Singapore's Chief executioner and hangman Darshan Singh has been fired. TalkLeft profiled hangman Singh here, noting that he has hanged 850 people in his 43 years as Singapore's hangman.

Unfortunately, it will not help Nguyen Tuong Van, an Australian of Vietnamese descent who is set to be hanged on December 2 for an offense involving 400 grams of heroin. Singapore is importing a new hangman within days.

Singapore's execution statistics are abominable.

Singapore has one of the world's toughest drug laws. Laws enacted in 1975 stipulate death by hanging for anyone aged 18 or over convicted of carrying more than 15 grams (0.5 ounce) of heroin, 30 grams (1.1 ounce) of cocaine, 500 grams (17.6 ounces) of cannabis or 250 grams (8.8 ounces) of methamphetamines.

Amnesty International said in a 2004 report that about 420 people had been hanged in Singapore since 1991, mostly for drug trafficking, giving the city-state of 4.2 million people the highest execution rate in the world relative to population.

Update: Australian Prime Minister John Howard says his fifth and final meeting with Singapore officials to spare Nguyen's life or agree to have his case transferred to the International Criminal Court has failed. Nguyen is to be hanged on Friday.

Bump and Update: The Time Magazine article reporting Viveca Novak has been subpoenaed is here. She is not, by the way, related to Robert Novak.

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Original Post

Time Reporter Viveca Novak has been subpoenaed to the grand jury investigating the leak of the indentity of CIA operative Valerie Plame. Fitzgerald is interested in her testimony about conversations she had with Rove lawyer Robert Luskin beginning in May, 2004.

Novak, part of a team tracking the CIA case for Time, has written or contributed to articles quoting Luskin that characterized the nature of what was said between Rove and Matthew Cooper, the first Time reporter who testified in the case in July.

The article takes this as a sign that Fitzgerald is still considering charges against Rove. Looking through some past Time articles written by Novak, I found some interesting tidbits in the July 25 Time article, co-authored by Ms. Novak:

by Last Night in Little Rock

I-40 Exit 125 @ US65, Conway AR: Exxon, Mobil, Shell, and Phillips 66: $1.849, and they've been that low since Wednesday.

That's slightly more than half the $3.599 I paid over Labor Day weekend. Crude oil was $56.34 last week, down from a high of $70.85 August 30.

Thanks to Berkeley law professior Liu Goodwin for pointing out in an LA Times op-ed that there are issues besides abortion that are cause for concern over Judge Sam Alito's nomination to the Supreme Court -- particularly his past rulings in death penalty cases.

Capital cases make up a substantial portion of the Supreme Court's docket each year. From 2000 to 2005, the court decided only three cases involving abortion but more than three dozen cases involving the death penalty. In this area, the Supreme Court often serves not only in its typical role of deciding unsettled questions of broadly applicable law but also as a court of last resort to correct errors and prevent injustice in individual cases.

Goodwin reviews Alito's record in capital cases:

What difference did the Iraq war make in terms of human rights advancements? None, according to former prime minister Iyad Allawi.

Abuse of human rights in Iraq is as bad now as it was under Saddam Hussein, if not worse, former prime minister Iyad Allawi said in an interview published on Sunday. "People are doing the same as (in) Saddam Hussein's time and worse. It is an appropriate comparison," Allawi told British newspaper The Observer.

"We are hearing about secret police, secret bunkers where people are being interrogated," said Allawi in an apparent reference to the discovery of a bunker at the Shi'ite-run Interior Ministry where 170 men were held prisoner, beaten, half-starved and in some cases tortured. "A lot of Iraqis are being tortured or killed in the course of interrogations."

This is scary stuff. From Walter Pincus at the Washington Post:

The Defense Department has expanded its programs aimed at gathering and analyzing intelligence within the United States, creating new agencies, adding personnel and seeking additional legal authority for domestic security activities in the post-9/11 world.

