The following article was submitted to us by the author, Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg of the Medill School of Journalism. We don't normally reprint the work of others, but since it's on a topic we have written about extensively at TalkLeft, we're making an exception. The article is about the upcoming execution of David Clayton Hill in South Carolina.

Hill is scheduled to die March 19, despite a ruling from a federal judge that orders South Carolina to investigate its lethal injection process. One of the drugs that will be used to kill Hill is found inhumane to euthanize animals.

Hill's attorneys are urging people to call the Governor and ask him to stop Hill's execution. The governor's contact information is at the end of the article:

You Wouldn't Do a Dog This Way

South Carolina is pushing forward with the execution of David Clayton Hill, despite an order from a federal judge directing the state to investigate its lethal injection procedures.

Lethal injection, contrary to popular myth, is not a peaceful way to die.

According to Hill, South Carolina does not give inmates enough thiopental, the drug which causes the inmate to lose consciousness. If Mr. Hill is executed on March 19 --as the state wants -- he may remain conscious through the other drugs' effects. This means, he could suffer a heart attack, while suffocating. He will be paralyzed throughout the execution from the thiopental.

The chemical used in lethal injection to induce a heart attack -- pavulon -- is found inhumane to euthanize animals in South Carolina and nineteen other states. Pavulon is banned in South Carolina.

"You wouldn't do a dog this way," said Jerome Nickerson, Hill's attorney in a phone interview. "The state of South Carolina needs to investigate its procedures for lethal injection as the federal court has directed."

by TChris

Paul Minor, a Mississippi lawyer, has been indicted in federal court for an act that the government deems corrupt: guaranteeing and partially paying a $75,000 loan to a judge's former wife. The judge in question, Mississippi Supreme Court Justice Oliver E. Diaz Jr., did not participate in any case involving Minor after the loan was guaranteed, but the government contends that Justice Diaz repaid the favor by joining a unanimous decision that benefitted Minor's father, who was a defendant in a libel case.

Whether or not the government can prove that Minor expected to receive such an attenuated benefit from Justice Diaz, the financial relationship between Minor and Justice Diaz doesn't pass any reasonable smell test. Nonetheless, Minor contends that the government's motive for prosecuting him carries a much ranker stench.

Mr. Minor, a former president of the Mississippi Trial Lawyers Association, contends that the United States attorney here, Dunn Lampton, a Republican, singled him out for prosecution for political reasons, because he is a big contributor to Democratic candidates and a vocal opponent of efforts to limit injury awards.

Minor asserts that Richard Scruggs, a Mississippi plaintiffs' lawyer who happens to be married to the sister of Trent Lott's wife, also guaranteed and paid off a loan to Justice Diaz. The difference between Scruggs and Minor is that Scruggs' law firm had two cases pending before the Mississippi Supreme Court at the time. So why isn't Scruggs being prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney who is so eager to pursue Minor? This is the answer given by Minor's lawyer:

"When the Republican U.S. attorney looks at Republican supporter Mr. Scruggs's actions, he sees them in a way that avoids any criminal overtone. When the same U.S. attorney looks at Democrat Paul Minor's actions, he sees racketeering. This is just not right."

The U.S. Attorney's office argues that Minor is basing his selective prosecution defense on unreliable news reports and "innuendo," although there seems to be a good deal of "innuendo" involved in the charges against Minor given his lack of any direct benefit from Justice Diaz.

If it doesn't derail before then, the case is set for trial in August.

by TChris

Those sneaky French! Just when we learn to order freedom fries, it turns out the French are on our side after all.

France's senior military officer said today that Osama bin Laden had on several occasions narrowly escaped capture by French troops working alongside American forces in Afghanistan, although he conceded that Mr. bin Laden's capture would not in itself suffice to dismantle Al Qaeda.

He said that 200 French special forces troops were participating alongside American forces in Afghanistan in the hunt for Mr. bin Laden. "Our men have not been far," he said. "On several occasions, I even think he slipped out of a net that was well closed."

Will President Bush be suitably chagrined if the French, of all people, capture bin Laden?

by TChris

First the Mayor of New Paltz was charged with a crime for conducting marriage ceremonies for same sex couples (TalkLeft coverage here). Now a district attorney in Kingston, New York has charged two ministers with criminal offenses for marrying thirteen gay couples "in what is believed to be the first time in the United States that clergy members have been prosecuted for performing same-sex ceremonies." So much for separation of church and state.

Unitarian Universalist ministers Kay Greenleaf and Dawn Sangrey were charged with multiple counts of solemnizing a marriage without a license, the same charges leveled against New Paltz Mayor Jason West, who last month drew the state into the widening national debate over same-sex unions.

Each charge could carry up to two years in jail.

Although District Attorney Donald Williams disclaims any desire "to interfere with anyone's right to express their religious beliefs," a less Demagogic mind might think that forcing a minister to preach through the barred windows of a jail cell constitutes a serious infringement of that minister's right to freely exercise her religion.

