This death penalty case about returned mail and multiple oversights on the part of lackadaisical court clerks and ball-dropping lawyers seemed to get a positive hearing from everyone but Scalia who reportedly was the only obvious contra.

The AP’s Mark Sherman has the story.

Here’s how it opens:

WASHINGTON (AP) — The tale of returned mail and a missed deadline might seem comical if it did not involve a man trying to stave off execution. Supreme Court justices had harsh words Tuesday for lawyers who abandon their clients and a state legal system that does not seem overly concerned.

At the end of a lively hour of arguments, it appeared the court would order a new hearing for Alabama death row inmate Cory Maples, who had lost the chance to appeal his death sentence because of a mailroom mix-up at the New York law firm Sullivan and Cromwell and the diffidence of a local court clerk.

Two Sullivan and Cromwell lawyers had been pressing Maples’ claim that his earlier legal representation was so bad that it violated the Constitution – until they both left the firm without telling him or the Alabama courts.

Deadlines usually matter a lot at the Supreme Court, where a few years back a defendant who was late to file an appeal because the judge gave his lawyer the wrong date still lost his case. Another principle the court often holds dear is that it’s tough luck for defendants whose lawyers make mistakes.

But Tuesday’s case, perhaps because it involves the death penalty, was the rare instance when the court seemed prepared to grant some leeway on both counts.

Justice Samuel Alito is a former federal prosecutor who often votes for the government in criminal cases. But he said he did not understand why Alabama fought so hard to deny Maples the right to appeal when the deadline passed “though no fault of his own, through a series of very unusual and unfortunate circumstances.”

FYI: Maples isn’t arguing innocence at this point, only basic fairness in being allowed an appeal. Nice to see the Supremes responding.

The NY Times has this editorial on the case.

FEDS: NO GUNS OR AMMO FOR MED MARIJUANA USERS…..MONTANA: OH, REALLY? SEZ YOU!

Oh, how, I love the folks in my other home state.

This is by Charles Johnson from the Missoulian. A clip to get you started.

Attorney General Steve Bullock voiced his objection Monday to the U.S. Justice Department over its recent memo banning the sale of guns or ammunition to licensed medical marijuana users and urged the agency not to prosecute anyone for now.

Bullock wrote U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder about the Sept. 21 memo from the Justice Department’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to licensed gun dealers. The memo said it is illegal for medical marijuana cardholders to buy guns and ammunition, and illegal for dealers to sell these products to them.

The letter from Bullock followed criticism of the policy last week from all three members of Montana’s congressional delegation, Sens. Jon Tester and Max Baucus, and Rep. Denny Rehberg. A firearms advocacy group and a medical marijuana group had earlier blasted the memo.

Bullock told Holder said he’s willing to work with the U.S. Justice Department staff “on exploring a reasonable solution to the problems created by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives letter.”

The goal, he said, is to find an approach that works for the Montana and the other 15 states and the District of Columbia that have legalized medical marijuana.

“This would be much better than the type of unilateral proclamation represented by the ATF letter, which was issued without any advance notice or discussion with the elected officials who represent more than one-fourth of this nation’s population and one-third of its states,” Bullock wrote.

“In the meantime, I respectfully request that the Department of Justice not pursue any criminal prosecutions against law-abiding citizens in Montana who exercise their constitutional rights to possess guns and enjoy hunting, or the licensees who are implicitly threatened by ATF’s letter.”

Bullock said Montana had about 200,000 hunters last year, and the state Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks sold more than 580,000 hunting licenses. As Montanans purchase guns and ammunition from sporting good stores, some of them may also have medical marijuana cards, he said.

Go Big Sky!

(For the record, I’m a wine drinker, not a toker—med or otherwise. And I don’t like guns. However, that isn’t the point. But thank you for inquiring.)

THE LETTER

On Thursday afternoon, the ACLU released a letter signed by 26 criminal justice, civil rights and religious leaders that calls for a broader Federal investigation of the alleged abuse of inmates and misconduct by sheriff’s deputies inside the LA County Jails.

The letter is addressed to US Attorney General Eric Holder, US Attorney Andre Birotte, FBI Director Robert Mueller, Thomas Perez, head of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, and Steven M. Martinez, the Assistant Director in Charge of LA’s FBI Office.

In other words, nobody with any power in the matter got left out.

The message conveyed is sober-minded and respectful but leaves no room for doubt about the seriousness of the request:

We, the undersigned, respectfully request that the federal government pursue a thorough criminal and pattern or practice civil rights investigation into the allegations filed by the ACLU yesterday in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California in Rutherford v. Baca, with documentation of a persistent pattern of deputy-on-inmate assaults, deputy-instigated inmate-on-inmate assaults, and use of excessive force in the Los Angeles County jails.

