The Governor of Michigan is expected to sign legislation next week ending most mandatory minimum penalties for drug offenses. The legislation consists of three bills, which had wide bipartisan support and the support of Michigan prosecutors.

Michigan's laws are among the strictist in the country. "Someone possessing 50 to 224 grams of narcotics or cocaine in Michigan must be sentenced to at least 10 years and up to 20 years in prison. The bills would eliminate the 10-year minimum, allowing the judge to sentence an offender for any time up to 20 years."

Under the new law, drug offenders would become eligible for early. The final decision will be up to the board, but drug offenders have the highest rate of in Michigan--72%. Here is the fact sheet o n the new laws.

Possession of over 650 grams of cocaine in Michigan until a few years ago used to carry a mandatory life sentence. That's a little over a pound. As of July, 1998, 225 inmates were serving life terms under this statute.

For more details on the Michigan changes, and on the evils of mandatory sentencing in general, we recommend you visit -- FAMM--Families Against Mandatory Minimums. They have worked the hardest to overturn these draconian laws. Here is their update on Michigan.

At what point do U.S. officials holding foreign detainees and prisoners cross the line between acceptable interrogation techniques and torture? It seems to us that the U.S. is operating under an "end justifies the means" philosophy--trying to justify tactics that anyone with an ounce of humanity would know amount to torture--under the rubric that the terrorist threat to Americans is so potentially catastrophic that such treatment is necessary.

We're not buying into the argument. We find these tactics to be a gross violation of human rights. They are also dangerous to our own servicemen and women: If we treat the citizens of other countries this way, why won't these other countries retaliate with similar or harsher treatment when they capture members of our military?

Quoting from today's Washington Post article, U.S. Decries Abuse But Defends Interrogations :

"Those who refuse to cooperate inside this secret CIA interrogation center are sometimes kept standing or kneeling for hours, in black hoods or spray-painted goggles, according to intelligence specialists familiar with CIA interrogation methods. At times they are held in awkward, painful positions and deprived of sleep with a 24-hour bombardment of lights -- subject to what are known as "stress and duress" techniques. Those who cooperate are rewarded with creature comforts, interrogators whose methods include feigned friendship, respect, cultural sensitivity and, in some cases, money. Some who do not cooperate are turned over -- "rendered," in official parlance -- to foreign intelligence services whose practice of torture has been documented by the U.S. government and human rights organizations."

The Bush Administration has been non-forthcoming about how it interrogates its prisoners. "But interviews with several former intelligence officials and 10 current U.S. national security officials -- including several people who witnessed the handling of prisoners -- provide insight into how the U.S. government is prosecuting this part of the war."

"The picture that emerges is of a brass-knuckled quest for information, often in concert with allies of dubious human rights reputation, in which the traditional lines between right and wrong, legal and inhumane, are evolving and blurred."

"While the U.S. government publicly denounces the use of torture, each of the current national security officials interviewed for this article defended the use of violence against captives as just and necessary. They expressed confidence that the American public would back their view. The CIA, which has primary responsibility for interrogations, declined to comment."

"If you don't violate someone's human rights some of the time, you probably aren't doing your job," said one official who has supervised the capture and transfer of accused terrorists."

We aren't talking about Guantanamo Bay here. "In contrast to the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, where military lawyers, news reporters and the Red Cross received occasional access to monitor prisoner conditions and treatment, the CIA's overseas interrogation facilities are off-limits to outsiders, and often even to other government agencies. In addition to Bagram and Diego Garcia, the CIA has other secret detention centers overseas, and often uses the facilities of foreign intelligence services."

"Free from the scrutiny of military lawyers steeped in the international laws of war, the CIA and its intelligence service allies have the leeway to exert physically and psychologically aggressive techniques, said national security officials and U.S. and European intelligence officers." Like sending prisoners to countries where torture will be inflicted. Like sleep deprivation, which even the U.S. Department has acknowledged is torture.

"The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, the authoritative interpreter of the international Convention Against Torture, has ruled that lengthy interrogation may incidentally and legitimately cost a prisoner sleep. But when employed for the purpose of breaking a prisoner's will, sleep deprivation "may in some cases constitute torture."

"The State Department's annual human rights report routinely denounces sleep deprivation as an interrogation method. In its 2001 report on Turkey, Israel and Jordan, all U.S. allies, the department listed sleep deprivation among often-used alleged torture techniques."

We really encourage you to read the whole article--we take great issue with national security officials who say the American public would back their techniques. Kharma. What goes around comes around.

