by TChris

The citizens of Killington, Vermont are mad as hell and they aren't going to take it any more. Killington intends to secede.

Will it become the Sovereign Nation of Killington? Sorry, no. Will it become the State of Killington? No, this isn't a revolutionary or civil war. The good people of Killington just want to redraw the boundaries to slide Killington into its close neighbor, New Hampshire. New Hampshire, Killingtonians believe, is a more tax friendly place.

It is unclear whether anyone has suggested to the residents of Killington that they could simply move to New Hampshire. It would seem a lot easier than redrawing all the maps and republishing all the zip code directories.

by TChris

FBI agents wanted to question Timothy McVeigh about the details of his crime before his execution, but "internal disagreements" kept them from doing so.

Some called it a missed opportunity, especially because much of the speculation about additional accomplices in the Oklahoma City case focused on periods in which there are uncertainties about McVeigh's whereabouts.

McVeigh could have answered some important questions.

An Oklahoma newspaper, the Idabel McCurtain Daily Gazette, and a college criminology professor, Mark Hamm, have studied McVeigh's whereabouts extensively and developed timelines showing [a] white supremacist bank robbery gang was in the same vicinity as McVeigh several times during gaps in the government's official version of events.

Hamm thinks it unlikely that the intersections between McVeigh and the white supermacist bank robbers were coincidental. As TalkLeft recently reported, the government's failure to disclose information about the gang could threaten the current prosecution of Terry Nichols.

Another disadvantage of the death penalty: the dead keep their knowledge to themselves.

by TChris

By a vote of 11-5, the common council of Madison, Wisconsin declared the week of March 14-21 "Madison Medical Marijuana Awareness Week." The five dissenters apparently think that awareness is a bad thing. A Madison resident speaking in support of the resolution explained its importance.

"In the face of uncontrollable suffering, marijuana has literally been a godsend," said Gary Storck, a glaucoma patient and medical marijuana advocate. "This resolution will send a message that this community thinks it's wrong that under federal and state law, the sick and dying should have to fear the police."

The council also weighed in on same-sex marriage. By a vote of 12-4, the council passed a resolution urging the Governor to seek the repeal of "discriminatory marriage laws" and opposing any constitutional amendments that would ban gay marriage.

by TChris

The judge presiding over Kobe Bryant's case handed the NBA star a victory yesterday, but prosecutors announced their intent to appeal the judge's ruling. Judge Terry Ruckriegle agreed with the defense that the 19 year-old woman who is accusing Bryant of sexual assault can be questioned during a closed hearing scheduled for March 24 and 25. He declined to grant a prosecution request to limit the questions that could be asked of her.

At issue is Colorado's rape shield law. Like other laws across the country, Colorado's rape shield law is designed to prevent defendants from bringing up an accuser's sexual history to besmirch her reputation or to support an argument that a promiscuous woman is more likely to have consented to sex.

Those laudable goals must give way to a defendant's right to a fair trial. Defendants have a constitutional right to present evidence that is relevant to their defense -- evidence that weakens the government's case or that supports a theory of innocence. The assumption that an accuser's sexual history is never relevant is mistaken, as Bryant's case demonstrates.

Defense attorneys Hal Haddon and Pamela Mackey say the details of the woman's sex life are important in determining whether injuries found after her encounter with Bryant could have been caused by other men and whether she suffered emotional trauma, as prosecutors claim.

They also say they want to know whether she had a "plan" to sleep with Bryant to win attention from an ex-boyfriend, and that she has slept with two prosecution witnesses.

The court's ruling does not mean that Bryant will be able to ask wide-ranging questions in front of a jury. The court will presumably decide whether, and in what way, to restrict cross-examination at trial after hearing the accuser's answers to Bryant's questions behind closed doors.

The court will also decide whether the accuser waived her right to keep her medical records confidential and whether investigators illegally questioned Bryant after the alleged attack. Rulings on those issues may come after the next hearing.

by TChris

Martha Stewart's fate is now in the hands of a jury. The case against Stewart's former Merrill Lynch broker and current co-defendant, Peter Bacanovic, was also submitted to the jury, but the judge made a point of instructing jurors not to hold the joint trial against either defendant.

