Attorney General Eric Holder spoke yesterday at the D.C. Court of Appeals Judicial Conference. His prepared remarks are here. On the issue of crack-powder cocaine sentencing disparity, he told them:

It is the view of this Administration that the 100-to-1 crack-powder sentencing ratio is simply wrong. It is plainly unjust to hand down wildly disparate prison sentences for materially similar crimes. It is unjust to have a sentencing disparity that disproportionately and illogically affects some racial groups. I know the American people can see this. And that perception of unfairness undermines governmental authority in the criminal justice process and breeds disrespect for the system. It leads victims and witnesses of crime to think twice before cooperating with law enforcement, tempts jurors to ignore the law and facts when judging a criminal case, and draws the public into questioning the motives of its officials. ...

I am confident that most of us agree that this situation benefits no one and must be reformed.

Holder also warned not to expect change overnight. [More...]

A reader asked a reasonable question -- When do you think Obama might consider replacing the Bush US Attorneys? -- that was ably answered by another reader, which led to polite disagreement about the robustness of Obama's effort. My own perusal of the internets revealed last month's report that the first batch would be announced in a few weeks. Three appointees got the Judiciary Committee's blessing a couple of days ago and will face confirmation votes as early as next week. Other announcements seem to be on the verge of ... announcement. A number of U.S. Attorneys have already resigned. Obama is keeping Patrick Fitzgerald, and in general appears to be proceeding with caution. Whether it is better for the White House to fire them all at once or to work its way through the appointments in an orderly way is a matter of opinion.

Laws that give the police discretion to write a noncriminal ticket instead of arresting individuals who possess an ounce or less of marijuana have become a commonplace compromise between drug warriors and policy realists. According to NORML's Allen St. Pierre, about a third of Americans live in a jurisdiction where the police have that discretion.

Cook County, Illinois may join that trend. A police sergeant in Chicago Heights, which enacted a similar ordinance last year, says that arrests for small amounts of weed are wasteful, given that 9 out of 10 cases get dismissed. Whether or not that figure is accurate, arrests for simple possession of marijuana are unfair to the arrested individuals and to the taxpayers who foot the bill.

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Pulitzer Prize winner and NY Times investigative reporter David Rohde, 41, was kidnapped 7 months ago while interviewing a Taliban commander for a new book. The Times kept it mum, as did other media outlets, so as not to jeopardize his safety. Yesterday, he and a local reporter kidnapped with him, Tahir Ludin, escaped by climbing over a wall. A Pakistani army scout safely delivered them to a U.S. military base.

The article reads like a novel, but it's all true. And Rohde sounds like an incredibly committed journalist. He was previously captured and held in Bosnian Serb territory while investigating mass graves. "After 10 days of imprisonment, during which he was interrogated relentlessly and deprived of sleep, Mr. Rohde was freed."

He spent three months in Afghanistan in 2001, and from 2002 to 2005, was co-chief of The Times’s South Asia bureau. As for the local reporter with him, [More...]

In his dissent in Gross v. FBL Financial Services (PDF), where the SCOTUS again engaged in an act of brazen extreme right wing judicial activism, Justice Stevens wrote:

The Court asks whether a mixed-motives instruction is ever appropriate in an ADEA case. As it acknowledges, this was not the question we granted certiorari to decide. . . . In the usual course, this Court would not entertain such a request raised only in a merits brief . . . Yet the Court is unconcerned that the question it chooses to answer has not been briefed by the parties or interested amici curiae. Its failure to consider the views of the United States, which represents the agency charged with administering the ADEA, is especially irresponsible. . . . I disagree not only with the Court’s interpretation of the statute, but also with its decision to engage in unnecessary lawmaking.

(Emphasis supplied.) Would the intervention of the Obama Justice Department really have mattered? [My hyperbole aside, as Steve M. points out, the Obama DOJ almost certainly would have argued Stevens' view (PDF). But the Roberts Court would not have cared.] After all, we have seen that the Obama DOJ has a penchant for adopting the views of the Bush DOJ. As Glenn Greenwald points out, the Obama Justice Department adopted the Bush Administration position in the DNA case (as it has in the state secrets cases):

Yesterday, in criticizing the Washington Post, I jokingly asked whether, like the Weekly Standard, it too would merge with the Washington Times, owned by billionaire conservative Phil Anschutz.

