The feds will try accused bomber Eric Rudolph first in Alabama, then in Atlanta.

Attorney General John Ashcroft said the legal maneuver of trying the single case in Alabama before three others in Georgia will ''provide the best opportunity to bring justice to all of the victims of the bombings and to each community that experienced these attacks.''

....Rudolph faces six charges of using an explosive against a facility in interstate commerce and could face the death penalty. Besides the Olympic and Birmingham bombings, he is accused of 1997 bombings in Atlanta outside a gay nightclub and an office building that housed an abortion clinic. In all, two people were killed and about 150 injured in the four attacks.

Rudolph's former sister-in-law described some of his beliefs on Good Morning America this morning.

Former sister-in-law Deborah Rudolph, who helped develop a profile for investigators, told ABC's ''Good Morning America'' that Rudolph believed that whites should further their race and opposed abortion because it was killing, in his view, too many white babies. And he had particularly harsh feelings about Jews, she said.

'I think he hated the Jews more than probably any other race,'' she said. ''He felt that, you know, they've been run out of every country they've ever been in. They've destroyed every country they've ever been in. They have too much control in our country. ''

You can read the Alabama Indictment against him here.

Update: "The Republican-led Federal Communications Commission voted 3-2 to allow the broadcast networks to own television stations that reach a combined 45 percent of the national audience, up from 35 percent. "

*********
The FCC is set to vote today on revamping media ownership rules. The fight isn't over even if the media prevails.

The FCC is expected to vote today to ease long-standing rules governing ownership of newspapers, TV and radio stations. The rules limit the number of TV stations a company can own, prevent big networks from merging and prohibit companies from owning newspapers and broadcast stations in the same market.

Today's vote will likely fall along party lines, with the three Republican commissioners indicating they support lifting some ownership limits, including a ban on one company owning newspapers and broadcast stations in the same city. The two Democratic commissioners are opposed....But deregulation opponents say they have no intention of letting the fight end today. They plan to battle on in the courts, and on Capitol Hill.

Consumer groups claim the issue is gaining traction with growing numbers of Americans of all political persuasions. Those groups have been sounding the alarm about the threat of concentration of media power in fewer corporate hands....Unlikely bedfellows on both sides of the political fence are rallying against the changes - from the National Rifle Association and the Family Research Council to the CodePink women's peace movement and the National Organization for Women.

``We're immediately going to mobilize and focus on Congress,'' said Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy. ``It says an awful lot when groups both on the left and right think the media is too tightly controlled and are fearful that their voices aren't being heard.''

Lisa English of Ruminate This has been covering this issue from top to bottom. Go over and read how you can join the fight and be heard. She provides all the tools. As Lisa says, "These are our airwaves, let them know we've only begun to fight."

From Atrios we learn that we've won--we've finally overtaken Russia. The U.S. now has the largest prison population largest in world .

We have over 2 million in jail. That comes to 702 prisoners per 100,000 population.

On a per capita basis, according to the best available figures, the United States has three times more prisoners than Iran, four times more than Poland, five times more than Tanzania and seven times more than Germany.

The Justice Department reports that one in eight black men in their 20s and early 30s were behind bars last year, compared with 1 in 63 white men. The chance of a black man going to prison in his lifetime is one in three, the department says.

The Sentencing Project says a major cause is the war on drugs. Whereas in 1980, there were 40,000 in jail for drug crimes, now there are 450,000, "three-fourths of them black or Latino, though drug use is no higher in those groups than among whites."

(If you want more than the dry statistics, go over and read Atrios on this, he is right on the money and he'll make you laugh out loud.)

Eric Rudolph was arrested in North Carolina. He is suspected of being responsible for the bomb placed at the Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta, Georgia in 1996 that killed one person and injured another 100 people. He is also a suspect in the 1998 bombing of the New Woman All Women Health Care clinic in Birmingham, Alabama that killed a police officer and maimed a nurse.

So where will he be tried first, Alabama or Georgia? The decision is going to be up to Attorney General Ashcroft. But Alabama officials are lobbying mightily to have him tried first in Alabama.