We understand that the FBI is currently investigating the beating of James Parker in Twin Towers Correctional Facility on January 24, 2011 based in part on the eye-witness statement of a civilian, ACLU jails monitor Esther Lim, and that the investigation has widened to include other such incidents in the Los Angeles County Jails. We are pleased that federal law enforcement officials have undertaken this investigation.

We note that Sheriff Baca, through a spokesman, responded to the report of this investigation in Sunday’s Los Angeles Times, by categorically denying the need for a federal investigation and insisting that the Sheriff’s Department has already investigated inmate accounts of deputy beatings and found most of them to be unfounded. Based on evidence presented by the ACLU, however, including sworn statements not only from some seventy inmates and former inmates but also from prison chaplains and civilian eyewitnesses to deputy-on-inmate assaults, we are concerned that despite the Sheriff’s protestations there appears to be a pattern of violations by deputies against inmates in the Los Angeles County jails that should be independently investigated.

We therefore respectfully urge you to proceed with a broad inquiry.

Former California Attorney General John Van de Kamp tops the list of those who signed. He is followed by 2 former US Attorneys, 3 former assistant US Attorneys, Los Angeles County Public Defender, Ron Brown, the former head of the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, plus 2 high profile law school deans, some well-known civil rights lawyers and religious leaders.

THE SHERIFF

It is interesting to note that, several of those who signed on to the plea for the Feds to step in consider themselves to be personal friends with Sheriff Baca, people like Connie Rice and Father Greg Boyle— among others.

Indeed Lee Baca is a very likeable man who has for many years expressed a deep commitment to criminal justice reform. For those who know him, this progressive and humanistic vision of LA’s popular Sheriff has always been hard to square with the hard fact that the jail system he oversees is a shameful quagmire of ongoing civil rights violations.

THE PAST

After the release of our recent jails story by Matt Fleisher, and in the run-up to the this week’s release of the harsh ACLU report on abuse at the jails, a lot of us who write (or litigate) about this topic wondered if any of the new round of stories and witness accounts would make any difference.

Now, with the appearance of this letter, I think maybe…..maybe we have reached a tipping point. The moment feels weirdly like period after the Rampart scandal broke about the LAPD. For a long time after the scandal, disbelief still governed public perception. It couldn’t be that bad, people said; even editors I worked with, said it; people experienced enough to know better said it.

But it was that bad. Most LAPD officers were excellent people. Yet there was a toxic culture inside the department that was doing terrible damage to the fabric of our communities and to the people within them—and to all the good cops who were doing their damnedest every day to protect and serve..

And so it is with the Los Angeles County Jails.

So maybe that’s the good news. In the case of the LAPD, eventually enough people acknowledged that the LAPDs problems were greater than the existence of a few bad apples that it led to a widespread push for reform.

THE FUTURE

As a consequence, the Los Angeles Police Department is now fundamentally different than it was in the bad old, pre-Rampart days.

So perhaps there is reason to hope the same will ultimately prove to be true for LA County’s jails system.

Of course, several elements went into the LAPD’s transformation. Good leadership at the top was essential. Bill Bratton and Charlie Beck, and their command staffs made a world of difference.

But equally important was the existence of a very sharp-toothed Federal Consent Decree.

Which brings us back to the letter at hand.

What those who signed it have requested is crucial.

Let us hope that those with the power to trigger a comprehensive investigation understand that.

****

What happens inside jails and prisons does not stay inside jails and prisons. It comes home with prisoners after they are released and with corrections officers at the end of each day’s shift. When people live and work in facilities that are unsafe, unhealthy, unproductive, or inhumane, they carry the effects home with them. We must create safe and productive conditions of confinement not only because it is the right thing to do, but because it influences the safety, health, and prosperity of us all.

—2006 report by the Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons, Vera Institute of Justice

AND IN RELATED NEWS….WHICH WAY LA? DOES THE JAILS

Warren Olney’s Which Way LA had a segment on the jails on Tuesday and another segment with Sheriff Baca on Thursday.

Plus there was a segment on realignment—the transfer of a large segment of parolees from state custody to the various California counties—which begins this weekend.

AND WHILE WE’RE ON THE TOPIC OF REALIGNMENT…

NPR Carrie Kahn did an excellent show on LA County’s role in realignment with some mention of the jails issue.

AND ONE MORE WRINKLE IN THE JAILS STORY

An inmate allegedly beat up by deputies in front of ACLU jails monitor Esther Lim and another witness was tried for assaulting those same deputies although Lim says he did not. Not even close. The trial ended in a hung jury that was reportedly leaning toward acquittal.

The LA Times Robert Faturechi has the story.

Photo by Damian Dovarganes/AP

In a filing late Monday, Attorney General Eric Holder argued that national security would be damaged if the feds were forced to reveal who was the focus of mosque-spying operation in 2006, and how it was done, the Sac Bee reports.

