"The New Jersey attorney general's office has opened an investigation into allegations that a secret society of rogue state troopers has harassed minorities and women among their ranks."

The cops' secret group is called "The Lords of Discipline." This is scary stuff.

Former Georgia Congressman Bob Barr, defeated in his last re-election bid may run again , according to the Washington Post.

"I'm taking a very close and hard look at it," Barr told the Associated Press. "I hope to make a decision with family very shortly." He is believed to be leaning toward running in the state's 6th Congressional District, a mostly Republican area just north of Atlanta. The occupant, Rep. Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.), plans to run for the Senate in 2004."

In other election news, Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) is considering a bid for the Democratic presidential nomination.

A Los Angeles janitor who was serving a prison sentence of 70 years to life for a robbery that he denied committing won his freedom Friday in Los Angeles Superior Court.

"Jason Kindle, 34, whose conviction was reversed by an appeals court last year, has been behind bars for three years. The prosecution moved to dismiss because the case against Kindle got weaker as new evidence became available."

Blogger reaction to the Columbia tragedy today:

Glenn Reynolds.com: Mourn and Move On--Glenn makes the case for not letting this roll back the space program, but rather, forging ahead.

Stephen Green of Vodkapundit: Bad Day for Bitterness --Eloquent, with similar thoughts to Glenn, including criticism of NASA.

Patrick Nielsen Haydenquotes the William Gibson weblog: "nobody ever said it would be risk-free. If it were, it wouldn’t be glorious. And it’s only with these losses that we best know that it really is."

Atrios: "To those who think it's inappropriate to mourn some lives more than others - well, it's the only way we can mourn at all."

Calpundit: "We learn from our mistakes, but we should never allow fear of failure to keep us from pushing the boundaries of what we can accomplish. Death — and recovery from death — are a fundamental part of the human condition, a lesson that we are re-learning rather more often than we'd like in the first few years of the 21st century."

This Washington Post article is really good too--"People who work on the program understand that failure is part of the enterprise. When he retired in 2001, Dan Goldin had a message for the assembled NASA staff at headquarters in Washington: "Be bold and don't fear failure. Treat failure as a blessing, because mediocre goals are poison."

Alex Gourevitch of American Prospect exposes Ashcroft's foreigner registration program as perhaps not being mandated by Congress at all. As to whom the program has brought in so far:

To date, the program has not been a complete waste of effort: Martinez points out that it has led to the arrest of "a wife beater, narcotics dealer and very serious violent offenders." But that isn't exactly the same as catching terrorists. And if what we really want is to catch wife beaters, narcotics dealers and violent offenders, the Justice Department should simply require everyone in America to show up and register.

RTWT.

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.