Cheers for the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals for throwing out a 25 year to life sentence for a man whose third strike was a shoplifting offense. The Court said the sentence was cruel and unusual punishment.

Ruling 2-1, a panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the 25-year term handed to a California man convicted of stealing a $199 VCR violated the Eighth Amendment constitutional ban on cruel-and-unusual punishment. The appellate court said the punishment did not fit the crime even though the Supreme Court last year upheld the same sentences for two California shoplifters. The appeals court said the life sentence was unjust and more severe than a sentence for "murder, manslaughter or rape." The San Francisco-based appeals court said the Supreme Court's precedent did not apply to every third-strike defendant convicted of a felony.

Ralph Nader today called for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq within six months. He has a three part plan:

He said he would create an international peacekeeping force under United Nations auspices, promote Iraqi self-rule through independent elections and provide humanitarian aid to stabilize the country....."The key is this," Nader told reporters: "How do you separate the mainstream Iraqis from the insurgents when the mainstream Iraqis now are increasingly opposed to our presence there and increasingly, quietly or otherwise, supporting the insurgents? "The way you do it is you declare you are getting out."

The longtime consumer advocate said that the international peacekeeping force he advocated would be drawn from neutral nations and from Islamic countries. Nader said the election process should be carried out at the same time as the six-month withdrawal and done under international supervision.

In other Iraq news, the BBC is reporting Honduras has announced it will withdraw its troops from Iraq. Reuters report on Honduras is here. And two U.S. soldiers have left their units and are seeking asylum in Canada.

EditorandPublisher.com has announced that an important memo on Iraq will be released Tuesday:

In an unusual move for the organization, the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies (AAN) will release what it promises will be a bombshell article related to the Iraq conflict at 10 a.m. Eastern Standard Time on Tuesday. ....The 3,000-word story, embargoed until Tuesday but obtained by E&P today, is based on a "closely held" memo purportedly written by a U.S. government official detailed to the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). It was provided to writer Jason Vest by "a Western intelligence official." The memo offers a candid assessment of Iraq's bleak future -- as a country trapped in corruption and dysfunction -- and portrays a CPA cut off from the Iraqi people after a "year's worth of serious errors." The article is titled, "Fables of Reconstruction," with a subhed, "A Coalition memo reveals that even true believers see the seeds of civil war in the occupation of Iraq."

This is very big news. For background, go here.

Secret Service reports in 1995 state the agency had a video showing the Ryder truck pulling up to the federal building in OKC minutes before the bomb exploded --and that it depicts the "suspects" exiting the vehicle. Up until now, the Government has always claimed McVeigh was alone in the truck. Federal prosecutors and agents say they didn't know about the video.

The article has much more on evidence the Secret Service didn't disclose. If this is true, we hope the Judge in the Terry Nichols trial follows through with his promise to dismiss the case against Nichols, with prejudice.

Today is the 9th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing.

Update: You can view the OKC documents obtained by the AP here (pdf.)

From the new issue of New York Magazine's intelligencer column--Condi's slip:

A pressing issue of dinner-party etiquette is vexing Washington, according to a story now making the D.C. rounds: How should you react when your guest, in this case national-security adviser Condoleezza Rice, makes a poignant faux pas? At a recent dinner party hosted by New York Times D.C. bureau chief Philip Taubman and his wife, Times reporter Felicity Barringer, and attended by Arthur Sulzberger Jr., Maureen Dowd, Steven Weisman, and Elisabeth Bumiller, Rice was reportedly overheard saying, “As I was telling my husb—” and then stopping herself abruptly, before saying, “As I was telling President Bush.” Jaws dropped, but a guest says the slip by the unmarried politician, who spends weekends with the president and his wife, seemed more psychologically telling than incriminating. Nobody thinks Bush and Rice are actually an item. A National Security Council spokesman laughed and said, “No comment.”