(Politico also has a good report here.)

A look at the lawsuit that has caused all this State Secrets invoking, makes one wonder a bit.

Peter Bibring of the So Cal ACLU, for one, is not convinced.

The Sac Bee reports:

ACLU attorney Peter Bibring said it was extremely unusual for the government to invoke the state secrets privilege, especially in a domestic case being investigated by a domestic law enforcement agency. The secrecy rules are usually only requested in extraordinary matters overseas, such as the targeted killing by drones or extraordinary rendition.

“The government’s position here is the FBI’s conduct should be beyond the review of the courts, which would render the protections of the constitution meaningless,” Bibring said. “Following the government’s argument, any domestic law enforcement operation deemed to effect national security would be beyond review.”

Bibring said the ACLU would oppose the government’s motion.

The So Cal ACLU filed the suit in February and this Washington Post article has most of the details. Here’s a clip:

An FBI informant who infiltrated a California mosque violated the constitutional rights of hundreds of Muslims by targeting them for surveillance because of their religion, the ACLU and a Muslim group said in a lawsuit Tuesday.

The lawsuit, filed against the FBI and seven of its agents and supervisors, focuses on the actions several years ago of Craig Monteilh, a paid FBI informant. Monteilh has said he was instructed to spy on worshipers at an Irvine mosque in a quest for potential terrorists, allegations that prompted fierce criticism of the FBI from some Muslims in Southern California and nationwide.

The lawsuit alleges that Monteilh was ordered by his FBI handlers to conduct “indiscriminate surveillance” of Muslims, violating their First Amendment right to freedom of religion. Filed on behalf of three Muslim plaintiffs, the 64-page document seeks class action status, unspecified damages and a court order instructing the FBI to destroy or return the information Monteilh collected.

“The FBI should be spending its time and resources investigating actual threats, not spying on every American who happens to worship at a mosque,” said Peter Bibring, a staff attorney for the ACLU of Southern California, which filed the complaint along with the Los Angeles office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

And then for a personal story about being a target of the spying, see KPCC’s Frank Stoltz report. Here’s an excerpt:

Civil rights groups on Wednesday said they’ve sued the FBI for allegedly violating the First Amendment by spying on Orange County Muslims inside mosques. KPCC’s Frank Stoltze says the case focuses on the activities of a paid informant for the federal law enforcement agency.

One plaintiff in the lawsuit is 26-year-old Ali Malek. He recalled his initial encounter with Craig Monteilh.

“I first met Monteilh when he testified to his faith in front of roughly 1,000 people at the mosque in Irvine,” said Malek. “It was a ceremony in which you become a Muslim.”

Malek said his imam asked him to teach the convert about his new religion. He said Monteilh had other interests.

“Constantly he would ask me about jihad and what I thought about it,” said Malek. “My reaction initially was, he is a new Muslim, he just became Muslim, perhaps has some misconstrued ideas and perceptions of the religion and I was more than happy to clarify those misconceptions.”

When Monteilh continued his questions about jihad and began showing up at the gym where he worked out, Malek became suspicious.

“I thought he was weird and so I just wanted to keep my distance,” Malek said. “And I wanted to give it some time to see how the situation developed. And then when the case came out, all the pieces of the puzzle came together.”

Monteilh, it turned out, was working for the FBI…

Eric Holder is firm in contending that there is legit reason for all this secrecy stuff, but it is hard not to be reminded of the book by my friend and colleague Barry Seigel, Claim of Privilege, that documents the rise of the State Secrets Act and shows how cavalierly the government invoked it—way back then—not for matters of national security, but because of an uncontrollable desire to cover its own butt.

Here is what we know of the story:

A sophomore on the Santa Monica High School wrestling team says that, on May 4, he walked into the school’s wrestling room and saw the team’s brown practice dummy with a noose around its neck. As this same student, who happens to be black, headed for the locker room, he was approached by two of his team members who, he says, enfolded him in a “bear hug.” Then, using a cable and a lock, they chained the black wrestler to a locker. According to his mother, Victoria Gray, her son said that the teammates-turned-tormenters, at that point, shouted “Slave for sale.”

Such actions are alarming enough on their face, but what is most perplexing is the actions of the adults in the hours and days and weeks that followed the noose and the chaining and the racial slurs.

The Santa Monica Daily Press reports a part of the sequence of events:

A few things are known for certain.

After the incident, which occurred on May 4, counseling sessions were held on site for other members of the wrestling team that wanted to talk about the experience.

At those sessions, students were told to go home and tell their parents what happened.

Victoria Gray, the mother of the boy who was chained, was never informed, neither by her son nor by school officials.

She found out over three weeks later when a woman she had never met called her to tell her one version of events.

The two boys who allegedly did the chaining have been disciplined by the school with a three-day suspension. They will also have to help teach a freshman seminar on hazing.

