Congrats to Houston lawyer Dick DeGuerin whose client, NY real estate heir Robert Durst, was found innocent of murder by a Texas jury today.

Durst, 60, who is under suspicion in two other killings and who posed for a time as a mute woman, testified in his own defense for nearly four days. He insisted that Black was shot accidentally during a struggle over a gun, and said he used two saws and an ax to cut up the body. The victim's head has never been found.

After the killing in late September 2001, Durst was a fugitive for six weeks until he was caught in Pennsylvania when he tried to shoplift a $5 sandwich even though he had $500 in his pocket.

At defense attorneys' request, jurors considered only a murder charge. They could have asked that jurors consider a lesser charge, such as manslaughter, in addition to murder, but opted for an all-or-nothing strategy.

As Skippy would say, it's the war that keeps on giving. The U.S. launched a raid in Afganistan Oct. 30th that killed 6 Afghans. Here's an account:

Maulavi Ghulam Rabbani, 60, a religious leader and commander allied with the government, said American planes bombed and fired on his home on the night of Oct. 30, killing six people, including two of his children.

...."Three planes came," Mr. Rabbani said. "First they bombed the mosque. My 18-year-old son was sleeping in the mosque and he was killed. When they started bombing, the people in the village started fleeing and my 21-year-old daughter was shot down by a plane as she was running in the street." A 75-year-old woman was trying to take three of Mr. Rabbani's young cousins — ages 15, 7 and 5 — to shelter when they were all killed by gunfire from a plane or helicopter, he said. The children's father, carrying his blind mother on his back, escaped, he said.

And in the Emily Litella "never mind" department:

A United Nations official in Kabul said the Americans had bombed the village by mistake, trying to hit the house of one of Mr. Hekmatyar's commanders.

The Colorado mother and soldier who refused to return to Iraq after a Judge in a child custody case said her husband's ex-wife might regain custody if she did, received a 'compassionate reassignment' today.

Simone Holcomb was 'demobilized' today. She will be allowed to transfer to the Colorado National Guard and remain in Colorado to deal with the custody dispute. She will no longer be considered to be "absent without leave."

The army did the right thing.

More than two dozen Democrats introduced a resolution in Congress today urging Bush to fire Rumsfeld.

This resolution would make official what so many members of Congress already believe -- that the soldiers in Iraq and America's foreign policy would be helped greatly if Donald Rumsfeld would leave," Rep. Charles Rangel of New York said in a statement.

Rangel said he so far had 25 co-sponsors to the resolution who were "willing to stand up and say what so many policy makers know, that the first step to bringing our troops home is to send Donald Rumsfeld home."

The resolution said Rumsfeld misled the American public on assessments of progress in the war and occupation, sent U.S. forces to Iraq "without adequate planning and sufficient equipment," and "demonstrated a lack of sensitivity" in statements on the war and U.S. casualties.

It's doubtful the resolution will come up for a vote before Congress recesses at the end of the month. Too bad.

Reuters interviews the doctors who treated Jessica Lynch in Iraq. They are unanimous in their assertions that she was not raped. Lynch does not recall being raped. Yet author Rick Bragg's publisher is standing by the charge in his book that she was sodomized.

Dr Jamal Kadhim Shwail was the first doctor to examine Lynch when she was brought to Nassiriya's military hospital by Iraqi special police. Shwail said Lynch was lying in the crowded reception of the hospital, unconscious and in shock from blood loss.

She was wearing her uniform including a flak jacket, military trousers and boots, none of her clothes had been unbuttoned or removed, as the book claims, he said. .... He said her flak jacket was removed and her clothes were cut away to expose the injured sites. The anesthetist cut away an area around her groin to insert a catheter to drain urine....Her clothes were not torn, her boots had not been removed. There is no way (she could have been raped)."

So could it have happened at the next hospital?

Bump and Update: Lawyers for the Guantanamo prisoners have set up this website to keep the public informed about the legal case. The Washington Post has this later article on the case and the Supreme Court decision to hear it.

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Original post: 11/10/03 at 8:23 a.m.

The Supreme Court today said it will hear the case of detainees being held at Guantanamo :

The justices agreed to review a ruling that U.S. courts lack jurisdiction to consider claims by a group of detainees held without access to their families or to lawyers, and held without any charges brought against them.

