Via Eve Tushnet, we found this interview by Michael Lynch in the January issue of Reason. Lynch questions three ex-warriors who now fight against the War on Drugs.

One is a former cop named Joe McNamara.

Reason: From the perspective of the working police officer, how has the War on Drugs changed over the years? McNamara: It has become the priority of police agencies. It’s bizarre. We make 700,000 arrests for marijuana a year. The public is not terrified of marijuana. People are terrified of molesters, school shootings, and people stalking women and children. The police are not putting the resources into those crimes where they could be effective if they gave them top priority.

Another is former DEA Agent, now radio host and author Michael Levine:

What’s the mindset of agents in this war?

Levine: Before you become an agent, you’re bombarded with stories of drug war victories. It’s painted as heroic -- guys in guerrilla outfits and jungle gear fighting the drugs everywhere. You want to do something for your country. Then when you get in, the first thing you discover is that you can’t touch some of the biggest drug dealers in the world because they’re protected by the CIA or they’re protected by the State Department. Everyone from Carlos Salinas de Gortari of Mexico to Manuel Noriega to the contras in Nicaragua to the Mujahedin in Afghanistan. Those of us who work overseas realize that this whole thing is a three-card monte game, that it’s a lie....

Reason: What is the relationship between informants, drug agents, and arrests?

Levine: Informants run the drug war. Ninety-nine percent of all drug cases start off with a criminal informant. These informants are criminals and liars and they will create crimes to make money and, at the same time, get the protection of the people they are working for.

The third is Orange County, California Superior Court Judge James P. Gray:

Reason: You write about a drug exception to the Bill of Rights.

Gray: When I graduated from law school in 1971, it was illegal for a police officer, even after arresting you, to search anything that was outside of your grasp. If you can reach over to something, then you could search it. But if a suitcase you were carrying was locked, the police could not go in there unless they got a search warrant first. They couldn’t go into the trunk of your car, they couldn’t go into the glove compartment, and they couldn’t go into the backseat.

That has totally been reversed. The police not only can search you and everything in your car, but they can also search your passengers. They can search your mobile home, which is in effect a home on wheels. They can go through and search everything....

When I was running for Congress a few years ago, I met individually with two sitting congressmen from Orange County to try to get their support. They both said that the War on Drugs isn’t working, but the problem is even worse than I thought because most federal agencies get extra money to fight the War on Drugs. It’s not just the obvious ones like the U.S. Customs Service and the DEA. It’s the little guys too, the Bureau of Land Management, the Bureau of Indian Affairs. They are addicted to drug war funding.

The above are just our selected snippets, all are worth reading in their entirety.

Michael Skakel, convicted of the murder of Martha Moxley and denied bail pending appeal is in a maximum security prison in Connecticut. Ms. Moxley was killed when Skakel was 15. Skakel is now 45 or so--he has not been involved with other criminal activity, has been clean and sober for fifteen or more years, and stuck around knowing he was going to be charged and then appeared every day for his trial.

His father, Rushton Skakel, the brother of Ethel Kennedy, died on Friday. Many prisons allow inmates furloughs to attend family funerals. Particularly if the inmate is willing to pay the cost of transportation and perhaps overtime for the police/marshalls who accompany them. Usually the inmate is handcuffed during the funeral service.

The Connecticut authorites have refused Michael permission to attend his father's funeral. Why? Skakel does not present a danger to the community and is not a flight risk. Other prisoners get to go, so why not him? According to the
spokesman for the Connecticut Department of Corrections, it's because he's serving his sentence in a maximum security prison and applications for funeral furloughs are only allowed to be made by those in minimum security prisons.

Sounds quite unfair to us. But then, we thought his trial was unfair.

Jury selection is going slowly in the trial of 11 Miami police officers charged with planting guns, manipulating evidence, or covering up crimes by others. Essentially, the officers are accused of "shooting suspects, then planting guns and concocting evidence to cover up wrongdoing."

Jury selection began this morning. The star witnesses against the 11 are two former cops who pleaded guilty and agreed to cooperate with the Government in exchange for leniency in their own cases.

"The case involved the city's worst police scandal since the 1980s, when the ''Miami River Cops'' stole cocaine from drug traffickers and sold the drug themselves. More than 100 officers were arrested, fired, or disciplined in that case. ''The history of Miami has been characterized by ugly police-community relations,'' said Howard Simon, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida. ''There is a loss of confidence, if not outright hostility, by the minority community because of the great number of shootings of typically unarmed black young men.''

The trial is expected to last three to five months. This brings back memories of the Ramparts police scandal in Los Angeles, which resulted the overturning of more than 100 guilty verdicts. Interesting too, that Miami just got a new police chief, John Timoney, who vied against Bill Bratton for the LA police chief job's several months ago. Bratton got the job in LA, and now Timoney has been selected for Miami. Both have quite a job ahead of them in terms of rooting out the corruption and boosting officer morale. Timoney and Bratton used to work together, and Bratton was instrumental in getting Timony his last police job as chief in Philadelphia. We think the two have different styles and we'll be curious to see which city, if either, is successful at reducing the big three: police misconduct , crime and low officer morale.

"A review of traffic ticket data shows Massachusetts police were more likely to search cars of black and Hispanic drivers during routine traffic stops than those of white drivers, the Boston Globe reported Monday."

"Two years ago, the state began collecting information on traffic citations to measure possible racial profiling by police, following the example of 20 other states. The Globe analyzed more than 750,000 tickets from every police department in the state and found a wide racial disparity in the tickets and vehicle searches."

"Statewide, black and Hispanic drivers received traffic tickets at a rate twice their share of the population. Once ticketed, they were 50 percent more likely than whites to have their cars searched. But a higher percentage of the white drivers whose cars were searched were arrested, the study found."

A more comprehensive article appears in the Boston Globe here.

Hamster reports that Ed Case has won the Hawaii congressional election to replace Patsy Mink who died before the November election. His take on Case: "Case is a moderate Democrat who will probably side with Democrats on most issues, but don't expect him to reflect the occasionally radical liberalism of the late Patsy Mink, whom Case is replacing."

Political Wire reports that the 108th Congress convenes tomorrow. The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) and the ACLU will be following criminal justice and civil liberites issues closely, so check in with them frequently. TalkLeft will keep you up-to-date as well.

Instapundit says that MADD has "morphed from an anti-drunk-driving organization to an anti-alcohol organization." He thinks MADD should be fact-checked: "Most of the anti-alcohol claims being peddled in the media are, to put it bluntly, lies. Journalists need to start checking these claims, rather than mindlessly repeating them. The fact that claims come from a group that styles itself "non profit" doesn't make them trustworthy."

We've been leery of MADD for a while. They've certainly come a long way from their original purpose. Here is our recent take on the group.

Via Atrios, here are all the names and addresses of everyone you've always wanted to write in the media, graciously provided by Take Back the Media, who reminds all of us:

It's time to remind the Washington Press Corps that they're there to do a job, not make best friends with the administration that they're supposed to be covering objectively. We at Take Back The Media urge you to email, fax or phone these correspondents and let them know that their utter lack of hard work is not going unnoticed. Tell them that the way to get information out of Ari is to stand up to him, not to let him obfuscate. Tell them that they're supposed to be covering the White House, not trying to befriend those who work there. Tell them that their journalistic ancestors are watching their actions with horror and disgust.

The CIA's use of "proxy torture" undermines the law and our humanity, says Roberto J. Gonzales in an op-ed piece in the Sunday San Francisco Chronicle:

Attempting to rid the world of terrorism should never justify its use [torture]. As citizens, we should insist that Congress investigate reports of torture and physical abuse by U.S. officials and allies, and we should demand that such practices end immediately. The rule of international law is all that we have to prevent the world from slipping into absolute lawlessness. Without it, brute force and militarism reign supreme. It will indeed be a bitter tragedy if the "war on terrorism" obliterates what remains of the American commitment to the rule of law.

Mr. Gonzales is an assistant professor of anthropology at San Jose State University and editor of the forthcoming book, "Anthropology Goes Public: Cultural Critique of American Empire" (University of Texas Press, 2003).

The Jan. 6 issue of the New Yorker has an article by author and former federal prosecutor Scott Turow titled To Kill or Not to Kill: Coming to Terms with Capital Punishment.

Turow served on Illinois Governor Ryan's Commission on Capital Punishment, formed after Ryan declared a moratorium on the death penalty in January, 2000. The purpose of the commission was to study what went wrong in Illinois and to make specific recommendations about how to fix the state's broken death penalty system. The Commission issued this report, containing 85 specific recommendations. Not one has been adopted by the Illinois legislature, prompting Governor Ryan to consider blanket clemency for all on death row, a decision he is still contemplating in his final weeks of office.

First, Turow explains who served on this Commission: Two sitting prosecutors; two sitting public defenders; a former Chief Judge of the Federal District Court; a former U.S. senator; three women; four members of racial minorities; prominent Democrats and Republicans. Twelve of us were lawyers, nine with experience as defense attorneys and eleven—including William Martin, who won a capital conviction against the mass murderer Richard Speck, in 1967—with prosecutorial backgrounds."

Turow recounts that at the press conference announcing the Commission, the members were asked whether any of them opposed capital punishment. Four people raised their hands, Turow's was not among them.

Turow did not confront the death penalty as a federal prosecutor because during the years he served in that capacity, there was no federal death penalty. It had been declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1972 and was not re-enacted until 1988, by which time Turow was in private practice.

In 1991, having already published two novels and not hurting for money, Turow could afford to take pro-bono cases, and he did--including an ugly death penalty case.

In February, 1983, a ten-year-old girl, Jeanine Nicarico, was abducted from her home in a suburb of Chicago, in DuPage County. Two days later, Jeanine's corpse, clad only in a nightshirt, was found by hikers in a nearby nature preserve. She had been blindfolded, sexually assaulted several times, and then killed by repeated blows to the head.

In 1991, Turow took on the appeal of Alex Hernandez, who had been convicted of the Jeanine Nicarico's murder, along with Rolando Cruz and Stephen Buckley. The investigation into the murder had gone nowhere for over a year, and then, just days before a politically charged election, the three were arrested and charged with the girl's murder. The incumbent in the race lost the election anyway, to a local lawyer named Jim Ryan. You've probably heard of him by now because he has been the Attorney General of Illinois for the past several years and just ran for Illinois Governor and lost. He was also the prosecutor in the third and final trial of Hernandez and Cruz.

Turow reviews the case history, which includes convictions of Cruz and Hernandez, reversals on appeals, retrials and again, convictions. (The state dropped the case against the third defendant.) There was no physical evidence linking Cruz or Hernandez to the crimes. Another rapist named Dugan had confessed to the murder but was disregarded by the prosecutors. Turow entered the case for Hernandez after reading the transcripts, reviewing the evidence and becoming convinced Hernandez was innocent. He won the second appeal for Hernandez, but that wasn't the end of it. Even after Cruz's and Hernandez's second convictions were overturned in the separate appeals that Larry Marshall and I argued, and notwithstanding a series of DNA tests that excluded Cruz and Hernandez as Jeanine Nicarico's sexual assailant, while pointing directly at Dugan, the prosecutors pursued the cases. It was only after Cruz was acquitted in a third trial, late in 1995, that both men were finally freed." That still wasn't the end of the case.

A special grand jury was convened after Cruz and Hernandez were freed. Three former prosecutors and four DuPage County police officers were indicted on various counts, including conspiring to obstruct justice. They were tried and—as is often the case when lawenforcement officers are charged with overzealous execution of their duties—acquitted...

Despite DNA tests linking Dugan to the murder, he has never been charged.

Turow uses this case and others as a springboard to discussing the pros and cons of the death penalty, his own turmoil and going back and forth on the issue and why he ultimately concluded, after two years of serving on the Commission, that despite those cases in which it might be appropriate, Illiniois should not have a death penalty.

Turow makes a compelling case, and we encourage you to take the time to read the whole article.

(Link via Hamster.)

Welcome back Media Whores Online  --and we thank them for including TalkLeft on their list of recommended blogs.

MWO is the ultimate source for who's using the media to tell the truth and who's using it to spin their own political agenda. We recommend visiting MWO daily, if you aren't doing so already.

An editorial today in the Los Angeles Times gets it exactly right on the Bush Administration's unprecedented and unparalled secrecy in terrorism matters. From When Justice Goes Mute:

"The American people are losing rights and freedoms each time a federal judge sides with the Bush administration's blanket orders to close courtroom doors, silence detainees or withhold evidence from defense lawyers."

"Last week, a three-judge panel added another notch to the president's victory column by ruling that government agents could shut down a U.S.-based Islamic charity and then refuse to give any evidence to defense lawyers -- or the public -- of the group's alleged links to international terrorists."

"The Global Relief Foundation, based in Illinois, is one of the world's largest Islamic charities. The president insists that it was directing contributions to terrorists. In December 2001, U.S. Treasury agents froze its bank accounts and confiscated computers."

"Maybe Global Relief does aid terrorists. Maybe it doesn't, as the organization's lawyers insist. But by letting the government keep secret its evidence, the judges have rendered worthless the group's constitutional due process rights, including the right to contest these allegations. "If there is ... evidence," the charity's lawyer said, "it's evidence I've never seen."

"American citizens should be more than a little alarmed at a lengthening chain of decisions in which judges sanction presidential actions shredding constitutional rights and limiting the openness that democracy needs to function."

There's more, but this is the gist, and it is something more people need to wake up to. We have a President and an Attorney General who are trampling constitutional rights and too few are complaining because it's not happening to them....yet.

(link via Buzzflash)