In a three part series, the Boston Herald and Fox 25 are probing the wrongful convictions of defendants in Massachusetts, raising troubling questions about how and why 22 men were imprisoned for crimes they never committed. The series highlights the work of a top Boston homicide detective whose tactics have been slammed by defense lawyers as over the line.

Since 1997 alone, nine innocent black men convicted in Suffolk County have been freed after serving anywhere from four to 30 years behind bars. Throughout the country, 143 innocent suspects have been freed since 1990, but experts say the number of Suffolk County's wrongful convictions is second only to Chicago, which has sent the largest number of innocent men to jail. "Unfortunately, Massachusetts in general has a big problem with wrongful convictions,'' said Aliza B. Kaplan, an Innocence Project attorney. `

To his credit, Boston Mayor Thomas Merino is trying to fast-track a statewide ``compensation fund'' for people wrongfully convicted of major crimes.

This is the state that thinks it can restore the death penalty in a way that will be fair and protect the innocent? We don't think so.

Tim at Road to Surfdom has both versions of a military news article reporting Rumsfeld's reaction to the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal. The first is titled "Rumsfeld Apologizes to Iraqi Victims of Prison Abuse". That was pulled, and replaced with an article titled, "Prison Abuse 'Unacceptable, Un-American', Rumsfeld Says." One difference between the articles is that this sentence in the first article was removed from the second:

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld apologized today to Iraqis abused by American prison guards in Abu Ghraib.

As Tim says, "I guess they really don't want us to get the impression that the Secretary would apologise. So noted."

A new poll released last night shows that an increasing number of voters believe that removing Saddam Hussein from power was not worth the cost, either in dollars or casualties.

The NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll found that 42 percent of registered voters say it was worth the cost to get rid of Saddam and 47 percent felt it was not worth it. An NBC-WSJ poll as recently as March found 50 percent of adults felt it was worth the cost to remove the Iraqi leader....More than half, 55 percent, said they favor withdrawing U.S. troops within 18 months. The number willing to say troops should stay as long as necessary has fallen to 44 percent from 56 percent in January.

[link via Buzzflash]

George Hunsinger, who teaches at the Princeton Theological Seminary, writes about the Meltdown in Iraq:

One year after "Mission Accomplished" was proclaimed by President Bush,
America may have lost the war in Iraq. Insurgency, instability and social
chaos, the familiar problems dogging the occupation, were exacerbated in
April by mutiny, collapsing authority and military deadlock. Then came the
devastating revelations of atrocity - first in the brutal siege of Fallujah,
then in the unspeakable photographs of torture from the Abu Ghraib prison.
The occupation has reached the point of meltdown.

"We have failed," stated retired Gen. William E. Odom, currently director of the Hudson Institute, a pro-administration think-tank. In an interview which rocked the foreign policy establishment, Odom told the Wall Street Journal he had abandoned all hope for success in Iraq. Predicting a radical Islamist regime hostile to the West, one prepared to fund terrorist organizations, he called for the swift withdrawal of U.S. forces. Otherwise Iraqis will be radicalized even further, he warned, risking the destabilization of the entire region.

We wrote about Odom and his advice here.

Carol Marin, writing in the Chicago Tribune, reminds us that mistreatment of prisoners extends beyond Iraq to those in the U.S.. She addresses specifically the torture of suspects by South Side Chicago cops, inflicted to obtain confessions.

From Iraq to Chicago, appalling acts regarding the mistreatment of prisoners are unfolding. This is about the torture of suspects by police officers on the South Side of Chicago to make the suspects confess to a crime. It's a story we should be sick about and one we should have dealt with long ago. We haven't.

That's why Wednesday morning there will be yet another hearing at the Dirksen Federal Building as four pardoned Death Row inmates, Madison Hobley, Aaron Patterson, Stanley Howard and Leroy Orange, continue to wage their long battle for justice. They have filed civil lawsuits against Chicago police and Cook County prosecutors who, to this day, dispute there was ever a pattern and practice of torture at Area 2 by Chicago Police Cmdr. Jon Burge and his men.

The difference between the abuses in Iraq in Chicago? No one took pictures between 1973 and 1991 at the Chicago police station.

Why is the city fighting these cases? Just as in the torture cases in Iraq, isn't there a moral argument here? A crying need for those in command to stand up and take responsibility for what happened under their watch? Until then, everyone keeps paying the price. Those who were tortured, certainly. And a majority of honorable men and women in the Police Department who don't deserve to bear the shame or carry the burden of the Burge years.

The Justice Department is asking Congress to expand its anti-terror powers.

Daniel Bryant, assistant attorney general for legal policy... said Congress should change the definition of "material support or resources" to include virtually any "tangible or intangible" money, property or service except medicine or religious materials. The current law includes a finite list of actions that could be criminal, ranging from financial services to provision of safe houses to making false identification.

The Justice Department also wants lawmakers to expand the scope of terrorism acts covered by the law beyond those that terrorists are believed most likely to commit, such as a chemical weapons attack, to include virtually any act of violence or destruction linked to them.

We don't need to give law enforcement more powers. We need to rein them in. We need the Safe Act to correct the flaws in the Patriot Act. We agree with the critics who say:

It's not just Bush that is mad at Rumsfeld. So is Congress. And Rumsfeld will testify on Friday before "a hornet's nest of angry lawmakers."

Republican and Democratic lawmakers said Wednesday they were angry at lax oversight at the prison, a failure of the Pentagon to be more aggressive in dealing with the charges and that fact that the issue was not brought to their attention before the damning pictures were shown on TV.