The Supreme Court will hear arguments in the case next year, with a decision due by the end of June. It marked the first time the nation's highest court agreed to decide a case stemming from the Bush administration's anti-terrorism policies.

The appeals were filed in the Supreme Court by British, Australian and Kuwaiti citizens after lower courts ruled they did not have authority to hear the men's complaints.

More details of the case are available here.

The Lawyers Committee for Human Rights is calling for an investigation into the Maher Arar case:

It is a clear violation of international law and of United States policy not only to commit torture, but also to send someone to a country where they would face torture.

Article 3 of the Convention on Torture, to which the United States is a party, states:

No State Party shall expel, return ('refouler') or extradite a person to another State where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture.... For the purpose of determining whether there are such grounds, the competent authorities shall take into account all relevant considerations including, where applicable, the existence in the State concerned of a consistent pattern of gross, flagrant or mass violations of human rights.

In this interview in Columbia Journalism Review, Mark Silverman, editor and publisher of the Detroit News, tells why his paper filed suit against Ashcroft in 2002 to obtain access to the secret deportation hearings. Here's the background:

In January 2002, the Detroit News filed a lawsuit in federal court in Michigan to obtain access to the Rabih Haddad deportation proceedings. Haddad, a Lebanese citizen, was arrested in 2001 for violating his tourist visa. He was also suspected of funneling money to al Qaeda through an Islamic charity he had helped to found. As a prominent member of the Detroit-area Arab community, Haddad's story was of great interest to the Detroit News. But the Creppy Memorandum issued four months previously barred the newspaper-and all newspapers-from attending Haddad's deportation hearing (see "The I.N.S. Test") . Mark Silverman, editor and publisher of the Detroit News, talks about why his paper filed suit to be there.

Thanks to Agonist for the link.

The Patriot Act is not just for terrorists anymore. Who should be investigated? Play cartoonist's Mark Fiore's Patriot Act Game and find out if you're a Patriot. You might just get a junior prosecutor badge. We won't be getting one. Our score was so low we almost didn't have one.

Good news on the death penalty front....from the Criminal Justice Reform Education Fund:

The DOJ Bureau of Justice Statistics published its annual Capital Punishment
report for 2002. The report can be found here.

Although there was an increase in the number of executions last in 2002, the number of death sentences continued to decline. This demonstrates the increasing skepticism with capital punishement, as highlighted on page 8:

"The 159 admissions to death row in 2002 marked a further decline from the 163 admissions recorded in 2001, and represented the smallest number received in a year since 44 persons were admitted in 1973. Between 1994 and 2000, in contrast, an average of 297 inmates per year were admitted."

The Supreme Court hears oral arguments today in Crawford v. Washington. The issue is whether there are exceptions to the defendant's right under the Sixth Amendment to confront and cross-examine witnesses against him. This article traces the origin of the right --back to the Walter Raleigh treason trial in England in 1603.

The defense brief argues:

"The right to confrontation is a categorical requirement that the government prove its case through live testimony that is subject to cross-examination."

We agree. Cross-examination has been said to be the greatest legal invention for ferreting out untruths in the Courtroom (We think Wigmore said that.)

The specific issue before the Court:

Is a pretrial recorded statement by the defendant's wife admissible as hearsay evidence on the grounds that it is virtually identical with the defendant's own pretrial statement?

Findlaw columnist and Human Rights Watch official Joanne Mariner today examines the plight of those "enemy combatants" being detained outside of Guantanamo Moussaoui and the Hidden Detainees:

The most important aspect of Zacarias Moussaoui's prosecution may have little to do with Moussaoui himself.....The larger significance of Moussaoui's case lies elsewhere. It is, at present, the only legal peephole by which to glimpse the circumstances of a much more important group of terrorist suspects: those, like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah, who are held by the U.S. military for interrogation in "undisclosed locations."

....Right now, the detainees are missing, "disappeared," vanished with hardly a trace. No one knows where they are, and little is known about how they have been treated, although disturbing reports are occasionally leaked. These hidden detainees are in a frightening legal limbo. It is time for the judiciary -- and the Supreme Court, eventually -- to step in.