Eideard

With prodding from a Bay Area judge, the Obama administration has quietly withdrawn regulations by President George W. Bush’s Justice Department that would have helped California and other states put their death penalty cases on a fast track in federal courts.

The change, authorized by Congress in 1996 but never implemented, was intended to compress a federal review process that can last anywhere from two years to a decade or more.

Death penalty appeals in California now typically take 20 to 25 years to resolve. Most of that time is spent in state court waiting for trial court records to be prepared, appeals lawyers to be appointed, and a badly backlogged California Supreme Court to rule.

But proceedings can also be lengthy in federal courts. The last inmate executed in California, Clarence Ray Allen, was put to death in January 2006 after more than 23 years of appeals – 17 of which were in federal court…

But Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington, D.C., and an opponent of capital punishment, said revelations about wrongfully convicted prisoners on death row show that this is no time for a speedup…

The fast-track system was authorized by Congress and President Bill Clinton in 1996 as part of a law designed to limit federal court review of state criminal cases, especially capital cases.

It would allow states to speed up federal review of death sentences if they have adequate procedures for appointing and paying lawyers to represent condemned prisoners…

The 1996 law let federal judges decide whether states qualified for fast-track, and the answer was uniformly no…

In 2005, a Republican-controlled Congress voted to bypass the judges and authorize the U.S. attorney general to review the state’s procedures, subject to final approval by the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., which has a conservative majority. But the change has never taken effect.

After 14 years, no doubt Republicans and those who see no requirement to balance adequate defense and timely resolution will try, again.

Then there are the judges and lawyers, too often working at their political careers more than anything else.

Before World War II, Poland was home to about 3.5 million Jews, the largest Jewish community in Europe.

Some 90% of them were murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust. Today there are only a few thousand Jews left in Poland to look after the country’s 1,400-or-so Jewish cemeteries, most of which are overgrown or in ruins.

But now prisoners have volunteered to take part in a nationwide programme organised by the prison service and the Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage in Poland…

“It gets the prisoners used to working and it helps destroy the stereotypes which still exist in Polish and Israeli culture. Thanks to this programme anti-Semitism can be defeated and the prisoners can learn a lot about Jews.”

Anti-Semitic incidents are on the decline in Poland, but the country has a reputation for being hostile to Jews…

A dozen prisoners from Grodzisk Mazowiecki outside Warsaw, carrying wooden rakes and metal trowels, walk the short distance to the town’s cemetery in the pouring rain.

As they arrive, workers are cutting the overgrown grass and weeds. Decades of neglect are clearly visible. Gravestones, some dating back to the 1700s, stick out of the grass at precarious angles or lie broken on the ground.

It is hard to imagine now, but at one time 85% of the town’s population was Jewish and the graveyard was seven times larger.

Small Jewish towns, or shtetls, were widespread across Poland and Eastern Europe before the war, but they were wiped out during the Holocaust.

A pleasant tale; but, I can’t help but compare it to the obligatory arrest of a couple dozen drug dealers every time there’s an election coming up – in my neck of the prairie.

She plea-bargained 800 DWI cases while she was DA.

Paul van Bree, a self-styled “paragnost” or clairvoyant, has been hired by the Dutch prison service to teach prisoners how to “love themselves”.

“I tell them that dead relatives are doing well and that they love them. That brings them peace. Big strong men burst into tears,” he said.

Mr van Bree, who also publishes annual predictions of the future, claims to be from a long line of clairvoyants, including his mother and grandmother….

“With my antennae I sometimes reveal more than a psychologist or a prison welfare officer,” he said. “My work can be compared to mental health care in widest sense of the words.”

The Dutch employment service has also looked beyond the normal to use “regression therapy” and tarot cards to help the jobless.

Uncooperative welfare claimants have been told they will lose benefits unless they accept the guidance of a regression therapist to help them get in touch with their past lives.

It could be worse. They could send them a priest.

Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

Mexican drug gangs have expanded their activities in the US with heroin production doubling in 2008, the US justice department says in a report. Despite US funding for the war on drugs, trade in marijuana, ecstasy and methamphetamine also grew, the National Drug Threat Assessment said.

The report found that Mexican groups were active in every region of the US.

Gangs were moving an estimated $40 billion in cash back into Mexico across the border each year, it added.

Mexico has long been the main conduit for illicit drugs smuggled into the US but this report suggests that the efforts to halt the flow on both sides of the border have had only a limited impact.

In 2007 the US pledged $1.4 billion over three years to fight the drugs cartels but the following year heroin production in Mexico rose from 17 to 38 metric tonnes. This, the report says, led to lower heroin prices and more overdose deaths in the US…

The assessment says that Mexican drug suppliers have increased their co-operation with American street and prison gangs to expand their distribution networks.

Decriminalizing drugs – even hard drugs – permits regulation of everything from purity to price, diminishes overdoses and related crime.

Way too sensible – even for reactionaries confused by new tax revenue sources.

The Polish authorities have for the first time admitted their involvement in the CIA’s secret programme for the rendition of high-level terrorist suspects from Iraq and Afghanistan.

After years of stonewalling, Warsaw’s air control service confirmed that at least six CIA flights had landed at a disused military air base in northern Poland in 2003.

“It is time for the authorities to provide a full accounting of Poland’s role in rendition,” Adam Bodnar, of the Warsaw-based Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights, said…

For years, European and human rights investigators have believed Poland played a key role in the secret renditions programme, which became a human rights scandal for the George Bush administration…

Scandal as far as the minority of progressive Americans and whole of the world was concerned. For most Americans, the government did it. Must be OK.

The Polish authorities told the investigators they were not aware of flight data that would reveal the traffic in kidnapping.