"My view is that the Atlanta case depends on the Birmingham evidence. There was nothing to link him to the Atlanta bombing before Birmingham," said former U.S. Attorney Doug Jones.

Jones, who was the top federal prosecutor in north Alabama at the height of the manhunt, said the Janet Reno Justice Department agreed years ago to try Rudolph in Birmingham first because officials felt the evidence here was stronger.

With a new regime in charge at the Justice Department, any prior agreements have been scrapped. Ashcroft has asked prosecutors in Atlanta and Birmingham to submit memos to him to assist him in making the final decision.

We're not sure it makes that much of a difference. The Government will go with the case that has the strongest direct evidence linking Rudolph to the crimes. This isn't like the sniper case where Ashcroft shopped for the forum most likely to impose the death penalty. Since Rudolph will be tried in federal court, the laws and the sentencing guidelines are the same. It would be a black eye for the Government to try him in a jurisdiction and lose. So look for Ascroft to pick the stronger case to try first from an evidentiary standpoint--regardless of which district has the greater emotional investment in a conviction.

The Washington Post has more on the upcoming decision here.

The Justice Department can -- and likely will -- seek the death penalty for Rudolph, regardless of where he is tried.....A Justice Department official said that Ashcroft will base his decision on where to try Rudolph first on the strength of the evidence in all the cases. "Where do we have the strongest evidence?" he said.

The Post also examines whether Rudolph was a "Christian Terrorist."

The question is not just whether Rudolph is a terrorist, or whether he considers himself a Christian. It is whether he planted bombs at the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, two abortion clinics and a gay nightclub to advance a religious ideology -- and how numerous, organized and violent others who share that ideology may be.

Update: We forgot to include the link before, sorry. It's in now.

Unfortunately, we are not making this up. We'll call it Ohio's dumb practice of the week.

Students in Akron will be fingerprinted beginning this fall to identify them in school lunch lines. The technology, instituted for security reasons and for bookkeeping purposes, is being used in Ohio's Garfield Heights district and in a sprinkling of colleges, universities, and businesses across the country.

Students' fingerprints will be put into a scanner that will make a template of binary numbers corresponding with the swirls and arches of each print. When students go through the lunch line, they will place their finger on a scanner identifying them based on the stored template.

The school board has received numerous complaints, and not only from parents. The ACLU, for example, has expressed concern that "the scans will be used to track students' eating habits."

Raymond Vasvari, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union, said systems such as the one adopted by Akron raise serious privacy issues. He said school leaders must take steps to ensure that the fingerprint images do not end up in the wrong hands. ''The question remains: Is there information that would be useful to someone and how can you be sure this information is not shared?'' he said.

The system will cost $700,000. It was voted on by the school board and approved. Did they even consider whether the money might not have been better spent on providing higher quality food, more free lunches, teacher salaries or after-school programs?

A criminal justice professor in Chicago has hit on a key factor to reduce the murder rate: provide affordable housing:

A study of the city's murder rate shows an unlikely factor at the heart of the violence. Chicago's rate is three times that of New York not because of policing, but because of a lack of good, affordable housing.

Here's some of what John M. Hagedorn, associate professor of criminal justice at the University of Illinois-Chicago and a senior research fellow at the Great Cities Institute, has to say:

I'm in the midst of a two-year study, funded by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, to investigate why Chicago's homicide rate hasn't fallen like New York City's. While we are still collecting data, Mayor Richard Daley's recent call for ideas to stop the violence has convinced me to join the discussion now.

Hagerdorn doesn't buy that policing styles make the difference since murder rates have also dropped in Boston, Houston, San Francisco and San Diego, without a Rudy Giuliani or Bill Bratton. He notes that violence "is generally high in cities and areas that have undergone severe disruption of daily life."

In Eastern Europe. Albania, for example, according to the World Bank, has very high rates of violence, and a quarter of all of its young men are working in the drug trade. Wherever there are cities with desperate conditions and high rates of violence, as in Kingston, Jamaica, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, or Bombay, we also find groups of armed young men. Whether they are paramilitaries, drug cartels, death squads, militant fundamentalists or gangs, these groups are a major obstacle to stopping the cycle of violence.

