One of our favorite fiction authors, Walter Mosley, writes in the Independent today that Ignorance is not Bliss. His theme:

The Race Riots of the 1960s Civil Rights Struggle Were Motivated by the Same Alienation That Fueled the September 11 Attacks

Definitely a good read.

It may be only July, but The Smoking Gun has already awarded the Legal Document of the Year Award...to Eric Vanatta, the deputy public defender in Fort Collins,Colorado who wrote it. It's great, go read it. Thanks to Kerim at Keywords for the link.

Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich amended the death penalty reform bill passed by the Illinois legislature by vetoing one provision--one that lowered the standards for proving perjury against individual police officers.

As a result of his partial veto, the whole bill will return to the legislature in the fall. The bill is expected to be repassed then, with or without the police perjury provision.

With regard to the perjury provision, one lawyer just wrote us:

Personally, I would like to know what standard of proof was called for in the bill. I wonder if this was a legitimate concern by the Governor, or if he was just looking for excuses or playing to police lobbyist. It seems to me that any police officer that would give false testimony during such an important trial ought not be a police officer.

But, we praise the Governor for his signing another bill two weeks ago that mandates videotaping of interrogations. And for his refusal to lift the moratorium on Illinois executions despite the reform bills.

It's not just members of Congress that want the classified portion of the 9/11 report made available to the public. The Saudi Government does too. They issued a formal request to Bush to declassify the report. Bush has refused the request.

In an interview this morning on "Good Morning America," [Sen. Bob] Graham said he believed the section of the report was being withheld "for political reasons — a key political reason being not to disturb the relationship between the United States and some foreign countries."

The Saudis have made it clear that they intend to fight back against any assertion that they were involved in the attacks. Some Saudi officials have said the organization behind them, Al Qaeda, is as hostile to Saudi Arabia's rulers as it is to the United States, or nearly so.

After the Congressional report was released last week, the Saudi ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, called the accusation that his country had helped pay the terrorists "outrageous" and added, "The idea that the Saudi government funded, organized or even knew about Sept. 11 is malicious and blatantly false."

Bush's reasons: Ongoing investigations and national security. His answer to everything these days.

The Boulder, Colorado Public Library does not want to have to comply with the Patriot Act's provision allowing for library records to be turned over to the Feds. So it has instituted a policy that will prevent its ability to do so:

If a federal agent asks a Boulder librarian for a list of all the books checked out by John Q. Public in the last month, the answer will be "Records? What records?"

"People have a right to read what they want to read without other people looking over their shoulder," said Priscilla Hudson, manager of the Boulder Public Library's main branch.

The library has decided to almost completely stop recording what books patrons have checked out. The library will keep tabs only while a book is checked out; when the book is returned, that record will be purged from the library's computers.

While purging records is not unique to Boulder, librarians from other areas say Boulder's move to delete records just to thwart investigators' requests, is unusual.

Also in Boulder, there are no sign-up sheets for using computers. They don't want to know who is using them. If they don't know, they can't tell. Beautiful.

The Judge in the Kobe Bryant trial issued formal media guidelines today. They will apply for next week's hearing.

Reporters will be barred from using cell phones and tape recorders inside the courthouse; photographing witnesses, potential jurors, and Bryant's accuser and her family; and parking on court grounds. Those spaces will be reserved for people involved in the trial, according to District Judge Terry Ruckriegle's order.

The Colorado Judicial Branch is setting up a Kobe Byrant case page on the internet this week.

The page will have information on hearing schedules, motions rulings, biographies of judges and other details.

The Boulder DA's office has donated their chief crimes prosecutor, Ingrid Bakke, to the Eagle County DA's office for one year to work on the case. Ptikin County (in which Aspen is located) is also donating proseuctorial resources for the case.

Update: The Eagle County DA's office received another $105,000 to prosecute Kobe from the Eagle County Commissioners.

This just in (at least, it's news to us) .... Saddam's bodyguard reportedly has been captured in a U.S. raid:

U.S. soldiers captured one of Saddam Hussein's bodyguards during a raid early Tuesday in the former dictator's hometown, where hours earlier troops found enough anti-tank mines and gunpowder for a month of attacks on American forces.

....The military reported a U.S. soldier killed in an attack in the capital Monday, while guerrillas blew up a major civilian bridge in an attempt to disrupt the U.S. occupation.

During the pre-dawn Tikrit raid, soldiers fired two shots before storming a house to capture the bodyguard. He was escorted from the home minutes later, blood seeping through his hat. "We got our prime target," said Lt. Col. Steve Russell. "This man was a close associate of Saddam Hussein." He declined to identify the man, saying only that he was "one of Saddam's lifelong bodyguards."

Update: Saddam has released a new tape vowing revenge for the murder of his sons.

Update: Whoops, the U.S. retracts its claim of capturing Saddam's bodyguard.

