The Senate Judiciary Committee is about to consider another judicial appointment by President Bush--that of Michael McConnell of Utah to the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals.

People for the American Way oppose the appointment for these reasons.

PFAW President Ralph Neas says "On too many constitutional rights and civil liberties issues, Michael McConnell may be the most dangerous Bush administration judicial nominee yet to come before the Judiciary Committee."

PFAW says that confirmation of McConnell, a Law professor and attorney who is strongly favored by Utah Senator Orrin Hatch "would threaten civil rights enforcement, religious liberty, reproductive choice, and other important principles. "

Among PFAW's points:

The California Supreme Court has appointed a legal guardian for a severely mentally ill death row inmate who claims there is a computer in his head and a telephone in his shoulder.

The appointment is without precedent in California and could impact whether the inmate is ever executed.

"The appointment raises questions about whether Dunkle, diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, was really ever sane enough to stand trial for his crimes and whether he will ever be stable enough to be executed.

"We think we have the craziest client on the row," said Michael B. Dashjian, one of Dunkle's lawyers."

"Professor Elisabeth Semel, who directs the Death Penalty Clinic at UC Berkeley's Boalt Hall School of Law, said the court's appointment of a guardian was "a very partial and inadequate way of addressing a much larger problem the lawyers have raised."

"Although the lawyers will now be able to obtain Dunkle's records without his consent, his mental condition may make it impossible for him to tell his lawyers about the events that shaped his life and may have led to his crimes, she said."

"If the client was seriously abused physically or sexually, who is going to tell you about it?" she asked. "If your client is so impaired that he can't even sign for a release of his records, how will you obtain vital information from him?"

Instapundit supports compensating the wrongfully convicted and asks:

"...now that the system appears to be correcting its mistakes, how far will it go to make things right? I think a million bucks each is reasonable, though no more than reasonable, compensation if these guys turn out to be honest-to-God innocent. Think they'll get that much?"

Probably not. New York and Illinois were pioneers in passing laws allowing compensation. The Innocence Protection Act, as originally introduced, provided for $50,000 per year in federal cases. The recent amendment to the bill lowered it to $10,000 per year.

From the Justice Policy Project analysis of the original bill and amendment:

"The bill includes a substantially smaller increase in the federal cap on compensation for unjust imprisonment. Under current law, the U.S. Court of Federal Claims may award up to $5,000 against the United States in cases of unjust imprisonment. The IPA as introduced raised this cap - which has not been raised since 1938 - to $50,000 for each year that the plaintiff spent in prison, or $100,000 per year if the plaintiff was sentenced to death. The [amended] bill raises the cap to $10,000 per year. In addition, while the original bill conditioned federal prison grants on States agreeing to pay reasonable compensation to exonerated death row inmates, the bill simply expresses the sense of Congress that States should provide such compensation."

Lots of people are weighing in this week on the topic of the recently disclosed wrongful convictions of five youths in the 1989 Central Park Jogger case. Recent DNA testing (and the confession of someone previously uncharged in the crime) has established that the five defendants who were convicted of the rape and served time for it were in fact not the rapists.

Instapundit believes that the real issue is not whether the system makes mistakes, because they all do, but whether the mistakes were made in good or bad faith. Robert Prather of the Neo-Libertarian News Portal agrees with him.

We think good or bad faith is important, but we don't think it resolves the issue. Providing the convicted with an opportunity to obtain the necesary evidence to establish their factual innocence after conviction, without being subjected to unrealistic time constraints, is equally important. So is requiring the police to maintain the physical evidence of the crime (such as samples that might contain DNA and tapes of any purported confessions) so that later review can be had. So is analyzing the cases after the fact to find out what went wrong.

Elsewhere in the Blogosphere, Jeanne D'Arc of Body and Soul has been writing on various aspects of the case all week. How much did the fact that the five innocent youths were black have to do with them not being believed at trial? Would people have paid more attention to their claims of coerced confessions had they been white?

Yesterday, Avedon Carol of The Sideshow weighed in. While agreeing with Jeanne D'Arc on almost everything she wrote, Avedon takes issue with Jeanne's statement that lots of guilty people say they are innocent when they are not. She writes:

Ramzi bin al-Shibh, aka Binalshibh, captured in Pakistan Wednesday, is on his way to an undisclosed location in the custody of the United States.

First, a name issue. In the Moussaoui Indictment, he is named Ramzi bin al-Shibh. The Washington Post is referring to him as Binalshibh. But we're talking about the same guy.

We are very interested in Mr. bin al-Shibh because of his alleged relationship to Zacarias Moussaoui, now awaiting trial in Virginia.

The government's theory has been that Mr. bin al-Shibh (former roomate of hijacker Mohammed Attah) was supposed to be the 20th hijacker on September 11. When he couldn't get a visa to enter the U.S., Moussaoui was picked to be the 20th hijacker in his stead. Bin al-Shibh sent some money to Moussaoui. The week before the 9/11 attacks, bin al-Shibh allegedly went to Spain and hadn't been seen by law enforcement since, until his arrest Wednesday.

We don't think Moussoui was going to replace bin Al-Shibh, or be the 20th hijacker. We think the French are more on target with their theory that Moussaoui was training for a different, later mission --in part based on the fact that Moussoui was trying to learn to fly a 747 and none of the 9/11 hijacked planes were 747's. Another popular theory is that Moussaoui was going to be used for a later mission involving crop-dusting planes.

A plan to speed testing "of hundreds of thousands of DNA samples from unsolved rape cases to reduce a national backlog of untested evidence is headed for the House after the Senate passed it without dissent."

"The DNA samples, which could identify or clear suspects in hundreds of thousands of sexual assault cases, now sit untouched at police laboratories across the country because of a lack of money."

The bill also contains "new privacy safeguards for DNA evidence and increases criminal penalties for misuse or unauthorized disclosure of DNA information."

Toby Sackton over at Toby's Political Diary - 'Let it Begin Here' lays out the theory that Bush is telling "The Big Lie" the same way Joseph Goebel told "The Big Lie" that laid the foundation for the Holocaust. Leaving the aptness of the analogy aside, Toby sets out five reasons for Bush's "Big Lie", from him being a fundamentalist, to having represented oil interests his whole life, to losing to Afganistan, and deflecting attention away from home issues. Go read it, it's good.

The military is sharply curtailing the media at Guantamo Bay.

"Interviews with U.S. military personnel are being monitored by media escorts, who accompany journalists to most places on the base, including bathrooms and vending machines. The media also has been barred from speaking without authorization to civilians working on the base."

An Italian film crew had its room searched by the Naval Crimnal Investigation Service. Then they were forbidden to take pictures of the sea or go to the side of the base where the detainees are being held.

Remember the international outrage over the arrival of the initial detainees? We all saw pictures of them blindfolded by goggles, shackled and kneeling . To avoid a recurrance, pictures are now banned. And a large green screen has been installed so the journalists can't see the detainees, even from a distance. The military says this is to protect their rights under the Geneva Convention. Wait, haven't we been told repeatedly that the detainees are "unlawful combatants" not prisoners of war and therefore they are not entitled to the protections of the Geneva Convention?

Then there was this restriction: "Before a four-day media trip to cover Sept. 11 ceremonies on the remote U.S. base in eastern Cuba, American and foreign journalists were told they would be allowed to photograph services but were then barred from filming or taking pictures. The military said media coverage would “interfere with the spirituality of events.”

Reporters Without Borders is not pleased. After all, the First Amendment is one of those freedoms we are going to war to try and protect. Isn't it?

One more thing. There is room now for 612 detainees now, and 204 more cells are being built. But the administration is planning for 2,000 detainees. We think the world has a right to know what's going on down there. Journalists are our only eyes and ears. We hope they yell loudly about this.

