by TChris

A cashier at a German grocery store thought she had devised a brilliant plan. She stashed the day's proceeds in her shoes, hit herself over the head, and told the police that she'd been robbed by a masked man who knocked her unconscious. Like most criminal schemes that require self-inflicted injury, this one didn't work. Doctors noticed that her head wounds didn't match her story, and the woman confessed when police confronted her with the discrepancy.

Close contender: the Florida man who allegedly hit his girlfriend with an alligator during a domestic dispute.

Update: Another contender: The man who forgot 88 bags of heroin, and his wallet, when he returned his rental car. (Thanks to Felix Deutsch for passing this along.)

by TChris

There are reports that Iraq's new Prime Minister, Iyad Allawi, executed about a half dozen suspected insurgents in June by standing them against a courtyard wall at the Bahgdad police station in handcuffs and blindfolds and shooting them. Allawi denies the accusation. The award winning journalist who broke the story has left Iraq for his own safety.

If the report is true, it lends support to Time's observation that Allawi "appears to have solid credentials for the role of strongman." Of course, so did Saddam Hussein.

by TChris

U.S. Attorney Thomas M. DiBiagio asked his staff to produce "Three 'Front-Page' White Collar/Public Corruption Indictments" by November. Whether there were actually three meritorious cases to prosecute in his Maryland district seemed unimportant; only the headlines mattered.

In an e-mail to prosecutors July 1, DiBiagio described a municipal corruption indictment in Philadelphia. "Why aren't we doing cases like this," he wrote in the e-mail quoted in the [Baltimore] Sun. "Am I the only one embarrassed by the fact that this Office has not convicted an elected official of corruption since 1988?"

When prosecutors are more concerned about headlines than justice, their prosecutions become inherently suspect. That point isn't lost on the chairman of Maryland's Democratic Party, Isiah Leggett, who is also a professor at Howard University School of Law. He says DiBiagio is using his office as "a political weapon."

Leggett said the documents confirmed what he and other critics already believed of DiBiagio: that he wanted headlines and wanted to indict "most notably" Democratic officials.

The Justice Dept. responded to DiBiagio's pronouncements by taking away his ability to pull the trigger on political prosecutions. Deputy Attorney General James B. Comey advised DiBiagio that he can't bring a public corruption case without first submitting the proposed indictment to Comey for approval. A former federal prosecutor calls the Justice Dept. rebuke "a major [butt] kicking" that is "highly unusual but well justified."

The very funny blogger TBogg is interviewed by Catch.

Kevin Drum of Political Animal weighs in on the scandalous Florida felon voting list and its ties to the states' Republicans about which we expressed our outrage here. More on the effect of the list in 2000 is here. And don't miss Billmon on Jeb Bush's shenanigans.

Jeanne D'Arc of Body and Soul tells us this is the quiz du jour.

Our "cyber-sis" Avedon Carol at Sideshow describes the hypocrisy of the latest conservative attack on liberals as only she can.

Skippy has some rants on Florida's voting system and on reports that Iraq's prime minister shot six detainees in the head, which he found out about from Holden who has been doing a great job filling in for the journeying Atrios.

Tim at Road to Surfdom writes about the air marshals' concerns over the new dress code imposed by Homeland Security--will it make them stick out like sore thumbs?

Julia at Sysyphus Shrugged reports on a blog fight going on over at World 'O Crap.

Gary Farber at Amygdala has a week's worth of good reading up. On the gay-outing plan. And on the craziness of our locking up crazy kids.

We're on Martha/Kobe/Scott Peterson duty again today, and then out to dinner, so unless TChris pops up, we'll see you tomorrow.

by TChris

A former district attorney who was elected to a judgeship won't be wearing the robe any longer, after entering "no contest" pleas to charges that he molested his 10-year-old daughter at a Hillary Duff concert in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Mark Pazuhanich was still serving as DA when the crime was committed. He was sworn in as a judge on the Monroe Court of Common Pleas about a month later.

[H]e served as judge only a few weeks in a diminished capacity until taking administrative leave in early February. He has continued to draw his $124,000-per-year salary.

Pazuhanich resigned his position on the bench Monday morning, when he entered his pleas. He was placed on probation for ten years.

Be prepared to laugh! This is quite a funny and well produced, bi-partisan spoof on the making of a president.

Update: This link says the servers are jammed. The site says check back later.

Several of our TalkLeft sponsor ads ended today, leaving the space totally free. The "Sponsor" slots on the right side of TalkLeft are the cheapest. We've just lowered the rates for the weekend. If you're interested, go here. (link fixed.)

Also, our second premium ad space is available --on the left side of TL, under the logo. The space is limited to one ad, so act quick. It's now taken for the week of the convention, but it's available now until July 24 and after August 1.

Why isn't anyone covering this? Accenture, the company that made Florida's felony voter list has contributed over $200,000 to Republicans since 2002. (hat tip to Brown Watch.)

In fact, the company's resume is littered with connections to drama that the nation's Republican leadership would rather forget: Enron, Abu Ghraib and mysterious Saudi businessmen.....Last month, some members of Congress expressed concern about the Department of Homeland Security's giving a $10 billion contract to Accenture. They cited Accenture's Bermuda address, which they said was an attempt to dodge U.S. taxes.

