The ACLU has confirmed i t will represent everyone arrested in the Racine, Wisconsin raid in which hundreds were issued 'disorderly' house citations at the November 2nd Uptown Theatre fundraising party which featured techno music. The ACLU today issued a press release urging the city of Racine to drop the charges.

"Electronic music concerts provide a critical arena for artistic expression for the hired performers and audience members. The First Amendment stands as a clear barrier to any governmental effort to silence musical artists and to prevent their audience from participating in expressive association with them", stated Attorney Micabil Diaz, Legal Director for the ACLU of Wisconsin."

"We urge that the Racine City Attorney, to save the city the time and expense in prosecuting tickets that serve no purpose in any legitimate effort to curb drug abuse - tickets that because they were issued unconstitutionally - may even be counter productive", added Chris Ahmuty, Executive Director of the ACLU of Wisconsin."

Also posted is the ACLU's letter to the City of Racine (scroll down).

Pete Karas' Progressive Racine blog is an excellent source of updates on the raid. Information is also available at The Haunted Theatre.

Some of our prior posts on the Racine Raids are here and here. Instapundit has been all over the story as well-- here is one of his more recent posts that contains links to his earlier ones.

The New York Times yesterday reported on the emerging Ambulance-Homicide Theory, as to why the murder rate is falling in some places. It seems that the correlation to lower homicides may not have anything to do with policing but rather, how close the attack takes place to a high-tech emergency room.

"for all the theoretical talk of ''broken windows'' and ''zero tolerance'' policing that has dominated the public discourse on crime during the past decade, research published this year suggests that the most significant factor in keeping the homicide rate down is something much more practical: faster ambulances and better care in the emergency room. That, in any case, is the intellectual hand grenade that Anthony Harris, director of the Criminal Justice Program at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, has thrown into the polarized debate over crime prevention."

There is a discussion of this going on in the comments section of our post yesterday about the drug war catching minnows instead of big fishes.

Kevin Connors points out this article by libertarian Lew Rockwell. PG (BertramRussell) contributes as well.

The official cite to Anthony Harris' report is:

Murder and Medicine: The Lethality of Criminal Assault, 1960–1999, Homicide Studies, May 2002, Vol. 6, No. 2, pp. 128–166, by Anthony R. Harris, PhD Department of Sociology, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Stephen H. Thomas, MD MPH Division of Emergency Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Gene A. Fisher, PhD Department of Sociology, University of Massachusetts Amherst, and David J. Hirsch, BS Emergency Medical Services, Lawrence Massachusetts.

Action Alert from the National Coalition Against the Death Penalty ( NCADP):

NCADP URGES CLEMENCY CAMPAIGN FOR OKLAHOMA MAN SET FOR EXECUTION

GOVERNOR IS IGNORING QUESTION OF INNOCENCE; BOARD VOTED UNANIMOUSLY FOR COMMUTATION

Dec. 16, 2002 - The National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty is urging its members to contact the office of Oklahoma Gov. Frank Keating and ask him to change his mind and grant clemency for an Oklahoma man scheduled for execution Tuesday evening.

Ernest Carter was convicted in the 1990 robbery-murder of Eugene Manowski. Carter's defense attorney has argued that despite the conviction, his client was not guilty of the crime beyond a moral certainty. The Oklahoma Board of Pardons ands agrees with this assessment, and unanimously voted to recommend that Gov. Frank Keating commute Carter's sentence to life in prison without. On Sunday, Gov. Keating indicated he will not comply with the board's recommendation.

"Executive clemency exists as the final safeguard to prevent an innocent person from being executed," said Steven W. Hawkins, NCADP executive director. "In a speech last year at the National Press Club, Governor Keating himself said that although he favors the death penalty, the state must not execute anyone unless there is a 'moral certainty' that that person is guilty. In this case, the threshold of 'moral certainty' simply has not been met."

Since Gov. Keating took office in 1995, the Oklahoma Board of Pardons ands has recommended clemency for four people on death row. Gov. Keating has accepted only one of those recommendations. This is despite the fact that nationwide, at least 102 people have been freed from death row due to actual innocence, including seven people from Oklahoma. Oklahoma is tied with Texas for third place in the number of innocent people exonerated, behind Florida and Illinois.

"In the past quarter century, Oklahoma has executed 54 people and seen seven people walk off of death row due to actual innocence," Hawkins said. "This is a clearly unacceptable margin of error. Oklahoma's death penalty cases simply are not receiving the level of scrutiny necessary to prevent the ultimate, unacceptable miscarriage of justice from occurring - the execution of a person who is quite possibly innocent. Governor Keating must step in immediately and commute Mr. Carter's sentence."

NCADP is urging its members to contact Gov. Keating's office and let their views be heard. Phone number is 405-521-2342; fax is 405-521-3353. Gov. Keating's
email address is governor@gov.state.ok.us

The execution is scheduled for 6 p.m. CST Tuesday, Dec. 17.

I've been waiting for something to happen For a week or a month or a year
With the blood in the ink of the headlines
And the sound of the crowd in my ear
You might ask what it takes to remember
When you know that you've seen it before
Where a government lies to a people
And a country is drifting to war
And there's a shadow on the faces
Of the men who send the guns
To the wars that are fought in places
Where their business interest runs
On the radio talk shows and the T.V.
You hear one thing again and again
How the U.S.A. stands for freedom
And we come to the aid of a friend
But who are the ones that we call our friends--
These governments killing their own?
Or the people who finally can't take any more
And they pick up a gun or a brick or a stone
There are lives in the balance
There are people under fire
There are children at the cannons
And there is blood on the wire
There's a shadow on the faces
Of the men who fan the flames
Of the wars that are fought in places
Where we can't even say the names
They sell us the President the same way
They sell us our clothes and our cars
They sell us every thing from youth to religion
The same

Released February 19, 1986, Elektra/Asylum Records

(link via What Really Happened)

The Associated Press reports that the number of inmates sentenced to death for their crimes fell sharply in 2001:

"A total of 155 inmates in the United States received a death sentence in 2001, the smallest number in 28 years, according to a Justice Department report released on Sunday. The third straight annual decline occurred at a time of growing national debate about capital punishment, sparked in part by recent exonerations of death-row inmates because of DNA evidence and calls for more state moratoriums on executions."

"The report by the department's Bureau of Justice Statistics found a steady decline in the number of inmates who received a death sentence, with 304 in 1998, 282 in 1999 and 229 in 2000."

"The number put on death row last year represented the lowest figure since the 1973 total of 44 inmates."

Oklahoma executed the most people in 2001, with 18, followed by 17 put to death in Texas and seven in Missouri. Preliminary statistics for this year show that Texas conducted 33 of the 68 executions nationwide.

Other statistics from the report:

Three states housed 40 percent of all death row inmates at the end of 2001: California, with 603; Texas, 453; and Florida, 372. New Hampshire was the only capital punishment state with no one on death row.

The youngest person on death row in 2001 was 19, the oldest 86.

Some states still authorize, in certain circumstances, electrocution, use of gas, hanging and -- in Idaho, Oklahoma and Utah -- death by firing squad.

Ninety people had their death sentences removed or overturned by the courts in 2001, with Florida leading the way with 11. Of the 90, 46 inmates now are serving life sentences, and most of the others were awaiting new trials or sentencing hearings.

Seven inmates had death sentences commuted. Nineteen death row inmates died while awaiting execution.

We had a feeling that we wouldn't like Don Nickles' stand on criminal justice and civil liberties issues, so we took a look at his voting record. Here's what we found.

On Crime and Drugs:

Voted YES on increasing penalties for drug offenses.
Voted YES on spending international development funds on drug control.
Voted NO on $1.15 billion per year to continue the COPS program. (May 1999)
Voted YES on limiting death penalty appeals. (Apr 1996)
Voted NO on mandatory prison terms for crimes involving firearms. (May 1994)
Voted YES on more penalties for gun & drug violations.
Voted YES on rejecting racial statistics in death penalty appeals. (May 1994)

He is a strong opponent of abortion.