"You are to consider the charges separately against each defendant ... as if that defendant were being tried alone," U.S. District Judge Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum said at the beginning of jury instructions. "You can find one guilty without finding the other guilty.

"The fact the defendants are being tried together is not evidence of anything," she said.

During closing arguments yesterday, Stewart's lawyer, Robert Morvillo, conceded that Stewart learned that ImClone founder Sam Waksal was dumping shares in his own company.

"No one is disputing whether or not Martha knew the Waksals were selling on December 27th. Frankly what we are disputing is that it made a difference to her," defense attorney Morvillo said.

Morvillo argued that Stewart had a preexisting arrangement to sell her ImClone stock if it fell to $60. He also argued that Stewart was too smart to have staged such a botched attempt at a cover-up.

Update: No verdict today. The jurors will sleep on it and renew their deliberations in the morning.

So far, jurors have been inquisitive.

by TChris

Heather Specyalski, charged with manslaughter in the highway death of prominent Hartford businessman Neil Esposito, contends that she wasn't driving the car. She couldn't have been driving, she says, because she was performing oral sex on Esposito at the time of the crash. The fact that Esposito's pants were thrown from the car lends some support to her story.

But that isn't good enough for the prosecutor, who argued that Specyalski should not be allowed to present her defense. The prosecution argued that the pants could have come off in a variety of ways.

"No one saw it," Assistant State's Attorney Maureen Platt said. "His pants could have been down because he was mooning a car he was drag racing. His pants could have been down because he was urinating out of a window. His pants could have been down because he wasn't feeling well."

It wasn't true that "no one" saw it. Specyalski, after all, was there. The court agreed with the defense that she had a right to tell her story to the jury.

"A defendant has a right to offer a defense no matter how outlandish, silly or unbelievable one might think it will be," Judge Robert L. Holzberg said.

Not exactly a charitable view of Specyalski's case -- the prosecution's speculation about the missing pants seems more outlandish than Specyalski's testimony would be -- but the judge got it right in any event. The Constitution gives Specyalski the right to present relevant evidence in her defense, and her explanation of her actions negates the prosecution's theory that she was driving the car. Her trial resumes today.

by TChris

Thanks to "carefully worded hints" from the Bush Administration before the invasion of Iraq, 70 percent of Americans thought the administration had knowledge that Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9/11 attacks. It turns out that the administration's evidence was even more dubious than the intelligence supporting the claim that Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

A Knight Ridder Newspapers review of the Bush administration statements on Iraq's ties to terrorism and what is currently known about the classified intelligence has found that administration advocates of a pre-emptive invasion frequently hyped sketchy and sometimes false information to make their case. On two occasions, they neglected to report information that painted a less sinister picture.

The CIA's Directorate of Intelligence concluded in a January 2003 report that, despite occasional meetings between Hussein's government and Osama bin Laden's terrorism network, the meetings never produced an "operational relationship."

“We could find no provable connection between Saddam and al-Qaida,” a senior U.S. official acknowledged. He and others spoke on condition of anonymity, because the information involved is classified and could prove embarrassing to the White House.

If the administration had shared the results of that report prior to the war, the 70 percent who concluded that Saddam shared responsibility for 9/11 may not have been duped. But duping was necessary to build support for the war, and despite all the evidence to the contrary, the administration continues to defend its prewar descriptions of Hussein as a terrorist threat.

by TChris

When elected policy makers, the courts, and the public cannot agree whether gay marriage is or should be legal, nothing could be sillier than arresting a mayor for conducting same sex marriages. And so, of course, that is exactly what happened.

New Paltz Mayor Jason West was arrested yesterday for 19 counts of "solemnizing a marriage without a license," a misdemeanor under New York law. West conducted marriage ceremonies for 25 same sex couples.

Is what he did illegal? State officials have no easy answer. Governor George Pataki thinks that New York defines marriage as a union of husband and wife, but Attorney General Eliot Spitzer isn't so sure that's the law.

