looseheadprop

The Verified Voting Foundation is reporting that over 85% of Pennsylvania's voters will be casting teir votes today on paperless electronic voting systems. Yep, no voter verified paper trail. Any hacker out there looking to cause mischeif is ganna consider that a plus.

For many years in this country prosecutors have enjoyed immunity from suit for the mistakes in judgment they may make, even if those mistakes result in a wrongful conviction. That may be about to change. The NYTimes is reporting that SCOTUS has granted certiari in a case which may limit prosecutorial discretion for prosecutors acting in capacity outside a strictly prosecutorial role.

The NYTimes awhile back had had an article just saturated in irony. It seems that when the CIA had that stupendously stupid and morally bankrupt "clever" idea to minimize the possible exposure of its agents to worries about POSSIBLE criminal prosecution for cruel and unusual punishment related to the harsh interrogation techniques used against Al Qaeda suspects, they seem to have DEFINITIVELY put themselves in legal jeopardy for destruction of evidence.

As some of you know from the comment threads, this past Saturday I attended the Association of the Bar of the City of New York's Council on Criminal Justice retreat entitled "A Summit on the Prosecution Function." Senator Sheldon Whitehouse was both a panelist and the luncheon speaker and he graciously responded to my request for a copy of his speech, so that I might share some of the highlights.

In the second part of this series on the Yoo torture memo, I pointed out that the absence of the Youngstown Steel case was a conspicuous sign that the memo had no validity. Well, over the weekend, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse brought another case to my attention in a speech he gave to a criminal justice retreat.

There have been quite a few mentions of the Altstoetter case in the comment threads and articles about the Yoo memos. I thought you might want to see for yourselves what they were talking about.

You know, this whole Yoo memo thing has had me very down about being a fellow lawyer; but that indictment from Chicago served as a reminder that a "J.D." degree is just a tool, like a hammer. It can be used for a good purpose or a bad purpose, but is not inherently good or bad itself. You can used that hammer to rehab a house in New Orleans Habitat for Humanity, or you can use it to crush a child's testicles to get his parent to answer during a Yoo authorized interrogation.

John Yoo has said that portions of the chilling March 14, 2003 memo he wrote are just cut and paste of boilerplate from other OLC opinions. But the thrust and conclusion of this 81-page nightmare is that the President has the power to authorize all kinds of torture; that if the President authorizes such torture, the persons who commit it are immune from prosecution; and despite clear language in the Constitution that empowers Congress to make rules for the governance of the armed forces, that Congress has no power to pass laws either stopping torture or making it a criminal act. Sickening.

Welcome to John Yoo's "crazy world." More in our continuing series on the distortions, fallacies and outright lies in the March 14, 2003 memo written by John Yoo in support of torture.

In this first part of a series about the 2003 Yoo torture memo, we examine the Youngstown Steel case, which is conspicuous by its absence in the memo. Perhaps that's because the Supreme Court clearly stated that the President lacks the power to make or circvumvent law.