Voted YES on maintaining ban on Military Base Abortions.
Voted YES on banning partial birth abortions.
Voted YES on disallowing overseas military abortions.

Here is his civil rights voting record:

Voted YES on loosening restrictions on cell phone wiretapping
Voted NO on expanding hate crimes to include sexual orientation.
Voted NO on setting aside 10% of highway funds for minorities & women.
Voted YES on ending special funding for minority & women-owned business.
Voted YES on prohibiting same-sex marriage.
Voted NO on prohibiting job discrimination by sexual orientation.
Voted YES on Amendment to prohibit flag burning.
Voted YES on banning affirmative action hiring with federal funds.

His environmental voting record is here.

His record on gun control is here. His immigration record is here.

And as we suspected, his record is not much different than that of his now-nemesis, Trent Lott. To be fair, it's not much different than McConnell's or Frist's either.

Today is the deadline in Attorney General John Ashcroft's controversial immigrant fingerprinting and tracking program. The American Civil Liberties Union "has called on the Justice Department to rethink the plan - which the ACLU says is full of holes - and advised immigrants to seek counsel before registering."

The program requires many citizens of five predominantly Arab or Muslim countries - Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan and Syria - to be fingerprinted at designated Immigration and Naturalization Service offices or face deportation.

"By January 10, 2003, citizens of 13 additional countries - Afghanistan, Algeria, Bahrain, Eritrea, Lebanon, Morocco, North Korea, Oman, Qatar, Somalia, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates and Yemen - must also submit to registration. "

"Failure to register could lead to arrest and deportation of otherwise lawful visitors, according to the INS. Adding to the anxiety, some Arab and Muslim visitors with pending immigration petitions were detained when they came in to be fingerprinted."

"By all accounts, the INS’s problems are actually stemming from a surplus of information, not insufficient investigatory powers, the ACLU said. For instance, the INS failed to process more than 200,000 change of address forms, which are piling up in an abandoned limestone mine outside Kansas City, MO that doubles as the largest underground records facility in the world, putting hundreds of thousands at risk of wrongful arrest and deportation."

"This program appears to be a thinly veiled effort to trigger massive and discriminatory deportations of certain immigrants whose only mistake will be to fail to register because they are confused and afraid, not because they have violated any existing immigration law or pose any threat to the United States," said Lucas Guttentag, Director of the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project."

Mike Males, a senior researcher for the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, and sociology professor at UC Santa Cruz takes sharp issue with what he says is police hyperbole over the juvenile crime rate. In Forget the 'Youth Menace': Crime, It Turns Out, Is a Grown-Up Business, Males points out:

"Meanwhile, felony arrests of California teens plunged from 148,000 in 1980 to 106,000 in 2001, topping national declines. Yet, because crime authorities rigidly insist that adults "age out of their crime-prone years" by 30, the graying of America's criminals has gone mostly unnoticed. In 2000, the U.S. Department of Justice's Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention finally broke the official silence: "Juvenile superpredators are more myth than reality," it declared. "The age group with the greatest increase in violent crime arrest rates is persons in their 30s and 40s."

"The middle-aged crime scourge is devastating. Prisons across the United States, especially in California, overflow with aging addicts, burglars, embezzlers and domestic abusers. California -- which spent $1.3 billion in 2001 caging inmates older than 40 -- and the rest of the nation remain woefully unprepared to manage mushrooming numbers of older convicts whose health costs may be staggering."

"Advocates of tougher sentences and cutbacks in prison rehabilitation services failed to anticipate today's murder and violence surge, as tens of thousands ofes are released every year without drug treatment or job prospects."

"Nevertheless, crime and law enforcement authorities continue to repeat the same alarmism that teenagers, particularly dark-skinned ones, augur more crime. Yes, blaming unpopular demographic groups is routine, wins funding and shields policymakers from accountability for ineffective strategies. But crime authorities' elevation of anti-youth prejudice over science and their warping of data to fit ideological ends remain a disservice to California and the nation that can only be termed criminal."

Justice Without Borders is one of a series of articles in the Los Angeles Times about Palestinians and Israelis who defy divisions.

