There are so many comments and emails coming in on Arnold and the new allegations of his mistreatment of women, that we can't keep up with answering them. So the podium is your's. Have your say.

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Baghdad says it is experiencing a devastating surge of illegal drug consumption among children and former prisoners released from jail right before the war. The graphic picture of a (pre-) teen sniffing what is said to be paint thinner while holding a gun looks a little staged to us, but we don't doubt illegal drug use has increased in Baghdad.

However, we think it's simplistic to blame the crisis on the former prisoners, as opposed to residual effects of the U.S. war. The Administration's failure to have an adequate after-war plan is the real culprit in our view.

Kobe Bryant has returned to basketball...for now. In a candid interview with reporters in Honolulu, Kobe describes the toll the criminal charges have taken on him and his family. He says he's "terrified" for his family and that basketball now comes second.

A telephone status conference is set for Tuesday of this week. Kobe's preliminary hearing is set for Thursday. An hour before the hearing the Judge will entertain motions to close specific portions of the hearing to the public.

If the preliminary hearing goes forward, it will not be a long one. The investigator who interviewed the accuser will testify as to what she told him. He will also testify as to what a nurse told him about the accuser's physical condition the night after her and Kobe's encounter, when she went to the hospital for an examination. Photographs showing the accuser's physical condition will be introduced in evidence. Whether those will be made public is yet to be determined.

The prosecution will not be introducing the accuser's videotaped statement to investigators or Kobe's audio statement. They bartered these away to bolster their argument for a public hearing. (See page 13, Paragraph 2 of the Judge's order.)

Update: Both the concert and the assisted suicide have been postponed one week.

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Hell on Earth, the band planning on featuring a live assisted suicide tonight at its concert said the threat of criminal charges will not deter it. The show will go on as planned.

The assisted suicide is scheduled to be simulcast on the band's website, hellonearth.net. We haven't been able to access the site this afternoon, so we suspect the police forced the site's hosting company to block access to it or remove it.

Jason Trindade, the operator of a San Diego-based technology company that hosts the band's Web site, said he would continue serving the site and carry the concert until he receives complaints from law enforcement officials to shut it down. "They haven't broken any law and I can't just turn them off," he said. "Myself, I think it's pretty twisted."

The band is proceeding against the advice of its legal counsel. We'd point out that Jack Kevorkian was denied early release this week.

Kevorkian, 75, was sentenced to 10 to 25 years after being convicted of second-degree murder in the death of Thomas Youk, 52, who had Lou Gehrig's disease. Kevorkian is eligible for parole in 2007....Kevorkian has said he assisted in at least 130 deaths. Michigan banned assisted suicide in 1998 to stop Kevorkian from helping terminally ill people die.

We hope the band reconsiders and follows its lawyer's advice.

Arnold got some good and bad coverage today. On the positive side, his former boxing trainer described how as a teenager, Arnold helped break up neo-Nazi gatherings.

Trainer Kurt Marnul told The Associated Press in an exclusive interview that Schwarzenegger was "filled with rage against the Nazi regime" and took part at least twice in organized disruptions of neo-Nazi gatherings in the southern Austrian city of Graz during the 1960s.

....On Friday, the Austrian magazine NU, which caters to the alpine nation's Jewish community, quoted former politician Alfred Gerstl as describing how Schwarzenegger once "hunted down" neo-Nazis who had gathered outside a teaching institute run by an avowed anti-fascist.

On the negative side, Arnold lost the endorsement of the Oakland Tribune. And three more women have come forward with reports of past groping on movie sets. Two of the complaints pertain to the filming of the movie Twins. Arnold denies the charges, and several involved in the film, including the director, Ivan Reitman, back him up.

"I was on the set all the time and it was one of the friendliest shoots I've ever been on," said Reitman, who has known Schwarzenegger for 15 years and recently held a campaign fund-raiser for him. "No raunchy stuff. People's families were there. "Nothing even approximating what you're saying happened. I would have heard something," he said.

If enough people votes no on the recall, there will be no Arnold issue. We still refuse to endorse a replacement candidate. Vote no on the recall, and no on Prop. 54.

Update: The Times of London has this amusingly written editorial about Arnold.

Matt Welch, associate editor of Reason Magazine, has an excellent article on the Joseph Wilson-Valerie Plame affair and what it says about the Bush Administration in today's National Post (Canada).

But even the most generous possible interpretation of events -- minimizing Plame's covertness, maximizing Wilson's partisan motives and assuming the leakers acted alone -- still provides more evidence of the Bush administration's most alarming pathologies. These are people who all too frequently confuse themselves with the U.S. government, see their enormous power as a tempting means to an end, and treat their critics like enemies of the state.

[Thanks to Smythe's Blog for the heads up]

Update: MadKane has the TraitorGate song.

As expected, President Bush has named James Comey, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, as the new Deputy Attorney General of the U.S. This is the number two position, under Ashcroft. Comey replaces Larry Thompson, who resigned a few months ago.

