Citizens for Legitimate Government has a list of the best quotations of the year regarding the Bush Administration's terror policies. Here are a few of our favorites:

Since his arrival, Ashcroft has rushed through the U.S. legal system with the same rampaging rage as a Baghdad looter, thoughtlessly shattering artifacts in looking for things of instant value. What remains are pieces of Americana, like the presumption of innocence and due process, that lay in shards after only a two-year period." --Jonathan Turley, Appetite for Authoritarianism Spawns an American Gulag, May 2, 2003

That is what habeas corpus was all about. That is what the Magna Carta was all about. You are talking about overthrowing 800 years of democratic tradition." --Philip Heymann, a Harvard Law School professor and a deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration, commenting on the 'Patriot' Act.

For the first time, the Who's Pete Townshend tells his story of accessing child porn on the internet in this Sunday Observer interview.

'Look, what I did was wrong. And stupid. The legal position is clear; my experience is clear, my culpability is clear, but my innocence is absolute. I feel completely and totally innocent.'

Here's the latest death toll from the war in Iraq:

As of Friday, Dec. 26, 471 U.S. service members have died since the beginning of military operations in Iraq, according to the Department of Defense. Of those, 323 died as a result of hostile action and 148 died of non-hostile causes, the department said.

...On or since May 1, when President Bush declared that major combat operations in Iraq had ended, 333 U.S. soldiers have died - 208 as a result of hostile action and 125 of non-hostile causes, according to the Defense Department's figures as of Friday.

Since the start of military operations, 2,332 U.S. service members have been injured as a result of hostile action, according to the Defense Department's Friday figures. Non-hostile injured numbered 370.

Howard Dean has clarified (or reversed, depending on how you view it) his position on what should happen to Osama bin Laden if caught. This was his position Thursday, according to a New Hampshire newspaper. In a nutshell, Dean said it's premature to say what penalty Osama should face because he hasn't been tried or convicted yet.

Friday, after a significant amount of fallout from the article, Dean told the AP in a phone interview that Osama should be put to death:

''As a president, I would have to defend the process of the rule of law. But as an American, I want to make sure he gets the death penalty he deserves,'' Dean told The Associated Press in a phone interview.

Dean's first position was the correct one. Otherwise it's back to Alice in Wonderland and "No, No," said the Queen. "First the punishment, then the verdict."

Jeffrey Rosen, writing for Wired, discusses a non-privacy threatening identification card. He says that by stressing verification over identification, civil libertarians can rest easy.

But a privacy-friendly card is feasible if it follows one simple rule: verification, not identification. In other words, the card would confirm identity but wouldn't allow the government to pick you out of a crowd. There's a model: In 1995, Canadian entrepreneur George Tomko invented an innovative technology that made it possible to lock packets of data in encrypted files, using a fingerprint as a private key. After clearing a background check, the users of a Tomko-like card would receive a digitized packet of information that said, for example, they were cleared to cross a particular border. They'd download the parcel onto a card and lock it with a thumbprint.

Using this card at a border checkpoint, they'd swipe it and then provide a thumbprint. If the print decrypted the file, the system would verify their identity. Because the fingerprints wouldn't be stored in a central database, individuals would retain complete control over how much personal information was revealed. To maximize privacy, the system would keep no identifiable records of who had passed through, and it would not be linked with any other databases that might allow predictions of future behavior.

"Media mogul" Steven Brill (formerly the CEO of Court TV and Brill's Content Magazine) has a company, Verified Identity, that anticipates having a (not quite as privacy friendly) version of the card and turnstiles in place by February.

Rosen points out a crucial fact: There is no evidence that identity cards will make us safer:

Even with careful attention to privacy, an ID card might do little to prevent another terrorist attack. Bruce Schneier, one of the world's leading computer security experts, says that any identification system that relies on background checks creates three categories of people: trusted, untrusted, and trusted-but-malicious - people who aren't on watch lists but turn out to be terrorists anyway. As Schneier pointed out to me, Ted Kaczynski and Richard Reid would have qualified for V-IDs. Brill says that the pressure for ID cards will be overwhelming after the next attack, so a well-designed one is better than a desperate one. But rather than fixating on whether ID cards threaten privacy, civil libertarians and techno-positivists should explore security measures that might actually thwart terrorism. Otherwise, feel-good solutions could make us less safe in the end.

This is music to our ears. Governor Arnold is making some good suggestions about shortening criminal sentences as a means of dealing with the state's fiscal crisis.

The changes would reverse years of a get-tough policy on criminals under California's last three governors, and could face opposition from Republican lawmakers who make up a minority in the Legislature.

A top Schwarzenegger aide, in a briefing with reporters, said the new Republican governor is at the "very, very preliminary" stage of considering whether to ask lawmakers to shorten sentences for lesser crimes and increase reliance on alternative punishments.

