Hillary Clinton says she will not run for the Presidency in 2004 or 2008. Her book, Living History, hits the stores tomorrow.

Check out this new Stanford law review article on mandatory detentions under the Patriot Act:

As the USA Patriot Act went into effect, several hundred immigrants remained in government detention under a separate emergency order allowing them to be held without charge for an extended period. The lengthy detention of so many aliens, few of whom were suspected of involvement in the terrorist attacks, generated concern that efforts to protect national security in the wake of September 11 had infringed on the constitutional rights of noncitizens.

....This Note argues that the USA Patriot Act's provisions for certification and mandatory detention contravene the Fifth Amendment's guarantee of due process of law. By denying noncitizens the opportunity for meaningful review of the certification decision, and by authorizing the detention of aliens on substantively inadequate grounds, the USA Patriot Act raises serious constitutional concerns under both the procedural and substantive prongs of the Due Process Clause."

[thanks to Lisa at Ruminate This and Al-Muhajabah at Veiled 4Allah for the link]

Reader Chris and Skippy tell us the Alterman-Hitchens debate will be re-broadcast Monday, June 9. Go here for details.

We didn't see the original as we've been out of town at a defense lawyers' retreat --no cable except CNN--No PBS--the ten of us here have dubbed it a federal prison camp---ok, maybe it's more like a halfway house-but no joke, it's a maze of concrete buildings, concrete rooms, color coded floors and ceilings(no town to go to, food is only available at certain hours in a cafeteria and it is not something you'd want to eat more than once in a month.) It does have high speed internet access and good water pressure in the showers, and we've had outside counsel come to visit and consult with us who didn't have to spend the night, but we can tell you we won't be doing this again any time soon. Anyway, we missed Eric sparring with Hitchens and hope to see the rerun after we return home--thankfully that's tomorrow. And on that note, we're going to click our heels three times now and hope we're back in Colorado when we wake up.

South Knox Bubba says you ought to be mad as hell and he's right:

People like Tom "I AM the Federal Government" DeLay (not to mention John Ashcroft) are exactly why Thomas Jefferson and James Madison demanded a Bill of Rights be made part of the Constitution. They experienced first-hand, and could foresee, abuse of the awesome powers of the government for political or ideological purposes, or simply criminal activity by powerful elected officials such as theft, retribution, or revenge.

Nobody cared when Ashcroft ignored the Constitution, which he was sworn to uphold and protect, and started arresting and detaining people without warrants, probable cause, or due process. Nobody cared about Ashcroft's blatant violations of detainee's Fifth and Sixth Amendment rights when he held them without charges and denied their right to legal representation and their right to confront their accusers. Nobody cared because the detainees were suspected terrorists, you know, Muslims, and people of Middle Eastern descent.

Now it appears that Tom DeLay and others have similarly abused the powers of the Federal government to threaten the rights and liberties of Texas legislators, ordinary Americans, for political purposes.

SK recaps the whole shameful incident.

Update: The Washington Post reports Sunday that Joe Lieberman is asking for records of calls between Bush, Karl Rove and Tom DeLay on the issue.

The issue is politically sensitive because the Department of Homeland Security has acknowledged assisting law enforcement officers who were asked by Republicans to round up Democrats who had fled the state to avoid voting on a redistricting plan championed by DeLay. The plan died when a deadline passed without a quorum.

An FBI agent also helped in the search, but the bureau said it did not act at the behest of politicians. The Federal Aviation Administration gave aircraft-tracking information to DeLay's staff, and his staff sought advice from the Justice Department.

Bush and Rove apparently spoke to DeLay before the legislators departed.

New Yorkers rally to defend the Bill of Rights: Nat Hentoff's latest on anti-Ashcroft demonstrations.

There may be a vacancy on the U.S. Supreme Court as early as the end of June, when the Suprme Court term ends. Lobbying has already begun:

Interest groups on the left and the right are beginning full-scale political campaigns — including fund-raising, advertising and major research — to prepare for what many expect to be a Supreme Court vacancy in the next several weeks. While none of the justices have said they plan to retire, any decision would traditionally be announced at the end of the court's term in late June.

Update: The New York Times has this graphic of the names and faces of those likely to be considered as Supreme Court nominees in the case of a retirement. [Via How Appealing]

Alabama Attorney General William Pryor's confirmation hearing is set for Wednesday.

Senators Patrick Leahy and Edward Kennedy are two Democratic senators planning aggressive questioning of Pryor. Leahy's spokesman said, "... the committee will also look at Pryor's role in "stripping" away congressional and fed eral authority to enforce constitutionally guaranteed protections." Kennedy's spokesman " indicated that the senator had questions for Pryor on his record on civil rights, abortion rights and his position as attorney general on treatment of prisoners when he unsuccessfully fought a lawsuit targeting the state's practice of handcuffing inmates to a hitching post as a means of disciplining them."

We strongly oppose Pryor's confirmation. Here are our reasons.

Attorney General John Ashcroft has banned an employee Gay Pride Month event at the Justice Department.

Justice Department officials told DOJ Pride, a group of almost 200 gay and lesbian agency employees, it could not stage the event at the department's Pennsylvania Avenue building later this month because President Bush -- unlike his predecessor, former President Bill Clinton -- has not issued a proclamation designating June as gay pride month

...gay and lesbian groups and some Democratic lawmakers said Ashcroft's decision was discriminatory because other employee associations, including ethnic employee groups, are allowed to hold similar events at the agency's headquarters.

