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By Ron Kovic
By Matt Miller
$16.50
$19
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youtube.com
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The Los Angeles jury hearing the case of the BART cop who killed an unarmed Oakland man on New Year’s Day 2009 went with the least serious of three possible charges, convicting the former officer of involuntary manslaughter. He faces two to four years in prison.
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supremecourtus.gov
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The U.S. Supreme Court changed the future fortunes of minors accused of less severe crimes than murder on Monday, ruling in a 6-3 decision that doling out life sentences with no chance of parole in those cases would amount to cruel and unusual punishment.
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AP / Alex Brandon
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On Thursday, Supreme Court hopeful Elena Kagan observed the nominee tradition of making the rounds on Capitol Hill by dropping in on key senators from both sides of the aisle, and it seems she made some key gains—even Scott Brown might vote to confirm her!
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Since conservative pundits are slacking in their duty of tearing apart Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan before she can clinch her lifetime position, Stephen Colbert is on hand to step in and grasp at straws, literally, in an effort to besmirch her sparkling reputation.
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Flickr / blhphotography
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Pointing to the First Amendment, the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday nixed a federal law from 1999 that made the creation, possession or sale of depictions of animal cruelty illegal, despite the Obama administration’s request that the top court consider the animal rights angle in its decision.
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Wikimedia Commons
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Liberal Justice John Paul Stevens has announced his retirement from the U.S. Supreme Court. The 89-year-old will step down when the court’s term ends in June or July, giving President Barack Obama the opportunity to make his second appointment to the high court.
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Flickr / HeatedGroundPhotography
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Lagging a few years behind the liberal media, public opinion and common sense, the justice system has come to the conclusion that President George W. Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program broke the rules. (continued)
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By Amy Goodman — An unusual trial begins in Israel this week, and people around the world will be watching closely. It involves the tragic death of a 23-year-old American student named Rachel Corrie. On March 16, 2003, she was crushed to death by an Israeli military bulldozer.
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Flickr / taberandrew
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The U.S. Supreme Court may be ready to change the scope of the Second Amendment, as five of the top court’s justices (guess which ones?) have signaled their opinions about American citizens’ rights to bear arms and appear ready to take steps that could override some local and state gun rules, with Chicago as a potential starting point.
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By Joe Conason — Before Najibullah Zazi is finally dispatched to a secure cellblock for good, it is important to remember how the taxi-driver-turned-terrorist was brought to justice—and why the critics who jeered his civilian prosecution were dead wrong.
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Wikimedia Commons / YooTube
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John Yoo’s Op-Ed in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal, in which he says he helped save Barack Obama’s presidency by “winning a drawn-out fight to protect his powers as commander in chief to wage war and keep Americans safe,” doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but then this is the dingbat who gave the legal thumbs up to torture.
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By Ruth Marcus — No one would question an African-American judge’s capacity to preside over a race discrimination lawsuit or a female jurist’s handling of a sexual harassment case. Does it matter if the judge hearing the lawsuit challenging California’s ban on same-sex marriage is gay?
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AP / Fareed Khan
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By Chris Hedges — The conviction of the Pakistani neuroscientist Aafia Siddiqui in New York last week of trying to kill American military officers and FBI agents illustrates that the greatest danger to our security comes not from al-Qaida but the thousands of shadowy mercenaries, kidnappers, killers and torturers our government employs around the globe.
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Wikimedia Commons / The Supreme Court Historical Society
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Granted, Sandra Day O’Connor is retired from the U.S. Supreme Court, to which she was a Ronald Reagan nominee, but during a law school conference Tuesday at Gerogetown, the former justice still made concerned noises about the top court’s Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling.
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abcnews.go.com/WN/DianeSawyer/
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The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision on Thursday to loosen corporate restrictions on campaign finance didn’t sit well with the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, an international human rights coalition of 56 European nations, but somehow we doubt that the top court’s conservative justices are going to lose sleep over that particular critique.
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AP / Lauren Victoria Burke
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By John Dean — The conservative majority of the U.S. Supreme Court, none of whom has been elected to anything, ever, has given a monumental victory to special interests.
