Bump and Update: Judge Fred Gannett in Eagle, Colorado makes the right decision. Here is the text of his order. The search warrants, affidavits and the affidavit for the arrest warrant will stay sealed at least until Kobe is acquitted, convicted or the case is dismissed. Even thereafter, Kobe can move to keep them sealed. Disclosure of the documents now would be contrary to the public interest and would be unduly prejudicial to Kobe's Sixth Amendment right to a fair trial.

The best part of the Order is the last full paragraph on page 12. We highly recommend reading it.

Other documents that do not contain factual information about the case will be released. This includes the arrest warrant (again, not the affidavit which contains the reasons for the arrest warrant), the bond and appearance documents, the request for non-testimonial identification evidence (which Kobe complied with and which also are devoid of facts) and the like. Even the affidavit for the request for non-testimonial identificiation evidence stays sealed.

We don't understand why the media is playing this up like the Judge ruled for them. Clearly, he ruled for Kobe and his right to a fair trial.

Update: Some better reporting in the morning editions of the papers here and here. This AP story is good.

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The Judge in the Kobe Bryant case says his office is typing up his decision on unsealing arrest-related documents in the Kobe Bryant case this afternoon. His decision will be released late today or tomorrow.

The decision will be available here.

In other Kobe related news, a 22 year old from Iowa has been arrested and indicted by a Colorado federal grand jury for making threatening to kill Kobe's accuser.

Say hello to Riverbend, a 24 year old female, Iraqi blogger who has the new blog in Baghdad town, Baghdad Burning. We like her, she's got some attitude. [link via Buzzflash]

The comments to our post on the granting of parole to former member of the Weather Underground Kathy Boudin show strong feelings. We wish some of those objecting to her parole would think more about what it is like to spend 25 years in prison for a crime, and remember that she also was deprived of raising her son, Chesa, now a Rhodes scholar:

Chesa Boudin. When he was 14 months old, his mother and father were sent to a maximum-security prison in New York State and, 21 years later, they remain there. He was born with epilepsy and dyslexia. He was unable to read until the third grade, and was marked as a "problem child" from an early age because of frequent temper tantrums. He has the sort of unenviable personal history out of which bad guys and life’s losers are made.

So where is Mr. Boudin today? Last month, he joined 31 other Americans to accept a Rhodes Scholarship, the country’s most prestigious academic honor, and will be heading to Oxford University to deepen his study of international development—an interest he developed as a Phi Beta Kappa at Yale. As The New York Times reported, his parents are barred from receiving phone calls or e-mail in prison, and so would only learn of their son’s accomplishment in the newspapers.

Here's the latest on Cobell v. Norton, the Indian Trust case:

Members of the Navajo Nation have been cheated out of tens of millions of dollars of trust revenue by the Secretary of the Interior who, in concert with major oil & gas companies, has permitted them to profit from sweetheart deals for rights of way across the Indians' individual trust lands in the West, a court official said today.

Special Master Balaran found that Interior Secretary Gale Norton has violated federal law and breached her trust duties to the Indians by allowing contracts that grossly undervalue individual Navajo trust lands, as much as 20 to 200 times below comparable lands owned by non-Indians and tribes. This allowed the gas companies to run pipelines to California at a fraction of real market costs.

Wonder who's profiting from the War in Iraq? Here's a sourced list--with detailed explanations.

Daily Kos reports Chemical Ali has been captured.... again ....seems the Brits claimed they discovered his body a while back in Basra. Here's the news article.

Warblogging has more.

We hadn't been reporting on Congressman Bill Janklow's unfortunate collision in his home state of South Dakota in which a motorcyclist was killed because, well, accidents can happen to anyone. It's that one moment in time you can't take back, the "what if I had gone through the intersection thirty seconds earlier," etc., etc. Whether fault is involved or not, a fatal accident is not one in which the driver wishes harm to occur. It occurs either because the driver was careless or reckless or because fate designed it that way. Think of all the times you've sped or indadvertently ran a stop sign, but thankfully, no one got hurt. Isn't that a "simple twist of fate?" (line by Bob Dylan.)

That being said, we have just finished reading this BuzzFlash report on other allegations in Janklow's past, and we are very concerned about them. Paticularly about his past record of treatment of Native Americans. And this comment, which he allegedly made to noted First Amendment attorney and author Martin Garbus, which Garbus published in his book, Tough Talk:

Garbus notes: "On his [Janklow's] way to election as attorney general [of South Dakota] in 1974, he began issuing statements aimed at endearing himself to white, anti-Indian voters. 'The only way to deal with the Indian problem in America,' he admitted saying, is to put a gun in the AIM [American Indian Movement] leaders' heads and pull the trigger."

Like Buzzflash, we don't know if the allegations against Janklow are true. But if they are, unlike the motorcyclist's death, there's no way they can be chalked up to an unfortunate accident.

Update: Is the reinvestigation into the death of Indian activist Anna Mae Pictou-Aquash just a coincidence?

Los Angeles Police Chief Bill Bratton scores again...

Police pursuits, that staple of local television newscasts, have declined sharply so far this year, according to a review of Los Angeles Police Department statistics....Overall, chases are down 62% from last year.