"Three Silicon Valley professionals, among hundreds of men arrested statewide last week when they showed up at immigration offices to be fingerprinted and photographed as part of a new homeland security program, were released from a San Diego jail for a Christmas Eve family reunion. "

"They were shackled with 10 other Bay Area men and detained in San Diego in what they described as a packed immigration detention center, about 12 men to a cell. The men said that they had slept little during two days at the center, where they were processed and interviewed, but that conditions had improved when they were transferred to a roomier jail."

"It was horrifying," Ziazadeh said Tuesday after he and the other two men landed at Mineta San Jose International Airport. "

They also said the INS officials and prison guards were both rough and rude. Here are some of the details and our thoughts on the class action lawsuit filed against the INS and Justice by groups reresenting the arrestees.

Tonight or tomorrow morning marks the sixth anniversary of the death of JonBenet Ramsey in Boulder. Her murderer has never been found. Whoever it is, he/she/they are walking the streets somewhere, free to strike again.

The District Attorney in Boulder made the decision to take over the investigaton this week and put it back on active status. This is a political matter, as the DA is essentially cutting the Boulder Police Department out of the loop. This is not to say that there won't be in some communciation between the two, and relations between the two offices are reportedly much better now that DA Alex Hunter is out of office. But the Boulder Police have acknowledged they are no longer running the show.

The Ramseys are thrilled that DA Keenan is in charge of the new investigation and will be using experienced homicide investigators like Lou Smit, who resigned from the earlier investigation because he said the police were ignoring leads that led elsewhere than to the parents.

While the Ramseys have not been excluded as suspects in the new investigation, they also will not be the focus. And that is what is good about Mary Keenan's office taking over: those involved will start on a clean slate, rehash all the evidence and follow up on leads the police neglected. They will let the evidence lead them to suspects rather than the other way around.

Is it too late? We don't think so. There was DNA found in JonBenets underwear that doesn't match the parents. While the police tried to spin this into a "so what" kind of thing by sending the underpants for testing to Southeast Asia where they were manufactured to prove there could be an innocent explanation for the DNA--such as someone who packaged the underpants at the factory--it didn't work. First off, the DNA in the underwear was right next to a spot of blood. Did a factory worker leave that too? Why didn't they send the foreign DNA to the FBI's Databank? We hope that gets done now.

Also, while the DNA under JonBenet's fingernails has long been claimed by the police to be compromised and not valuable, there are reports that genetic markers from that DNA are similar to those in the underpants. Again, the parents have been excluded as being the source of this DNA.

This was the Boulder Police's first serious homicide investigation in years. The Police Chief, Tom Koby, had never worked on a homicide investigation. Commander Eller who was initially in charge of the investigation had no homicide investigation experience. Detective Steve Thomas, who consistently expressed his belief the Ramseys were guilty on television and in a book (and who later settled a libel suit brought by the Ramseys for an undisclosed sum to be paid the Ramseys by his publisher), had been a narcotics cop until the day before Jonbenet's funeral. In other words, the Boulder police department in December of 1996 simply did not have the necessary experience to conduct an intensive homicide investigation. Yet, instead of calling for help or accepting help from nearby Denver or from the FBI, the Boulder Police decided to go it alone.

The Boulder police botched the crime scene, and within days made up their minds that it had to be the parents. Then the law enforcement leaks began--most of them untrue--resulting in a mass barrage of media myths. We cannot recall a similar case in which parents of a murdered child have been so excoriated by the press based on rumor, speculation and innuendo.

We began the Jonbenet Ramsey Media Un-Lynch Mob Page on our sister site CrimeLynx i n 1999. We have more or less kept it updated since then, moving items into archives at the end of each year. We have chronicled the 2002 events in the case on another site of our's, Crimes'R Us - the Legal Side of Crimes in the News, in which we highlight a select group of cases that seem to catch the public's attention.

We have been highly critical of the Boulder police in the past--and generally had praise for the Boulder DA's office. We still feel the same way, and will continue to report on developments as they arise. We share the Ramseys' hope that this will be an open-minded and impartial investigation.

[edited to reflect that it was the Boulder Police Department's first serious homicide investigation in years, not the first homicide, as we initially said and as noted by Walter in the Comments section. Thanks, Walter. Our point is the same: The Boulder police should have allowed more experienced homicide investigators, such as those from Denver or the FBI to work with them from the very beginning.)

A class action has been filed in federal court in Los Angeles by Arab and Muslim groups against Ashcroft and the INS over last week's arrest and detention of over 1,000 Middle-Eastern men who went to register in accordance with a new government regulation.

