We hope we never get on skippy's bad side the way CNN Anchor Aaron Brown did today--our ears were burning for him. It's a skippy classic.

The British-American citizen fighting Texas execution lost tonight, and was put to death by lethal injection.

"Asked by the warden if he had anything to say, John Elliott mouthed "No sir" and nodded his head. He then closed his eyes. As the drugs began to take effect, he had a slight snort, cough and gasp before slipping into unconsciousness. As the lethal drugs continued to flow into his arms, witnesses, including his son and a sister, prayed aloud.

He was pronounced dead at 7:09 p.m. CST, seven minutes after the drugs started flowing."

Elliott denied his guilt. His lawyers sought a stay to conduct DNA tests (which hadn't been done at trial) but the courts refused.

"Elliott was born in 1960 in England, where his father was stationed at a U.S. air base, giving him dual citizenship. British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw asked Gov. Rick Perry to grant clemency for Elliott and more than 100 ministers of Parliament signed a House of Commons motion demanding clemency."

Elliott is the third British citizen executed in the U.S. The other two were put to death in Georgia. Our prior coverage of the case is here .

For UK coverage, start here and work backwards.

The vote on Bush judicial pick Miguel Estrada is tomorrow. Dial 1-800-839-5276 tonight or early tomorrow and tell your senators to filibuster Miguel Estrada tomorrow. The Washington Post says "Republicans...hold a two-vote advantage in the Senate where a filibuster is the only likely option for Democrats to stop a presidential nominee."

What's wrong with Miguel Estrada? Start with the New York Times editorial, "An Unacceptable Nominee." Then read Media Horse this past week - they have the whole story. For more, go to People for the American Way.

Remember, Estrada is particularly dangerous because he is up for a seat on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. A disproportionate share of our Supreme Court Justices come from that court. Those in the know posit that Bush intends to put Estrada on the Supreme Court. We don't even know what he stands for. We've never read opinions by him. We know he worked on the Bush election controversy in Florida with Ted Olson, and that he offers advice to, and is a friend of, a certain acerbic-tongued light-haired pundit.

What can you do? Lisa English of Ruminate This has this answer:

The administration is pushing for a vote on Estrada that will come soon...anytime between now and Colin Powell's speech before the United Nations tomorrow. Distract the people and they'll not think to protest the packing of uber-conservatives with lifetime appointments onto the nation's courts.

Timing is everything. Do these two things. It will take you TEN MINUTES:

1. Pick up the phone - right now - and dial the toll-free congressional switchboard at 1-800-839-5276. Urge your Senator to FILIBUSTER the Estrada nomination. That's it. You'll be asked your name, address and phone. Simple and to the point.

2. Follow up that call with a visit to True Majority and send off their fax which calls for an Estrada filibuster. The fax is already written. If you agree with the verbage, just sign your name and move on. If you'd like to craft your own personal message, take the opportunity to do so.

We are talking ten minutes of your time. Ten minutes that can make a difference. Our country cannot afford to tolerate the corporate and religious ideologues being pumped out by this administration onto our courts.

Here's a small part of what the Horse says about Estrada:

Our site meter has been busy all day today--thanks to Instapundit, Vodkapundit, and Eric Alterman's Altercation. Last week Atrios helped our numbers out a lot. If you haven't read them yet today, go on over. They are must reads every day. Thanks, guys.

While we do keep our sitemeter private (mostly for user privacy), we're happy to announce that we just hit 200,00 visits and 300,000 page views today. We've been averaging between 2,000 and 3,000 visits a day since just before Christmas. We're not in the big leagues yet, but we're climbing. So please, all of you readers, keep coming back. And if you'd like to hit the "chip in" link on the left, we'd be most grateful for your couple of bucks.

Update: We had 3,589 visitors today, a few hundred more than our previous "record."

The prosecutors lost their bid to keep pot guru Ed Rosenthal in jail pending sentencing.

This kind of overkill by prosecutors is how they lose the public trust. There was no justification for their request--Rosenthal is not a flight risk or a danger to the community. He's stuck around throughout these proceedings, including showing up for court today, after the verdict, and he's on a $200k bond. Ashcroft should know better by now.

Update: Daily Kos weighs in, read to the end. So does Instapundit, and Calpundit. Matt Yglesias weighs in here on legalization.

"A jury awarded more than $11 million to a former hotel manager Tuesday after concluding he was fired by real estate maven Leona Helmsley because he is gay."

"The jury found that Charles Bell had endured a "hostile and abusive work environment" while running Helmsley's Park Lane Hotel. He was awarded $10 million in punitive damages and $1.2 million in compensatory damages."