Today, WaPo has an editorial criticizing the court's decision to allow the Jose Padilla civil case against John Yoo to proceed.

Mr. Yoo provided legal opinions on what he believed the law allowed the executive to do, but he did not make the final policy decisions. Allowing Mr. Padilla's case to proceed could have a chilling effect on the ability of government lawyers to give candid, good-faith advice for fear of being held personally liable.

On Monday, the paper called for passage of a law that would allow D.C. to create "public "safety zones" deemed off-limits to individuals identified as members of gangs." Violators would face up to 120 days in jail. The editorial found no civil liberties problems with the bill.

There's no editorial this week on the Supreme Court decision rejecting an inmate's right to DNA testing to prove innocence (unlike the NY Times which ran a great one.)

Sad, just sad. It really used to be a good paper.

The Democrats have introduced an 852 page health care bill. First off, we'd get a Health Czar and another federal agency:

Under the House bill, health insurance would be regulated by a powerful new federal agency, headed by a presidential appointee known as the health choices commissioner.

And we'd get a public health plan, that will be opposed by insurance companies, Republicans, business owners and doctors. Why doctors?

The plan would initially use Medicare fee schedules, paying most doctors and hospitals at Medicare rates, plus about 5 percent. After three years, the health secretary could negotiate with doctors and hospitals....The bill would limit what doctors could charge patients in the public insurance plan, just as Medicare limits what doctors can charge beneficiaries.

It will require everyone to have a qualifying insurance plan and violators have to pay penalties. [More...]

Billionaire financier Allen Stamford has been under investigation for months and represented by Dick DeGuerin of Houston, one of the country's best criminal defense lawyers. Yesterday, the Government chose to unseal the indictment against him, while he was in Virginia. The FBI knew exactly where he was -- at his girlfriend's home -- and arrested him there.

Today, Stanford appeared in court in Virginia and the Government announced it was seeking detention. The court ordered him held without bond until his detention hearing, which will be in Houston.

So Stanford, who is presumed innocent, will spend at least the weekend, and probably more, in jail waiting to be flown by the U.S. Marshal's Service to Houston. [More...]

The ACLU has filed a federal lawsuit in Indiana against the Bureau of Prisons over the creation of "CMU's" -- "secretly created housing units inside federal prisons in which prisoners are condemned to live in stark isolation from the outside world."

Who is in these CMU's? Mostly muslims.

The government says it created CMUs to house prisoners it views as terrorists, but today they are disproportionately inhabited by Muslim prisoners – many of whom have never been convicted of terrorism related crimes. In addition, these CMUs were established in violation of federal laws requiring public scrutiny, without any opportunity for public comment or oversight in a clear effort to skirt obligations of accountability and transparency.

[More...]

A lot is happening in Iran and a lot is being written about it. Besides not having the time for it, I have been reluctant to write about it because I think we know so little about how Iran is actually governed.

If you have thoughts about this issue, or anything else, feel free to comment here.

This is an Open Thread.

In Monday's meeting with former President Bill Clinton, I reminded him of a speech he gave in 1993 at an event for the reelection of then-NYC Mayor David Dinkins. In that speech, President Clinton discussed the issue of folks being able to "vote for people who look different than ourselves." It was a brave speech for the first year of a first term President. I asked President Clinton about the issue in light of the election of the first African American President in our history. In response, President Clinton mused about the new state of our identity politics and told a story about his own paternal cousins and their own struggles with identity politics (both for and against them.) It was an interesting answer and got me to thinking.

Regular readers know I am disdainful of claims of persecution coming from white males. The history of the world has shown that is has been a man's world and the last millenium belonged to white men. In a way, I think Clinton was giving me a slightly veiled warning about demonizing white males generally. I take his point. What struck me at the time is President Barack Obama is truly President Clinton's political heir regarding this aspect of politics. With one important difference - Obama operates from a position of political strength electorally -- the Emerging Democratic Majority predicted by Texeira and Judis is largely upon us and strengthening. But Democratic political strength has not translated into progressive policy strength. I'll explore these themes on the flip.

In the news this morning:

• Walter Cronkite Gravely Ill, May Be Near Death

• NY Times Blasts Supreme Court for Rejecting Right to DNA Innocence Test

• New Study Shows 88% of Criminologists Believe Death Penalty is Not a Deterrent to Murder. The study, by Univ. of Colorado Sociology Professor Michael Radelet, is published in the Northwestern University School of Law’s Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology.