A self-help group in California, composed mostly of those dying of AIDS and cancer, intend to make history with a civil rights lawsuit against the Feds over their right to use marijuana for medicinal purposes. The City and County of Santa Cruz have joined the lawsuit on their behalf.

An elderly woman leans unsteadily on her walker. A hip young paraplegic fellow glides his electric wheelchair past a dapper old man clutching a cane. Men wiry with AIDS sidle into folding chairs in the cramped meeting hall. A blind man hunkers at the edge of the throng. There is talk of housing and finances, discussions of dipping health and impending death.

They finish by flouting federal law.

Marijuana, deemed illegal by the U.S. for any purpose, is dispensed in small baggies to the group, most of them terminally ill with AIDS or cancer. They say their brand of medicine, justified under California's 1996 medicinal marijuana initiative, brings relief from pain and suffering.

Read the whole thing.

This Monday (8/11) from 9-10 AM, C-SPAN will broadcast a debate between Ronald Weich,Former Counsel, U.S. Sentencing Commission and Daniel Collins, Associate Deputy Attorney General (Justice Department) on recent changes to federal sentencing laws. Tune in to watch Ron defend truth, justice and the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984. The 1984 Act is far from perfect, but it was way better before Congress passed the Feeney Amendment to the Amber Alert bill and before Ashcroft got his hands on it.

You can watch on television or your computer.

We just returned from San Francisco and the American Bar Association annual meeting. We participated in the two mornings of the Criminal Justice Section Council meetings. NACDL has a voting seat on the Council, which we have occupied for the past two years, since Albert Krieger of Miami, who had it for the five previous years, moved up to be the Chair-Elect and then Chair of the Section. Albert is a past president of NACDL and one of our favorite lawyers. [Here's a picture of the two of us after we won awards at an NACDL meeting several years ago.]

The Criminal Justice Section is composed of prosecutors, defense lawyers and judges. As you can imagine, we don't always see eye to eye. Among other duties, the Section sponsors and co-sponsors resolutions that then go to the ABA House of Delegates. If passed, the resolutions become ABA policy.

A big issue this year was a resolution by one of the corporate sections to amend the ABA's Model Rules of Conduct for lawyers in a way that would allow lawyers to reveal client confidences in a greater number of situations. The requested changes were in response to the Enron and other corporate scandals in recent years, as well as changes brought about by the Sabranes-Oxley Act.

If the changes are approved, the code would permit, but not compel, a lawyer to disclose client confidences to prevent or to mitigate "injury to the financial interests or property of another," when the lawyer's services were used to further a client's crime. In 2001, the delegates approved a narrower change, permitting a lawyer to breach client confidentiality "to prevent reasonably certain death or substantial bodily harm," but even that change was controversial.

As one corporate lawyer quoted in the Times says,

....The confidentiality privilege belongs to a client... and only the client can waive it. Besides, it is rarely a black and white question whether a client's plan is illegal, and it is not the lawyer's job to make that determination.

We didn't like the resolution and voted against co-sponsoring it. The nays carried the day. That doesn't mean it won't pass the House of Delegates, only that in its present form, the Criminal Justice Section delegates to the House of Delegates will vote against it when it comes up there for consideration.

The number two position at the Justice Department is held by Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson, who has just announced he is leaving the Department to return to private practice. He is the fourth Justice Department higher-up to leave in recent months.

We like Larry Thompson a lot, and have always felt a little better knowing he was at Justice, hopefully providing some measure of moderation to Ashcroft. We don't like the list of possible replacements and are concerned that Larry's departure will be a bad omen for freedom and justice.

Justice Criticizes Lengthy Sentences:

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy of the Supreme Court said today that prison terms were too long and that he favored ending mandatory minimum sentences for some federal crimes.

"Our resources are misspent, our punishments too severe, our sentences too long," Justice Kennedy said in remarks prepared for delivery to the annual meeting of the American Bar Association. "I can accept neither the necessity nor the wisdom of federal mandatory minimum sentences," he said. "In too many cases, mandatory minimum sentences are unwise or unjust."

