The Sunday New York Times Magazine explores false memories and the controversy over the work of Susan Clancy, formerly with the Harvard Psychology Department. We agree with Clancy:

As the subject tries to remember what happened, ''source'' errors creep in. ''You think you're recovering your own memory, when in fact it's something you pulled out of a movie,'' Clancy said. ''Memory's tendency to be reconstructive, combined with the desire to believe, combined with a culturally available script, leads to a false memory. The content of that memory is dictated by the society you live in.''

The current controversy over Clancy involves her use of people who claimed to be abducted by space aliens as subjects for her tests. We'd refer you to the work of memory guru and Distinguished Professor Elizabeth Loftus on the topic and her excellent book, The Myth of Repressed Memory, which is available in paperback.

Popular Science also explored the phenonemon yesterday:

Our memories are, to some degree, like a final-cut videotape: Research confirms that each of us continually edits and splices recollections, replacing one "picture" with another, sometimes with a little outside assistance. "Memory is a creative event, born anew every day," says Elizabeth Loftus, a University of California, Irvine, psychologist who is a leading expert on the malleability of eyewitness testimony. "You fill in the holes every time you reconstruct an event in your own mind."

A decade of intensive research has taught Loftus and her colleagues how easy it is to plant false memories. In experiments, they've demonstrated that few people, if any, can reliably distinguish between memories of something they've been shown and something they've been asked to imagine.

Congress unanimously passed legislation targeting prison rape on Friday. The bill is the Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003.

[The bill] establishes a system of grants and reforms that will cost $60 million a year. The centerpiece is an annual survey by the U.S. Department of Justice that will be the most sweeping study ever made of sexual assault in prisons, congressional sponsors and criminal justice experts said.

"It's been a long, strange battle, but I think everyone has come to understand that a prison sentence in the United States should not include rape as added punishment," said Rep. Frank R. Wolf, (R-Va.), a House co-sponsor of the bill, along with Rep. Robert C. "Bobby" Scott (D-Va.).

If you're interested in story of the sealed pages of the 9/11 report, and you should be as they contain information embarassing to Bush about his prior statements about the Saudi connection to 9/11, go right over to Media Horse--they have it all, including this Washington Post article and this one and Joe Conason.

Bush's comment on the Saudis on Sept. 20, accompanying White House Photo:

The President, from the first day, has been very satisfied with the actions of the Saudi government and the Saudi people," said White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer.

Again, a big thanks to the Horse for assembling all this in one place.

Update: The pages themselves have not been released.

There were two significant advances in the drive to restore voting rights to felons this week, one in Florida and one in Washington state.

Advancement One:

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals revived an inmate voting rights case . The challenge was based on grounds that the state's law depriving felons of the right to vote discriminated against minorities. The appeals court sent the case back to the lower court to conduct a "searching" investigation.

The appeals court expressed no opinion on the merits of the inmates' claim, but said the lower court failed to consider evidence of bias in the state's criminal justice system. The appeals court noted, for example, that blacks make up about 3 percent of the state population but account for 37 percent of the ``persistent offender'' sentences handed down.

The law professor representing the inmates said the ruling has national implications. The Sentencing Project describes the ruling this way:

On July 25th, 2003, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the decision of the district court in the Washington state felony disenfranchisement litigation of Farrakhan v. Locke. While the district court had recognized that the state's disenfranchisement scheme resulted in a disproportionate impact on African Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans, the court had ruled that this impact was not related to the disenfranchisement provision itself. In overturning the ruling, the 9th Circuit stated that under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act a "totality of the circumstances" inquiry "requires courts to consider how a challenged voting practice interacts with external factors such as 'social and historical conditions' to result in denial of the right to vote on account of race or color." The court further held that "evidence of discrimination within the criminal justice system can be relevant to a Section 2 analysis."

Advancement Two

In Florida, the settlement of a lawsuit means 20, 000 to 30,000 ex-felons will regain the right to vote. There are an estimated 400,000 ex-felons in the state.

Richard Jewell is back in court, seeking the confidential sources of the Atlanta Journal Constitution, which he says he needs to proceed with his libel suit against the paper, for its coverage of the 1996 Atlanta bombings in which it was reported that Jewell was a suspect.

The matter is back in the trial court after an Appeals Court reversed its ruling:

The panel said Mather should balance Jewell's need for the information with the public policy that favors protecting journalists' confidential sources by scrutinizing each specific allegation of libel. If the alleged libelous statement cannot succeed as a matter of law or if Jewell could prove it using alternate means, then the court should rule against disclosure of confidential sources. But if a particular libel allegation was legally viable, and the identity of the sources was relevant, material and the only means to obtain other admissible evidence, Mather should order disclosure. Atlanta Journal-Constitution v. Jewell, 251 Ga. App. 808 (2001).

Jewell is still represented by libel guru Lin Wood, who sucessfully represented John and Patsy Ramsey, in several of their suits. He is also suing author Dominick Dunne on behalf of Gary Condit.

Congratulations to the Iowa Civil Liberties Union which won its federal lawsuit today challenging a sex offender banishment law.

A federal judge issued an order Friday blocking enforcement of a state law that prohibits sex offenders from living within 2,000 feet of a school or day care center.

The lawsuit said the requirement makes it nearly impossible for an offender to find a place to live ``because there is virtually no place in towns or urban areas in Iowa that is not within 2,000 feet of a school or daycare center.''

The Judge will decide in September whether to make the termporary restraining order permanent. He also allowed the civil liberties group to include prosecutors as defendants.

President Bush has nominated two more ultra-conservatives to the federal bench, adding fuel to Senate fire.

