by TChris

Zero tolerance policies are great for public employees, who can follow them while doing zero thinking. Highland Park, Texas has zero tolerance of people who don't pay their traffic tickets -- they all get arrested, no matter how silly the arrest might be.

When [the police] found that 97-year-old Harriette "Dolly" Kelton had an outstanding warrant for failing to pay a traffic ticket, they handcuffed her, put her in the squad car and hauled her to jail.

Dolly's son notes that his mother is a tad forgetful, an understandable infirmity in a person who has nearly reached the century mark. A reasonable officer would have reminded Dolly that she needed to pay the ticket. Instead, the police wasted time and resources taking her into custody and processing her into the jail. The cost in manpower undoubtedly exceeded the amount of the unpaid fine, making this a poor investment for taxpayers, apart from creating a public perception that the Highland Park police are too dim-witted to exercise discretion or common sense.

The Nashville Tenessean reports:

Defense lawyers to huddle

The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers is meeting this week in Nashville to discuss the difficulties of defending clients accused of rape, murder and other heinous crimes.

Attorneys from around the nation will gather at Loews Vanderbilt Hotel for the seminar, ''In Their Defense: Representing the Client Everyone Loves to Hate.''

Criminal defense attorney Mark Geragos, who represents Scott Peterson and has defended actress Winona Ryder and, until recently, pop star Michael Jackson, is scheduled to speak at a luncheon.

The seminar begins tomorrow and runs through Saturday.

The cost of the seminar for nonmembers of NACDL is $520. Attorneys affiliated with state criminal defense lawyer associations of Tennessee, Kentucky, North Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi and Missouri get in for $295. The seminar is free for law students. For more information call 202-872-8600 or log onto www.nacdl.org/meetings.

We'll be there starting tomorrow. If you're a defense lawyer who's never been to an NACDL meeting, we highly recommend it.

Last month, when writing about the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals decision holding that South Carolina's "Choose Life" license plates violated the First Amendment, we opined:

We have a simple solution. Allow "Choose Life" license plates, provided they include the phrase "End the Death Penalty."

We're pleased to report that a growing number of Catholics are beginning to question the support for one, but not the other:

The Florida Senate has passed a bill raising the minimum age for the death penalty to 18. Currently, the state has no minimum.

Capital punishment would be reserved for murderers 18 or older when committing their crime under the bill (SB 224) sponsored by Sen. Victor Crist, R-Tampa. No Florida law regulates how old a criminal must be to receive the death penalty, though the standard in case law is for those 18 and older.

Similar laws have passed in Wyoming and North Dakota. In New Hampshire, the legislature passed the bill but Gov. Craig Benson has said he will veto it.

Unfortunately, there may not be enough time left in Florida's legislative session to get the bill passed by the House and enacted into law. On the other hand, failure to pass it could put Florida's death penalty law for adults in jeopardy:

Driving the measure is a U.S. Supreme Court case that will determine the constitutionality of executing juveniles. If the high court rules against it, Florida's capital punishment laws, which make no separate provisions for minors, would be thrown out.

The bill is sponsored by Sen. Victor Crist, R-Tampa, who has introduced it every year for the past five years.

The Public Integrity Section of the Department of Justice will conduct an investigation of Attorney General John Ashcroft's alleged campaign finance irregularities:

The Justice Department's Public Integrity Section is reviewing allegations that Attorney General John D. Ashcroft may have violated federal campaign finance and disclosure laws based on information developed by the Federal Election Commission. The Public Integrity Section is responsible for determining whether allegations merit investigation as potential criminal violations of campaign finance and disclosure laws and for making recommendations as to whether a special counsel would be needed when a potential conflict of interest with senior Justice officials exists.

At issue is the valuable campaign fundraising list of then-Sen. Ashcroft. He had claimed ownership of the fundraising list during an FEC inquiry, but had not reported it as an asset on his Senate or Justice Department financial disclosure statements.

Jerome at MyDD is covering the Pennsylvania primaries. Republican Senator Arlen Specter has a comfortable lead (52% to 48%) over challenger Toomey with 73% reporting. You can follow the votes here.

Bush backed Specter. In our view, Specter is better than Toomey, but a Democrat would be better than either one:

Specter is in line for the chairmanship of the Judiciary Committee next year _ a prospect that scares conservatives still smarting over his 1987 vote thwarting the Supreme Court nomination of Robert H. Bork.

....Toomey, a three-term lawmaker, is a fiscal conservative, opposes abortion rights and has voted against an increase in the minimum wage and background checks for firearm purchasers at gun shows.

Specter will face Democrat Joe Hoeffel, a Congressman from Philly's suburbs.

Please contribute to Hoeffel here. Here's one reason you should:

American foreign policy should reflect the American ideals of social justice, human rights and personal liberty. And if we must go to war, we must do so with the support of our allies and the United Nations, with a plan to keep our troops safe and a plan to bring our kids home.” - Joe Hoeffel

Atrios sees it one way, Unfair Witness sees it another. The issue: The increasing number of soldiers whose injuries cause permanent brain damage, blindness and paralysis. Heads up: This is one seriously depressing topic.

