Great news for Martha! The Judge has thrown out the securities fraud charge against her.

The charge accused Stewart of deceiving investors in her company, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, by lying about her sale of ImClone Systems stock. "Here, the evidence and inferences the government presents are simply too weak to support a finding beyond a reasonable doubt of criminal intent," the judge wrote.

U.S. District Judge Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum left intact four other charges against the celebrity homemaker - conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and two counts of lying to investigators.

The Judge did not dismiss any counts against co-defendant Bacnovic. Closing arguments will be Monday. The Judge's 23 page ruling should be available here soon.

Morley Safer reports on 60 Minutes this Sunday on how interrogators can convince innocent people to make a false confession. Here's an e-mail we got about it:

The long-awaited 60 Minutes Story on False Confessions, featuring the cases of two individuals who falsely confessed, is set to air this Sunday night (unless Janet Jackson bares her breast, Martha Stewart is convicted, the Oscars are stolen again, or some other story preempts the show....)

The two false confessions featured are those of Abdullah Higazy, an Egyptian student studying abroad, who was coerced by the FBI into making an inculpatory statement (he claimed he owned a pilot's radio which the FBI believed was involved in the WTC bombings), and Jorge Hernandez, an 18 year old Palo Alto high school student who was coerced into confessing to a rape of an elderly woman . Both young men will describe the pressure which was brought to bear on them by interrogators and should explain why they felt they had no choice but to cave into the pressure.

Higazy was cleared when the radio he claimed was his was actually claimed by an American commercial airline pilot (oops!) and Hernandez, whose admission was captured on tape (though the interrogation was not), was cleared when DNA testing excluded him as the source of the semen. Should make for interesting primetime t.v. -- a nice pre-Oscar warmup.

Over objections by the prosecution, the Judge in Terry Nichols' state trial will allow death row inmate David Hammer to testify at Nichols' trial. The prosecutors argued Hammer is not a credible witness:

Hammer spent time with McVeigh on federal death row before McVeigh was executed in 2001. Hammer claims McVeigh gave him the identities of coconspirators including John Doe 2, a mystery man some claim to have seen with McVeigh on the day of the bombing, defense attorney Mark Earnest said.

Nichols' attorneys contend Nichols was set up by unknown coconspirators involved with McVeigh in the plot to bomb the building. Hammer's testimony was bitterly opposed by prosecutors, who described Hammer as "one of the least credible sources ever to serve time" in an Oklahoma prison. Assistant District Attorney Lou Keel said Hammer once threatened to kill him and a judge and blow up the Oklahoma County Courthouse.

Hammer is on federal death row for the 1996 murder of his cellmate, Andrew Marti, at the Allenwood Federal Penitentiary outside Williamsport, Pa.

Hammer has co-written a book with another death row inmate about what McVeigh allegedly told him, due out this month. It's titled "Secrets Worth Dying For" and is described as containing "details of being on death row with Oklahoma City Bomber Timothy James McVeigh and revelations about others involved in the 1995 bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City."

David Paul Hammer #24507-077 is on Death Row in Terre Haute, Indiana. His execution is now scheduled for June, 2004. Mr. Hammer's website is here. The Canadian Coalition Against the Death Penalty offers free websites to death row prisoners.

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has taken a lot of heat for going on a duck-hunting trip as the guest of Vice President Dick Cheney, flying on Air Force Two, after the Supreme Court agreed to hear VP Cheney's appeal in which he is trying to keep details of his national energy policy task force a secret.

Now The Los Angeles Times reports that Scalia has another questionable hunting trip in his past:

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was the guest of a Kansas law school two years ago and went pheasant hunting on a trip arranged by the school's dean, all within weeks of hearing two cases in which the dean was a lead attorney. The cases involved issues of public policy important to Kansas officials. Accompanying Scalia on the November 2001 hunting trip were the Kansas governor and the recently retired state Senate president, who flew with Scalia to the hunting camp aboard a state plane.

Two weeks before the trip, University of Kansas School of Law Dean Stephen R. McAllister, along with the state's attorney general, had appeared before the Supreme Court to defend a Kansas law to confine sex offenders after they complete their prison terms. Two weeks after the trip, the dean was before the high court to lead the state's defense of a Kansas prison program for treating sex criminals.

Scalia later sided with Kansas in both cases.

Sean-Paul of Agonist has seen Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ movie. He compares it to Reservoir Dogs and is sorry he went. He hated it, and tells why.

For more on how the movie is a shameful travesty of violence and anti-semitism, we recommend Leon Wieseltier's The Worship of Blood at TNR. In a nutshell,

It is a repulsive masochistic fantasy, a sacred snuff film, and it leaves you with the feeling that the man who made it hates life.

[comments now closed]

The Dreyfuss Report asks:

The Bush administration told us that Iraq was a major threat to the United States, and they got it wrong: no weapons of mass destruction, no ties to Al Qaeda. Maybe they were just wrong, maybe they lied—but no threat. Could they be wrong about terrorism too? Could they be exaggerating the threat to the United States from terrorism? Is it possible that the Bush administration wants to scare American voters into staying with President Bush in 2004 by hyping the threat of terrorism?

Here's a snippet of the answer:

The reality is that since 9/11, there has been no terrorism in the United States at all. None. Not a single American has even been punched in the face by an angry Islamic militant, as far as I know, since then. If there is this global enemy with vast powers out to get us, where is it? Why hasn’t it attacked us? It’s certainly not because our highly competent Department of Homeland Security is doing its job so efficiently.

