Don't miss the Beast's 50 Most Loathsome People in America --it's funny, provacative and just mean enough without being ugly. (link via Rittenhouse).

We found an excellent left-leaning, free news aggregator called The President Evil News Portal. You can select your publications from a great variety of choices, in the U.S. and abroad, and it will return the current news headlines, most with descriptions of the articles, all on one page. It even includes TalkLeft's blog postings as an option.

Other news aggregators we like are What Really Happened and re-broadcaster Take Back the Media.

And of course we want to mention TalkLeft's own newsfeed which we create manually and update at least once a day. It's on the left hand side of the TalkLeft home page.

The Colorado Supreme Court will allow ABC to eavesdrop on Colorado trials.

"The Colorado Supreme Court has granted ABC News unprecedented media access to the workings of Colorado criminal trials, including jury deliberations."

"In the next few months, ABC's "State v." program hopes to begin filming as many as six Colorado criminal cases that will be aired up to a year after juries return their verdicts. "State v." is a television program that offers a behind- the-scenes look at actual criminal cases from trial preparation through the final verdict."

"The state high court has given "State v." permission to go behind the scenes and film testimony, jury reaction, jury deliberations, and discussions of trial strategy by prosecutors and defense attorneys."

All participants appear very excited about this idea--except for Colorado's Public Defender, David Kaplan, who says his office will not participate.

"My bottom line to them was that I did not see the potential benefit to our representation from allowing them to do it. And my gut reaction is if there is a potential to compromise our effective representation, then the rule should be, 'Don't go there,"' Kaplan said.

"He is concerned about the attorney-client privilege that exists between his lawyers and the accused. Lawyers need a relationship with clients and witnesses that maximizes candor and decreases awkwardness, he said."

Admittedly, we haven't seen the predecessor shows, filmed in Arizona, which even Kaplan praises, but we aren't keen on the idea. We laid out our concerns last week on a similar proposal by Frontline to film an entire trial, including jury deliberations, in a capital case in Texas.

The Colorado project will require assent by the defendant as well as his or her lawyer. In addition, prosecutors, victims, jurors and judges will have to agree. We understand why the Court is in favor of it-- for public education purposes--but like Kaplan, we fail to see the benefit to the defense--particularly of allowing camera access to private attorney-client conversations and strategy sessions.

Update: This editorial in the San Francisco Chronicle, To Peer Inside the Jury Room, also opposes cameras in the jury room. And don't miss this poignant commentary by a former juror who says cameras in the jury room during the deliberations in his case would have prevented the jury's guilty verdict.

"In an unusual move that keeps a capital murder case on hold, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals on Wednesday announced it will review whether a camera should be allowed to record jury deliberations in a Harris County death penalty case."

"The step means some legal ruling may be warranted in an unprecedented move by state District Judge Ted Poe to allow PBS' Frontline to record all aspects of 17-year-old Cedric Harrison's capital murder trial in Houston, from jury selection to deliberations."

"Usually the state's court of last resort in criminal cases does not intervene in a trial. The court typically reserves its rulings for appeals after a verdict has been rendered. "

The taping would be for a Frontline show. See our prior post with background on this case and our feelings on cameras in the deliberation room.

Ted Barlow traces Pat Buchanan's holocaust denial roots and wonders how he can be a celebrity journalist.

Is it too simplistic to say that if we spread the word, people will change the channel when he appears on their tv screen, his ratings will plummet and the networks will cease to showcase him, based on economics rather than principles? Or will there always be enough viewers cheering him on, in which case we are stuck with him?

Via Eric at Altercation: "By the way, Bruce is on Conan O’Brian tonight, along with Al Gore. Let’s hope and pray that Al doesn’t sing and Bruce doesn’t mention the patients’ bill of rights.”

Via Buzzflash we learn that Fundamentalists are losing favor with the public:

"The American Family Association, a far right lobbying group in Washington, released results from a recent survey that shows mainstream Americans see evangelical Christians as one of the least likeable groups in the country."

"Small wonder Researchers from the Barna survey asked respondents how they felt about evangelicals, born-again Christians, ministers, and other groups of people in society. According to the survey, evangelicals came in tenth out of eleven, narrowly beating out prostitutes. "

Here are some of the top stories in Asia. You can read them at the South China Morning Post, but since a premium subscription is necessary, we will highlight for you:

The Aids epidemic sweeping through China will drag 20 million people into absolute poverty and cost the country 770 billion yuan (HK$726 billion) by 2010, mainland experts have warned. "Unless China faces and tackles the problem seriously, the disease will resuly in an economic and medical disaster."

