[via] From the Washington Post: President Obama‘s advisers are nearing a recommendation that Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, be prosecuted in a military tribunal, administration officials said, a step that would reverse Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.’s plan to try him in civilian court in New York Read More
Cross-posted from TAPPED. On Tuesday, a judge in Kansas ruled for the second time that he wouldn’t bar Scott Roeder, the 51-year-old accused of killing the Kansas abortion provider George Tiller in May, from arguing that he believed he needed to kill Tiller to protect unborn children. The judge, Warren Wilbert, denied prosecutors requests to Read More
Adam Serwer writes that after decades of taking increasingly punitive steps against nonviolent felons, many of the folks who championed so many of those same tough-on-crime policies — which has left 1 percent of the U.S. population behind bars — are starting to change their tunes. Fueled by the damage mass incarceration has done to Read More
After spending 35 years in prison for a rape that he didn’t commit, James Bain was finally released Thursday morning. As I mentioned in an earlier post, Bain made five requests for DNA testing before a judge granted his motion. The testing eventually cleared him of the crime. Obviously, the state of Florida owes Bain Read More
David Martin, the trial attorney for the executed Cameron Todd Willingham, said Willingham was guilty on Anderson Cooper’s 360 and dismissed as biased the science debunking the “science” that determined the fire was arson. While plenty of experts have called the arson investigators’ work mysticism and folklore, the fire investigator who found evidence of arson Read More
Believe it or not, I’ve been known to be a jackass. Ask anyone who had the misfortune of knowing me in college. Or a couple years ago. I really hope President Obama isn’t asked about it anytime soon: Anyway, lots of things have happened since our last Monday roundup. Here’s a few of them, a Read More
This week’s New Yorker features this breathtakingly tragic and much-discussed piece by David Grann about Cameron Todd Willingham, a Texas man who was sentenced to death for starting the fire that killed his three kids. Grann’s piece points to evidence that more or less invalidates the entire case against Willingham, and exposes the shoddy “fail-safes” Read More
Plaxico Burress probably should have established residency in Arizona, where he could have registered his handgun – or an automatic weapon, even – and then brandished it at a large public event. Maybe even at a health care town hall hosted by the president of the United States. That would have been perfectly legal. And Second Amendment Read More
Back in the Princeton days. Sounds good, don’t it? The only other sitting justices who failed to clear the symbolic 70-vote threshold are Justices Alito and Thomas. Nate Silver says it’s unclear how much the proportion of Latin@s in a senator’s state would influence the way they voted on Sotomayor. …among the five Republicans in the Read More
If this post from Thomas Lifton passes for true American Thought, then we’re all doomed: “I think this photo constitutes another major Obama blunder. As some AT commentators point out, this picture becomes a metaphor for ObamaCare.” A former colleague once told me, “Blackink, don’t argue with logic. Because logic will argue with you.” Truer Read More
