by TChris

It's no secret that the U.S. has been imprisoning people in Iraq without adequate cause to justify the detentions. The sudden drive to release prisoners after the embarrassment of Abu Ghraib demonstrates that many detainees should never have been taken into custody, or should have been released promptly.

Maj. Gen. John Ryder recognized that problem last fall, when he completed a report concluding that hundreds of Iraqi prisoners were being held in Abu Ghraib "despite a lack of evidence that they posed a security threat to American forces."

The unpublished report ... reflects what other senior Army officers have described as a deep concern among some American officers and officials in Iraq over the refusal of top American commanders in Baghdad to authorize the release of so-called security prisoners.

General Ryder, the Army's provost marshal, reported that some Iraqis had been held for several months for nothing more than expressing "displeasure or ill will" toward the American occupying forces. The Nov. 5 report said the process for deciding which arrested Iraqis posed security risks justifying imprisonment, and for deciding when to release them, violated the Pentagon's own policies. It also said the conditions in which they were held sometimes violated the Geneva Conventions.

Ryder gave his report to Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the top American commander in Iraq, but Sanchez apparently deferred to the desire of other officers to ignore international law by keeping the prisoners locked up.

Daily Kos has initiated a new project, the DKospedia.

....a collaborative project of the DailyKos community to build a political encyclopedia. The dKosopedia effort was started in April of 2004 and currently consists of 616 articles. Please see our Policies before contributing. Articles are written from a left/progressive/liberal/Democratic point of view while also fairly acknowledging other sides' take.

Readers are invited to contribute original material.

by TChris

It's time for fingerprint experts across the country to start sweating. Until now, jurors have been accustomed to thinking that any testimony given by a fingerprint expert is unassailable. Defense lawyers may find jurors more receptive to attacks on the accuracy of fingerprint identifications after the FBI called the connection between a partial print and Brandon Mayfield "absolutely incontrovertible" and a "bingo match."

[W]hen three top experts manage to blow such an important identification, our longstanding faith in fingerprints must be questioned. Nor is this the only such mistake to come to light in recent months. In January a Massachusetts conviction was overturned when the fingerprint identification, the cornerstone of the case, was shown to be erroneous.

Fingerprint evidence has always depended more on faith than science.

We lack good evidence about how often examiners make mistakes, nor is there a consensus about how to determine what counts as a match. Our current approach to fingerprint evidence, in which experts claim 100 percent confidence in any match, is dangerously flawed and risks causing miscarriages of justice.

Full confidence is impossible to achieve, but it sure sounds good in court. It's time for judges to start questioning the nearly automatic admissibility of fingerprint evidence, as one judge tried to do before changing his mind.

More TalkLeft coverage of fingerprint issues here.

by TChris

Once again, this time in Utah, zero tolerance equals zero thinking:

Because of a zero-tolerance drug policy, a 13-year-old boy has been suspended from school for 45 days for giving a cousin a cold pill - even though it had been prescribed for both children.

Do school administrators seriously believe that denying children access to their prescription medications prevents drug abuse? Zero tolerance policies rarely advance their stated goals, but they make life easier for administrators by relieving them of the burden of using good judgment. It's time to remind public employees that they're getting paid to think, not to enact mindless zero tolerance policies.

by TChris

TalkLeft has written (here and here) about the reasons to oppose the nomination of William Haynes to a seat on the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. People For the American Way has a statement you can sign urging the Senate to reject Haynes' nomination. It's an easy way to make your voice heard.

by TChris

The Mayor of Maple Park, Illinois was arrested last night in a gambling raid conducted by State Police at D.J.'s Tavern West. The Mayor was in good company: Maple Park's chief of police was also arrested.

by TChris

Is the White House melting down?

For months now, the same administration whose members once prided themselves on never contradicting one another in public has been riven by conflicting pronouncements. Senior officials keep missing opportunities to keep their signals straight, prompting cases of vicious backbiting that one senior member of Mr. Bush's national security staff said with disgust the other day "make us sound like Democrats.''

If "some of us sound like Democrats" means "some of us are telling the truth," more power to them. Maybe the White House can't stay on message because the message is so often false or nonexistent.

Even President Bush -- who likes to criticize John Kerry for "flip-flopping" -- has difficulty staying on message, or figuring out what the message is, as evidenced by his varying and indecisive descriptions of the degree of sovereignty Iraq will enjoy after June 30.

It has all sown such confusion that a European foreign minister, asked on a recent visit what he thought of the latest administration plan for the handover, smiled and responded, "Last week's or this week's?''

The linked article recaps some of the administration's internal disagreements and external flip-flops, then asks: "how did an administration that made an art form of singing from the hymnal suddenly lose its rhythm?"

by TChris

The death of Pat Tillman in Afghanistan made headlines by virtue of his celebrity: Tillman gave up a $3.6 million contract with the Arizona Cardinals to enlist in the Army after 9/11. It's making headlines again because the Army admits he was probably killed by friendly fire.

by TChris

Josh Connole thinks the FBI viewed him as a suspect in an arson at a Chevrolet-Hummer dealership in West Covina, California because of his liberal politics. West Covina police arrested Connole at the direction of the FBI. He was detained for four days. A Caltech graduate student has since been arrested as a suspect in the crime.

Although the City of West Covina maintains that its officers did nothing wrong, the City paid Connole $20,000 to settle his false arrest lawsuit. Now Connole plans to sue the FBI. He's angry that he was labeled an "environmental terrorist."

Why did the FBI issue a warrant for Connole? Connole is described as "an outspoken environmentalist and antiwar activist who matched the general description of one of two men caught on a security videotape at one of the dealerships." Large numbers of people match "general descriptions," so it's difficult to believe that Connole's politics didn't motivate the FBI to view him as a suspect.

by TChris

A patent attorney took home $5 million after winning the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas, beating out a math and economics major in the final round. Not a bad return on the $10,000 entry fee, and way more fun than patent law.

Isabel Hilton, a visiting professor at Harvard, writing in The Guardian, explains why Britain should refuse to extradite Abu Hamza.

...the measure of a legal system's virtue does not rest on how it treats lovable innocents, but on how it tests the evidence against those whom public opinion is ready to condemn. Thus far, the British authorities clearly found Abu Hamza guilty of terminal unlikeability. They had not, however, charged him with anything more. Now a British court must decide on his extradition to the US. There are many reasons for extreme caution.

In a highly unusual decision, set forth in a 45-page unanimous opinion, the Arizona Supreme Court upheld a recommendation for disbarment of the state's most "successful" capital homicide prosecutor for suborning and exploiting known perjury.

The use of false testimony in the trial of two men accused in a 1992 triple-slaying at a market in Tucson "could not have been more harmful to the justice system," wrote Justice Michael D. Ryan for the unanimous court. "A prosecutor who deliberately presents false testimony, especially in a capital case, has caused incalculable injury to the integrity of the legal profession and the justice system."

[Kenneth] Peasley was admitted to the state bar in 1974 and conducted about 250 felony cases, 140 of which were homicides, the court said. Sixty of the cases were capital murder trials. In a ruling overturning the conviction of one of the defendants in 2002, the Supreme Court said Peasley intentionally deceived the jury to paper over weaknesses in his case.

[hat tip to Peter Goldberger, who emails that apparently some of Peasley's victims were executed.]