by Last Night in Little Rock

The Topeka, KS Westboro Baptist Church fundamentalist wackos (previously noted here and here by TChris) disrupted another soldier's funeral in Nashville a week ago with placards celebrating the soldier's death. From their message, one would think they were violent Islamic fundamentalists rather than purported Christian fundamentalists. They are about as unChristian as a group can get.

As result of their activities, several states have adopted laws against disrupting funerals or burials as an inappropriate place for political speech, and some Members of Congress want to get into the act.

by Last Night in Little Rock

CNN reported at 2:01 pm ET today that the defense lawyers for the two Duke lacrosse players arrested this morning (arrest noted by TChris here, which has an update from ABC News with similar information) offered alibis for both men. Both claimed to be elsewhere at the time of the occurrence, with witnesses and time stamped video from an ATM. CNN.com alluded to it in a post at that same time:

Sources close to the investigation told CNN Tuesday that the defense will present evidence -- including ATM receipts and a cab driver -- that neither Seligmann, 20, nor Finnerty, 19, were at the team party at the time the alleged rape took place.

by TChris

Two Duke lacrosse players, both sophmores, have been arrested on the indictments that were reported here. Their names will now appear in newspapers around the world although, as this post lamented, the accuser's equally newsworthy identity will not be similarly publicized. A third student was also accused, but the DA said today that he hasn't been charged because he can't be "identified with certainty."

The players were charged with first degree forcible rape, first degree sexual offense and kidnapping. William J. Cotter, the lawyer representing one of the young men, said:

"The grand jury, as you know, has indicted him. They hear one side of the story. They almost always indict. The next jury will hear the entire story, which includes our evidence. We're confident that these young men will be found to be innocent."

by TChris

It was only a matter of time. As TalkLeft noted here, two men were murdered because their names and addresses appeared on a sex offense registry in Maine, making them easy targets for a vigilante. The man who killed them committed suicide when police contact was imminent, and his motives are unclear, but the victims were among 34 men he looked up on the registry.

Maine took down its registry. It's time for other states to do the same.

"This is a stark reminder that there's no evidence that online sex offender registries increase public safety," said Allen Gilbert, executive director of the Vermont ACLU. "In fact, they might just do the opposite."

by Last Night in Little Rock

Last night I posted on FourthAmendment.com the Supreme Court's new proposed Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 41 dealing with search warrants. Unless countermanded by Congress, which is highly unlikely, the rule change becomes effective December 1st.

And, it appears to me that e-mail search warrants will become possible. We already get e-mail through our cellphones, Pocket PC phones, and Blackberrys, so why not allow the police to receive search warrants that way? As a matter of common knowledge, we know that e-mail tends to be lax and lackadasical, fired off with less thought or usually without circumspection. One feels a shudder when a search warrant might be involved--breaking down the doors of homes and less than adequate information, sometimes without warning and creating danger for police and homeowner alike.

It's time for the Tuesday Open Thread. The TL kid popped into town for a few days, and if there's anything I'd rather do than blog, it's hang out with him. Markos of Daily Kos is also in town, and of course I want to hang out with him too. I'm even going to be out and about by 8:30 a.m. to attend a coffee klatch with him at Progress Now at 9:00. So my blogging may be close to non-existent until this evening.

Join us tomorrow from 8:30 until 9 a.m. for an interview with Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, founder of DailyKos.com, live from the ProgressRadio webcasting studio. DailyKos is America's top blog, drawing more than 1,000,000 visitors each day. Tomorrow, beginning at 8:30 a.m., connect with Markos and ask questions at this web address. And if you're in the Denver-Boulder area, here's Markos' schedule.

Hopefully, TChris or LNILR will pop in a few times, and I may as well, but just in case you end up here on your own with little or no guidance or new posts, just use the comments as a place for you to have some fun.

Tomorrow we will learn the names of the Duke lacrosse players accused of criminal activity in the alleged rape case.