No physical evidence. No witnesses. A recanted confession. So why is Max Soffar still on death row? Kinky Friedman is on the case. Here's a snippet, go read the whole thing:

For the past 23 years, since confessing to a cold-blooded triple murder at a Houston bowling alley, Max has been at his final station on the way: the Polunsky Unit, in Livingston. But he long ago recanted that confession, and many people, including a number of Houston-area law enforcement officers, think he didn't commit the crime. They say he told the cops what they wanted to hear after three days of interrogation without a lawyer present. At the very least, they say, Max's case is an example of everything that's wrong with the system. In the words of my friend Steve Rambam, who is Max's pro bono private investigator, "I'm not anti-death penalty; I'm just anti-the-wrong-guy-getting-executed." Another observer troubled by Max's case is Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals judge Harold R. DeMoss Jr., who wrote in 2002, after hearing Max's last appeal, "I have lain awake nights agonizing over the enigmas, contradictions, and ambiguities" in the record.

Chief among these Kafka-esque elements is the fact that Max's state-appointed attorney was the late Joe Cannon, who was infamous for sometimes sleeping through his clients' capital murder trials. Cannon managed to stay awake for Max's, but he did not bother to interview the one witness who might have cleared him. There are, incidentally, ten men on death row who were clients of Cannon's. Then there's the evidence—or the total lack of it..... [link via Brian at Ain't No Bad Dude.

by TChris

Camilo Mejia had enough of war. Tired of being used as bait to lure Iraqi fighters into the open, and uncomfortable with the efforts taken by the military to avoid civilian casualties, Mejia made a decision when he returned home on leave last fall. He wasn't going back.

Now, after five months in hiding, Mejia ... aims to become the first Iraq war veteran to publicly challenge the morality and conduct of the conflict. At a time when Americans increasingly hold grave concerns about the bloody war, Mejia intends to seek conscientious objector status to avoid a court-martial.

Soldiers aren't supposed to question orders, but Mejia knew he couldn't live with himself if he continued fighting a war he believed to be unjust. That realization was partially motivated by an order to shoot at Iraqi protestors who, in Mejia's judgment, were too far away to harm troops.

"It was the first time I had fired at a human being," Mejia recalled. "I guess you could say it was my initiation at killing a human being. ... It was part of a general feeling that we had no right to be there, and every killing, whether provoked or not provoked, was unjustified because we had no right to be there."

Although Mejia could face execution for deserting during time of war, his lawyer thinks that extreme outcome is unlikely. He's probably right, as about 600 other soldiers have gone AWOL during home leaves from Iraq, and an administration facing reelection might have a difficult time explaining why it would want to execute more American soldiers than have died in combat.

That doesn't mean that Mejia will be granted conscientious objector status or spared a court martial. A soldier recently convicted of deserting, Kenneth Carter, received a six-month sentence in a Fort Knox prison after his court martial.

Mejia's company commander complains that Mejia is nothing but a "mommy's boy." His view may parallel that of the military establishment. But not everyone agrees with that assessment.

by TChris

"I'm not a reporter, but I play one on TV." That disclosure is missing from videos prepared by the Bush administration that tout the new Medicare law -- videos that are designed to look like, and to substitute for, objective journalism.

The administration provides the videos to local news stations, and helpfully provides a script for the local anchor to read as a lead-in to the video. One script reminds viewers that "President Bush signed into law the first-ever prescription drug benefit for people with Medicare." The script goes on to say "there have been a lot of questions about how the law will help older Americans and people with disabilities. Reporter Karen Ryan helps sort through the details." The video ends with a voice-over that says "In Washington, I'm Karen Ryan reporting."

Except that Karen Ryan isn't a reporter. She's an actor hired by the company that produced the videos for the administration.

Why would the Bush administration want to disguise its "educational" materials about the new Medicare law as the product of objective journalism? Could it be that the videos are transparent efforts to assist the President's reelection campaign?

Several of the videos include pictures of President Bush receiving a standing ovation from a crowd cheering as he signed the Medicare drug-benefit law on Dec. 8.

It's bad enough that the government's number one financial analyst for Medicare was ordered to withhold information about the true cost of the Medicare package to assure its passage by Congress. Now the administration wants seniors to think that unbiased reporters agree that the new law works to their advantage.

But when seniors get their information from sources other than the Bush administration, they come to a different conclusion.

A recent Kaiser Family Foundation survey indicated that only a fraction of the U.S. seniors understood the law, and the more they learned about it, the less they liked it.

Hence the need to mislead seniors into believing that their local news stations have investigated the Medicare changes and have concluded that the President gave seniors a great benefit by pushing for the new law.

by TChris

President Bush was spectacularly unsuccessful in his efforts to recruit foreign governments to join the United States in its plan to invade and occupy Iraq. Now one of the few governments that supported Bush has paid the price, as voters in Spain handed an election victory to the country's Socialist party on Sunday.

Spain's incoming leader Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero said Monday he would probably pull Madrid's troops out of the "disastrous" occupation of Iraq, in a major swing from his predecessor's pro-American foreign policy.

