Here's an open thread, all topics welcome (except Zimmerman who has his own threads.)

If you are looking for something moving to read today, try Senior U.S. District Court Judge Richard Kopf's blog post, "The best gift I ever got from a convicted killer" about sentencing decisions.

Judge Kopf is not going to be pleased that I'm praising his blog again, but now that I've read all the posts, I can't help but point out some that I especially liked. There's several on the sequester cuts to defender services. Today he proposed this solution:

Unless the House Judiciary Committee is run entirely by hypocrites, I think the Committee ought to fire one of its lawyers every time a federal public defender gets the axe as a result of the sequester. Perhaps Mr. Branden Ritchie, Deputy Chief of Staff and Chief Counsel for the House Judiciary Committee, would be a good candidate for the first sequester generated pink slip.

As Democrats in Colorado pushed through three new gun control laws in March, 2013, with virtually no support from Republicans, applications for concealed weapons permits were soaring.

In the first half of 2013, the Denver Post reports the numbers rose dramatically, from 16, 886 to 31, 518:

From January to June, 31,518 background checks were processed for concealed-carry permits by the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, according to bureau data. For the same period last year, there were only 16,886 processed

Here's a chart showing the first six months of both years. [More...]

The New Zealand prosecutor's office has spent almost 10,000 hours battling Kim Dotcom in New Zealand, either on behalf of the U.S. or defending against NZ's actions in providing assistance to the FBI.

The latest figures show 9688 hours worked on the case since July 15, 2011 - the date the Crown Law Office opened its file on the American request. The estimate of $2 million is based on rates usually paid for counsel hired to work for the Crown. In this case, additional legal work for the Crown had been done by Christine Gordon QC, Kirsty McDonald QC and Mike Ruffin, adding about 200 hours.

...Some of that work is on behalf of the United States but most has been damage control around the mess which came with helping the FBI shut down Mr Dotcom's Megaupload.

It's not just a drain of money. It's also a drain on prosecutorial and court resources that could be better spent on other matters, such as crime in New Zealand.

As to why you should care, it's because the same waste of money and resources is occurring with DOJ's prosecution of Kim Dotcom and Megaupload in Virginia.[More....]

Looks like our recent George Zimmerman posts have maxed out at 200 comments, which is the limit. Here's a new thread.

Over at Slate, William Saletan breaks down the Juror B-29 interview pointing to ABC's phoney-baloney editing job, which appears to be designed to produce the maximum salacious effect. Three versions are here, here and here. [More...]

Happy birthday to Mick Jagger, who turned 70 yesterday. While I couldn't possibly list all my favorites in one post, here he is singing Satisfaction in 1969; Happy in 1972; Under My Thumb and Time is On My Side in 1982;You Can't Always Get What You Want in 1990; Gimme Shelter in 1997; Let It Bleed in 2003; Sympathy for the Devil in 2006; at the Superbowl halftime show in 2010; It's Only Rock n Roll at Hyde Park a few weeks ago.

This is an open thread, all topics welcome (except Zimmerman which will have its own post shortly.)

Meet the new Kim Dotcom, New Zealand activist for privacy rights, fighting against expansion of government surveillance and U.S. drone strikes and for the rights of whistleblowers.

Kim Dotcom spoke at a rally of thousands of New Zealanders (video here) who had gathered to voice their opposition to a bill expanding Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB)surveillance authority and information sharing with law enforcement.

Dotcom said it was very important for people to understand the GCSB is a subsidiary of the NSA and spying for the Americans, feeding them information for its war on terror to locate targets for drone strikes.

Dotcom tells the crowd the U.S. didn't want him spied upon because they thought he was a terrorist or a threat to national security, but because a handful of billionaires in Hollywood didn't like his business. The crowd cheers its approval. He asks, "Why would they spy on me?" [More...]

Busy work day ahead. Here's an open thread, all topics welcome, except Zimmerman, who has his own threads. Far as i can tell the B-29 thread is still open.

On a lighter note, via How Appealing: Senior U.S District Court Judge Richard Kopf (Nebraska)has a blog about the role of a federal judge called Hercules and the Umpire. A few days ago he wrote a post opining that no misdemeanor and 7 day jail sentence for abuse of a toilet and bathroom warrants 57 pages in an appellate decision. The opinion at issue: U.S. v. Strong, decided last week by the First Circuit Court of Appeals. Judge Kopf describes the case:

In Strong, the defendant was convicted of three misdemeanors, and received a sentence of seven days in jail, for literally messing up a bathroom in a federal court-house. He claimed to have a problem with his bowels, but the government saw his conduct in a more malicious light.

Judge Kopf also includes some personal details in his post, including that he's a "toilet freak" and the worst part of moving from being regular District Court Judge to senior status was losing his private bathroom.

I decided to read some more of Judge Kopf's blog. Parts of it are really funny.

Chicago Tribune columnist Eric Zorn takes on the claims that Chicago's murder rate is the highest in the country and that it's murder rate has reached a crisis point in his new column, Wrongly Accused.

"Since Trayvon Martin was killed, 500 people have been killed in Chicago alone," said talk-show host Larry Elder during a guest appearance on CNN on Tuesday evening. The previous night on the same network, in a video montage related to the umpty-whillionth panel discussion prompted by Zimmerman's acquittal, an unidentified woman said, "Nobody's talking about what happened in Chicago last week; 62 people were killed."

Nobody was talking about it because it didn't happen. No one on the show bothered to correct the assertion — the actual number of murders in Chicago in that week was 10, police said...

Juror B-29, the sole minority juror in the George Zimmerman trial, and her attorney flew to New York to be interviewed by Robin Roberts of ABC News.

ABC identified B-29 as Maddy and said she is Puerto Rican.... Maddy tells ABC that the case was never about race for her.

In fact, Maddy says she doesn't believe the case should have gone to trial. "I felt like this was a publicity stunt," she tells Roberts. "This whole court service thing to me was publicity."

In other reports of the interview, "Maddy" says she wanted to convict Zimmerman but the jury instructions didn't allow it, and she thinks he "got away with murder." [More....]

(Note: Links added and blockquoting fixed.)

A federal jury in Brooklyn has sentenced Ronell Wilson to death for killing two undercover cops a decade ago. Wilson was previously convicted and sentenced to death, but the Second Circuit reversed the death sentence due to prosecutorial misconduct during closing arguments.

That sentence was overturned in 2010, when an appeals court ruled that prosecutors had unfairly tried to influence the jury in the case.

The court specifically faulted prosecutors for arguing that Wilson's claims of remorse should be discredited because he declined to plead guilty and refused to testify in his trial.

More...]

The DEA raided several medical marijuana dispensaries in Washington State yesterday. One had only been open a month.

Casey Lee, an employee at the Bayside Collective, said DEA agents served him with a search warrant and seized about "11 or 12 plants Wednesday morning. They also took marijuana in jars that is set aside for patients. He said the seized marijuana totaled about a quarter pound. The DEA agents seized his and another employee's cell phone, Lee added.

Fellow Bayside Collective employee Addy Norton said she was "terrified" during the raid, and DEA agents pointed guns in her face as they entered the building.