GARDENING INMATES LESS LIKELY TO COME BACK TO LOCK UP

A growing number of corrections facilities across the US are surprised to find that inmates who participate in gardening programs are significantly less likely to return to prison than the national average predicts.

Pattie Baker writing for Youth Today, has the rest of this terrifically cheering story. Here’s a clip:

The most recent study by the Pew Center for the States and the Association of State Correctional Administrators found the [national] rate of recidivism (percentage of people released from prisons who are rearrested, convicted, or returned to custody within three years) to be 43.3 percent. What may be surprising, however, is that correctional facilities with a few years under their belt with a garden are finding not just reduced recidivism rates, but significantly reduced rates. According to the WorldWatch Institute, Sandusky County Jail in Ohio finds a recidivism rate of only 18 percent from those inmates who participate in its garden program, as opposed to 40 percent for those who don’t. Graduates of the Greenhouse Program at Rikers Island in New York City experience a 5-10 percent recidivism rate, as opposed to 65 percent in the general inmate population. Participants in The Garden Project at the San Francisco County Jail have a 24 percent recidivism rate, rather than 55 percent otherwise.

Jail gardening programs that involve people at even younger ages show promising positive effects in not only reducing recidivism but also helping youth avoid first-time offenses. Sidney Morgan, the Community Works Leader for the Department of Community Justice in Multnomah County, Ore., sees big changes in youth when they work in a garden. Morgan runs Project Sega (which means “to grow”) which provides youth on probation the opportunity to work on a quarter-acre garden to pay restitution for their offenses. Produce from this garden is sold at New Seasons supermarkets in the metro-Portland area, and the participating youth get the opportunity to plant, maintain, harvest from the garden, prep the food, and bring it to market. Morgan says New Seasons will even offer jobs to youth in Project Sega after they are done with probation. Through Project Sega, Morgan claims they learn that they can be successful, and that crime is not their only option.

“I’ve been doing probation work for seven years, and I’ve never seen anything like the reaction and results we get from kids who participate in gardening,” Morgan exclaimed.

STATE SUES OC TO PROTECT SCHOOL MONEY

The State of California filed a lawsuit against Orange County on Thursday to prevent the budget-strapped OC from using education funds ($73.5M worth) to pay other bills, leaving the state to foot the bill for schools. While California would be held to a constitutional requirement for funding K-12, if the court ruled in favor of the OC, community colleges could take a big hit with the loss of county funding.

The LA Times has the story.

Ted Guest at The Crime Report writes about a new DOJ and MacArthur Foundation-funded study, “Causes and Consequences of High Rates of Incarceration,” headed by eighteen corrections experts, will study the the nation’s 2.3M prison population (roughly six times that of most other countries). Research will explore possible low-cost, high-social benefit alternatives to current prison policies.

The panel of scholars, chaired by Jeremy Travis, president of John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, will examine the reasons for the dramatic increases in U.S. incarceration rates since the 1970s, which have produced one of the world’s highest incarceration levels—with more than 2.3 million people behind bars in U.S. prisons and jails at any time

The topic has been widely discussed and analyzed for years by advocacy groups on the left and right, as well as by individual scholars. But the two-year, $1.5 million project, convened by the National Research Council (part of the National Academy of Sciences) represents the first time in recent memory that these issues have been subject to wide-ranging, cross-disciplinary research.

“It now is time to review the state of knowledge—to look at the causes of the high rate of incarceration and the consequences for society,” said Travis, author of But They All Came Back: Facing the Challenges of Prisoner Reentry (2005).

DIGITAL SELF INCRIMINATION

So, let’s say you’ve been arrested, and you’ve been told by the cops (or the assistant district attorney, or whomever) that you have to decrypt the hard drive of your laptop, which law enforcement has been unable to hack. Let’s also say that you know that the material on said hard drive will not be….um…helpful to your legal situation (not that any of you would ever find yourself in such a nasty dilemma; we’re speaking hypothetically here). Anyway, would you have to do it—legally speaking?

Or does that fall in the category of self incrimination, thus you cannot be made to do the decrypting?

On Thursday, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, located in Atlanta, GA, said nope. You cannot be forced into digitally confessing your sins.

Joe Palazzolo of the Wall Street Journal has more.

In a ruling that could have broad ramifications for law enforcement, a federal appeals court has ruled that a man under investigation for child pornography isn’t required to unlock his computer hard drives for the federal government, because that act would amount to the man offering testimony against himself.

The ruling Thursday appears to be the first by a federal appeals court to find that a person can’t be forced to turn over encyption codes or passwords in a criminal investigation, in light of the Fifth Amendment, which holds that no one “shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself.”

The Atlanta-based U.S. Court of Appeals of the 11th Circuit ruled that “the Fifth Amendment protects [the man’s] refusal to decrypt and produce the contents of the media devices,” which the government believes contain child pornography.

The ruling could handcuff federal investigators, as more data are secured behind sophisticated encryption software. A Justice Department spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

SHERIFF BACA JOINS CHIEF BECK IN SAYING YES TO LICENSES FOR ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS

Robert Faturechi, Joel Rubin and Paloma Esquivel report for the LA Times:

Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca said he supports the idea of allowing illegal immigrants to have driver’s licenses as long as they have been in the United States for a number of years without committing other crimes.