Democratic Underground today publishes one man's autobiographical account of the conflict he faced as a drafted soldier in the days of Vietnam who was opposed to that war.

Titled Of Empire, War, Propaganda, and Courage, author Punpirate says:

"Intelligent people everywhere, therefore, have both the right and the obligation to express doubt when doubt arises. We have the right to demand honest answers from government (yes, I know, I know the futility of that exercise with the Bush administration). Had more of us, and more of our legislators, expressed doubt about the evidence regarding the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964, we might have prevented millions of unnecessary deaths and disabilities, American and Vietnamese alike, might have resolved a difficult problem with diplomacy instead of militancy, and might have engendered in many parts of the world a respect for the United States, instead of affirming fear and suspicion of our country. "

"Today, that same fear and suspicion of us is rising in the Arab and Islamic world because an administration purportedly representing the people of the United States has consciously chosen militancy over diplomacy and common sense. This current administration has chosen to do so, without adequately informing the American public of all the consequences, because of a very narrow view held by the most extreme and conservative elements of our society about America's determinist role as an empire. "

The New York Times today calls on the Government to stop betraying the families of the foreign 9/11 victims.

"Shockingly, many of those who were grieving the loss of a loved one at ground zero on Wednesday are now subject to deportation. Congress ought to rectify this unconscionable situation immediately. It should grant the hundreds of family members of lawfully employed foreigners who perished in last September's terrorist attacks the right to reside in the United States, regardless of when their original visas expired. It would also be fitting to honor the foreign casualties of this attack on American soil by offering citizenship to any of their dependents who wish it. "

What a positive step that would be, we hope the powers that be are listening.

"Gonzo Journalist" Hunter Thompson said in an interview today with CBS Market Watch, among other things, that President Bush should quit.

Hunter, who had the CBS reporter call back so he could finish his dinner before speaking with him (at 7am) discussed a variety of topics, from his conversation last week with Bob Dylan who was in Aspen to perform (we hear Dylan was great by the way, and had everyone singing along for Subterranean Homesick Blues) to:

"He has a new book coming out in December. The title? "Kingdom of Fear." That's basically how he views the state of the U.S. right now.
The only stock he said he ever bought was the Boston Celtics.
He still has harsh words for the "greedheads" and the Republican oil tycoons who come to Colorado and complicate his life.
His advice for President Bush: "QUIT!"
His advice for his fellow citizens: "Get out and vote."

The article about the interview is almost as much fun to read as the interview. But then, we've always been a major Hunter fan. We were especially proud to know him when he took to writing about Lisl Auman, who is doing life for a murder of a policeman. Her case is on appeal, and Hunter wrote about it a lot in his ESPN column. He also got the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers to file an amicus brief on her behalf. Lisl was in police custody at the time of the crime and she was convicted and given life, no, under the "felony murder" rule. Our coverage of the case has links to Hunter's articles and information about the case.

Received today from the Marijuana Policy Project, which is working hard to see that legalization passes in Nevada in November. They're asking for $10 contributions to keep their tv ads running up to the election:

"We took our opponents by surprise by launching the first wave of TV ads in Nevada. Please visit this site to view the two ads and to make a donation so that we can afford to continue
running them."

"The first ad features the state government's official explanation of what our initiative would do. It then concludes with the tag line: "In the privacy of a home, or under the care of a doctor, vote YES on Question 9."

"The second TV ad features people openly smoking marijuana in public, then explains that this kind of activity would remain banned under our initiative. We felt the need to demonstrate this because our opponents have been lying by saying that our initiative would let people smoke pot anytime, anywhere, all the time and everywhere. The ad goes on to explain that our initiative removes penalties for people who use marijuana in private, as well as giving patients greater access to medical marijuana. It shows images of a private home and a physician talking to a patient. The ad concludes with the same tag line as the
first commercial."