The Supreme Court Justices are obviously avid TalkLeft readers. How else to explain the Court's agreement to decide whether the imposition of a sentence of "life without parole" upon a juvenile offender for a crime other than murder is constitutional? After all, the Court granted certiorari in two cases raising the issue yesterday, just four days after this TalkLeft post declared such sentences to be "costly, cruel and foolish." When TalkLeft speaks, the Supreme Court listens!

Yeah, right. To be fair, the Justices might be readers of the Los Angeles Times editorial page, from which the "costly, cruel and foolish" language was borrowed. Or maybe they just thought the issue had merit. If so, they were right.

If, as the Court reasoned in Roper v. Simmons, the death penalty is unconstitutional when applied to crimes committed by children because children are "immature, unformed, irresponsible and susceptible to negative influences, including peer pressure," the penalty of life without parole suffers from the same infirmity. It assumes that a child, whose intellectual and emotional development is incomplete, will never change, even after reaching adulthood, and therefore deserves no chance of parole. [more ...]

Your turn.

This is an Open Thread.

Citing Jeffrey Rosen's atrocious and embarassing piece, Marc Ambinder defines Rosen as the "Respectable Center."

There was nothing "respectable" about Rosen's piece, it was an embarassment. And his unbridled defenses and support for now Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito make clear that he is by no stretch of the imagination in the Center. He is Neocon Right Center - a sort of Stuart Taylor. That's not the Center. Marc Ambinder is simply accepting the Village Wisdom.

Interestingly, Ambinder deigns to give "advice" to the "Left" on how to fight these fights. My first piece of advice remains the same - NEVER EVER let people like Marc Ambinder define what the Center is. People like Rosen, Taylor and Ambinder are of the Center Right, at best. That's who they are. Knowing that and SAYING That is step one in this process imo.

Speaking for me only

The practice of charging undocumented workers with identity theft for using a fictitious social security number to obtain work -- or, more commonly, threatening the charge to induce pleas to less serious crimes that lead to quick deportations -- will screech to a halt after yesterday's unanimous Supreme Court ruling that making up a number, without knowing whether the number has been assigned to a real person, is not identity theft.

The decision (pdf) makes the Justice Department's coercive tactics against undocumented workers even more shameful. As TalkLeft observed here, the Justice Department (with a federal court's blessing) cranked out assembly line justice in Iowa following the arrest of hundreds of undocumented workers at an Agriprocessors meatpacking plant. The workers were told to accept a five month sentence or face prosecution for identity theft, and were required to make that decision without having an adequate opportunity to consult with counsel or to explore their options. It is now clear that the workers were coerced with a meaningless threat.

[more ...]

Atrios writes (citing Josh Marshall):

The only way to get [Specter] to do the right thing is to have a credible primary challenger in the wings, whether that's Sestak or someone else.

Yesterday, I wrote Make Them All Work For It, arguing that the idea of holding Specter to account applies to all of our Dem pols - from Obama on down. I know everyone is ready to primary Jane Harman, and I am glad to hear it. But it should not just be Specter and Harman being held to account. What's most interesting about Specter is that the Netroots is prepared to defy President Obama for once (Obama has promised Specter his full support.) That is a good sign. See, e.g., Markos here - "[T]he party bigwigs who think they can deprive the Democratic primary electorate of democracy versus a new net- and grassroots army taking control of their own destiny." The head bigwig of course is named President Barack Obama.

Speaking for me only

Richard Cohen writes:

It was Ricci's misfortune to take -- and pass -- the New Haven, Conn., fire department's exam for promotion to lieutenant and captain, and then have the job denied him because he is white. Others will argue -- fatuously and, when they are before St. Peter, with heads bowed in shame -- that race had nothing to do with what happened to Ricci, but the fact remains that had he been black, his uniform would already sport a lieutenant's bar.

