Larry Johnson has served 18 years of a life sentence for a rape he did not commit. He is about to be freed since DNA tests have confirmed he could not have been the rapist.

We would like to note his counsel's comments in the article about the prosecutrix, Jennifer Joyce, who is now trying to sound sorry about the conviction and waste of a man's adulthood.

Barry Scheck, co-director of the New York-based Innocence Project, said Joyce was "personally responsible" for a two-year delay in freedom for Johnson.

"We have found she has been one of the most obstinate district attorneys in the United States, with respect to DNA testing," Scheck said. "By obstinately refusing to go along with testing ... she is getting in the way of innocent people getting out of jail.... She deserves no credit for the case."

We join Scheck and others in calling for Joyce to stop opposing DNA testing for inmates asserting factual innocence and to drop all "frivolous" appeals.

The House Judiciary Committee has passed an amended version of the bipartisan Family Reunification Act, H.R. 1452.

According to the American Immigration Lawyers' Association's July 26 Press Release,

"The Act would restore a limited measure of fairness to a harsh 1996 law that was meant to clamp down on illegal immigration and make it easier to deport serious criminals. Instead, the 1996 law has torn apart thousands of American families and stripped long-term legal immigrants of their basic rights. "

"The final measure the Judiciary committee passed reflects a compromise between House Judiciary Chairman James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) and the bill's sponsor, Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA). The Sensenbrenner-Frank compromise would provide a limited opportunity for certain long-term legal permanent residents to ask a judge to consider the facts of their case before deciding whether to deport them from the United States. The measure includes an amendment by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) that requires any new grounds of relief from deportation to be personally approved by the Attorney General or Deputy AG and contains a sunset provision that would terminate the measure in 2005. AILA opposed the Issa amendment but supports the Family Reunification Act as an important first step toward reforming the harsh 1996 laws. The measure would:

Give immigration judges the option to grant relief from deportation in cases involving long-term legal permanent residents who committed relatively minor offenses.

Ban relief for anyone convicted of terrorism-related or other serious offenses, such as rape, murder, and sexual abuse. "

We, like AILA, wanted more, but we also welcome what we got.

Good expose of the juvenile criminal justice system in American Prospect's TAP: Vol 13, Iss. 14. "I Plead the Sixth. by Sasha Polakow-Suransky. Thanks to Hamster for alerting us to it.

Under the now repealed federal Independent Counsel statute, subjects of grand jury investigations who end up not being indicted can apply to recover their attorneys' fees from the Government. It was only a matter of time until the Clintons decided to take advantage of this law. Clintons Ask Millions from U.S. in Whitewater Legal Fees

The Clintons by agreement cannot seek reimbursement for the Monica Lewinsky or Paula Jones matters, but are free to do so for Whitewater.

Whether or not they need the money is not the issue to us. They deserve it because they were unjustly scandalized by the Whitewater investigation. We say unjust because it was never proven that they committed any violations of law in connection with Whitewater. They were targets of the radical right. They were victimized by Ken Starr and his minions. Ken Starr wasted five years and tens of millions of dollars on this investigation, tarnished the Clintons' reputations and caused them to go into debt for $10 million of legal fees. The Government is responsible for Starr's misjudgments and now it must pay the piper.

Ronald Regan and George Bush got reimbursed for their legal fees when they were subjects of independent counsel investigations that failed to result in indictments against them.

What's good for the goose....

Too bad Susan McDougal and Webster Hubbell also can't recover their attorneys' fees.

Circling the Legal Wagons in today's Los Angeles Times explains why so many criminal defense lawyers are supporting Lynne Stewart, the 62 year old New York lawyer whose conversations with her client, the blind Sheik Abdel Rahman, serving a 65 year sentence for conspiring to blow up New York landmarks, were recorded by prison officials during their attorney-client visits.

Stewart has been charged with conspiring to aid terrorists, lying and breaking an agreement with the Bureau of Prisons.

She is being represented by legendary lawyer and law school dean Michael Tigar, who recently defended Terry Nichols in the Oklahoma City Bombing trial.

