by TChris

Many in the "lock 'em up" crowd believe deprivation of liberty alone provides inadequate suffering to constitute true punishment. Some (particularly those who are certain that the innocent are never convicted) believe that any incarcerated person deserves whatever pain and abuse might be inflicted upon him. Others just don't care, which is why society largely ignores the problem of prison rape.

The National Prison Rape Elimination Commission is learning that the problem is too endemic to ignore. The effect of sexual abuse on individual inmates is devastating, but, as commission chairman Judge Reggie B. Walton recognizes, "people [who] say inmates get what they deserve ... don't think about the overall impact on society."

Mounir al-Motassadeq, 31, was convicted yesterday in a German court of being a member of an al-Qaeda cell. He was acquitted on the charge he was involved in the 9-11 attacks. This was Motassedeq's second trial. At his first trial, he was found guilty of helping to prepare for 9-11 and sentenced to 16 years, but the conviction was reversed on appeal because the U.S. failed to provide potentially exculpatory information from alleged 9-11 participant Ramzi Binalshibh and others whom the U.S. has been holding in secret, foreign detention facilities for a few years.

For the re-trial, the U.S. said it would provide summaries of interviews with Binalshibh.

In a three-hour judgment, read out before a court in Hamburg, Judge Ernst-Rainer Schudt said that the US Justice Department had refused to co-operate fully with the German court. “How are we supposed to do justice to our task when important documents are withheld from us?” the judge asked.

Although Washington did send transcripts of interviews with two al-Qaeda members in American custody, Judge Schudt complained that the testimony was incomplete and that the two witnesses should have been interviewed in person.

In Motassedeq's case, the German paper Die Zeit reports that the little bit of information from Binalshibh exonerated him of participation in the 9/11 attacks. This is the same argument Zacarias Moussaoui has been making for years. How can he get a fair trial, particularly on the issue of the death penalty, when Ramzi Binalshibh, among others, reportedly has favorable evidence to provide that would show he was not involved in the 9-11 attacks?

by TChris

Joseph Califano Jr. misses the point when he claims, “If you don’t reduce the use of marijuana, you can't possibly reduce illegal drug use because marijuana is far and away the most used drug.” Of course it is. It is among the safest of illicit drugs, and millions of world-wide tokers have learned that responsible use will not adversely affect their lives. Not only is it possible to “reduce illegal drug use” while largely ignoring marijuana use, it should be the government’s priority to help individuals reduce their reliance on drugs that have the greatest potential for dangerous abuse.

John Walters, the director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, makes the same mistake when he tells reporters: “The issue here is not meth or marijuana. We’re concerned about substance abuse generally.” If we’re to take our drug policy seriously, shouldn’t reduction efforts be most closely targeted to the most dangerous drugs?

Focusing resources on marijuana users is wasteful. Between snacking and napping, pot smokers have little time (and even less energy) to rip apart the social fabric. If the government were serious in its desire to address actual (rather than imagined) social harm, it would direct its attention to predatory lenders.

by TChris

Countries that refuse to immunize Americans from prosecution in the International Criminal Court are feeling the wrath of the Bush administration.

The United States has … cut aid to some two dozen nations that refused to sign immunity agreements that American officials say are intended to protect American soldiers and policy makers from politically motivated prosecutions.

As usual, the Bush administration’s heavy handed approach to diplomacy is making the country less secure.

by TChris

Update: The NY Times explores the Discovery Institute's impact on the Intelligent Design debate:

Pushing a "teach-the-controversy" approach to evolution, the institute has in many ways transformed the debate into an issue of academic freedom rather than a confrontation between biology and religion.

*****

Original post:

Pandering once again to religious extremists (perhaps to make up for his flip-flopping position on stem cell research), Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist echoed the president today by arguing that "intelligent design" should be taught in public schools. Frist thinks students need to be exposed to "different ideas." Of course, some ideas (like "people are born with a particular sexual orientation") haven't made the list of ideas to which Frist thinks students should be exposed.

I'm finishing a long brief that's due by 5pm today. Here's a place for you to vent.

USA Today reports that in 1983, Judge John Roberts lobbied for a national ID card.

When he worked in the Reagan White House in 1983, John Roberts made the case for a national ID card, saying in a memo that it would help address the “real threat to our social fabric posed by uncontrolled immigration.”