In the debate Thursday night, presidential candidates John Kerry and John Edwards expressed differing views on the death penalty:

Confronted with a question about a child killer, Kerry said his instinct ``is to want to strangle that person with my own hands.'' But the Massachusetts senator, a former prosecutor, quickly added that he favors the death penalty only for cases of terrorism.

Edwards, a Southern-bred politician, differed, saying there are other crimes that ``deserve the ultimate punishment.'' He cited as an example the killers of James Byrd, a black man who was dragged to death from a pickup truck in 1998 in Texas.

There's more, as we reported here:

John Kerry supports a moratorium on the death penalty at the federal level due to the number of persons on death row who have been found to be factually innocent of their crimes. John Edwards does not.

On a related note, the candidates also differ on medical marijuana. The Marijuana Policy Project gives an "F" grade to John Edwards in its Voter's Guide:

Edwards has publicly stated that he thinks it would be "irresponsible" to end the Justice Department's policy of arresting patients and caregivers who defy federal law. Edwards gets an "F" grade for refusing to pledge an end to these cruel and heartless raids on medical marijuana patients who are complying with state law.... Edwards has not taken any action to protect medical marijuana patients. He has neither cosponsored nor voted on legislation specifically addressing medical marijuana.

John Kerry gets an A-:

Atrios is profiled in a news article--we learn a lot about him, but of course, not his name.

At the bar of Marathon on the Square, a quiet man in a gray turtleneck sweater sips a martini. It's the night of the Iowa caucuses, and a gaggle of Philly media and political types is watching the returns on a large TV screen. By Philadelphia standards, it's a solid B-list party -- reporters, mayoral spinners, admen. But the most powerful person in the room may be the man in the turtleneck sweater. And no one knows who the hell he is.

....So here's what I can tell you about Atrios. He's a college-educated white man of average height and build. He looks about 30, maybe 35. He lives in Center City Philadelphia with his wife (no kids), and he works in the suburbs. Atrios describes his parents as "idiosyncratic socialists," and smiles. None of this is really surprising, given the smart chunklets of anti-GOP rhetoric that Atrios uploads to his site several times a day.

This just in from Reuters :

The U.S. Justice Department has subpoenaed Planned Parenthood for the confidential medical records of hundreds of women as part of its defense against challenges to a federal law that bans a type of late-term abortion, the family planning organization said on Thursday. Attorney General John Ashcroft said this month the records were needed to find out whether the procedure, called "partial birth abortion" by its critics, was medically necessary.

"We believe that this is a sweeping invasion of medical privacy. Ashcroft has subpoenaed hundreds of confidential medical records and we're taking every step within the law to resist this," said Elizabeth Toledo, a spokeswoman for the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

Planned Parenthood said subpoenas had been served on Tuesday at six of its locations -- Los Angeles, San Diego, New York, Washington, Kansas City and Pittsburgh. ABC News reported that the subpoenas demand hundreds of women's medical records

[comments now closed]

233 Haitians have been caught by the Coast Guard trying to flee to the U.S. since December 30 and returned, despite the turmoil going on there.

Bill Strassberger, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, said Haitians living in the United States illegally would continue to be deported and those picked up at sea would continue to be sent back, unless they presented a well-founded fear of persecution. Advocates for immigrants said they feared that the government was abdicating its responsibilities to Haitian refugees. President Bush said Wednesday that American officials would "turn back any refugee that attempts to reach our shore" from Haiti.

This policy is unfair and inhumane.

...advocacy groups and several members of Congress argue that the government is denying refugees fair access to the American asylum process. They said the government should not send Haitians home when it has deemed the country dangerous enough to evacuate non-essential personnel and deploy marines to guard the American Embassy.

"To send people back into the kind of killing field that Haiti has descended to is a violation of all that refugee status and humanitarianism calls for," Senator Bob Graham, Democrat of Florida, said in a telephone interview.

Eleanor Acer, asylum director for Human Rights First, said, "It sends a very clear message that the U.S. is not willing to step up and accept its legal and moral obligation to accept refugees, particularly when the refugees at issue are at our own doorstep."

[comments now closed]

The Governor of Oklahoma issued a last-minute stay today in the planned execution of Hung Thanh Le. The stay was granted after the Governor received an official request from the Vietnamese government.

Amnesty International issued a press release about the execution earlier today:

Twenty-four hours after Secretary of State Colin Powell proclaimed that "President Bush regards the defence and advancement of human rights as America's special calling," the USA is due to carry out its 900th execution since resuming judicial killing in 1977. The events set to unfold in the Oklahoma death chamber tonight will once again give the lie to US claims to be global human rights champion.

....Hung Le's trial was marked by prosecutorial misconduct and inadequate legal representation. He has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of his experiences as a teenager in refugee camps. The state clemency board unanimously voted that his death sentence should be commuted to life imprisonment, but Oklahoma Governor Brad Henry rejected their recommendation.

Mr. Le would have been the 900th person executed in the U.S. since the death penalty was reinstated in 1977.

Tell your senators that we should not enact laws out of grief and passion, or in response to a singular criminal event, however horrific it might be. Cooler heads are needed where our fundamental liberties are at stake. The House of Representatives didn't get that message and passed a dangerous bill today. We have no doubt that the bill will have serious implications for abortion rights.