[link via Wonkette, of course]

Update : Via Atrios, we just can't resist:

Following last week's article in the Charlotte Observer that prominently featured TalkLeft, this weekend's Washington Post reports on the increased number of political candidates who are placing ads on weblogs.

Premium and Regular blogads on TalkLeft are available and a terrific way to cost-effectively reach thousands of politically savvy readers.

Two years ago, in Ring v. Arizona, the Supreme Court said juries, not judges, must decide the factual basis for imposition of the death penalty. Today, the Supreme Court hears a case in which the question is whether that decision should be retroactive. Scotus Blog profiles the case here. We last wrote about the case here. Today's AP article is here.

Update: Here is a news article on today's oral argument.

Update: Dalia Lathwick of Slate, here on the case which she writes is about "the lusty lawyer, the hangman and the pot-smoking judge--she envisions Uma Thurman and Ben Affleck in the movie.

Last week we wrote about KDrink, a new Peruvian beverage which provides a buzz from the coca leaf:

In need of a little pick-me-up? Head on down to Peru and hit the grocery stores, where you'll find a new kind of iced tea drink--KDrink--with a formula made from coca leaves, the prime ingredient in cocaine.... Silvia Dongo, a pharmaceutical chemist who helped develop Kdrink, says the beverage provides energy from its 15 vitamins and minerals, 12 amino acids and 14 to 16 alkaloids that are found naturally in coca leaves. "Drinking coca beverages is a way to seek a natural and healthy stimulation," she says.

We said, "Sounds no different than Red Bull to us, but somehow, we think Drug Czar John Walters and AG Ashcroft will find a way to keep it from coming to America. "

Today we received an e-mail from Royal Food and Drink Co. in Peru, owner and maker of KDrink, with a request we publish it. We're happy to oblige.

A new study from the University of Michigan, to be presented Friday at a defense lawyer conference in Austin, TX, has examined 328 cases of wrongful conviction, and concluded that there are thousands falsely imprisoned today in America's jails:

A comprehensive study of 328 criminal cases over the past 15 years in which the convicted person was exonerated suggests that there are thousands of innocent people in prison today. Almost all the exonerations were in murder and rape cases, and that implies, according to the study, that many innocent people have been convicted of less serious crimes. But the study says they benefited from neither the scrutiny that murder cases receive nor from the DNA evidence that can categorically establish the innocence of people convicted of rape.

Here are the numbers:

The Los Angeles Times reports that Bush is losing ground with voters of rural areas:

....cracks have surfaced in President Bush's once-solid rural constituency. From places like Sherman County to Montcalm County, Mich., and Mahoning County, Ohio, some Republicans are so concerned about crop prices and high unemployment that they're considering voting Democratic for the first time.

Spain's new Prime Minister, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, has announced the withdrawal of Spanish troops from Iraq--as soon as possible:

A day after he was sworn in, Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero said he did not believe the United Nations would assume responsibility for Iraq after the U.S.-led occupation formally ends June 30 -- his criterion for allowing the troops to stay. "More than anything, this decision reflects my desire to keep the promise I made to the Spanish people more than a year ago," said Zapatero, whose Socialist party came to power after general elections on March 14. "Driven by the deepest democratic convictions, the government does not want to, cannot and will not act against or behind the backs of the will of the Spanish people."

9/11 Commission member and former Department of Justice official Jamie Gorelick repudiates John Ashcroft's testimony of last week in today's Washington Post:

At last week's hearing, Attorney General John Ashcroft, facing criticism, asserted that "the single greatest structural cause for September 11 was the wall that segregated criminal investigators and intelligence agents" and that I built that wall through a March 1995 memo. This is simply not true.

First, I did not invent the "wall," which is not a wall but a set of procedures implementing a 1978 statute (the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA) and federal court decisions interpreting it. In a nutshell, that law, as the courts read it, said intelligence investigators could conduct electronic surveillance in the United States against foreign targets under a more lenient standard than is required in ordinary criminal cases, but only if the "primary purpose" of the surveillance were foreign intelligence rather than a criminal prosecution.