The granting of clemency to all death row inmates in Illinois today is an issue we feel strongly about. We have been a strong advocate of blanket clemency through our work with the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. We team-teach the Wrongful Convictions class at Denver University's College of Law. And we have been writing about the issue for the past several years.

Tonight , we'll be expressing our support for Governor Ryan's decision in a live debate around 10:15 pm EST on Rita Cosby's Foxwire on the Fox News Channel. Hope you can watch.

Except for lewd comments or nasty personal attacks, feel free to use the comments section to express your opinion about Governor Ryan's decision.

Greenwich Time is running a poll today on whether readers think that Joseph Lieberman should be the Democratic candidate for President. Out of 215 votes cast so far, here are the results:

31.2%
Yes (67 responses)

63.3%
No (136 responses)

5.6%
Undecided (12 responses)

Even putting aside that it's not a scientific poll, and the numbers so far are small, this is not a positive sign from those in the Senator's home state.

JANUARY 11, 2003 -- FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Life without can be worse than painless death
Illinois commutations can benefit even victims,
lead to better U.S. international relations

Washington, D.C.--In response to today's commutation by Illinois Gov. George Ryan (who received NACDL's Champion of Justice award and addressed the luncheon at NACDL's Fall Meeting in Chicago this past November) of the remaining 156 death sentences in that state to life without, Lawrence Goldman, president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, issued the following statement:

"While we understand that this is a time of anguish for many members of the families of victims of these inmates, we hope they will find solace in not being asked to be involved in at attempt to kill again to show that killing is wrong. We also hope they benefit from not having to deal with the ongoing legal battles, and ultimately an execution, which would have forced them to relive painful memories. Perhaps they will also get some satisfaction from knowing that those inmates who are guilty must live, largely alone and under horrible conditions, in contemplation of their own crimes.

"We also hope that as Americans consider this momentous action, we can soon reach the same conclusion that most of the rest of the advanced world has reached: that even if we could be sure that the death penalty deters, even though studies say it does not; that even if the vengeance of the death penalty somehow satisfies many victims and officials alike; and that even if death truly were a more fitting punishment than life in a cage, the cost of the death penalty to our humanity and the risks of error in a system incapable of perfection and fairness are just too great. Such an appreciation of life can only help us if we truly wish to achieve peace in a troubled world.

"Finally, to Gov. Ryan and all the NACDL members and others who worked to make this day a reality, we simply say, 'Thank you.'"

Goldman is a criminal defense lawyer in New York City. He can be reached at (917)816-4635.

The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) is the preeminent organization in the United States advancing the mission of the nation’s criminal defense lawyers to ensure justice and due process for persons accused of crime or wrongdoing. A professional bar association founded in 1958, NACDL’s more than 10,000 direct members — and 80-plus state and local affiliate organizations with another 28,000 members — include private criminal defense lawyers, public defenders, active-duty militarydefense counsel, law professors and judges committed to preserving fairness within America’s criminal justice system.

For more information:
Daniel Dodson
Director of Public Affairs
National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers
(202)872-8600 ext. 228
cell (202)486-5513
dodson@nacdl.org
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The Nobel Peace Prize For Governor George H. Ryan of Illinois

Illinois Governor George Ryan

Thank you.

It's official, from the spokesman of outgoing Illinois Governor Geoge Ryan: In a few minutes, at a press conference at Northwestern University Law School, home to the Center on Wrongful Convictions, Governor Ryan will grant clemency to all 156 death row inmates. This means the death sentences previously imposed on almost all of the inmates will automatically become life sentences, with no possibility of parole.

CNN and probably the other cable news networks will cover the press conference live. Please watch. It's important for the public to understand why this is not only the correct decision, but the only fair and just decision in a state where the death penalty system has broken down and so many innocent people have been wrongfully convicted.

"Ryan, who leaves office Monday, sent overnight letters to the families of murder victims warning them he would announce during a speech Saturday afternoon that he was commuting most of the death sentences to life in prison without the possibility of."

"What does it take? Now that we can say the number of wrongfully convicted men is 17, will that be enough?" Ryan asked.

We just saw a lengthy interview on CNN with pardoned death row inmate Leroy Orange, age 52, who has served 19 years . He was tortured into confessing by the Chicago police, who used tactics which included electric shock treatment. He is a soft-spoken man, and quite articulate. When asked whether there are other innocent men on death row, he replied "yes." When asked if there are guilty men on death row, he said "yes." In reply to the obvious next question, why grant blanket clemency to all, including the guilty, Orange gave the correct answer, essentially, because we don't know who is innocent and who is guilty.

