Author: Chris Cassidy

This week, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals opened the door for Delaware to resume inmate executions, and Attorney General Beau Biden immediately heralded the opportunity to “schedule executions as appropriate.”

It’s a disappointing development, but also one with a lesson in it. For too long, the progressive community and its reform-minded allies have lagged behind conservatives in understanding the judiciary’s importance, and it’s time that attitude changed.

As unsatisfying as this decision may be, the fault here really lies with the Supreme Court, which has bound lower courts with its misinterpretation of the Eighth Amendment. In its decision, the unanimous three-judge panel voiced serious concerns about what they called Delaware’s “occasional blitheness” in its application of a three-drug protocol to execute prisoners. The court also chastened Delaware to respect its “moral obligation to carry out executions with the degree of seriousness and respect that the state-administered termination of human life demands.”

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It turns out that the trial of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and other 9/11 conspirators will not be held in lower Manhattan. And now, the mainstream media seems dead set on making us believe that, somehow, this development is a setback for the rule of law. It’s enough to make your head hurt.

Last week, Mayor Michael Bloomberg initiated a domino effect by rescinding his prior support for having the trial take place in a New York courthouse once overshadowed by the Twin Towers. With recent cost estimates for the trial’s security reaching up to $1 billion, and growing concerns about the disruption it would cause residents, Bloomberg’s change of heart is hardly unreasonable or disappointing. His suggestion that the trial be moved to a cheaper, less disruptive venue makes sense, given his constituents’ increasingly vocal concerns.

By contrast, though, the reaction of the mainstream media — who rushed to transform the development from a mole hill to a mountain — was disappointing.

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It took a jury of his peers only 37 minutes to find the gunman accused of killing famed pro-choice doctor George Tiller guilty of first-degree murder. After the twists and turns of this six-day trial, it’s a relief to see politics removed from the courtroom and justice served.

To be sure, gunman Scott Roeder never disputed killing Tiller at all. Instead, he sought to justify the assassination as an attempt to save innocent lives, meaning fetuses. Remarkably, the judge actually ruled that Roeder could testify to that effect, opening the possibility that the jury might convict Roeder for the lesser charge of voluntary manslaughter. What’s more, that ruling also had the potential to turn Roeder’s trial into a referendum on the merits of abortion.

But anti-choice activists were disappointed — the show trial never come to fruition. And even after ruling that a voluntary manslaughter defense might be considered, the judge also ruled that the jury wouldn’t be instructed to consider a lesser charge.

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Criminal justice reformers: If you were troubled by President Obama nominating then-Judge Sonia Sotomayor, the announcement of her first notable opinion for the Supreme Court offers no solace.

Sotomayor was a vigorous prosecutor before joining the federal bench. As a trial judge, she handed down more convictions and longer sentences than her colleagues. Serving on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, Sotomayor sided with prosecutors the vast majority of the time. But as a justice, reformers still wondered, how would she adjudicate criminal cases?

Today, as the Supreme Court releases Justice Sotomayor’s majority opinion in Wood v. Allen, we have the beginning of an answer. In Wood, the defendant shot and killed his girlfriend while she slept. Before the Alabama trial for his crime, he scored below 70 on a preliminary IQ test. In other words, Wood likely was developmentally disabled, which — if introduced as evidence — might have prompted a jury to recommend a more lenient sentence. Among Wood’s three public defenders, two were veteran attorneys, and one was rookie lawyer fresh out of law school. And it was this fledgling defense attorney, having never handled a capital case, who presented Wood’s case during the sentencing phase of the trial.

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Death penalty foes descended on Louisville, Ky. this weekend, in the latest wave of an emerging trend among criminal justice reform advocates: bipartisanship. It turns out that even in this much-examined age of political polarization, conservatives and progressives occasionally prove capable of privileging common sense over egos and ideologies.

The Louisville gathering was the annual conference of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty (NCADP), featuring Republican candidate for governor in Montana, Roy Brown, among others. Echoing arguments by NCADP, Brown made it clear that his opposition to capital punishment is, in fact, firmly rooted in his conservative perspective. In particular, his views that the death penalty is a). unjustifiably expensive and b). that “life is precious from the womb to a natural death” are two cornerstones of an effort to woo conservatives into adopting what many see as an inherently conservative position — that is, that governments shouldn’t be in the executions business.

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The Guantanamo Bay detention facility won’t close this week as originally slated, but the moment that some detainees will have their day in court is nearing. Next on the Justice Department’s list? The alleged mastermind behind the 2002 Bali nightclub bombings that killed 202 people: Riduan Isamuddin, aka Hambali.

Unnamed DOJ officials said last week that Hambali may be tried in a Washington, D.C. courthouse. No timeframe announced yet, but the AP calls this possibility a rejection of the policies of former President Bush, who portrayed Hambali as a “success story” that resulted from interrogating terror suspects in secret CIA prisons.