Baca’s comments Thursday come as Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck has also expressed support for driver’s license for illegal immigrants.

Baca said such licenses should only be issued after illegal immigrants fill out comprehensive applications, similar to those for citizenship. The sheriff also said the licenses should be up for renewal annually, and be noticeably different than those issued to citizens.

“There’s enough potential for Chief Beck’s idea for it to be explored,” Baca said Thursday.

The sheriff has expressed openness to illegal immigrants being issued driver’s licenses before. In 2002, he supported a proposal to allow the licenses, but to imprint them with a special marker such as the letter “I” for immigrant so police could determine immediately if they were dealing with someone in the country illegally.

At the time, the sheriff was the head of a task force helping then-Gov. Gray Davis craft a plan to allow certain unlawful immigrants to get licenses, a proposal that eventually was scuttled.

Baca emphasized then that many illegal immigrants were already driving without having passed a driver’s test or buying auto insurance.
“At some point in time, we will allow illegal immigrants to have a driver’s license as long as they are trustworthy and non-criminal people,” Baca said at the time.

Good for the Sheriff. Now if the state legislature would just show some common sense and understand that this is less about immigration policy, than it is about public safety.

The Times editorial board put it well when it wrote:

….critics will argue that granting driver’s licenses to undocumented immigrants condones their presence in this country and makes it easier for them to stay. That makes sense in theory but not in practice. The reality is that undocumented immigrants are already here, and they are already driving to jobs taking care of children, mowing lawns and working in factories, among other things. Doesn’t it make sense to ensure that every driver, regardless of immigration status, is trained, capable and insured?

As Beck wisely points out, California’s push to keep undocumented immigrants from obtaining driver’s licenses hasn’t reduced the problems on the road

SCOTUS APPEARS TO BE HEADED TOWARD AFFIRMING THE STOLEN VALOR LAW

The New York Times’ Adam Liptak has a good summary of what went on in the court when the Supremes heard the Stolen Valor case. Here’s a clip (that includes in back story, in case you’re not up to speed:

Over the course of an hourlong argument on Wednesday, the Supreme Court seemed gradually to accept that it might be able to uphold a federal law that makes it a crime to lie about military honors, notwithstanding the First Amendment’s free speech guarantees. The justices were aided by suggestions from the government about how to limit the scope of a possible ruling in its favor and by significant concessions from a lawyer for the defendant.

The case arose from a lie told in 2007 at a public meeting by Xavier Alvarez, an elected member of the board of directors of a water district in Southern California.

“I’m a retired Marine of 25 years,” he said. “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.”

That was all false, and Mr. Alvarez was prosecuted under a 2005 law, the Stolen Valor Act, which makes it a crime to say falsely that one has “been awarded any decoration or medal authorized by Congress for the armed forces of the United States.” Mr. Alvarez argued that his remarks were protected by the First Amendment.

But for the personality of the SCOTUS discussion go to the report from Slate’s Dalia Lithwick, in which she details the kinds of lies that worry each of the justices.

Here’s a clip:

Most interesting to me is what judges think people lie about. So, for instance, amid the flurry of opinions written as the 9th Circuit tried to decide whether to review the Stolen Valor decision as a full court came this gem from Judge Alex Kozinski:

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 [sic],” “I got stuck in traffic” and “I didn’t inhale” could all be made into crimes.

In so doing, Judge Kozinski launched a weird little judicial Rorschach test one might call Lies Federal Judges Worry About. Entries fly fast and furious this morning.

INSIDE THE GRAY BOX – THE INCONVENIENT FACTS ABOUT SOLITARY CONFINEMENT IN AMERICA

Right now approximately 80,000 Americans are living in solitary confinement in this country’s prisons. Many of them have no record of violence either in or out of prison, says a new investigative report by The Dart Society.

Here’s a clip from the report, written by Susan Greene:

Among the misperceptions about solitary confinement is that it’s used only on the most violent inmates, and only for a few weeks or months. In fact, an estimated 80,000 Americans — many with no record of violence either inside or outside prison — are living in seclusion. They stay there for years, even decades. What this means, generally, is 23 hours a day in a cell the size of two queen-sized mattresses, with a single hour in an exercise cage, also alone. Some prisoners aren’t allowed visits or phone calls. Some have no TV or radio. Some never lay eyes on each other. And some go years without fresh air or sunlight.

Solitary is a place where the slightest details can mean the world. Things like whether you can see a patch of grass or only sky outside your window – if you’re lucky enough to have a window. Or whether the guy who occupies cells before you in rotation has a habit of smearing feces on the wall. Are the lights on 24/7? Is there a clock or calendar to mark time? If you scream, could anyone hear you?

In the warp of time and space where [Osiel] Rodriguez lives, the system not only has stripped him of any real human contact, but also made it unbearable to be reminded of a reality that has become all too unreal. It’s ripping him apart. [Rodriguez robbed a bank and a pawn shop when he was 22 years old.]

“Looking at photos of the free world caused me so much pain that I just couldn’t do it any more,” writes Rodriguez, 36. “Time and these conditions are breaking me down.”

This is what our prisons are doing to people in the name of safety. This is how deeply we’re burying them.

SHOULD FREE SPEECH PROTECT THE RIGHT TO LIE?

