As we said yesterday:

We can't thank TChris enough--he did such an outstanding job of blogging here this week, what a great writer he is. TChris, thanks, and check your mail in a few days for a nice present from us.

U.S. Marines are bringing a new weapon to Iraq--one that can deafen and cause cellular damage.

Marines arriving in Iraq this month as part of a massive troop rotation will bring with them a high-tech weapon never before used in combat — or in peacekeeping. The device is a powerful megaphone the size of a satellite dish that can deliver recorded warnings in Arabic and, on command, emit a piercing tone so excruciating to humans, its boosters say, that it causes crowds to disperse, clears buildings and repels intruders.

"[For] most people, even if they plug their ears, [the device] will produce the equivalent of an instant migraine," says Woody Norris, chairman of American Technology Corp., the San Diego firm that produces the weapon. "It will knock [some people] on their knees."

American Technology says its new product "is designed to determine intent, change behavior and support various rules of engagement." The company is careful in its public relations not to refer to the megaphone as a weapon, or to dwell on the debilitating pain American forces will be able to deliver with it. The military has been equally reticent on the subject.

The new megaphone being deployed to Iraq can operate at 145 decibels at 300 yards, according to American Technology, well above the normal threshold for pain. The company posits a scenario in which Al Qaeda terrorists would run screaming from caves after being subjected to a blast of high-decibel sound from the devices, their hands covering their ears. But in Baghdad or other Iraqi towns, where there are crowds and buildings, the sick and elderly, as well as children, are likely to be in the weapon's range.

Military analyst William Arkin asks, shouldn't there be a discussion about this new weapon before it's deployed?

Is actual combat in a foreign country the appropriate place to test a new weapon? Apparently, we are about to find out.

[comments now closed]

The new issue of Newsweek has several articles on Martha Stewart's conviction. One discloses that Martha turned down two deals , including one in April, 2003 which would have allowed for, but not guaranteed, a non-jail sentence.

Had she admitted wrongdoing in early 2002, she could have gotten off with a $200,000 fine and no jail time. And NEWSWEEK has learned that the Feds gave Martha another opportunity to avoid prison. Federal prosecutors offered Martha a deal last April to cop to one count of making a false statement, say several sources familiar with the offer. She would have received probation and continued working at her company, they say. But Martha refused to plead guilty to a felony, and a defense source says the Feds couldn't guarantee she'd stay out of jail.

Police now speculate that former federal prosecutor Jonathan Luna, whose mysterious death three months ago has never been explained, may have killed himself. We don't see it. Not with 36 superficial stab wounds and Luna found face down in a creek. Some experts say the number of wounds don't rule out suicide, they could be "hesitation wounds."

We think the investigation got botched along the way. Why? How many times does this happen in a federal murder investigation?

When an unidentified female FBI agent was found to have "referred several cases to Luna" for prosecution she was "questioned about her private life," "ordered to turn over her private computer for a search" and was "asked if she had been having an affair" with Luna. The agent "denied the implication" and "protested the questioning." FBI headquarters now admits that interrogation was "wrong," and may have been prompted by "personal" animosities on the part of supervisory agents. The "potentially inappropriate behavior" is now under internal investigation, according to a bureau spokesman.

The Luna homicide had been under the direction of former acting Special Agent in Charge Jennifer Love....Now, a senior agent working for Love - and possibly Love herself - appear to be the subject of the internal FBI probe.

Then there's this unresolved angle:

As the FBI looked into Luna's background and financial situation after his death, agents reopened a probe into $36,000 in missing evidence in a bank robbery case that Luna prosecuted in September 2002. As the trial ended, authorities discovered that the money had vanished while being transported from the courtroom to a storage area. The FBI investigated the disappearance, but the case is unsolved.

Luna left behind a wife, children and parents. We think the investigation should continue--it should not get shut down as a suicide without more evidence than that disclosed to date.

The former prosecutors and white-collar lawyers interviewed for this article predict that Martha Stewart's guidelines will be 10 to 16 months--a level 12, which is in Zone C of the Federal Sentencing Guidelines. Here's how we initially calculate Martha's guidelines:

Presidential brother Neil Bush got remarried Saturday night. There were some notable absentees: The President, Florida Governor and other brother Jeb Bush; and Neil Bush's eldest daughter, Lauren Bush.

by TChris

A.M. was eleven years old in 1993 when Anna Gilvis, 84, was murdered in her Chicago apartment.