Both are nominated for the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, the second most influential court in the country. One is Janice Rogers Brown, whom we wrote about here. The New York Times reporter accurately, in our opinion, characterizes her this way:

Justice Brown, 54, has been touted intensively in conservative legal circles as someone whose judicial philosophy would match that of Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, both of whom Mr. Bush said would be his models for any Supreme Court appointments.

The other is Brett M. Kavanaugh.

Mr. Kavanaugh, at 38, would be one of the youngest members of the federal appeals bench. He is assistant to the president and staff secretary, and has been responsible for marshaling the fleet of largely conservative judicial nominees the president has sent to the Senate, resulting in angry battles with Democrats. But he is probably better known as a senior assistant to Kenneth W. Starr, the independent counsel who investigated President and Mrs. Clinton for a variety of issues.

During the Clinton Administration, the Republicans refused to allow any judges to be appointed to the D.C. Circuit, claiming its light work load did not require more than ten judges. Miguel Estrada was to have been the tenth judge. That makes Rogers Brown and Kavenaugh numbers 11 and 12. What will the Republicans say now?

These judges are appointed for life. The D.C. Circuit is considered a direct line for a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court. If you care about preserving the independence of our judiciary during your children's lifetimes, get on the horn now and let your elected officials know you oppose these nominations.

The New York Times opines there is Chaos in California due to the upcoming recall vote on Governor Gray Davis. The Times thinks California's recall methods need to be redesigned. First, it only takes 12% of the voters to cause a recall. In most other states, it's 25%. Next, it's possible for someone without much experience or even broad support to win the prize after a recall.

Salon asks whether it will be Arianna vs. the Terminator.

Kevin Thurman of Raise Your Hands has examined the situation in detail, here and here.

Digby has a very thoughtful piece opposing the recall here.

A safari being promoted by Las Vegas producer Michael Burdick, on which men would be able to shoot women with paintballs at a cost of $5k and $10k, was actually a scam to sell Burdick's paintball video, "Hunting Bambi."

Burdick should have quit while he was ahead. As soon as we saw Oscar Goodman, the great mayor of Las Vegas (and former stellar criminal defense lawyer) on O'Reilly, promising to shut him down and charge him, we knew it would happen.

....Las Vegas officials investigated and found that the purported safaris were nothing but a hoax to promote the ''Hunting for Bambi'' videos that Burdick sells. The videos show nude women being hunted by men.

The footage in the videos ''was all staged,'' Mayor Oscar Goodman said Thursday. ''There were actors and actresses and there wasn't even the real shooting of paint balls.''

John Redlein, an assistant city attorney, said Burdick offered the hunts at high prices to discourage bookings, and told investigators his Internet site could not even accept credit card charges in the amount necessary to reserve a hunt. ''He's told us in great detail ... that it's a scam to sell videotapes,'' Redlein said.

Burdick is now charged with a misdemeanor, operating without a license.

Goodman derided Burdick for promoting "abusive, violent, assaultive behavior."Burdick could face six months in jail and a $1,000 fine. "He's going to be punished for it, "the mayor said. The summons accuses him of "advertising, promoting and offering for sale paint ball activity videos, paint ball hunts and merchandise,"and operating an Internet Web site" advertising his business through the media without the proper city license."

"It's a joke and a fraud,"Goodman said of the"Hunting for Bambi"enterprise that was touted by promoter Michael Burdick on a Web site and publicized nationally. "I'll do everything I can to see this man is punished for trying to embarrass Las Vegas as a result of a lie and a scam,"Goodman said.

Before admitting the safari was a hoax, Burdick had insisted that the hunts were real, even inviting a reporter to witness one. Sounds like Burdick got outfoxed by the good Mayor.

The county court Judge presiding over the Kobe Bryant case will allow cameras in the courtroom for the August 6, Kobe Bryant hearing.

True, it's a very small courthouse and the individual courtrooms are small. But our position is that cameras should be allowed only if the defendant consents. It's the defendant who has a constitional right to a fair trial. The Bill of Rights was designed to protect the rights of the citizen accused. We don't know if Kobe's lawyers agreed.

For this hearing, it's not a big deal. The accuser does not need to be present. The hearing will be short, maybe 10 minutes or less. It is simply to advise Kobe of the charges against him and his rights, both of which his attorneys have already explained to him, and to set a date for the preliminary hearing.

This is strange....Private Jessica Lynch has selected her co-author for her book about her ordeal in Iraq. It is former New York Times reporter Rick Bragg:

The irony is Bragg, pictured at right, resigned from the New York Times over questions about his reporting methods in the wake of the Jayson Blair scandal. Blair wrote a story about Lynch wrongly claiming he was in her West Virginia hometown.

[comments now closed]

New Nat Hentoff column up today--on the Yaser Hamdi case and the adverse 4th Circuit decision. Hentoff opens with a great quote from a dissenting judge in the Hamdi case:

Courts have no higher duty than protection of the individual freedoms guaranteed by our Constitution. This is especially true in time of war, when our carefully crafted system of checks and balances must accommodate the vital needs of national security while guarding the liberties the Constitution promises all citizens. —Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals judge Diana Gribbon Motz, dissenting, Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, July 9

He ends with this sobering thought:

In the January 9 New York Times, Elisa Massimino of the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights exposed an earlier decision by a panel of the Fourth Circuit to bow to Bush and to continue the stripping of Hamdi's citizen's rights. "[The Fourth Circuit] seems to be saying that it has no role whatsoever in overseeing the administration's conduct of the war on terrorism . . . the beginning and end of which is left solely to the president's discretion."

Now, the full Fourth Circuit bench has handed George W. Bush the crown that George Washington disdained. What if the Supreme Court agrees? Bush will be King George IV.