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."

Excellent news on the death penalty front out of Illinois:

State lawmakers adopted a measure Friday to make Illinois' death penalty system fairer, virtually assuring a sweeping overhaul of the capital punishment process will go to Gov. Rod Blagojevich.

The House bill covers many of the recommendations made by a commission appointed by then-Gov. George Ryan, who suspended all executions in 2000 and cleared out death row of all 167 inmates at the end of his term earlier this year.

The measure makes it easier for murder defendants to get evidence that could help them in their trials, allows judges to second-guess jury death sentences and lets the Supreme Court set aside sentences it deems unjust.

It also sets up a pilot program for police to videotape interrogations and prohibits executing the mentally retarded.

The bill has now gone through both state houses. The amendments added by the House "are all but assured of passing" and the Governor is for it.

A little off-topic perhaps, but very interesting. From the LA Times, which requires free registration: Rorschach Tested

....a chorus of critics has emerged in recent years, saying that much of the test is mumbo jumbo, better relegated to a medical museum along with radioactive tonics and bloodletting fleams. They say that the test has potential to do harm by misdirecting therapy or by influencing decisions in high-stakes situations such as custody disputes.

"If psychologists used tea leaves instead of the Rorschach, we'd probably be better off, because then, at least, no one else would take the results seriously," says James Wood, associate professor of psychology at the University of Texas at El Paso.

....Rorschach defenders are fighting back fiercely. They counter that critics are unfairly scapegoating the test with a tenacity that borders on the fanatical. They say the test, which homes in on people's differing reactions to ambiguous images, is far more solid than detractors claim, and that time after time, Wood, Garb and Lilienfeld have failed to acknowledge the evidence in support of it.

We've always wanted to know how the test is scored, and here it is:

We like this guy already.

Military trials of terrorism suspects should be public to ensure that the world sees the proceedings as fair, said the Air Force officer appointed as chief defense lawyer for the tribunals.

Col. Will Gunn said Thursday that he would push for any such trials to be as open as possible. "I see that as in the best interest of the nation as a whole," Gunn told reporters at the Pentagon. "We will be judged from the world community on whether or not the process was fair and just."

Salam Pax returned to his blog recently. UPI has this report:

Salam Pax is back. The anonymous Iraqi whose cyber-reporting of life in Baghdad during the war made him an Internet star, is back in business, issuing a grim warning after a roving tour through Iraq's postwar chaos: "I came back from the trip seriously worrying that we might become an Iran clone."

"If anyone went to the streets now and decided to hold an election we will end up with something that is scarier than (Ayatollah) Khomeini's Iran," Salam Pax writes, using the nom-de-plume that became famous during the war. It means peace-peace, in Arabic and Latin.

An appellate court in Colorado has ruled that Neglect Laws Don't Apply to Fetus:

"There are no remedies in the (Colorado Children's) Code appropriate to an unborn child or designed to restrict the conduct of a pregnant woman," the ruling said. The appeals court said a contempt charge is the only remedy Colorado courts have to punish pregnant women who ignore a court order to stop taking illegal drugs or engaging in other harmful activity.

In ruling, the Colorado court examined the opinions of state courts around the country and found a general consensus that there is a lack of jurisdiction over the fetus in dependency and neglect proceedings.

The appeals court said a contempt charge is the only remedy Colorado courts have to punish pregnant women who ignore a court order to stop taking illegal drugs or engaging in other harmful activity.

We'll put up the link to the opinion when we find it.

Now that the chief prosecutor and chief defense counsel for any upcoming military tribunal trials are set, the issue turns to staffing the offices with capable prosecutors and defense counsel. While there is no shortage of volunteers for the prosecution side, not a single civilian lawyer has applied to be a defense lawyer.

No, it's not because defense lawyers don't wan't to represent these particular individuals.

Don Rehkopf, a Rochester lawyer who is co-chairman of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers' military law committee, said in a telephone interview that the military rules were so stacked against the defense that few civilian lawyers would want to apply.

"It would be unethical for any attorney to agree to the conditions they've set," Mr. Rehkopf said. "You have to agree to waive the attorney-client privilege so that the government can monitor your conversations. It's a total farce."

See our post from yesterday about the conditions placed on civilian defense lawyers representing defendants in military tribunal proceedings, and the ethical problems they pose.

Texas has passed one of the country's "most sweeping" abortion counseling laws. Among its many objectionable provisions is the requirement that doctors "warn women that abortion might lead to breast cancer."

That link, however, does not exist, according to the American Cancer Society and federal government researchers, and critics say the law is a thinly veiled attempt to intimidate, frighten and shame women who are seeking an abortion. Proponents say they are merely trying to give women as much information as possible, and argue that research into the alleged link between abortion and breast cancer remains inconclusive.

After years of failed attempts to outlaw abortion outright, social conservatives across the nation are now finding success in limiting abortions by requiring so-called counseling of patients. Among the most aggressive tactics is the attempt to link abortion with breast cancer, a move that many conservative organizations have undertaken, but rarely with the success they have found in Texas.

The bill has passed both houses in Texas and the Governor has said he will sign it into law.

The BBC is reporting that a Pakistani man, formerly held as a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay and recently freed, has said he was given injections to make him talk.

Shah Mohammad was released earlier this month and is now back in Pakistan after months in custody, suspected of links with Islamic militants.

Mr. Shah alleged that the Americans had given him injections and tablets prior to interrogations. "They used to tell me I was mad," the 23-year-old told the BBC in his native village in Dir district near the Afghan border. "I was given injections at least four or five times as well as different tablets. I don't know what they were meant for."

Mr. Shaw, who was not in the military, but was working as a salaried bread baker for the Taliban, had this to say about his transport to Guantanamo and the conditions there:

Before boarding the plane our hands and feet were tied and duct tape was stuck across our mouths, blindfolds were placed on our eyes and devices were shoved into our ears. "Our hair and beards were shaved off," he said.

Mr Shah said conditions at Guantanamo were appalling to begin with. "We were not allowed to pray and little food was served. But later things improved," he said.

[link via balasubramania]