Democratic presidential contender Dennis Kucinich issues the strongest criticism to date of the drug war.

"A judge authorized doctors Friday to perform an abortion on a 28-year-old disabled woman who has the cognitive skills of a 4-year-old."

"Circuit Judge Arthur Rothenberg allowed doctors to do a tubal ligation so the woman cannot become pregnant again. He also ordered doctors to take a DNA sample from the nearly 6-month-old fetus to help identify the father. Police believe the woman was likely raped more than once.
The woman's lawyer said she appeared to be pleased with the ruling. ``She can't verbalize much of anything, but you can see by her actions that she is happy,'' said attorney Lewis H. Fogle Jr."

This is the second such case in Florida in recent weeks. In a case involving an Orlando woman, Gov. Jeb Bush made headlines by calling for a guardian to be appointed for the fetus.

Due to an erosion of trust in the FBI's disciplinary system, Director Robert Mueller has ordered an independent review of the agency's Office of Professional Responsibility.

Among the chief complaints are claims of retaliation against whistleblowers--and that agents are sanctioned more severely than managers.

A report by the Justice Department's inspector general last fall said the FBI "suffers from a strong, and not unreasonable, perception among employees that a double standard exists within the FBI." That view grew in part from the existence of a separate disciplinary system for managers until August 2000.

The inspector general cited several "troubling cases" in which discipline for managers appeared "unduly lenient." These included the handling of the confrontation at Ruby Ridge and falsified expense accounts submitted by several FBI managers who traveled to Washington to attend a retirement party for one of their colleagues.

Another inspector general's report early this year found that the current head of the OPR [Office of Professional Responsibility], Robert Jordan, exercised poor judgment in denying a promotion to FBI agent John Roberts after Roberts told the CBS program "60 Minutes" that managers and line employees weren't disciplined equally.

The review will be conducted by Attorney General Griffin Bell and former FBI Associate Director Lee Colwell. They will examine the practices of the FBI's Office of Professional Responsibility. The review is expected to take three to six months.

From the Chicago Tribune :

More than a quarter-century after they were sent to prison for one of the most sensational crimes of the 1970s, two Chicago men walked free into the arms of tearful relatives and a dramatically different world Friday after prosecutors agreed they should have a new trial.

Citing DNA tests that excluded Michael Evans and Paul Terry in the 1976 rape and murder of 9-year-old Lisa Cabassa, Cook County prosecutors dropped their opposition to a new trial, though they plan to try the two men again.

....Evans and Terry were sentenced to 200 to 400 years in prison for the abduction, rape and murder of Lisa on Jan. 14, 1976. The girl was abducted as she walked near her home in the South Chicago neighborhood. Her body was found the next day.

At the time, Evans and Terry were 17.

If prosecutors do not try Evans and Terry or if the two men are acquitted, the case would be the oldest DNA exoneration in the nation, said Rob Warden of the Center on Wrongful Convictions. Winning a conviction would seem difficult in the face of the DNA evidence and the numerous contradictions in Januszewski's testimony, lawyers for the men said.

Evans also called on prosecutors to drop the case. "They know they were wrong," he said. "They need to let it go."

Salon Readers respond to Andrew Sullivan on President Bush's "looming package of manhood." Here's one:

Since Chris Matthews and Gordon Liddy, the criminal, have stated that women will vote for Bush because of the bulge in his flight suit, the formerly private parts of Bush are now a subject open for questions and answers. Why did he have an erection upon seeing all those young men aboard the carrier? At our house we've been laughing about Bush's stuffing his flight suit with socks, à la male ballet dancers. I've been polling my girlfriends. None of us, not a single one, will vote for Bush, bulge or not.

Or maybe all of this is none of our business and we should attack him on more worthwhile grounds. I personally think his bulge is as worthless as his brain. And women are far too smart to trade their civil rights and future aspirations for a roll of socks.

Atrios reports that Neil Young is afraid of getting deported for his Dixie Chick-like criticism of George Bush.

The People's Republic of Seabrook got a major bloglift and is looking good.

Arthur at Light of Reason writes about a federal judge in Seattle who has struck down a law on first amendment grounds that made it illegal for anyone to disseminate personal information about law enforcement-related employees if it was being done for malicious reasons.