...The decline drew praise from some of the LAPD's biggest critics as well as experts on police pursuits, who described it as a step in the right direction. "These are just astounding numbers," said Ramona Ripston, executive director of the ACLU of Southern California, which had long challenged LAPD pursuit practices.

Chief William J. Bratton, who championed a policy to reduce the number of pursuits, called the figures "good news all around." ... The new LAPD policy is shaping up to be one of the most tangible of Bratton's efforts to remake the department....Bratton said the report contradicts naysayers who had predicted that restricting chases would lead to fewer arrests and increased crime.

Traffic collisions have "plummeted." So have accidents involving officers.

Good going, Chief.

The Justice Department's Bureau of Statistics has released its second report this week on the nation's prison population. Titled Bureau of Justice Statistics Probation and Parole in the United States, 2002, we learn the following:

One in every 32 adults is now on probation, parole or incarcerated.

That's 3.1% of the adult population in the U.S.

Of the more than 2 million probationers discharged from supervision, 62 percent successfully completed the terms of their supervision, 14 percent were reincarcerated because of a rule violation or a new offense, 13 percent had their probation sentence revoked without incarceration and 3 percent had absconded.

As of last December 31, about 1 in 5 probationers were women. More than half were white, 1 in 3 were black, 1 in 8 were Hispanic and 2 percent were of other races.

The bulletin, "Probation and Parole in the United States, 2002" (NCJ-201135), was written by BJS Statistician Lauren E. Glaze. Single copies may be obtained by calling the BJS Clearinghouse at 1-800-851-3420.

You can also read the whole thing here.

This past Sunday, the Justice Department released a report finding that 1 of every 37 adults in the U.S. has done time. The report also found that:

A black male will have a 1 in 3 chance of going to prison while a hispanic male's chance is 1 in 6 and a white male has a 1 in 17 chance...

The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers ( NACDL), through its new President, E.E. "Bo" Edwards of Nashville, today condemned the Bush Administration for agreeing with Colombia to resume the shooting down of planes of suspected drug runners:

Another Unwarranted Response to an Exaggerated Threat

Does our government honestly believe that it is acceptable to kill, or even take a substantial risk of killing, unidentified human beings, our citizens or not, just because they may be committing a non-capital crime? Evidently so.

"The Bush Administration speaks in terms of 'procedures to protect against loss of innocent life.' But these mere suspects are innocent until proven guilty, and not subject to the death penalty even if convicted. This administration continues to find the poor and dark-skinned expendable based on almost any fear-based pretext. In this case, we can kill in the name of fighting illegal drugs, which kill 20,000 per year by generous estimates, while subsidizing tobacco, which kills 400,000 per year.

"Just as importantly, should we as citizens, and the media as our watchdogs, continue to let it go on without questioning it?"

While browsing the NACDL website, we also came across this press release --we're excited to be serving in our new role.

While Attorney General John Ashcroft distracts us by parading around the country touting the Patriot Act, the equally dangerous, overly broad Victory Act bill is making the rounds through Congressional offices. The full name of the bill is the Vital Interdiction of Criminal Terrorist Organizations Act of 2003.

In a nutshell, the bill reinvents drug offenses as terrorism crimes. The ho-hum label of "controlled substance offense" will get a glossy makeover as many routine drug crimes become elevated into crimes of "Narcoterrorism."

Whose brilliant idea was this? The bill was drafted by worker bees in the office of Sen. Orrin Hatch (R.-UT.) Justice Department employees are disassociating the department from the bill, but we take that with a heavy grain of salt. Do you have any doubt Ashcroft will come to praise it?

ABC News has obtained a copy of the draft of the bill and provides this preliminary analysis of the 89 page bill:

Provisions in the draft would:

* Raise the threshold for rejecting illegal wiretaps. The draft reads: "A court may not grant a motion to suppress the contents of a wire or oral communication, or evidence derived therefrom, unless the court finds that the violation of this chapter involved bad faith by law enforcement."

Remarks of of Laura W. Murphy,
Director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office:

Ashcroft Speech Obscures True Threat of PATRIOT Act

....there is a growing sense among regular Americans of all political stripes – from the most right-wing to the most left – that the PATRIOT Act went too far, too fast. Instead of merely taking rational, judicious steps to update and improve our federal police and intelligence resources, it overreaches by eroding basic checks and balances against White House and cabinet-agency power, at the expense of the people’s representatives in Congress and the bulwark of our rights, the courts.

....Moreover, when the Attorney General makes the unsubstantiated claim that the PATRIOT Act would have definitively prevented the 9/11 attacks, he also obscures another key point: the USA PATRIOT Act isn’t just about terrorism....By the Attorney General’s own admission to the Judiciary Committee, the Act is actively being applied in non-terrorism related investigations, even though terrorism was the sole justification for the bill for most of the lawmakers who voted for it.

....we need to ask ourselves several questions. Most importantly, is the Attorney General’s roadshow political in nature, designed to shore up flagging conservative support in swing states and is it prudent to have the Attorney General give up his official duties to hit the huskings for an unpopular piece of legislation? Safety and freedom will both suffer if the answers are what some expect.