Question: When their names are released, shouldn't the accuser's be as well? Charges are merely allegations, they are not proof. Why should the accused's name be public but not the accuser's?

If we want people to recognize that rape is a crime of violence, it is not about sex, and are serious about trying to remove the shame and stigma associated with rape, shouldn't we treat potential rape victims the same as stabbing and shooting victims -- whose names are routinely publicized?

The Duke accuser's name is on the internet. I've seen it. I'm not going to publish it or link to it tonight. I'd like to hear your thoughts. But this is like Kobe redux -- his name was dragged through the mud while the media refused to publish the accuser's name.

I think it's time for this double standard to end.

by TChris

Your movements are recorded as you walk the streets of major cities. You know that private security cameras watch you shop for sweaters, but city streets have always been anonymous, a place to be lost in the crowd. Until now. The hope of finding private moments in a public setting, you now realize, is so last century.

In New York, "wireless video cameras peer down from lamp posts about 30 feet above the sidewalk." Five hundred of them. New Yorkers paid $9 million dollars so their government could record their public meanderings. And that's only a start.

Jason Leopold and Truthout have published a June 10 recently declassified State Department Memo (pdf) from Carl Ford to Marc Grossman on Joseph Wilson's trip to Niger. The New York Sun earlier today posted a copy of the July 7 version of the memo. Jason writes:

Monday's declassified State Department memo was obtained over the weekend by The New York Sun under a Freedom of Information Act request the newspaper filed last July. The Sun's story Monday morning, however, did not say anything about the State Department's warnings more than a week before Bush's State of the Union address about the bogus Niger documents.

The memo was drafted by Carl Ford Jr., the former head of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, in response to questions posed in June 2003 by I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, about a February 2002 fact-finding trip to Niger that former Ambassador Joseph Wilson undertook to investigate the uranium claims on behalf of the CIA.

Update: Defense lawyers confirm two players were indicted. The New York Times reports:

....defense lawyers had asked Nifong on Thursday and again today to issue public indictments so that anyone who was charged with a crime could voluntarily surrender. Ekstrand said Nifong refused the request, "so we'd be left in the dark." He said the situation meant students could be arrested in classrooms or paraded in front of the media. "I can't imagine any other reason but humiliation." he said in an interview while the grand jury was in session.

Update: Court sources tell WRAL there are two sealed indictments of players in the case.

Update: CNN reports there are two sealed indictments. Ordinarily, when Indictments are sealed, no one other than the prosecutors and grand jurors and the arresting authority responsible for executing the arrest warrant would know until the first person is arrested. It's doubtful the prosecutors would tell the defense lawyers. What's so silly about this is that sealed indictments are usually handed down to avoid tipping off a suspect who might flee if he got advance word. The prosecutor seems to be milking this for all it's worth.

ABC has a tape recording of the Kroger security guard who made the second 911 call in the Duke case. It is a private investigator's interview made three weeks after the incident. Likely, this is a defense investigator. In it the guard says there is no way the woman had been raped.

The guard was on duty at the store on the night of March 13, when the two women pulled into the store's parking lot in a dark sedan. The alleged victim, who says three men held her down in a bathroom and kicked, strangled and raped her, was in the passenger seat.

On the tape, which was recorded April 3, three weeks after the lacrosse party, the guard can be heard saying, "There ain't no way she was raped -- ain't no way, no way that happened."

More inconsistencies by the second dancer:

With all the speculation that the accuser was drugged, not just drunk, I just took another look at the return and inventory for the search warrant for the party house. Look at item number 28. Does it say "pills" or "bills"? They would take bills, like phone bills, to show indicia of residency or ownership of the house. Why would they take pills, when the warrant doesn't authorize them to search for pills? If pills were seized, I would think they would be suppressed from any future trial as being illegally seized.

There were no pills seized during the search of the dorm room of the since-suspended student who sent the offensive e-mail.