"It's shocking that the agency in charge of protecting the civil rights of all Americans is singling out one group of people for unequal treatment," said David Smith, spokesman for the Human Rights Campaign, the nation's largest gay and lesbian advocacy group. "It sends a very chilling message to gay and lesbian employees that says, 'You are not welcome.' "

Remember the forced Arab male registration program Bush instituted this past year? Where all of the muslim males from several countries had to register with the Government as part of the plan to make us safer? 13,000 of those men who followed the directive, believing they would have a chance to argue to stay here, are being deported. Only a few have been linked to terrorism.

Many had hoped to win leniency by demonstrating their willingness to cooperate with the campaign against terror. The men were not promised special treatment, however, and officials believe that most will be expelled in what is likely to be the largest wave of deportations after the Sept. 11 attacks.

The government has initiated deportation proceedings, and in immigrant communities across the country, an exodus has already begun. Quietly, the fabric of neighborhoods is thinning. Families are packing up; some are splitting up. Rather than come forward and risk deportation, an unknowable number of immigrants have burrowed deeper underground. Others have simply left — for Canada or for their homeland.

The New York Times says:

The deportations are a striking example of how the Bush administration increasingly uses the nation's immigration system as a weapon in the battle against terror.

We think the sentence should read:

The deportations are a striking example of how the Bush administration increasingly uses the war on terror as as a weapon against the nation's immigrants.

Matt Yglesias tackles hate crime legislation, and having read something written by blogger Matt Singer, says Singer makes a strong case in favor of them. Since we oppose hate crime legislation, and a few years ago chaired a task force for the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers on the issue of federal hate crime legislation, we'll chime in with some arguments against such legislation at the federal level--they come from an article we wrote in 2000, and from the last paragraph, we assume it was sometime after the murder of Matthew Shephard:

Arguments Against Hate Crime Laws:

• The federal judiciary released a statement recently expressing constitutional and practical concerns about hate crime laws. The underlying criminal activity of a hate crime, such as robbery, assault, or murder, traditionally falls under state jurisdiction. The concern is that by passing federal hate crime laws, there will be a mass federalization of crime which should and could be adequately handled at the state level instead of overburdening our already overwhelmed federal courts.

• There is no evidence to suggest that hate crime laws will have a deterrent effect upon hate crimes.

• In many cases, it is very difficult to prove a hateful motivation for the criminal act. The decision to charge a hate crime as such should not be left to law enforcement. The F.B.I., for example, includes gestures and other body language in its hate crime statistics. Prosecutions to date in some cases have been based upon bigoted statements made several years before the act in question.

• There are already sufficient criminal laws and penalties on the books to punish hate crimes. We should punish the act, not the thought process of the actor. If these acts are inadequately prosecuted and punished when the victim is of a minority or disadvantaged class, the answer lies in increased education and sensitization of law enforcement and the judiciary.

From Rough Justice: An interview with Innocence Project co-founder Peter Neufeld in the June 6 issue of The New Scientist:

The US criminal justice system needs an overhaul to make it more scientific, more reliable, and ultimately more just. That's the view of lawyer Peter Neufeld, famous for his role as part of the defence team in the OJ Simpson murder trial. In 1991 Neufeld co-founded the Innocence Project, which uses DNA evidence to free the wrongly convicted. It has mushroomed into a civil rights movement and spawned numerous similar projects around the world. Rachel Nowak visited Neufeld in New York to find out what criminal justice can learn from science.

On the Number of Exonerations:

Since we started post-conviction DNA testing in the US, 130 people have been exonerated in total, including 12 people who had been languishing on death row. The Innocence Project was counsel for about 65 per cent of them.

On False Confessions:

The Innocence Project was involved in the case of the Central Park jogger in which five teenagers were exonerated of rape after serving up to 12 years in gaol. They had all admitted to the crime...

That was extraordinary because they even had their parents in the room part of the time. But the police are very good at what they do. In this country they are allowed to use trickery during the interrogation. You tell people, "Your buddies have already told us you did it. We're going to make you the heavy unless you tell us that you were on the sidelines and that it was really your buddies that did it." And they go, "OK. I'll give you that." Twenty-five per cent of our cases involve false confessions. In other countries, they require the entire interrogation, not just the confession, to be tape-recorded, but not here.

On What Else Needs Changing:

The way identifications are conducted. When the victim looks at line-ups or photo arrays, studies indicate that if the perpetrator is not in the group, the victim will make a relative selection. She will say to herself: who among these six pictures looks most like the fellow who assaulted me? One way to remedy that is to show one picture at a time, or in line-ups to make one person come out at a time.

There's lots more, so go read the whole thing.

Law Professor Eric Muller has moved his blog off of blogspot. Its new home is www.isthatlegal.org. Update your bookmarks, and if you haven't been reading it before now, this is a good time to start. We don't always see eye to eye with Eric, but we respect and appreciate his point of view -and we do agree with him a lot. His coverage of the Japanese internment camps and Howard Coble's prejudicial comments is top-notch.

Emma of Notes on the Atrocities has two new terrific, detailed posts up--one on Bush's attempted takeover of the judiciary and Frist's attempt to limit filibustering on the nominees--and one on Ashcroft's testimony claiming victory in the legal war on terror and the Inspector General's report showing his department's abuse of many of those detained.