But following a freedom of information campaign from the Helsinki Foundation and the New York-based Open Society Justice Initiative, the Polish Air Navigation Services Agency released flight data showing that at least two of the aircraft used in the CIA operations flew from Kabul and Rabat, in Morocco, to Szymany at least six times between February and September 2003…

“[The Polish aviation authority] collaborated with the CIA by accepting the task of navigating these disguised flights into and out of Szymany airport without adhering to the requirements of international flight planning regulations.

“The most remarkable aspect is that the Polish government, which maintained for more than four years that no such records existed – or that, if they did, they were untraceable – has now provided an apparently comprehensive list of these landings, compiled and presented in an orderly and coherent fashion.”

Must be an election coming soon enough that “transparency” gets a chance – for a while.

The month’s mendacity award goes to Kwasniewski, Poland’s president at the time who now admits he knew of the flights – but, didn’t know the prison(s) existed. Uh-huh.

Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

With his state strapped and his legacy looming, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has proposed to greatly reduce the amount of money California spends on its prisons and to funnel that sum to the state’s higher education system instead…

“Choosing universities over prisons,” Mr. Schwarzenegger said in his final annual address to the Legislature. “This is a historic and transforming realignment of California’s priorities…”

The proposal, which would require a constitutional amendment or ballot box action, comes at a time when the state’s vaunted public university system is increasingly perceived as the most visible victim of huge budget cuts. It is a system that for decades has attracted families and businesses to the state with its promise to residents of a low-cost, world-class education…

“The priorities have become out of whack over the years,” the governor told lawmakers. “I mean, think about it, 30 years ago, 10 percent of the general fund went to higher education, and 3 percent went to prisons. Today, almost 11 percent goes to prisons, and only 7.5 percent goes to higher education.”

We already knew that Arnold was never going anywhere in the hierarchy of present-day American Republicanism. It is, after all, a political party that would much rather put almost anyone in prison – than in school.

I wonder why Republicans hate students and education so much?

Welcome to Otter Creek

Hawaii prison officials said Tuesday that all of the state’s 168 female inmates at a privately run Kentucky prison will be removed by the end of September because of charges of sexual abuse by guards…

Otter Creek is run by the Corrections Corporation of America and is one of a spate of private, for-profit prisons, mainly in the South, that have been the focus of investigations over issues like abusive conditions and wrongful deaths. Because Eastern Kentucky is one of the poorest rural regions in the country, the prison was welcomed by local residents desperate for jobs.

Hawaii sent inmates to Kentucky to save money. Housing an inmate at the Women’s Community Correctional Center in Kailua, Hawaii, costs $86 a day, compared with $58.46 a day at the Kentucky prison, not including air travel.

Hawaii investigators found that at least five corrections officials at the prison, including a chaplain, had been charged with having sex with inmates in the last three years, and four were convicted. Three rape cases involving guards and Hawaii inmates were recently turned over to law enforcement authorities. The Kentucky State Police said another sexual assault case would go to a grand jury soon.

How to go, folks! You saved the state of Hawaii how much money?

Of course, that was before the lawsuits that should be rolling down the surf.

Nebahat Albayrak
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

The Dutch Justice Ministry plans to shut down eight prisons and cancel new prison building programs to deal with what it calls a capacity surplus, according to Dutch Justice State Secretary Nebahat Albayrak.

The move will lead to the scrapping of 1,200 jobs and is expected to save 164 million euros.

“Currently, there is detention capacity of some 14,000 cell places, while according to the estimates there is a need for about 12,000 cells. This overcapacity is expected to continue for some years,” Albayrak said in a policy document on national prison system sent to the Dutch parliament Tuesday.

The cell surplus is caused by falling crime rate, Albayrak said.

Here we are – studying a nation perpetually castigated by Law and Order nutballs for being too soft on drug users, too free and easy on sex, having too many unions and too much personal freedom in the face of a large immigrant population and the danger of terrorism – ending up with empty beds in the prison system.

What’s wrong with this picture of freedom, tolerance – absent Christian morality? Apparently, damned little.

Thanks, McCullough, a co-conspirator at DU

Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

The U.S. Senate passed a measure Wednesday that would prevent detainees at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, from being transferred to the United States for now.

The measure passed with overwhelming bipartisan support in a 90-6 vote. A similar amendment has already passed the House. It was attached to a supplemental war funding bill.

Following in the steps of House Democrats, Senate Democrats rejected on Tuesday the administration’s request for $80 million to close the Guantanamo facility. They instead asked that President Obama first submit a plan spelling out what the administration will do with the prisoners when it closes the prison…

Congressional Democrats, however, are now attempting to avoid an onslaught of criticism from Republicans, who argue it would be reckless to shutter the prison before deciding where to transfer the detainees.

Are there more Republican cowards than Democrat cowards?

In response to a question from Texas Rep. Lamar Smith, the ranking Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, Mueller said he is concerned about the potential for fundraising to support terrorist groups and the radicalization of others, as well as the potential for attacks within the country…

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Advocates for the separation of church and state say they’re closely watching Florida’s expansion of non-denominational faith-based prisons.

While 21 other states have faith-based dormitories, Florida is the only one with entire prisons focused on faith and character.

Glade Correctional in Palm Beach County this week becomes the fifth faith-based prison in Florida under a program begun in 2003, said Kathy Connor, a state corrections spokeswoman.

Constitutional issues arise, however, when prisons start linking where inmates live to religious programs, said Alex Luchenitser, a lawyer with Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

“The question is, ‘Are inmates being given incentives to enroll in a prison with a religious environment,’” Luchenitser asked.

I can be pragmatic about a lot – but, not witless programs like this. It smacks too much of opportunism – on the part of Florida politicians grabbing votes from their bible-struck constituents – on the part of cons who often use the God-hustle to cop an easier road.