Bump and Update: The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles voted to recommend a stay. What will Gov. Rick Perry do?

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Frances Newton is not going to the texecution chamber Wednesday without a fight. She's been claiming her innocence for 17 years.

Questions have been raised, however, about the quality of her legal defense and the reliability of forensic testing by the Houston Police Department crime lab, both of which have come under scrutiny in recent years, her attorneys said.

We wrote about Frances here, quoting the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty :

Frances Newton faces execution in Texas Dec. 1, despite resounding doubts about her guilt. Newton's case is a witches' brew of death penalty dysfunctions. Her trial counsel was egregiously incompetent, she has a strong innocence claim and her conviction rests largely on dubious tests conducted by the now-discredited Houston Police Department crime lab.

She will be the first African-American woman to be executed in modern Texas history. Take action here in support of her lawyers' request for a 120 day reprieve.

It might be the hardest lawyer's job in the country--soliciting lawyers to represent death row inmates for free. But it's a full time job for the head of the ABA's Death Penalty Representation Project.

Robin Maher is a traveling saleswoman whose wares are condemned prisoners. From Boston to Albuquerque, from Denver to New Orleans, she pulls out their pictures and histories and makes her pitch. They have been sentenced for sometimes gruesome crimes, she acknowledges. Many may be guilty as convicted; others have circumstances that could save their lives. A few could be innocent.

Not one has an attorney.

And therein lies the rub. In an age when hundreds of inmates have been found innocent by DNA testing not available or provided at the time of trial, there are even fewer lawyers who are willing to devote the hundreds or thousands of hours necessary to represent someone who they think probably is guilty.

The Sunday Los Angeles Times Magazine has a long article, well worth reading, on the hallucingenic drug Ibogaine, being used in clinics from the Caribbean to Canada to Pakistan, and touted as the new wonder drug to relieve addiction to heroin, opiate painkillers, cocaine, methadone, alcohol and more. The experience is anything but fun, in fact it sounds awful. But thousands of anecdotal accounts have emerged that ibogaine is successful both in reducing cravings for the other substances and eliminating painful withdrawal symptoms.

The drug is illegal in the U.S., but legal in many other countries. The closest, reputable clinic appears to be in Tijuana. As to how it works, here's one explanation:

Raw Story reports that the Center for Constitutional Rights, the advocacy group that brought the successful lawsuit in federal court on behalf of the Guantanamo detainees, is ready to strike again. The group will file suit in Germany Tuesday against Donald Rumsfeld, George Tenet and others seeking an investigation into the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. According to the organization's press release:

In a historic effort to hold high-ranking U.S. officials accountable for brutal acts of torture including the widely publicized abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib, on Tuesday November 30, 2004, CCR and four Iraqi citizens will file a criminal complaint with the German Federal Prosecutor’s Office at the Karlsruhe Court, Karlsruhe, Germany. Under the doctrine of universal jurisdiction suspected war criminals may be prosecuted irrespective of where they are located.

Update: Teddy Ebersol did not suffer. He was ejected from his seat and killed instantly.

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Bump and Update: Local authorities say they are 99% sure they have found the body of 14 year old Edward "Teddy" Ebersol. They are waiting for dental records to confirm. NBC released a statement today saying Dick Ebersol and son Charles are expected to make a full recovery.

The Denver Post has this article on the many philanthropic contributions of the family to the Telluride community.

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Authorities now believe that Edward "Teddy" Ebersol, the 14 year old son of NBC Sports Chief Dick Ebersol and Susan St. James, died in yesterday's plane crash, although his body remains unfound.

Dick and Charlie Ebersol are at St. Mary's Hospital in Grand Junction, Colorado. No details have been released on their condition. Susan St. James is at the hospital and has no comment.

Our heartfelt condolences to the Ebersol family, and best wishes for a speedy and total recovery for Dick and Charlie. An article with a picture of Dick, Susan and Teddy is here.

Our original post with updates is here.

The Third Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that universities can bar military recruiters from campus and not lose federal funding as a result. The suit was brought by a consortium of law schools and legal scholars. They brought the suit because they object to the military's exclusion policy concerning gays and lesbians.

A 1995 law, known as the Solomon Amendment, bars the federal government from disbursing money to colleges and universities that obstruct campus recruiting by the military. As amended and interpreted over the years, the law prohibits disbursements to all parts of a university, including its physics department and medical school, if any of its units, like its law school, make military recruiting even a little more difficult.

Billions of dollars are at stake, and no university has been willing to defy the government. Indeed, several of the law schools that are members of the Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights, the group that sued to block the new law, have not been publicly identified.

The Court found the law violates the First Amendment's guarantee of the right to "convey a message opposing discrimination" and against compelled speech. Bottom line, according to the winning side:

"Enlightened institutions have a First Amendment right to exclude bigots. In a free society, the government cannot co-opt private institutions to issue the government's message."

by TChris

A policy adopted by TSA on September 22 requires more frequent and thorough searches of airline passengers for explosive materials. The implementation of the policy has angered many women, including Rhonda Gaynier, who was asked to step aside for additional screening.