None of the boy's fingerprints were found in the home and a bloody palm print and a bloody shoe print could not be matched to the boy. No physical evidence linked him to the crime.

A.M. was charged with the murder a year later even though a blood trail suggested the 173-pound victim had been dragged from the kitchen to the bathroom. The boy was about 5 foot 1 and weighed 88 pounds at the time.

With no physical evidence connecting A.M. to a crime he probably couldn't have committed, why was he charged? Because he confessed, or so said Chicago Detective James Cassidy.

According to A.M., Cassidy yelled and swore at him, then promised that he could go home to his brother's birthday party if he would just tell the truth. Cassidy claimed that A.M. wasn't in custody, even though he was questioned in a police interrogation room, and that A.M. "spontaneously confessed" during the questioning.

The Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit -- ordinarily no friend to the accused -- concluded that an eleven year old with no prior criminal justice experience is "in custody" when he's questioned for two hours in a closed interrogation room with no access to a parent, lawyer, or way home. The court of appeals ordered expungement of A.M.'s conviction if he isn't given a new trial within 120 days.

The court was critical of the appellate courts in Illinois for failing to question Cassidy's account of the interrogation that led to A.M.'s alleged confession. Cassidy has a track record of getting innocent kids to confess.

In 1998, four years after Cassidy said A.M. had confessed, Cassidy said he obtained similar confessions from two boys, ages 7 and 8, in the investigation of the murder of 11-year-old Ryan Harris.

The boys were later exonerated by DNA tests that were linked to Floyd Durr, who was charged with the murder and is awaiting trial.

In 2001, a Tribune review of 10 years of homicide cases in Cook County spotlighted numerous cases of alleged confessions improperly obtained from juveniles. Several of those cases involved Cassidy, who testified that juveniles spontaneously confessed to him outside the presence of a youth officer or parent.

Congratulations to Northwestern law professor Steve Drizin, who represented A.M. in the Seventh Circuit. Drizin hopes the decision will send a message to the police that children should not be interviewed as if they were adults.

Here's an open thread for The Sopranos, which has its season premiere tonight, 9pm ET, on HBO.

Update: Maxspeak details the show.

by TChris

Firing 50,000 volts of electricity into a person's body is an extreme measure, but at least it's better than a bullet. That may be the ultimate lesson to draw from the experiences of police departments that have issued Taser guns to their officers.

The number of people killed by police in Seattle, Miami, Phoenix, and other cities has fallen dramatically, in part, it seems, because officers in those cities have been relying on Taser guns when, in the past, they might have used deadly force.

But as the Taser spreads rapidly, it is raising questions about whether the weapon, which can also be applied directly to the skin as a stun gun, could be abused by the police. The Taser zaps suspects with 50,000 volts of electricity, disabling them for five seconds at a time. Critics say the weapon is ripe for abuse because the shock leaves no obvious mark, other than what looks like a small bee sting. Human rights groups in the United States and abroad have called Tasers potential instruments of torture.

Incidents of abuse are not unknown. A man in Las Vegas died last month after being shot with a Taser four or five times. Here's what his cousin saw:

"He was on the ground," Ms. Bell said in a telephone interview. "He had two pairs of handcuffs on him, and I didn't know the Taser was being used until I heard him screaming. He kept screaming and screaming, saying, `Oh God, Jesus, please no.' He was screaming in pain, he was hurt and he didn't resist."

The long term effects of being zapped with 50,000 volts are unknown, and the possible lethality of the weapon is open to debate. Still, if the alternative is the use of a gun that will almost certainly cause serious injury or death, police departments should seriously consider training officers in the use of a Taser.

Police departments should vigilantly guard against the abusive use of Taser guns, just as they should guard against abuse of any kind. Policies limiting the use of Taser guns should be strictly enforced, so that officers are held accountable if they resort to a Taser gun when safer and less painful methods can safely be used to obtain an offender's compliance.

by TChris

Did the Justice Department single out Martha Stewart for prosecution because she's a celebrity? Or because she's a high profile supporter of Democrats? A news analysis in the New York Times poses these questions in the aftermath of Stewart's conviction.

As the Times points out, Stewart was essentially convicted of lying about a stock trade that saved her about $45,000. Small potatoes compared to the allegations made against Tyco's Dennis Kozlowski, Enron's Jeffrey Skilling or WorldCom's Bernard Ebbers, who reportedly "defrauded investors, stole tens of millions of dollars or drove their companies into the ground, or some combination of the three."