"State Supreme Court Justice Walter Tolub had told the jurors to take into account the defendant's financial condition and said Helmsley's net worth is estimated at $3.2 billion to $4 billion."

Kudos to Mr. Bell and his lawyers...for their perserverence in taking the case to trial--undoubtedly Mrs. Helmsley had a battery of high powered lawyers from a big firm--this just goes to prove that the little guy can win too.

From the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty:

Proposals to ban the execution of people with mental retardation and juvenile offenders and measures that would abolish the death penalty or place a moratorium on executions are under consideration in a number of states, according to an analysis released today by the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty .

Even though it is still early in most state legislative sessions, legislators already have filed more than 200 death penalty-related measures. Bills that would reform, curtail or abolish the use of the death penalty outnumber unfavorable bills by a three-to-one ratio, according to the NCADP analysis.....

On Tuesday, NCADP also unveiled a new tool that will allow activists to lobby their state legislators and state legislative reporters to track legislation in their state capitals. By visiting www.ncadp.org, activists can access the NCADP Legislative Action Center and find out what death penalty-related bills have been filed in their state, the status of those bills and how to contact state legislators.

Thanks to Howard Bashman of How Appealing for e-mailing us about this decision from a divided en banc panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals today. The Court ruled that the head of a public defender's office may be held liable in a civil rights suit brought by a criminal defendant for denial of effective representation of counsel. You can access both the majority and dissenting opinions here.

Howard explains here that "according to the plaintiff's complaint, the head of the public defender's office in Clark County, Nevada 'allocated investigative and defense resources based upon a defendant's performance on a polygraph examination and assigned inexperienced and untrained attorneys to capital and other felony cases.'" The decision pertains to whether the trial court erred in dismissing the plaintiff's case at the summary judgment stage. The Court of Appeals allows the plaintiff/client's lawsuit to proceed against the chief public defender and the county.

Howard says "Circuit Judge Andrew J. Kleinfeld's dissenting opinion does quite a persuasive job of explaining how this really isn't as bad as it sounds." Here's a condensed version of the sample of the dissent that Howard provides:

Maybe to those who haven't done any criminal defense, it isn't obvious why a polygraph examination would be used except to sort the innocent from the guilty. But to an experienced criminal defense lawyer, the distinction between lying and telling the truth is altogether different from (and much more important than) the distinction between guilt and innocence.... The biggest problem criminal defense lawyers face is that their clients often lie to them. Criminal defense clients lie a great deal to their lawyers....It is very difficult for a lawyer to prepare a good defense or negotiate effectively for a plea agreement when the client lies to the lawyer. The polygraph is a high-tech way to scare some of the clients into telling their lawyers the truth, and identifying other clients who won't....

We disagree. We would never polygraph a client for the purpose of determining whether he or she was telling us the truth. Even if we believed in the reliability of polygraphs, which we don't, we would not do that. To us, the public defender's policies are indeed as bad as they sound.

There is a great editorial in the Palm Beach Post criticizing Jeb Bush, titled If State Kills, State Must Pay Lawyers. It was sent to us by a Florida public defender.

Last week, Rudolph Holton walked out of Union Correctional Institution, becoming the 23rd person -- and the fourth in 2 1/2 years -- to be released from the state's Death Row since Florida resumed capital punishment in 1979. He is free because lawyers for the Office of the Capital Collateral Representative (OCCR) stayed with the case long enough to find evidence that could have cleared Holton years ago. In his proposed budget, Gov. Bush zeroes out the OCCR.

On March 18, 2003, America will commemorate the 40th anniversary of the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision in Gideon v. Wainwright, in which a poor Florida prison inmate caused the single biggest change in the history of the U.S. criminal justice system. The Gideon decision guaranteed assistance of counsel to all persons facing imprisonment.

The rationing of legal services to the poor when life and liberty is at stake is neither equal nor just. We say, Shame on Jeb Bush.

Florida's Office of the Capital Collateral Representative was formed in 1995 after a request from the Florida Attorney General and funding was provided for by the state legislature. Today it employs 50 lawyers in three regional offices to represent Death Row inmates.

But legislators always have tried to undercut the agency. Because of conflicts, OCCR sometimes can't represent an inmate, so the state must hire private counsel. In 1998, the Legislature limited to about 800 the number of hours that private attorneys can spend on a case. Nationwide, the standard for death-penalty appeals is more like 3,000 hours. What happens when a lawyer asks for more money? Last year, the Legislature voted to take any such lawyer off the list.

Gov. Bush says cutting OCCR would save $4 million a year. Almost certainly, he's wrong. Courts can't drop the constitutional requirement for adequate counsel. The state will have to find lawyers somewhere, and pay them.

Gov. Bush, typically making the issue all about him, said after Holton's release, "If the question is, are innocent people being executed under my tenure as governor? I can honestly tell you that's not the case." In fact, he can't say that honestly, not with Florida's system having all the credibility of pro wrestling. After each release, the governor says it proves "that the system works." Let him spend 16 years on Death Row for a crime he didn't commit and say "the system works."

It doesn't matter that some of the men released from Death Row were guilty of other crimes, some of them serious. Retaining all respect for murder victims' families, the state cannot tolerate a system with inadequate safeguards against wrongful execution. If Gov. Bush and Mr. Crist want to save money and prevent wrongful executions, they can have it both ways: Abolish the death penalty. (emphasis supplied)

A court in Texas has turned down an 11th-hour appeal by a British man due to die by lethal injection in America tonight.

Jackie Elliott, 42, who was born in Suffolk to American parents, was sentenced to death 16 years ago for the rape and murder of a 19-year-old mother in Austin, Texas.

Last night a court refused to hear fresh evidence which Elliott's lawyers believe will prove his innocence. Judge Chuck Campbell said the DNA evidence did not specifically relate to Elliott but came from other suspects in the case.

Elliott has always protested his innocence and says he was convicted only because of the testimony of police informers covering their own guilt. In the past few days, his legal team has unearthed 40 police reports, allegedly suppressed by the prosecution, that identify other key suspects.

His lawyers believe DNA testing could settle the issue. They said it was "unprecedented" for a state execution to take place before the courts had heard all the evidence.

This is just the best! From the San Francisco Chronicle:

"Jurors who convicted marijuana guru Ed Rosenthal of cultivation and other drug charges said Monday they would have acquitted him had they been told he was growing medical marijuana for the city of Oakland. "

"I feel like I made the biggest mistake in my life," said juror Marney Craig, a 58-year-old Novato property manager. "We convicted a man who is not a criminal. We unfortunately had no idea of who he was or what he did."

Another juror: "Some of us jurors are upset about the way the trial was conducted in that we feel Mr. Rosenthal didn't have a chance and therefore neither did state's rights or patient's rights. I would have liked to have been given the opportunity to decide with all the evidence."

The other jurors agreed--and they are all going to write Ed an apology.

So much for Ashcroft thinking he got a victory and that the good citizens of California back his anti-medical pot campaign.

The Government announced after the verdict it would seek to have Ed detained pending sentencing, and a hearing was scheduled for that tomorrow. Let's hope the prosecutors (no, make that Aschcroft, since the prosecutors just do what Ashcroft tells them to these days) sees the light and drops that overkill request.

Update: The New York Times in an editorial, Misguided Marijuana War, addresses the inequity of the Rosenthal conviction and says, "The courts should not allow Mr. Rosenthal's conviction to stand. It would be a serious injustice if he were to serve years in prison, as he well may. Meanwhile, the administration should stop tyrannizing doctors and sick people and focus on more important aspects of the war on drugs."

80 nursing home residents in Mill Valley staged a protest for peace

Some residents of Mill Valley's Redwoods Retirement Center feel President Bush is leading the country into war and they demonstrated yesterday - using canes, walkers and wheelchairs - to let him know they want no part of it.

"He doesn't tell us what's going on," said Nora Boskoff, 84, organizer of a curbside demonstration yesterday outside the nursing home on Camino Alto. "It's becoming like (Soviet) Russia or (Nazi) Germany."

Dozens of protesters attended the demonstration, many using canes, walkers and wheelchairs as they stood by the roadside waving signs and singing protest songs.

Last week, Ms. Boskoff decided the time had come to start the nursing home's first peace group and anti-war demonstration. Little did she know that more than 80 other residents would be there to support her.

The nursing home residents are already planning their next protest, and this time, the nursing home is promising more support.

Bea Lott, program coordinator at the nursing home, said only about three or four of the residents attended the large San Francisco anti-war rally last month because it required so much standing. The nursing home doesn't necessarily support the anti-war position but she said the residents have a right to speak their minds and it is her job to help them accomplish that. "We'll have coffee, hot chocolate and American flags next time," she said, referring to another demonstration scheduled for 4 p.m. Friday. "Next time it will be more colorful."

Cars driving by honked their support for the protesting seniors. The oldest one was 95 year old Mutsu Muneno.

Burrowed inside a winter coat, gloves and a wool hat, she chanted "No War," while holding up one end of a banner that spelled out PEACE. She said Bush needs to do a better job of convincing the public before taking such drastic measures with America's troops. "I don't support any of this," she said. "It winds up killing the young."

Link via Common Dreams.