I'm beginning to think the confimation hearings may get feisty after all. If they don't, there's something wrong with our Senate Democrats.

The Washington Post today calls the bill to streamline death penalty appeals, introduced in the Senate by Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) and in the House by Daniel E. Lungren (R-Calif.), "an unmitigated disaster."

Habeas corpus is the centuries-old device by which inmates challenge the legality of their detentions. In modern times it has become the essential vehicle by which convicts on death row or serving lengthy prison terms attack their state-court convictions. Many innocent people owe their freedom to their ability to file habeas petitions.

Yet in many death cases, the most drastic versions of the bill would eliminate federal review entirely. Even where they didn't do that, they would create onerous procedural roadblocks and prevent federal courts from considering key issues. They would bar federal courts from reviewing most capital sentencing and create arbitrary timetables for federal appeals courts to handle these cases.

The Post points out [as I did here]that "chief justices of the nation's state court systems have voted overwhelmingly to urge Congress to slow down."

by TChris

Inmates in jails and prisons make collect calls to stay in touch with their families. Jail administrators and prison wardens don't much care what it costs the families to accept those calls, so they sign contracts with telephone companies that permit outrageous charges while giving a kickback to the government. The Center for Constitutional Rights sued the New York State Department of Correctional Services and MCI seeking to end that practice in New York.

The lawsuit, Walton v. NYSDOCS, seeks an order prohibiting the State and MCI from charging exorbitant rates to the family members of prisoners to finance a 57.5% kickback to the state. MCI charges these family members a 630% markup over consumer rates to receive a collect call from their loved ones, the only way possible to speak with them, CCR says.

A judge dismissed the suit as time-barred, but the CCR has appealed. (Law geeks take note: the linked article contains a link to the CCR's brief.) Whether or not the lawsuit gets reinstated, New York and other jurisdictions should stop punishing the families of the incarcerated who often have their telephone service disconnected because they can't afford to pay for the collect calls. Yet a proposed New York law to require telephone companies to provide fair-market rates to jails and prisons has gone nowhere.

Anti-war and human rights activist Dr. Habib Siddiqui, has some unkind words for New York Times reporter Judith Miller. Writing for al-Jazeera, he calls her a "Yellow Journalist."

The role of a good reporter is like that of an intelligence analyst who digs for the truth, and not of a stenographer who simply reports what he/she hears without verification. Regrettably, Miller has been nothing but an eavesdropper, and if I may add, a terrible one in that. For the War Party she performed miracles by essentially becoming its spokeswoman. Earlier in the program, she described her role as the conveyor of official news rather than of a skeptical reporter: “My job was not to collect information and analyze it independently as an intelligence agency; my job was to tell readers of the New York Times as best as I could figure out, what people inside the governments who had very high security clearances, who were not supposed to talk to me, were saying to one another about what they thought Iraq had and did not have in the area of weapons of mass destruction.”

[hat tip Patriot Daily.]

The right-wing blogosphere has launched a coordinated assault on former Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick as part of a larger effort to blame the Clinton administration for 9/11. Think Progress sets the record straight and explains why the smear is a lie.

Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer claims a “highly classified intelligence program, known as Able Danger, had identified the terrorist ringleader, Mohamed Atta, and three other future hijackers by name by mid-2000, and tried to arrange a meeting that summer with agents of the Washington field office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation to share its information.” Shaffer says those efforts were blocked by military lawyers.

....Shaffer’s story, if it’s true, involved communications between the Department of Defense and the FBI. Gorelick’s 1995 memo was only about communications between the FBI and the criminal division of the Justice Department. (It also didn’t create a wall between the FBI and the Justice Department but that’s another story.) Whatever problems Shaffer had trying to communicate with the FBI it had absolutely nothing to do with Gorelick.

Gorelick's memo is here. She explained herself in the Washington Post which I wrote about here, where I also explain why the "the wall" often is a good thing.

by TChris

Judge Roberts presumably rubbed sticks together to start a fire in his cave before using a dinosaur bone to scrawl these words on the wall:

Supreme Court nominee John Roberts disparaged state efforts to combat discrimination against women in Reagan-era documents made public Thursday, and wondered whether "encouraging homemakers to become lawyers contributes to the common good."

Does encouraging sexists to join the Supreme Court contribute to the common good?