend who supplied the weapon wasn't even charged.

Munford and his friend are white. LeGrande is black. He's also mentally ill. He insisted on representing himself at trial, and he did so while wearing a Superman T-shirt. Despite his mental illness, North Carolina plans to execute him on December 1.

During the crucial penalty phase of the trial, LeGrande's incoherent ramblings reached a pinnacle when he goaded the all-white jury to "Pull the damn switch and shake that groove thing." The jury sentenced him to death after only 45 minutes of deliberation.

This will be an unpopular post with my Democratic brethren. It is about who is to blame for frustrating the voters' intent in the House race in Florida's 13th Congressional district (Katherine Harris's old seat). While it seems absolutely clear most voters wanted the Democrat Jennings, that votes did not register for her is mostly the fault of Democratic Party officials and the Jennings campaign imo. Today Paul Krugman writes:

Reporting by The Herald-Tribune of Sarasota, which interviewed hundreds of voters who called the paper to report problems at the polls, strongly suggests that the huge apparent undervote was caused by bugs in the ES&S software. About a third of those interviewed by the paper reported that they couldn’t even find the Congressional race on the screen. This could conceivably have been the result of bad ballot design, but many of them insisted that they looked hard for the race. Moreover, more than 60 percent of those interviewed by The Herald-Tribune reported that they did cast a vote in the Congressional race — but that this vote didn’t show up on the ballot summary page they were shown at the end of the voting process.

I must say, as a fan of Paul Krugman, I find this passage to be incredibly well - NOT good. Fully a third interviewed said they could not find the race on the screen. not surprising when one considers the ballot design in the FL-13 race on the ESS machines. The Fl-13 race ballot is clearly flawed in design. The Sentinel reporting shows a third of those reporting problems as having not seen the race. This is not strong thinking by Paul Krugman. More.

The American Civil Liberties Union and the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law won a major victory against Fresno, California in federal court this week.

They are asserting that police and sanitation workers violated the rights of the homeless for the past three years by defining their property as trash and bulldozing their encampments.

The federal judge assigned to the case, Oliver W. Wanger, ruled:

U.S. District Judge Oliver W. Wanger, calling Fresno's policy regarding homeless people's property "dishonest and demeaning," granted a preliminary injunction Wednesday ordering the city to stop seizing and destroying homeless people's property without warning while the civil rights lawsuit winds through the courts.

"Persons cannot be punished because of their status," the judge said. "They cannot be denied their constitutional rights because of their appearance, because they are impoverished, because they are squatters, because they are, in effect, voiceless."