Law Prof. Glenn Reynolds (aka Instapundit) on the recess appointment of Charles Pickering to the 5th Circuit:

...It's unfortunate that things have come to this pass. Recess appointments to the bench are nothing new, but this one is clearly another step in the ongoing breakdown of civility in government. .... I suspect, though, that we're in the midst of a political realignment, and that those "norms of civility" hold mostly during periods of relative stability.... Larry Solum has more here, and David Bernstein opines that this was a bad choice: "Pickering was among the worst of the Bush judicial nominees."

The New York Times criticizes the appointment here.

Calpundit and Atrios note the irony of the appointment occurring on Martin Luther King's birthday weekend. Our reaction is here, and very simple: Boot Bush.

Update: The Horse has some great Pickering stuff up, including this.

Steve Perry and Mark Gisleson have been debating Howard Dean vs. Wesley Clark as well as the Iowa primary over at Bush Wars--go check out the exchanges. Both are Iowa natives, now based in Minnesota.

Jay Caruso at Classless Warfare sticks up for Howard Dean on critics' charges that he had no African-Americans in his cabinet. He makes a good point.

The latest prison guard scandal, this time in Pennsylvania: Four guards have been indicted in a sex-for-drugs scheme:

Four guards have been indicted in a sex-for-drugs scheme that prosecutors described as a serious problem at Allegheny County Jail. The arrests of several guards Friday followed a two-year grand jury investigation that found at least nine female inmates had been sexually assaulted.

The grand jury found cigarettes, drugs, cash and other illegal contraband were used by guards "to reward or to induce female prison inmates to participate in sexual activity."

Most of the women involved were jailed for petty crimes, [Allegheny County District Attorney Stephen] Zappala said....The investigation is ongoing and Zappala suggested more arrests are likely.

VP Dick Cheney went duck hunting last week with Supreme Court Justice Anton Scalia--just weeks after the Supreme Court agreed to consider a case involving Cheney's records. Shouldn't Scalia recuse himself from the case? He doesn't think so.

While Scalia and Cheney are avid hunters and longtime friends, several experts in legal ethics questioned the timing of their trip and said it raised doubts about Scalia's ability to judge the case impartially.....But Scalia rejected that concern Friday, saying, "I do not think my impartiality could reasonably be questioned."

Federal law says "any justice or judge shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might be questioned." For nearly three years, Cheney has been fighting demands that he reveal whether he met with energy industry officials, including Kenneth L. Lay when he was chairman of Enron, while he was formulating the president's energy policy.

Scalia responded in writing to a Los Angeles Times inquiry:

Scalia said: "Cheney was indeed among the party of about nine who hunted from the camp. Social contacts with high-level executive officials (including cabinet officers) have never been thought improper for judges who may have before them cases in which those people are involved in their official capacity, as opposed to their personal capacity. For example, Supreme Court Justices are regularly invited to dine at the White House, whether or not a suit seeking to compel or prevent certain presidential action is pending."

Ethics Law Prof Stephen Gillers says Scalia should have missed this year's hunt:

"A judge may have a friendship with a lawyer, and that's fine. But if the lawyer has a case before the judge, they don't socialize until it's over. That shows a proper respect for maintaining the public's confidence in the integrity of the process," said Gillers, who is an expert on legal ethics. "I think Justice Scalia should have been cognizant of that and avoided contact with the vice president until this was over. And this is not like a dinner with 25 or 30 people. This is a hunting trip where you are together for a few days."

Kos over at Daily Kos tracks the latest Iowa poll numbers, and tries to make sense of them. It's a little difficult to figure out who's really on top --to us that means it's an open race and up for grabs. The LA Times says its the state's closest presidential race in memory.

The cliff-hanging finish has energized the candidates and their supporters and pleased Iowa's civic leaders, who always seem a bit self-conscious with all those eyes of the world watching. They forecast a record turnout Monday night, possibly topping 125,000 participants, or more than double the number who took part in the Democratic caucuses four year ago.

Update: John Edwards predicts an upset.

An anguished Folsom Prison guard committed suicide, and in the note he left behind, said his job killed him. We wrote about it today over at The American Street.

Update: Here's the latest from the Sunday (1/18) Los Angeles Times. (free subscription required.)

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Update: Was it a lynching or justice?

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original post

Marcus Dixon is a black high school honor student serving a ten year sentence in a Georgia prison for consensual sex with his nearly-16-year-old white girlfriend.

Although a jury acquitted Marcus of rape and three other counts of violent acts, the prosecutor also charged him with "aggravated child molestation." Consensual sex with a virgin fits into the technical reading of this Georgia statute. The statute has never been applied to consensual sex between two teenagers with less than three years age difference, until now.

Supporters of Marcus Dixon are invited to join Southern Christian Leadership Conference President Emeritus Dr. Joseph Lowery, Rep. Tyrone Brooks, Sen. Vincent Fort and people from throughout the state and the country who will attend a special church service and candlelight vigil to the steps of the Georgia Supreme Court on Jan. 20, 2004 at 6 p.m. The event will be held at Central Presbyterian Church, located at 201 Washington Street across from the Georgia capitol (Atlanta).

The service will also include an opportunity for people to donate to the Dixon relief fund aimed at funding Marcus’s college tuition whenever he gets out of prison, providing for him after college, and reducing the debt his family has encumbered. For those who can not attend the event but would like to send a donation, please make checks payable to “Marcus Dixon Trust” and mail to: Marcus Dixon Trust, P.O. Box 102812, Atlanta GA 30368-2812.