Governor George Ryan is a courageous hero. Saving the life of an innocent man is far more profound an act of justice than any act of bribery or political misconduct in office can be considered an act of injustice. We don't care what happened with taxes and driver's licenses in Illinois. We care about saving the lives of these innocent and wrongfully convicted men.

It is better than 100 guilty men go free than for one innocent man to be put to death. In 1895, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a decision in the case Coffin v. United States, traced this principle past England, Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome, to Deuteronomy.

Here, no guilty person is going free. A few sentences will be shortened as is appropriate in those cases. The remaining sentences except for those four pardoned yesterday, are being commuted to life in prison, without. This is fair and this is just.

We purposefully wrote our last post of 2002 on this issue and the 428 legal scholars who wrote Governor Ryan to advise him that granting blanket clemency is legally supportable by precedent and valid.

Rob Warden, director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University, put it this way: "Isn't it better that we let 10 absolutely guilty men who committed horrible crimes spend the rest of their lives in prison, rather than risk one, a single execution of an innocent person?"

We are going to watch the conference live and will report back later. Please make a few minutes to stop by The Innocent Project, The Death Penalty Infomation Center and Stop Capital Punishment.Org and familiarize yourelves with the facts before criticizing Governor Ryan's noble action. To read our past posts on this issue, click on our " Death Penalty", " Innocence Cases" and " Inmates and Prisons" archives.

Here is a timeline of Governor Ryan's efforts to reform the death penalty system in Illinois.

Here are the guidelines for executive clemency in Illinois.

[comments now closed]

Howard Bashman of How Appealing , in the last paragraph of his post, sends us to Memeufacture, a Weblog and Automated Trend Reporting site. Memeufacture scans hundreds of websites of different "genres" with some sort of formula using a python program, and comes up with the most popular sites in various categories, followed by the most influential sites in the same categories.*

How Appealing is the second most influential blog in the "law" category. We thought Howard was just being modest when he said there must be an error in balloting. So we went to Memeufacture to take a look. TalkLeft isn't in the law category at all, it's in the Politics-Left category, and they list TalkLeft as the second most influential weblog in the "Politics-Left" Category. Here are their top ten (as of this moment):

1 : Eschaton
2 : TalkLeft: The Politics of Crime
3 : BuzzFlash - Daily Headlines and Breaking News
4 : Taegan Goddard's Political Wire
5 : TAPPED
6 : Cursor.org -
7 : Daily Kos: Political analysis and other daily rants on the state of the nation
8 : Matthew Yglesias
9 : NathanNewman.org - News and Views
10 : Eric Alterman: Altercation

Now, we know we get linked to a bunch, but still, number two in that category, when compared to the others? In our dreams, maybe.

For Politics - Right, Instapundit is the most influential, and Oliver Willis is number 6. Wonder what Oliver will have to say about being in this category at all.

The most popular left political sites (as opposed to most influential) are:

1 : NathanNewman.org - News and Views: Pickering and Anti-Klan Testimony
2 : Eschaton
3 : Spinsanity - Taxing the public's trust: The Bush administration is stretching the truth again to sell its latest tax cut
4 : Long story; short pier.: Boom and Bust.
5 : Altercation: Slacker Friday
6. the next five are mainstream media newspapers

*This is Memeufacture's description of what they do: "The automatic content is generated using a simple Python program (about 200 lines.) Memeufacture scans hundreds of websites of several different genres. It determines which links are most popular and which websites posted those links first."

We are obviously missing something here. Can anyone explain Memeufacture and what they are measuring?

Update: We also expressed our puzzlement via e-mail to Memeufacture's chief, John Weher. He has replied:

The ranking mechanism is automated and objective.

Essentially it works by recording who links to what first. If two sites link to the same site at once, it is counted as a tie and disqualified. The rankings change quite frequently, but it is interesting to see the sites that consistently stay near the top, such as instapundit, metafilter and talkleft.

Your being listed in the top means that you tend to point out issues that others find important (and link to) later on. Congratulations for running a great site.

Pete Karas of the Progressive Racine Blog advises that court dates for the hundreds of rave-goers arrested in Racine, Wisconsis have been canceled .

"75 people had been scheduled to meet with city prosecutors today in Municipal Court to discuss their cases."

"Police issued $968 citations to more than 440 people who attended the Nov. 2 party at a bar, which had been billed as a fund-raiser for the Uptown Theatre. The citations were for being an inmate of a disorderly house. Police had said drug activity was obvious to all attendees, but only three people were arrested on drug charges."

"The Racine City Attorney's Office offered to reduce the fines to $100, but most of the people cited pleaded not guilty and demanded trials."

Apparently, negotiations are underway between the Attorneys for the American Civil Liberties Union, including Racine attorney Erik Guenther, who is volunteering his time to the Milwaukee-based American Civil Liberties Union of Wisconsin, and the City of Racine.

This has us a bit curious:

"Guenther said any rave-goers who have pleaded not guilty prior to Friday will be notified by the court if any proceedings are rescheduled....Guenther also said people who had pleaded no contest but not yet paid the fine should not pay the fine and should await further instructions from the court."

What do they mean "if any proceedings are rescheduled?" And why are they instructing those who agreed to pay the fine but haven't yet done so not to pay? Pete at Progressive Racine Blog says his sources are telling him the negotioations may lead to a very quick "settlement or closure" in all of these cases. We have no sources, but it sounds like a done deal to us--and a favorable one. If so, our hat is off to Mr. Gunenther and the Milwaukee ACLU.

Further Update: Two mayoral candidates think charges should be dropped against all those arrested.

"I agree that the party probably did get out of hand, but I think they've taken it too far, and I think they're wasting the taxpayers' money," said political newcomer Laurie Kell. Added County Supervisor Ken Lumpkin, another mayoral candidate: "I think they should cut their losses and walk away from it."

Nathan Newman says Bush Judicial Re-Nominee Charles Pickering is " milking false kudos for "courage" in testifying in an anti-Klan trial in the 1960s." Nathan says the case "involved a town where WHITES were being attacked by the Klan as a series of bombings threatened the white establishment. And it was interlaced with violent labor struggle in the primary employer." Here is the source article.

MediaWhoresOnline has more, and says Pickering lied not once, but twice.

Anyone who reads Altercation, Eric Alterman's hip and biting MSNBC weblog on a regular basis, and that's lots of folks, including us, looks forward to "Slacker Friday"--the day that Eric posts replies from readers. Today, MSNBC gave Slacker Friday its own home .

Eric's new Nation column is out, but the editors have decided no longer to publish it on line for free. That's a shame, we suggest you write them in protest. At least you can still access his last column on Howell Raines.

Faysal Galab, one of the Buffalo Six, is in Court this afternoon and has agreed to plead guilty to a criminal charge. Details available soon, check the AP wire.

In other news, as we expected, the Judge in the trial of accused sniper John Lee Malvo has refused to close next's week's preliminary hearing to the media and public.

From Nat Hentoff's new Village Voice column, An Indispensable Gay Man .

"On Monday, January 20 (Martin Luther King Jr. Day), the Public Broadcasting Service (Channel 13 in New York) will air Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin. This long-due tribute vividly brings back to life a man who deeply and brilliantly influenced the course of the civil rights and peace movements."

"Because Bayard never hid that he was gay, he was abandoned, for a time, by leaders of both movements in this country. He died in 1987, and late last year, hundreds of residents of West Chester, Pennsylvania, where Rustin was born, signed petitions protesting the decision of the school board to name a new high school after him."

Hentoff says the film, Brother Outsider, "is a thoroughly honest portrait of Bayard and his tumultuous times." Hentoff knew him well in those years and says Bayard was a mentor to him. Go read the whole thing and then check out the movie site. (link above.)

Illinois Governor George Ryan has granted pardons to four inmates on death row. He said ''a manifest injustice'' had occurred when they were apparently tortured into confessing by Chicago police.

He is also expected on Saturday to commute many of the state's remaining 150 death sentences to life in prison."

Update: Ryan's press conference Saturday on who will get clemency (meaning their death sentences will be converted to life sentences without) will be at 1:00 pm at Northwestern University.

Also, don't miss reading Crime, False Confessions and Videotapes, an editorial in today's New York Times.

According to the Innocence Project at the Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University, 23 percent of the people who are exonerated after conviction turn out to have falsely confessed to the crime. Many of those confessions were taped and played as compelling evidence to a jury. As the jogger case and other reversals demonstrate, innocent people can be led into confessions. Their questioners — wittingly or not — also often provide them with details that would seem to be known only to the real criminal....

Beyond the injustice of punishing the wrong people, false admissions of guilt allow the real culprits to remain free to commit more crimes, as did Matias Reyes, who raped four other women, killing one of them, after he attacked the jogger in Central Park....

By videotaping every minute of interrogations, the police would help protect themselves against charges of coercion, improve the integrity of confessions and plug a gaping hole in the system.

Only Alaska and Minnesota now require videotaping of interrogations. Bill Perkins, a city council member in New York, has introduced a bill to require it.
If you are in New York, get on the horn (or the internet or to a fax machine) and support it.