Atrios:

I really hope Kerry gets out in front of this and proposes massive increases in VA funds. You can have my goddamn tax cut back. I'd rather pay out the money that way and get some quality care for these people than throw it into their change cups a few years from now.

Unfair Witness:

The real solution to this problem is to get those Americans out of Iraq, not to throw money at yet another government program. Besides, if you want the best of care for these broken people why would you send them to a shabby hospital system like the VA anyway? Why throw money at the VA when there are thousands of state of the art hospitals all over the US? Let them go to real doctors at real hospitals, not government facilities which are all run as efficiently as Amtrak. Better yet, bring them home before any more get hurt.

California has declared an emergency at five prisons due to an upsurge in maximum security level prisoners:

California has declared a "state of emergency" in five of its 32 prisons because of an unexpected influx of inmates who have committed serious crimes, officials said on Tuesday. The decision, effective April 1 but only made public in a Los Angeles Times article on Tuesday, allows prison officials to put three inmates into cells usually used by two and suspends other rules for an open-ended but temporary period.

Perhaps if the state incarcerated fewer non-violent felony offenders, they would have more staff and resources available for those who are truly dangerous. The LA Times has more.

Update: Mark Kleiman has more:

Imprisoning people who need to be there is highly cost-effective crime control. But the voters can't repeal the law of diminishing returns. The larger the prison system, the lower the personal crime rate of the marginal prisoner.

Doubling the number of prisoners between 1980 and 1989 was probably a good investment in crime control, even accounting for the suffering of the prisoners and their intimates. Doubling it again between 1989 and today almost certainly wasn't worth it. Continuing to ratchet up the prison headcount as crime rates fall is madness.

by TChris

President Bush doesn't think Americans should see the consequences of the war in Iraq, particularly the flag-draped coffins waiting to be flown back home. (TalkLeft has one photo here with links to the rest.) As Peabody award winner Bill Gallagher observes: "The truth is the president's torturer, and any image that challenges his arrogant fantasies must be stopped."

Truth will surely torture the President Friday night, when ABC's Nightline will devote its entire program to reading the names of the war dead while showing their photographs. The executive producer of the program hopes that this effort to honor the sacrifices our soldiers have made (as the President asked us all to do) will cause viewers to "take some time to reflect on the price that these men and women have paid in our names."

Is Government spying on weblogs around the corner? This article says maybe. [hat tip to Big Tex]

The Washington Post today opines on the defeat of the Victim's Rights Amendment to the Constitution, and the (in our view) unwise provision contained in the Senate's new Victim's Rights legislation that would allow victims to go to federal appeals courts to enforce their rights under the law:

A constitutional amendment on this subject was never necessary -- unless, that is, the goal was to diminish protections for the accused in criminal trials. Congress can provide for victims anything that doesn't infringe upon defendants' trial rights, using its normal legislative powers. The new bill would guarantee them the right in federal cases to notice of public proceedings, to be protected from the accused, to attend proceedings, to confer with prosecutors, to receive restitution from the perpetrator and to be otherwise treated "with fairness and with respect for the victim's dignity and privacy." Such protections are actually not new; current law is, broadly speaking, similar. What is new is that the law would have an enforcement mechanism: It would allow victims to go to federal appeals courts to force trial judges who ignore their rights to respect them.

This is a potentially troubling provision; it will probably -- particularly at first -- spawn a great deal of litigation as victims seek to intervene in pending criminal cases, prosecutors seek to preserve their own latitude to try cases in ways that best serve the government's interests, and defendants seek to ensure that their constitutional rights are not compromised. Granting victims standing in court whenever they feel their "dignity and privacy" have been disregarded could prove troublesome for prosecutors.

But at least the Senate, by writing these rules into a statute instead of into the Constitution, has preserved the critical principle that the rights of defendants -- whose liberty the state is seeking to take away -- must trump whatever accommodations the government offers to victims, in the event that the two cannot be reconciled. The statutory route lets Congress tinker further if the balance proves imperfect, and it largely avoids compromising the fairness of trials.

As Gary of Amygdala writes, ordering a pizza may get you in hot water with the government:

It's dinnertime, and you're hungry and tired, so you pick up the phone and order your favorite pizza. But you might have just landed yourself a lot more than pepperoni and cheese. If you owe fines or fees to the courts, that phone call may have provided the link the state needed to track you down and make you pay. That's one of the strategies of firms such as a company being hired by the Missouri Office of State Courts Administrator to handle its fine and debt collections.

David Coplen, the state office's budget director, said he discovered that pizza delivery lists are one of the best sources such companies use to locate people....A sampling in January of just three of Missouri's 114 counties found about $2 million owed to courts by people whose Social Security numbers were known, Coplen said. That finding suggests courts statewide could reap significant revenue once Dallas-based ACS Inc. gets to work this month pursuing people using phone numbers and addresses.