William Bennett Turner writes for the NY Times about the alarmingly slippery slope presented by the Stolen Valor Act.

Here’s a clip:

XAVIER ALVAREZ is a liar. Even the brief filed on his behalf in the United States Supreme Court says as much: “Xavier Alvarez lied.” It informs us that he has told tall tales about playing hockey for the Detroit Red Wings, being married to a Mexican starlet and rescuing the American ambassador during the Iranian hostage crisis. But as the brief reminds us, “none of those lies were crimes.”

Another of his falsehoods, however, did violate the law. In 2007, while introducing himself at a meeting of a California water board, he said that he was a retired Marine who had been awarded the Medal of Honor (both lies). He was quickly exposed as a phony and pilloried in the community and press as an “idiot” and the “ultimate slime.”

But his censure did not end there. The federal government prosecuted him under the Stolen Valor Act, which prohibits falsely claiming to have been awarded a military medal, with an enhanced penalty (up to a year in prison) for claiming to have received the Medal of Honor. Mr. Alvarez was convicted but appealed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which held that the act violated the First Amendment.

The government has taken the case to the Supreme Court, which is scheduled to hear arguments this week. The question before the court is not whether there is a constitutional “right” to lie. Rather, it’s a question about the scope of the government’s power over individuals — whether the government can criminalize saying untrue things about oneself even if there is no harm to any identifiable person, no intent to cheat anyone or gain unfair advantage, no receipt of anything of value and no interference with the administration of justice or any other compelling government interest.

Read the rest. It’s extremely interesting—especially when you start to consider the implications. (Hint: One of them involves Steven Colbert.)

THE SUPREMES, CITIZENS’ UNITED, THOSE CRANKY MONTANANS CHALLENGING THE LAW—AND THE MEANING OF RUTH GINSBURG’S REMARKS

On Friday of last week, the Supreme Court agreed to a stay on the Montana Supreme Court’s ruling of last fall,—one that upheld its own state law and thus basically made the US Supreme Court’s extremely controversial (and truly hideous) Citizens United decision inoperative in the Big Sky state.

Tom Goldstein over at SCOTUSBlog explains the significance of the message conveyed in the statement made by Justice Ruth Ginsburg (joined by Justice Breyer) at the hearing’s conclusion.

Or, if SCOTUSBlog is too wonky for your taste, the story at the Washington Post, addressing the same issue, lays things out more directly. Here’s how it opens:

Two Supreme Court justices suggested Friday that the court reconsider its controversial 2010 decision that allowed unlimited corporate and union spending in elections.

The suggestion came as the court blocked a Montana Supreme Court decision upholding a century-old ban on corporate campaign spending in the state.

The Montana ruling seems squarely at odds with the court’s 5 to 4 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which allowed unlimited corporate spending. The U.S. Supreme Court majority had said such independent spending did not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.

In Friday’s order, Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer said the upheaval in the world of campaign finance since the Citizens United decision does not bear out the majority opinion.

“Montana’s experience, and experience elsewhere since this court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, make it exceedingly difficult to maintain that independent expenditures by corporations ‘do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption,’ ” Ginsburg wrote.

“A petition for certiorari [from those challenging the Montana court’s decision] will give the court an opportunity to consider whether, in light of the huge sums currently deployed to buy candidates’ allegiance, Citizens United should continue to hold sway.”

Most experts think that the chances of Citizens United being modified or undone by the Supremes are worse than slim, as that would require Justice Kennedy (or someone more conservative than he) switching sides, which is unlikely. But the fact that the discussion will likely be raised may lay down tracks for a future court’s consideration.

While WitnessLA didn’t go dark on Wednesday for the SOPA blackout (too much jails stuff going
on to even consider it), the protest seems to be helping.

If you’re unfamiliar with the fuss about SOPA—the Stop Online Piracy Act—and its little sister PIPA …. the Protect IP Act, let writer and NYU professor Clay Shirky explain it all to you.

Shirky, who is one of the smartest people breathing on all things web, was asked to do an “emergency TED talk,” to address the issue of SOPA (and PIPA) in plain terms.

You can find it here.

And then if you want to take action, go here.

In 2006, a Hannibal MO high school student, unhappy about being rejected by a girlfriend, sent an instant message to another friend about his desire to bring a gun to school and shoot several of his classmates. His threats were specific and the IMing student, who is referred to as D.J.M. in all court papers, made sure to tell the friend that he could easily get a gun. The friend got spooked and reported the IMs a school principal, who called in district officials and the cops. D.J.M. was suspended from school.

The student and his parents sued.

A three-judge panel for the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the school’s right to discipline D.J.M., and ruled that his threatening IMs were not protected speech.

No kidding!

There is admittedly a fine line in some of these kinds of cases, but not on this one. Mark Walsh of Ed Week has the details.

Here’s a clip:

[The court wrote,]“The First Amendment did not require the [school] district to wait and see whether D.J.M.’s [the student] talk about taking a gun to school and shooting certain students would be carried out,” said the court’s Aug. 1 opinion in D.J.M. v. Hannibal Public School District.

Court papers say D.J.M. was instant messaging with a friend in October 2006 when he discussed being romantically spurned by a female classmate. D.J.M. said he had access to a gun, and that while he would probably let the female friend live because “I still like her,” he named several specific students who he “would have to get rid of,” and he used anti-gay and racist epithets.

