Political Wire today notes that a recent poll shows Illinois voters are not confused by the two Ryans

For background on this, see our Ryan v. Ryan post.

Attorney General Jim Ryan's complaints that he would have more support for his gubernatorial bid if people didn't confuse him with the man he is trying to replace, Governor George Ryan, don't hold up.

Political Wire reports: "... a Pantagraph/WEEK-TV poll "that sought to clarify his perceived problem shows that only 1 percent to 2 percent of those surveyed were confused about the two Republicans." The poll also found Rod Blagojevich (D) is favored by voters over Ryan 53 to 39 percent. "

"Lawyers for two French men held in a U.S. prison camp in Cuba on Friday asked a French judge to declare them prisoners of war after the United States ruled the Geneva Conventions did not apply to suspected al Qaeda fighters."

"In an unprecedented legal move, lawyers for Nizar Sassi and Mourad Benchellali and their parents asked a civil judge to rule on the issue on the grounds that conditions at the Guantanamo Bay camp violate their fundamental freedoms as French citizens."

This is the second challenge by non-citizens to their indefinite detention without access to lawyers and other rights resulting from their designation as enemy combatants.

Yesterday we wrote about the Kuwaiti detainees' challenge, backed by their government, here.

We are guest hosting the vacationing Eric Alterman's MSNBC weblog Altercation today. It's Slacker Friday over there, meaning the column is mostly reprinting selected letters received from readers during the week. He sure does get a lot of mail.

The column will be up around 5 pm EST and stay up through the weekend.

Daily Kos updates the Governor races with his unique maps showing outcomes based on a few different case scenarios.

Via a heads-up e-mail from Jim Capozzola at Rittenhouse Review, the Judge in the Florida case of the two teenage boys convicted of killing their father has overturned their convictions.

"The brothers were facing prison terms of 20 years to life under state sentencing guidelines because they were tried as adults rather than juveniles. They were convicted of arson and second-degree murder without a weapon."

"The six-member jury concluded an adult co-defendant, Ricky Chavis, wielded the weapon but that the boys were accomplices by letting him in the house. Jury forewoman Lynne Schwarz said at a courthouse rally for the boys prior to the hearing that she never thought the jury's verdict would result in prison time for the boys."

A second jury acquitted Ricky Chavis, but the verdict in his case was sealed and the boys' jury weren't told about it.

Reverand Thomas Masters, speaking at the courthouse rally, "said Florida leads the nation in prosecuting children as adults, most for nonviolent crimes."

"We cannot see what we are doing to our kids in this state is a total embarrassment to our nation, and especially our president, the honorable President George W. Bush, who said we must never, never leave any child behind," Masters said. "That includes Alex and Derek King."

We'll update tonight or tomorrow when we learn why the Judge overturned the verdict. If you find out first, please post it in a comment here.

A writer with attitude recaps the Buffalo Six Bond Hearing with a view of the proceedings we haven't read anywhere else, and from our experience attending and participating in some media-frenzied cases the past several years, we think he's right on target. Thanks to Jack at NACDL for sending it to us.

Where is Maher Arar? Canada doesn't know what happened to its citizen after the U.S. deported him to Syria, a country he hasn't lived in since he was a teenager.

"It has been 21 days since Monia Mazigh last spoke with her husband. She has just one question for the people responsible for deporting the Ottawa man to Syria without the federal government or his family being notified. Where is Maher Arar, and what has happened to him?"

"Mr. Arar, 32, was deported to Syria on Oct. 7 or Oct. 8 from Kennedy Airport in New York during a stopover on his way home to Montreal, officials at the Department of Foreign Affairs revealed yesterday. The Canadian government was not contacted about Mr. Arar's case until after he had been deported, on Oct. 10."

"Mr. Arar, who holds dual Syrian-Canadian citizenship, has not set foot on Syrian soil in 16 years. The thought that her husband is back in the country he chose to leave pains Ms. Mazigh. "Just the idea is a torture for him," she said. "Syria is not a democratic country. Anything can happen there. "The proof: I don't know where he is and I have no contact with him."

"Foreign Affairs Minister Bill Graham admitted yesterday that Canada has no idea where Mr. Arar is being held. And in a statement yesterday, Syrian Ambassador Ahmad Arnous denied any knowledge of Mr. Arar's whereabouts. "We have no information regarding Mr. Arar, only what we know from the Canadian press," said Mr. Arnous. "It's a matter between the Canadian government and the American government."

"In a speech yesterday, Mr. Graham said Canada has "registered our protest to the United States. Our position is that a person travelling on a Canadian passport is a Canadian citizen and has a right to be treated as a Canadian citizen."