....corrections officials project as many as 25,000 of the state's 161,000 inmates could be safely released, but he cautioned: "The vast majority of our inmates are in there for serious crimes. Those are not being looked at (for early release) at all." The Bee reported Saturday it obtained internal memos showing the administration is considering abolishing parole for nonviolent inmates. The move would save $231 million a year by 2005-06.

California is not alone in reviewing this option. Twenty-five states have replaced mandatory minimum sentences with programs that substitute treatment, rehabilitation or early-release over long prison sentences. The shift away from "get tough" sentencing has been led mostly by Republican lawmakers who are faced with a state budget crisis and are unwilling to increase taxes to build more prisons.

One in every 32 adults is now on probation, parole or incarcerated. There are far better and cheaper alternatives to incarceration for non-violent offenders. We hope that Democratic candidates across the country take notice and add this to their platforms.

Via Atrios, we're joining in on Tip a Blogger day--his pick, and our's, is James Capozzola of The Rittenhouse Review. As Atrios says,

No one really expects to make substantial money blogging, but it nonetheless does take a lot of time and the occasional tip for all the free pie is much appreciated.

There's a new report on felony disenfranchisement: Punishing at the Polls: The Case Against Disenfranchising Citizens with Felony Convictions (PDF) by Alec Ewald, for De-mos, a non-partisan, non-profit public policy research and advocacy organization.

The report is 62 pages and includes the historical basis for disenfranchising felons, the U.S. historical development, the present status with stats and the current trends. You might want to print out pages 14 to 21. From the preface:

We haven't seen much written about this lawsuit filed by a 9/11 widow in November. From her lawyer's press release:

(Philadelphia, PA – 11/26/03) - Philip J. Berg, Esquire, announced today that he, attorney for Ellen Mariani, wife of Louis Neil Mariani, who died when United Air Lines flight 175 was flown into the South Tower of the World Trade Center on 9-11 at a news conference regarding the filing of a detailed Amended Complaint in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania on 11/26/03 in the case of Mariani vs. Bush et al that he is alleging President Bush and officials including, but not limited to Cheney, Ashcroft, Rumsfeld and Feinberg that they:

1. had knowledge/warnings of 911 and failed to warn or take steps to prevent;

2. have been covering up the truth of 911; and

3. have therefore violated the laws of the United States; and

4. are being sued under the Civil RICO Act.

Columnist Steve Chapman makes an excellent argument for the admission of expert testimony on false confessions. We think it's only a matter of time. We've successfully argued for the admission of expert testimony critiquing handwriting examiners and for psychological experts on memory to explain the fallacies of eyewitness evidence. The same arguments can be made for false confessions. As Chapman points out:

The record of wrongful convictions, however, indicates juries acting on their own instincts can be completely fooled. They often put too much weight on a defendant's self-incrimination and not enough on the pressures that led to it. That's why there are so many people sent to prison after confessing to things they didn't do. Hearing from an expert can overcome that tendency.

As a federal appeals court said in a 1996 decision overturning a conviction because the trial court rejected such testimony, "Even though the jury may have had beliefs about the subject, the question is whether those beliefs were correct. Properly conducted social science research often shows that commonly held beliefs are in error." Expert testimony "would have let the jury know that a phenomenon known as false confessions exists, how to recognize it, and how to decide whether it fit the facts of the case being tried."

Juries are regularly allowed to hear confessions from defendants and urged to believe them. Why shouldn't they be allowed to learn about the grounds for doubt? Anything that reduces the frequency of wrongful convictions ought to be embraced by prosecutors and police. False confessions aren't good for them or anyone else — except the guilty.

Meet U.S. District Court Judge John Gleeson, appointed to the federal bench in 1994 after a long career as a tough prosecutor. Among his convictions was that of John Gotti. So, hardly your liberal judge. Gleeson presided over the recent Flatbush trial of a crack dealer and murderer in which Ashcroft had overruled the local prosecutors and insisted on seeking the death penalty. The jury returned a verdict of life. Gleeson denounces Attorney Ashcroft's death penalty push in a law review article in the Virginia Law Review:

We stopped by Howard Dean's website today, just to take a look, and were very pleasantly surprised to see him state these positions on criminal justice issues:

• I will work to ensure that racial profiling ends and I will direct my Attorney General to use regulatory authority under existing anti-discrimination laws the 1964 Civil Rights Act to define racial profiling as discrimination, and to withhold federal funds from state and local law enforcement that violate those regulations.

• I will appoint an Attorney General who sees our constitution not as a document to be manipulated, ignored, and violated, but who recognizes and respects it as the fabric that binds the American community together.

• I will oppose expansion of the Patriot Act, efforts to remove sunset clauses included in the act, and I will seek to repeal the portions of the Patriot Act that are unconstitutional.

• I will put the weight of my office behind the Innocence Protection Act, proposed by Senator Patrick Leahy, which would expand access to DNA testing and strengthen the quality of lawyers for defendants facing the death penalty.

• I will protect the civil rights of immigrants detained by the Department of Homeland Security.

• I will work for federal legislation to restore the right to vote in any federal election for ex-felons who have paid their debt to society.