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By Eugene Robinson — If killing a terrorist in Kandahar creates one in Killeen, we’ll never make progress.
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By Joe Conason — The loudest voices on the right never tire of telling us that they are the truest patriots, but when did fear-mongering in a time of war become an act of patriotism?
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By Amy Goodman — “Extraordinary rendition” is White House-speak for kidnapping. Just ask Maher Arar. He’s a Canadian citizen who was “rendered” by the U.S. to Syria, where he was tortured for almost a year.
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Flickr / Rainer Ebert
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We can’t be certain why Louisiana Justice of the Peace Keith Bardwell quit his post Tuesday because his one-sentence resignation doesn’t say, but we can guess it has something to do with his refusal to preside over an interracial marriage—and the public outcry that soon followed.
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AP / J. Scott Applewhite
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By Stanley Kutler — It is somewhat late in the day to lament the politicization of the judiciary, a condition that has always existed, but extravagant campaign contributions have now perilously altered the landscape.
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Flickr / ThisParticularGreg
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Executing people is expensive. A new report by the Death Penalty Information Center says California is spending more than 10 times as much on capital punishment—$137 million a year—as it would on an alternative life-without-parole system. New York and New Jersey repealed ...
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Flickr / TheTruthAbout
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The Justice Department is officially going to quit harshing the mellow of the 13 states that have medical marijuana laws on the books. Dispensaries and patients will no longer have to worry about federal raids—unless they’re “drug traffickers who hide behind claims of compliance with state law.”
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Flickr/dbking
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Sometimes when making a legal argument, it’s useful to go to hyperbolic extremes to illustrate the ideological flaws or possible outcomes associated with a potential ruling, which is why the conversation in the United States Supreme Court on Tuesday ranged from dog-fighting videos to a (hypothetical) cable channel for human sacrifice enthusiasts.
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CIA / JFK Presidential Library
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How about that Eric Holder? The Justice Department plans to make it harder for the government to hide behind “national security” in legal cases—a process that has been abused since a highly flawed Supreme Court decision first allowed wide latitude in such matters.
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Wikimedia Commons / Einarsson Kvaran
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Eighty-two years ago Sunday two Italian immigrants were executed after a dubious trial for murders someone else later confessed to. Whatever really happened, Ferdinando Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti have come to stand for the greater inequities of American justice. (Howard Zinn explains, after the jump.)
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Flickr / blmurch
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By Amy Goodman — Remarkably, the Supreme Court has never ruled on whether it is unconstitutional to execute an innocent person.
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AP / J. Scott Applewhite
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Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor has made history after successfully navigating the grueling confirmation process by finally being sworn in by Chief Justice John Roberts at a ceremony at the court’s headquarters Saturday. However, the partisan politics that played out during the grilling phase are just a taste of things to come, according to The Christian Science Monitor’s Brad Knickerbocker.
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AP / Ron Edmonds
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The U.S. Supreme Court just got a little wiser. On Thursday, the Senate voted 68-31—split largely along party lines—to confirm Sonia Sotomayor as the first Latina Supreme Court justice and only the third woman to serve on America’s top court.
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AP / J. Scott Applewhite
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By Marcia Alesan Dawkins — The struggle over Sonia Sotomayor’s viewpoint and voice has important ramifications for legislative politics and identity politics in our country.
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By Amy Goodman — Nonviolent activists and Muslims are held in draconian conditions, while the man charged with killing Dr. George Tiller trumpets from jail the extreme anti-abortion movement’s campaign of intimidation, vandalism, arson and murder.
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AP photo / Amy Sancetta
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By Chris Hedges — If you have defrauded banks and customers and investment firms of billions of dollars, as AIG or Citibank has, you get taxpayer money. If you are moral scum in America we take care of you. But if you are poor, if you are, say, Tearyan Brown of Trenton, N.J., you are in trouble.