Check out the new TAPPED weblog. They've moved to Movable Type and it looks so much better. They've added a relatively short list of blogs on the right hand side, including TalkLeft and many of our favorites, like Atrios, Daily Kos, Rittenhouse, Maxspeak, Matt Yglesias, Cooped Up and MyDD, and of course, Law Professor Glenn Reynolds's InstaPundit and Eric Alterman's Altercation, which were our role models and inspiration in revamping TalkLeft into a blog.

Tapped has a new url and would like you to update your bookmarks.

A judge today ordered Noelle Bush jailed for ten days for having a controlled substance, allegedly crack cocaine, in her shoe while in a treatment program. She was led out of the courtroom in handcuffs.

This is her second drug related sentence this year. Hopefully it will push her father, Florida Governor Jeb Bush, into recognizing that treatment rather than prison is the appropriate response for drug users.

"UPDATE from Atrios:

"Just wanted to add what shouldn't be necessary from some bleeding heart liberal like me, but inevitably is. Like most of my ilk I favor treatment over punishment. Noelle obviously has a serious drug probably and should receive treatment. It does sound like the kind of treatment she's getting - when the rehab repeatedly looks the other way - isn't going to help, but that aside she has a disease which needs treatment not punishment. Her father has overseen budget cuts in drug treatment funds and been a strong supporter for prison time for addicts."

"I feel for Noelle, but I also feel for the numerous people Jeb has condemned to decades in prison for their diseases."

Illinois Governor George Ryan today pardoned four wrongfully convicted men. DNA evidence proved them innocent. The four, including one who was an 8th grader at the time who could barely read, say their confessions were coerced.

Two other men were charged ain February and are facing the death penalty in the case after DNA testing allegedly identified them as the killers.

"It was very clear to him by looking at the totality of the circumstances that there was a terrible injustice that occurred," Ryan spokesman Dennis Culloton said Thursday.

The four Marcellius Bradford, Omar Saunders and cousins Calvin Ollins and Larry Ollins were convicted in the 1986 death of medical student Lori Roscetti in Chicago. Calvin Ollins was 14 at the time, an eighth-grade special education student who could barely read.

As part of its reporting of the Washington area sniper attacks, The Washington Post today explains why faulty eyewitness reports are not unusual. We spoke with one of the Post reporters this morning and some of our comments are included in the article.

"Criminal trial lawyers, former police officers and psychologists were disappointed but not that surprised yesterday when witness accounts from the latest serial sniper shooting -- thought to be the best descriptions yet -- turned out to be conflicting and imprecise."

"Up to 50 percent of the time, eyewitnesses are wrong," said Jeralyn Merritt, a Denver defense attorney and a member of a federal task force that studied problems with the reliability of eyewitness testimony. "They're not lying; they're mistaken."

"She cited a 1996 U.S. Department of Justice report that examined the cases of 28 people convicted of sexual assaults and murders who were released after post-conviction DNA tests proved they could not have committed the crimes. In 24 of the cases, eyewitnesses identified the defendant at trial as the assailant. The 28 inmates served a collective 197 years in prison before being exonerated."

"Hearing other witnesses talking about the event, reading about it in the newspaper or viewing accounts on TV can adversely affect the accuracy of memory or skew observations, Merritt and other legal experts warned."

You can read the 1996 study, Convicted By Juries, Exonerated by Science, here.

The task force we served on was the National Institute of Justice's Technical Working Group on Eyewitness Evidence which produced the 1999 publication, Eyewitness Evidence: A Guide for Law Enforcment, available here. The National Institute of Justice is the research arm of the Department of Justice, and the task force included police, psychological researchers, prosecutors and defense attorneys.

For more on how memory works and problems with eyewitness evidence in non-legalese, you can read our article What If This Happened to Your Spouse or Child: Wrongful Convictions and Eyewitness Evidence, published by Martindale-Hubbell and Lawyers.Com.

We also highly recommend the websites of Professors Gary Wells and Elizabeth Loftus, the leading national experts in the field.

The New York Times agrees that felons who have paid their debt to society should have a right to vote.

"There are movements afoot in several states, including Virginia and Alabama, to extend the vote to former felons. Representative John Conyers Jr., a Michigan Democrat, introduced a bill this month to grant former inmates the right to vote in federal elections. And the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit in Atlanta has a class-action suit before it seeking to strike down Florida's laws, which deny voting rights to more than 600,000 people."

"All of these efforts are worthy of support. This nation still believes in rehabilitating criminals who have served out their sentences. Restoring their right to vote is an important part of this process."

For more on the movement to restore voting rights to those with felony convictions, see our prior posts here and here.

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