Accenture eventually won the contract to design a system to track foreign visitors entering or leaving the United States. Accenture will work on the venture with Titan Corporation, one of the companies whose employees were caught up in the Abu Ghraib prison torture scandal in Iraq.

Update: The transcript of our Washington Post live online chat today on Martha's sentencing is available here.

Bump and Update: Martha gets 5 months in federal custody, five months of home detention. The Judge recommended she serve her time at the federal prison camp in Danbury, CT. She is not contrite. The news is reporting she received a stay pending appeal, but since her lawyers haven't yet filed the Notice of Appeal (they have ten days to do so) we're wondering if the news is confusing release pending appeal with an order for a stay pending a voluntary surrender. We'll keep checking.

What do you think? Did she get off too light or was this a trophy conviction for the Government? In our view, it's the latter.

**********************
Original Post 12:10 a.m.

At 10 am this morning, Martha Stewart learns her fate. We'll be doing the live chat for the Washington Post on the sentencing at 1:00 pm ET. Please join in.

It's expected the Judge will give Martha between 10 and 16 months. We've heard a lot of so-called experts on tv tonight, mostly former prosecutors who are still pro-prosecution, giving a lot of different scenarios. One former prosecutor gleefully said she's going to a federal penitentiary and she's going tomorrow.

Let's be real. If her guideline range is between 10 and 16 months (Zone C of the Federal Sentencing Guidelines,) the minimum term may be satisfied by --

• (1) a sentence of imprisonment; or

• (2) a sentence of imprisonment that includes a term of supervised release with a condition that substitutes community confinement* or home detention (pdf) according to the schedule in subsection (e), provided that at least one-half of the minimum term is satisfied by imprisonment.

So Martha's best case scenario is five months in federal custody, followed by five months of home detention.

by TChris

TalkLeft recently asked whether the Bush administration is hiding detainees at undisclosed locations to prevent them from exercising their right to seek review of their detentions, as charged by the International Committee of the Red Cross. When asked about the secret detentions, Scott McClellan provided these direct and illuminating answers on behalf of the administration:

Q Does the President -- does the United States harbor or hold secret detainees who are not available to the International Red Cross?
MR. McCLELLAN: Actually, this is an issue that came up earlier in the week and I talked about it at that point. When it comes to the International Committee for the Red Cross, we work very closely with them on detainee issues, and we --
Q I have a follow-up.
MR. McCLELLAN: Okay -- we stay in close and regular contact with the Red Cross on all the issues related to detainees. And they do, from time to time, raise issues and we work to address those issues directly --
Q Why don't you answer the question? Do we have secret detainees and is it possible that they could be subjected to the same treatment as in Baghdad prisons?
MR. McCLELLAN: We work to address these issues that the Red Cross raises directly with the Red Cross. And any issues that they have, we respond directly to the --
Q That's not the answer to the question.
MR. McCLELLAN: -- Red Cross. We meet with them on a regular basis at a variety of levels, and we stay in close and constant contact with them. And I really don't have anything else to add to this issue.
Q You don't know whether we have secret detainees --
MR. McCLELLAN: Like I said, Helen, I don't have anything else to add to this issue.
Q Why?
MR. McCLELLAN: Go ahead.

Ed Cone writes about a speech Sy Hersh recently gave to the ACLU.

Seymour Hersh says the US government has videotapes of boys being sodomized at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. "The worst is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking," the reporter told an ACLU convention last week. Hersh says there was "a massive amount of criminal wrongdoing that was covered up at the highest command out there, and higher."

He called the prison scene "a series of massive crimes, criminal activity by the president and the vice president, by this administration anyway…war crimes." The outrages have cost us the support of moderate Arabs, says Hersh. "They see us as a sexually perverse society."

Hersh describes a Pentagon in crisis. The defense department budget is “in incredible chaos,” he says, with large sums of cash missing, including something like $1 billion that was supposed to be in Iraq. ....Hersh described the folks in charge of US policy as "neoconservative cultists" who have taken the government over, and show "how fragile our democracy is."

Cone links to Hersh's speech which is streamedhere.

by TChris

The latest version of Homeland Security's attempt to use computers to assess the security risk of airline passengers (CAPPS II) is dead. CAPPS III might still be on the way.

A department spokeswoman Thursday said she couldn't elaborate on technology issues that hindered CAPPS II, but she did say that the project would be redirected to take into account data privacy concerns. "Homeland Security is still highly committed to replacing the antiquated passenger pre-screening program already in place [known as CAPPS], which Transportation Security Administration inherited," she said. There is no yet timetable for the new project.

The original CAPPS was administered by the airlines. CAPPS II raised concerns about privacy and due process. TalkLeft's coverage of the issue is collected here.

CAPPS II set a dangerous precedent by promising to give the government the power to fight terrorism by sifting Americans into trustworthy and not so trustworthy designations, says Jay Stanley, communications director of the ACLU Technology and Liberty Project. "The way to stop terrorism is through good physical security and reliable intelligence," he says. "It's not effective to sort through hundreds of millions of Americans using computer algorithms."