New York legislators have passed a bill moderately reducing the state's harsh Rockefeller drug laws. (see TChris's post on this yesterday.) Governor Pataki is expected to sign.

What was a mandatory 15 year to life sentence will now be punished by a term of 8 to 20 years. The good news is that up to 400 offenders punished under the old law will be allowed to get out early. The bad news? The law doesn't go nearly far enough.

[Critics] complained that inmates serving what they called unduly long prison terms for lesser crimes would not be allowed to apply for early release, and that judges were not given the power to sentence some offenders to treatment programs rather than prison.

"This is it?" an exasperated State Senator Thomas Duane, a Manhattan Democrat, shouted during the debate. "This is it? After all this time, this is what comes to the floor? It would be an unbelievable stretch to call this Rockefeller drug reform."

New York's drug laws are among the harshest in the country:

U.S. border agents are going high-tech at the Canadian border. By the end of December, visitors from Canada will face fingerprinting. Also in use will be "motion-detecting sensors and land- and air-based surveillance of deserted stretches."

This is not a first.

Fingerprinting has already started at Mexican border crossings in Arizona, Texas and California. All land border crossings will be included in the program by the end of 2005.

A new policy by the Department of Homeland Security ends the policy of using dogs around detainees:

The U.S. Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a division of Homeland Security, issued a memo to its field offices last month ordering them to refrain from contracting with lockups that use dogs around detainees.

The lockups will still be able to use the dogs to sniff for drugs or other contraband, and to guard regular prisoners who are not being held on immigration charges, said bureau spokesman Russ Knocke.

Long overdue reform, with credit going to immigrants rights groups.

The Passaic County Jail in Paterson is among 81 detention centers nationwide that use dogs, and one of between seven and 10 using them to control federal immigration detainees. There are 200 to 400 such detainees at the jail, which gets $77 per day from the government for housing each inmate.Dogs are used to accompany prisoners being transferred to and from the infirmary, or to break up fights.

Little by little, thanks to hard work by the ACLU who continues to fight government secrecy, the shameful details of the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal continue to come out. As a result of Freedom of Information Act requests filed by the organization, new Government memos have turned up.

U.S. special forces accused of abusing prisoners in Iraq threatened Defense Intelligence Agency personnel who saw the mistreatment, according to U.S. government memos released Tuesday by the American Civil Liberties Union.

The special forces also monitored e-mails sent by defense personnel and ordered them "not to talk to anyone" in the United States about what they saw, said one memo written by the Defense Intelligence Agency chief, who complained to his Pentagon bosses about the harassment. In addition, the special forces confiscated photos of a prisoner who had been punched in the face.

The description of the condition of some of the prisoners is appalling:

The House of Representatives has passed the 9/11 Intelligence Reform bill with its sweeping new investigative and law enforcement powers:

The House voted Tuesday to overhaul a national intelligence network that failed to prevent the Sept. 11 attacks, combining under one official control of 15 spy agencies, intensifying aviation and border security and allowing more wiretaps of suspected terrorists.

Once again, a bill that won't make us safer, only less free. Anyone who thinks this bill will stop a future attack is in Dreamland.

Intelligence veterans...question whether more bureaucracy is what the nation needs, whether the new structure is well-suited to stop terrorists and whether the changes should come in the midst of a war. Above all, some doubt whether the bill will truly bring together the nation's intelligence apparatus to "connect the dots" - a phrase so common it's become almost cliche when discussing intelligence criticism post-9/11.

The Senate is expected to pass the bill tomorrow. It then goes to Bush who will sign it into law.

Update: Sensenbrenner extracted his due for conservatives:

He's been talking about it for years. Today, New York Attorney General Elliot Spitzer threw his hat in the ring for the 2006 NY Governor's race. Is he a shoo-in? I don't know, but he sure is popular.

by TChris

Defendants who have two prior felony convictions for drug crimes or crimes of violence are typically sentenced as "career offenders" under the federal sentencing guidelines. The "career offender" designation usually results in something close to a maximum sentence, regardless of the nature of the new drug crime or the characteristics of the offender.