The student on the other end of the IM conversation, C.M., became concerned, and she passed along some of the comments to an adult friend, who contacted the principal of Hannibal High School. C.M. also passed along comments from D.J.M. that he “wanted Hannibal to be known for something,” that he had access to a gun, and that he might commit suicide after shooting his classmates.

School officials immediately contacted police, who took D.J.M. into juvenile detention. Meanwhile, D.J.M. was suspended for 10 days, and later for the rest of his sophomore year. The student and his parents sued the Hannibal district, alleging that the suspension violated his free-speech rights because the instant messages were conducted outside of school and were not meant as serious expressions of intent to harm anyone.

Despite the pressing need to revisit our nation’s schools’ problematic zero tolerance polices, which often do more harm than good, these IMs, as the court pointed out, were “true threats.” Any adult who ignored them would have been frighteningly irresponsible.

All that said, I hope the school administrators—and whatever other powers-that be who were involved—also made it their business to find out what was going on with “D.J.M” and thus offer him help as well as discipline.

The fact that, as the Hannibal Courier-Post reports, D.J.M. eventually returned to school and graduated ahead of his class is a heartening sign.

AND THE FUN FAMILY AWARD OF THE MONTH GOES TO….THIS GROUP WITH THE SHANKS IN THE BIRTHDAY CAKE

LA Now reports this cheery tale of a couple of brothers—Chong and Gary Vue— awaiting trial, one of whom attempted to pass a shank to the other one by embedding it in some birthday cake that he had in his cell, and talking a deputy into passing a piece to his brother, who was elsewhere in the Sacramento jail. Fortunately the deputy thought, Hey, wait a minute, maybe this isn’t such a swell idea..” and checked the cake out at which time the added….um…ingredients were discovered.

(So tell me again why brother number one got to have a birthday cake in his cell in the first place..?)

And what are the Vue brothers on trial for you might wonder? LA Now elaborates:

Chong Vue, 32, and Gary Vue, 31, are accused of shooting and killing Steve Lo, 39, at his Sacramento home in October 2008, just as Lo was leaving for his job as a state correction officer at the California Medical Facility in Vacaville.

Prosecutors said the two were carrying out a hit taken out by their older brother, Chue Vue, 46, a former Sacramento sheriff’s deputy. Chue Vue had discovered his wife was having an affair with Lo and retained his brothers to kill him, prosecutors say.

Chue Vue has already been convicted for arranging the murder of Lo. He is currently serving a sentence of life without parole.

The younger Vues, Chong and Gary, have previously been convicted of a gang murder in Minnesota.

Like I said, a fun family.

NOTE: Evidently the Sac Bee reporter Andy Furillo had the same question that I did about how the damned cake got into the cell in the first place. To wit:

It was unclear how the cake got in the cell or whether it was baked in the jail’s kitchen. Sheriff’s spokesman Jason Ramos said Tuesday that he has never heard of inmates at the downtown jail having cake in their cells.

“I would be very curious to look into it,” Ramos said. “Wow.”

In next week’s issue of the New Yorker (April 11), the magazine’s legal writer, Jeffery Toobin, has a MUST READ story about SCOTUS’ view of campaign reform.

It is an interesting and important read, but not exactly a cheery one:
Below I have posted a few salient clips but the whole thing is worth your time:

Eight of the current Supreme Court Justices are known for their zeal in questioning lawyers. That tendency was on display last week during the oral argument over the constitutionality of an Arizona law known as the Citizens Clean Elections Act, a law that attempts to do a little something about campaigns in which one candidate has a great deal more money than the others. Roughly, the law says that the ones who are outspent should receive a modest subsidy from state funds. By the end of the questioning, however, it had become clear that a majority of the Justices will probably declare the Arizona law unconstitutional. In apparent frustration, Justice Stephen G. Breyer departed from custom and allowed himself a despairing comment about the Court’s treatment of campaign-finance laws, which he has long, and mostly futilely, defended. “It is better to say it’s all illegal than to subject these things to death by a thousand cuts, because we don’t know what will happen when we start tinkering with one provision rather than another,” he said.

[SNIP]

In many other respects, this Court’s commitment to free speech is admirable. Earlier this year, Chief Justice John Roberts gave voice to the best American tradition of tolerance when he (along with seven colleagues) overturned a damage award against a fringe religious group. The Westboro Baptist Church, which, as it happens, is more of an extended family than an actual church, had launched one of its odious anti-gay publicity stunts near a funeral at which a mother and father were grieving the loss of a son in Iraq. Understandably, perhaps, a judge had awarded five million dollars in a civil suit brought by the father, but the Court recognized that such a judgment threatened the free-speech rights of all unpopular groups. “Speech is powerful,” Roberts wrote, but it was the Court’s duty “to protect even hurtful speech on public issues to ensure that we do not stifle public debate.”