Using an open hand, a security agent touched her shoulders, under her arms, around her waist, across her bra strap, and between her breasts, Gaynier said - all in front of other passengers.

Sommer Gentry stopped flying as a result of the screening policy.

Gentry said she has had several upsetting encounters with the screeners, and calls the way she was touched "humiliating and deeply offensive." "I will go to great lengths to avoid flying now, because patdowns make me feel dirty and ashamed," she said. "It just gets worse every time. Now I'm afraid."

The policy gives screeners license to touch women on a whim.

The new TSA rules say screeners can select passengers for patdowns based on "visual observations," even if they do not set off metal detectors. Amy Von Walter, a TSA spokeswoman, said screeners are looking for "irregularities in a person's natural shape or contour."

TSA has received 250 complaints since the policy took effect.

by TChris

Faced with the novel argument that federal courts should protect state citizens from a state court's "tyrannical" interpretation of a state constitution, the United States Supreme Court declined to review a failed challenge to same-sex marriage in Massachusetts. The challenge, brought by the Florida-based Liberty Counsel, claimed that the Massachusetts Supreme Court violated the federal constitutional guarantee to "a Republican Form of Government" by legalizing same-sex marriage. The challenge was rejected in the First Circuit (search for "04-1621" under "Opinions").

Merita Hopkins, a city attorney in Boston, had told justices in court papers that the people who filed the suit have not shown they suffered an injury and could not bring a challenge to the Supreme Court. "Deeply felt interest in the outcome of a case does not constitute an actual injury," she said.

Massachusetts legislators may decide to put the issue before state voters in 2006.

by TChris

An effort to amend the Alabama Constitution by eliminating provisons once used to disadvantage minority groups appears to have been narrowly defeated.

The proposed amendment would delete unenforced sections of the constitution that mandate racially segregated schools and allow poll taxes, once used to discourage blacks from voting. ... Alabama's constitution mandated separate schools "for white and colored children" and imposed poll taxes. After the U.S. Supreme Court's 1954 decision banning school segregation, Alabama amended its constitution to say there is no constitutional right to an education at public expense.

Unless a recount produces a different result, the proposed amendment failed by 1,850 votes — a margin of 0.13%. The notorious Roy Moore, who championed the display of the Ten Commandments in the state courthouse, opposed the amendment.

The American Civil Liberties Union has released the first-ever national report on women on death row. It finds the women live in harsh conditions, in virtual isolation, and many are sentenced for crimes that don't result in a death sentence for men.

"For the first time, we have a snapshot of the experience of women on Death Row - and the picture is grim," said Rachel King, a staff attorney with the ACLU Capital Punishment Project and one of the authors of the report. "Women who have been condemned to death are put into isolation and forced to endure abusive and degrading conditions that simply have no place in our criminal justice system."

The report, The Forgotten Population: A Look at Death Row in the United States Through the Experiences of Women, details the experiences of 56 women living on death row, and also reviews the case files of 10 women who have been executed since 1976. The report found that women on Death Row face similar problems as men, such as inadequate defense counsel and struggles with drug and alcohol addictions, but that women are subjected to harsher living conditions because of their small numbers.

Two weeks ago, Senator Richard Durbin (D-IL) introduced a bill to provide an affirmative defense in federal prosecutions for people who comply with state law in the use of medical marijuana. Here’s the MPP press release:

U.S. Sen. Richard Durbin (D-IL), joined by Sens. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Jim Jeffords (I-VT), have introduced the first-ever Senate bill to ensure that federal juries hear the full story when medical marijuana patients and providers, operating legally under state law, are tried on federal marijuana charges.

S. 2989 is similar to H.R. 1717, the "Truth in Trials Act," introduced by a bipartisan House coalition last year and inspired in part by the case of Ed Rosenthal. In January 2003, Rosenthal was found guilty of felony marijuana cultivation charges by a jury that was not allowed to consider that the marijuana was for medical use by seriously ill patients and was grown with the authorization of the city of Oakland, California.

...In his statement introducing the legislation, Durbin noted, "This is a narrowly-tailored bill ... Under this legislation, defendants in the ten states with medicinal marijuana laws could be found not guilty of violating federal law if their actions are done in compliance with state law."

The San Francisco Chronicle provides this concise explanation of the issue in Ashcroft vs. Raich, the medical marijuana case that will be argued today at the Supreme Court:

The question before the court is whether individual patients -- and, possibly, some of their suppliers -- are immune from federal enforcement.

The argument goes like this: The Constitution authorizes Congress to regulate interstate commerce. But no interstate commerce is involved when patients, acting legally under state law, use marijuana that was grown within the state and supplied without charge.

The counterargument, by the government and its allies, is that all illicit drug use affects interstate commerce. Even freely supplied marijuana boosts the demand for the drug, reduces the overall supply and may affect the price, the government says; in addition, pot looks the same whether it's grown locally or shipped between states.

For an exhaustive case primer, you need look no further than Drug War Rant.

We still haven't run across a link where you can listen live to the oral arguments. If you find one, please post it in the comments.