Debo Adegbile deserved full Democratic support and Senate confirmation to top civil rights post

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Debo Adegbile is supremely qualified to lead the Justice Department's civil rights division. He was, after all, the director of litigation for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, working for that organization in different legal capacities from 2001 to now. He has argued cases before the Supreme Court and is, needless to say, an expert in a wide range of civil rights matters.

But as director of litigation at the NAACP he worked -- among many other things -- on the defense team for Mumia Abu-Jamal, who had been sentenced to death for killing a Philadelphia policeman. And not in the original trial phase but only in the death penalty phase, where -- as I'll get to shortly -- there were serious constitutional problems that needed addressing. But no matter. Apparently it's not appropriate to do such things -- to defend a black man facing death on a civil rights violation (just as apparently certain people don't deserve their constitutional rights to defend themselves in court, and those who defend them are somehow doing something wrong) -- and that was enough to turn enough Democrats against him to join with the anti-Obama Republican mob to block his nomination in the Senate. He was rejected 52-47.

One expects Republicans to oppose a supremely qualified Obama nominee for the top civil rights job in the federal government, especially a black man from the NAACP, but what's up with Dems voting against him? Well, they're the barely Democratic, Republican-leaning Democrats from purple and red states you might expect them to be -- Bob Casey (PA), Chris Coons (DE), Joe Donnelly (IN), Heidi Heitkamp (ND), Joe Manchin (WV), Mark Pryor (AR) and John Walsh (MT). All that was needed was a simple majority, but these cowards stood with the Republican obstructionists, and worse, to vote down a great nominee.

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AG Holder seeks to reduce punishments for non-violent drug offenders

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Given the country's overcrowded jails, given the ridiculousness of putting people in prison for long periods of time simply for non-violently violating the country's insane anti-drug laws, and given the cruel stupidity of mandatory minimum sentences, this is certainly promising:

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. announced Monday that low-level, nonviolent drug offenders with no ties to gangs or large-scale drug organizations will no longer be charged with offenses that impose severe mandatory sentences.

The new Justice Department policy is part of a comprehensive prison reform package that Holder unveiled in a speech to the American Bar Association in San Francisco. He also introduced a policy to reduce sentences for elderly, nonviolent inmates and find alternatives to prison for nonviolent criminals.

And his assessment of the problem, while limited, is pretty much on the mark:

"We must face the reality that, as it stands, our system is, in too many ways, broken," Holder said. "And with an outsized, unnecessarily large prison population, we need to ensure that incarceration is used to punish, to deter and to rehabilitate — not merely to warehouse and to forget."

"A vicious cycle of poverty, criminality and incarceration traps too many Americans and weakens too many communities," Holder said Monday.

Yes, it's broken, badly broken. But why not go further? Why not put an end to the failed "war on drugs" altogether -- and so legalize or decriminalize where possible, while elevating recovery and rehabilitation (especially for those who are no threat to society) above punishment?

This is a start, but some truly progressive reforms are in order. Because, let's face it, the other way, a combination of moralism and vengeance, simply doesn't work.

More evidence of the government's assault on liberty, privacy, and the Constitution

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Reuters:

A secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funneling information from intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans.

Although these cases rarely involve national security issues, documents reviewed by Reuters show that law enforcement agents have been directed to conceal how such investigations truly begin -- not only from defense lawyers but also sometimes from prosecutors and judges.

The undated documents show that federal agents are trained to "recreate" the investigative trail to effectively cover up where the information originated, a practice that some experts say violates a defendant's Constitutional right to a fair trial. If defendants don't know how an investigation began, they cannot know to ask to review potential sources of exculpatory evidence -- information that could reveal entrapment, mistakes or biased witnesses.

"I have never heard of anything like this at all," said Nancy Gertner, a Harvard Law School professor who served as a federal judge from 1994 to 2011. Gertner and other legal experts said the program sounds more troubling than recent disclosures that the National Security Agency has been collecting domestic phone records. The NSA effort is geared toward stopping terrorists; the DEA program targets common criminals, primarily drug dealers.

Because the DEA's Special Operations Division (SOD) -- which also includes the FBI, CIA, NSA, IRS, and DH -- is supposedly targeting (bad) people suspected of drug-related crimes, this will no doubt be written off by many, including the surveillance state apologists, as necessary, just like the supposedly anti-terror surveillance conducted by the NSA.


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Did George Zimmerman get away with murder?

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Well, a lot of us think so, and so does one of the jurors:

The only minority on the all-female jury that voted to acquit George Zimmerman said today that Zimmerman "got away with murder" for killing Trayvon Martin and feels she owes an apology Martin's parents.

"You can't put the man in jail even though in our hearts we felt he was guilty," said the woman who was identified only as Juror B29 during the trial. "But we had to grab our hearts and put it aside and look at the evidence."

She said the jury was following Florida law and the evidence, she said, did not prove murder. 