It is also apparent that where class differences within dominant groups is the main source of conflict, violence is usually sporadic and muted. High rates of persisting violence are almost always related to ethnic, racial or religious conflict.

The wide variation in rates of violence within ethnic groups debunks any notion that African-Americans, or Irish, or Hispanics are violence prone. Violence is a property of social structure, not people. (emphasis supplied)

Turning to Chicago, Hagerdorn says,

"Former Charles Manson disciple and convicted murderer Susan Atkins is suing Gov. Gray Davis, contending his policy opposing for nearly all murderers has made her a political prisoner." Atkins is right about Gov. Davis's policy.

"Soon after he took office, Gov. Gray Davis told a newspaper reporter that any inmate serving time for murder in California was not going to get out during his watch. " He's kept his word. "What the governor is doing is fundamentally unlawful -- but politically astute," said Franklin Zimring, a criminal law professor at Berkeley's Boalt School of Law. Prisoners -- especially those convicted of murder -- don't have a large voter constituency, he said. "

"The governor's policy, his critics say, has turned every murderer's sentence into life without possibility of, regardless of any mitigating factors. "

Both the Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Chronicle have criticized Davis for his anti-parole stance for murderers.

Last year the Board, hardly a liberal group, granted parole to 140 inmates. Davis vetoed all but two. "When a judge issues a sentence that includes the words "with possibility of," it reflects our society's belief that a small number of criminals can be rehabilitated, as well as our constitutional right to a fair and impartial hearing. One of the important reasons for a system is to give inmates a strong incentive to follow the rules and to turn their lives around."

Nonetheless, we doubt Ms. Atkins will have any more luck than fellow former Manson devotee Leslie Van Houten, even though both of them have been model prisoners.

The Judge ordered the Board to give her [Van Houten] a new hearing and to consider her model prison behavior and not just the severity of the offense. If only the severity of the crime were considered, her sentence effectively would be a life sentence without instead of the-eligible life sentence she received. The board has been ordered to tell Van Houten what it is she must do to get if they deny her again.

[Note: The board gave Van Houten another hearing in June, 2002, and denied her for the 14th time. And last year, the California Supreme Court upheld the governor's authority to block the of convicted murderers.]

Atkins is taking a different legal approach. She has filed a federal civil rights action seeking $1.1 million in punitive and other damages, as well as her freedom. The state claims it has immunity and has filed a motion to dismiss. A hearing has been set for June 30, but the Judge has said he will rule based on the pleadings without holding oral argument. Atkins has served 33 years of her parolable life sentence. Her lawyer says if she wins any money in the lawsuit, she will donate it to crime victims.

While Canada is moving to decriminalize marijuana, the U.S. is becoming stricter than ever. Don't miss this insightful and informative article in Sunday's New York Times by Eric Schlosser, author of "Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market."

The number of marijuana arrests now approaches three-quarters of a million annually, largely for simple possession. More people are in prison for marijuana crimes today than ever before. Dozens, if not hundreds, are serving life sentences for nonviolent pot offenses. Attorney General John Ashcroft has called for full enforcement of the pot laws and spearheaded a crackdown on medicinal marijuana providers in California, though their efforts are legal under state law.

Some interesting factoids:

• The first American law about marijuana, passed by the Virginia Assembly in 1619, required every household to grow it. Hemp was considered a valuable commodity.

• Popular fears of marijuana arose in the early 20th century, prompted by the use of the drug by Mexican immigrants. Rumors spread about the "killer weed" that incited violent crimes and drove its users insane. The fears quickly spread to blacks and to jazz music.

• Marijuana was first outlawed in 1937. Not long after, the feds planned to conduct a national raid to round-up black jazz musicians who smoked pot. The plot failed because the agents couldn't infiltrate the "jazz milieu."