"Local immigration lawyers estimated last week that 1,000 men and boys were detained in standing-room-only centers and forced to sleep on concrete floors, under a system designed to track potential terrorists but that instead locked up many caught in the lengthy process for obtaining permanent residence.

The lead attorney for the detainees is Peter Schey, president of the Los Angeles-based Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law. Schey said mass registration was irrational because "no undocumented terrorist will come forward."

Schey said the lawsuit was not about resisting registration but about the way it was being implemented. "The program is being used as a scam to lure people into INS offices supposedly to register, when what they really face is arrest, detention and even deportation despite their pending petitions to legalize their status which the INS refuses to process," he said."

Since the new registration requirement applies to males age 16 and older, several teens were among those locked up on visa issues. We wrote about them here, and our problems with the registration program and the mass arrests here.

What's next? Rounding non-Americans up and putting them into camps? Remember all those new beds the Government is building at Guantamo? Who's going to fill them? The Government's answer is "enemy-combatants." But remember, under Bush, Ashcroft and Rumsfeld's plan, they get to choose who the enemy combatents are, they get to hold them in secret without access to lawyers and they claim their decisions are not reviewable by our courts.

At what point will people join to speak out against this unprecedented executive power grab? The class action suit by Muslim and Arab Americans is a good first step, but we need the American public to join behind them and offer support. Today it's their liberty rights being impinged upon. Next year it could be your's or your child's. Then what?

Update: Matt Yglesias on this topic today:

"Everyone ought to consider the fact that there's a quite real chance that in the not-too-distant future we'll see another terrorist attack with thousands of casualties. Maybe next time around the killers will know not to blow up an office building until late enough in the day that it's full. Or maybe there'll be a WMD attack killing not thousands, but tens or even hundreds of thousands."

"I bring this up both to remind people that the government is getting paranoid about security with good reason, but also to remind you that the level of terrorism-related panic could get much higher in the future and with it could come popular support for really and truly repressive measures. A person's going to have no standing whatsoever to make the case against something like, say, the wholesale internment of America's Arab population if he's been spending the past two years running around screaming "the sky is falling" every time the government says Arab immigrants are worthy of more scrutiny than other immigrants."

The "winners" of the Best of the Notable Quotables of 2002 awards have been announced.

For those unfamiliar with these awards, they are awards by conservative journalists, through the auspices of the Media Research Center, for the worst reporting by liberals during the year. The list of Judges includes the she-pundit-with-blond-hair-who- hails-from-Connecticut-and-writes-books. See if you can make it through the whole list of judges without wincing.

This is the 15th year of the awards. We are proud to say that we won one of these awards in 1999 for comments made during a MSNBC interview with anchor Gregg Jarrett about Hillary Clinton and Rudy Guiliani during their antagonistic Senate campaign. Runners-up in our category included Larry King, Sam Donaldson and Dan Rather. We still haven't figured out what was objectionable about the exchange--so we thought we'd reprint it here. (you can watch the actual ten second video here):

Politics of Meaninglessness Award for the Silliest Analysis

Rudy Giuliani joking on the Late Show about running for the Senate from Arkansas: "I?ve never lived here. I?ve never worked here. I ain?t never been here. But I think it would be cool to be your Senator."

Jeralyn Merritt, MSNBC legal analyst: "That?s just so unfair."

MSNBC anchor Gregg Jarrett: "It?s ugly."

Merritt: "It?s ugly and it?s unfair because she has spent a lot of time in New York and she has the desire to help and she is bright. She?s the best of the group."

-- Exchange on MSNBC?s InterNight, June 25.

We'd say the same thing again, and actually, we hope to in 2008.

A federal judge in Washington has ordered an ethics probe of six Justice Department attorneys in a lawsuit over billions of dollars claimed to be due Native Americans.

"A federal judge this week ordered a court ethics panel to investigate six Justice Department attorneys for their conduct in a landmark class-action suit against the government that seeks billions of dollars and was filed on behalf of more than 300,000 Native Americans."

"In a stinging 20-page opinion, U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth also blocked the Interior and Justice departments from continuing to send mass mailings to the Indian plaintiffs that include a provision that would terminate the Indians' rights to claim damages, even as the lawsuit continues."

"Lamberth has already held three Cabinet officials in contempt of court for their failures in Indian trust fund reform, including Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton."

We read a great article a few months ago about the lawyer for the Native Americans. We'll try to find it and post the link to it.

We wish all celebrants a great holiday--and non-celibrants a wonderful respite.

American-Muslim youth react to their recent treatment by the INS in Is This a Way to Ease Muslim Fears?. We hope Bush and Ashcroft and Rumsfeld read their stories and are ashamed of themselves. And if not, we're very ashamed for them.