Monitoring attorney-client conversations in jail is one of the unacceptable practices instituted by Ashcroft after September 11. Here's all the reasons why.

Sasha Abramsky makes the case for allowing ex-felons to vote in A Growing Gap in American Democracy.

"Felony disenfranchisement, coupled with very high incarceration rates, has become a major challenge to our democratic values. In a self-confident democracy, such laws simply have no place. "

Yes, we agree.

The Rittenhouse Review praises the decision to send Alfred Taubman to jail. We respect Rittenhouse and think their blog is one of the best. But we respectfully disagree on this one.

How is it not inhumane to put any 78 year old non-violent offender in ill health in jail? What if this was your father?

Particularly for a financial crime. Why would home detention not be punitive enough for the man? It is very confining and would deprive him of the privileges in his life he has so taken for granted. He's going to pay 7.5 million which will undoubtedly cover the losses he's caused (and if not, he'll have to pay restitution on those).

As Rittenhouse points out, his snitch cohort and underling got home detention and she's relatively young and in good health. Why praise a sentence that is the result of a system that rewards ratting over everything else.

She sang for her supper to save her own hide, just like Sammy Gravano and countless others, by providing purchased testimony, testimony that is purchased with promises of freedom instead of money. To most people, freedom is a commodity far more precious than money. And it gives a powerful incentive to lie.

Here is the transcript of the Moussaoui hearing. We read it late last night and found it to be quite a window into Moussaoui's intended defense strategy (his, not his standby lawyers). And it's in html instead of pdf which we like much better.

Attorney General Ashcroft testified about Operation Tips yesterday before the Senate Judiciary Committees.

He defended Operation Snoops, explaining that it would not have its own database. Rather, he said, it would be a referral service, whereby calls from citizens about other citizens' (their neighbors' and employers' and customers' )odd activities would be transferred to federal and state law enforcement agencies.

Like those agencies aren't going to log the transferred calls into their own databases? What's the difference whose database it is? Isn't the point of contention here that we don't want to be spied on and have information about what people think they see, or believe they saw, or didn't see but decide to lie and say they saw, end up in the hands of the Government?

We like ACLU Director Laura Murphy's comments as reported in the article: "Notwithstanding all of these assurances, this is still government-sanctioned peeping Toms. This is a program where people's activities, statements, posters in their windows or on their walls, nationality, and religious practices will be reported by untrained individuals without any relationship to criminal activity."

For today's op-ed piece against the Rat Pact, we like The Societal Cost of Surveillance in the New York Times. (Free Registration Required.)

Thanks to Jason Rylander for leading us to Natural Causes by Richard Just in the July 24 issue of American Prospect. The article thoughtfully examines the impact the Supreme Court's recent rulings may have on the death penalty in the future--it does not predict a moratorium or aboliton, but stresses the reactive rather than proactive role the Supreme Court is likely to play.

Just concludes that the real place to wage the abolition war is in the state legislatures and with the public, where it may die a natural death.

If you are a prior felon with a current gun charge, and want to raise the argument that the Justice Department's recent policy switch on the Second Amendment presents a new ground upon which to contest your charges, you better be able to afford it. At least in Northern California.

According to No Free Ride For Gun Argument, Chief Judge Marilyn Hall Patel of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California has ruled that there will be no compensation for lawyers appointed under the Criminal Justice Act who raise that particular challenge.

The Criminal Justice Act authorizes the appointment and payment for an indigent defendant's attorney (on quite a reduced scale) when the Federal Defender's Office cannot represent the defendant--usually because of a conflict of interest.

Judge Patel does not think the Second Amendment argument has merit. She may be right. But should she be deciding that poor defendants cannot even raise it?

If the argument is not raised in the trial court, the defendant will be precluded from arguing it on appeal. And maybe the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals judges would see it differently.

Her words: "The court will not reimburse attorneys out of CJA [Criminal Justice Act] funds for such useless time."

In case you haven't been following this topic, the beef is over the Justice Department's policy switch from holding that the Second Amendment is an collective right to it being a personal right.

We couldn't resist...The Onion | What Do You Think?