Justice Kennedy's criticism puts him at odds with Attorney General John Ashcroft, who wants prosecutors to monitor which judges impose more lenient sentences than federal guidelines recommend. Such oversight, critics say, could limit judicial independence.

We're off to the ABA Criminal Justice Section Council meeting --being held in conjunction with the annual ABA meeting--in San Francisco. We're especially looking forward to the presentation and debate Saturday morning on military tribunal rules. Stay tuned, as we'll report here on any significant developments. But posting may be lighter than usual throughout the weekend. As always, we recommend you visit the excellent blogs and news sources listed on the right.

Update: It's now 4pm and we're still at the Denver airport. The plane was delayed then cancelled due to a broken winshield. We won't leave now until 6pm...but we found some good company to compare justice notes with while we're waiting...CNN's legal analyst Jeff Toobin, freshly back from Eagle and on his way to the ABA meeting in San Francisco, is on the same flight.

Happy Second Blogiversary (ywctp) to Instapundit.com. From his latest post critical of Attorney General Ashcroft.

NICE TO SEE that the Justice Department has plenty of resources for the terror war and can even spare the time and money for, ahem, lower-priority cases like this one:

"Federal prosecutors said today they have charged a North Hollywood wholesaler of adult films with violating federal obscenity laws as the government steps up a campaign against the major distributors of adult entertainment."

"The U.S. Justice Department said that its 10-count indictment against Extreme Associates and the husband-and-wife team that owns it is part of a renewed enforcement of federal obscenity laws after more than a decade in which they were rarely imposed."

Obviously, there's no need for a budget increase this year. Coming soon: a crackdown on interstate parking-ticket scofflaws, and a multi-agent, years-long investigation into New Orleans bordellos. Oh, wait. . . .

Glenn finishes with this prediction which is music to our ears.....

Ashcroft is becoming a liability. I doubt he'll survive past this term....

The trend continues. The latest Pew Poll shows that Bush's approval rating continues to decline:

Bush's overall rating dropped from 58 percent last month to 53 percent while 37 percent of respondents said they disapproved of the way he was handling his job, according to a Pew Research Center survey of 2,528 Americans.

The disapproval percentage is the highest negative rating the president has received since taking office nearly three years ago, the poll organizers said.

A solid majority, 57% of those polled, say that the economy is the President's most pressing concern, not terrorism.

Greg Sargent of The New York Observer reports on the most recent brief filed on behalf of Jose Padilla in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals:

A bipartisan group of prominent New York lawyers, former federal judges and former government officials has launched a fierce attack on the Bush administration’s conduct in the war on terror, charging that the detention of suspected terrorist Jose Padilla is unconstitutional.

The group, which includes a number of former high-ranking officials in Republican and Democratic Presidential administrations, made the accusation in an amicus brief filed in federal court in New York on July 30. The brief concerns the legal plight of Mr. Padilla, whose case has attracted international attention since he was arrested in Chicago for his alleged role in an Al Qaeda plot to detonate a radioactive "dirty bomb" on U.S. soil.

This is an extraordinary case," Harold R. Tyler Jr., a former federal judge and longtime Republican who was brought in by President Gerald Ford to clean up the Justice Department after Watergate, told The Observer. "We have in this country something called habeas corpus, which guarantees that a person who is held incommunicado has to be produced in a court. The people in the government seem to have forgotten that. They should charge this man if they’ve got something against him. And they should give him right to counsel. These are all constitutional rights."

Mr. Tyler, who as deputy attorney general under Mr. Ford was also an important mentor to a young prosecutor named Rudolph Giuliani in the mid-1970’s, continued: "I have been a longtime Republican, but I’m a disenchanted Republican in this case."

The brief assails the Bush administration’s handling of the Padilla case in blunt terms, describing it as "one of the gravest threats to the rule of law, and to the liberty our Constitution enshrines, that this nation has ever faced." A copy of the brief, which was filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, was obtained by The Observer.

