Busy week for me. Here's an open thread, all topics welcome (except Zimmerman.)

Dias Kadyrbayev and Azamat Tazhayakov, the friends of Dzokhar Tsarnaev who took items from his dorm room a few days after the Boston Marathon bombing, appeared in court today and entered pleas of not guilty to charges of conspiracy to obstruct justice. After court, Dias' attorney released a statement, which reads in part:

“Dias comes from a former Soviet-bloc region where police routinely are distrusted. Yet when authorities first approached him, he fully cooperated and for nearly 12 hours over two days Dias answered the FBI’s questions without an attorney or a Kazakh Consular official present,” the statement read.

“Dias also voluntarily turned over the computer from Tsarnaev’s room and told the FBI where they could find the backpack that contained a packet of fireworks. The FBI recovered all of the items because of Dias’ complete cooperation with their investigation.”

At Slate, Azamat's first lawyer, Harlan Protass, has an op-ed arguing against long sentences for the pair. The Government told the court today it expects to call 15 to 20 witnesses at trial.

Graphic from Human Rights Watch report

The Bureau of Prisons has issued new compassionate release guidelines. Dated August 12, 2013, they are available on the BOP website here.

The policy addresses release under both 18 U.S.C. 4205(g) and 18 U.S.C. 3582©(1)(A) (pre and post-1987 sentences).

18 U.S.C. 4205(g) was repealed effective November 1, 1987, but remains the controlling law for inmates whose offenses occurred prior to that date. For inmates whose offenses occurred on or after November 1, 1987, the applicable statute is 18 U.S.C. 3582©(1)(A).

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NYTimes:

In a repudiation of a major element in the Bloomberg administration’s crime-fighting legacy, a federal judge has found that the stop-and-frisk tactics of the New York Police Department violated the constitutional rights of minorities in New York, and called for a federal monitor to oversee broad reforms.

Here is the opinion.

Attorney General Eric Holder will announce a sea change in policy at the Justice Department this morning in his speech to the American Bar Association in San Francisco. I hope he gets a standing ovation.

“I have mandated a modification of the Justice Department’s charging policies so that certain low-level, nonviolent drug offenders who have no ties to large-scale organizations, gangs, or cartels will no longer be charged with offenses that impose draconian mandatory minimum sentences,”

Since we have had a do-nothing Congress on mandatory minimums since they were enacted in Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 under President Reagan --27 years -- Holder is going to effect change through prosecutorial discretion. Why?

[Mandatory minimum sentences] "breed disrespect for the system. When applied indiscriminately, they do not serve public safety. They have had a disabling effect on communities. And they are ultimately counterproductive."

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"Breaking Bad" begins tonight.

Here's an open thread, all topics welcome (except Zimmerman.)

The New Yorker has a lengthy new article on civil forfeiture abuse by state and local authorities. It's filled with horror stories of corruption and violations of civil liberties.

In many states, it's no more than highway piracy:

Patterns began to emerge. Nearly all the targets had been pulled over for routine traffic stops. Many drove rental cars and came from out of state. None appeared to have been issued tickets. And the targets were disproportionately black or Latino.

In others, it's policing for profit. Some cities, like Detroit, try to justify the seizures as "quality of life" preservation under ancient vice statutes. This one is a doozy: [More...]

In an op-ed in the New York Times, author John Grisham writes he was puzzled by reports that his books were banned at Guantanamo. Lawyers for some of the detainees said their clients had requested them, so they brought copies with them when visiting, but the books weren't allowed through, due to "impermissible content."

Grisham says he tracked down one detainee, Nabil Hadjarab, a 34-year-old Algerian who grew up in France, who speaks perfect English. Grisham got to know Nabil's history, and it is similar to many of the detainees: they were sold to the U.S for a bounty of $5,000.

Nabil has been at Gitmo for 11 years. Grisham thinks he will be one of those released. But, he asks, what then? [More...]

Your Turn. All topics welcome -- Except Zimmerman

President Obama held a press conference today on NSA surveillance and released two documents concerning the program. They are combined here:

• Pages 1 to 23: A legal memorandum explaining the Government’s legal basis for an intelligence collection program under which the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) obtains court orders directing certain telecommunications service providers to produce telephony metadata in bulk.
• Pages 24 to 30: NSA on Legal Authorities: a seven-page document describing the legal authorities that the agency uses as the basis for its spying, the controls that are in place to limit the surveillance and a brief description of what guides the agency’s use of what they call signals intelligence.

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Raphael Caro-Quintero, accused of the murder of DEA agent Kikki Camerena in 1985, has been released from prison in Mexico after 28 years. An appeals court reversed his conviction, finding the federal court in Mexico lacked jurisdiction because Camerena was not a consulate official or diplomat and should have been tried in state court. (also see the translated version of this article from Mexico.)

The DEA is angry. It wants Caro-Quintero to stand trial in California for Camerena's murder and has an extradition request and international alert for him. [More...]

This is an interesting bit of pushback from the NSA, as anonymously sourced to Dana Priest of the WaPo:

The analysts’ 215 requests go to one of the 22 people at the NSA who are permitted to approve them — the chief or the deputy chief of the Homeland Security Analysis Center or one of 20 authorized Homeland Security mission coordinators within the Signals Intelligence directorate’s analysis and production directorate.

Once a request is approved, it is given to one of the Signal Intelligence directorate’s 33 counterterrorism analysts who are authorized to access the U.S. phone metadata collection.

The sourcing is intended to push back from the idea that any old analyst can just make this decision. But in the attempt, it undermines the idea that the FISA court is an actual check on NSA abuse. The FISA court is not involved at all in the individual search process, according to Priest's NSA sources.

That undermines the idea of the FISA court as an effective check on the NSA.