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AP photo / Khampha Bouaphanh
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By Andrew Becker and Hugo Cabrera, CIR —
While the nation’s understaffed immigration courts strain under a backlog that has grown to more than 200,000 cases, thousands of new border agents have been hired and the number of government attorneys who argue for deportation has increased by 35 percent, pushing more cases onto an already overburdened system.
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Wikimedia Commons
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Signed by Bill Clinton, the Defense of Marriage Act keeps the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriages and allows states to refuse to recognize such marriages performed in other states. Barack Obama’s Justice Department has just issued a defense of DOMA, even though the president has said he’d like to see it overturned. The gays who voted for these Democrats, meanwhile, are losing patience.
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thebeatwithin.org
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This week on the podcast: Sheerly Avni and Omar Turcios from The Beat Within, a magazine written by and for the troubled kids in juvenile prisons. Such facilities could be “recruiting grounds for crime fighting,” argues Avni, and that’s in our self-interest.
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thebeatwithin.org
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This week on the podcast: Sheerly Avni and Omar Turcios from The Beat Within, a magazine written by and for the troubled kids in juvenile prisons. Such facilities could be “recruiting grounds for crime fighting,” argues Avni, and that’s in our self-interest. “If you want to stop crime—very simple. You look at a bunch of 5-year-old kids in the ghetto. Ask yourself: ‘Do I want them to be criminals or not in 10 years? What’s that going to do to the value of my home?’ ”
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By Ellen Goodman — Forget Rush Limbaugh. In Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination, we face the riddle of the wise old man, the wise old woman, and the wise old person.
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By Joe Conason — The same impulses that have long driven the Republican Party toward ethnic polarization and immigrant-bashing seem certain to infect its opposition to Judge Sonia Sotomayor—in ways that can only benefit the Democrats and Mr. Obama in elections to come.
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By Ellen Goodman — So it is that I am watching the run-up to the nomination of a new Supreme Court justice with eyes wide open. We’ve already had pre-emptive strikes against three women on the media short list. Elena Kagan, Diane Wood and Sonia Sotomayor are getting the scary radical treatment without even getting picked.
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Flickr / methTICALman
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By Marie Cocco — In my nearly two decades of covering New York’s irrepressible Alfonse M. D’Amato, agreement between us was, to put it politely, rare. Yet there was one extraordinary moment when good governance and good politics collided to bring me into alliance with the former senator.
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np.edu.sg
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U.S. Supreme Court Justice David Souter is reportedly planning to retire from the bench at the end of the court’s current term. Souter’s decision to leave will likely not affect the political balance of the court, as his replacement by President Obama will likely be another liberal-minded justice.
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“Cruel and Unusual” by Anne-Marie Cusac reveals a startling reality: Since 1973, America’s imprisonment rate has jumped more than five times and is now the highest in the world. Why?
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theblacksentinel.wordpress.com
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What to make of the administration’s policy on holding torturers accountable? Attorney General Eric Holder says he “will not permit the criminalization of policy differences,” but will pursue wrongdoing “to the full extent of the law.” The problem here is that when it comes to torture, policy differences just might be criminal.
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By Amy Goodman — The door to bringing torturers to justice is open only a crack. Whether it is kicked open or slammed shut is not up to the president. Though he may occupy the most powerful office on Earth, there is a force more powerful: committed people demanding change.
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White House / Pete Souza
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Responding to reporters Tuesday, the president walked back from his “torture is a thing of the past” policy. While the administration still doesn’t want to hassle the good Germans who carried out torture, or even the superiors who ordered it, Obama said the Justice Department may go after the Bush lawyers who tried to legalize such abuses.
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By Marie Cocco — It is astonishing that someone who has proved in his memos to be so lacking in judgment and so ideologically twisted in his reasoning that he laid a blanket of legal immunity over those who wanted to torture now holds one of the most powerful and prestigious seats a lawyer can attain.
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Wikimedia Commons
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Was it for information or revenge that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the man who claimed to be the mastermind behind 9/11, was waterboarded 183 times by the CIA? That figure, sussed out of a Justice Department memo by some enterprising bloggers and repeated in the pages of The New York Times, makes the president’s determination not to prosecute such torture all the more curious.
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