Sixteen-year-old Hossein Ahmadi is an Iranian-born British citizen who lives with his mother in Encino, Calif. Ahmadi said he was working on his literature homework while waiting to speak to an immigration official but 30 minutes later he was led away in handcuffs as his 7-month pregnant mother watched.

"They sat me in a tank with three other boys and I was the only INS case," said Ahmadi. "I asked them what they were doing in there. One of them had done a burglary and one of them had stabbed someone. Just being among them, I felt like a criminal."

"I thought this was the place of freedom — a place where I could come and become someone. But the last couple of days, my mind has really changed about the United States," said [Shawn] Eliaspoor, who was 6 when his family moved to Southern California from Iran.

Eliaspoor's changed outlook follows his detention by Immigration and Naturalization Service officials in Los Angeles last week. It's an attitude that surprises those who view Eliaspoor as a typical 18-year-old American.

Hal Kay, 22, was born in Iran, but is a Canadian citizen who has lived in the United States since age 16. Also held last week by the INS, he also feels betrayed by the government of the country he considers home. "I really didn't know the INS was this backward. It felt like in America there are situations where it's practically like it is in Iran," Kay said.

Like hundreds of other Middle Eastern males, Eliaspoor, Kay and Ahmadi lined up at a federal building in Los Angeles to register voluntarily for a new INS database to track foreigners who enter and leave the country on tourist, business and student visas. Dec. 16 was the deadline for male visa holders ages 16 and older from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan and Syria.

Those who showed up to register on the deadline day expected to be released within a few hours. Instead, according to INS figures, they were among 400 men arrested. Most of them were born in Iran.

"I thought I was doing something good for myself," said Eliaspoor. "Something for the country. But they tricked me."

From today's New York Times:With Dog Detectives, Mistakes Can Happen

Experts on explosives detection say that when dogs' handlers are excited and stressed, the dogs may overreact and falsely suggest that explosives are present when they are not. False alerts are better than missing a live bomb, they say, but it is better for the dogs to be accurate. More rigorous training and certification standards and more research into the way dogs detect scents and the relationship between them and their handlers are needed to avoid these problems, said Dr. Lawrence J. Myers, an expert on dog olfaction at the Auburn University College of Veterinary Medicine.

If true for explosive searching dogs, it should also be true for dogs searching for drugs following the routine traffic stop.

The Chicago Tribune wisely calls for a review commission in its editorial, Four More Terrible Mistakes. In the case under discussion, four men were imprisoned for a murder authorities now know they didn't commit. These were not death penalty cases.

"These were the largely unexplored next layer of the onion, suggesting once again that problems exist throughout the criminal justice system, not just in the way capital punishment is administered." "The case seemed airtight. One man confessed. Two pleaded guilty after they had spent four years in jail awaiting trial. A key witness had provided many details implicating the men."

Only now it turns out the men could not have committed the murder. The confession was junk and the key witness is now charged with making false statements.

"All of these cases cry out for safeguards that must be implemented across the state."

"One is the videotaping of interrogations and confessions taken in police stations. A videotape of the entire questioning process may have provided critical information that would have prevented the wrongful convictions in some of the cases cited above."

"The other is the need for a formal, public review process to examine these accumulating cases of wrongful convictions and other cases where a conviction might be suspect."

"Models already exist. The United Kingdom and Canada appoint retired judges and others to conduct extremely thorough investigations of wrongful convictions. They are accorded subpoena power and stage exhaustive public hearings on various issues that arise from each case."

"County prosecutors in St. Paul, Minn., San Diego and Austin, Texas, have undertaken their own reviews of violent crime cases...."

"Perhaps the best model for Illinois is the National Transportation Safety Board. When planes crash, the independent NTSB swoops in, conducts a thorough investigation by experts and reveals its findings to the public."

This is what Barry Scheck, Peter Neufeld and Jim Dwyer called for in their book, Actual Innocence. It's more than high time we do it.

On Monday, a U.S. federal judge endorsed the decision by a Magistrate Judge on Friday to release of one of four brothers in Texas who were arrested last week and charged with aiding the Palestinian militant group Hamas. The Judge and Magistrate Judge found that the government had not proven the man to be a flight risk.

A second brother was ordered released Friday. but will stay in detention because like a third brother, he is also charged with overstaying his visa. They will appear in court again on January 10.

"The four brothers run a computer company called InfoCom Corp. and live in suburban Dallas with their families." There is a fifth brother, but he is already in jail, serving a sentence in an unrelated matter.

You can read the Indictment here.