The problem is that there is more than one way to stifle public debate. The idea behind limiting campaign contributions and expenditures is to insure that the voices of the wealthy don’t drown out the voices of those who are less well off. A surreal moment during the Arizona argument summed up how peculiar the Court’s campaign-finance jurisprudence has become. Springing a well-planned trap, Roberts told the lawyer defending the Arizona law, “I checked the Citizens Clean Elections Commission Web site this morning, and it says that this act was passed to, quote, ‘level the playing field’ when it comes to running for office. Why isn’t that clear evidence that it’s unconstitutional?” To many ears, levelling the playing field hardly sounds like a sinister activity, worthy of the Supreme Court’s ultimate sanction. Indeed, as recently as 1990 the Court upheld a campaign-finance law because of “the corrosive and distorting effects of immense aggregations of wealth that are accumulated with the help of the corporate form and that have little or no correlation to the public’s support for the corporation’s political ideas.” But the Court explicitly overruled that decision last year in the Citizens United case. For better or for worse, Roberts is right: leveling the playing field is now verboten.

JERRY BROWN SIGNS BILL SENDING THOUSANDS OF NONVIOLENT PRISONERS BACK TO JAIL TO SERVE OUT THEIR TIME

Yeah, I’m sure this sounded great on paper. And I’m all for doing whatever is necessary to reduce the California state prison population. But all this new plan seems to be is simply moving prisoners around in some kind of shell game strategy in which the county jails take the hit instead of the state prisons—a hit that LA’s county Jail system, for one, really cannot take right now.

Here’s a clip from Jack Dolan’s story for the LA times.

Tens of thousands of felons convicted of nonviolent crimes would serve their time in county jails instead of state prisons under a law signed by Gov. Jerry Brown on Monday evening.

The measure is designed to reduce the number of inmates in California’s chronically overcrowded state lockups and keep relatively low-level offenders closer to their homes, where drug treatment and mental health services are believed to be more effective.

Supporters hope to save taxpayers money by lowering the number of offenders who return to prison and by housing many parole violators in less expensive county jails.

“For too long, the state’s prison system has been a revolving doorr for lower-level offenders and parole violators who are released within months,” Brown said in a news release. “Cycling these offenders through state prisons wastes money, aggravates crowded conditions, thwarts rehabilitation and impedes local law enforcement supervision.

Sounds dandy. Unfortunately, however, the county jails have even less in the way of rehabilitation and other programs than the California prisons, so this bill is going to help our recidivism rate how exactly?

We need sentencing reform if we want to reduce CA’s prison population.

….AND SPEAKING OF SENTENCING REFORM, THERE IS THIS FROM FORBES MAGAZINE

Here’s a relevant clip from the Forbes report:

…Republican governors and lawmakers pushed for many of the policies that put low-level drug offenders and nonviolent felons behind bars and extended sentences for many convicted criminals. But with the GOP in control of more financially strapped state governments, a growing number of Republican elected officials favor a review of the sentencing laws that contributed to a fourfold increase in prison costs over two decades.

The total cost of incarcerating state inmates swelled from $12 billion in 1988 to more than $50 billion by 2008.

Newly elected Republican governors in Florida and Georgia are among those pushing sentencing reforms. Brent Steele, a Republican state senator in Indiana, concedes that lawmakers share the blame for driving up state prison costs in recent years. High-profile crimes prompt lawmakers and governors to adopt ever-tougher criminal sentencing, such as three-strikes laws that impose minimum mandatory sentences for those convicted of a third felony, no matter the offense.

“But with that eventually comes the time when we run out of prison space,” said Steele, who is sponsoring a criminal justice overhaul in his state, prompted by budget concerns. “So what do you do? You concentrate on incarcerating those we’re afraid of and not those we’re just mad at.”

I want that last sentence on refrigerator magnets so we can give ‘em out in Sac’to.

Once again, in California, we not only cannot persuade our Republican lawmakers to go along with sentencing reform—we can’t get the Dems show a little spine on the topic either.

(Dear Georgia and Florida Repubs, can’t you talk sense to these people? Seriously. It would mean a lot to us.)

SHOULD STATE BE ABLE TO DEMAND A JUROR’S FACEBOOK POSTS? CALIFORNIA SUPREMES WANT THE QUESTION CAREFULLY CONSIDERED

This one’s a doozey and is shaping up to be a Constitutional battle. On one side you have the right to privacy and freedom of expression, on the other hand you have the constitutional rights of the accused.

Here’s what the case is about as the Sac Bee reports it:

[A Sacramento juror named Arturo Ramirez] posted his online remarks in a gang-beating trial last year in which five men were convicted. Before the defendants were sentenced, defense lawyers found out about his Facebook postings.

Mostly, the writings chronicled the juror’s attendance at the trial in which he later served as foreman of the panel. At one point in his writings, Ramirez said he found the evidence “boring.”

Defense attorneys asked Sacramento Superior Court Judge Michael P. Kenny to retrieve all of the juror’s postings to see if he was biased or if he was influenced by any of his Facebook friends.

Kenny on Feb. 4 ordered Ramirez to allow Facebook to make the postings available for a private review. Facebook had opposed releasing the postings on its own, citing federal computer privacy law….

Mike Wise, the lawyer for one of the defendants in the gang case, said it is critical for his side to see what Ramirez wrote to make sure the defense clients received a fair trial. Wise on Wednesday also welcomed the state Supreme Court decision.

“I think it’s a great opportunity to resolve the issue,” he said. “I think in the end, the constitutional rights of the accused will prevail over the privacy rights of the juror.

A new hearing on the matter is expected soon.