Update your bookmarks, the Volokh Conspiracy has left Blogger for Volokh.Com.

Happy wedding anniversary to Skippy. His weekend blogpicks:

go read talkleft or atrios or calpundit or little red cookbook or roger ailes or tom tomorrow or body and soul or eric alterman or wtf is it now? or the daily kos or the horse or ruminate this! or lean left or spadehammer or plucky punk or liberal oasis or cursor or blah3 or antiwar or the smirking chimp or the daily rant or madkane or gail davis or brad de long or the democratic veteran or the rittenhouse review or max sawicky...or any other fine blog on our blog roll.

This tale of alleged police abuse comes from Detroit, where an officer has been charged in federal court with supplying drugs to one group of people and then charging other people to watch the first group use the drugs on a website. Even we couldn't make this one up.

A police officer who officials say supplied narcotics to people, filmed them and ran a Web site where people paid to watch them use drugs was arraigned Friday on federal charges.

Police say Campbell, who had been with the Detroit department for eight years, supplied narcotics to individuals and secured their approval to film them while they used the drugs.

The cop is charged with conspiracy to distribute controlled substances. If he's convicted, maybe a webcam can be installed in his cell so we all can watch him do his time.

A Colorado judge has overturned the death sentence of a man convicted of a brutal murder because the jury read and referred to bibles during its deliberations.

While noting that [Robert] Harlan's crimes ``were among the most grievous, heinous and reprehensible'' he had seen in 18 years on the bench, Adams County District Judge John J. Vigil said court officials failed to properly sequester the jury.

Jury members stayed in a hotel during deliberations and court officials made sure newspapers were not delivered to their rooms, but the jurors did find bibles in the rooms.

In a five-day hearing last month, Harlan's attorneys argued that several jurors consulted biblical scripture during jury deliberations, particularly two Old Testament passages from Leviticus that read, ``fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, as he has caused disfigurement of a man, so shall it be done to him.'' And, ``whoever kills an animal shall restore it, but whoever kills a man shall be put to death.''

``The jury supervision performed in this case was extremely negligent and appallingly lax,'' Vigil wrote in his ruling. ``Jury resort to biblical code has no place in a constitutional death penalty proceeding.''

The prosecution said it will appeal.

Alaska has joined Hawaii and 112 other cities and towns across the nation in passing a resolution opposing the Patriot Act.

Alaska's measure goes further than most, advising police and other state agencies not to "initiate, participate in, or assist or cooperate with an inquiry, investigation, surveillance or detention" if there is not "reasonable suspicion of criminal activity under Alaska State law."

"We have a concern that [the Patriot Act] could be abused. The potential for abuse is too great," said Rep. David Guttenberg, a Democrat who co-sponsored the resolution. "America is an open state. There's a cost to that. Where are we willing to sacrifice for that? Guys are dying on the battlefield to protect our freedoms. It's up to us to protect those freedoms here at home."

The ACLU also reports on Alaska's tough stance.

This resolution affirms the motto of Alaska, ‘North to the Future,’” said Jennifer Rudinger, Executive Director of the AkCLU. “As a state, we have always led the Lower 48 in respecting and ensuring the individual rights of our residents under the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. This exceptionally strong resolution reflects our dedication to civil liberties and our deep-seated belief that Alaska – and America – can be both safe and free.”

The Alaska resolution was bipartisan and passed in the House with a vote of 37 to 1. On May 20 it passed the Senate with a vote of 19 to 0.

The Alaska resolution explicitly prohibits state agencies from engaging in racial profiling and prohibits the use of state resources or institutions for the enforcement of federal immigration matters. It also bars state agencies from creating intelligence dossiers on the political, religious and social views of individuals and organizations, unless the information directly relates to an investigation of criminal activities.

Further, in the absence of reasonable suspicion of criminal activity under Alaska state law, it prohibits participation in investigations, detentions and surveillance as well as seizure of personal library, medical, financial, student and sales records, even when authorized by the PATRIOT Act. Additionally, the resolution calls upon the Alaskan Congressional delegation to work to correct sections of the USA PATRIOT Act and other measures that unduly restrict personal freedoms.

You can read the text of the resolution here. [Thanks to Manish of Damn Foreigner for tipping us to the news and link]

[comments now closed due to being spammed.]