Zapatero said his Socialists' surprise win in Sunday's general election -- overshadowed by the Madrid train bombings that killed 200 people -- was the first consequence of the unpopularity among Spaniards of the Iraq war. "The second will be that the Spanish troops will come back," he told a Spanish radio station. "Mr. Blair and Mr. Bush must do some reflection and self-criticism... you can't organize a war with lies."

by TChris

Military families walked to the Dover Air Force Base Sunday -- the site of the military's largest mortuary -- in the opening leg of a protest march that concludes Monday morning with a six mile hike from Walter Reed Army Medical Center to the White House.

They walked Sunday to mourn those who have died since the beginning of the war in Iraq, to call for an end to the U.S. occupation of Iraq and to protest the Pentagon policy that keeps families and the media from attending the return of remains at Dover's mortuary.

Recent media coverage of violence in Iraq has focused on attacks against Iraqi citizens who further the interests of the United States, but attacks upon American soldiers continue, too often with tragic success.

One American soldier was killed early Sunday when his convoy west of Baghdad was blasted by a roadside explosive. Three soldiers died Saturday when their patrol in southeast Baghdad also fell victim to a homemade bomb.

Those deaths, announced by a military spokesman on Sunday, followed an attack on Saturday with an improvised explosive device and small-arms fire in Tikrit that left two soldiers dead.

by TChris

So which George is in trouble here? Tenet or Bush?

The Senate Intelligence Committee will soon release a report blaming Tenet for the claim that Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons.

The committee report criticizes Tenet and the CIA for consistently seizing on the worst-case scenario of the Iraq threat and overriding the views of intelligence agencies in areas where those agencies had expertise.

Different agencies made conflicting intelligence assessments, but "poor coordination at the top" only contributed to the confusion of policy makers, says the report.

The Bush administration would love to keep the focus on Tenet, and the report furthers that aim by failing to address the administration's complicit demand for any intelligence, however questionable, that served its political needs.

Fortunately, there are people who have longer attention spans than the president, and those people will remember that the administration manipulated intelligence to its own ends. Those people will not stop with the conclusions reached by the Intelligence Committee but will continue to insist that the buck move farther up the chain of command.

This editorial in the Virginian-Pilot, for instance, adds up the evidence and concludes that "hawkish administration officials, intent on invading Iraq, went around Tenet and grasped at any shard of intelligence they could find to bolster their case." One of those hawkish officials, Donald Rumsfeld, put together a "personal intelligence team" that "briefed the National Security Council and Vice President Dick Cheney’s staff, channeling information to the top, without Tenet’s knowledge."

So as much as the administration might like to see Tenet blamed for intelligence failures, blame goes all the way to the top -- to the other George, and to Rumsfeld and Cheney for cutting Tenet out of the loop.

It was just over a year ago that former Illinois Governor George Ryan pardoned all on death row. Now, with new Governor Rod R. Blagojevich, the debate is heating up again:

On one side of the new debate are legislators and prosecutors who say landmark reforms state lawmakers have adopted in recent months mean it is time to begin executions again. On the other side are critics of capital punishment who praise the reforms but say many more must be made before Illinois can be certain it is not executing an innocent person — if that can ever be assured.

The reforms instituted by the Illinois legislature over the past year are good ones. But they have not been in place long enough to fix the broken system. According to Edwin Colfax, executive director of the Illinois Death Penalty Education Project:

"Our big concern is that people see the substantial progress we've had to date and are under the impression that the death penalty has been fixed," Mr. Colfax said. "That would be a tragedy. The reality is that there is such a long way to go. We are not on the cusp of a death penalty system that deserves our confidence."

An investigation is underway in California into the death of Khem Singh, a 72 year-old crippled, Sikh priest from India who died of starvation. After being brutalized by a prison guard, Mr. Singh would not leave his cell for meals or medical visits. Fellow inmates wrote letters and filed complaints about his condition and officials did nothing. His weight dropped to 80 pounds. Now, he is dead.

Prison officials said Friday that they would talk to the inmates and review their letters and complaints as part of a growing investigation into Singh's death. The case coincides with increased scrutiny of California's vast prison system, which is riddled with accusations of brutality, coverups, fraud and poor medical care.

At Corcoran, Singh's condition took a turn for the worse early this year. Some correctional officers went to the prison's medical staff to express their own concerns, according to Romero, but logbooks show that no medical technician, nurse or doctor followed up and treated him in his cell. "Mr. Singh has not left his cell to go to eat — not once," the inmate wrote to Romero in a Feb. 11 letter. "They do not bring him any food. None. I smuggle bread back.... Mr. Singh is gentle, polite. I am ashamed it took me so long to speak out."

The guard who supervised the cellblock — the same one suspected of having assaulted Singh — is alleged to have told another inmate not to bother speaking out on behalf of the starving inmate. "Forget it; he's going to die," the inmate quoted the guard as telling him, according to Romero. A few days later, after collapsing in his cell, Singh died of lung and heart failure caused by starvation.

There's more: