Three gay Catholics were refused communion at Mass. The next day they knelt in lobby of the hotel where Bishops were holding a conference, again seeking communion and an explanation for the refusal the day before. They were arrested for unlawful entry, and convicted at a non-jury trial. The Judge apologized for what happened to them and refused to impose sentence, other than a mandatory Crime Victim Fund cost assessment. The Judge said to the three:

"Tremendous violence was done to you...when the Body of Christ was denied to you," Edwards said, referring to the contention of the three that refusal of Holy Communion had prompted their actions. "As a member of your church, I ask you to forgive the church."

The Church claims it was a case of mistaken identity.

Doug McGill's rational, thoughtful essay, A Global Citizen Thinks About War : 

"If the war happens it will be tragic and God-damned, because innocents will surely die. But if it happens, its explicit goal should be not simply the eradication of Saddam as a potential nuclear threat, which is spurious because we all understand that Saddam is deterrable, as he has been for thirty years. Rather, it should be done for the express purpose of the liberation of the people of Iraq; and it should be done without gloating or breast-beating; and only after longer deliberation and with a genuine commitment to long-term support of liberal democracy in the Middle East."                              

Rabbi Lewis Warshauer has an interesting torah commentary opposing the death penalty today. After going through the Talmud sections that address it, including the protections it provides against wrongful executions, such as requiring two witnesses be present at trial and thoroughly examined by the Judge, he concludes:

I would advocate for abolition, on the grounds that the capital punishment system in too many states in America is so broken that it cannot be fixed. It is not just a question of procedural safeguards. The criminal justice system in the United States is driven by prosecutors whose main goal is to obtain convictions. Judges are being sidelined. The Jewish legal system, however, is judge-driven. The judge is supposed to be interested in obtaining justice, not in securing the conviction of the defendant. These are not always the same thing. Because execution is irrevocable, inequities for the meantime have to be tolerated. Capital punishment should be abolished until the system can be overhauled. Only then can it correctly be called a justice system.

According to Green Aid's trial updates today, Ed Rosenthal faces a mandatory minimum five year sentence (not ten as we and others previously reported)--the jury found him not guilty of cultivation of over 1,000 plants, but guilty of the lesser included offense of cultivating more than 100 but less than 1,000 plants.

Also, the previous report that Ed is to be sentenced Tuesday is incorrect. He is scheduled to be sentenced on June 4.

The Court denied the prosecution's request to have Rosenthal held in custody until sentencing. The Court also said it would conduct it's own independent inquiry into the possibility of a downward departure. However, with a mandatory minimum sentence and no government motion to reduce the sentence for substantial assistance in the investigation or prosecution of others, that may be tough to do. Let's hope where there's a will, there's a way.

We reprinted Ed Rosenthal's statement on his convction earlier, but you can also access it directly through Green-Aid here.

A federal court Friday handed down the largest award to date for defense legal fees under the Hyde Amendment (we'll explain that in a minute.) See, Aisenberg bill for feds: $2.9-million

That's the price the judge set for the legal fees of the couple once accused of lying about their baby's disappearance. Pre-Condit, you may recall, the Aisenbergs were once nightly fixtures on the cable news. Their baby Sabrina was taken from their Miami home, and the authorities suspected the couple had something to do with it. They advanced the theory that father did something bad and the mother was covering up. The couple were convicted in the court of public opinion in short order.

The feds decided to bug their bedroom. Then they indicted the Aisenbergs on federal charges. The charges were dismissed in a scathing opinion. Here's the current news:

The award is the largest in the five-year history of the Hyde Amendment, a federal law that protects defendants against prosecutorial abuses. ....Merryday also ordered the release this month of all grand jury transcripts. He said the unusual move is warranted because the pblic has a right to know how the case went so awry.

In the 94-page order, the judge painted a grim picture of an investigation that lacked credible evidence. He referred to parts of the indictment as "trivial," "gratuitous" and "misleading."

Bump and Update from 12:06 am:

In recent months, Attorney General John Ashcroft has been over-ruling decisions of his local prosecutors on the death penalty. He is insisting they ask for it. He's threatening to do it in a case in Denver that is set for trial at the beginning of March--over strong objections from the Judge and despite recommendations against it by his local prosecutors.

But now he's reached a new low. The New York Times reports today that in this case in New York, his prosecutors already cut a deal with the defendant for life in prison--and Aschroft just voided it and said they will go for death.

"Mr. Ashcroft has stirred a controversy in federal prosecutors' offices nationally in recent months by insisting that they seek executions in some cases in which they had recommended against it. Under Justice Department rules, local federal prosecutors can only recommend whether to seek the death penalty; the final decision is up to the attorney general."

Update: Atrios comments on this here :

Leaving aside my objections to the death penalty, this is idiotic. It'll make it impossible to get pleas, which was about the only freaking argument for the death penalty I ever bought - the effectiveness of using it to get people to narc on their pals. I mean, I don't actually know it's all that good for that purpose, but it seems to work pretty well on Law and Order, which is where most of my knowledge of criminal law comes from...

and TBogg here, with a very funny edition of Ashcroft's Ten Commandments.

The Sunday New York Times Magazine runs a long profile on Gary Hart--mostly favorable. Instapundit says Gary should write a blog, he'd be great at it. We agree and suggested it to one of his media advisors earlier this week.

We reported on Gary's interview aired last night on Denver's public television station here. He was just awesome on the subject of the detainees and in his criticism of Ashcroft.

Oliver Willis is not happy with the Bush Administration's plans for The American War .

This is America's War, one in which our president feels no guilt or cynicism about invoking the heartrending images of September 11th, an event that recast his presidency from the expansion of fundamentalist conservative ideology in our nation to a philosophy of American expansion into the middle east.... The administration’s spin is that Iraqis and the Middle East will welcome America’s expansion. But is it moral for America to expand via military means? The history of our country is intertwined with westward expansion, and while such expansion contributed to American superpower, the treatment of native Americans and African slaves in the course of this expansion was immoral at best – genocidal at its worst "

Oliver's clearly given a lot of thought to the issue and he raises some valid points.

Here is the statement of Ed Rosenthal on his federal marijuana growing conviction today, for which he will be sentenced June 4. He is subject to a mandatory minimum sentence of five years, and possibly up to 40 years.

Statement of Ed Rosenthal on the Medical Marijuana Trial Verdict
January 31, 2003

"I am disappointed in this verdict for several reasons.

"This was an unconstitutional prosecution. It should never have come to trial.

"Once it did, I was not afforded a jury of my peers. They had to bring in 80 people to come up with 12 who would agree to set aside their beliefs on this issue.

"Even so, they would have acquitted me if they had been permitted to hear my story. But I did not get the chance in this trial to defend myself and explain my actions.

"Federal prosecutors made extraordinary efforts to block the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Because the truth is that I was deputized by the City of Oakland to legally grow marijuana for medicinal use by sick or dying patients under California's Prop 215, the Compassionate Use Act, the law that is supposed to guarantee safe and legal access to medicinal marijuana.

"The City of Oakland showed courage in working to come up with a safe, open, and legal system to harmonize California's medical marijuana law with federal law. And I was acting as an official of the city, implementing their program to help patients.

"Had the jury known about the City's attempts to give immunity to their people, including me, it would have acquitted me today.

"The other victims of today's decision are patients -- people who are extremely ill or dying and who are soothed by medicinal marijuana -- because I am only one of many people that they are trying to put in jail for helping sick people, as allowed under our laws.

"For these reasons, we will be asking for a new trial. This verdict will not be allowed to stand.

"The federal government silenced my courtroom defense, but it can't silence the court of public opinion. The opinion of the American public is one of overwhelming support of medicinal uses of marijuana.

"The federal government needs to get this message.

"My case clearly demonstrates that it is time for a national debate on the issue of medical marijuana. California voted to make medical marijuana legal, but the federal government is trying to block that law. The federal government is choosing to prosecute and imprison individuals instead of working directly with the State of California and local cities to resolve the conflicts in medical marijuana law.

"Our elected officials must have the courage to discuss this issue publicly, and then resolve this conflict.

"Because helping sick people should never be a crime.

"For my entire family, thank you all for your support."

--Ed Rosenthal

(Received from DrugSense.Org)

The St. Petersburg Times reports that in the last six months, the Pentagon has ordered 9,640 body bags.

"Right now, we're just replenishing supplies" in military warehouses, said Frank Johnson, a spokesman for the Defense Supply Center in Philadelphia. "It's not necessarily an indication of things to come." But two military suppliers said it is logical to assume that the government is anticipating battlefield casualties."

Here's something we didn't know: "The military shuns the term body bag, which gained widespread usage during the Vietnam War, when 58,000 American military personnel died. Instead, the military began calling them "human remains pouches" during the 1991 Persian Gulf war. They are made of vinyl and cost the government about $38 a pouch."

The two Dallas detectives involved in the fake drug scandal also worked federal cases. The federal cases may now be tainted.

The scandal involved the officers' use of informants who were paid more than $200,000. to distribute fake drugs while passing them off as real.

"The officers' work through the Police Department led state prosecutors to dismiss more than 85 state felony drug cases.... The latest disclosure raises questions about whether federal cases may have been tainted and if so, how many."

Major kudos to the Fort Lauderdale Police Department which has announced they will videotape all homicide interrogations from start to finish to reduce the chance of a false confession.

"Fort Lauderdale is the first large police department in South Florida to videotape murder interrogations in their entirety, a reform urged by false-confession experts nationwide to prevent coercion, improper promises of leniency, off-the-record threats and beatings by detectives."

''We're looking forward to it and welcome the new procedure,'' said Capt. Bob Lamberti, who heads the Fort Lauderdale Criminal Investigation unit. ``We think it's in everyone's best interest -- attorneys, prosecutors, judges, detectives, the whole criminal justice system.''

"The Fort Lauderdale department studied other police agencies and concluded that ''the advantages of taping far outweighed any perceived disadvantages,'' according to a statement"