Thousands of patients are missing from Hong Kong's public hospital wards. Nine have been found dead. The Government assumes most simply walked away and didn't say anything.

A woman barbecued her arm and had to have it amputated. She brought a portable barbecue into her bedroom for heat, and fell asleep with her arm draped over it. Authorites suspected she was drunk or drugged, since she claimed not to feel anything until she woke up in the morning. She denied it.

Relationship problems? The latest sign of social turmoil in China is the increase in the number of people who use rat poison to kill their loved ones or business partners. Sociologists attribute the increase to "the abscence of strong social values, rendering people more likely to act on selfish desires." Lacing food with rat poison to resolve personal conflicts "reflects a serious social problem related to a society in transition."

There has been a lot of coverage of the Kenya hotel attacks. Also, there is a lot of attention paid to an alleged regional terrorist network, Jemaah Islamiah. Planned attacks by the group, "forced the closure of the Canadian, Australian and European Union embassies in the Philippines. "

On CNN television, the news much of the day included a feature about America. It was a story about Angola prison in Lousiana, where it is cowboy and rodeo day. 10,000 people came out to view the festivities. The inmates here are mostly doing time for murder. The tradition has been ongoing for 38 years and not once has an inmate tried to escape on Rodeo day.

We take great umbrage at this article in the Centre Daily Times, TV prosecutors now have the upper hand on defense attorneys.

On the one hand, it accurately points out a reality that criminal defense lawyers have been up against for sometime: that people are more apt to believe in guilty until proven innocent than the other way around, and that in the media, guilt sells while stories about innocence don't get much play.

But we have to take uber-producer Dick Wolf to task for his comments. Wolf is the producer of Law & Order and innumerable other television series that glorify cops and prosecutors and always feature a guilty defendant.

Now Mr. Wolf is a very personable man and obviously a tremendous success as a television executive. But the following comments are totally one-sided and really stretch the truth--and cause damage to the public's perception of our system of justice--and next time we run into him, we'll tell him so ourselves.

"Any of the people you see" working as assistant DAs in "Crime & Punishment" "could clean out their desks on a Friday afternoon and double or triple their salary on Monday morning" by going to work in a law firm, Wolf said recently.

"They really do think they're doing God's work."

"Moreover, he said...I don't hold criminal defense attorneys in very high regard, based on what they do for a living, which is basically getting guilty people off."

Now come on, Mr. Wolf. You don't think public defenders believe they're doing God's work? You don't think they couldn't get a job in a corporate firm earning twice or three times as much?

The lawyers who dedicate themselves to freeing the innocent, that's not God's work to them?

The lawyers who make a career of trying to save a life in a death penalty trial, while underfunded, understaffed and underpaid, you don't think they believe they're doing God's work?

Prosecutors and Public Defenders have a few things in common: Both groups have chosen public service, and in so doing, they have sacrificed more financially rewarding opportunities to become overworked and often under-appreciated public servants. Prosecutors have no leg up on defenders in terms of doing God's work.

Trends come and go. In the 80's, LA Law and defense lawyers were on top. This past decade, it's been all about guilt and cops and DA's. Just wait, a few more years of Ashcroft, the Patriot Act, secret detentions and programs like TIPS and Total Information Awareness, and the tables will turn again.

One other thing. The majority of prosecutors don't stay in it for the length of their careers. They leave and become....private criminal defense lawyers. Look into the background of the lawyers for the Enron and WorldCom and other high-level corporate crime defendants, and more often than not they will have "former U.S. Attorney" in their bios. What happened to their belief in "God's work?" But how many criminal defense lawyers can you name who left the practice to become prosecutors? Which stay truer to their beliefs? Or put another way, whose beliefs were truer in the first place?

[edited to correct spelling of Mr. Wolf's name. It is Dick Wolf, not Dick Wolfe as we originally posted.]

A brouhaha is developing in Texas over a trial judge's acquiesence to a request by PBS and lawyers for a 17 year old charged with capital murder to allow the filming of the actual jury deliberations as part of a documentary for Frontline on the murder trial.