The matter first came before the Board of Education at its meeting June 16, when Gray used public comment time to express her dissatisfaction with how the incident had been handled.

The Santa Monica Evening Outlook reports that Gray said her son, ” told her he didn’t want to make a big deal about the whole thing because he didn’t want to jeopardize the wrestling program.”

Gray said that her son told her that Leslie Wells, the principal of H House at Samohi, told him that the incident could get the whole wrestling program canceled.

Great.

It has also been reported that administrators insisted that students who snapped cell phone photos of any aspect of the noose and chaining incident, must turn in their phones, at which time the administrators deleted the photos.

The California penal code on the matter reads that: “Any person who hangs a noose, knowing it to be a symbol representing a threat to life, on the property of a primary school, junior high school, high school, college campus, public park, or place of employment….. shall be punished by imprisonment in a county jail not to exceed one year, or by a fine not to exceed five thousand dollars ($5,000).

Community organizer Najee Ali of Project Islamic Hope held a press conference in front of the high school on Wednesday afternoon to call for an investigation into the incident as a hate crime,. When I spoke to Ali on the phone afterward, he too said he was particularly angered and dismayed by the behavior of school administrators.

“I’m more shocked by the adults behavior than by the students,” Ali said then noted that the student’s mother has said that she was not informed of the incident, “Which meant the student didn’t get the support he needed.”

Ali is also troubled by the cell-phone-picture-deleting part of the story.

“If that happened, legally, they destroyed evidence. It sounds like they were more interested in protecting the school than in protecting the student who was bullied, or in using this incident as a real teachable moment.” Ali sighed. “And all that needs to be investigated. It also needs to be brought out into the open and talked about.”

There will be a chance to begin that conversation Thursday night, June 30, when there is a school board meeting scheduled at which school board member, Oscar de la Torre, said the noose and chaining incident will be discussed, and there will be a time for public comment.

PS: As bad as this incident is, the lock-’em-up zero tolerance reaction to the acts of teenagers helps no one. Emotionally violent actions such as these require meaningful consequences, which means more than a few days suspension, but they do not call for legal vengeance.

A few serious consequences for the adults, however, are clearly in order. They are the ones who should have been instantly protective toward Victoria Gray’s son then precipitated some kind of school-wide assembly or action to address the the myriad implications of the incident—and the deep damage actions like it can wreak.

Instead, it seems, the adults mostly ran to hit the “delete” button.

On Monday a Federal judge heard arguments about why Judge Vaughn Walker, the retired chief justice of the Federal District Court should have his ruling last year striking down California’s ban on same-sex marriage set aside. Walker, in case you’ve been ignoring this part of the drama, is gay (gasp, choke, wheeze, flutter, faint).

This is, of course, not much different than demanding that an African American judge be disqualified from ruling on a civil rights case that might, in the broadest sense, benefit his or her grandchildren, excluding a woman justice from a gender bias case, or calling foul because a Christian jurist rules on a case about about public prayer.

Most every major California news outlet covered this story but the most bracing, as is often the case, was the smart and outrage-laced report by Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick.

Here’s how it opens:

Today, a court in San Francisco heard arguments about one of the most contemptible legal claims advanced in decades: that Vaughn Walker, the federal judge who voted last spring to strike down California’s ban on gay marriage, was too gay to decide the case fairly.

The claim brought by ProtectMarriage, the group that sponsored the 2008 ballot initiative, tries to shimmy around a direct assertion that Walker’s homosexuality should disqualify him from having judged the Prop 8 case. They don’t say that Walker, who retired from the federal bench last February following his Prop 8 ruling, is biased in favor of gay marriage because he is gay. Instead ProtectMarriage argues—see this April 25 motion to vacate Walker’s ruling—that Walker, who has lived with his partner for 10 years, may have ruled for gay marriage so that he himself could get married and someday enjoy the benefits of marriage. The motion to vacate is thus rooted in their argument that “no judge is permitted to try cases where he has an interest in the outcome.” And since “no one would suggest that Chief Judge Walker could issue an injunction directing a state official to issue a marriage license to him, yet on this record, it must be presumed that that is precisely what has occurred,” his ruling, they insist, must be scuttled.

The problem for the proponents of Prop 8 is that there is no evidence in their motion that Walker ever sought to marry his partner, despite the existence of a decadelong relationship. So they rely instead on the argument that he is gay, and that’s enough.

[BIG SNIP]

No claim that a federal judge should have been barred from hearing a case because of race, gender, or religion has ever succeeded, a point made by California Attorney General Kamala Harris in her brief opposing the motion to vacate this ruling: “Just as every single one of the attempts to disqualify judges on the basis of their race, gender, or religious affiliation has been rejected by other courts, this Court should similarly reject Defendant-Intervenors’ effort to disqualify Judge Walker based on his sexual orientation.”