For media coverage of Marcus's case, check out:

Fox World News is airing a piece "The Big Story" at 9:30 EST Saturday 17th;
CBS Evening News two part segment Monday 19th and Tuesday 20th;ABC Nightline on Wednesday 21st

Marcus' appeal is pending in the Georgia Supreme Court. It will likely be heard on January 21, 2004 with a decision rendered some months later. Lis at Riba Rambles adds her thoughts, having seen a post by Skippy at American Street.

Please sign the petition opposing the wrongful conviction and sentencing of Marcus Dixon.

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We've written several times about Mexico's challenge to the imposition of U.S. death sentences to 52 Mexcian nationals in the International Court of Justice in the Hague, see here, here, here and here. Essentially, the dispute is this (from our prior post):

Mexico filed suit against the US in the International Court of Justice in the Hague over the U.S.’s failure to comply with the Vienna Convention’s guarantee of allowing foreign nationals access to consular officials prior to interrogation. Mexico is also seeking provisional measures, essentially a temporary restraining order, against all capital prosecutions in the US against Mexican nationals until the case is resolved.

Adam Liptak of the New York Times brings us up to date:

There is little dispute that the United States violated the treaty in most or all of the 52 cases before the court in The Hague. The core issue during several days of arguments before the court last month was what should follow from that.

In March, the [State] department's top lawyer acknowledged in a speech to state attorneys general that the pending executions were a matter of concern. "We have had a number of conversations with government lawyers in both states about these cases," the lawyer, William Howard Taft IV, said. In November, Mr. Torres asked the United States Supreme Court to honor the international court's interim order staying his execution. The Supreme Court declined to hear the case. Justices John Paul Stevens and Stephen Breyer indicated that they would be inclined to consider it once the international court rendered its final judgment.

"The answer to Lord Ellenborough's famous rhetorical question, `Can the Island of Tobago pass a law to bind the whole world?,' may well be yes," Justice Breyer mused, "where the world has conferred such binding authority through treaty."

While the 52 inmates sit on death row, awaiting a ruling from the 15 judges in the Netherlands, the parties positions are clear:

Checkout the Washington Post story on the call by Public Citizen and other public interest groups for a special counsel to investigate Ashcroft's 2000 Senate campaign. It gets more complicated -- Bush-Cheney's deputy finance director is implicated in the scandal.

Another aspect of the case is the role of Jack Oliver, now deputy finance chairman of the Bush-Cheney '04 reelection committee. Oliver, who was executive director of Ashcroft's PAC, was deposed by FEC investigators last February because his signature appears with Ashcroft's on a controversial work product agreement under which ownership of the mailing list was transferred to the then-senator, according to documents released in December by the FEC.

Michael Jackson went all out. It was some party at Neverland today.

Details of the almost two hour court proceeding are here.

Update: We'll be discussing the Michael Jackson case Saturday night on Fox News with John Kasich (From the Heartland) at 8:30 pm. ET

The Supreme Court today agreed to hear a case involving the detention of immigrants:

The Supreme Court will decide whether to extend the reach of a 2001 ruling that limited the detention of some immigrants to a "reasonable period," generally six months. The 2001 ruling covered the detention period, while the United States attempts to find a country to take them, for permanent resident immigrants convicted of a crime and ordered deported.

The new case will determine whether the same six-month time limit also extended to immigrants apprehended at the border while attempting to enter illegally and then ordered removed from the United States.

The case involves Daniel Benitez, a Cuban refugee , who came to the U.S. in 1980 and was later jailed for armed robbery, burglary, battery and other crimes. His sentence was up in 2001 but he has remained in immigration custody under a 1996 law.

His lawyer, John Mills of Jacksonville, Fla., said Benitez and the others "face the very real possibility of spending the rest of their lives incarcerated, not because of any crimes they may have committed, but because their countries will not take them back."

....Records show that 2,269 immigrants awaiting deportation are in prison, and more than half have been detained more than six months, including 920 Mariel Cubans. Lower courts have split on what to do with them since the 2001 Supreme Court ruling that immigrant detentions longer than six months would probably be unconstitutional. The government has been told by some courts to release 63 detainees.

NORML provides this letter for you to send to CBS to protest their decision to air anti-marijuana ads during the Superbowl, while refusing to air MoveOn's anti-Bush Ad.

As a CBS viewer, I am writing to voice my concern over your network's decision not to accept an ad for the upcoming Super Bowl from MoveOn.org. I understand this decision was based upon the network's policy of not running ads promoting "controversial issues of public importance." While I do not take issue with this policy in general, I assume that CBS will also refuse to run controversial anti-marijuana ads from the Office of National Drug Control Policy.

If your network is to be consistent, then you must also adhere to this policy when it comes to anti-marijuana propaganda ads. Marijuana decriminalization currently enjoys 72% support among the American public, according to the latest CNN/Time polling data. Clearly this is a "controversial issue of public importance" that divides American public opinion, and any public service announcement on the subject that promotes only one side of this issue must be considered an issue ad.

As a viewer of your network, I hope you will reconsider your decision to ban some issue oriented ads while allowing others. A free society relies on the honest debate of controversial issues. For CBS to allow certain points of views to be expressed on it's network while denying others strikes at the heart of democracy and the free flow of ideas. I hope you will either reconsider this network policy or reject the ONDCP's propaganda ads in accordance with CBS policy.

Where to send it?

CBS Television Network
51 W. 52nd St.
New York, NY 10019
Main Number: 212-975-4321

or send it via internet, go here, scroll down and click on "feedback."