"I think we ought to raze that prison. I think we ought to take it down. I think it has become a symbol of Saddam Hussein but also of U.S. mistakes and a very deplorable situation," said U.S. Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

Reminds us of We Can Be Together from Volunteers by the Jefferson Airplane: ("Up against the wall motherf**er, tear down the walls."

In a first for his Administration, President Bush let it be known that he was upset with Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld over the release of the Iraqi prisoner photos. Bush claims he learned about them on 60 Minutes II, just like the rest of us.

Another White House official said, "The president was not satisfied or happy about the way he was informed about the pictures, and he did talk to Secretary Rumsfeld about it." The disclosure of the dressing-down of the combative Mr. Rumsfeld was the first time that Mr. Bush has allowed his displeasure with a senior member of his administration to be made public. It also exposed the fault lines in Mr. Bush's inner circle that have deepened with the violence and political chaos in American-occupied Iraq.

Will Rumsfeld resign? Doubtful.

Despite the behind-the-scenes criticism of Mr. Rumsfeld, Mr. Bush insisted that the defense secretary still had his full support. "Of course I've got confidence in the secretary of defense," Mr. Bush said in an interview with Al Hurra, an Arab television network.

So the "dressing-down" was just a cheap soundbite.

On a related note, apparently many of the soldiers responsible for the abuse are from Appalachia. Their unit is the 372nd Military Police Company.

Specialist Charles A. Graner Jr. is a guard at one of Pennsylvania's most heavily secured death row prisons, accused by his former wife of violent behavior. Pfc. Lynndie R. England was married and divorced before she was 21, worked at a chicken-processing plant in West Virginia and wanted to attend college to become a storm-chasing meteorologist. And Staff Sgt. Ivan Frederick, another prison guard, planned to quit the Army Reserve this year to spend more time fishing near his rural home in central Virginia. But he did not get out soon enough.

Here's what court records show about the man entrusted with guarding death row and Iraqi prisoners:

Specialist Graner was involved in a bitter divorce. In court papers, his wife, Staci, accused him of beating her, threatening her with guns, stalking her after they separated in 1997 and breaking into her home. Since 1997, local judges have issued at least three orders of protection against him, records show.

U.S. soldiers have been accused of abusing an elderly Iraqi woman:

U.S. soldiers who detained an elderly Iraqi woman last year placed a harness on her, made her crawl on all fours and rode her like a donkey, Prime Minister Tony Blair 's personal human rights envoy to Iraq said Wednesday.

Drudge says he is developing another story alleging that the CIA is being probed in the suspicious deaths of three detainees.

Via Drudge--the Washington Post is about to release some new photos of U.S. soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners of war. Drudge says:

The pictures obtained by The Post include shots of soldiers simulating sexually explicit acts with one another and shots of a cow being skinned and gutted and soldiers posing with its severed head. There are also dozens of pictures of a cat's severed head....Other photographs show wounded men and dead bodies. In one, a dead man is lying in the back of a truck, his shirt, face and left arm covered in blood. His right arm is missing. Another photograph shows a dead body, gray and decomposing. A young soldier is leaning over the corpse, smiling broadly and giving the "thumbs-up" sign.

And in another picture a young woman lifts her shirt, exposing her breasts. She is wearing a white band with numbers on her wrist, but it is unclear if she is a prisoner. Another photograph of a naked man with a dark hood over his head, handcuffed to a cell door. And another of a naked man handcuffed to a bunk bed, his arms splayed so wide that his back is arched... A picture shows a soldier holding a leash tied around a naked man's neck in an Iraqi prison....

That's SPC Lynndie England in the photo with the soldier on the leash. And in other photos with naked Iraqi prisoners. Her family's reaction: She's being picked on. She was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. The family is even attacking President Bush:

Goin and Klinestiver said the family is furious with the comments of President Bush, who said he was "disgusted" by the photographs. "He doesn't know what these guys are going through," Klinestiver said. Referring to Bush's limited National Guard service during the Vietnam War, he added, "How can you make decisions for our military unless you've served yourself?"

Come on, you don't have to go to war to know what human decency means.

Update: You can view the new Washington Post photos here. [link now fixed]

The Judge in the Martha Stewart case has denied her motion for new trial based upon a juror's false answers to questions during the jury selection process. We think that juror had it out for Martha from the get-go.

Update: 2/20/05: Hunter Thompson died tonight. Our tribute to him is here.

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Original Post

We've been writing about Hunter Thompson covering Lisl Auman's unjust felony murder conviction for a few years--as well as covering Lisl's case on our own. Lisl was in police custody at the time of the crime, yet under the felony-murder rule she was sentenced to life in prison without parole. As Hunter wrote:

It is no small trick to get a "Convicted cop-killer" out of prison -- but it will be a little easier in this case, because Lisl no more killed a cop than I did. She was handcuffed in the backseat of a Denver Police car when the cop was murdered in cold blood by a vicious skinhead who then shot himself in the head & left the D.A. with nobody to punish for the murder -- except Lisl.

Go out and get the June issue of Vanity Fair. Our's came today. Hunter has written a huge article on Lisl in which he demonizes the Denver Police Department for their conduct in the case. He spares no one. Unfortunately, Vanity Fair articles are not on line.

Meanwhile, Lisl's case will be decided this summer by the Colorado Supreme Court which will decide whether Lisl's arrest by police precluded her liability for felony murder. For more information, and ways to help, go to her website, Lisl.com.