As jury selection was underway today, the Texas Court of Appeals, acting upon the request of the prosecution, issued an order staying the trial and directing the trial judge to explain his ruling by next week in writing.

The defense lawyers want the filming. They want to show the reality of trying a juvenile for murder which includes the state's arguing for the death penalty for a 17 year old and the jury's grappling with both the guilt decision, and potentially, the life or death decision. The Prosecutors oppose it.

We are as much of an opponent of the death penalty as anyone, and we rarely agree with prosecutors, but this is a tough one. There is something just too unseemly about it, too Gladiator-like, too reminiscent of the days of ancient Rome when people went to the colliseum to watch so-called sporting events in which one contestant was brutally killed. What's next after broadcasting deliberations into into our living rooms? Football stadiums where people cheer as the final needle is administered?

However, we acknowledge that some death penalty opponents think that by televising executions and confronting citizens with the reality of their brutality and inhumanity (yes even lethal injection is a brutal process, it's not like getting an iv before surgery), more people will come to oppose them.

The fact that it's Frontline makes a difference to us, but not enough to change our mind. Frontline is an exceptional documentary series on PBS that frequently deals with injustices in the criminal justice system. Their programs Snitch and What Jennifer Saw (on eyewitness misidentification) and A Case for Innocence were simply masterful (and are re-run from time to time.)

Rejecting the idea of televising jury deliberations isn't such a big leap for us because we have always been opposed to cameras in the courtroom unless the defendant and his lawyers want it. It should be the defendant's choice--he has the constitutional right to a fair and impartial trial --although, that being said, we can't imagine wanting a televised trial for one of our clients. We think cameras that broadcast trials into living rooms affect the participants. Everyone plays to them a little bit, no matter how much they may deny it - from the Judge, to the lawyers to the witnesses.

We were surprised to read, in the same article, that Henry Schleiff, the CEO of Court TV, opposes the filming of deliberations and said Court TV has never requested to film them. Another opposing view came from Richard Dieter, who heads up the excellent anti-death penalty organization, Death Penalty Information Center.

We were a little curious about the Texas Judge who agreed to it.

"Poe, a former prosecutor who was appointed to the bench in 1981, is well known in Houston. He has forced convicts to carry signs outside the courthouse proclaiming their crime and earlier this year said a teacher convicted of having sex with a student was ``a bigger threat to our culture and our students than Osama bin Laden and his cave dwellers.''

Not our kind of Judge. But, even so, but we have to vote against Frontline on this one. Jury deliberations have always been sacrosanct and secret. We believe the secrecy of deliberations encourages people to speak freely and share their views (even as awful as some of them might be) and return a verdict that is more likely to be free from external influences. We like juries. We don't want them to be afraid to vote "not guilty" in a case involving an ugly crime but the wrong perpertrator because they fear being ostracized by the community afterwards.

Update: The New York Times takes the same position we do in an editorial Wednesday, The 13th Juror.

"Some people thought "The Vagina Monologues" -- women sitting on stools talking about vaginas -- was controversial. What people will think of "The Marijuana-logues" -- men sitting on stools talking about pot -- is anyone's guess."

The show is tonight in Kansas City at Stanford & Sons Comedy Club, 504 Westport Road.

"The show's comical monologues on the "killer weed" are written and performed by comedians Arj Barker, Doug Benson and Tony Camin. Their individual credits include appearances on "The Tonight Show," "The Late Show With David Letterman," "Late Night With Conan O'Brien," "The Late, Late Show With Craig Kilborn" and "Friends."

"The trio points out in a statement: "This verbal journey will not glorify drug use but will show that the ritual of pot smoking can be a thing of sustenance, humor and creativity. Either that or you will think, `What a bunch of dumb potheads.' "

Courtesy of Mercedes Benz, Salon Premium articles are free today. All you have to do is look at four pictures of a new mercedes, it's very short. We did it because we wanted to read Eric Boehlert's interview with law professor and civil liberties expert David Cole about the effect of the new FISA court opinion. It's a good interview.

Another don't miss is Bush's Reefer Madness that confirms what we reported last week, "Terrified that an increasingly pot-tolerant America will spell the end of their moral crusade, the president's anti-drug warriors are making a last stand over marijuana."