From the National Conference of State Legislatures:

The certainty provided by DNA technology has prompted legislators in 25 states to pass laws to allow DNA testing after a conviction, under certain conditions.

Laws vary as to which offenders are allowed post-conviction testing, who pays for the test and whether evidence susceptible to DNA testing must be preserved.

Delaware, Florida, Idaho, Illinois, Maine, Minnesota, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Texas and Virginia allow those convicted of any crime to request DNA testing. Arizona limits petitions to those convicted of felonies, as do California, Louisiana, Michigan, Oklahoma and Utah. Some states, including Missouri, Nebraska and Washington, restrict testing to those presently incarcerated or in the custody of the state's department of corrections. And still other states, such as Indiana, Maryland, Oregon and Tennessee, limit testing to those convicted of certain felonies. Connecticut's law allows the use of newly discovered DNA evidence as a basis for obtaining a new trial.

Not all measures mention who pays for the testing. The majority of states that address cost allow the court to order the petitioner to pay for the DNA test. Exceptions, including the ability to pay and whether the petitioner is incarcerated, can shift the cost to the state.

These measures depend upon the quality and availability of forensic evidence, making preservation and storage of DNA evidence an issue before legislatures, as well. Arizona, Indiana, Tennessee and Utah require that evidence be preserved while the post-conviction proceeding is pending. Laws in Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Maryland, Virginia and Washington require that evidence be retained for a certain time. California, Michigan, Nebraska, North Carolina, Oklahoma and Texas require evidence be kept during the entire incarceration period. Florida, Texas and Virginia retain evidence in capital cases until the sentence has been executed.

Legislation also is addressing standards for storage and what evidence must be preserved. Under a Virginia bill passed this year, evidence must be preserved under standards set by the Department of Criminal Justice Services. The measure also allows preserving samples of the evidence if storage of the entire amount is impractical and bans appeals when testing is denied. North Carolina and Oklahoma also permit representative samples. Other states allow destruction of evidence after the defendant has been notified.

The power of DNA to exonerate has captured the attention of Congress, as well. An Innocence Protection Act has been introduced in both houses, and would require states, in order to receive federal money from the DNA Analysis Backlog Elimination Grant to certify that DNA tests are available to individuals convicted of certain crimes and that evidence has been preserved.

We need Congress to pass the Innocence Protection Act. Contact your Congresspersons and Senators now. With over 265 bipartisan sponsors in Congress, the bill is being held hostage by a few Republicans, most notably Utah Senator Orrin Hatch. Let Hatch and your elected officials know this is an issue of importance to you. Help get this act passed.

A 31-year-old Chicago man who was eligible for the death penalty -- and could have been the first person sentenced to Death Row after former Gov. George Ryan's mass clemency decree -- instead was sentenced today to life in prison for his role in the deaths of two Chicago men.

Authorites are calling the fire that gutted Presidential candidate Al Sharpton's offices today "suspicious."

Today in The Guardian, playwright Harold Pinter published a poem about America's intended military confrontation with Iraq. Instapundit says he agrees with blogger Chris Bertram that it is "scraping the bottom of the barrel."

Here's the poem:
Wednesday January 22, 2003
The Guardian

Here they go again,
The Yanks in their armoured parade
Chanting their ballads of joy
As they gallop across the big world
Praising America's God.
The gutters are clogged with the dead
The ones who couldn't join in
The others refusing to sing
The ones who are losing their voice
The ones who've forgotten the tune.

The riders have whips which cut.
Your head rolls onto the sand
Your head is a pool in the dirt
Your head is a stain in the dust
Your eyes have gone out and your nose
Sniffs only the pong of the dead
And all the dead air is alive
With the smell of America's God.

© Harold Pinter, January 2003

We'll admit, we didn't care much for the imagery in the poem. But we knew if anyone would defend the poem it would be TalkLeft's sister, who is the Bibliographical Editor of The Pinter Review and has published a book and otherwise written extensively about him. So we asked her what she thought. She sent us to a message board on Pinter where she had posted her detailed response earlier this morning. Her post is in response to a poster who had written (in response to yet another poster,)

"Please feel free to hit that highway, both you and the idiot Pinter (what the hell is "sniff only the pong of the dead"). Those of us who are left will do what has to be done. I won't bother to argue with either of you, might as well argue with bricks.

Here is her reply:

The word "pong" (British usage) means odor. The word appears in The Dumb Waiter (regarding the possibly unchanged bed sheets/linens) and relates to The Caretaker, where Aston complains about Davies' "stinking" the place out. I think it also is used in The Dwarfs (novel and play).

I just saw the poem "God Bless America" today too. I think it is another one of Harold Pinter's powerful indictments of the hypocrisy of the current (and past) American "Administration."

It continues his critique of American political and military policies and practices exposed in his poems "Partners," "American Football," "Death," "After Lunch," and in other recent poetry, speeches, essays, and letters to newspapers, and in the dramatic works The New World Order, One for the Road, Mountain Language, Party Time, and Press Conference.

I think that "God Bless America" merits rereading from the perspective of those who are not citizens of the United States and who are urgently opposed to an America-led war on Iraq as well as from the perspective of those who are citizens of the United States and feel equally appalled by President Bush's drive toward "conducting" this war. The poem also addresses past actions by the United States and their dire consequences.

The "head" alluded to repeatedly in the last verse paragraph recalls the horrific image that Harold Pinter has described of the child's head literally blown off by an American bomb in the Serbian marketplace in Nis.

There is a documentary film about that war:

"The documentary traces how crucial mistakes by the West]particularly Germany and the US[ led to the violent breakup of Yugoslavia in 1991, culminating in the devastating NATO bombing campaign of 1999. "Yugoslavia: The Avoidable War" traces the role of Western intelligence agencies in arming separatist groups in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo. The film also examines media manipulation by the warring sides which helped shaped policies which prolonged the war."

Will we in the years to come be lamenting "The War in Iraq: The Avoidable War?" Better to avoid it now than to be sorry about not having done so later--if we are all still here to be able to lament.

In my own view, there is much more danger of a nuclear catastrophe resulting from engaging in a war on Iraq (which will polarize even more terrorist groups who may actually have access to nuclear and chemical weapons of mass destruction) than there is from a nuclear catastrophe resulting from dealing with Iraq's breaches of UN resolutions by other means. The US is not alone in the world now; it is part of the United Nations. I think that it needs to act accordingly. Otherwise, it may very well be alone--or not anywhere, as all of us will be too--no matter where we live--we'll all be dead, as Pinter's poem implies.

Susan Hollis Merritt, Ph.D.
Bibliographical Editor
The Pinter Review

[edited jan. 26]

The new documentary film Mad Dog Prosecutors has been selected for the New York International Independent Film and Video Festival to be held April 2 through April 12, 2003 in New York City. The film will be featured at the opening evening's gala event at Madison Square Garden and will have individual screenings throughout the following week.

Executive Producer Michael Zinn said, "We are so pleased that our timely film has been recognized during a period of erosion of constitutional safeguards and rapid changes in our legal system. We sincerely hope Mad Dog Prosecutors will become one of the most important legal documentaries of our time."

Maryland has officially ended its moratorium on the death penalty. The new Governor, Republican Robert Ehrlich, has authorized Judges to begin signing death warrants. The first to be signed will be that for inmate Steven Oken.

The Governor's action lifting the moratorium flies in the face of a new study demonstrating that "of the 12 men awaiting execution in Maryland, nine, including Oken, are from Baltimore County. Eight are black, and all were convicted of killing whites."

It's not just a question of factual innocence. Also at issue are fairness in the application of the death penalty, and the arbitrariness with which it is sought.

Maryland was the only other state besides Illinois that had issued a moratorium.

Update: The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers issued the following statement today, following the announcement:

"Before his own seat is even warm, Maryland's new Republican governor has announced he will keep his campaign promise to lift his predecessor's moratorium on the imposition of the death penalty with the flippant comment by his spokesperson, 'Consider the moratorium over.' "We perhaps should not be surprised, but in light of the independent study in his own state showing serious racial and geographic disparity in the imposition of the death penalty and the recent exposition in Illinois of all that is wrong with it, we certainly are dismayed."

Diana Alvarez, a Government lawyer in the Elian Gonzales case has sued Ashcroft and the INS for damages, alleging she was a victim of retaliation.

Diana Alvarez claims one of her superiors at the Immigration and Naturalization Service made disparaging comments about Cuban-Americans and deliberately kept her from receiving a good evaluation after she objected to ``anti-Cuban bigotry and discrimination'' during the seven-month custody battle over Elian. ``There was an atmosphere of outward discrimination against Cuban-Americans at the Miami district INS office, discrimination that was fully condoned and many times initiated by management,'' Alvarez, who is Cuban-American, said Tuesday. ``The retaliation is ongoing to this day and there truly seems to be no end in sight.''

Alvarez is seeking damages for "employment discrimination, emotional distress and injury to reputation."

Law Professor Glenn Harlan Reynolds today makes the case that Congress has no power to regulate abortion. The Constitution gives Congress certain enumerated rights--Reynolds goes through them all-- and abortion regulation is not on the list. The only thing that is arguably in the ballpark is the Commerce power, and Reynolds explains why that is too much of a stretch, given Supreme Court opinions limiting the application of that power in recent years.

For more on this view, you can read a law review article the Professor wrote with Dave Koppel here.

Mexico argued yesterday to the World Court that it should block the U.S. executions of 51 Mexican citizens.

The government of Mexico, in a direct challenge to the Bush administration, asked the International Court of Justice today to block the executions of 51 Mexicans on death row in the United States. The court, the highest tribunal of the United Nations, sits in The Hague. It has no enforcement powers. But if it issues an injunction, the United States must choose whether to respect or defy its judgment.

From our prior post,

Mexico filed suit against the US in the International Court of Justice in the Hague over the U.S.’s failure to comply with the Vienna Convention’s guarantee of allowing foreign nationals access to consular officials prior to interrogation. Mexico is also seeking provisional measures, essentially a temporary restraining order, against all capital prosecutions in the US against Mexican nationals until the case is resolved.

Here is the text of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations and Optional Protocols.

Gary Hart delivered a great speech Tuesday at the Council of Foreign Relations in New York--on the military, technology, terrorism and homeland security. We were able to obtain a copy, and have reprinted it in its entirety. We're told it will be available soon on GaryHartNews.com.

Finally, a politician who makes sense. It's long but well worth reading.

Lots of comments are still coming in on one of our prior posts on Hart--most of it is very favorable towards a presidential run. Here's one that came in tonight from a reader named Brendan.

I'm too young to remember 88, but reading what has been printed of Hart, by all means, RUN man RUN! We need a Bartlet running for office, and he seems to be the only dem out there with a brain. Gep is a geek, Kerry is too Northern, Edwards too Southern, Lieberman too Republican and Sharpton...yeah, right.

We said in our November post that we were impressed with Hart but not quite ready to jump on his bandwagon. We're getting closer to making the leap.

Update: The Washington Post has a profile on Hart and his potential presidential run here.

Update: Gary Hart's national security speech is now up on his website, here.

John Nichols in the Madison Capitol Times makes some good points about Hart. So does Jonathan Cohn in The New Republic, especially about how Hart can effectively neutralize the Donna Rice incident.

According to census statistics, the hispanic population is booming in the U.S.

"In the months following the 2000 census, the number of Latinos who were born in the United States or who immigrated to the country grew at more than twice the rate of African Americans.... In 2001, according to the new figures, that deadlock was even tighter: 37.7 million people identified either as black, or as black and one other race. Thirty-seven million Hispanics were counted."

"It doesn't surprise me," said Hector Flores, president of the League of United Latin American Citizens. "Anybody that travels around . . . can see Latinos everywhere, working everywhere, paying taxes, trying to reach the American dream."

A new ABC News/Washington Post poll shows support for the War in Iraq is at its lowest level since last summer. The poll also shows Bush's approval rating for handling the Iraq situation is now down to 50%. And "71 percent of Americans said if U.N. inspectors cannot find hard evidence of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons, the United States should present its own evidence before attacking."