(Emphasis supplied.) Richard Cohen calls himself a "conditional liberal." I have no idea what he means but I do know he is a fool. In fact, no one argues that Ricci's condition in life has nothing to do with the fact that he is a white man. Quite the opposite. The argument is that we are a nation that has been advantaged for white men throughout its history. Cohen the fool believes that the ascendancy of Barack Obama to the Presidency washes this all away. It is of course Richard Cohen who does not understand the history and realitiies of this country. How could he? Could anyone imagine Richard Cohen holding the exalted station he currently holds were he not a white man? Gawd help us if it were true. He is the very picture of the problem. More . .

You know you're doing good work when prosecutors give up without a fight. Northwestern Law Professor Steven Drizin and the Northwestern Center on Wrongful Convictions can always be counted on to do good work. This time, their good work freed Thaddeus Jimenez from prison, 16 years into a 50 year sentence -- a sentence Jimenez started serving at the age of 13.

Juan Carlos Torres was mentioned as a possible suspect in the 1993 murder of Eric Morro. Witnesses identified Jimenez as the shooter, but a witness who was with Morro told the police that it wasn't Jimenez. The police evidently didn't like his story, and after a "lengthy interrogation" the witness changed his mind and identified Jimenez.

The case came to the attention of the Northwestern University Center on Wrongful Convictions in 2005. The center conducted an investigation and, in September 2007, sent its findings to the state's attorney's office. The office launched its own review and, along with Jimenez's attorneys, asked a judge on Friday to vacate Jimenez's sentence. The judge agreed.

Wow. Whether the Cook County prosecutors did the right thing because it was the right thing to do, or just didn't have the energy to battle Drizin and the dedicated students and staff at Northwestern, the outcome is outstanding. Meanwhile, Torres awaits extadition to stand trial for Morro's murder.

To join the chorus, Jeffrey Rosen should be ashamed. It's one thing to misjudge badly on Roberts and Alito (yes, Rosen was a supporter of both "moderates"), but to write a hatchet job on Judge Sonia Sotomayor without even having read her opinions in any depth? Disgraceful

Of course, The New Republic has been an embarrassment for some time now.

Speaking for me only

Janet Jackson's n*pple, exposed for 9/16 of a second during the 2004 Superbowl halftime show, is still in the news. And the FCC is 2-for-2 in the Supreme Court this term.

Last week, the Supreme Court decided that the FCC did not act arbitrarily when it revised its "indecency" policy in 2004. The Court upheld the FCC's decision to sanction the fleeting and singular utterance of a naughty word, even one blurted unexpectedly during a live broadcast.

Today the Court vacated a Third Circuit decision that overturned the FCC's $550,000 fine against CBS for broadcasting a glimpse of Janet Jackson's nipple. The one sentence order does not decide whether the Third Circuit's decision was right or wrong, but invites the lower court to reconsider its decision in light of last week's ruling. [more ...]

Your turn.

This is an Open Thread.

I owe Stuart Taylor. Jr. some post time on the torture issue, and eventually I will get to that. But in the meantime, Scott Lemieux, via Atrios, demonstrates how Mr. Taylor views issues through a conservative prism, despite his claim to being a "moderate" (hey, we all do it, I call myself a "centrist"):

Atrios writes:

The absurdity is obvious. Dirty f---ing hippies like me were horrified at the illegal warrantless wiretapping program and general expansion of the surveillance state in part because of the potential for political abuse . . . Jane Harman and her pal Joe Klein heaped scorn on dirty f---ing hippies for such crazy views. Harman gets caught up . . . though the release of the details of it might be evidence of the kind of political abuse possible in any surveillance program. Suddenly Harman is a staunch defender the right of People Like Jane Harman to not be wiretapped.

I return to my first principle of politics - pols are pols and do what they do. When primaried by Winograd in 2006, Harman became an opponent of warrantless wiretapping. Now, for more political reasons, she is an even more vehement opponent of it. Our reaction should not be to just have fun at Harman's expense - but to USE HARMAN - to forward OUR policy goals. I do not see what is so hard to understand about this.< UPDATE - Glenn Greenwald gets the absurd, but seems unwilling to try the useful.

Speaking for me only