by TChris

Even new prosecutors quickly learn the basic rules, making it difficult to understand why a seasoned prosecutor would have told the jury in Keith Beaulieu’s trial that he "wouldn't have put these people on the stand if they weren't telling the truth." Lawyers can’t vouch for the credibility of witnesses, and the result of Connecticut prosecutor Mark Hurley’s misconduct is a new trial for Bealieu.

At Bealieu’s bond hearing, however, Hurley asked the court to increase Beaulieu’s bail from the $50,000 that had been set prior to the first trial to $500,000. Prosecutors aren’t supposed to be vindictive after their misbehavior leads to a reversal. Did Hurley engage in misconduct again? Hurley claimed higher bail was justified because a kidnapping charge was added to Bealieu’s case after his first bond hearing, but $50,000 proved to be adequate to secure Bealieu’s appearance on the same kidnapping charge at his first trial.

"That's vindictive," [defense attorney John] Williams said of the prosecutor's high bond request. "We all know he's [Hurley] the reason the conviction was reversed."

Hurley objected to the comment and said Williams was making things personal. "I'm not going to make this personal," Hurley said in court. "I'm taking the high road."

Asking for excessive bail after getting caught breaking the rules hardly seems like “the high road.” Fortunately for Bealieu, the judge set bail at $75,000, permitting Bealieu to leave prison (for the first time in three years) while he awaits his new trial.

by TChris

The meth crisis, like every other drug crisis since Reefer Madness, is a myth. John Tierney argues that law enforcement agencies and the politicians who fund them need to get their priorities straight:

Like addicts desperate for a high, [law-enforcement officials and politicians who lead the war against drugs] declared meth the new crack, which was once called the new heroin (that title now belongs to OxyContin). With the help of the press, they're once again frightening the public with tales of a drug so seductive it instantly turns masses of upstanding citizens into addicts who ruin their health, their lives and their families.

The failed drug war policy, recycled for each new "drug du jour," leads to absurd results:

by TChris

Lawyers for Salim Ahmed Hamdan have asked the Supreme Court to reverse a ruling from the D.C. Circuit that permits Hamdan to be tried before a military tribunal. Terming the decision (in which Judge Roberts joined) “extreme,” Hamdan’s lawyers accuse the circuit panel of disregarding established law.

"Its decision vests the president with the ability to circumvent the federal courts and time-tested limits on the executive," wrote Neal K. Katyal, a law professor at Georgetown University who represents Mr. Hamdan. "No decision, by any court, in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks has gone this far."

The Hamdan decision is frighteningly deferential to the executive branch of government. The court held that Hamdan has no right to enforce the Geneva Conventions in court, and that, in any event, “the 1949 Convention does not apply to al Qaeda and its members.” Hamdan denies membership in al Qaeda, but the court left that determination up to the president.

posted by Last Night in Little Rock

Fulton County Sheriff Myron Freeman fired eight courthouse security deputies yesterday as a result of the internal investigation into the March 11 courthouse shooting that left three dead, including Judge Rowland Barnes, at the courthouse and a fourth the next day as reported here.

Those fired included the major in charge of courthouse security. There were 13 people subjected to 14 disclinary actions.

posted by Last Night in Little Rock

Speaking to the ABA this weekend, Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens spoke of "serious flaws" in the death penalty as reported by Gina Holland of the Associated Press.

Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens steered the debate over President George W. Bush's nominee to a new subject: capital punishment, sharply condemning the country's death penalty system.

The Court has been closely divided in death row cases, with Justice Sandra Day O'Connor often in the middle.

Stevens' remarks were not prepared and were motivated by the ever increasing number of exonerations of the actually innocent from Death Row.

by TChris

Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, a student from Qatar, was arrested in the US in December 2001. Shortly before his trial was to begin in 2003, the Bush administration declared him an enemy combatant. He has been detained without trial ever since at a naval brig in Charleston. Yesterday, he filed a lawsuit challenging the conditions of his confinement. (An earlier challenge to the fact of his detention is pending.)

The prisoner maintains that he has been regularly denied access to basic necessities like a toothbrush, toilet paper, adequate bedding, and medical and psychological care. He has been confined in isolation in a dark 6-by-9-foot cell round the clock, his suit says, except for brief periods of outside recreation three times a week when he is deemed to be in compliance with jail rules.

Military jailers have also subjected him to extreme cold, used the roar of a loud fan nearby to "harass and torment him" and denied him access to any books, newspapers, radio, television or religious material except for the Koran, he says.

Marri also contends that jailers have treated the Koran disrespectfully and that he’s been denied access to his wife and children. He complains of abusive interrogation techniques, including threats to send him to a country where he “would be tortured and sodomized and where his wife would be raped in front of him.”

I have an unpleasant day ahead, with no time for blogging.

A graveside funeral for my first federal drug client from 1976 with whom I've remained in contact (he was 62, had a stroke and died on Friday), followed by client visits at the jail, followed by court and a fourth attempt at bail for a client in a current drug case (bail was granted by the federal magistrate, overuled by the District Court Judge, his denial of bail was affirmed by the Tenth Circuit, and it's now back in front of the same District Court Judge.) And how kharmic is this: the judge in my bail case today was the prosecutor in the 1976 case against my client whose funeral I'm attending. How times change, and how they remain the same. Definitely one for the memoirs I probably will never write.

Anyway, I'm counting on readers (although TChris or Last Night in Little Rock might be around, so check back) to take over for the day. I'll be back tonight.

Patrick Fitzgerald's four year term as U.S. attorney in Illinois is set to expire in October. Some have wondered whether Bush would replace him. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, speaking at the American Bar Association Meeting in Chicago today, tried to lay such doubts to rest.

US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald got a vote of confidence from his boss Monday. There had been speculation Fitzgerald's aggressive investigations in Chicago and Washington might have angered important people and that Fitzgerald might not get reappointed.

The US attorney general, Alberto Gonzalez made it clear in Chicago Monday that a controversial and high-visibility justice department subordinate, US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, will probably be reappointed by President Bush when his four-year term expires in October.

I've been tracking potential criminal exposure in RoveGate, but there's more to the story, particularly for those interested in the media aspect. Follow the links:

• Digby
• Fire Dog Lake
• The Next Hurrah

And don't forget Arianna, who's been on this aspect for a while.

Via Suburban Guerilla who asks, Better Off?

Reuters:

Hassan Feiraz, a 16-year-old boy, has started a desperate new life since being forced into the sex trade in Baghdad, joining a growing number of adolescents soliciting in Iraq under the threat of street gangs or the force of poverty.

"Every day I cry at night," Feiraz said. "I'm a homosexual and was forced to work as a prostitute because one of the people I had sex with took pictures of me in bed and said that, if I didn't work for him, he was going to send the pictures to my family."

"My life is a disaster today. I could be killed by my family to restore their honour," he said, explaining that homosexuality was totally unacceptable in Iraq due to religious beliefs.

Judge John G. Roberts' wife is a consistent Catholic pro-lifer who opposes the death penalty. She belongs to an anti-capital punishment group. In the article on Justice Stevens' speech critical of the death penalty that I reported on earlier today, someone has called my attention to this statement which I missed.

"It [the death penalty] doesn't appear to be shaping up as a major issue," said Kent Scheidegger, legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, a pro-death penalty group.

Scheidegger said that although Roberts' wife, Jane, is a member of a group that opposes capital punishment, Roberts has had no opportunities to vote on death cases in his two years on a federal appeals court.

Murray Waas writes that Reps. John Conyers of Michigan and Louise Slaughter of New York, the ranking Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee, have written Lewis Libby, Cheney's Chief of Staff, and asked him to provide jailed New York Times reporter Judith Miller with a "personalized waiver."

I think this whole business about "personalized waivers" is bunk. A red herring. Judith Miller has said she doesn't trust Fitzgerald. Where's her assurance that if she shows up to talk about Libby, he won't then ask her about other sources, as he did with Matt Cooper?

Libby's lawyer, Joseph Tate, has told the New York Times that Libby's original waiver covered all New York Times reporters. The notion of "personalized waivers" started with Matthew Cooper and Karl Rove. Cooper didn't get any "personalized waiver" - he got a letter from Rove's attorney reaffirming that Rove's original waiver included him.

In court shortly after 2, he [Cooper] told Judge Thomas F. Hogan of the Federal District Court in Washington that he had received "an express personal release from my source." That statement surprised Mr. Luskin, Mr. Rove's lawyer. Mr. Luskin said he had only reaffirmed the blanket waiver, in response to a request from Mr. Fitzgerald.