Judge Gregory Presnell in Florida recently decided not to impose a sentence of at least 188 months (the minimum required by the guideline range) on a 24-year-old man afflicted with thyroid cancer. Torrey Williams was a "go-between" in a deal to sell about 10 grams of crack, and he sold another 2 grams to an undercover officer. The two transactions involved only $500.

Downward departures for ill health are rarely granted, but Judge Presnell couldn't stomach the result if he didn't give one to Williams. Judge Presnell imposed a 70 month sentence in an eloquent opinion (pdf) that includes the following passage:

A guideline sentence in this case starkly illustrates the problem of attempting to fit the human experience into a discrete mathematical matrix. It just can't be done, and this Court cannot in good conscience do it, because it offends the Court's concept of justice.

The short opinion is well worth reading for its criticism of the "war on drugs" and of the federal sentencing guidelines. Also worth reading is Prof. Doug Berman's excellent commentary and background information regarding the case.

by TChris

Volunteers at a monthly middle school dance, hosted by the Center for the Arts in Grass Valley, California, asked a 13-year-old girl to take off her clothes to prove that she wasn't in possession of marijuana. The executive director of the Center claims the strip search was an appropriate implementation of its "zero tolerance" policy.

The Center apparently has "zero tolerance" of the privacy rights of minors. Kudos to the local police, who realize that the Center erred.

"Officers advised staff that what they did was unlawful," Grass Valley Police Sgt. Michael Hooker said Tuesday. "It's not criminal, but it's a civil wrong. It's an invasion of her privacy."

by TChris

NBA Hall of Fame member and former Houston Rocket Calvin Murphy was acquitted yesterday of charges that he molested five of his daughters. It took the jury less than two hours to return its verdict of not guilty on all counts.

Now Murphy can begin the difficult task of rebuilding his life.

"To hear that people believe in me and found me innocent of those charges, my heart just swelled up and started beating very fastly in my body," Murphy said afterward. "I cannot say enough for what they have done to give me my life back."

by TChris

New York legislators are again considering reform of the state's draconian drug laws. One of the advocates for reform is Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, who wants lawmakers to abolish mandatory state prison sentences for low-level dealers.

The proposed change might make little difference in Manhattan, where only 14 percent of defendants charged with B-level drug offenses in the past 20 months have received prison sentences. Most have been allowed to plea bargain for a package of jail time and treatment. Still, the proposed change would be a welcome measure in other parts of the state, where prosecutors may be more inclined to seek prison for minor drug dealers.

Other Morgenthau proposals are less sanguine, including his suggestion to replace indeterminate sentences with fixed sentences and his request for a "kingpin" statute that would make it "easier" to impose 25-to-life sentences on those identified by the DA's office as "leaders." On the whole, however, reform is desperately needed. Has the time finally come?

Human Rights Watch has released a new report with evidence that the Iranian judiciary employed secret interrogation squads to torture Internet journalists and political activists in an effort to gain "confession letters" from them.

Evidence obtained by Human Rights Watch confirms that secret squads of interrogators—primarily former intelligence officers purged in the late-1990s by President Mohammed Khatami but now employed by the judiciary—forced the detainees to write these “confession letters” under extreme pressure as a condition for their release on bail. In an attempt to cover up the government’s illegal detention and torture of detainees, interrogators have coerced them to write self-incriminatory letters that describe detention conditions as satisfactory and confess that civil society organizations are part of an “evil project” directed by “foreigners and counter-revolutionaries.”

Human Rights Watch has documented an extensive pattern of forced confessions by political detainees who have later retracted their statements, which they have attributed to their interrogators. The Iranian government continues to pursue a project to strangle critics and activists, one that Human Rights Watch documented in the report, “Like the Dead in Their Coffins.”

Democracy dies behind closed doors. Secret detentions, interrogations and squads in Iran. Secret arrests, detentions, interrogations and closed door hearings in the U.S. The Bush/Rumsfeld/Ashcroft Administration may be the most secretive administration ever. With the array of new powers contained in the 9/11 Intelligence Reform Bill, we are sliding backwards. Democrats in Congress should take their blindfolds off.

The ACLU launches its new campaign Tuesday to stop the FBI from spying on political and religious activists. Freedom of Information Act requests will be brought In ten states and the District of Columbia. Colorado is one of the states - background and details are available here.