After the loathsome comments of that juror who came out in defense of Zimmerman, and who was probably going to vote to acquit no matter what, it is refreshing to see such a sense of responsibility given the gravity of the situation:

"I was the juror that was going to give them the hung jury. I fought to the end," she said.

However, on the second day of deliberations, after spending nine hours discussing the evidence, Maddy said she realized there wasn't enough proof to convict Zimmerman of murder or manslaughter under Florida law. 

I said it afterwards, and I'll say it again: The verdict, sadly, made sense. The jury did what it had to do and ended up reaching a verdict that was probably the right one given the circumstances.

The problem wasn't the judge or the jurors or the system, even though there is racial discrimination in how such incidents are treated by police and prosecutors. In this case, the problem was the law, which allowed Zimmerman to carry a gun while acting as a self-appointed vigilante and then to shoot an unarmed black teenager, whom he was clearly targeting, supposedly in self-defense.

That's how he got away with murder.

Because I was not a terrorist...

By Frank Moraes 

Everyone knows Martin Niemöller's "First they came for the communists..." poem. These days, we mostly hear it from conservatives because it is based on the slippery slope argument that is so beloved on the right. But I think the poem is fundamentally wrong; oppression doesn't happen that way.

I was thinking about this yesterday while reading Glenn Greenwald. He was writing about some reporting in the Los Angeles Times that quoted an anonymous source who said that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev repeatedly asked for a lawyer and was refused "since he was being questioned under the public safety exemption to the Miranda rule." This is a big deal if it is true. It is one thing to not tell a suspect his rights, it is quite another to withhold those rights. And there is nothing in the public safety exemption of the Miranda rule that allows the government to refuse a suspect his right to representation for hours or even days.

And that's what got me thinking about the Niemoller quote. It is not that we don't speak up for the "communists" because we are not one. It is that we don't speak up for them because we hate them. I know the reaction of the vast majority of people in this country to my belief that Tsarnaev deserves all of the guarantees of the Constitution. They would say something along the lines of, "He's a terrorist! We shouldn't give him any rights at all!" So may I humbly offer a rewrite:

First they came for the communists,
and I didn't speak out because I hated the communists.

And that really is the way rights are lost. This is why we allow the Nazis to have parades. It isn't because we like them. As a culture, we hate them. But as John Adams wrote, we have "a government of laws, and not of men." And if we can't listen to him, perhaps we can listen to that hippy Jew, "Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did it to one of these brothers of mine, even the least of them, you did it to me."

I don't have any specific fondness for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. But I have a great fondness for this country and especially its ideals. And if one criminal can destroy that, we are all lost. 

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Terrorist watch list

By Mustang Bobby

John Yoo is one of those people who will go down in history as one of those benignly evil people who don’t actually do terrible things like commit torture or genocide themselves but enable those who do and defend them:

"Apparently the FBI interrogated the younger Tsarnaev for 16 hours," wrote torture memo author John Yoo at National Review. "And then, for reasons that are still unknown, the government read him his rights."

Yoo has never met a right he didn't want to ball up like a piece of paper and toss into a trash can in the name of national security. But despite being an attorney and professor at the prestigious University of California Berkeley School of Law, Yoo is either misleading his readers about why Tsarnaev was read his rights or unaware of a basic legal rule.

The judge appeared at the hospital because the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure state that suspects have to be brought before "a magistrate judge, or before a state or local judicial officer" and it must be done "without unnecessary delay." The Supreme Court has held that, absent exigent circumstances or the suspect waiving the right to go before a judge -- as wannabe Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad reportedly did -- a suspect has to appear before a judge within 48 hours of being apprehended. This is usually referred to in legal shorthand as "presentment," as in, "presentment before a judge."

He is also one of those people who tell us that our rights and the Constitution don't really matter if you're dead, and that the Founding Fathers certainly didn't intend to protect the rights of people who were indoctrinated by foreigners to blow us up. And he does it all without getting that faraway stare in his eyes or wearing a hat with teabags dangling from it.

He's the one who should be on the terrorist watch list.

(Cross-posted at Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

Giffords shooter deemed incompetent, won't stand trial (yet)

By Michael J.W. Stickings

NYT:

A federal judge ruled Wednesday that Jared L. Loughner was not mentally competent to stand trial on charges that he opened fire at a constituent event for Representative Gabrielle Giffords in January, killing six and injuring her and 12 others.

The ruling by Judge Larry A. Burns of Federal District Court suspends the court proceedings against Mr. Loughner while the suspect, who experts said has schizophrenia, undergoes treatment at a federal psychiatric facility in Springfield, Mo.  

It's disappointing, I suppose, that Loughner will now face treatment instead of a trial, but it's good that the system allows for such determinations. In this case, we can assume that the judge did not make his ruling lightly.

For more, see Jeralyn Merritt at TalkLeft.