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.

We've been covering the growing state budget crisis as it affects the criminal justice system for several months. Fox Butterfield's article on Portland, Oregon's police department in Saturday's New York Times illuminates the issue:

Station houses now close at night, and the 960-member force is down 64 officers. With no money for overtime, undercover drug officers sometimes simply stop what they are doing — for instance, tailing suspects or executing search warrants — when their shifts end.

Because the city also has little money for public defenders, Mark Kroeker, the Portland police chief, said officers were now giving a new version of the Miranda warning when they arrested a suspect in a nonviolent crime.

"They effectively have to say, `If you can't afford a lawyer, you will be set free. Enjoy,' " Chief Kroeker said.

Other states are releasing inmates early to save money.

Maybe if we stopped putting non-violent offenders in jail in the first place, there would be money to house the remaining, dangerous ones.

DNA is not foolproof. Why? Because the testing isn't always done correctly. William Thompson is one of the leading skeptics--It's not like CSI in real life, mistakes are made, you can't always trust a positive match.

In March, a 21-year-old Texas man serving a 25-year sentence for a 1998 rape was released from prison after Thompson's review of DNA evidence in the case. Prosecutors argued at trial that Josiah Sutton's DNA was a 1-in-694,000 match with the rapist's. It took a jury just two hours to convict him. In fact, Thompson was able to show that Sutton's DNA wasn't found in any of the police samples.

None of this surprised Thompson, an attorney who also has a doctoral degree in psychology.

Although cases of innocent people falsely convicted by bad DNA evidence are rare, Thompson sees ambiguous results, sloppy lab work or overstated findings in a quarter of the cases he examines.

After hearing three days of testimony in a Florida courtroom, the Judge ruled against the muslim woman who claimed a religious right to wear her veil in her drivier's license photo .

... Circuit Judge Janet C. Thorpe ruled that the state has a compelling interest in protecting the public, and that having photo identification was essential to that interest. Thorpe also said Sultaana Freeman's right to free exercise of religion would not be infringed by having to show her face on her license.

The Judge in the Scott Peterson case refused to issue a gag order in the case. He also refused to unseal the autopsy reports.

We find this reprehensible. California is expanding the use of 24 hour lockdowns in prisons--as a cost-cutting measure.

The state's financially strapped corrections department is prohibiting inmates from leaving their cells at three prisons in an attempt to reduce overtime pay for guards and is considering further cost-saving restrictions at most of the system's 32 institutions, according to the chairwoman of the state Senate committee that oversees prisons.

The ACLU says the policy is unconstitutional but has no plans to sue. Too bad.

Chisum Lee, who has been writing some of the best in-depth articles out there on the abuse of civil liberties under Ashcroft in the Village Voice,explains why the Government's treatment of suspected "dirty bomber" Jose Padilla threatens all of our rights.

Lisa English of Ruminate This is on top of Ashcroft's testimony today before the House Judiciary Committee on the Patriot Act and renewal of anti-terrorism powers. We will be on the road until this evening, so be sure to check in with her. C-SPAN will air the testimony, starting at 9 A.M. EST, on video and audio feed. Click here for more information.

Attorney General John Ashcroft will be testifying this morning before the House Judiciary Committee on his implementation of the Patriot Act, and whether or not these anti-terrorism powers should be renewed. You can bank on legislators renewing his powers, but be prepared for some rhetorical fireworks especially coming on the heels of a scathing report issued earlier this week about immigrant detentions. Lawmakers are also justifiably peeved over the Justice Department's high level of secrecy.

Even in the face of the negative Inspector-General's Report on the treatment of detainees, Ashroft continues to defend his policies.

Others tell a different story:

...at a forum on Capitol Hill, one immigrant after another told of the toll that they said the fight against terrorism had taken on them. After Sept. 11, 2001, the authorities questioned, jailed or deported hundreds of people who had no known ties to terrorism.

If we trample the Constitution in the name of security," Jeanne Butterfield, director of the American Immigration Lawyers Association and a participant in the forum, warned, "the terrorists have won."

The report concluded that the department's arrests of 762 illegal immigrants, most of them Middle Eastern, were plagued with "significant problems." Many of the suspects were left in jail cells for weeks or months without being formally charged, with some suffering physical and verbal abuse from their jailers, investigators found, and few of the detainees proved to have ties to terrorists, investigators found.

The inspector general, Glenn A. Fine, found that the problems were rooted in part in an unstated policy that allowed the F.B.I. to keep the suspects in detention unless it was established that they were not tied to terrorism.

At his press conference today,

....Mr. Ashcroft did not mention the inspector general's findings, and he left the briefing room without answering questions about the report.

Also in denial was Utah Senator Orrin Hatch, who said,

the report showed that the Justice Department "scrupulously followed the law, while aggressively protecting innocent Americans from future terrorist attacks."

Update: The ACLU is considering lawsuits on behalf of the rounded-up immigrants as a result of the report. [link via Cursor.]