Heck, it all makes for an intriguing read, so check it out here.

AND THEN IF YOU WANT THE WHAT WHERE WHO WHEN HOW WHY’S OF THE ISSUE, THEN THE SF CHRON HAS A WELL-WRITTEN AND THOROUGH REPORT

You can find it here.

CA SENATE DECIDES WED. JUVIE LWOP CASES SHOULD BE GIVEN A CHANCE AT RESENTENCING.

Progress! Patrick McGreevy of the LA Times has the story:

A sharply divided state Senate on Wednesday approved giving minors who are sentenced to life in prison without parole a chance to get out.

The bill by Sen. Leland Yee (D-San Francisco) would allow those under 18 to have their cases reviewed by the courts after 15 years with the possibility of having their sentences changed to eventually allow parole. Yee said the United States is unique in allowing minors to be sentenced to life without parole.

“These youngsters did in fact commit a rather horrible crime,’’ Yee told his colleagues. But he said young people are more prone to impulsive acts and have a better chance of rehabilitation. “This bill is about giving kids a second chance,” Yee said.

Onward to the the state assembly!

FORGET SCHOOL VOUCHERS, WHAT ABOUT PRISON VOUCHERS?

Alexander Volkh has written a provocative paper for the Penn Law Review about the idea of prison vouchers. “School vouchers,” he writes, “have been proposed as a way to bypass the political pathologies of school reform and improve school quality by transforming students and parents into consumers. What if we did the same for prisons – what if convicted criminals could choose their prison rather than being assigned bureaucratically?

“Under a voucher system, prisons would compete for prisoners, meaning that they will adopt policies valued by prisoners….”
Volkh is serializing the article on his blog in two parts here and here.

And here’s a larger clip:

We should care about prison quality even if we don’t care about prisoners: Bad prison conditions often indirectly hurt the rest of us too. Brutal conditions, as well as excessive use of high-security segregation, make prisoners less useful members of society and more likely to reoffend. The low level of educational, vocational, or rehabilitative programs also contributes to recidivism. And communicable diseases can spill over into the outside world when infected inmates are released. “Every year, more than 1.5 million people are released from jail and prison carrying a life-threatening contagious disease.” The risk in multi-drug resistant tuberculosis in New York in the 1980s and early 1990s may have been linked to poor medical treatment in prisons and jails.

There are thus clear opportunities for gains from prison vouchers—not just to prisoners but also to society at large—as competing prisons seek to attract prisoners by offering better security, medical care, and vocational programs.

I can see some obvious problems with this plan. (Plus certain labor unions I could mention will hate the idea.) Yet the notion is intriguing.

U.S. ATTORNEY BIROTTE TALKS ABOUT BALANCING SAFETY AND CIVIL LIBERTIES

The issues of public safety and civil liberties should not, and must not, be mutually exclusive. Most of us know this in theory but when there are threats to public safety sometimes government agencies in general and law enforcement in particular, can forget about that essential balance between the two.

For this reason it was especially refreshing to read this weekend’s Op Ed in the Daily News about the the necessity of safeguarding civil liberties, written by U.S. Attorney Andre Birotte.

The Op Ed is smart and thoughtful, yet what is the most notable about it is that Birotte decided to declare his intentions publicly, thus implicitly telling us that we may hold him to this better standard.—which can a very good thing.

Here’s how it opens:

The upcoming anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks was on the minds of many at last month’s International Counter-Terrorism Conference in Los Angeles where national security experts gathered to compare strategies.

Since 9-11, we have learned that terrorists can strike anywhere, anytime, and without warning. To meet this asymmetrical threat, we have studied terrorist organizations and their tactics, and developed strategies for combating them. The counter-terrorism conference reflected this work, addressing topics such as recruitment and radicalization, counter-insurgency strategies and the emerging threats to the Internet, collectively known as “e-terrorism.”

One workshop at the conference was of special interest to me: “Civil Liberties in Post 9-11 America.” This workshop was a powerful reminder that, even as we affirm our resolve to use all our tools to stop violent extremists who plot against us – as demonstrated by the Navy SEAL raid in Pakistan that led to the death of 0sama bin Laden – we must also acknowledge the vital importance that civil liberties play in our society.

As United States attorney for the Central District of California, I am tasked with both combating terrorism and protecting civil rights – responsibilities I view as complementary, not conflicting…..

ROBOTICS AND AMIR ABO-SHAEER, THE “GENIUS” TEACHER

The LA Times Steve Chawkins writes about a gifted and innovative high school teacher who last year got a MacArthur Genius Grant, and is leading his school’s robotics team into the finals of the national competition—among other accomplishments.

Here’s a representative clip. But read the rest:

At a time when the profession is under attack, Abo-Shaeer has emerged as a national example of great teaching.

