The Lima (Ohio) News features a two part series with interviews of death row inmates.

The inmates were asked about appeals, about waiving appeals, about the prospect of being executed, and about how they spend their days. Some of their answers might make you mad. One comment was just plain depressing. What a waste. These are people who, if they hadn’t gone astray, might have led productive lives, allowing their victims to do the same.

One of the inmates interviewed is Kenneth Richey:

Ohio death row inmate Kenneth Richey is locked in a cell 23 hours a day and sleeps on a plastic mattress atop a warped sheet of steel. “It sucks,” he said. “This ain’t no … damn picnic. People out there think we’re having a pic-nic; this ain’t no picnic.” ....Living on death row is a tougher punishment than death, he said. “It’s a 24-hour a day torture,” the 40-year-old Richey said. “You have no life. You’re just ex-isting from one day to the next. Believe me, it’s an ... existence you don’t want.”

Richey maintains his innocence. Amnesty International says his treatment is one of the most barbaric cases it's seen.

Part One of the series is here.

Too many of our nation's mentally ill population are languishing in jails because there is no other place to put them when they have been accused of a crime. Georgia has taken a big step.

A $17.8 million facility set to open next month at Central State Hospital will help in the effort to remove mentally ill inmates from county jails, officials said last week....The forensic services division accepts inmates referred by state courts, offering both short-term and long-term treatment. It also performs pretrial mental evaluations of people charged with crimes.

Last week we reported on a new study finding that death sentences in the U.S. have sharply declined. The San Antonio Express-News today informs this is not the case with Texas.

Courts nationwide handed out about half as many death sentences in each of the past four years as they did on average in the 1990s....Death penalties in Texas declined only 6 percent in that time span.

There will be a lot of focus on the U.S. Sentencing Guidelnes between now and October 4 when the Supreme Court hears oral argument in two cases, Booker and FanFan. The Guidelines are in jeopardy following last term's decision in Blakely v. U.S.

The Wall Street Journal has an article today on one aspect of the guidelines that doesn't get enough attention: That a defendant can be sentenced by a Judge for conduct for which he was acquitted by a jury. All it takes is for a jury to find the defendant guilty at trial of one of the charges against him. The prosecutor can then ask the judge at sentencing to increase the sentence based upon conduct the jury rejected. How can this happen? Because the standard of proof at trial is proof beyond a reasonable doubt, while the standard before a judge at sentencing is the lesser one of "preponderance of the evidence."

TalkLeft's contributing blogger TChris is counsel for the defendant in the Booker case. He's been on hiatus from blogging while preparing the case for its big day before the Supreme Court. Here's his brief (pdf).

Our favorite source for all things Blakely online is Law Professor Doug Berman's blog, Sentencing Law and Policy.

News sources report that CBS will concede it was misled on the Bush National Guard Record memos. The network is trying to get their source for the memos to come foward. Assuming CBS was misled, it's time to move on to the real story here: Bush's National Guard Service.

Two articles delve into Mr. Bush's past service. The first is a New York Times article written by Sara Rimer and other reporters. Military Service: Portrait of George Bush in '72: Unanchored in Turbulent Time. The second is by Eric Boehlert in todays' Salon Magazine, Bush in the National Guard: A Primer. From Boehlert:

What is also already known is that in the spring of 1972, with 770 days left of required duty, Bush unilaterally decided that he was done fulfilling his military obligation. Also in the spring of 1972, Bush refused to take a physical and quickly cleared out of his Guard base in Houston, heading off to work on the Senate campaign of Winton "Red" Blount in Alabama. Referring to that period, one of Bush's Guard flying buddies remarked to USA Today in 2002, "It was an irrational time in his life."

It may have been an irrational time for him, but Bush managed to focus intently on not serving in the Guard in any significant capacity again. His public records paint a portrait of a Guardsman who, with the cooperation of his Texas Air National Guard superiors, simply flouted regulation after regulation, indifferent to his signed obligation to serve.

Get ready for even greater security measures in October:

Convinced that al Qaeda is still determined to disrupt the U.S. fall elections by an attack on the homeland, FBI officials here are preparing a massive counter-offensive of interrogations, surveillance and possible detentions they hope will disrupt the terrorist plans, reports CBS News Correspondent Jim Stewart. FBI field offices and Homeland Security agencies will be advised of "extraordinary measures" that will go into place "beginning the first week of October through the elections."

...Specifically, the plan calls for "aggressive - even obvious - surveillance" techniques to be used on a short list of people suspected of being terrorist sympathizers, but who have not committed a crime. Other "persons of interest," including their family members, may also be brought in for questioning, one source said.

All recent truck thefts, chemical thefts and suspicious cargo truck rentals will also be reviewed as part of the plan. Mosques will be revisited and members asked whether they've observed any suspicious behavior.

[link via Jihadunspun]

In an innovative solution to a growing problem of providing inmates with thir right to access legal materials, Lexis-Nexis has partnered-up with a company called Touch Sonic Technologies to create legal research kiosks for inmates. From a press release we received not long ago:

As part of LN focus on the state corrections market, LexisNexis and Touch Sonic Technologies® launched a new legal information kiosk that will change the way prisons comply with court mandates requiring inmate access to the law. The new wall-mounted kiosks with shatterproof touch screens in corrections facilities have already been installed in Hawaii and Riverside County, California.

The kiosks, called the TSTLL, were developed specifically for prisons by Touch Sonic Technologies and feature legal research from LexisNexis. Most prison libraries offer legal books, which can be damaged or lost, and are quickly outdated. With these kiosks, corrections departments are expected to save hundreds of thousands of dollars on costly law books, while offering comprehensive and current legal information to inmates. States also stand to save money with fewer prisoner complaints about lack of access to legal research, which comprise substantial numbers of the inmate lawsuits filed.

Is anyone discussing that the forged Niger-Iraq documents relied upon by the Bush Administration as a grounds for going to war were full of flaws??

Which documents were more important in the grand scheme of things? Clearly, Niger.

The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. -- President Bush's justification for killing four thousand Iraqi civilians: a fake document

Nonetheless, things don't look good though for CBS. Whose heads do you think will roll? Mary Mapes? Rather? CBS President Andrew Heyward? They must be deep into crisis control talks...who do you think is advising them?

Update: David Neiwert of Orcinus points out no one has actually determined the CBS documents to be fakes. Check this out, and see if you can tell which was typed on a 1972 IBM selectric and which in MS Word?

Following up on our post below about the release of new documents showing the planned expansion of the privacy-intrusive "CAPPS II" passenger screening program, now dead, there is news that Congress is addressing the issue:

Federal agencies that use data-mining technologies will be required to submit a report to Congress on the privacy impact of their activities under the Senate-passed fiscal 2005 Homeland Security Department spending bill. An amendment offered by Sens. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and Russ Feingold, D-Wis., was unanimously accepted. The Senate passed the bill, H.R. 4567, on Tuesday on a 93-0 vote. The House version of the bill, passed in June, does not contain such an amendment.

"At the same time that the [Bush] administration has been making it harder and harder for the public to learn what government agencies are up to, the government and its private sector partners have been quietly building more and more databases to learn and store more information about the American people," Leahy said in a statement.

In July, TChris trumpeted the death of the CAPPS II, the intelligence plan that would have collected massive amounts of information on ordinary Americans, yet warned of a planned "CAPPS III." For those unfamiliar with the details of CAPPS II, the color coded airline passenger screening plan, here's a short summary.

Internal documents of the Transportation Security Administration were recently released pursuant to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by EPIC. The San Francisco Chronicle reveals their details:

Alfred W. McCoy is a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of the book, "The Politics of Heroin," an examination of the CIA's alliances with drug lords, and "Closer Than Brothers," a study of the impact of the CIA's psychological torture method upon the Philippine military.

Today a shorter version of his article on the C.I.A.'s history of torture appears in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Even as pundits fantasized about "limited, surgical torture," the Bush administration, following the president's orders after 9/11 to "kick some ass, " was testing and disproving their theories by secretly sanctioning brutal interrogation that spread quickly from use against a few "high-value target" al Qaeda suspects to scores of ordinary Afghans and then hundreds of innocent Iraqis.

....Looked at historically, the Abu Ghraib scandal is the product of a deeply contradictory U.S. policy toward torture since the start of the Cold War. At the United Nations and other international forums, Washington has long officially opposed torture and advocated a universal standard for human rights. Simultaneously, the CIA has propagated ingenious new torture techniques in contravention of these same international conventions, a number of which the United States has ratified.

A longer version of his article is available here. An even longer version will appear in The New England Journal of Public Policy (Volume 19, No. 2, 2004).Also don't miss Human Rights First September 9 report, Detainee Abuse: New Human Rights First Report Details Failings of Pentagon Investigations

TBogg takes on Powerline's pictures comparing Kerry to Bush with ones that cast the two in a far truer light.

Dave Johnson at Seeing the Forest says in the strongest possible terms that those under 30 should be worried enough to vote because they are going to be drafted. Go copy his post and email it to someone you care about who's in the target age group. They need to know how crucial it is that they vote in this election.

Democracy Now has a transcript of BBC investigative reporter Greag Palast's interview with Bill Burkett about Bush's National Guard service from his new documentary, "Bush Family Fortunes: The Best Democracy Money Can Buy" by Greg Palast. [link via Buzzflash.]

Mary Jacoby of Salon interviews Seymour Hersh who provides an "alternative history of Bush's war."

The crack investigative reporter tells Salon about a disastrous battle the U.S. brass hushed up, the frightening True Believers in the White House, and how Iran, not Israel, may have manipulated us into war.

Ben Wasserstein, writing in the LA Times, on why the conservative bloggers should get a pat on the back but not a standing ovation for their role in Rathergate.

Veteran political reporter Martin Nolan in the San Francisco Chronicle explains why Bush may lose the election, despite current opinion polls. Four reasons: