Joan Didion has been our favorite author since she wrote Play It As It Lays. Since then, we've read everything she's written, before and after. Her newest article Fixed Opinions, or The Hinge of History, taken from a speech she gave in November, 2002, appears in the Jan. 16 issue of the New York Review of Books. It has to do with September 11 and its aftermath, and with the politicizing of the tragedy.

While we will always be partial to Maria and Inez (from Play it as it Lays and Democracy, respectively), we think everything she writes is outstanding, so go over and give her a read.

(link found on Wood s Lot)

Update: Avedon Carol at Sideshow posts a great section of Ms. Dideon's article here.

Hesiod at Counterspin reminds us to go over to MWO and vote for Media Horse of the Year. There is a wide selection. Hesiod votes for Bob Woodward, we're still making up our minds.

Don't miss Jack of the People's Republic of Seabrook on why you should object to DNA dragnets.

Even we couldn't make this up...and it comes from the New York Times, not the National Enquirer.

"When Lawrence Jacobs walked into the courtroom a few weeks ago, he couldn't believe his eyes. There was a noose swinging from the prosecutor's chest. Mr. Jacobs's son is being tried on capital murder charges. The noose was on a necktie." "Then he saw it again. This time two prosecutors were wearing ghoulish ties, one with a dangling rope, the other with an image of the Grim Reaper. "That's when it really hit me," Mr. Jacobs said. "These guys are out to kill my son. And they're making light of it."

The prosecutors said the ties were jokes. Their boss was not amused but took no disciplinary action--just told them to stop wearing them.

"Defense lawyers say the neckties are simply the latest proof of a racially tinged, bloodthirsty culture at the Jefferson district attorney's office, which has put more people on Louisiana's death row in recent years than any other parish."

Until recently, the proseutors handed out plaques decorated with hypodermic needles to comemmorate each execution by lethal injection. This proseuctorial disease is not limited to Jefferson Parish.

In East Baton Rouge, 75 miles away, the district attorney celebrates death sentences with office parties, replete with steak and Jim Beam.

In Texas, one district attorney formed a "Silver Needle Society" while another one hung a noose over her office door.

In Mississippi, a former assistant attorney general had a toy electric chair on his desk that buzzed.

If we have to have a draft, forget the youth--let's make these southern prosecutors go first.

Holly Burkhalter, Director of Physicians for Human Rights gives three reasons the U.S. should say No to Torture , and concludes:

"Treating captured combatants humanely should not be a difficult task for the United States when it goes to war; it is the bare minimum. To date, the Bush administration has flunked this rudimentary test of military professionalism, and in so doing degraded itself, along with the international law norms it flagrantly violates."

There is a fascinating, long article in the Sunday New York Times on how the jury in the trial of the alleged Al Qaeda members and associates of Osama bin Laden charged with committing the American Embassy bombings in 1998 in East Africa deadlocked on the death penalty decision for both men for whom the government had sought execution.

It may be the most detailed recounting of a jury deliberation process in a death case we've seen. And it is one filled with numerous questionable actions by the jurors. One looked up a complex legal issue on the internet. Two discussed the death penalty with their pastors during the trial. Another was purportedly anti-death penalty from the start but somehow made it through the jury selection process.

The six month long trial took place in Manhattan in 2001, with the deliberations ending just two months before September 11. The jurors deadlocked twice on the death penalty issue, with a final vote of 9 to 3 for death. In federal criminal trials, death sentences must be unanimous. Also, death penalty opponents are not allowed to serve on capital juries--jurors are questioned in detail about their death penalty views during jury selection, a process referred to as "death qualifying the jury"-- and only those who are at least open to the possibility of voting for a death sentence are allowed to serve.

Here's a quote from the article:

Interviews with the jurors now show that two of them, concerned about the religious implications of voting for execution, violated the judge's directive by consulting their local pastors during deliberations. Another juror confused the court during jury selection about his willingness to impose a death sentence, and from the early stages of the trial had ruled it out. In the end, his adamant refusal to consider death helped lead to the deadlocks on execution.

Yet another juror said that he was afraid throughout the trial of possible retaliation by Islamic terrorists, and that he, as the lone Jew on the panel, felt especially vulnerable. "Maybe I'm overly fearful," the juror said of his experience, "but these are crazy times we live in." The juror was one of three to vote against the death penalty in both instances.

The details of the jury's deliberations are the result of extensive interviews done over the last year with 9 of the 12 anonymous jurors. All nine spoke on the condition that their anonymity be preserved, and some provided copies of notes they wrote at home.

The revelations about the jury's actions, previously known only among the 12 men and women themselves, come at a moment of intense debate about whether trials in civilian courts are appropriate for deciding the fates of accused terrorists. The Bush administration has argued that military tribunals are a better way to try some international terrorists and to more successfully win death penalties. One administration concern involves a problem that appears to have surfaced in the bombings trial: in terror cases, jurors might feel vulnerable to reprisal, and such fears could influence their actions.

But there is also broader interest in the performance of death penalty juries — the nature of the discussion, the role of personal belief — in part because there have been so many examples of men and women being wrongly convicted, including some who were facing execution. Recently, a judge in Houston said he would allow public television to film deliberations in a death penalty case.

In interviews, some lawyers for the convicted men, while grateful that the lives of their clients were finally spared, said they were troubled to learn that jurors had sought outside advice. All four men are appealing their convictions, but whether the disclosures about the jury's conduct could play a role in those appeals is unclear, the lawyers said. (Both jurors who sought spiritual guidance voted for death.)

....It is impossible to say how unusual the conduct of the bombings jury was. Most accounts of jury deliberations remain secret, or at least untold. And accounts of some juries, often told by jurors themselves, have shown that the process of reaching verdicts can be imperfect, even disturbing.

There's so much more, often told in the voice of the jurors. Really a good read, no matter which side of the death penalty aisle you might be on.

Ashcroft's goal to clear the immigration appeals board's backlog has resulted in members deciding cases and issuing deportation orders in minutes, a process that is being assailed by critics.

"A Justice Department overhaul of the immigration appeals system, often the last stop for people fighting deportation, has prompted a barrage of unusually fast rulings rendered without explanation -- and an outcry about noncitizens' rights to due process."

The Board of Immigration Appeals hears the cases of foreigners who contend they face torture, death or other "travails" if they are returned to their home country".

The 23 member board reviews the cases of 220 immigration judges around the country. There is a backlog of 56,000 cases, and Ashcroft has decreed it must be current by March 25.

"In turn, immigrants are appealing to the federal court system in unprecedented numbers, creating another backlog, The Times found in a survey of federal appellate courts. "Immigrant advocates say the speedup is the latest in a series of actions compromising the rights of noncitizens in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks."

T. Alexander Aleinikoff, a law professor at Georgetown University and former Immigration and Naturalization Service general counsel said "We are already seeing results: Many, many cases are decided at a speed that makes it impossible to believe they got the scrutiny a person who faces removal from the United States deserves."

"The Justice Department also plans to cut the Board of Immigration Appeals in half -- from 23 members to 11 -- once the backlog is reduced, even though Ashcroft had expanded the board in 2001."

"The pending cutback has focused acute pressure on individual board members to process cases swiftly. Ashcroft has said that productivity -- broadly, the number of rulings each board member makes -- is one of the factors he will consider in determining who stays on the board."

A very unflattering portrayal of the Bush Administration appears in the Sunday London Observer. The article reports that both civil liberties groups and congresspersons accuse Bush and Cheney of a civil rights clampdown:

President George Bush is presiding over the most secretive administration in 'living memory', according to American civil rights groups and congressmen. Critics accuse him of orchestrating an unprecedented clampdown on freedom of information and the press. This has resulted in a dramatic increase in documents and proceedings being classified secret and an overall shutdown of the free flow of information over the government's political and legal conduct. They are also concerned over what they see as alarming restrictions on the Freedom of Information Act.

The article recounts a multitude of specifics to support the charge.

We find ourselves agreeing with columnist George Will that the Jury Room Is No Place for TV. The issue is allowing television coverage of a jury's deliberations in a death penalty case.

"In a society saturated by entertainment values, "the public's right to know" can be an excuse for voyeurism tarted up as a journalistic imperative. However, the public's fundamental right is to good government, and the function of juries is to produce justice, not entertaining journalism.

Here is some background on the case, which involves a request by Frontline, a show we much admire, to tape deliberations in a Texas capital murder trial - with the permission of the defense--and the reasons we oppose it.

Outgoing Illinois Governor George Ryan met with the families of 45 death row inmates, providing them an opportunity to tell him why their loved one's death sentences should be commuted to life in prison.

"In a private, emotional meeting in a Near South Side Chicago church, family members of 45 Death Row inmates one by one asked Gov. George Ryan to commute the sentences of their children, siblings and parents."

"How do you look a mother in the eye, especially when the system is broken?" the governor said Friday outside Old St. Mary's Catholic Church. "I have to wonder if he's really guilty."

He was there "strictly to listen," the governor said, before deciding whether to commute any of the 142 death sentences to life in prison without.

The Chicago Tribune has learned that the FBI used a cooperating individual to secretly tape a phone call to Illinois Governor George Ryan:

"Federal investigators secretly tape-recorded a telephone call of Gov. George Ryan's from a close confidant last April as part of the Operation Safe Road probe, the Tribune has learned."

"According to a source close to the investigation, Donald Udstuen, once part of Ryan's "kitchen cabinet" of prominent advisers, agreed to make the monitored call to the governor on the same day Udstuen began to work undercover for federal authorities."

Nothing incriminating was said during the call. Still, to use an undercover ploy to tape a Governor, any Governor, is not a routine matter.

The Better Rhetor has begun a campaign to dump Attorney General John Ashcroft. He's not coming from a vindicative point of view, but from a policy stance.

We have written post after post about how John Ashcroft is eviscerating our constitutional rights and civil liberties--with the support of Bush. For a list of over 40 of our posts critical of Ashcroft, go here.