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN WRITES LETTER TO THE EDITOR OF THE ASBURY PARK PRESS PRAISING STORY ABOUT HOW BUDGET CUTS ARE AFFECTING MANY OF THE POOR

To wit:

Thank you for your March 27 front-page story by Michael Symons, “As poverty rises, cuts target aid.” The article is one of the few that highlights the contradictions between a policy of large tax cuts, on the one hand, and cuts in services to those in the most dire conditions, on the other…..

And so on.

Nice to know that The Boss is paying attention to such things, as the US Congress doesn’t seem to be concerned.

BRONX ZOO EGYPTIAN COBRA FOUND AND RECAPTURED…. (NO WORD ON WHETHER THE SNAKE WILL HOST SNL)

Entertainment Weekly reports.

You may now breathe a ssssigh of relief. After escaping from a cage at the Bronx Zoo last week and going MIA, a venomous 24-inch Egyptian Cobra was found on Thursday by zoo staffers. Was it captured while slithering its way through Central Park? Catching a Knicks game at Madison Square Garden? Enjoying a quiet dinner at an Italian bistro in the Village? Nope. She was just coiled up in a dark corner of the reptile house, a mere 200 feet from her cage, and is now “resting comfortably and secure,” according to zoo officials. (Cue the singer from Survivor: The search is over/you were with me all the while…)

The snake, who insists she is a female (at least in her very popular Twitter incarnation), has launched a Facebook campaign to host Saturday Night Live.

THE QUESTION OF HUFF POST NOT PAYING ITS WRITERS ISN’T GOING AWAY

Author Michael Walker is the latest voice to question the Huffington Post’s no-pay policy for its freelance writers. The clip below is from his LA Times Op Ed.

Should stage owners who profit from the talent appearing on those stages be obliged to pay the talent in something other than exposure?

<strongTwo labor disputes over talent and compensation, three decades apart yet eerily similar, suggest the issue remains as vexing as ever.

The more recent concerns whether the Huffington Post should pay its non-staff writers and bloggers, who supply most of the popular website’s content for free. Arianna Huffington, who sold the site she cofounded to AOL in February for $315 million, has increasingly come under fire for not paying for most of the content she runs.

Last week the Newspaper Guild called on its 26,000 members to boycott the Huffington Post in support of a “virtual picket line” until a pay schedule for writers was established.

The core of Huffington’s justification for not paying is that the Huffington Post is a showcase for writers, and that exposure there leads to paying gigs and greater visibility. Huffington merely — and generously, by her estimation — provides the stage. Mario Ruiz, the Huffington Post’s spokesman, claims that contributors are happy to write for free because they “want to be heard by the largest possible audience and understand the value that that kind of visibility can bring.”

This was precisely the argument put forth 32 years ago by Mitzi Shore, the owner of L.A.’s Comedy Store, for not paying the comedians whose performances filled her club night after night…..

TUESDAY ILLINOIS POISED TO ABOLISH STATE’S DEATH PENALTY

Go Illinois!

Reuters has the story. Here’s a clip:

Illinois was poised to become the first state since 2009 to abolish the death penalty after the state Senate approved the ban on Tuesday and sent it to Democratic Governor Pat Quinn for his signature.

The Senate vote came after House approval late last week. The Senate vote was 32-25.

Illinois has not executed anyone for more than a decade after former Republican Gov. George Ryan imposed a moratorium on the death penalty in January 2000 following a series of revelations that people had been sent to Death Row who were later found to be innocent.

“We’ve had 20 innocent people on Death Row,” said Jeremy Schroeder, executive director of the Illinois Coalition Against the Death Penalty. “It’s time to be done with the moratorium and do the right thing.”

State Sen. Kwame Raoul, the measure’s sponsor, said that too many mistakes had been made in Illinois that sent innocent people to death row.

“We have an historic opportunity … to join the civilized world and end this practice of risking putting to death innocent people,” Raoul said before the vote.

FYI: The bill just passed would take the money saved from the Capital Litigation Trust Fund (which will no longer be needed), and re-allocate the $$$ to a fund for murder victims’ services and law enforcement.

OKAY, THIS IS UNBELIEVABLY CREEPY

This cheery ad is on the web page of the Palmetto State Armory.

Palmetto State Armory would like to honor our esteemed congressman Joe Wilson with the release of our new “You Lie” AR-15 lower receiver.

(For those unfamiliar with armaments, an AR-15 is the automatic rifle that is akin to an M-16, and the “lower receiver’ is the “gun” part of this particular gun.)

UPDATE: The above link to the ad no longer works. Obviously, it has been taken down.

Evidently Congressman Wilson was tickled by the matter since he is shown cradling the AR-15 named in his honor.

ASSANGE LAWYERS WORRIED ABOUT “ILLEGAL RENDITION” AND THE DEATH PENALTY

The NY Times has the story:

Lawyers for Julian Assange, the founder of the WikiLeaks antisecrecy group, said on Tuesday that they would oppose his extradition to Sweden because he might subsequently face “illegal rendition” to the United States, risking imprisonment at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, or even the death penalty.

They made the assertion in defense documents released after Mr. Assange made a brief appearance in a British high-security court for a largely procedural hearing concerning his resistance to demands for his extradition to Sweden, where he has been accused of sexual misconduct….

