The Justice Department has disclosed it is conducting an investigation of F.B.I. agents regarding abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and Guantanamo. The Pentagon announced last week that it had launched a similar investigation.

The decisions to investigate emanate from the FBI memos obtained by the ACLU under the Freedom of Information Act. The ACLU describes the memos here.

After five hours of deliberation, a ten member military jury found Abu Ghraib guard Charles Graner guilty of abusing Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

Graner stood at attention and looked straight ahead without expression as each verdict was read. His parents, Charles and Irma Graner, held hands tightly as they listened.

The jury begins deliberating his sentence this evening. He can get up to 15 1/2 years.

The charges he was convicted of include Assault, conspiracy, maltreatment of detainees, committing indecent acts and dereliction of duty. He was found guilty on all counts, except that one assault count was downgraded to battery.

Each side will present witnesses during the sentencing phase, and Graner may testify. He should. He needs to tell his side of the story.

Staff Sergeant Cardenas Alban was sentenced to a year in jail today after being convicted of murder and conspiracy to commit murder at a court martial. Last month, another soldier, Johnny Horne, was sentenced to three years for the incident. One more soldier is awaiting trial. Here's what happened:

The charges relate to the Aug. 18 killing of a 16-year-old Iraqi male found in a burning truck with severe abdominal wounds sustained during clashes in Baghdad's Sadr City, an impoverished neighborhood that was the scene of fierce fighting between U.S. forces and Shiite rebels loyal to anti-U.S. cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. A criminal investigator had said during an earlier hearing that the soldiers decided to kill him to "put him out of his misery."

The teen was 16-year-old Qassim Hassan, who was working with relatives collecting rubbish. The Geneva Convention prohibits shooting wounded persons. Here's more on the case.

Update: Tulia undercover cop Tom Coleman gets seven years probation, no jail. AP report here.

Guilty of one perjury count, not guilty on the other. Grits for Breakfast has the details.

Update: Associated Press here. Houston Chronicle article here. Quick recap on the drug case from the article:

The 9th Circuit has ruled that a "Knock and Announce" warrant means cops can announce and skip the knock. The case is U.S. v. Combs, available here. (pdf) CrimProf blog has the details, and some criticism of the decision.

Rather than knock, the officers loudly announced their presence and their possession of a search warrant from the street via the patrol car's loudspeaker. When no one came to the door, they broke the door down with a battering ram and found the defendants and a meth lab inside. The officers justified their failure to knock, in essence, by explaining that active meth labs can explode, and they did not want to position officers close to the house any longer than they had to.

After analyzing the opinion, Prof. Mark Godsey says,

U.S. District Court Judge Paul Cassell has rushed to press with the first post-Booker decision and it's awful. You can read it here. As one lawyer e-mailed us, "Read it and Weep. The radical right has been planning for this." Two paragraphs in Cassell's opinion tell the story:

To be sure, reasonable minds may differ about whether the Guidelines are the best standard against which to measure the fairness of sentences. It is no secret that some judges believe sentences are too harsh, although the degree of judicial dissatisfaction with the Guidelines is easy to overstate.81 The fundamental fact remains, however, that the Guidelines are the only standard available to all judges around the country today. For that reason alone, the Guidelines should be followed in all but the most exceptional cases.

For all these reasons, the court concludes that in exercising its discretion in imposing sentences, the court will give heavy weight to the recommended Guidelines sentence in determining what sentence is appropriate. The court, in the exercise of its discretion, will only deviate from those Guidelines in unusual cases for clearly identified and persuasive reasons. This is the only course that implements the congressionally-mandated purposes behind imposing criminal sentences.”

Here's the 23rd Sigh - Oy to the World

Bush is my shepherd;
I dwell in want
He maketh logs to be cut down in national forests.
He leadeth trucks into the still wilderness.
He restoreth my fears.
He leadeth me in the paths of international disgrace for his ego's sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of pollution and war, I will find no exit for thou art in office.,

The Inspector General's summary report on FBI translater Sibel Edmonds is out. It finds she was fired for reporting misconduct. The ACLU, which represented Edmonds, says (in press release to be online soon):

According to today’s summary, the Inspector General’s investigation found that many of Edmonds’ claims “were supported, that the FBI did not take them seriously enough, and that her allegations were, in fact, the most significant factor in the FBI’s decision to terminate her services.....the Inspector General states, “By terminating Edmonds’ services, in large part because of her allegations of misconduct, the FBI’s actions also may have the effect of discouraging others from raising concerns.”

There's more discredit to the FBI contained in the report summary:

Closing arguments were this morning in the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse trial of Charles Graner. The jury received copies of e-mails Graner sent to family and friends, joking about the pain he inflicted:

[Prosecutor] Graveline used some of Graner's own e-mails as evidence of how much he enjoyed the pain he inflicted on detainees. In one e-mail, he described beating on prisoners as "a good upper-body workout, but hard on the hands." The e-mail messages were given to jurors Tuesday. The New York Times, which said it got them from a person close to the defense, reported that they were sent to Graner's family and friends, including his young children.

"The guys give me hell for not getting any pictures while I was fighting this guy," said the message, titled "just another dull night at work," with the photograph of the howling, bound, bleeding detainee, according to the Times. The paper also reported that Graner responded to an e-mail message about a Take Your Children to Work Day event, "how about send a bastard to hell day?" attaching a photograph of a detainee's head bloodied beyond recognition.

Despite the Supreme Court's ruling that the U.S. cannot continue to indefinitely detain persons who have been ordered deported but whose home countries won't take them back, some experts wonder whether Immigrations and Customs will comply with the ruling. Mark Dow, author of American Gulag: Inside America's Immigration Prisons, notes in the comments to our post,

The question remains: Who will make sure the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) will comply with the law?

The recent Mariel ruling was based on the court's 2001 ruling in Zadvydas v. Davis that the government could not detain certain legal immigrants indefinitely, but a May 2004 study by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) concluded that the immigration service has failed to comply fully with that ruling. Some 2000 immigrants effected by the new ruling are scattered in jails and prisons around the country. Congress must immediately establish an independent body to ensure that ICE complies with the new -- and old -- laws.

As if there isn't enough news to write about, the Wall Street Journal (free link) picks up on a spat that's going on in the blogosphere over fallout from the Armstrong Williams consultancy flap. It repeats what Markos of Daily Kos and Jerome of MyDD told their readers ages ago - that they had been hired by the Dean campaign as consultants for a period of time. Jerome shut down MyDD while he was working for Dean and Markos kept the disclosure on the front page of Daily Kos for the duration of his consultancy.

Very few bloggers make a living by blogging. Most are lucky to take in a few bucks through donations and advertising. There is nothing wrong with bloggers being consultants. In this case, Jerome and Markos went the extra mile to disclose it. So where's the story? Answer: There is none.

The Florida Supreme Court is weighing a challenge to the reliability of a drug-detecting dog. CrimProf blog aptly notes:

I always tell my Criminal Procedure class that narcotics-sniffing dogs should be subjected to the same 4th Amemdment reliability standards as other "tipsters." A dog who has consistently falsely alerted in the past should be considered like an informant whose tips have repeatedly not panned out. The Supreme Court of Florida is considering this issue currently, as a defendant is arguing that the narcotics that a canine named "Razor" found on him should be suppressed on the ground that Razor has been so unreliable in the past that his "alert" with respect to the defendant did not give rise to probable cause for the search. Currently, no national standards exist to measure canine competence.