The brief is unusual in that it includes many prominent Republicans among its authors:

Now that Arnold is in the race for California Governor, it's only natural that people want to know his positions on issues. The Washington Post says they are a mystery--we're not so sure. He's pro-choice. He's described as becoming less of a traditional Republican since marrying Maria Shriver. He said the GOP drive to impeach Clinton made him ashamed to be a Republican.

Last year, he led the campaign in California for Proposition 49, which calls for about a half-billion dollars in state spending on after-school programs.

....After riots here a decade ago, Schwarzenegger began pumping millions of dollars into a nonprofit organization called Inner-City Games, which offers recreational opportunities to disadvantaged youth. With his financial backing, the program has spread to 15 cities across the country.

Schwarzenegger also has been a major financial contributor to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a prominent Jewish institution in Los Angeles.

Arnold is sounding pretty good to us. This isn't an endorsement, and we still oppose the recall. But we do like what we see so far.

Update: Here's a sobering thought though.... Bush campaigning for Arnold? That would definitely cost Arnold our good wishes.

Executions are becoming so common these days, most are not big news. Some are not even news. All of us opposed to the death penalty must continue to pay attention. Here's a portion of an excellent news account of the execution yesterday of Tommy Jerry Fortenberry in Alabama who spent the last 17 years of his life on Death Row. He was 20 years old at the time of the murders for which he was executed.

"No last words" Fortenberry said seconds before he was administered the first of three different drugs that comprised a lethal injection that took his life in the death chamber at Holman prison. Fortenberry, 39, was pronounced dead at 6:16 p.m.

As the execution began at 6 p.m., Fortenberry lay mostly still on a white gurney in the stark white execution chamber. He said nothing else, but motioned twice to his spiritual adviser, Ben Sherrod of Kairos Prison Ministry, and another witness, showing them the international hand sign for "I love you."

Fortenberry nodded several times to the witnesses, but mostly lay still as the color slowly drained from his face. After a few minutes, his eyes closed and his chin quivered several times. Finally, he was still. There were no sounds in the death chamber.

"Punishment is not in the dying. It's in the 19 years of hell he's lived through," Sherrod said quietly as the curtain on the window separating the witness room from the death chamber was pulled shut, indicating that Fortenberry was dead.

The Horse is back this week, with an expose of right-wing books that appear on best seller lists--check it out. If you doubt them, go to the New York Times list of best-selling Hardcover Nonfiction. Check out Book Number 4 this week. Catch the symbol (+) next at the end of the book's description. Then, scroll down to bottom where the symbol, referred to as a "dagger," is explained:

A dagger (+) indicates that some bookstores report receiving bulk orders.

So it's not Jane Q. Public buying up the books, one by one, hungry for the content. It's right-wing activist groups and speakers' bureaus buying en masse and then offering the books free to those who ask for it. Even Drudge on occasion has offered the book for free . Here's another such ad, from NewsMax. Here's one from Human Events.

Credit goes to Sidney Blumenthal for speaking out about this (scroll down,) and to the Times for making the distinction.

According to Mr. Blumenthal, evidence of the "vast right-wing conspiracy" once proclaimed by Hillary Clinton can be found on The New York Times Book Review's best-seller list. "What I think the key question is for AC and all these other right-wing writers is, why is there a dagger in the New York Times best-seller list next to their books?" Mr. Blumenthal said in reference to the small symbol that appears next to Treason, which rocketed to the top of the Times list. According to the fine print at the bottom of the Times list, the dagger denotes "that some bookstores report receiving bulk orders."

"That means that someone is buying their book in bulk to put them on the best-seller list. These are bogus best-sellers," Mr. Blumenthal told The Transom. "I want to know why [AC] won't come clean and explain which rich right-wing sugar daddies are putting her on the best-seller list."

So who's buying up all these books?

"I don't know. I don't even know if she knows, but I know she's benefiting, and I know that all the other right-wing authors whose books have no merit in any way, on substance or as fact, are simply being put on there through a well-organized campaign involving vast resources of money of wealthy Republicans," Mr. Blumenthal said. "AC is a phony best-seller."

You can read Ms. C's response at the links above--we don't intend to reprint it.