Last year, he was awarded a MacArthur Foundation $500,000 “genius” grant, the first high school teacher to win one. He and his robotics team — known as Team 1717 and the D’Penguineers — are the subjects of a recently released book, “The New Cool.” A film is in the works.

And while Abo-Shaeer likens navigating the educational system to wading through peanut butter, he has managed to launch an in-school engineering academy and to raise $6 million for it.

Not bad for a hometown guy who could have made a lot more and worked a lot less if he hadn’t decided to become a teacher at his old public high school.

Abo-Shaeer grew up in Goleta, the son of an Iraqi theoretical physicist who had worked and studied on four continents.

As a young man, Muhsin Abo-Shaeer had so excelled at math and science that the Iraqi government prepared him for a science career the way Russia grooms gymnasts for the Olympics. But when he settled in Santa Barbara, where he’d earned his doctorate, and couldn’t find a physics job, he started mowing lawns for a living….

GAYS TRANSFORMING THE LAW

When the bigtime law firm of King & Spalding said this week it would no longer represent Congress in trying to prop up the Defense of Marriage Act, the suggestion was that the firm had been bullied into their withdrawal by political correctness and gay lobbyists.

But, as law professor Dayle Carpenter suggests in an op ed for Friday’s New York Times, the full picture is more complicated and more interesting.

Here’s how Carpenter’s essay opens:

THE prestigious law firm King & Spalding has not fully explained its decision this week to stop assisting Congress in defending the law that forbids federal recognition of same-sex marriage. But its reversal suggests the extent to which gay men and lesbians have persuaded much of the legal profession to accept the basic proposition that sexual orientation is irrelevant to a person’s worth and that the law should reflect this judgment. The decision cannot be dismissed simply as a matter of political correctness or bullying by gays.

Gay-rights supporters have transformed the law and the legal profession, opening the doors of law firms, law schools and courts to people who were once casually and cruelly shut out because of their sexual orientation.

But it was a process that took a half-century to unfold. In 1961, a Harvard-trained astronomer, Frank Kameny, stood alone against the federal government. Fired from his federal job simply for being gay, he wanted to petition the Supreme Court. But at a time when all 50 states still criminalized sodomy, even the American Civil Liberties Union declared it had no interest in challenging laws “aimed at the suppression or elimination of homosexuals.” Mr. Kameny wrote his own appellate brief; without comment, the court turned him away.

Over the next quarter-century, lifted by gales of change in sexual morality and in the status of women, gay-rights advocates mobilized at every level of the legal profession.

Read the rest.

“DOG WARS” DOG FIGHTING VIDEO IS NOT GONE FOR GOOD, BUT THE DAMAGE CONTROL AND SPINNING HAS BEGUN

The extremely creepy sounding “Dog Wars” video game that allows you to train canines for the kind of dog fighting that got Michael Vick some prison time (it’s a felony offense in all 50 states), has not been pulled from the market, but just withdrawn briefly for some changes. News of its return runs contrary to the hopes, and urging of animal rights groups plus an unlikely coalition of opposition including the LAPD union, the Police Protective League, whose board called the game “sickening and irresponsible.

Additional details at Yahoo News. Here’s a clip:

In an email to The LA Times, signed by pitboss@kagegames.com, an official for Kage Games said proceeds from the game would benefit animal rescue organizations and the Japanese tsunami relief effort.

Pitboss did not give his real name, citing threats of violence by animal rights activists.

“We are in fact animal lovers ourselves,” the email reads. “This is our groundbreaking way to raise money/awareness to aid REAL dogs in need, execute freedom of expression, and serve as a demonstration to the competing platform that will not allow us as developers to release software without prejudgment.”

IN A WILDLY SENSIBLE MOVE, JERRY BROWN CANCELS PLANS TO BUILD A NEW $356 MILLION DEATH ROW HOUSING IN SAN QUENTIN

Good grief! Finally, someone has come to their senses on this matter! Thank you, Jerry.

This is from the governor’s official statement:

“At a time when children, the disabled and seniors face painful cuts to essential programs, the State of California cannot justify a massive expenditure of public dollars for the worst criminals in our state,” said Brown. “California will have to find another way to address the housing needs of condemned inmates. It would be unconscionable to earmark $356 million for a new and improved death row while making severe cuts to education and programs that serve the most vulnerable among us.”

Ya think?

The SF Chron has more details:

The new, bigger Death Row had a projected construction cost of $356 million, an amount that had grown from an original estimate of $220 million in 2003. The costs were criticized in several reports by state officials, and the state auditor estimated the state would spend $1.2 billion on additional staffing to operate the new Death Row over the next 20 years.

[SNIP]

The new Death Row would have been able to house up to 1,152 condemned inmates. There are less than 700 people in state prison who have been sentenced to death. The current Death Row is made up of three different buildings at San Quentin, the oldest of which was built in 1927.