Read Rob Kall of Op-Ed News on The Techno Voting Nightmare. In addition to his commentary, Rob points us to the definitive site on the topic: Blackbox Voting

As we've highlighted before, the reason the Lackawanna Six (also called the Buffalo Six) pleaded guilty to terrorism charges was because of threats from the Justice Department. Why would they plead guilty if they weren't guilty?

Defense attorneys say the answer is straightforward: The federal government implicitly threatened to toss the defendants into a secret military prison without trial, where they could languish indefinitely without access to courts or lawyers. That prospect terrified the men. They accepted prison terms of 61/2 to 9 years.

"We had to worry about the defendants being whisked out of the courtroom and declared enemy combatants if the case started going well for us," said attorney Patrick J. Brown, who defended one of the accused. "So we just ran up the white flag and folded. Most of us wish we'd never been associated with this case."

The mainstream media is now covering the issue of how terrorism cases are tilted towards the prosecution.

The Lackawanna case illustrates how the post-Sept. 11, 2001, legal landscape tilts heavily toward the prosecution, government critics contend. Future defendants in terror cases could face the same choice: Plead guilty or face the possibility of indefinite imprisonment or even the death penalty. That troubles defense attorneys and some legal scholars, not least because prosecutors never offered evidence that the Lackawanna defendants intended to commit an act of terrorism.

"The defendants believed that if they didn't plead guilty, they'd end up in a black hole forever," said Neal R. Sonnett, chairman of the American Bar Association's Task Force on Treatment of Enemy Combatants. "There's little difference between beating someone over the head and making a threat like that."

Read the Lackawanna prosecutor's response to the assertion....although he says there was no "explicit threat, "he hardly issues a denial. It's more like an explanation why it was justified.

This is a thorough article on the Lackawanna case....and on some others. The next article in the series will focus on Jose Padilla, the American citizen who has been held in a military brig in South Carolina for over a year, with no charges and no access to his lawyer.

We told you about Darnell Williams last week. The Prosecution and some jurors who convicted him supported his request for a stay of execution to allow DNA testing in his case. At the time of his conviction, DNA testing was not available. The Judge refused, saying he had no jurisdiction to order it.

Today, Indiana Gov. Frank O'Bannon granted Williams a 60-day stay of execution, so that blood evidence in the case can be DNA-tested. Williams was scheduled for execution this Friday.

With the release today of Joseph Armine in Missouri, there have now been 111 inmates released from death row as a result of their innocence claims, according to the National Coalition Against the Death Penalty. If Nicholas Yarris is released in Pennsylvania, see the post just under this one, the number will be 112.

Far more often than we want to admit, we are convicting innocent people and sentencing them to death,” said Steven W. Hawkins, NCADP executive director. “This is absolutely chilling for three reasons. First, it is a life-wrecking experience for those who spend decades on death row for a crime they did not commit. Second, it means we quite likely are executing innocent people. And third, it means crimes are going unsolved, which constitutes a continued threat to public safety.”

Nicholas James Yarris, 42, of Philadelphia has been on death row since for 21 years....half of his life. Today at a press conference, his lawyers, Peter Goldberger and Christina Swarns, announced that DNA testing has cleared him.

Recent tests show that Yarris' DNA did not match physical evidence left on the victim's clothing and under her fingernails, said Swarns, of the Federal Defender Association of Philadelphia. The association said that Yarris is the first person on death row in Pennsylvania to be cleared by DNA testing.

In the late 1980s, Yarris -- who has maintained his innocence -- was one of the first prisoners in Pennsylvania to demand DNA testing. Test results done in at a state police lab in 1992 were inconclusive. After Yarris exhausted his state court appeals, federal defenders took over the case and in 1997 demanded new tests, which were completed last week by a private lab in Richmond, Calif., Swarns said.

Each piece of evidence kept by the Delaware County District Attorneys Office-- gloves left in the victim's car, the victim's underwear and skin samples from under her fingernails -- was retested and each piece excluded Yarris, Swarns said.

The prosecutor has said he will evaluate the new evidence. So does this mean the system works? No.

"The fact that after 21 years Yarris was lucky enough to have this evidence discovered is by no means proof of the system working," said Jeff Garis of Pennsylvania Abolitionists United Against the Death Penalty.

"The true killer has escaped justice, a young man's life was destroyed and the limitations of our justice system have been exposed."

Since DNA evidence is available in only a small number of homicide cases - approximately 15% -- this exoneration should cause us to consider the fact that 85% of death penalty cases can never be 'scientifically verified.' An erroneous conviction of this magnitude is ample evidence of a problem. The vast majority of reasonable people - both for and against the death penalty - can agree that no executions should take place until we can be certain that there aren't other innocent people on death row."

This case is another glaring example of why a moratorium on the death penalty is needed.

Update: Here's some more news on the case.