With so many sharks to catch, why go after a goldfish?

Ms. Stewart has long been a lightning rod because she has been politically active, female, powerful and rich, and perhaps because she has managed to straddle class lines in her dual roles as a celebrity and an adviser on taste.

Ms. Stewart's supporters have contended that the decision to prosecute her was motivated by the desire to take down a popular and very public female chief executive. Some say she became a target for prosecution because she supported members of the Democratic Party; others say she simply was not part of an old-boy network.

Mary Becker, a law professor at DePaul, says Stewart was "a wonderful target to show that the administration is serious about fraud. ... Lots of publicity doesn't disturb any of the old boys or anybody who made a significant amount of money."

Yet the case can be made that charges were brought quickly against Stewart because there was so little evidence against her to sift through, while the more complex charges of corporate fraud that prosecutors are beginning to bring take more time to prepare. Others argue that there is value in making an example of celebrities in light of the common observation that the affluent often escape justice while the powerless lose their liberty for less serious transgressions.

The easy (if naive) answer is that the criminal justice system should treat celebrities -- whether Martha Stewart or Rush Limbaugh -- in the same way it treats the poorest offender. That's what equal protection of the law is all about. By the same token, an accused's position on the political spectrum should not influence decisions about prosecution or sentencing.

The solution to inequality is not to make examples of celebrities by treating them more harshly. The solution is to improve the way the criminal justice system treats everyone else.

We're just about ready to resume blogging. Today is our first "outing" since our wrist surgery--we're going to Colorado Springs to visit a client in jail. Thankfully, we're not driving. Then we will rest our wrist, watch the Sopranos and log back in here.

We can't thank TChris enough--he did such an outstanding job of blogging here this week, what a great writer he is. TChris, thanks, and check your mail in a few days for a nice present from us.

A note regarding our newsfeed: We can't resume it just yet, it requires too many short wrist movements, so we're going to an automated news feed for a few weeks. We figure it's better than no newsfeed. So the article selection won't be quite as relevant as it is when we manually pick them, but it'll have to do for now.

We get our stitches out Wednesday, and then we should have an idea as to whether the surgery was successful. Thanks to all of you for making your comments pleasant this week--it takes a lot of wrist movement to go in and delete words and comments and then rebuild, and even to read 400 comments a day.

Here's an open thread, choose your own topics, just remember to put urls in html format as per the instructions in the comments box.

by TChris

Did John Ashcoft tell a fib to the Federal Election Commission?

By renting out a political mailing list, Ashcroft's Spirit of America PAC made $165,000 in 1999 and 2000. It transferred $112,000 of those funds to Ashcroft's 2000 Senate reelection campaign committee. But the PAC had already donated the maximum permitted by law, so the FEC wondered whether the transfer was illegal. Ashcroft's campaign committee insisted that Ashcroft owned the mailing list that generated the funds, exempting the fund transfers from contribution limits. After a two year investigation, the FEC disageed.

[T]he FEC last year rejected that assertion because Ashcroft did not disclose his ownership or the rental income in his 1998 and 1999 Senate financial disclosures. He has also not listed the mailing list as an asset in his required filings as attorney general.

Oops.

Ashcroft's spokesman at the Justice Department is calling all of this old news. Last year, the PAC and the campaign committee raised $100,000 to pay fines and costs resulting from the campaign finance violations. Case closed, says Ashcroft's man. But some of that money again came from renting out the mailing list.

The way the fines were paid disturbs John Bonifaz, general counsel of the Massachusetts-based National Voting Rights Institute (NVRI), which filed the original FEC complaint against Ashcroft and his committees.

"It is unseemly for the nation's chief law enforcement officer, whose committees are under investigation, to use those very committees to raise funds from campaign contributors as a means for defending against possible criminal charges and paying civil fines," Bonifaz said. "Ashcroft is very powerful, and people who get called are going to feel pressure to make such contributions."

The NVRI is one of several organizations asserting that Ashcroft violated the law, either by failing to disclose the mailing list as an asset in his financial disclosure statements as attorney general, or by conspiring to defraud the FEC by claiming ownership of a list he did not own. Last week, the NVRI asked Justice Department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine to investigate "potential civil and criminal violations of federal law" by the two committees and Ashcroft while he has been attorney general.