The moves have taken place on several fronts. The White House is considering expanding the power of a little-known Pentagon agency called the Counterintelligence Field Activity, or CIFA, which was created three years ago. The proposal, made by a presidential commission, would transform CIFA from an office that coordinates Pentagon security efforts -- including protecting military facilities from attack -- to one that also has authority to investigate crimes within the United States such as treason, foreign or terrorist sabotage or even economic espionage.

Bump and Update: I'll be arguing to save Tookie's life on Los Angeles KKLA radio station (99.5 FM)tonight at 9:00 pm PT. You can listen live online here. It's a Christian radio network -- you would think that if they really believed in choosing life, they would oppose the death penalty, but apparently the show's host, who I'll be sparring with, does not.

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A positive sign today for Stanley "Tookie" Williams -- Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is considering his clemency petition and will meet with Tookie's lawyers on December 8, five days before his scheduled execution.

by TChris

This sums up nicely the Bush administration's policy regarding the detention of those it suspects of terrorism:

"The position of the executive branch," said Eric M. Freedman, a law professor at Hofstra University who has consulted with lawyers for several detainees, "is that it can be judge, jury and executioner."

In the wake of the Padilla flip-flop, Adam Liptak explores the secret (or absent) standards the Bush administration uses to designate detainees as enemy combatants rather than criminal defendants. The prospect of indefinite detention as an enemy combatant is so frightening that it might induce someone in Padilla's shoes to plead guilty to a serious criminal charge with the hope of remaining under the jurisdiction of the criminal justice system.

by TChris

Catherine Crier discusses her top five books about crime (a list that suffers from the omission of Crime and Punishment). What's on your list?

by TChris

The Washington Post reports that the Jack Abramoff inquiry has morphed into an investigation of corruption in Congress and the Bush administration. The most immediate target is Rep. Robert Ney. (TalkLeft background on the Ney investigation is collected here.)

Ney's lawyers have been denying that Ney is a target of the investigation, but the Post's sources disagree.

[T]he sources said that during the third week of October prosecutors told Ney and his former chief of staff, Neil Volz, that they were preparing a bribery case based in part on activities that occurred in October 2000. Abramoff and another business partner, Adam Kidan, were also told that they are targets in that case, the sources said.

The five-year statute of limitations for filing charges based on those events expired last month; the prosecutors sought and received a waiver of the deadline from all four men while they continue their investigation, the sources said. Prosecutors are often able to obtain such waivers by giving the targets a choice of being indicted right away or granting more time to see if information might surface that exonerates them.

Also under scrutiny are Tom DeLay (are you surprised?), Sen. Conrad Burns, and Rep. John Doolittle.

Can a gay defendant invoke the marital privilege to prevent his partner-spouse from testifying against him in a criminal proceeding? Stephen Signorelli, a defendant in New York is raising the issue.

A gay man charged with helping his lover loot a wealthy school district has asked a judge to rule that state law protecting spouses from having to testify against each other also applies to same-sex partners.

"Mr. Tassone and I have been loving partners for 33 years," Signorelli said in an affidavit, adding that the two had participated in "a solemn religious ceremony" conducted while they were on a Caribbean cruise "to memorialize our relationship and love for one another." The two registered as domestic partners in New York City, where they live, in 2002. "It's our position that the statute should be read gender-neutral," Signorelli's attorney, Kenneth Weinstein, told Newsday. "If a heterosexual couple can assert marital privilege, then a homosexual couple should be able to do the same."

From the facts provided, this does not seem to be a good test case. When both spouses are involved in the criminal scheme, the "crime fraud" exception to the marital privilege kicks in. Maybe there's more to the story.

President Bush made telephone calls to the families of 10 soldiers on Thanksgiving. Congressman Jack Murtha has visited the wounded at Walter Reed almost every week since the beginning of the Iraq War.

The President is on another vacation in Crawford, using Thanksgiving as a cover. While most Americans were able to get off work Thursday, and some were lucky enough to get both Thursday and Friday off, I bet not many got off from Tuesday through Sunday, the period Bush is spending at the ranch.

I'm no math whiz, so clue me in. Between his trips to Latin America, Asia and the Ranch this month, how many days has he spent working for us in Washington?