Thanks to TalkLeft readers for coming through once again. Wampum, the incredibly generous hosters of the Third Annual Liberal Blogging Awards, announced tonight that TalkLeft has won in the Best Single Issues blog category, making us the only "threepeat" winner.

This year is different though because there are two winners in our category ...TalkLeft and Grits for Breakfast, an excellent blog that specializes in Texas Criminal Justice Issues. Wampum reports:

Only one blog, Jeralyn Merritt’s Talk Left, has ever won a Koufax for Best Single Issue Blog. Jeralyn won in both 2002 and 2003. With the Daily Kos edging out Atrios for Best Blog this year, only Jeralyn has a chance for a threepeat.

Grits for Breakfast’s focus is on the Texas Criminal Justice system. ...GFB received a large number of votes in this category. If you go to the appropriate comment thread and count the votes, you will see that GFB has the most votes. A number of those votes per posted after I closed the voting for the awards. At the time I closed the voting, Talk Left, by virtue of a large number of email votes, held the lead by a very small margin. The votes for GFB coming in after the close of voting would erase that margin and swing the award, also by a very narrow margin.

Update: ABC News provides this in-depth look at the jurors.

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Jury selection has been completed in the Michael Jackson trial. It resumed yesterday after a two week hiatus.

The panel included four men and eight women, ranging in age from 20 to 79. The racial and ethnic breakdown appeared to be: seven whites, four Hispanics and one Asian.

They are now in the process of selecting eight alternates for what is expected to be a six month trial. The jurors are between 20 and 79 years old.

Among the jurors were a woman who said her grandson was required to register as a sexual offender because of a crime; a woman who said she was related to the pilot of Flight 93, one of the planes that went down on Sept. 11; a 20-year-old man who likes "The Simpsons" TV show; and a man who is interested in Western art and country music.

One of the jurors had been asked during selection if he recognized celebrity witnesses in the case including self-help guru Deepak Chopra. He responded, "I think he's a rapper."

Michaels' defense will allege the mother of the accuser told him (and persumably his brother) to lie.

The Aspen Daily News reports,

A commemoration for [Hunter]Thompson's close friends and family has been scheduled on March 5 from 4 to 8 p.m. at the Belly Up nightclub in Aspen, a.k.a. Fat City - the name The Good Doctor initially prescribed to owner Michael Goldberg.

A family spokesman said, "You know who you are" if you should attend.

If that's not you (it's not us either), you will get another chance this summer when "a public celebration of Thompson's life" is planned.

Thanks to those of you who have hit our tip jar this week. I try to send out individual thank yous, but sometimes I get behind. I'll try to do better. The donations really help and are much appreciated.

Raw Story reports that Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) is asking other senators to join him in calling for an investigation into fake news reporter Jeff Gannon.

The letter, issued from Minority Whip Richard Durbin (D-IL), calls on President Bush to “order a full inquiry” into how a “fake” journalist working for a “sham” news organization got access to the president,

America Blog has more details and an Action Alert so you tell your Senators to sign onto Durbin's letter.

Update: House Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) is joining in Sen. Durbin's request. Raw Story has the details.

The Supreme Court has ruled in Johnson v. California, that California must discontinue its policy of segregating prisoners by race for 60 days upon arrival unless it can show it passes a strict scrutiny test and there is a compelling reason for it.

State prisons cannot temporarily segregate inmates by race except under the most extraordinary circumstances, the Supreme Court said today, all but ending a long-standing California policy aimed at reducing gang-related violence. As a result, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals must now scrutinize the 25-year-old policy for hard evidence that it is necessary and works — a burden that will be hard to meet.

In order to justify the policy, there has to be a "compelling reason." Many inmates, including some of my clients across the racial spectrum, probably would tell you that staying alive is a pretty compelling reason.

Governor Owens just can't stay quiet about C.U. Professor Ward Churchill. Showing his complete disregard for principles of academic freedom and the spirit of the First Amendment, he sent this letter (pdf) to a Denver citizen last week (we've blocked the name and address to protect his privacy.)

Governor Owens will be out of office in 2006. The recipient of the letter hopes he will be out of politics by then as well.

We've gotten accustomed to legislators introducing bills that increase the number and length of mandatory sentences, eliminate well- established defendants' rights and establish procedures designed to ensure convictions. This year, California takes it one step further with a bill to eliminate conjugal visits.

Here's a letter to the editor that defense attorney Jeff Friedman of Santa Ana, CA wrote that probably won't get published:

This is great, but it might be one of those "only in Aspen" things:

The Pitkin County coroner confirmed yesterday that author and counterculture icon Hunter S. Thompson died from an intentional, self-inflicted gunshot wound. Coroner Steven Ayers said Thompson died instantly. The sheriff's office told The Associated Press the weapon was a .45-caliber handgun.

Ayers has not ordered a toxicology report to reveal whether there were drugs or alcohol in Thompson's body at the time of death. "I'm not ordering a toxicology report in this case because it was incidental to the cause of death. It doesn't matter if there were drugs in his system; it had nothing to do with the manner of his death," Ayers said.

Translation: It was nobody's business but his own.

Why are all criminal defense lawyers depicted on Law & Order shows as being "ethically challenged?" The creators of the new Law & Order spin-off, the one that begins with the late (and great) Jerry Orbach, have announced that this depiction not only will continue, it will be a plot point specifically written into the formula for the show.

But for all that is new - including early guest appearances by Annabella Sciorra, Lorraine Bracco and Peter Coyote, each playing ethically challenged defense lawyers - there will be much that viewers will recognize after Briscoe has passed.

The reason, I suspect, is because that is how the series creator, Dick Wolf, thinks of us. Comments like this tell the story:

Mr. Wolf, speaking by phone last week from California, said that "one of the things both Walon and I hope to accomplish with this is to demolish the shibboleths that have grown up around criminal law, namely that a defense attorney will never ask their client if they did the crime."

"All defense attorneys, if you give them three drinks and a good steak, will say that of course they've had clients who confessed to them and who they know to be guilty."

An emergency stay has been granted pending a hearing tomorrow in the Terry Schiavo "right to die" case. Her feeding tube was scheduled to be removed today.

In somewhat related news, the Supreme Court has agreed to hear challenge to Oregon's assisted suicide law.

We wrote the other day that Hunter Thompson, among other things, was a mensch. It was Hunter that brought these folks to Denver, to fight an injustice to Lisl Auman, serving a life sentence for a murder that occurred after she was in police custody.

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Warren Zevon
enlarge (he opened the rally with "Lawyers, Guns and Money")