From Fox News:

A source who has seen the 25-page autopsy report and does not work for either the defense or the prosecution told Fox News that the body of the 8-months-pregnant woman was missing the head and neck, and both arms are cut off at the elbows.

The right leg is severed at the knee; the left foot is missing; the heart, lungs and other internal organs are gone and there is a hole in the upper abdomen above the belly button that may be a knife wound, said the source, who asked not to be identified.

The womb, however, is intact -- suggesting that the nearly full-term baby was not cut out of Laci’s body but was expelled naturally after she was killed.

Hmmm....Who would have seen the autopsy report that is not working for the defense or the prosecution? How about a medical examiner who was consulted by the prosecutior or defense and asked to take on the case but either declined or was not extended an offer after rendering their opinion?

Here's more:

The source said X-rays weren’t included in the autopsy report, which maintains that the limbs showed no sign of having been sawed off. The document indicates that instead, they were probably lost naturally after the still-intact body was dumped into San Francisco Bay.

But Fox News’ source disagrees, believing it’s much more likely that a knife was used to dismember the corpse. “It’s been cut at the joints, much as you would carve a turkey,” the source said.

The source also told Fox that the condition of the body did not point to a ritual slaying, but instead indicates that it was cut up to aid in its disposal.

As a follow-up to our post Wednesday on the pending bill to allow the Drug Control Office to spend huge advertising dollars fighting legislative intitiatives that would legalize marijuana, this just came in from Kris Krane at NORML:

Today we are writing with more good news. Thanks in large part to the thousands of e-mails and letters generated by drug law reform supporters over the past week, Congress has decided to postpone voting on HR 2086, the
ONDCP Reauthorization Act, while they debate changing some of the more nsulting provisions.

In the past week, we two legislative alerts regarding provisions of this bill. One alerted you to the fact that the bill authorized reallocating $60.5 million from High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas to target medical marijuana users. The second dealt with the ONDCP allocation of over $1 billion to fund the National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign, despite the government¹s own studies proving it has been a massive failure.

It appears that your letters had a tremendous impact. During yesterday¹s
hearing, several members of the committee, including Diane Watson (D-CA) and Carolyn Maloney (D-NY), directly challenged key aspects of these provisions. In addition, writers form the Associated Press have also published a pair of national news stories alerting readers to these controversial amendments.

Don't miss the spring issue of MS Magazine with its special report on women and the death penalty by Claudia Driefus. It's available free, on-line.

Since 1976 when the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty, 131 women have been sentenced to death. Ten women have been executed, nine of them within the past five years.

As this is being written, there are 44 women sitting on death rows in some 14 states, less than 2% of the total among the condemned. In the 27 years since the Supreme Court revived capital punishment, ten women have been put to death. As the nation continues to debate the use of executions as a crime prevention strategy, the fate of these women is mostly absent from public discussion. They are a policy afterthought, as invisible in their potential deaths as they were in their lives.

The broad arguments against capital punishment, male and female, are widely known: It is applied unequally to the poor and unequally by race; innocent people have likely been executed; it does nothing to deter crime; it brutalizes all of society by heightening the general ambiance of violence. But when one examines the stories of the women on death rows around the country, all the rest seems doubly true. The females who draw death sentences seem to be the poorest of the poor, the most socially marginal, the least able to protect themselves in court with a well-funded and coherent defense.

To "thunderous applause," Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue today signed into law a bill that overhauls the state's indigent defense system .

Two years in the making, the Georgia Indigent Defense Act seeks to ensure equal justice for poor people facing criminal charges. Public defender offices will be set up in each of the state's 49 judicial districts, replacing an overwhelmed system that has been judged incapable of protecting the rights of indigents.

There's only one catch: No source of funding has been obtained for the bill.

The state now hands out $6.3 million in grants to fund county programs, a fraction of the overall cost. During this past General Assembly, lawmakers approved a $2 million increase, to $8.3 million next year. But the new public defender system will cost substantially more than that. Perdue estimated the system could cost $50 million to $70 million a year.

Still, the Governor and legislators are promising to find funding:

"For too long, we have turned our heads away from a real and growing statewide issue," Perdue said of Georgia's indigent defense system. "We have not provided the resources and tools necessary to uphold our moral obligation of providing criminal defendants with adequate legal counsel."