In particular, Bush made the case that Hambali’s interrogation at a CIA black site produced invaluable evidence, leading to several terrorist plots being disrupted. But — rather like Bush’s claims about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and yellowcake uranium in Niger — this convenient myth has been roundly debunked, as detailed by the American Prospect‘s Adam Serwer.

Paired with Khalid Shaikh Mohammed’s prosecution in New York City, Hambali’s trial in DC would transform both sites of 9/11 carnage into reaffirmations of America’s recommitment to rule of law. After years of U.S. leaders trying to draw an easy dichotomy between national security and our country’s best ideals, an administration that trusts the the American judicial system is a heartening change.

As President Obama said last May, “From Europe to the Pacific, we’ve been the nation that has shut down torture chambers and replaced tyranny with the rule of law. That is who we are.”

Or at least who we want to be. Both Obama and Attorney General Holder’s commitment to the rule of law sometimes seems spotty. Not only does Guantanamo still house hundreds of detainees, but there’s fear that this role is increasingly being duplicated at the Bagram airbase in Afghanistan. Likewise, the administration’s continued invocation on the so-called “state secrets privilege” is disturbingly reminiscent of the Bush regime. And despite recent promises that a report on the Bush torture program was close to completion, the administration has yet to embrace torture accountability.

Photo Credit: shmoofins

Should incarcerated felons be allowed to vote? The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals answered the question yesterday in the affirmative, announcing a 2-1 decision recognizing the voting rights of convicted felons.

According to the court’s majority, Washington State’s felon disenfranchisement laws “cannot be explained in race-neutral ways,” violating the federal Voting Rights Act. Washington has been at the forefront of felon disenfranchisement debates since last April, when the legislature passed a bill to extend convicts the right once they serve their time and are no longer on parole or probation. That legislation left in tact, however, another law that prevented current prisoners from voting.

According to The Sentencing Project, 5.3 million Americans cannot vote because of a felony conviction, resulting in roughly 13% of Black men being excluded from making their voices heard in our democracy. The disparate impact that these laws have on people of color is no coincidence; felon disenfranchisement laws are historically rooted in the Jim Crow era. It’s only appropriate, then, that the Voting Rights Act — a landmark piece of legislation intended to sweep discrimination at the ballot box into history books — is now being successfully wielded by felons seeking to renew their commitment to society and participate in our democracy.

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Remember when the Justice Department was filled with partisan hacks who followed illegal and immoral policy directives, irrespective of the law? Oh, the good ol’ days, says Newt Gingrich.

As part of a larger attack on the Obama administration during this year’s David Horowitz Restoration Weekend, the former House Speaker bewailed Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision to try terrorism suspects in federal court: “Now you have an Attorney General whose basic position is, let’s have a public trial under American criminal defense models, with their lawyers having access, or demanding access, or suggesting access — frankly, someone should introduce a resolution of impeachment.”

Wow. In Gingrich-landia, attorneys general should, nay, must deny criminal defendants access to the the rights of, well, criminal defendants. One would imagine that the Founders, who enshrined these guarantees in the Bill of Rights, would meet such disrespect with disappointment, if not disdain.

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It’s no secret that the American criminal justice system is “grossly inefficient and morally unacceptable,” as has been documented here before. In the latest American Prospect, Adam Serwer artfully peels back the layers of failure, and surveys the landscape for change:

In the 1980s and 1990s — the “tough on crime” era — -incarceration was touted as the simple solution to our crime problem. Today, the United States imprisons 1 percent of its entire population. Including the number of people on probation and parole, one in 31 Americans is under supervision of the criminal-justice system. Mass incarceration has succeeded in reducing crime, but the strategy has diminishing returns. The offense rate of the top 20 percent of offenders is more than 10 times that of the average prisoner — a few very active criminals commit most of the crime. But under the current system, offenders who could be more cheaply deterred or rehabilitated instead incur the most expensive — and, from the perspective of its effect on the community, damaging — form of punishment possible. This is why, even as the number of incarcerated people has increased exponentially, crime hasn’t decreased at the same rate.

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Tomorrow’s scheduled execution of Kenneth Biros may be a first in U.S. history. Biros, convicted of killing and dismembering a woman in 1991, has been delivered to the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville where he awaits lethal injection by a single drug. No one has ever been executed by this novel method, which some observers fairly note is a form of “human experimentation.”

The one-drug protocol was embraced by state authorities last month after Ohio botched the execution of condemned murderer Romell Brown — the latest in a long line of instances demonstrating the state’s cruel and inhumane ineptitude at dispatching of the condemned. Biros is scheduled to be injected intravenously tomorrow with about 14 times the dosage of anesthetic used in other states’ lethal injection protocols.

Experts indicate that the one-drug method is likely to induce death more slowly than Ohio’s former method, which states have relied on as the exclusive method of lethal injection since restoration of capital punishment in the 1970’s. As a fallback, in case Ohio once again proves a clumsy killer, state authorities will employ a two-drug injection into Biros’ muscle.

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