Kynn Bartlett over at Shock and Awe has a quote-filled post about Comey and asks our opinion.

Comey appears to be a dream appointment for Ashcroft. His tenacity in terrorism and financial fraud cases is well-known. Two things we haven't liked about his positions:In the case against attorney Lynne Stewart, Comey vowed to keep fighting even after the Judge threw out the terrorism charges against her.

Second, we don't like this quote from a brief he submitted in the Jose Padilla case:

. Comey, U.S. attorney for the Southern District... declared in a brief, "A court of the United States has no jurisdiction ... to enjoin the president in the performance of his official duties." (Source: The Legal Intelligencer August 29, 2003, available on Lexis.com.)

But we're not up in arms about Comey. We're sorry to see Larry Thompson go, but we doubt Bush and Ascroft would ever appoint anyone as reasonable as Thompson to that position again. In a sense, one tough prosecutor is the same as the next. We don't know of any attacks on Comey's integrity as a prosecutor or of charges of deliberate misconduct. We don't doubt we'll be criticizing his policies, but we have no criticism now of him as an appointee. That could change, of course, but that's our position now.

The Palm Beach Post interviews several local defense attorneys and former prosecutors who explain why, from a legal standpoint, it is unlikely that Rush Limbaugh will face criminal charges. We agree with them.

The New York Times has an excellent article today titled Foreigners' Rights in the Post-9/11 Era: A Matter of Justice. Here's the beginning but we recommend reading the entire article:

More than 5,000 citizens of foreign countries have been detained by the government since 9/11 in connection with anti-terrorism measures. Only a handful have been charged with a terror-related crime. Many were held initially without charges, denied access to lawyers, judged in secret and locked up for months without any showing that they had committed crimes or otherwise posed any danger. More than 500 were deported for immigration violations.

The Bush administration's anti-terrorism campaign has set off a fierce legal and philosophical debate over what rights foreigners have compared with Americans. When is it permissible to treat noncitizens differently? Are there some rights — whether to a speedy trial or a formal charge — that transcend nationality, and should be accorded to every human being?

For more on the issue, Georgetown Law Professor and civil liberties expert David Cole's new book "Enemy Aliens: Double Standards and Constitutional Freedoms in the War on Terrorism" is a must read. We've made it the "hot read" of the month on CrimeLynx.

Buy the Book Today!


David Cole is the country's great voice for civil liberties today. In this important book he shows how 9/11 has been used to undermine the legal rights of immigrants—and that after them, it will be easy to target American citizens.

CBS's " 48 Hours" tonight presents an interview with a former boyfriend of Kobe Bryant's accuser. We've seen advance clips. The young man, Johnray Strickland, states that the accuser asked him to present her side of the story because she feels she's being unfairly treated in the media. Among other details, Strickland says the accuser would love to see Kobe Bryant in jail; that she is definitely a victim and not just an accuser; that she was sexually assaulted by Kobe; and that the reason she went back to Kobe's room alone after getting off work that night was because she felt safe with him, primarily because she knew he was married. He also confirms her two prior overdoses on pills.

We hope people avoid watching the interview. Mr. Strickland wasn't there, didn't see anything, and is only repeating what the accuser told him and what she wants repeated. It's tabloid trash, not news, and we're suprised and disappointed a national network like CBS is running it.

Our legal view (as reported in today's Los Angeles Times):

The interview with a friend of Bryant's accuser that will air tonight on CBS' "48 Hours Investigates" is troubling to legal analysts, because Johnray Strickland said the woman asked him to go public.

"I'm appalled by it," said Jeralyn Merritt, a Colorado defense attorney. "It smacks of unfairness. We have no way of knowing that what she said to him is truthful."

The judge presiding over the case issued a gag order July 24, but it appears to apply only to attorneys and law enforcement officials — not to Bryant's accuser or other witnesses.

"She made a serious charge and should let it work through the courts," Merritt said. "If it doesn't violate the letter of the gag order, it violates the spirit."

What are the pros and cons of asking the court to allow the jury to take a field trip to the scene of the crime? This new ABA article, View to a Kill, discusses both sides.

The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) has a webpage up here with all the information about the newly introduced Advancing Justice Through DNA Technology Act of 2003, which contains a modified version of the Innocence Protection Act.

NACDL has just issued a press release praising the legislation (we will link to it when it's available on the web)--but also expressing these concerns:

We regret that the Act does not go further to redress the gross imbalance that exists between resources available to prosecutors as compared to resources available to defense counsel. Although Congress already gives hundreds of millions of dollars to state and local prosecutors, the Act requires that the newly authorized funds be allocated equally between capital defense and capital prosecution improvement purposes. Additionally, while competent counsel is the principle bulwark against wrongful convictions, there are many other steps that must be taken to reduce the risk of imprisoning or executing an innocent person. The eyewitness identification procedures used in most jurisdictions are prone to error and, despite many troubling cases of false confessions, most jurisdictions do not require that police interrogations be videotaped. NACDL urges policy-makers to more fully address the systemic problems that underlie wrongful convictions.