LATE TUESDAY UPDATES

LA COUNTY DEPUTY SHOT BY SUSPECT

The LA Times has the story:

A Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy was shot in the face Tuesday night in East Los Angeles after he and his training officer were attacked by a reputed gang member on parole, authorities said.

The suspected gunman was fatally shot by the training officer after a struggle ensued, authorities said.

Deputy Mohamed Ahmed, 27, was taken to a local hospital and may lose sight in one eye, said a source familiar with the incident. The Sheriff’s Department initially reported that the deputy had been shot in the cheek.

Ahmed did not appear to have suffered any brain damage and was listed in critical condition. He joined the department in April 2007.

As we hope for the health of Gabrielle Giffords, we also hope for LA County Sheriff’s Deputy Mohamed Ahmed.

In his column in Wednesday’s LA Times, Steve Lopez reports that the Los Angeles Sheriff’s department—presumably with the okay of Sheriff Lee Baca—has instructed its deputies not to talk to reporters from LA County’s main news outlet, namely the Los Angeles Times.

Or something like that.

Here’s the relevant section on Lopez’s column:

The latest [LASD/Lee Baca] head-smacker involves an e-mail from one of Baca’s captains ordering deputies not to speak to the L.A. Times. As my colleague Robert Faturechi reported Tuesday, the captain’s directive came just a few days after the paper ran Faturechi’s story on the fact that Baca had launched a criminal investigation in Beverly Hills — which has its own presumably competent Police Department — on behalf of a political donor.

It was outrageous enough that Baca took the unusual step of sticking his nose into a case Beverly Hills police had already decided was a civil matter. But then his department puts out the word to punish The Times for doing its job?

Sheriff’s spokesman Steve Whitmore claimed the e-mail had nothing to do with The Times’ Beverly Hills story.

Yeah, OK.

Whitmore also claimed The Times wasn’t being singled out.

Hmmmm. Then why did the e-mail instruct deputies to forward media requests to headquarters, “Specifically any LA Times requests.”

“It’s vernacular,” Whitmore told me. “It’s shorthand. I know it sounds silly.”

Um, yeah. Really, really silly. And really disingenuous.

But, hey, we’re living through a month in which the US Air Force just announced on Tuesday that it is barring its personnel from using work computers to view the Web sites of The New York Times and more than 25 other news organizations and blogs.

Why? Take a wild guess.

Yep. You got it. Wikileaks.

I’d say all this madness was due to some new contaminant in the water, but the east coast/west coast nature of these dismayingly wrong-headed occurrences pretty much leaves that out.

Dunno. Bad moon rising.

The hysterical reactions by seemingly sane people on the topic of WikiLeaks and Julian Assange grow ever more deeply disheartening.

But there are, fortunately, a few people talking sense, among them Ron Paul and Tom Hayden, two men who would find themselves at opposite ends of many questions. But on this crucial issue they agree. Similarly, Salon’s lawyer/columnist Glenn Greenwald finds a kindred spirit on the matter on former Bush administration lawyer, Jack Goldsmith:

LYING IS NOT PATRIOTIC

Texas Congressman Ron Paul spoke on the floor of the House of Representatives on Friday where he passionately defended Julian Assange and WikiLeaks.

Here’s a clip from reporting by the Atlantic Wire:

“Why is the hostility directed at Assange, the publisher, and not at our governments failure to protect classified information?” asked Paul. He went on to compare WikiLeaks to the Pentagon Papers, explaining how both exposed American wars that were based on “lies.” He also asked his colleagues which events caused more deaths, “Lying us into war, or the release of the WikiLeaks papers?”

At the end of his speech, Paul asked his listeners 9 questions, which are as follows:

Number 1: Do the America People deserve know the truth regarding the ongoing wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen?

Number 2: Could a larger question be how can an army private access so much secret information?

Number 3: Why is the hostility directed at Assange, the publisher, and not at our governments failure to protect classified information?

Number 4: Are we getting our moneys worth of the 80 Billion dollars per year spent on intelligence gathering?

Number 5: Which has resulted in the greatest number of deaths: lying us into war or Wikileaks revelations or the release of the Pentagon Papers?

Number 6: If Assange can be convicted of a crime for publishing information that he did not steal, what does this say about the future of the first amendment and the independence of the internet?

Number 7: Could it be that the real reason for the near universal attacks on Wikileaks is more about secretly maintaining a seriously flawed foreign policy of empire than it is about national security?

Number 8: Is there not a huge difference between releasing secret information to help the enemy in a time of declared war, which is treason, and the releasing of information to expose our government lies that promote secret wars, death and corruption?

Number 9: Was it not once considered patriotic to stand up to our government when it is wrong?

Thomas Jefferson had it right when he advised ‘Let the eyes of vigilance never be closed’

THE LYNCH MOB MOMENT

Tom Hayden is just as impassioned as Paul, although his approach is calmer. Here is a clip from the analytical essay that he sent out to friends on Wednesday about what he calls The Lynch Mob Moment.

We know that conservatives are extremists for order, but why have so many liberals lost their minds and joined the frenzy over Julian Assange and WikiLeaks? As the secrets of power are unmasked, there is a growing bipartisan demand that Julian Assange must die.

Once-liberal Democrat Bob Beckel said on FOX, “there’s only one way to do it: illegally shoot the son-of-a-bitch.” Center-liberal legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin said on CNN that Assange is “absurd”, “ridiculous”, “delusional”, and “well beyond sympathy of anyone”. The Washington Times called for treating him as an “enemy combatant”; Rep. Peter King of the Homeland Security Committee who wants him prosecuted as a terrorist; and of course, Sarah Palin wants Assange “pursued with the same urgency we pursue al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders”, or a wolf in Alaska.

This is a lynch-mob moment, when the bloodlust runs over. We have this mad overreaction many times since the witch-burnings and Jim Crow, including the Palmer Raids of the 1920s, the McCarthy purges of the 1950s, the Nixon-era conspiracy trials, the Watergate break-ins, and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq after 9/11.

Most Americans now know that those frenzied periods of scapegoating did nothing for our security, which instead damaged our democracy and left in their wake a secretive National Security State.

There is wisdom in expecting calmer heads to prevail in the WikiLeaks matter, but what can be done when the calmer heads are going nuts or hiding in silence?

Do the frothing pundits remember that we have a legal system in which the accused is entitled to due process, legal representation and the right to a defense? The first obligation of our threatened elected officials, bureaucrats and pundits is to calm down.

Hayden acknowledges that wholesale release of the WikiLeaks documents could do damage:

I can understand the reasonable questions that reasonable people have about this case. It is clearly illegal to release and distribute the 15,652 documents stamped as “secret.” Why should underground whistleblowers have the unlimited right to release those documents? There is a risk that some individuals might be harmed by the release. There is a concern that ordinary diplomatic business might be interrupted.

But he also reminds us what we have thus far gotten from Julian Assange and WikiLeaks:

1. WikiLeaks disclosed 390,136 classified documents about the Iraq War and 76,607 about Afghanistan so far. No one died as a result of these disclosures, one of which revealed another 15,000 civilian casualties in Iraq which had not been acknowledged or reported before;

2. Fragmentary orders [FRAGO] 242 and 039 instructed American troops not to investigate torture in Iraq conducted by America’s allies;

3. The CIA operates a secret army of 3,000 in Afghanistan;

4. A secret US Task Force 373 is assigned to nighttime hunter-killer raids in Afghanistan;

5. The US ambassador in Kabul says it is impossible to fix corruption when our ally is the corrupt entity;

6. One Afghan minister alone carried $52 million out of the country;

7. US Special Forces operate in Pakistan without public acknowledgment, apparently in violation of that country’s sovereignty;

8. America’s ally, Pakistan, is the chief protector of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

9. Following secret U.S air strikes against suspected al-Qaeda militants, Yeme’s President Ali Abdullah Saleh told General David Petraeus, “We’ll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours.”

10. U.S. government contractor DynCorp threw a party for Afghan security recruits featuring trafficked boys as the entertainment. Bacha bazi is the Afghan tradition of “boy play” where young boys are dressed up in women’s clothing, forced to dance for leering men, and then sold for sex to the highest bidder. DynCorp has been previously linked to child sex trafficking charges.

CORRECTING THE MEDIA FALSEHOODS

Salon’s Glenn Greenwald (who also happens to be an attorney trained in Constitutional law) has been stalking the absurd inaccuracies put out by major media outlets—like, for example, Time magazine— when they report on the ongoing WikiLeaks story.

Read and grow angry.

IF ASSANGE IS GUILTY WHAT ABOUT THE NY TIMES? WHAT ABOUT BOB WOODWARD?

On Friday, former Bush administration lawyer, Jack Goldsmith, posted 7 “thoughts” on the matter of WikiLeaks. They are all worth reading, but here are the first three:

* I find myself agreeing with those who think Assange is being unduly vilified. I certainly do not support or like his disclosure of secrets that harm U.S. national security or foreign policy interests. But as all the hand-wringing over the 1917 Espionage Act shows, it is not obvious what law he has violated. It is also important to remember, to paraphrase Justice Stewart in the Pentagon Papers, that the responsibility for these disclosures lies firmly with the institution empowered to keep them secret: the Executive branch. The Executive was unconscionably lax in allowing Bradley Manning to have access to all these secrets and to exfiltrate them so easily.

* I do not understand why so much ire is directed at Assange and so little at the New York Times. What if there were no wikileaks and Manning had simply given the Lady Gaga CD to the Times? Presumably the Times would eventually have published most of the same information, with a few redactions, for all the world to see. Would our reaction to that have been more subdued than our reaction now to Assange? If so, why? If not, why is our reaction so subdued when the Times receives and publishes the information from Bradley through Assange the intermediary? Finally, in 2005-2006, the Times disclosed information about important but fragile government surveillance programs. There is no way to know, but I would bet that these disclosures were more harmful to national security than the wikileaks disclosures. There was outcry over the Times’ surveillance disclosures, but nothing compared to the outcry over wikileaks. Why the difference? Because of quantity? Because Assange is not a U.S. citizen? Because he has a philosophy more menacing than “freedom of the press”? Because he is not a journalist? Because he has a bad motive?

* In Obama’s Wars, Bob Woodward, with the obvious assistance of many top Obama administration officials, disclosed many details about top secret programs, code names, documents, meetings, and the like. I have a hard time squaring the anger the government is directing toward wikileaks with its top officials openly violating classification rules and opportunistically revealing without authorization top secret information….