Today's article is about the emergence of a group of Israeli attorneys specializing in human rights. Many of their clients are Palestinians, and they rarely win in court.

"For three decades, Leah Tzemel, an Israeli Jew, has been representing Palestinians in Israeli courts. The people she defends have ranged from terror suspects to refugees to the hapless and sometimes unwitting families of murdering militants."

"Her work and her extreme-left politics make Tzemel one of the most despised women in Israel. She has been accused of treason, physically attacked, and called a "Palestinian-loving whore."

"Despite it all, she continues to fight what is essentially a losing battle, and, in her view, defends the fundamental rights of even those her nation considers the enemy. Tzemel, 57, was the pioneer. Today, an entire cadre of Israeli attorneys has emerged to specialize in human rights and represent Palestinians. Human rights work has gained a modicum of prestige and respect, they say."

"I used to be the 'lawyer of Satan.' Now I'm a 'human rights defender,' " Tzemel said. She didn't change, she says, Israel did....

"Despite their strong beliefs, Tzemel, Sfard and other like-minded attorneys sometimes wonder whether they are doing more harm than good. Are they accomplices of a system that grants the appearance of justice without truly making it available? Are they allowing Israeli society to pay lip service to respect for human rights?"

"I love this place, and I still feel I make a difference, a very small one," Tzemel said. But at some point, she said, the mere act of going to court will be misleading and futile, and create a false sense of fair play. At that point, I will not do this anymore," she said.

There's lots more to the story, and it's quite interesting. (Note, the LA Times requires free registration).

Al Gore announced on 60 minutes tonight that he will not run for President in 2004. You can read the transcript here.

"Gore made his announcement tonight in an interview with CBS's "60 Minutes," saying, "I personally have the energy and drive and ambition to make another campaign but I don't think that it's the right thing for me to do."

Conn. Senator Joe Lieberman, Gore's vice presidential running mate in 2002, has said he is likely to run if Gore declines. Mass. Senator John Kerry and Vermont Governor Howard Dean have also thrown their hats in the ring.

"Senate Democratic Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.), House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.) and Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.) are actively exploring whether to run."

That's a pretty crowded playing field and it's still early. We'd like to see a more left-leaning Democratic candidate with some libertarian sensibilities get on board. We wish we could think of one.

Update: Katharine Seelye in the New York Times examines Gore's Saturday Night Live Appearance, just one day before his announcement he won't run, looking for signs. What she finds is that Gore is now comfortable with himself and his decision and yes, the signs were there in the show.

Here's more on the wide-open nomination race and who's likely to join the fray.

Politics in the Zeros reports first-hand on the anti-war march in Hollywood yesterday.

Republican Oklahoma Senator Don Nickles, a fiscal and social conservative, became the first to stab Trent Lott in the back today, going on television to say others could do the job of leading Republicans in the Senate better than Lott because Lott has become too weakened.

What a transparent grab for power. Nickles has made it clear that he wanted Lott's job, even before Lott made his racially insensitive comments.

"Lott, however, maintains wide, but not very deep, support and might benefit from the perception that Nickles is trying to exploit the situation for his own political gain."

"Lott has no plans to step down, an aide said, and believes Nickles is exploiting the controversy for his own political gain. The two men have had frosty relations for years, and Nickles considered running against Lott earlier this year. Nickles didn't have the votes, so he brokered a deal with Lott to chair the Budget Committee in the next Congress."

"Senate Republican Conference Chairman Rick Santorum (Pa.) told NBC's "Meet the Press" Lott should remain party leader, and several other GOP senators are rising to Lott's defense. But the future looks bleak for Lott. Senior White House officials say Bush will not defend Lott from a challenge."

Among the possible replacements: Nickles, Rick Santorum (Pa), Sen. Mitch McConnell (Ky.) Chuck Hagel (Neb.) and incoming Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Richard G. Lugar (Ind.). And maybe Bill Frist (TN).

"Senator Lott knows that he's weakened," McConnell said on ABC's "This Week." "He knows he made a bad mistake. But he's apologized, as I said, on four different occasions. I think we ought to accept the apology and move on."

Here's more on the ouster issue from an earlier Washington Post article today.