In a nutshell,

Marijuana has always been associated with minorities and subcultures that seem to threaten mainstream America. America's marijuana laws usually expressed that fear of outsiders in moralistic terms, while proving ineffective at stopping pot use.

Oregon was the first state to decriminalize pot--in 1973. Jimmy Carter supported decriminalization at the federal level. With Reagan, the pendulum began to swing the other way.

Moral condemnations of pot smokers and long prison sentences were revived by President Ronald Reagan, as a part of that era's culture wars. Mr. Reagan's first drug czar, Carlton E. Turner, felt that marijuana use was linked to anti-authority behavior and insisted pot could turn young men into homosexuals.

Today, it is largely poor people and minority offenders who are imprisoned for marijuana offenses. Pot smokers can now lose their cars, houses, jobs, student loans and food stamps after getting busted.

How high-tech is the equipment and how interested are our officials in this kind of technology?

Please Contact your U.S. Representatives and Senators to Co-Sponsor and/or Support This Legislation:

Congressman Danny K. Davis, 7th District of Illinois, introduced new legislation entitled "Public Safety Ex-offender Self Sufficiency Act of 2002" (H.R. 2166) into the House of Representatives. It provides for transitional housing for ex-offenders, with on-site delivery of employment placement and supportive services to facilitate successful ex-offender re-entry and promote public safety.

H.R. 2166 amends the IRS code of 1986 to reflect an ex-offender low-income housing credit to encourage the provision of housing, job readiness training, and other essential services delivered in structured living environments designed to assist ex-offenders in becoming self-sufficient.

This comprehensive legislative initiative addresses the United
State's lack of a systematic, comprehensive approach to re-
integrating the increasing number of returning ex-offenders. It seeks to decrease recidivism rates and the cost of crime to victims, and increase public safety.

1996 Olympic Bomb Suspect Eric Rudolph, last seen in 1998, has been arrested in the mountains of North Carolina. Rudolph appeared to be a homeless person rummaging through a trash bin at the time he was caught.

Rudolph had eluded a massive manhunt, much of it in the North Carolina mountains, for five years and was on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted list. The FBI had offered a $1 million reward for his capture.

....Authorities spent years searching the rural mountains and caves of western North Carolina for any trace of Rudolph. They ran across some camping sites believed to be his and found cartons of oatmeal and raisins, jars of peanuts and vitamins, and cans of tuna they said were the same brands Rudolph ate.

Rudolph, a Florida native who moved to North Carolina in 1981, is believed to adhere to Christian Identity, a white supremacist religion that is anti-gay, anti-Semitic and anti-foreigner. Some of the four bombs Rudolph was charged with planting included messages from the shadowy "Army of God."

....Pockets of western North Carolina have had a reputation as a haven for right-wing extremists. Some there mocked the government's inability to find Rudolph with bloodhounds, infrared-equipped helicopters and space-age motion detectors and some said they would hide him if asked.

A secretive law enforcement convention scheduled in Seattle next week has drawn the ire of civil liberites and minority groups--to the point where demonstrations are planned for 11 area Starbucks. Starbucks is one of the suppliers for the convention.

Top FBI and White House anti-terrorism experts will join law enforcement colleagues in Seattle next week for a police intelligence convention that is drawing fire from a coalition of local social justice and minority organizations.

The Law Enforcement Intelligence Unit -- a private group of local and state police intelligence officials -- is for the first time allowing federal intelligence personnel to participate in the conference. On the table will be initiatives instituted since the Sept. 11 attacks to improve the sharing of federal intelligence with local agencies.

The conference is closed to the public and the media.

And that concerns members of the People of Color Coalition Against the War at Home and Abroad. The ad hoc collection of groups considers the response by police to Sept. 11 to be an attack on civil liberties that especially hurts minority and immigrant communities.

Michael Woo of the Northwest Labor and Employment Law Office slammed the law enforcement group and the Department of Homeland Security as "the KGBs in our modern era" bent on stripping away our rights and civil liberties.

Starbucks response? "I don't think it is appropriate to have an expectation that Starbucks can resolve issues of civil liberties."

[link via Balasubramania]