Paul Verke, a spokesman for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, said prison officials wanted a new Death Row because of the state of the aging buildings, but he said the department supports the governor’s decision, even though it is not clear what the new plan is for housing condemned inmates.

AND NOW OVER TO THAT WEDDING, I GUESS… (YAWN)

(Okay, I do kinda like the hats.)

In 2005, the Congress passed what is known as the Stolen Valor Act, making it a crime to claim one was a military hero if that doesn’t happen to be true. One can get get six months in jail plus a fine if one “falsely represents himself or herself, verbally or in writing, to have been awarded any decoration or medal authorized by Congress for the Armed Forces of the United States.”

Falsely awarding yourself the highest military honors like a Purple Heart or a Medal of Honor can get you a year in prison under the act.

The law was tested in California when a So Cal politician named Xavier Alverez made extravagant public claims regarding his past as US Marine.

The Washington Post reports:

There’s no question Alvarez lied. After winning a seat on Southern California’s Three Valleys Municipal Water District board of directors in 2007, he introduced himself by saying: “I’m a retired Marine of 25 years. I retired in the year 2001. Back in 1987, I was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. I got wounded many times by the same guy.”

None of that was true. But a district judge overturned Alvarez’s conviction by declaring the law a violation of the First Amendment. A panel of the 9th Circuit agreed, and earlier this month the full court refused to reconsider the panel’s decision.

In his concurring statement, 9th Circuit’s Chief Justice Alex Kozenski explained in great and often witty detail why, except in certain instances, lying needs to be protected:

So what, exactly, does the dissenters’ ever-truthful utopia look like? In a word: terrifying. If false factual statements are unprotected, then the government can prosecute not only the man who tells tall tales of winning the Congressional Medal of Honor, but also the JDater who falsely claims he’s Jewish or the dentist who assures you it won’t hurt a bit. Phrases such as “I’m working late tonight, hunny,” “I got stuck in traffic” and “I didn’t inhale” could all be made into crimes. Without the robust protections of the First Amendment, the white lies, exaggerations and deceptions that are an integral part of human intercourse would become targets of censorship, subject only to the rubber stamp known as “rational basis review.”

The WaPo also quoted Kozinski:

“We lie to protect our privacy (‘No, I don’t live around here’); to avoid hurt feelings (‘Friday is my study night’); to make others feel better (‘Gee, you’ve gotten skinny’); to avoid recriminations (‘I only lost $10 at poker’),” Kozinski wrote recently in a case about an inveterate liar named Xavier Alvarez who, just to drive home the point, is also known as Javier Alvarez.

Kozinski listed 28 other reasons we avoid the truth, including to “avoid a nudnick” and to “defeat an objective (‘I’m allergic to latex’),” and ending sweetly with “to maintain innocence (‘There are eight tiny reindeer on the rooftop’).”

Kozinski’s entertaining treatise was in service to his point about the Constitution.

“If all untruthful speech is unprotected . . . we could all be made into criminals, depending on which lies those making the laws find offensive,” he wrote. “And we would have to censor our speech to avoid the risk of prosecution for saying something that turns out to be false.

“The First Amendment does not tolerate giving the government such power.”

The issue is expected to eventually make its way to the Supreme Court.

You can read Kozinski’s full—and very entertaining—statement on the essential nature of lying starting on page 14 of the 9th Circuit panel’s order.

Lee Baca was just great in the face of the bigoted and staggeringly arrogant questioning from Congressman Peter King’s House Homeland Security Committee hearing on the “radicalization of American Muslims.”

The LA Times’ Robert Faturechi reports:

Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca shot back at a congressman who warned him during a congressional hearing Thursday that a Muslim group the sheriff supports is affiliated with terrorists and is “using” him.

The reference to the Council on American-Islamic Relations, whose Southern California branch Baca has allied with, came during a controversial House hearing on the question of whether American Muslims are becoming radicalized.

“You are aware” that CAIR is affiliated with Hamas, Rep. Chip Cravaack (R-Minn.) said.

“No I’m not aware,” Baca interrupted.

“Let me bring this to your attention ... I’m trying to get you to understand that they might be using you,” Cravaack said.

Baca, noticeably irritated, told the congressman that he is aware of no criminal allegations have been made against CAIR. If there were any such allegations, he said, “bring them to court.”

“We don’t play around with criminals in my world,” Baca said before the packed hearing.

The tense exchange wasn’t Baca’s first on the issue.

During a hearing last year, Baca cut off a congressman who asked the sheriff why he attended CAIR fund-raisers, despite the group’s “radical” speech. Baca called the line of questioning from then-Rep. Mark Souder (R-Ind.) “un-American.

Un-American is right.

A big thank you to Lee Baca for standing up to these fools.

You can find Baca’s prepared remarks here.

