ACLU AWOL? So contends Wendy Kaminer in this article in the WSJ (free site), critical of the ACLU's decision not to defend politically incorrect speech in several cases. "Once the nation's leading civil liberties group and a reliable defender of everyone's speech rights, the ACLU is being transformed into just another liberal human-rights group that reliably defends the rights of liberal speakers. This transformation is gradual, unacknowledged and not readily apparent, since evidence of it lies mainly in cases the ACLU does not take."

Inmate scheduled to die by lethal injection tomorrow in Ohio. According to today’s AP story, Christopher Newton left his hand print at the scene of an attempted burglary in hopes of going back to prison because he was on probation at the time. Once in prison, Newton sought the death penalty and in 2001 slammed cellmate Jason Brewer’s head into the wall and strangled him to death. Attorneys for Newton believe his mental disorders should spare him from the death penalty, but last fall he was found competent to “forgo his appeals.” If all goes accordingly tomorrow, Newton will be the 26th Ohio inmate executed since 1999. Newton’s rap sheet is on the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction website.

More Louisiana: Yesterday was apparently unique death row inmate day at La. S. C. Along with the child rape case, the court affirmed the death sentence of former policewoman Antoinette Frank, reports Gwen Filosa in the Times-Picayune. Frank entered the Vietnamese restaurant where she moonlighted as a security guard and killed two of the owner's children, Cuong & Ha Vu, and fellow moonlighter Ronald Williams. The issue in yesterday's opinion, which followed an earlier remand, was entitlement to a state-paid expert.