"My personal view, just stepping back from a detailed legal analysis, is that the law is clear, the law is being broken, and that it is appropriate to seek an injunction" against more same-sex marriages in the state, Mr. Pataki said. "The attorney general has indicated he does not agree with that," he said. "We are waiting for his analysis."

If the law isn't clear, why is the mayor being charged with a crime? As an elected official, his job is to make judgment calls on matters of public policy. If his judgment is that the logic applied by the Massachusetts Supreme Court also applies in New York, he should not face criminal liability simply because some other official believes the mayor's view of the law is mistaken.

Using the criminal justice system to punish a public official for taking an unpopular stance is abusive. The charges against Mayor West should be dismissed.

Update: New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer split the baby in half, announcing that New York law only permits marriage between a man and a woman while declining to opine whether that law violates the state constitution.

by TChris

In preparation for his Supreme Court argument yesterday, Solicitor General Ted Olson spent part of his weekend searching for free porn on the internet. It should not surprise most readers to learn that his exploration was rewarded, although he was not prepared to say whether every website returned by his search engine was actually obscene. Nor was Justice Sandra Day O'Connor surprised to learn that there is porn on the internet; she asked why Olson was in court defending new anti-porn laws when no serious effort has been made to enforce old ones.

At issue is the Child Online Protection Act, enacted in 1998 after the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional the Communications Decency Act.

The new law prohibits commercial Web sites from publishing material "harmful to minors" unless the site can show that it has made good faith efforts — requiring a credit card, for example — to keep out all Web surfers younger than 17. Violators could be fined as much as $50,000 and spend six months in jail, with higher penalties for repeat offenders.

The Third Circuit declared the law unconstitutional last year, but the Supreme Court instructed it to reconsider its decision. The Third Circuit again struck down the law on various First Amendment grounds. Joining the American Civil Liberties Union in this second trip to the Supreme Court were "a broad coalition of Web sites, booksellers and civil liberties organizations, as well as online stores like Condomania and online publications like Salon." Those entities worry that the law's overly broad coverage will chill their ability to engage in frank discussions of graphic subject matter. They also worry that their content will not reach interested members of their potential audience who may be reluctant to surrender credit card information as proof of age.

Those concerns are legitimate. As ACLU lawyer Ann Breeson said in her argument, "The government can't burn down the house to roast the pig."

by TChris

Bernard Ebbers, the Worldcom CEO who allegedly cooked the corporate books to conceal the company’s financial woes from investors, has been indicted. The indictment adds Ebbers to what the Associated Press terms the “swelling ranks of corporate chieftains facing criminal prosecution and possible jail time for financial misdeeds.”

The “swelling” of the federal prison population to date has been the product of the war on drugs (pdf), not a war on corporate fraud. Will those who puff profits now be prosecuted with the vigor once directed at those who puff roaches? Apparently they will, if you believe John Ashcroft (and who wouldn’t?), who wants the indictment to send a message: “No one,” Ashcroft said, “stands above the law.” Reassuring words from that bastion of respect for the rule of law.

But why hasn’t the Attorney General protected investors by hauling Ebbers to a detention camp, denying him access to lawyers or courts? If Ashcroft truly believes that the law applies equally to all, shouldn't he be giving Ebbers the Jose Padilla treatment?

We'll be taking a few days off to have surgery on our wrist for DeQuervain's Tenosynovitis.

Surgical management involves incising the skin, identifying and cutting the diseased tendon sheath under local anesthesia, and applying a compression bandage. Patients can usually return to their normal activities within 2-3 weeks after surgery. This procedure is successful 90% of the time.

Actually, we're opting for general anesthesia, and we're told our entire arm will be bandaged. That's our right arm, and we're right-handed. Nonetheless, we're pleased to report that our wonderful guest blogger TChris has agreed to take over for Wednesday and Thursday, so TalkLeft won't be going dark. We expect to be back by Friday, but if that's not possible, keep checking in as we'll be back as soon as we can resume typing.

John Edwards is out, John Kerry is in. It will be Kerry vs. Bush this fall.