THE ONGOING MISTREATMENT OF BRADLEY MANNING

The punitive mistreatment of Bradley Manning has taken another turn. The London Independent summarizes the situation:

The young American soldier who has been charged with leaking confidential cables to the WikiLeaks website is being forced to sleep naked in his cell and stand outside each morning to be handed back his clothes because he made a single sarcastic quip, his lawyer has claimed.

Fresh outrage at the conditions faced by Bradley Manning, a former research analyst in the Army, at the Quantico Marine Corps Base in Virginia erupted last week.

“Is this Quantico or Abu Ghraib?” Democrat congressman Dennis Kucinich, demanded. At the time, the Army would say only that the order was “non-punitive”.

In a blog post yesterday, the soldier’s lawyer, David Coombs, said he had got to the bottom of the nocturnal nudity requirement: his client was being punished because of a response to a suggestion from his warders they he was being considered a risk of “self-harm”, if not actual suicide.

Since Manning is not on suicide watch, it is difficult to see the warders’ actions as purely motivated by Manning’s health and well being.

Former Constitutional lawyer Glenn Greenwald at Salon is withering on the topic.

Keep in mind, Manning has not yet been convicted of anything, as Scott Lemieux at The American Prospect points out.

THE TIRE IRON AND THE TAMALE

An essay from the NY Times. I don’t want to give away the whole thing. Just read it. Here’s how it opens:

During this past year I’ve had three instances of car trouble: a blowout on a freeway, a bunch of blown fuses and an out-of-gas situation. They all happened while I was driving other people’s cars, which for some reason makes it worse on an emotional level. And on a practical level as well, what with the fact that I carry things like a jack and extra fuses in my own car, and know enough not to park on a steep incline with less than a gallon of fuel.

Each time, when these things happened, I was disgusted with the way people didn’t bother to help. I was stuck on the side of the freeway hoping my friend’s roadside service would show, just watching tow trucks cruise past me…

(Thanks for the tip from the always awesome Daniel Kowalski)

MANY STATES TRYING FEWER KIDS AS ADULTS (EXCEPT CALIFORNIA, OF COURSE)

Why is it that our fair state sucks so badly on this issue?

Here’s a clip from the article by the NY Times’ Mosi Secret. (Is that a great name or what?) It is very much worth reading:

A generation after record levels of youth crime spurred a nationwide movement to prosecute more teenagers as adults, a consensus is emerging that many young delinquents have been mishandled by the adult court system.

[SNIP]

The changes followed studies that concluded that older adolescents differed significantly from adults in their capacity to make sound decisions, and benefited more from systems focused on treatment rather than on incarceration.

A 2010 report by Wisconsin’s juvenile justice commission to the governor, James E. Doyle, and the Legislature found that “for many, if not most, youthful offenders, the juvenile justice system is better able to redirect their behavior,” in large part because of the greater availability of social services.

Most of the studies pointed to a 2005 decision by the United States Supreme Court in Roper v. Simmons that outlawed the death penalty for defendants who were younger than 18 when their crimes were committed, because of the “general differences” distinguishing them from adults — a lack of maturity, greater susceptibility to peer pressure and undeveloped character….

MO DO DOES JERRY

Sunday’s Maureen Dowd column on Gov. EGB Jr. was reasonably amusing. Here’s a clip. (And yes, Jerry Brown is a social justice issue. He always was.)

Once a priest-like bachelor and loner whose only visible attachment was to power, Brown now seems almost cuddly. At an Oscar lunch at the Beverly Hills mansion of Diane Von Furstenberg and Barry Diller, Brown and his wife, 52-year-old Anne Gust Brown, stood by the fire chatting with other guests.

Anne did not know she was coming to the lunch and had nothing to wear, so Brown swept her off to the store of his old friend Von Furstenberg and helped her pick out three frocks. He reminisced about how he had conspired with Von Furstenberg to design his wife’s wedding dress.

Was this, I wondered, the same guy who sometimes showed up in the ’70s with mismatched shoes?

His clever and charming wife, who served as top campaign adviser and is now de facto chief of staff, is a huge improvement over his ’90s Sancho Panza, Jacques Barzaghi, who wore a black beret and made strange comments like: “We are not disorganized. Our campaign transcends understanding.”

Oh, the Jacques Barzaghi stories I could tell….

FEDERAL JUDGE GOES ON A FIELD TRIP TO GANG NEIGHBORHOOD TO BETTER UNDERSTAND A CASE

Better than simply taking the usual ivory tower stance, I guess, although his stroll was not exactly casual, in that it featured an armed retinue.

Tom Hays of the AP has the story.

BE SURE ALSO TO READ….

….The Liberation of Lori Berenson by Jennifer Egan in the NY Times Magazine. It’s a fascinating tale and Jennifer Egan is a wonderful journalist—who also happens to have written one of last year’s best novels. (Really. )